I’m beginning to wonder if it might have been faster if our bus driver had just driven us all the way to Chicago and we said to hell with the train.

So, now I’m back on the train, and we're racing through Michigan, on our way to Chicago. My health is good, and I'm getting my equilibrium back. But that Canadian security was intense, and I think that their measures were silly and unnecessary.

But according to the conductor, since Sept. 11: Everything is different. It sure is.

I'm wondering if the AA battery in my AlphaSmart laptop is starting to fail because it is acting strangely. Paragraphs are beginning to mix, and old files are coming back to haunt me from out of nowhere. It is positively surrealistic.

I feel hot and flushed because the train car is overheated. Gerard is fast asleep by my side, and I will not abandon him. (Hopefully, he won't try to lose me.) The future seems more and more uncertain with time, and I'm beginning to like that.

I went down to the bathroom after the car's ventilation system finally kicked in, and I'm feeling better now, though not perfect, but certainly better than this morning.

Gerard suspects that the Chinese food I ate last night in Toronto might have something to do with my current condition, but I think that the Chinese food killed something I picked up on the VIA train.

Anyway, life is good, and I begin to write furiously on my AlphaSmart, but the clicking of my laptop is starting to irritate the people in the train car, especially Gerard.

2:32 a.m. Marco Santi, an old high school acquaintance, was supposed to pick me up in front of Chicago's Union Station and he's not there!

I yell out to the gods, to the homeless, to anybody who will hear me, “Marco! Marco! Where are you, Marco!”

No response. The temperature starts to dip and, lacking credit cards and cash, I begin to feel vulnerable.

I find a pay phone and call Marcos, but he doesn't answer. Instead, he has left an outgoing message on his answering machine, directed specifically to me, that says his car has broken down and he can't pick me up.

So there I was, standing in front of the towering Grecian columns of Chicago Union Station in the frigid cold. And it was getting even colder by the minute as Chicago's legendary winds began blowing in from frozen Lake Michigan.

In desperation, I pulled out my address book, thumbed through my meticulously OCD-composed pages and found a listing for my first cousin, Marty, who I hadn’t spoken to in over 30 years.

Marty lives about 10 miles from Union Station, and miraculously he was home and answered the phone promptly, without screening it.

“I’m Chuck Reuben," I said. "Do you remember me?”

“Sure, how could I forget: you’re my cousin.”

“Well, I’m standing here just outside of Union Station, and my ride broke down outside of Northbrook. I'm out of money and freaking out. I need to catch a train in the morning, and I don't know what to do."

“Hey! You're my cousin! What can I say? Just call a cab and come over: You can crash here.”

“Are you sure I’m not imposing,” I ask him as I stand in front of the floodlit Union Station at midnight while the homeless people begin to gather. “I don’t want to be any bother.”

“How can I say no,” he says. “You’re my cousin.”

I called a cab and drove to Marty's warm, well-lit house, a stately four-story townhouse in the city. My cousin is married to a charming lady named Fran, and they have two huge, excitable and affectionate rescue dogs.

Marty and Fran fed me delicious cold fried chicken and plied me with exotic beers. Now I’m lying in a comfortable bed with a down cover thinking that surely there must be a God in heaven that is looking after me.

I can barely keep my eyes open now: I lucked out.

Monday, Jan 7, 6:30 a.m. I felt so much better after taking a shower in the huge bathroom adjoining Marty's guest bedroom. I slept well last night.

My cousin's townhouse is monumental, like something out of Architectural Digest with four or five stories connected by a looming carpeted stairway that rises into the heavens. Having left my big bag at the entry foyer when I first arrived, I was going to go downstairs and fetch my underwear later that night but had second thoughts lest I fall down the stairs or bump into a bounding dog.

So I think I will not wear underwear this morning. Now that’s sexy. Even sexier than my silk underwear.

My health is good. Marty's shower made all the difference in the world, and I feel refreshed. The weather in Chicago has become unbelievably good.

Outside I hear a bell toll the hours. It's Monday morning.

Milwaukee. Monday, January 7, 2001.

Marty drove me to Chicago Union Station, and I managed to catch the Hiawatha to Milwaukee five minutes before it left the station. Talk about luck.

Owen was waiting for me at the Milwaukee Station, and he drove me to his new home, a two-story 100-year-old Victorian in urgent need of repair.

