Chicago, Illinois

January, 2017

The homeless are all waving now. They walk in between the lines of cars at stoplights and smile and wave and smile and wave and smile and wave.

I once read an article that explained how all the members of England’s royal family waved and what their waves meant. It was in a Canadian newspaper. Prince Henry was honest and open. Some ex-wife was conspiring to hide some secrets with her bent fingers and wry smile. The queen was perfect and her wave, honed over the years, was just as blue as her blood. Other royals waved too and their waves meant something, but I forget what.

It’s hard to see how the homeless wave because their coats are ill-fitting and bulky and they wear mittens and gloves that hide their fingers.

Now, in Chicago, you can say “isn’t it fun” when you show off the glass pipe you bought your husband to smoke pot out of.

Everyone loves mezcal now—which is a kind of tequila that tastes like smoke—but immigrants are still bad. I met a guy who knows a guy who drove fifteen gallons of it back from Mexico. The same guy once tried to fly home with fifteen gallons of mezcal but they took ten gallons of it at the airport.

I remember seeing the Mexicans who finished the drywall of my parents’ house sitting on empty five gallon buckets of drywall mud. The buckets were white and the lids were blue and the lids were covered in glops of dried mud.

There is a special kind of mezcal called “pechuga” which means “breast” in Spanish. It costs at least $200.00 per bottle. It is made by suspending a dead chicken over a batch of mezcal and letting the steam cook through it so the fat and grease drip-drop through a piece of cheesecloth and into the finished product.