For reasons unmentioned I slugged three quarters of a bottle of red wine and was on the corner of Rush and Chicago with my bike on a rare warm autumn night just as it was hitting my bloodstream. Five Chicago cops come out of a service entrance with their Cannondales and bullet proof vests. If it weren’t for those radios you’d never catch me, I thought, clearly the wine was inflating my ego, it’s true though, no way I’d let them catch me, I’d ride at full blast until my heart exploded. They headed north on Rush. I watched them go. Occasionally I chat with the bike cops when I see them on the bike path. They think I’m a messenger so at first they’re skeptical, give me the once over to asses what I’m all about, but after a minute they open up and we talk. I had a nice talk once with a cop, big black guy (and I mean huge, good looking too, he'd drink for free all night at the Jackhammer that's for sure), and he was telling me how much he loved his job, even in winter. I checked out his legs (I always size up potential challengers) he was fit, but he had too much muscle mass whereas I had finesse, once he got up to speed there’d be no outrunning him, but by then I’d have sprinted and dodged the hell out of there.

Back to last night

Five minutes pass after the cops leave and a security guard comes out of the building. He’s looking around and although we haven’t exchanged a word, I know what he’s thinking, “they went that way,” I say, nodding north. “Damn,” he says. Pause. Pause. “Want me to catch them?” I ask. “You can catch them?” “Oh, I can catch them” “If it’s not too much trouble, tell them I need badge numbers for my report.” With that I’m gone, with a burst of Green Day: “on a steady diet of...soda pop and ritalin...in the land of make believe that don’t believe in me”

Most of you aren’t from Chicago so you don’t know what that mile between Chicago and Division on Rush is all about: it’s jam packed with cabs and cars and drunks and teetotalers, and the whole rest of the world from Albuquerque to Bangladesh, from Christ to Krishna. By now the buzz had settled in nicely and instinct took over. I had no idea where those cops went but I was certain they would stay on Rush until Division, so sure I didn’t even bother checking down the side streets as I whizzed past. Just past Johnny Rockets (I like using the French “Jacques Rochet” for my burger joints, Kobe beef anyone?) the traffic heats up, congestion as tight as a sinus during ragweed season. I hit gaps between cars no bigger than 2 bike widths at full speed, at Le Passage a lady in fur steps towards an open car door, my shout stops her dead in her tracks as I shoot it, so close I could smell her perfume, see her chin tuck. Zig zagging between cars near Gibsons’s it occurs to me I’m taking chances I never would have taken sober, never even would have tried if I wasn’t chasing the cops. It was at that little park just across from Carmine’s that I entered the zone, that place where time and space fracture and you enter into an alternate universe, where the doors of perception open anew. Solid mass became marshmallow soft as I saw for the first time the space between molecules, societal rules disappeared, shouts of joy and anger didn’t register, I was all over the road, left right left, hello mister spinks, in perfect bliss, blazing a new path. I was seeing trails, glowing white, white hot light from the fires of the spark plugs, searing white light from after market halogens, bright orange umbrellas from the mono-chromatic street lights, the trails flirt and engage chaos then takes form in letters “Chicago Police” in reflective lettering as I make the left on Division, meat now in my mouth, pretty little kitty. “Security guard says he needs your badge numbers for his report.” “He sent a messenger to tell us that?” “Yes he did,” I say. “Tell him we’ll call it in.”

I head back south on a quieter Dearborn. Took an hour for the world to become mundane again.