Remembrances of Youthful Strolls In A Chocolate Scented City.

We’d exit Second City well after midnight wound up from a night of washing dishes and slinging drinks discussing which bar, diner or whose apartment we’d be wiling away our late night hours. Before we knew it our feet had carried us to the North Avenue Beach.  We’d keep walking with the lake to our left the Chicago skyline before and we wouldn’t stop until we were on the post-apocalyptic empty streets of Chicago’s Loop.

Downtown was more to our liking after the office dwellers had scurried back to the safety of their suburban homes and the tourists were tucked away in their hotels. The city’s solemn streets were ours for drifting as our chatter and laughter echoed down empty alleys. There was no destination. This was an open exploration. An improvisation with our feet only stopping to pay homage to the Picasso, Calder’s Flamingo, or Buckingham Fountain as we stood under ominous dark skyscrapers.

The conversation was as free and meandering as our walking: art and cinema, who we wished we were sleeping with, who we wished we could sleep with. We’d compete to see who could make the longest pun, “Your mom is a Ho Chi Minh trail mix-ed up in the head and shoulders above the rest In a piece of pie in the skyway to heaven seven eleven.” We’d also play a game where you took a famous movie title and substituted one of the titles words with vagina: Vagina Wars, Vagina Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, It’s a Wonderful Vagina. Our Man In Vagina. 

I know, not the brainiest of games. What do you expect? It was four or five in the morning and we were riding high on cigarettes and adrenaline. Does it help that I learned about Eastern philosophy Eastern philosophy, Sartre, SJ Perelman, Philip Roth, Bukowski, Dorothy Parker and a long list of others during these walks? I’d read some of the books by these astute individuals or at least gathered enough knowledge from the talks so that I could sound like I knew a thing or two during bar room blabberings.

It was during the very first late night stroll that I learned that Chicago’s loop was filled with the aroma of chocolate. Warm baking chocolate. As if some celestial mother hovered in the heavens baking chocolate chip cookies for all of the city to wake up to. None of us pointed out the confectionate fragrance. We let it hover in the night air stirring our sense memories as we were in the midst of creating new subconscious souvenirs. 

The Blommer Chocolate Company was responsible for this aromatic gift. It opened in 1939 and quickly became one of the largest chocolate processing plants in North America. That’s almost 80 years of permeating Chicago’s night sky with the aroma of cocoa. It’s not inconceivable that some people took their first and last breaths of life with the smell of chocolate filling their senses.

Late night chocolate became an elemental odor of my early twenties. If the air was right and the breeze headed a certain direction the scent would waft through the window of my first real apartment and mingle with the smells of nicotine, mildew and burnt coffee. It was as much of my early twenties as the music I was listening to and the clothes that I believed gave me identity. It hung in the air as I made love to my first serious girlfriend, had my first one night stand, watched Hitchcock films on a broken television set, ate cheap spaghetti with jarred sauce procured from drugs stores, listened to my neighbor yell at his mother, lamented my youthful errors and dreamed of fame. Often the smell of warm chocolate would hover in my room when I came home from these long walks with my legs twitching as I crawled under sheets that were too small for my bed. 

It was an already rarefied time made more so magical by the warmth of cocoa in the air. As these moments unfolded I knew that life wouldn’t always be spontaneous, open and free, that these friends would move on to different cities, and life would become more regular.  I’m grateful I was aware of this. It allowed me to hold the moments closer and let them become a part of my being.