Lost in the bando
Hector Dominguez
I rip away the NO TRESPASSING tape on the hospital doors and slide past the poly-sheeting with the asbestos warning. A veil of dust coats my jacket and I wonder if I should have worn a mask. The perils here are no different from any other bando: crumbling staircases, mold-spotted ceilings, potential encounters with junkies. The odds of a resulting injury, assault, or arrest increase with every step. If I’d stood here five months ago, I would’ve kept near the streetlamp’s glow like a child to a night light, never stepped inside. But tonight, it provides what I need: eyes and mind on the present danger, not on the past and its what-could-have-beens. And so, I walk into the abandoned.
Slipping into bandos, subway tunnels, and construction sites at night has become a common occurrence, a hobby. Unknowingly I’ve stumbled into urban exploration (much later I’ll discover the Reddit threads). Urbexers, its practitioners, do it for myriad reasons: to tag walls and leave their mark; to rummage or photograph the ruin and decay; but for many, the draw lies in the adventure, the kick of adrenaline from breaking and entering the restricted spaces filled with unknown hazards.
My reasons for urbexing are more nebulous (and they’ll remain this way until I interrogate them in the next decade), but I’ve done it enough to have settled on a process.
First, I choose a day early in the week when most Chicagoans head home after work, say a Tuesday. Next, I wait until after midnight because when the city sleeps, fewer citizens and police abound. Once there, a pull of brown from my flask quells the jitters and I’m ready. On these nights, when I’m off work, it’s also when my apartment feels so truly cavernous and disquieting that even the whiskey fails to chase away the restlessness. That’s when (and why) I flee into the bandos.
This urge, this need, this hobby began weeks ago on a late afternoon in early spring when my apartment in Pilsen conjured shared moments with Leslie (a woman whose name I could hardly utter then): our legs hanging out the window onto the rusted fire escape; our shoes clacking up the stairs as vodka fumed from our mouths; the sheers filtering the streetlight’s harshness falling on our skin. Neither the TV’s images, nor the words on my bookshelf could contain the flooding of these moments—and they’d continue deep into the night, keeping me awake if I let them. I wished to strip these memories from my apartment and strike them from consciousness, but I was realizing places could be chained to the past and become repositories not easily emptied.
I fled north in the direction of University Village and reached UIC’s campus by sunset. The green lawns contrasted with the pastel brushstrokes above and the student chatter had long been replaced by howls blowing in from Lake Michigan. In my college days, I’d always speedwalked this stretch, home to class, then back to car and home, rarely acknowledging the periphery, always hurrying to the rooms that’d cast me into the mold of a psychologist, and later, a sociologist. (And much later like a true dilettante, photographer before finally landing on writer.)
Seeing the dozens of intersecting paths from the Behavioral Sciences Building to Lincoln Hall where my liberal arts courses were held made me wonder how I’d walked into this career dead end, this no vocation gulch.
The night came with clouds that draped all in absolute gray and I was ferried by the streetlamps toward the I-290 Eisenhower overpass. At the peak of the bridge’s arch, I looked at the Loop’s skyline of glass and steel. An incoming mist made the Sears Tower’s antenna lights flutter like flags on a mountain summit. Droplets gathered and seeped into my jacket’s fibers, but there I stayed, in stillness, staring.
Where else could I go? Home would trigger the memories. Harbee’s and the other Pilsen dives were no better: Being on a first name basis with the bartenders and doormen, clearly, I was sitting too long on the barstools.
Blue Line trains shot from the skyline’s base camp in my direction. While I perched my elbows on the overpass rails, the cars zipped underneath. The city was in a hurry while I stood by.
Above the steering wheels, eyes peered upward. They may’ve wondered about my intentions on that bridge, standing under the rain like some sad goth kid. But no, I wasn’t contemplating that. It was their commute, the lives they were fleeing off to that was on my mind.
Tonight’s bando is Edgewater Hospital and Medical Center, a complex of separate structures, eight floors each, all connected by skywalks. It’s the riskiest of my break-ins: the grounds are enclosed with two fences and patrolled by an overnight watchman inside a Ford Escape. On the plus, visibility is low. The rain slashes the chances of being detected.
I park out of view by the Mexican bakery on Clark Street. Its lights are off like all businesses on this strip and I sip on my flask in the car. Liquor impairs reflexes but it also suppresses the anxieties of the superego (or so I thought then), meaning I turn a singleminded creature focused on putting one foot in front of the other when in the abyss.
