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6.4.2019

The Chicago Loop

My parents took my brother and I to see a Kiss concert when we were children. It was January in New England and we stood in line for three hours in our puffy snow suits waiting for the doors to open. Our mom brought snacks and hot chocolate in a thermos. There was a crush when the doors opened as hundreds of stoned, denim-clad and half-frozen Paul Stanleys, Gene Simmonses, Ace Frehleys and (to a lesser extent) Peter Chrises surged forward, catching us up. In a biblical moment, our father, a towering man, extended his arms and bulldozed a perimeter, protecting his two confused sons and terrified wife. We scrambled through concrete tunnels and claimed some available seats just above the floor level. We spent the next hour, speechless, reverent, watching beach balls and frisbees float and glide and pot smoke waft in ribbons toward the ceiling of the civic center. Later, as we watched Kiss strutting, howling, preening, bellowing, spitting fire, blood and semen all over the stage, I was unable to fully grasp that such humans could exist. I couldn't quite believe my eyes. My brother and I stood on our chairs, screaming and squealing, all decorum lost, and took turns taking pictures with our Kodak Pocket Instamatic with a disposable flash cube on top. 

Afterwards, we piled back into the family station wagon and drove the three hours north through the frigid dark, ears ringing, back to our little house in our small town, back to dirty snowbanks and silence and school. Our photos came in the mail two weeks later, each frame revealing giant, flashed-out backs-of-heads in the foreground, nearly obscuring the pixel-width specks of color on the distant stage, a weak suggestion of what we had beheld with our own eyes. It was, at least, proof that we had been there and that it had happened.