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CHICAGO - ADVENTURES IN INFRASTRUCTURE SPENDING

Everyone always hears about how much winter sucks in Chicago. But Obama recently gave the

NPO

tens of millions in the stimulus package, and suddenly they had to figure out how to inspect and repair four times as many houses next year as in the past. Now, if you own your own home here but fall below some household poverty line and are struggling to pay your heating bills, you can apply to this program to have your house slightly fixed so it's more energy-efficient and your bills drop and you can keep making those mortgage payments. In their frantic dash to hire people, I just got a job as an inspector.

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Somebody in the interview process made the argument that if Americans use less energy to heat their homes, the US is less dependent on foreign oil and so therefore it's like Fighting The Terrorists. I am on salary to help the War on Terror, and they actually offer a healthcare plan, even though it sucks. And at some mysterious date in the near future I am supposed to be issued a cell phone, laptop, and vehicle, all For Work Use Only.

For the first six weeks it was just constant classes about insulation and furnaces and mold, and I kept wondering if this was what the WPA was like, except with computers and air conditioning. Boring, easy, and on the clock. Last week we had our "certification exam," I rocked it, our salary ticked upwards, and I finally actually got out in the field. After two buses down a long stretch of Cottage Grove Avenue I met up with the guys I was assigned to ride along with on his route for the day--a dreadlocked 19-year-old kid named Alcamenes and my training partner, Brasidas.

First up at 8 AM is this tiny brick house where the owner's watching her TV Judge Show or whatever it's called about how he never pay child support and how oh but no your honor she a lyin ho. Brasidas, who was a local college basketball star back in the 90s who still gets recognized on the street even though he got injured out of the game before he could go pro, keeps asking the lady for updates on who the baby daddy

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really

is every time he passes through the front room.

I'm back in the kitchen checking out some fucked up window when I catch someone out of the corner of my eye. I thought the old lady was the only one home. I turn quick and there's a man sticking out of the kitchen floor. We stare each other in the eyes for a death second, like Who the fuck are you and what are you doing here? Walking in, I didn't even notice that trapdoor. In front of the oven. Which is, of course, the only way to reach the basement, where this guy, the owner's grown son, has been sleeping or watching TV or jerking off, I have no idea. The stairs down to his netherworld are set at a ridiculously steep pitch--it's basically a ladder without handrails with the second tread missing and a hole punched through the drywall behind it, thanks to a fall. And this 65-year-old woman drops through the trapdoor and scrambles down there like it's nothing so she can show Alcamenes where the furnace is.

I head into the bathroom off the kitchen, removing one of the office-style drop-ceiling panels, and about two feet above that is a wide open wooden hatch to the attic. The first thing I see is a fucking wooden barrel. Next to it, in a cabinet, is a wet battery dated 1937 that is attached to a telegraph signal set. The museum nerd in me is freaking out, but it's about 120 degrees up in there and Brasidas has just shown up asking for help downstairs, so I stop exploring.

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We drive off and Alcamenes goes, "Wanna hear some my music? I'm a recording artist." Before I answer, "Probably not," he plugs his Work Laptop into the Work Minivan stereo. I'm expecting

the usual $5 Chicago street rap CD-R crap

, but no, this is actually some pretty great R&B with his girlfriend on vocals. Apparently Lil Wayne's producer ripped off two of his songs. Alcamenes whiles away the time with a yarn about another inspector who was recently fired for making his cocaine delivery runs on Company Time in the Company Vehicle, but using, of course, his own cell.

We show up to a bungalow in South Shore and, as I expected, a little old black lady answers the door. As I didn't expect, she proceeds to ask us, in French, to wait there a moment while she gets someone: her bilingual grown son and his wife. By the end of the day I couldn't tell if they were Haitian or West African, but that house's boiler had some major leak problems, the interior design was crazy 3-D zigzag plaster walls mixed with giant baroque ceramics of dudes in knee breeches, there was no insulation anywhere in the building except the addition's crawlspace--where it was installed backwards--and whatever chicken dish they were cooking up smelled AMAZING.

Unfortunately this scent was followed by the taste of a lunch run to the McDonald's at 79th and something east, near a boarded-up block of flats spray painted "CORK CITY," the kind of place where the bums just cut to chase and ask you for change inside the restaurant while you're in line at the registers. This is where a professed ex-CIA/ex-marine/ex-army all-at-the-same-time regaled us with tales: "At least when you're in the army you know who your enemy is. 'Round here, you can get shot for nothin';" "In the Army you're never gonna get rich, but you weren't get poor neither, and you get the best food in the world;" "The CIA knows where I am RIGHT NOW." This all came from a grizzled 66-year-old wearing a St. Lawrence seminary necklace who claimed to be a voodoo priest and liked to keep showing us his VA card wrapped in a flag while talking about how we were all on camera. Alcamenes then proceeded to discreetly table-top video him with his Work Digicam.

Alcamenes gave me a ride home. I unlocked the door to my own apartment, where the indoor thermometer showed 90 degrees despite all the fans, and I started pulling off sweat-soaked clothes on my way to the fridge with the Sailor Jerry rum, blood orange juice, and soda water. Ten minutes later my lady came home with some pistachio ice cream. Thanks Obama!

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