Good food, city hall scandals and the Cubs - Chicago hasn't changed.

Byline: Paul Neville / The Register-Guard

CHICAGO - They say you can't go home again, that the relentless march of time and inevitable distortions of memory ensure that efforts to rediscover the places of our youth invariably end in disappointment.

Turns out it's not true, at least when you're talking about Chicago.

Chicago is still Chicago - good and bad.

It was - and still is - a bold, brawny, bawdy city where money and power flow like traffic down Michigan Avenue. It was - and still is - a city ruled by machine politics, though the machine has become smaller and subtler, where a Richard Daley is forever mayor, and where the streets, sidewalks, parks, zoos and lakefronts are the impeccable stuff of magazine covers.

Chicago was - and still is - a city where you find the poor living in projects where children are shot to death on school playgrounds and where the rich live blocks away in resplendent condos with commanding lakefront views. It was - and still is - a city with theaters, music and museums that are the match of any in the known universe.

It was - and still is - a city where you can eat yourself to slow, sweet death on heartbreakingly wonderful food that can be found on every block.

I returned to Chicago, where I graduated from high school and college, to visit two daughters who are in their early 20s and share an apartment on the city's north side. On the night I arrived, a small mob gathered outside a nearby restaurant to watch the ritualistic obliteration of the ``Foul Ball'' that dealt Cubs fan Steve Bartman a brush with infamy in the team's World Series run. In case you're wondering, the ball was blown into a frazzle of threads in a clear, bullet-proof tank by an Oscar-winning special effects coordinator.

As I watched, I remembered 1969, the year I graduated from high school. The Cubs, led by three future Hall of Famers, trampled my heart and those of all Cub fans by blowing a monster lead and falling to the Mets - the Mets, mind you. The team's collapse began after a black cat ran on the field, and local humane society officials expressed concern that Cub fans would declare open season on black cats throughout the city. (I don't believe any ever fell into the hands of a special effects coordinator.)

Chicagoans remain a merciless, unforgiving lot when it comes to their Cubs. As my daughters and I sat in a deep-dish pizza joint, a table of genteel middle-aged professionals were engaged in deep and thoroughly liberal reflections on "The Passion of the Christ" and the Holocaust. When the conversation eventually turned to spring training and Bartman, the group was suddenly transformed into a wolf pack with fangs bared and dripping with foam. "That SOB (Bartman) knew exactly what he was doing when he went after that ball," one man said. "He deserves every bad thing that's happened to him."

Chicago is still run by a Richard Daley, although these days it's hizzoner's son and not the original who roiled the liberal sensibilities of my youth. During my visit, the younger Daley stunned me by announcing he looked favorably on gay marriages, something I'm certain caused the coffin containing his late father to stand on end.

But just as I was beginning to think city government might really have changed, I picked up a Chicago Tribune to read about the latest scandal involving waste and corruption in Daley's administration. It's a scandal of the magnitude that only this city can produce and that gives Chicagoans a perverse sense of pride.

Over the decades, the city has been an epicenter of extortion, bribes, backroom dealing, ghost payrolling and other sordid and illegal acts. Until recently the Chicago City Council witnessed one of its members hauled off to prison at the rate of one a year for a quarter century with federal investigations ranging from Operations Phocus to Silver Shovel an ever-present reality.

The latest scandal is a thing of beauty. The Daley administration has spent $40 million annually for privately owned dump trucks that did nothing but sit there and rust.

But wait - there's more. Turns out an aide to the city's most powerful alderman is a partner in a key company, and a number of the trucking firms are owned by reputed mobsters. Meanwhile, the mayor's cousin has a mother-in-law who is involved in the mess, as is the chief investigator in the city clerk's office.

There's more, but that gives you a taste. For people who love scandals dripping with subplots - and fine food - there's no finer place than Chicago.

Somehow it's reassuring to know you really can go home again.

Paul Neville ([e-mail]) is an associate editor at The Register-Guard.

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