I suspect that time travel is possible—at least in a way that can be described as mental. I travel in time…and during such occasions, I’m on foot. I’m aware of my surroundings, sometimes in an exceptionally heightened way. A shift takes place, however, and I’m always where my body exists, but there’s another part of me that has stepped…backwards, or if in Prague sideways. I’m not sure if sidestepping is possible in Chicago. It’s never actually happened, but countless backsteps have occurred, and always…always…always, I’m transported into a realm that feels like a novel by John Rechy, James Baldwin, William S. Burroughs. On other occasions, it feels as if I’ve slipped into a multi-ethnic version of a short story by Leroi Jones (or Amiri Baraka, though the stories I often slip into were by Leroi Jones, before his nearly-radical, not-unexpected Afrocentric identity shift.) I’ve stepped into other times on Belmont Avenue, near The Abbott, a transient hotel with caged doves in the lobby window. I’ve found myself immersed in tawdry, neon-lit nights, alive with cigarette smoke and hayburners (prostitutes, hookers, ‘working girls’) with dabs of vanilla flavoring behind each ear, because perfume was too expensive. Hayburner territory seems to linger along the westerly border of the Eisenhower Expressway, where Chicago’s West Side asserts itself with a jangling, edgy, rusted, and well-used skid-row intensity. In Chicago’s Greek Town, on a particularly cold day, I found myself stepping into a version of the Near-West Side with alarming ease. I felt the presence of a street hustler, male, making his way into a place I didn’t know existed. I saw him heading there with another hustler, also male. I saw them. I felt them speaking and planning what to do with the fifth of whiskey one of them had stolen from a trick. I saw guys with shoulders like the stooped wing-crests of vultures, pinching cigarettes between lips and teeth. I saw the hustlers enter the hotel I’d never seen, and I was aware of their conversation, their shy intimacy with each other. I sensed that it was a violation of quite a number of social and economic taboos. They seemed interested in each other; they seemed to trust each other. They were ready to share things…and I won’t go into what they shared and how long it took, but I can say that there was a sound associated with it: clanking radiators and music from another room. It lasted for only an instant, and I wondered if I’d just stepped into a fictional realm, or some stretch of the past as relayed to me by the red bricks of the New Jackson Hotel. Chicago was once filled with red-brick buildings of a particular pedigree. They are all but gone, but those that remain often shed their history, like brick dust, easily inhaled by anyone walking by. The New Jackson Hotel was shedding something and I am amazed at how tender, profane, and vulnerable that thing was. It might find its way into a story: one doesn’t feel inspired by “tender profanity” often, but red bricks and old, unlit neon tend to evoke such things. This is a photo. Nothing more. But I suspect that something tender, profane, and harrowingly human lurks within it, and now, I wonder who those street hustlers were, where they’ve gone, and what depths of honesty they pulled out of that bottle of cheap, stolen whiskey. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting and I hope you like this photo as much as I enjoyed making it.