Chicago in February is a bad decision.

No, let me correct that. Being in Chicago in February is a bad decision. The city itself? Perfectly fine. Historically rich, architecturally gorgeous, blessed with enough food options to ruin any plausible dietary aspirations. But visiting Chicago in February, especially when you’ve been soft-cooked in Southern California sun most of your life, is a choice only masochists and touring musicians make willingly.

I was neither, technically.

After graduation, I’d pieced together a makeshift existence as a sound engineer. “Engineer” was a generous title. It was more like a glorified roadie with knob-twisting privileges. I picked up gigs wherever I could – club shows, backline setup, monitor mixes, cable runs at conferences, speaker checks for godawful motivational speakers whose presence always felt like being trapped in an MLM sermon by a man in salmon-colored slacks.

At the time, I didn’t care. I had an old GMC conversion van with an airbrushed desert mural on the side and a mattress in the back. I was twenty-two, underpaid, over-caffeinated, and drunk on the illusion of freedom.

By the time I made it to Chicago in February 2003, I’d been living this highway-hotel lifestyle for almost a year. No fixed address. Just a calendar of vague possibilities and a glove box full of crumpled W-9s.

The job that week was at the Arie Crown Theater, a venue inside McCormick Place, the largest convention center in North America and an architectural complex that feels like it was designed by someone who got a CAD license in exchange for selling their soul.

Alicia Keys had just wrapped her show the night before, and the next touring act wasn’t due for load-in until the following weekend. My job was in that in-between space – quiet time. Maintenance. Calibration. Lugging out outdated rack-mounted equipment and replacing it with things that blinked more enthusiastically.

I liked working the quiet days. There was something oddly peaceful about an empty venue. It was like being backstage at a haunted house. You knew it got loud and dramatic once the lights came on, but in the meantime, it was just you and the click of relays, the hum of transformers, and the occasional coffee run.

The gig wrapped a little before midnight. I packed my gear, pocketed my per diem, and headed back to the motel I’d found near Bronzeville – a little dump with buzzing fluorescent lights, suspicious stains on the comforter, and an ice machine that sounded like it was mourning something.

I was asleep by one.

A few hours later, twenty-one people would be crushed to death just blocks from where I’d spent my day.

The E2 Nightclub sat above the Epitome restaurant on Michigan Avenue, not far from Chinatown. If you’ve never been to Chicago’s Chinatown, picture a low-key, working-class version of San Francisco’s – more utilitarian, less photogenic, and far more interesting if you know where to look.

I’d been wandering that neighborhood earlier in the day. Had dim sum at a place that charged extra if you asked for forks. Bought a cheap, knockoff Misfits T-shirt from a place that also sold fake jade and electronics that probably never passed QA.

Had the E2 been open during the day, maybe I would’ve wandered in out of curiosity. But it was strictly a late-night spot. That night, the club was hosting a crowded Monday event – hundreds of people packed into a space that had been ordered closed months earlier for code violations.

The place was under a court-ordered closure. Still open. Still selling drinks. Still booking DJs. Still ignoring every city citation stapled to its walls.

Around 2 a.m., a fight broke out inside the club. Security moved in, probably not their first brawl of the evening. Someone, possibly a guard, used pepper spray to break it up.

That’s when it unraveled.

This was only a year and a half after 9/11 and people were still panicking over the idea of chemical attacks. Duct tape sales had spiked. Emergency water purification kits were flying off the shelves at hardware stores. Every unmarked van was suspect. Every loud noise, an existential threat.

So when someone shouted “Gas!” inside the club, people ran.

Correction, they tried to run.

The club had been built with a tragically poetic level of incompetence. Its exits either didn’t open outward, or were literally chained shut.

Panic. Stampede. Bodies piling onto bodies in the rush to escape through a single, impossible door. People suffocating under the weight of the crowd. Shoes left behind in the scramble. Phones crushed underfoot. Screams drowned in the sound of crushed ribs and collapsing airways.

Twenty-one dead. Dozens more injured.

And like most preventable tragedies, this one followed a painfully predictable script.