Decades ago, Edgewater was a state-of-the-art hospital, a practitioner of early open-heart surgeries, and home to medical breakthroughs. More akin to a luxury hotel, replete with rooftop pool, sun tanning deck, and teenage paiges assigned to suites, celebrities like Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack regularly sought respite within its walls. Over the decades this luster peeled away, turning it into the North Side’s reputable stain. Edgewater is now synonymous with bankruptcy, malpractice suits, and Medicare scams. Defunct for fifteen years now, the half-demolished complex and parking garage fence off an entire city.
I cross Ashland Avenue and stroll into the residential street pretending to head into a surrounding home. A sweeping glance for the sentry and I hop the fence. Then the other. I land on the exposed dirt wet as cake muddying my Reeboks.
After sliding past the boarded door and tearing into the entrance seals, I enter the hollowed darkness and traipse through the corridors, concealing in the shadows to avoiding detection. The dust cut by my tracks is the only evidence of my presence.
No one knows I’m here. *
On the Eisenhower overpass, I thought about the commuters: Was a spouse, two children, two-story house behind a white picket fence awaiting in suburbia? The US had sold me the American Dream all my life and still it felt unappealing, unrealistic. If it was a
step up from the walls of adobe, the floors of dirt and clay, and the cracked roof tiles that my parents had once lived in, why hadn’t this been my aspiration? Had my family been far too burdened with securing work, providing food and shelter, and gaining a foothold in the country that they’d left abstract aims, like the Dream, entirely up to me?
In the drivers’ eyes I sensed tiredness. Patterns must emerge in the Top 40 stations’ daily rush hour playlist; cars in the commute must become identifiable by their Calvin peeing decals, the Ben Hur chariot hub caps, the steel scrotums hanging from the trailer hitch—wouldn’t that familiarity turn even the beadiest of eyes bleary? Revisit the feasibility of goals once dismissed as pipe dreams? I think it’d invoke the risks, the leaps of faith not taken.
I felt unmoored, swept away my projections, airing out doubts like old rugs and for once, Leslie wasn’t conjured. I wanted to strip away the old varnish and get to the fiber of my being. Could this bridge serve as my thinker’s rock?
My musings were short-lived. In the distance she eventually emerged from the mist in the glow of a red and white Target bullseye.
Inside the hospital rooms, CPR dolls are propped on chairs, lain on cots as if in an eternal wait for medical attention. Records torn from cabinets carpet the floors. I wonder if any of those belong to the hospital’s most famed births, Hillary Clinton and John Wayne Gacy. It’s rumored Gacy returned to Edgewater as an adult as a children’s clown and maybe a predator of the hospital’s paiges. I prefer not to think about this as I explore.
The air feels lighter, cooler with each subsequent floor. Phone flash as my lantern, I slide past the curling wall paint that narrows the hallways careful to disturb as little as possible. I circumvent the
half-broken plasterboards above that threaten to collapse, break more linoleum or powder my head and shoulders with hazardous dust. I climb up the staircase single-mindedly in my buzz, in search of the pool and famed rooftop view.
*
The bullseye conjured the Target in Logan Square where I waited for Leslie on Christmas Eve. It was cold and my windows had fogged from waiting. The silver wrap of the gifts in the backseat turned crimson once the logo became the sole source of light.
She’d insisted on holding our Christmas gifting tradition, one that survived our friendship, relationship, and break up two years prior. Lately, she’d been busier and we saw each other less, a symptom I attributed as some post-breakup hangover. When we did meet, her mind would be elsewhere, until her concerns sent her out the door. Despite that, she seemed enthusiastic suggesting exchanging gifts during her commute between jobs.
*
I reach the end of the stairs. There are rumors about the top floor: that it is haunted and that doors lock behind intruders, keeping them from leaving. This is common in many bandos, regardless of otherworldly presences. In the subway tunnels there are one-way doors that announce exits but only lead to ladders under locked grates. Hence, another urbexing habit: avoiding doors slamming behind me. Gently, I guide it back, keep it from latching and step forward.
Late spring showers patter the cracked panes of the hospital’s solarium. It’s puddled in places, but the pool’s tiles are powder
dry. An orange chair faces the skyline—proof, that the rooftop natatorium is still a draw. Maybe I’m not even the only visitor here tonight. *
Our breakup came in the wake of an unwanted pregnancy. (It was a situation I now know I approached too timidly, tentatively, and maybe cowardly.)
Back then, Leslie sported choppy bangs, skinny jeans, dirty checkered Vans, and wrists thick with festival bracelets. I regularly played the role of firefighter, putting away fires in the shape of retrieving her car from the city pound, picking her up from bars she’d been cast out of for overdrinking, or cleaning offices when she’d fallen behind schedule. Fully in rave mode phase, her commercial cleaning startup bankrolled by her father was waging war with her partying—and losing it seemed.
