To Get Back

The time I spent living in Chicago was bookended by 9/11 and the death of my mother. I dropped out of school, cut financial ties with my parents, bloodied (and scarred) my hands on chandeliers, and was on multiple occasions punched in the face. In 2004, I returned to the city for a visit, having won a free stay at the W Hotel. Instead I crashed on the floor at my friend Luis’ apartment, drunk for a week on sweet Mexican wine. In the summer of 2005, on my next visit back, the tire of our Cadillac blew out on the highway in Michigan, and I realized I had lost my cellphone at a party the night before. We were stranded in the Midwest. The next day I was put in jail for marijuana possession. These were hard times. I loved Chicago, but for me to ever return, I needed the city to send me a sign that things had changed. And then it did.

At the end of his version of “A Change Is Gonna Come,” Chicago legend Baby Huey, says… “It seems like I tried so hard to get back where I started from. It took about twenty years of very serious smoking, few ups and downs, few trips, little space odyssey once in a while, to get back. To get back, to get back, to get back. To get back to being a kid all over. But you know when you see a little boy or a little girl running down the street. Running to meet the popsicle truck and all of a sudden you got to turn around and say, “Wow, I’ll be glad when this cat gets here. All these changes I’m going through.” Then comes the age when you start drinking wine and taking care of business at the drive-in movies. Then one day a partner of yours gives you one of them funny looking cigarettes. And says its time for you, for you, to get mellow one more time. And after that first hit, the whole world sort of brightens up a little bit. But you know I come from back, way back in Indiana where we still got outhouses and brothers wearing pointy toed shoes and carrying forty fives. But you know there’s three kinds of people in this world — that’s how I know a change has got to come. I said, there’s white people, there’s black people, and then there’s my people.”