Months before, the city had cited E2 for multiple violations. Unsafe stairwells. Blocked fire exits. Overcrowding. The judge issued a closure order. The club’s owners claimed it only applied to part of the premises. The city disagreed. The legal language was vague enough to give everyone plausible deniability – until the bodies hit the floor.

The following morning, the news ran the same grainy footage over and over. Shoes in the snow, medics lifting sheets, a parade of dazed survivors recounting how they thought they were going to die.

I watched from my motel room, wrapped in the same blanket I’d thrown over myself the night before to block the draft from the cracked window. The radiator wasn’t working. Neither was the cable. I watched it all play out on a fuzzy local broadcast, trying to remember whether I’d passed the club earlier that day.

I had.

I was almost certain.

Chicago, it seems, is particularly adept at forgetting.

In 1903, the Iroquois Theater fire killed 602 people. The building was “fireproof.” The audience was mostly women and children. The fire curtain failed. Exits were locked. Bodies piled six deep at the doors.

In 1979, a crowd crush at a Who concert in Cincinnati left eleven people dead. Same setup – general admission, bottlenecked exits, no crowd control.

In 1989, Hillsborough Stadium in England: ninety-seven people died, crushed against fences at a football match. Blamed on “hooliganism” at first. Turns out, poor planning. Locked gates. Indifference.

And now, 2003. Chicago. Again.

If I had decided to sleep in my van that night, which was my usual routine, I might’ve parked nearby. Maybe even within earshot. Maybe I would’ve seen the aftermath. Maybe I would’ve heard the screaming.

But it was too cold. A fluke. Twenty-seven degrees and wind slicing through the city like a knife dipped in liquid nitrogen. I’d paid for the cheapest motel I could find because I didn’t want to wake up with my teeth frozen to my own tongue.

After the E2 disaster, people demanded answers. Politicians did what politicians do – they pointed fingers and expressed concern. The owners were charged. Lawsuits were filed. There were calls for reform.

But not much changed. Clubs still overbook. Doors still open the wrong way. Security guards still aren’t trained in crowd control. And when something goes wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault.

We live in a country where buildings are designed to be profitable, not survivable. Where fire codes are suggestions and inspections are just items on a to-do list that no one has the budget to complete. Where the same mistakes are made over and over again, as if repetition somehow absolves responsibility.

From the back of the venue, where the mix board sits, you can see it all. You see the room fill. You feel the temperature rise. You clock the bottlenecks before anyone else does. I started keeping a mental checklist. Exit widths. Barricade locations. The number of security guards versus the number of doors.

I started refusing gigs at certain venues. Places that made my skin crawl. Ones where the only emergency lighting was from the Bud Light sign. Places where the fire extinguisher was last checked during the Clinton administration.

Some people thought I was paranoid. Maybe I was. But I knew the stats.

I’d read about crowd crushes. Watched footage from South Korea, Brazil, Russia. All the same script. All the same mistakes. Doors that open the wrong way. Panic. Poor signage. Zero leadership.

All the same ending.

I drove out of Chicago a the next day, crawling along icy interstates with the heater barely working and my side mirror held on with tape.

I thought about the people at E2. The ones who made it out. The ones who didn’t. The ones who left early. The ones who stayed.

I thought about the theater fire in 1903. About how every generation forgets.

I thought about the door I’d propped open at the Arie Crown Theater the night before so I could carry in gear more easily. A fire marshal would’ve had a fit. But the door opened outward.

That night, I dreamed I was inside the club. The music was loud, but I couldn’t move. The exits were gone. And then there were no walls. No floor. Just pressure. Like the air itself was trying to crush me. When I woke up, I couldn’t breathe. I sat in the van’s driver’s seat until sunrise, listening to static on the radio and watching the snow fall sideways.

There’s a line I heard once that stuck with me: “Tragedy is a song on loop. We just change the tempo.”

I didn’t go to the vigil. Didn’t know anyone at the club. Hadn’t even stepped inside. But I remembered their names. I kept the clipping from the Tribune. I still have it, folded into the back of an old notebook full of decibel charts and stage plots. A reminder. Not of my near-miss. But of their no-escape.