My Kind of Humidity Chicago Is

The steam hits you as soon as you walk out of O'Hare Airport. It's like somebody left the sauna on high. Or a teenager spent a little too long in the bathroom shower. You're hit in the face with a hot towel. Or you're hanging your head over a vat of steaming Vaporub when you had one of those childhood colds.

Welcome to summer in the Midwest. If I ever wonder why LA is filled with so many peckerwoods in July and August, I should just remember that they are probably fleeing weather like this.

Chicago has long gotten a pass from me. It's an oasis in the middle of the country. Where stupidity stops and ends, oh, so briefly. Tucked in between the pinheads of Iowa and the numbskulls of Indiana, Chicagoland is the last bastion of intelligence before you hit New York going east or Los Angeles going west. If I wanted to add one more address to my list of homes, Chicago would be the only other possible fit. Except for those months that are not May or September. Because, for all the excitement embedded in Chicago, it's still not bearable if you find yourself there in the summer or the winter.

My short stay this week featured the best of the city and the worst of the city. The sweet and the sour. The yin and the yang. The Cubs and the White Sox.

My business travel did not sync up well enough to see a ball game at the wonderful Wrigley Field. But, the White Sox were in town playing the Detroit Tigers and a young associate of mine was from the Motor City. Indeed, as we boarded the Red Line to travel down to the South Side, we found a lot of Cub fans mixed in who were all coming home for the Cubs' afternoon contest on the North Side. I noted that both factions were co-existing marvelously in a very confined and sticky location. These people were probably too hot to start a good fist fight.

I had not been to US Cellular Field since it first opened some 15 or so years ago. At that time, I remembered it being all white---the sort of baseball stadium that might result if Bellevue Hospital was awarded a major league franchise. But, they have completely redone the place and it is a marvelously homey place to watch a game. Granted that there was some bathmat that was acting as a team mascot. And the fireworks/exploding pin wheels get a little annoying and overused if there's a particularly inept opposing pitcher on the mound. But the stadium has a charm that shows Wrigley Field hasn't completely cornered the market in the gotham on Lake Michigan.

The purchase of tickets via Stub Hub, however, presented a rather odd twist of fate. I looked for field level seats on the website and found two on the first base side that seemed promising. The row was "WCH." Admittedly, an odd numbering for rows, but I chalked it up as one more ridiculous quirk of the Midwest. Except we could not find such a row. Until I had a horrible thought as I looked at the handicapped section at the top of the aisle.

WCH equals "wheelchair." Leave it to me to get price gouged by the handicapped. Yep, that's where we were seated. The location was wonderful. The sightline was terrific. The fans around us were immobile. To cover, I exaggerated a limp as if I was playing Tiny Tim in the local high school production of "A Christmas Carol." And I noted that, even if you're confined to a wheelchair, you can still have too many beers and fall over. That's exactly what the guy next to us did.

Chicago is thought of being a city with very basic, down-to-earth American values. Of course, I didn't see much of that staying at the Sofitel Hotel, which is a Eurotrash version of the Marriott chain. They fancy themselves as high class and French, and those are words which usually do not appear in the same sentence. Everything at the Sofitel comes with a faux French accent with a soupcon of snootiness. When you call the switchboard, it's "Bonjour" and "Bonsoir." The simple act of leaving a wake up call required the intervention of NATO. Given the French theme, I was surprised to actually find soap in my bathroom.

The hotel rooms are constructed out of Ikea furniture and are overly high tech for no particular reason. The bathroom, itself, looked like an outlet store for Brookstone, which sells a lot of fancy junk that is ultimately useless. There was a metal cutter for the roll of toilet tissue, much the type you would find on a Scotch tape dispenser. I wondered just what individual has a problem ripping off a piece of toilet paper. On the other side of the commode was a speaker phone complete with a computer jack. Just who is jockeying their laptop and on-line access while relieving themselves on the bowl? Can even that simple human act be done without looking at your Facebook? Every time I went to surgically remove a slice of toilet tissue, I would hit the speakerphone and wind up dialing God knows where.

The French also have not mastered the art of hotel keys. In the period of three days, my electronic room key stopped working seven times. And several of my associates had the same issue. If you consider France's tepid WWII resistance, none of the above should be rendered as a great revelation to any of us.

Grabbing a late night adult beverage with a college buddy, I was approached by some French skanky ho who thought I was this guy she was meeting for whatever.

"Don't you even know what the dude looks like?" Why was I even talking to her?

"I met him on-line, but now that sheet-het won't answer my texts. That is you, yes?"

"No."

She gave up. "Eh, fuck youse all." Off she went on her nine inch heels. I thought about all the trash I have successfully avoided in both New York and Los Angeles. How did I manage to run across it in the alleged sanctity of the middle of the country?

Of course, you cannot eat a meal in Chicago without having a 25 ounce piece of beef. One dinner consisted of a steakhouse where you eat till the cows come home. Or are slaughtered on the way. The meal still lies in my stomach and won't be digested till we have a new President. I crawled back to my hotel amidst the sweltering nighttime air. After three days in the middle of the country, I was ready to go back in any direction.

Because, indeed, in the heart of America, it ain't the heat, it's the humanity.

Dinner last night: Lasagna at Maria's Italian Kitchen.