Where to start when it comes to describing my second apartment in Chicago? For starters, it was a good move for me, Mr. Extremely Limited Funds, since having a roommate meant I could live in a larger apartment for less money and also be closer to downtown. As I was preparing to finish my sublease in my studio and sign a one year lease, a friend was looking to move out of his current apartment and needed a roommate. Being only 22 and still in the “drink on a weeknight and damn the consequences” mode, this apartment above a bar seemed like a great place to live at the time.
There were several weeks in between when we would both move out of our place and move into this new apartment. At the time, my friend was out of town for work a lot and so I went with Megan and another friend to check out the bar below our apartment. As you can see from the picture below, there were no indications it was anything other than a neighborhood bar. Yes, the name “Big Daddy’s” might have been a small clue, but since we had grown up in college at Big Al’s, the local strip establishment, any other bar with the name “Big” in it didn’t seem out of the norm. It wasn’t like the sign at The Manhole which showed a guy in a speedo and you knew that there were glory holes in the bathroom walls. No, this place was discreet at the time.
We walk into the place in mid-afternoon and there are 3 guys at the bar closest to the door. Keep in mind my friend at the time had facial features that drove gay men wild with lust. In we walk and they spin around and eye him up and down. His eyes by this time are bugged out like that scene in Total Recall where the people on Mars who are exposed to the Martian air have their eyes bug out before they die. One of the guys notices our discomfort and he says “HeyHEYhey, we won’t bite!!! Unless you want us to!!!” and then they giggled like old queens do. I tell Megan “Go to the bathroom” as if that’s going to be our cover and our way out of the place without buying anything. As we extricate ourselves without having to serve my friend up as sacrifice to the Gay Gods, it hits me that I now will be living on top of a gay bar.
It wasn’t the fact that I was about to live on top of a gay bar that bugged me. Heck, I’m a “live and let live” kind of guy. It was more a disappointment that we weren’t going to be able to go downstairs in our building and have a drink. Of course the entire year we joked about it, saying to friends “We went downstairs to the bar last night and for some reason we couldn’t buy a beer. Guys were so friendly and kept shoving new bottles in our hands.”
Like I said above, there weren’t the typical markings that this was a gay bar at the time. Maybe it was an old hideaway or maybe it had recently been taken over by the Gay Mafia – who knows. All we do know is that a few months after moving in, it was THEN that they draped a rainbow flag outside and started to decorate the windows with rainbow neon signs and other markers that identified the place as a gay hangout. Sometimes we’d come home late from the bars and guys would gawk at us as we got near our entrance (middle of the building, whereas the bar entrance was to the right – off Oakdale and Broadway).
As far as neighborhood characters go, see this link for Speedo Guy. In addition to him, we also had Burlap Guy who usually hung around the Dominick’s grocery store. He wore nothing but burlap and all his possessions were in a grocery cart. How he survived in burlap in the summer heat was beyond my comprehension.
Viewing the picture below, our apartment was in the middle of the three apartment floors. We were on the left half. At one point I had mooned some friends from the kitchen window and since this was a guy’s apartment and the windows weren't exactly sparkling clean, it left two oval butt marks on the window that were visible from the outside depending on the light and weather.
We thankfully couldn’t hear the thump thump thump of the bass from the songs being played in the bar below since we had a buffer of a floor below us. There were two exceptions to this though. Our bedrooms faced the alley and regardless of how tired and/or drunk you were, there was no way to sleep when the clang of bottles were thrown into the metal trash bins. Also, I was convinced the occupants above us had sex that somehow involved moving furniture. The scrapes and moans of what I assumed were wood furniture legs being dragged across a wood floor happened almost daily and were quite annoying to listen to.
The other main memory I have of being woken up was one fine morning when there was cheering and clapping every 30-45 seconds coming from the street. My roommate and I both stumbled out of our rooms saying “What the fuck?” We look outside and it hits us – our street is part of the route of the Chicago Marathon!!