It wasn’t that I was above it—after all Leslie and I’d met at a DIY party in a foreclosed building, and we’d traveled to raves where we’d raged and lost ourselves entire weekends. The difference was I had outgrown this phase. I’d turned my attention to college in my late twenties and was grappling with insecurities, doubting I had the perseverance and studiousness to see a Bachelor’s through. No one in my family had attended college, nor encouraged its pursuit, so when I did, I treated it as one would a pottery class or a New Year’s resolution: heavy engagement at first, then immediate disinterest when it became demanding. I withdrew from courses or attendance-failed them perfunctorily (behaviors I now deride my students for exhibiting). After many false starts and long hours of studying, my school engagement and A’s finally came but only after skipping the party life and disowning drinking buddies.
*
This hospital was not chosen at random; just like Clinton and Gacy, I also sprang from its belly. I’d passed Edgewater many times as a Lyft driver, even lived within walking distance of it, but I hardly associated it with my birthplace, or a hospital at all because I hadn’t sat in its waiting room or lain on its beds, at least that I could remember. It was an abandoned structure much like the Damen Silos or the Uptown Theater, or others scattered throughout Chicago, its identity lost in time.
From the ruins before me, I want to discern the room that might’ve housed my pregnant mother and spot the windows that filtered my first morning’s sunlight. There’s no way of knowing that room is still intact, but if it was and I stepped inside it, would I feel some connection? Arrive at some new insight? Maybe it could offer a fresh start?
*
The pregnancy poured on cold sobering questions. Were Leslie and I compatible beyond nightlife? Moving in, having a child, could that stabilize our relationship? How far could I stretch the freelance wages of a live sound tech? And my studies? On whom would the blame of dropping out fall on? Did I want a child?
*
Apa once told me he’d busted doubles for months, paid out of pocket, so I was delivered here and not Cook County Hospital. He was twenty-one at the time, my mother eighteen. They were so certain of wanting me, so mature beyond their years, that I wish I inherited this sense of purpose.
After the abortion, Leslie and I transitioned to friends with benefits in an oddly placid way. Not once reproaching my recusal, she left me wondering if I should’ve been more forthcoming with my reservations, if I should’ve shared some of the burden of her decision.
How much longer will Edgewater Hospital agonize through its open-air vivisection? Rumor is, after reconstruction, a complex of condominiums is in the works.
If structures can be rebuilt, their past covered by new concrete, their mistakes tucked behind fresh drywall, then Chicago, too, with its developments and year-round construction, can one day clear the slate. How else does one strip away memories from the city?
Rain obscures the downtown skyline and the lakeshore view that Sinatra might have enjoyed from this balustrade. This nearsighted panorama could make you forget you’re in Chicago. But that’s okay, life is serene and unfamiliar here. That’s hard to find.
When you’ve lived in one place for too long, the sense of unfamiliarity is rare and precious. The transpiring of time files every storefront, park, street corner into an archive of moments lived. Attached to those moments are people from our past. I wanted to halt it—No, I wanted to strip places clean of the faces and unsolicited memories.
A few days after Christmas Eve an unannounced gift bag was left by the door with a note. We can’t see each other anymore, it said on the back of a ComEd utility bill. In scribbles it went on: she’d met someone, it had turned serious quickly, and she only wished me the best.
I racked up the changes I’d noticed after Leslie’s pregnancy: knitted sweaters, flower-patterned dresses, oversized pair of Peggy Hill square frames. It was as if she’d undergone a seasonal closet purge, except this went beyond a makeover. Like unneeded cargo, I had been jettisoned, making room for essentials on a long voyage. The type of purge that frees up room for someone else.
*
Maybe it’s the night’s breeze or the rain, but I feel cleansed, unburdened. I must be careful though and not linger here. Perhaps it’s best I haven’t ascribed meaning to this place after all these years. Even as my birthplace it holds no memories.
I step back inside. In the natatorium, footsteps freshly cut in the dust draw my eye. My Reeboks are swallowed in the imprint. They are of a larger footprint, one that dawdled around the pool in places I hadn’t.
How long had I been on the balcony? Had the footprints been there earlier? Maybe I’d grown smaller.
I head to the staircase. I cannot entertain these doubts. The door to the stairs is still unlatched and I step inside. This is when my lantern is extinguished.
My phone is dead. *
Since our relationship hadn’t labels, nor adhered to obligations or expectations, I hadn’t any say in the matter.
