At the library I scanned craigslist ads, which is what I’d been doing for an hour or so every day at work, but I had yet to find anything promising. Most were apartment shares. I yearned to live alone but the reality was that it’d be too expensive on my modest wage. Though they were far from New York prices, Chicago rents were anything but cheap. I searched for a half hour and responded to five ads before stumbling across the following:

Lakeview studio—400 sq. ft.—2nd f loor—
Between Belmont and Addison El stops—$550/month

It was small but I didn’t care; I could afford $550. Was there a catch? Probably, but what expectations did I have to begin with? The ad was only ten minutes old and I entered the number into my phone and rushed outside. A man’s gruff voice answered on the second ring.

“Hi, I’m calling about the apartment. Is it still available?”

“Sure is,” he said, then cleared the phlegm from his throat. “Would you like to see it?”

“I can come right now,” I said, already huffing it to the train.

It was an old three-story building covered with beige siding discolored and cracked from the seasons. It seemed to lean at a slight angle as if it were a drunkard tired of standing upright, and the kicker—the reason for the cheap rent, I was sure—was that the back of the building was mere feet from the El. If the empty apartment was the second-floor rear-facing unit—which I was confident it was—the trains would pass by the windows so close I could probably reach out and touch them.

The man’s name was Gene. In defiance of his gravelly voice, he was clean-shaven and fit and looked to be around sixty, tall and slender and sharp featured with close-cropped graying hair. He was nicely dressed in a black polo tucked into khaki slacks that made the half-smoked cigarette dangling from his lips look amiss. He squinted his blue eyes to keep the rising smoke from burning them. He shook my hand firmly, and the way he pumped it hard one time caused me to like him immediately.

“Come on up,” he said.

The building contained four units, and of course the studio was in fact where I had guessed. It was small, perfectly square save for two side-by-side doors to the left of the main entryway, one the bathroom, the other the closet. The kitchen, which contained a two-burner oven, a fridge, and a 1½-foot-long counter with sink, was situated to the right. The walls and floor were covered with dust and cobwebs.

“So how bad are the trains?”

“You get used to them.”