Owen’s wife was in New York, showing off her professional portfolio, trying to land a big job as a photographer. Owen stayed home, playing the part of a general contractor, overseeing the replacement of the furnace and trying to get the ancient plaster walls up to snuff.

The basement has a dirt floor with a tiny, ancient river running through the middle of it and severe drainage problems. It is very damp down there, and you can smell the wet in the two long stairways that lead up and down the house.

I would have tackled the drainage problem first, but Owen prefers to address superficial things like cracks in the wall. Owen’s thinking is that since the house has managed to last a hundred years, it will last until he gets around to it.

Since Owen's kids were at school, we decided to take his dog for a very long walk along the Milwaukee River. I told Owen about my harrowing experience with the border guards at the Canadian border, and he said his 14-year-old son Woody was recently stopped by a cop who searched his backpack for no apparent reason.

The cop found a suspicious can labeled “nuts” on it. Woody cautioned the policeman not to open it. And of course, the policeman opened it, and one of those immense springy surprise snakes flew out at him!

“Don’t say anything about this to anybody,” he warned Woody as he let him go off on his merry way.

Owen’s daughter, Camille, is a real overachiever, involved with gymnastics, ballet and music. She was also playing the lead role in the school musical "Oliver." Another girl performs as the Artful Dodger. I found all that gender-bending adorable.

Camille is very much the opposite of Woody, who is quiet and reserved. We hit it off quite well and later that night she showed off her skills at Irish dancing, and I tried to recreate my famous African dance solo from years gone by.

We talked a lot about family, and old friends and then we spoke about our bodies. I told him about my cures for arthritis (glucosamine sulfate) and my enlarged prostate (pygeum, saw pamento, with a bit of Cardura for good measure) and he said that we’re beginning to act like a bunch of old men, talking about our ailments all the time.

Maybe so, but as I recall, I was much unhealthier when I was in college with my horrible skin problems and back issues. The difference is I’m trying to do something about my ailments these days instead of blowing them off.

Owen and I are getting older but among close friends, one hardly even notices the passage of years. I get a headache if I talk about philosophy for too long, and Owen is a world-renown professor of Philosophy at Marquette University.

At one point, back in his apartment, he gave me a paper to read about the ethics of eating meat according to the ancient Greek philosophers. I struggled with it, most of the words having well over three syllables.

I guess Owen could see my difficult because he said, as I reached page two, “Thanks Chuck, but you don’t have to read that if you don’t want.” I didn’t put up a fight.

“K,” I said and gently put it aside. I inserted Tom Wait’s “The Heart of Saturday Night,” into the CD player and turned up the volume.

I cannot count the times Owen and our friends stayed up late into the night listening to that album in college, drowning our sorrows with alcohol and marijuana.

And on this occasion, our voices filled his old, stately Victorian as we bellowed along with Tom.

Apropos to my journey and my dismay at not finding Marco waiting for me in front of Union Station was a Waits’ songs whose lyrics went,

“Depot, Depot, what am I doing here? Depot, Depot, what am I doing here?
I ain’t coming, I ain’t going,
my confusion is showing….”

Later, after the kids were fed and busy with their homework, Owen and I headed out for a night on the town.

We walked to Linneman’s, located about a mile or so away in the bitter cold, but I was dressed in many, many layers of clothing and well prepared for the icy weather. Linneman’s is a great place, with its hardwood floors and tin ceiling.

We enjoyed the fantastic entertainment of Violet Femmes featuring Sigmund Snopke III on the keyboard.

There was no cover charge, and there were all of ten people in the audience at the peak of the evening. At one point, he introduced me to the audience as being from Albuquerque, New Mexico. We could choose from two beers on tap, and Owen and I took turns buying rounds for each other and tipping the bartender generously. It was a classic night out!

After handing out free sunglasses that looked like something that the robot in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” wore, Sigmund played his heart out to us, employing the height of digital keyboard technology, including digital magic wands that sounded just like an Indian sitar.

He also played the flute, the trombone and something resembling a large French Horn. He played his heart out to an audience of seven while Owen drank strong stout and I enjoyed at least five pints of excellent local red ales.

Now everything is spinning all around me. Ottawa is undoubtedly the king of homebrews, but Milwaukee is a close second.

My friend Owen, with his yarmulke under his baseball cap, is not only a wise man but also one hell of a good friend.

---

This marks the end of the TWENTY-NINTH installment of "The Last Hoorah." If you'd like to start from the beginning, then please click this page.

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