Crap is a fun word to say but hard to define. Somebody wrote a whole book about it and I reviewed it. But I still couldn’t tell you for certain what the word means and what it doesn’t. It’s a all-in-one placeholder like shit or fuck, I guess. The best thing in that book is Murro the Wonder Pig, an ancient German ancestor of the Chia-Pet. The dark art of marketing had convinced people to wonder at watching grass grow by the the turn of the twentieth century.
Feels good not to know what I’m doing with these collages but when I put a bunch of them up on a wall and squinted from them to a painting completed a couple years ago they kind of looked the same. Maybe not the same but definitely related. There’s some innate thing in how I compose and organize a picture that is lodged so deep I can’t get away from it even when I’m seemingly relinquishing control by using unfamiliar materials. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad. But it was a surprise. Maybe “new” just isn’t possible; just endless variations on an old theme.
Doodling in restaurants will never grow old. I was at Antico, in the patio, waiting for John to show up and had my sketchbook. They’re constructing some sort of covering for the colder months. I asked how much difference it would be from just being inside, once there’s basically a roof over the patio, but the waitress didn’t like where I was going. She insisted that there would be much more airflow. Who knows? Restaurants are being forced into terrible choices. I hope Antico makes it through. It’s a good one.
A couple days before I gave myself an early birthday present. Rick Rizzo was playing a backyard benefit in Beverly and I bought a ticket. Been a fan for thirty years at least. The complicating part was the neighborhood. I know that guy said you can’t go home again, but you can sure as shit ride past homes you used to live in. When you live in a place long enough the streets become littered with them.
I don’t go to Beverly much because for me there’s little there but the past. The three years I lived there were my last attempt at cohabitation. It didn’t end so well. But I was looking forward to a long ride through streets I only knew well as a cabdriver. Locked in the bubble of an automobile you’re not part of a place the same way you are on a bicycle.
I turned to Bill for routing advice from Bridgeport to Beverly. It’s a fragment of a ride he does weekly. He gave me detailed directions which I wound up ignoring. Chicago is a grid so there are often actual straight lines between starting and ending points. In the case of my ride, south of the stockyards the most direct route is Damen Avenue. Bill said there was a lot of construction between 55th and 63rd so he’d avoided it all summer. With summer just about over I decided to chance it.
Before I could get to Damen though, I got stuck at a rail crossing on the northern edge of the former stockyards. I watched the endless freight train crawl east a few minutes until it came to a standstill. I waited a few minutes, then pedaled west to Ashland to get around it. I took the sidewalks to 47th Street, then turned right. The street was jammed with Saturday afternoon commerce. I darted in and around the stalled cars, thankful not to be one of them.
Damen was free and easy for about a mile before becoming pockmarked with recent roadwork. There was no equipment or work crews but the surface was a Frankenstein patchwork for about a mile. Then it smoothed out. I knew this area—Back of the Yards, West Englewood—mostly from taking mentally- and physically-impaired young people home from activity centers in my cab. That was a decade and more ago. Since then, like most people, I’ve stayed within a much more circumscribed area. The bar, the coffeeshop, a trip downtown sometimes. There had been no reason for me take this trip until Rick gave me one.
I looked at the houses as I rolled through. Not too many people out. A few working on their cars or mowing lawns. Like every place. I didn’t envy the home or automobile owners. I felt light on the bike. Not a common feeling for me.
At 87th Damen is interrupted by the Dan Ryan Woods. I rode the Major Taylor Trail to 95th, then cut over to Prospect. I took a deep breath as I rounded the corner at 100th Place. I’d passed the house only a couple times since moving out at the beginning of 2015. A woman sat on the front lawn in front of a newish fence hiding the yard which used to be visible from the street. There was a big Black Lives Matter sign behind her. I thought of stopping but didn’t. I’ve never done that thing you see in movies sometimes where somebody shows up at the house they used to live in and asks the current occupants if they can look around. Kind of a creepy thing to do, if you think about it. What do they hope to see besides ghosts and architectural alterations?
Monica’s place is around the corner. I’d been there once or twice before. She took the gigantic couch Shay and I bought together. She greeted me after I’d leaned my bike against the fence and pointed upstairs to say the couch was still up there. The backyard was filling up with folding chairs, blankets. Rick would say later it was as close as he’d get to playing Ravinia. A few people recognized me from when I lived nearby. They asked if I’d moved back. I set my chair next to Elliot and Sarah. Elliot was the one that told me about the show.
I talked to Rick awhile. He was surprised but happy to see me. Said he didn’t expect to know anyone here. He lives in Elmhurst now. He told me about his teenaged son taking a bike ride to Garfield Park from the suburbs recently. He had no cellphone and Rick and his wife were worried enough to call the police. But then the kid showed up, completely energized from his adventure. He described the route he took to his dad and Rick couldn’t be mad at him afterward.
I knew about every song Rick played aside from the new ones from the Eleventh Dream Day record which isn’t done yet. It was a great show. The best I’ve heard since the lockdown for sure. This and Bill MacKay playing at Firecat a few weeks ago will be the ones I’ll remember like signposts of this time.
Afterwards I went to Fox’s for pizza for old time’s sake. Bill texted to see how my ride went and offered directions for the return trip. I took Damen back. It was an effortless ride.
I rented a car and drove to Boston again. This time it was for my mother’s birthday and to celebrate my own with my parents a little early. The plan was for them to come visit Chicago but that isn’t possible for obvious reasons. So I drove east.
Because of my cabbie days driving is a strangely automatic experience for me. I do it rarely now but it really is like riding a bike. It’s like plugging a familiar appliance back into the socket. There’s little to look at along the way since the entire trip is via tollways and interstates. It’s as if they were consciously designed to inspire ennui. Nonplace after nonplace punctuated by billboards and flashing lights. Long haul truckers must have rich fantasy lives to survive these vistas every day. I depend on music and podcasts in order not to lose it.
On arrival my parents and I fall into a familiar routine focused around meals and movie-watching. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do, so we have to make our own fun. The last two visits I’ve brought new art as presents so an hour or two is spent rearranging their collection—which is 95% my work—in order to find room for the new stuff. My suggestion that some of it should be retired to the trash is never received well. So I do my best to cram pictures closer and closer together. I’m glad that they enjoy things I make. What I think of my pictures is really beside the point. Once I’m done with them, they’re not for me.
There’s a wooden shelf in the kitchen with Russian folk-art crockery that my parents have had my whole life. I’ve told them that it’s the only thing in their house that I want. On the second or third day of my visit I start a painting of the shelf. The vantage point is where I always sit for breakfast. My mother sits with me as I work. She tells me that these ceramics were given to them by artist friends of my grandmother’s on the occasion of my birth. They traveled to the Ukraine to find the pieces. So maybe it makes some extra-logical sense that I’d been drawn to them. Whatever the reason, they’ve decorated my parents home always and so will always remind me of them. She asks if I want to take one of them home but I don’t want to break up the set.
Back in Chicago I start back on the collages. It’s strange how they’ve kind of taken over. Prior to a few months ago it would’ve never occurred to me; now I can’t wait to rip up old drawings and make something new of them. It’s probably something to do with my age. A need to look forward and backward all at once.
p.s. I turn fifty today. Wish me a happy birthday.
These are Archie and Millie. They live near Damen and Division. They’re friends of Wallace’s.
