It’s good to get back to ripping up old papers. The support for this one is an old manila envelope of my father’s. It’s from his teaching days, but in recent years, it held a working manuscript for Soviet Stamps. I dumped those pages out because I liked the envelope with its notes and numbers. I’ll use the pages later maybe.
I bike to Compound Yellow to listen to Bill and Cooper doing their new thing. The room in which they play——upstairs from a gallery, in a converted out building——feels like a kids’ art classroom. There are blackboards, musical instruments, and bins full of various art & craft materials. Rows of mismatched chairs have been set out in the middle. Cooper turns off most of the lights before they play.
I help carry gear out to the car afterwards, then sit talking to Laura, who runs the place, and a couple of her friends. One of them saw me sketching and guessed who I was. He’d read one of the cab books. I tell them about the bar book and they both buy a copy.
I send Laura a scan of my sketch the next day and ask how far her gallery’s booked in advance. I need to find some place to host a show all these damn collages. Maybe her place is it.
This one started from a colored-pencil phrase I found in another folder. A bunch of prep sketches to illustrate some poems by a former friend back in the early 90s. Nothing came of it, but I kept the drawings.
Evidently, they were fated to be cut up and reused thirty years later.
I fought it for as long as I could. Ever since the bar reopened last summer, it hasn’t felt right. Now I’m leaving and I’m really fucking sad about it.
When I started at the Skylark in 2015, I was starting over. A long-term relationship had ended and I was trying a new neighborhood. I’d sworn I wouldn’t work in a restaurant or bar ever again, but there I was, checking IDs at the door in between chapters of whatever book I was reading. Soon after that, I was behind the bar for the first time in fifteen years. It went on every week for several years until the plague put a stop to it in March, 2020.
My relationship to dayjobs has always been one of weary tolerance. Sooner or later something goes sideways. More often than not, it’s a conflict with a manager/boss type. I don’t do well with authority figures. It’s the reason I drove a cab for twelve years. For 90% of that job, there’s no one to blame or credit but yourself. The Skylark was a good fit because the owners were so hands off. We were expected to be adults and just do our fucking jobs. Historically, the less interference I have, the better job I do. It worked really well until lockdown came.
Like so many others, that solitary year caused me to reflect upon what was and wasn’t necessary in my day-to-day. I became more disciplined, more productive and creative. I discovered——or, more accurately, had reconfirmed——that I needed very little daily interaction to keep above water emotionally. So long as the work was going, I was fine.
Then, last summer, the bar reopened. I told myself I’d see how I felt going back, then decide whether I wanted to keep working there. I’d rearranged my life to the point that this place, which was such a constant, was no longer in the equation. Now I had to pivot backwards.
It felt off from the start. Everyone was trying so hard to pretend it was 2019. Coworkers kept going down. Seizures, accidents, psych ward stays. It just kept piling up. Felt like we were marked. We’d talk about it sometimes. Who would be next to fall?
My regular shift at the bar has been Sunday all these years. It’s an industry night, meaning that workers from other bars and restaurants come in. It’s mostly regulars on my shifts. They’re super generous and have rescued many a slow night. But what they do most of their time with me is bitch about their jobs. They go on and on about their idiot bosses and coworkers, how the places would fall apart if they left, etc.
I don’t want that to be me. I started to dislike coming in so I’m nipping it in the bud. I know the bar will be fine without me and that the only factor I have any control over is myself. So I’m leaving before I start hating it. I don’t want yet another place in the city I don’t feel welcome.
I’ll miss making playlists and changing things up according to the temperature in the room. I’ll miss most of my coworkers. I’ll miss the priceless eavesdropping opportunities from bad dates and ridiculous circular inebriated arguments.
I’ve never missed a job in my life, but I’ll miss this one.
I get on the Ashland bus at the Orange Line and head north. I thought about biking it, but the mental image of an electric guitar and amp bungee-corded to the bike rack for the return trip, while comical and my kind of challenge, is deterrent enough for reason to prevail for a change.
After seeing the Velvet Underground doc, I got it into my head to try playing again. It wasn’t the first time. I’ve been obsessed with guitar-based music since before I was allowed to quit playing violin at fourteen. But my experience with that instrument made me steer clear of playing. I decided to just listen. Safer that way. But it’s never stopped eating at me.
I texted Bill right after leaving the Landmark, all excited about the guitar again. I asked if he’d help me find the right one. Fifteen years ago, I traded Bill a drawing for guitar lessons. It lasted a few months, then I stopped practicing. He’s always said I still have some lessons left on the tab. Maybe now’s the time to cash in.
I get to the store early. I’m early to everything. I go to the bakery across the street to kill time. I get coffee and an eclair and sit watching an old man in an extravagantly hideous clashing-pattern shirt adjust and readjust a coffee cup, thermos, book, and notebook on his table. He’s completely oblivious to my presence. Doesn’t look up a single time in half an hour. A perfect model.
I cross the street and meet Bill by the door to the music store. We wander around a bit as I tell him what I have in mind. I basically know what I want. It has a lot to do with how the thing should look, but Bill’s here so I don’t waste my money on a beautiful lemon.
We take a couple guitars into a little room with amps and he tries each out before handing them to me. We talk about the wide range of price tags. Is it just aesthetics? Extra bells and whistles? Bill’s been at it over thirty years, so I trust him. As I hold one and pluck this string or that, I don’t remember a single lesson he taught me fifteen years back, but it feels good to make the thing make sounds.
A few days earlier I remembered that I’d bought an electric once before. It was in Boston in the mid-90s. I was driving cab and stopping at the Middle East and T.T.’s to hear bands every chance I got. I never took a lesson. It was before the internet, so I couldn’t play along with a how-to video. Perhaps I’d bought a book. I’ve managed to wipe it from the memory bank. I know that guitar didn’t make the trip back to Chicago in 1997.
So why now? Can’t be a mid-life crisis since I’m way past mid-life. I have a friend who’s been bugging me to start a band forever and ever. Maybe now’s the time. I know I’m not afraid of embarrassing myself. It’s late enough in the game that real aptitude or skill is not really in the cards. But I can just enjoy making a little noise, right?
