Letter

I have no concept of time. It’s all happening right now, whatever you mention. Even if you tell me it’s years away. Even if you’re thinking out loud, never intending to follow through, as soon as the idea/plan/date leaves your lips, to me it’s set in stone. I have to mechanically walk myself back from the brink multiple times a day because of things I hear, read, and see. It gets exhausting.

Recently, a friend refused to believe I wasn’t mad at her for often being late. I kept telling her that I’d long since gotten used to it. That it was part of the deal, if we were to remain friends. She kept insisting she was sure I still got angry every time. If I’m put out by any part of it, it’s that I keep expecting her to be on time, knowing full well she won’t be. That’s on me. Also, of course, I’m perpetually early, so I’m always waiting.

I fixate on signposts. Like packages that are delayed, upcoming events, trips, deadlines. They all push against one another to be topmost in my consciousness. Then, halfway through them happening, they are already being erased and forgotten, ceding their place to the next thing in line. Is it all just about the anticipation? The thing is that I’m most at peace when not looking forward at all.

The times I’m least tormented by time is when I’m working. Half hours morph into seconds when it’s going right. If I’m into what I’m doing, what comes next or what came before doesn’t even occur to me. So why can’t the rest of life be a little more like that?

My day can be ruined because a package doesn’t arrive as promised. Never mind that what I’m waiting for isn’t time-sensitive in the least. What possible difference does it make that I listen to that record tomorrow rather than today, that I read this book next month instead of this moment? How do I stop caring about things that don’t matter?

The fucked-up Catch-22 of it is that this fixated urgency makes me good at what I do. If I didn’t feel with every fiber of my being that this brush stroke or that phrase is crucial, the only thing that matters, I wouldn’t know how to do anything.

It’s only the rest of the day and night that this is no way to be. The parts where there are other people, most of all. I sit waiting, turning myself inside out because what I’m waiting for would be done this instant if I was doing it. But I know if I’m allowed to do as I want and think I need, it would mean yet another person cut out of my life. Because the only way to deal with others is to compromise. To not act on certain impulses.

I know too that this instinctive certainty of mine often betrays me. I’m wrong a lot, yet the complete confidence is the thing that lets me continue to put one foot in front of the other. Knowing full well that inertia will slam me into wall after wall.

Is everyone this way? I’ve never been anyone else, so I have no idea.

—Here’s Barry Gifford doing q&a after a screening of Roy’s World at the Music Box.

I text my brother from a rest area somewhere near Ithaca, NY that I’m on schedule to arrive at his new house by dinnertime. I’ve written out every turn once I get off I-90 in my notebook and have consulted it multiple times. I pride myself on navigating without the crutch of GPS. I never get lost. That’s what I tell anyone who will listen.

When planning the ride east a few weeks before, I ask my brother to crash at his new place in Western Massachusetts. He and his wife moved there a few months back and he’s started a new teaching job in the area. I’ve only seen the house on the realtor’s site. He texts me a few days later and asks if I know a woman named Rachel. She’s a fellow teacher in his district. They met via Zoom and she asked, noting his unusual surname, whether we were related. At first her name rings no bells, but then I ask if she’s married to Chris.

I met Chris through his brother Mike, who was dating my manager at Pearl Art & Craft in Chicago in 1997. We were all in the art/music scene around Wicker Park back then. Both brothers moved to the East Coast and got responsible adult-type jobs ages ago. I haven’t seen Chris in several years. I met Rachel only once, at their wedding near Buffalo eighteen years back. Now they’re awaiting my arrival at my brother’s place.

I know something’s off when I pass the first exit on the Mass Turnpike. Miles and miles crawl by with no way off, when I know I should be turning north. I text Boris to start eating without me. By the time I ascertain my actual location, I’m 30-40 miles off track.

There’s no cell reception in most of Western Massachusetts and nothing but winding two-lane country roads, so by the time I arrive, it’s two hours after my ETA. I catch up with Chris a few minutes before he and Rachel have to leave to relieve their babysitter. It’s the boonies, so they have a 45-minute drive and it’s nearing midnight.

Everybody has a laugh when I point out that there’s been an imposing portrait of Chris’s brother in Boris’s childhood bedroom for about twenty years. Now Mike lives a mile or two back on the same road as Boris. Maybe they’ll make friends.

On the way back home from visiting with my folks, I make plans to grab lunch with Gil in New Jersey, not far from his home. I’d thought that I’d be coming from Western Mass rather than Boston that morning, so Gil asks me to text when I hit the bridge formerly known as Tappan Zee. Trouble is that I wrote out directions from Boston. I end up at a weird alternate universe outpost called the Vince Lombardi Rest Area, which has every kind of junk food and souvenir, but no public wi-fi. Gil patiently waits the extra hour for me to blunder my way to the correct location and we have a nice lunch, followed by a visit to an art supply store.

As we eat, I wonder aloud whether the fact I got lost twice in one trip heralds a new phase in my life. Early onset Alzheimer’s, perhaps. Though, to my credit, in both instances, I was able to retrace my steps and see where I went wrong. My brother had teased me about not having a smartphone, but at no moment during either period of aimless wandering did the prospect of getting back to that nightmare cross my mind. I felt bad that I was keeping people waiting, but otherwise, I was pretty at peace not knowing where the hell I was.

I’m looking forward to when they take my license away, so automobile navigation will cease to be an issue. Then, the true wandering can begin.

In 2019, a literature professor from Tel Aviv emailed to say that she was writing something about me and hoped to visit that summer to meet up.

Now the thing she wrote is an academic survey of Chicago literary history. My friend, Bill, who wrote a chapter about the city’s literary future, gave me a copy. Good thing too, since it’s priced at an astounding $110, guaranteeing it a minuscule readership. The standard explanation for academic presses pricing hardcovers this way is that they are aiming at libraries that expect high-quality copies to stand the test of time. But it seems to me that a book like this could have appeal beyond the halls of academe. There are a lot of Chicago homers out there.

Selfishly, I’ve only read the couple pages about myself so far. It’s flattering stuff. Nice to get some institutional acknowledgment, though I don’t know what it actually means. Does a foreign academic press’s decision to include my work in a survey of Chicago literature give me a place in the official history? Is there even such a thing anymore? A universal standard by which any casual reader acknowledges this or that writer as belonging to the canon. Canons aren’t popular these days anyway.

Whatever the case, it is validating when anyone takes notice of what I do. It makes it feel like it’s not all just pissing into the wind.

My one quibble with the book so far is the cover. Maybe it’s a cultural blindspot rather than a dig at the city, but who the fuck chose to put that horrible building on there? At least the tramp-stamp its namesake marked our city with isn’t visible. A completely generic photo otherwise. You’d think they’d have a couple bucks in the budget set aside to decorate a $110 book properly, rather than just doing a Google Image search and slapping a random result on the front. I wish they’d called me. I would have made them a much more attractive cover.

I don’t expect anyone to shell out $110, but if you’re curious what the professor wrote about me, drop me a line and I’ll send you a pdf scan of the relevant pages. Still working through what I feel about this development. Should I have a pin made——something between a blue ribbon and a hammer-and-sickle, say——so passersby know who they’re sharing air with? More likely, I’ll forget about it entirely in a week or two. Even historical figures have to go on with their lives sooner or later.