Leslie’s note was courteous but also incisive and sterile like a surgical cut. If all I could do was react, I did so by acting nonplussed and shrugging it off. My way of making sense of things came in the way of a Mexican refrain I’d heard friends drop after breakups: What’s destined for you, comes despite stepping aside; What’s not, won’t even if you move in its way. Basically, fate knows best, and I was okay with that. No further reflection required.
Each stairstep thuds underneath. I paw at the pitch black, arms outstretched, feeling for the rails, the cold concrete walls. Is there someone else in the staircase?
No one knows I’m here. The phone is dead.
Leslie re-emerged months later at the cusp of spring. Scrolling down a Facebook timeline, I saw that a mutual friend had posted photos of her next to the rusted State Street bridge on the Riverwalk. She was in a white satin dress, facing skyward, held by two stringy arms. I wanted to click to unveil the subsequent photos, the face of the man, and the occasion, but I already knew the pictures were taken after a trip to City Hall.
I tip-toe my way down. They say climbing Everest is easy, descending is deadly. One foot in front of the other. Fear cannot
cross my mind. I cannot fear the place I was born. Baby steps. Circle clockwise and patiently descend.
I lose track of the staircase landings. The end will be the correct floor.
I’d hidden in the dark. By leaving Leslie to decide the fate of her pregnancy, she’d dictate what ought to happen to her body. I thought I was being deferential, maybe even brave by quietly awaiting her decree. Was I avoiding confrontation wishing not to provoke her ire? Or was I afraid she’d think I was egotistical for wanting to pursue a degree over having a child?
I’m slapped by a thick and moldy dampness. Beyond the door drips echo all around. Light barely filters through but once my eyes adjust, reflections fill the floor. The level is flooded, rain is seeping inside. Enraptured by reaching the roof, I’d forgotten the underground level that accesses the other structures of the hospital. My chest thumps, sobering me, keeping me at bay. My desire to explore fizzles away, evaporates with my buzz.
Reluctantly, I head back into the blindness where the vacuum hums in my ears and my footsteps rebound off the staircase walls like tennis balls.
It’s okay to hold dreams in higher regard than obligations. We look more fondly to the future than at the present. There are ways for dreams and obligations to coexist. It’s clear I skirted
responsibility by recusing myself. I imagine Leslie wanted my blunt honesty, not caginess. Silence gives the illusion of neutrality, but it can just as easily be callous and uncaring.
My father had acted so decisively at a much earlier age—why couldn’t I do the same? Were his goals more tangible? I felt guilty for not wanting family life at thirty-three. Instead, I opted to keep the door to graduate school open even if I hadn’t a field of study in mind. Could something so friable qualify as the American Dream?
Once at the ground level, I retrace my steps but can no longer find the sealed entrance. This is not uncommon in urbexing: at some point the rooms, doors, hallways turn dead ends in a maze. Windows on this level are shut with steel shutters as if to prevent escape.
After an hour of backtracking, retracing steps in the shadows a mad scramble overtakes me. Tugging, pushing on doors. All ways out are rusted shut or padlocked.
No one knows I’m here. My phone is dead. There is no escape.
I can no longer go without properly communicating my reservations, my desires. When would I properly interrogate my choices? (Until I began taking writing seriously.)
I return to the staircase and climb to another floor, one where the windows won’t be boarded up. From a patient room the surrounding houses and streets look peaceful and unlit, and the
pavement, wet without a pedestrian in sight. The grey has passed, the sky is deep blue now. First light is almost here. I must leave even if I’m unsure if I’ve found what I sought.
*
(These are my last moments in Edgewater and in the weeks to come my incursions into the abandoned end. Years later, after a new decade and a pandemic comes and goes, Edgewater will turn into a luxury apartment complex and a park will sit under the floors I explored. I do not see this transformation—by then, I am a thousand miles away, writing this.)
*
Under a pile of brochures and folders, I find an old crutch. I hammer the peg end against the glass again and again, until I break the hermetic seal. I kick it with my Reeboks for good measure until the glass spills into a ventilation grate twenty feet below. I push out of the crack and fall into the grates. I inspect myself: I am covered in dust, but no blood. I get up leap over the fences and walk back to Clark Street. The neighboring houses are lit now, the #50 bus idles awaiting the first commuters, and the smell of fresh bread grows stronger with each step closer to the car. The bakery’s shutters are closed but the radio blares and pans clatter, spill from the back door. Everything seems to be in place for a fresh start and a new day. But I’m not ready yet. I need to find home first and then wash away all the dust that covers me.