Letter

I get a strange letter in the mail. It’s from Marquis Who’s Who. The envelope looks like something from Publishers Clearing House minus Ed McMahon’s cheerful visage. IMPORTANT INFORMATION ENCLOSED from the Editorial Department. The letter within congratulates me on my nomination and approval to join the ranks of the most successful and the most famous. There’s a link to an online questionnaire where I can list my accomplishments to cement my place among the créme de la créme. No purchase necessary. What do I have to lose? 

I like a good scam as much as the next guy. A while back I kept up communications with someone claiming to be from England who pretended to be buying artwork from me long enough to get their phony money order. I tried to cash it a currency exchange to confirm it as fake, then reported them to the FBI. I know that this was an exercise in futility but there was that tiny bit of satisfaction in catching on in time not to be taken. Nobody wants to be a mark, do they? 

But what if the people trying to shake you down aren’t in a boiler room in Nigeria or the former Eastern Bloc? What if they’ve been selling their success snake oil on Main Street since 1898? Before typing the link to their online questionnaire, I look them up. The company was established by Albert Marquis at the end of the nineteenth century and has been publishing their directories of “accomplished” people ever since. There’s a recent CEO with the last name Marks. Surprisingly, no references of PT Barnum’s involvement. But on their website, a ringing endorsement from Warren Buffett is featured repeatedly. Seems the Oracle of Omaha attributes much of his success to his inclusion in Who’s Who. Who’d’ve thunk? And no purchase necessary. I’d be a fool not to join.

I’m charmed by the idea that an antiquated thing like Who’s Who still exists. A fat dictionary-like thing that lists prominent people lives in a universe of rotary phones, typewriters, and citizens who can read the face of a clock AKA most of my life. There’s a part of me that wants to believe even a fraction of their con is the real McCoy. 

I fill out the form and wait for the sure windfall. What I get instead is a ringing phone. I don’t answer the first three times they call because I don’t recognize the number. Aside from my parents the only calls I get are from spambots, but the same number keeps coming up so one day I pick up. The woman on the other line has an accent I can’t place. It takes her repeating it several times for me to understand that she’s with Marquis. She needs to interview me for fifteen minutes to iron out the details of my inclusion in “the most exclusive country club in the world.” She says their book is one of the few included in a time capsule to Mars and among the select, rarefied number of tomes on display in the Oval Office. She knows how to wow a guy like me. 

It’s clear that this woman hasn’t read the form I’d submitted because she wants to know about my accomplishments, how I got started in my “field” (she has no inkling in even the vaguest terms). It’s kind of like being on an ersatz blind date with someone reading boilerplate “personal” questions. She details the many benefits sure to come my way once the press-release and bio they’re preparing is complete. I will be in rare air among others of the highest echelons.

I wonder how much longer it will take until she gets to the ask. When it comes, her bedside manner remains blasé and clinical—a Premier membership was $900; a Standard, $600. When I repeat for the third or fourth time that I will not be sending any money, she asks if I want to take just the plaque for $199? I wonder how much Buffett was charged to have his life changed in this way? I would have asked her but she doesn’t give me the chance. She can’t get off the line fast enough. Not even a goodbye.

Marquis claims in their literature that you have to be nominated to be in their book. So who nominated me and, if someone actually did, why? As great a privilege as it might be to throw $900 away, I’m not worthy.

Who am I if I’m not in Who’s Who? My interviewer wanted to know at one point if I had a motto, words I lived by. To what did I attribute all my success? I replied that I’d leave it to Marquis to sum it all up since they were the experts.

Now I’ll never know.

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. 

I couldn’t falling asleep the other night so I read a couple pages of Suttree into a microphone, then set it to music (a fragment of Chris Brokaw’s 31-minute cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Heaven”), and drew a sketch of Cormac McCarthy to decorate it. Then I fell asleep. 

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. 

The Night Music series has ended. Here’s what you missed.

One thing I know for sure isn’t crap is Time. Watch it.

I spent a chunk of my birthday making another collage. I don’t know where they’re going but think maybe they’re pointing to some meeting point between painting and writing. I’ll keep ripping up old shit until I find out or get sick of it. 

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.

—Listen to my talk with Gil Roth about All Hack via Pilsen Community Books right here.