Letter

At the end of my block, where my street meets Archer Avenue, sits a boarded-up shack. It used to be Hamburger Heaven Express until a grease fire shuttered it last year, or was it the year before? Time, as we all know, has gone haywire in the last four months. In any case, I used to stop by for a cheeseburger and onion rings—which were a lot better than they needed to be for a place open all night—back when I drove cab. I never used the drive-thru window awkwardly positioned in such a way that most vehicles would need to back in to use it. If I had, I’d miss the banter between the white counter woman and Latino cook. She was older, with homemade tattoos and a few missing teeth. Very friendly, the kind to call you sweetheart. But after taking my order she’d holler it out as if the cook was miles rather than inches away. He’d mutter something in response, then I’d hear the meat hit the flattop. I’d take my food and eat it in the lot, leaning against the back bumper of the cab.

A few weeks after the plywood boards went up, somebody spray-painted CLOSED DO TO FIRE on both the Archer and Lock sides of the building. It’s still there. I pass by nearly every day and always think the message describes our current situation well, bad grammar and all. If anything, the lack of literacy feels just right to the moment.

I’ve been reading a pretty amazing book called The Yellow House. It’s a lot about the author looking back to her younger self, which, of course made me think back to my own. One night after putting the book down but unable to fall asleep I typed the name of a girl I went on a summer art trip to France with in 1988 into a search engine. A few minutes later I was looking at the fifty-year-old version of her smiling in a spotless kitchen somewhere in Georgia. She has a business offering a Southern version of Martha Stewart/Marie Kondo living-your-best-life coaching services. She’s married. There are likely children. But I recognized the smile of the girl I had a crush on thirty-two years ago. I find a sketchbook from that trip and scan in a drawing of her asleep on the bus on the shoulder of the guy she chose to be her boyfriend for those two weeks. I think we exchanged some letters after, then lost touch.

I debated sending the email a minute or two, but it was the middle of the night when all kinds of nonsense feels like a good idea, so I sent it. She wrote back the next day. It was good that she remembered me but I didn’t write back. What would I even say?

An email arrived from a man in Maine. He’d seen an article online about my pet portraits—likely this self-serving one, which is looking like my last meaningful contribution to the Chicago Reader. The man wrote about his rescued cat, Johnny Depp, who’d passed away some time back. It was only now that he could bring himself to look at photos. I wrote back with a price and heard nothing back for a few days.

It was no surprise. I’ve lost count of commissions and sales which sounded like done deals before evaporating into thin air. Buying art is mostly an emotional thing, so when the excitement of the moment passes, the rational mind wrests controls back, and what seemed like a great idea now seems foolish. I used to get mad about but don’t anymore. Now, until I get the check, cash, or notice of payment it’s just a pleasant thought to me. This is a mental health measure. Art is crazy-making enough without others getting my hopes up for no reason.

So when Johnny Depp’s old owner wrote back it was a nice surprise. He sent several shots of the cat, then some of the yard he wanted for a background, then that he’d like some forget-me-nots at Johnny’s feet. The next day brought several photos of puffy clouds in a blue sky. I wrote back I’d do my best and send him a photo before sending the painting out. He wrote back that he’d been looking at my website and that my work reminded him of his favorite artist, LeRoy Neiman, but also Edward Hopper. One out of two ain’t bad. I wrote him that Hopper’s one of my favorites.

A story popped up in the news about the non-feline Depp fighting in court with his ex-wife. Domestic violence, drug-abuse, the whole shebang. I wondered why my friend in Maine named his recently-departed friend after that clown. I have to believe from the way he wrote about this cat that he had a much better disposition than his namesake. Do pets ever have to fight in public for relevance? Do they fear becoming grotesque has-beens? I hope not.

I finished the portrait and sent a snapshot East. I got an ecstatic response a couple hours later. My friend in Maine wrote that he felt like he’d taken a chance which paid off. He invited me for a lobster dinner if I ever found myself in his state. I wrote back that one of my brothers has a place there, so I might take him up on his offer.

No need to tell him I don’t eat seafood, right?

This book came together quickly, though its gestation period was long. I’d been unsatisfied with my second cabbie book ever since it came out in 2014. The publisher turned out to be a crook and he hired an incompetent designer who butchered the book to such an extent it took three people to reconstruct the thing into some semblance of coherence. There was also the second book/sequel problem; it was difficult to explain why there should even be a second cabbie book. I was never able to successfully explain that it wasn’t a continuation of the first book.

Cut to the end of 2019. I’d just self-published Soviet Stamps and was thinking about what to write next. I wrote to the University of Chicago Press for permission to reprint the material in the first book in a new limited edition. They gave their okay and I got to work.

The virus lockdown provided the necessary block of isolated concentration to put this book together in a compressed amount of time. I wound up rewriting a lot of the old material. I also cut chunks that I just couldn’t fix. I’d never taken a writing class prior to working on my first book, so it was basically a crash course in the process. I integrated vignettes from the two books into as coherent a flow as I could, then added essays I wrote after I quit driving cab in 2012 and reprinted the zines which started the whole project twenty years ago. The result is my final word on cabdriving and a kind of obituary for a job that’s all but extinct in 2020. I drove to Michigan, packed the rental with forty boxes of books, then drove right back to Chicago. Carrying them into the new place was almost a pleasure compared to the three flight ordeal I survived for the last two books. I spent a chunk of the week signing and numbering. Get yours here.