I ran away to Chicago as a teenager, and found a family immediately, via the Chicago Reader’s Help Wanted pages, where a little ad for a job at Ragstock rested, looking out at me like, “Hey, come get it.”

It was hard to get a job at Ragstock, my roommates told me.  You just hung out and ate pizza and listened to metal.  Everyone wanted to work there.  I went in and applied.  The job application was one of the best personality tests I’ve seen in my whole entire life.  It was called “Draw a Face on the Cowboy.”

To complete it, you had to draw a face on the cowboy.  Offer your best joke.  Tell the most embarrassing story that had ever happened to you.  And tell something else, I don’t remember.  But I did get the job.  A kid who worked there had created the test.  He liked my application a lot.  He lobbied for me.  He really liked what I wrote.  Everyone did, but he really did.  We ended up in love, moving in together, and eventually left Chicago together for the Northwest.  Great test, right?

At Ragstock, I made minimum wage and learned to perfect my “street face,” the one that says DON’T FUCK WITH ME.  I got DEEP into the Melvins, drew comics for approximately 60% of every shift, and learned about everything awesome on earth from my coworkers, all guys, for the next 3.5 years.

The friends I made there are the smartest, most talented people I’ve ever met and I love them to death.  When I recently went back to visit, I was prepared to face inevitable grown-up-hood.  Everyone had gotten married/ had kids/ bought houses/ broken up/ found new work.  Even though those years where I changed from a teenager to a twenty-one year old immeasurably affected who I am today,  I couldn’t expect the same amount of time and energy we used to expend together.  I couldn’t expect our friendships to pick back up again.

But they did.  Like a real family, my friends made time for me.  We fell back into friendship like no time had passed.  Instead of loading boxes into elevators and ringing up customers together, yelling at suburbanites to “CHECK IN YOUR BAG!” I went to their shows and got my hair did at their salons and bought their paintings and met their kids.  We’d grown up, but they were still there, still awesome, still inspiring.

Chicago was not necessarily a city I’d dreamed about moving to.  I ended up in Chicago on accident, crashing for a summer with a friend.  I had no idea what Chicago was about, and actually had moments of panic when I would forget what state I lived in.  Was it Illinois?  Was that right?  I really lived in Illinois?

Everyone asks, “But didn’t you hate the winters?  Those winters, though!”  Honestly, I didn’t mind the winters.  Not even that first year when I didn’t have money to buy pants and wore these punk cutoff skinny jeans with legwarmers and hi-top Chucks that would get soaked in the snow.  I had one red denim jacket I wore over a black hoodie every day until my boss took pity on me, mega-discounting a military parka so he could sell it to me for $4.00.   I ate $2.00 cheese fries for lunch and got really, really sick because I put off going to the medical clinic VISIBLE FROM MY BEDROOM WINDOW until a month into bronchitis, but I didn’t give a shit.  I was in a real city.

A real city meant that you never had to stop exploring.  That opportunities were everywhere, whether they were handed to you in the form of a life-changing minimum wage job, or whether you created them yourself by putting together your own shows, stapling flyers all over Milwaulkee Avenue and carrying your guitar and amp home from practice, alone in the middle of the night.  A real city had neighborhoods and danger and bars where you could drink as a teen and best friends and enemies just waiting to reveal themselves.

This summer, on my trip back to Chicago, I found myself at Club Foot, an old haunt, where I spent every birthday from 21 and up, bullshitting with Chuck the bartender and Lawrence Peters and Andy Slater and Frank Pollard.  Shooting pool, playing Tetris, drinking Old Styles.  That night was like going back in time.  It was like going home for Christmas, if going home for Christmas was supremely awesome.  It was like Oprah burst into my house all “Surprise!  Your friends nominated you for a trip to Chicago! And my show’s back on the air!”  It was like Satan himself appeared and said, “Suzy Mae, what is your fondest memory?  I will take you there, for you have been obedient.”  It was like being a cat in a cardboard box.

I was home, I was with family, I was in motherfucking CHICAGO.
773 forever.