Letter

It’s not how it used to be. It never was.

The Western Flyover went down quick. Built to ease traffic around Riverview Park, it had, in recent times, become a run-down eyesore. The park—where so many Chicago children rode roller coasters, ate cotton candy, went on first dates—was bulldozed and gone fifty years back when the wreckers came.

I watch the machines whacking away at the concrete of the pockmarked bridge until the rebar sticks out all over like frayed nerve endings. A small crowd gathers to gawk. A fat man shimmies up a nearby light-pole and furiously snaps photos.

I stand back a bit, closer to the Marathon station, where American United Taxi used to be. In a year, this gas station will be gone. The building across the street where the Chicago Dispatcher cabbie newspaper and a greasy spoon called the Point was is now an empty lot behind a chainlink fence. As each structure disappears, bits and pieces of my history follow. What’s left of these places is mutable and grows fuzzier each time I remember. Without the buildings as proof, the time I spent in them feels made up.

The Old Style sign swinging at all hours against the whipping wind doesn’t say ZIMNE PIWO like so many around Chicago. Just BLUE LIGHT. The bar stands where the northern end of the overpass used to be. A typical Chicago two-story building with an apartment upstairs and a business at street level.

The Blue Light was a corner bar in the middle of a block.

After 9/11 the jukebox was full of America-will-put-a-boot-in-your-ass songs. But they would’ve been on there even if the Twin Towers still stood.

The Blue Light was a dump. The kind of place where promotional Budweiser ads hang dusty and fraying decades after the beer reps dropped them off. Years after what they advertised was no longer on the market. These posters were the decor because the owners didn’t care about what their bar looked like and because they were free decoration.

But the day I watch the overpass come down, the Blue Light is no longer that Blue Light. There is now a big picture window and exposed brick walls inside. The bar is now along the north wall of the room rather than the south the way it was in my day. Also, many flatscreen TVs. Peering in, it’s clear it’s been out of business for some time. I haven’t been inside since long before Sharon and Kenny sold it. I think back a few years to when I dropped off a couple here in my cab. They were fighting the whole way. She started flirting with me, asking if I’d park the cab and go in with her. She was doing it to piss off her boyfriend, but it came off as a perfect example of what the Blue Light had always been: a dark place where men and women go to treat each other badly. I did my best to soothe the guy’s ego as I let the couple out into the oversized mitts of the gorilla guarding the door. This was definitely not my Blue Light. Sharon and Kenny were way too cheap to hire a bouncer. 

—I got lead in my pencil but no one to write to.

The punchline of Wes’s favorite Viagra joke. He tells it every time. I’m thankful to pretend to laugh because it’s one of the few in Wes’s repertoire which doesn’t involve the word nigger.

Wes is built like a fire hydrant. A squat bald man who fancies himself a real cut-up. He’s a doorman at a big apartment building. When he isn’t bitching about the rich people who live there, he’s ragging on his coworkers—all worthless niggers according to Wes. A couple hours and a dozen Miller Lites in, he gets weepy, asks if I ever met Gayle—his dead ex-wife.

Wes is my favorite regular at the Blue Light. 

*****

I turn away from the bar’s darkened façade to where the overpass used to end. I can see across Western Avenue now to the sprawling cop station across the street. When I worked here, I’d listen for car and motorcycle engines idling, then cutting out, as regulars parked underneath the ramp.

I see Timmy the Cabbie’s American United Crown Vic left angled while every other car is perpendicular to the roadway. He’s inside trying to mooch a dollar stein of Old Style off Wes or Bill or one of the others. Timmy’s face is scuffed and scratched like he’d used it to screech to a halt outside the bar to save the cab’s brakes.

I see Bill’s behemoth of a Harley. Tassles, detailing, storage racks and all. Hard to believe it never collapsed under that mountain of a man after he walked out of the bar, a case of Miller Lite augmenting his prodigious gut.

Sue’s out there, her SUV idling as she talks on her cell. She’s still in her Wrigley garb. She’ll run inside in a minute or two, breathless, ready to get behind the bar, or sit and drink with her girlfriends if it’s her night off.

Tommy used to sleep in the underpass sometimes. I see him out there near closing time, waiting to come in to mop the floors in exchange for bottomless Old Style. Tommy was the first one I got to know at the Blue Light after Sharon.

I see the shithead I cut off earlier in the night loitering in the shadows, waiting for me to come out after I’ve thrown away the empties. Does he have a gun? A knife? A bunch of his deadbeat pals posseed up to kick my ass?

*****

I knew about Riverview Park long before I got to Chicago. I read about it in a book. It’s where Lefty Bicek takes Steffi on their date, before leaving her in a basement to get gang-raped by guys he’s known all his life.

Now there’s a cop station and a strip mall where the park used to be. Cops came into the Blue Light and put their service weapons on the bar before ordering frosty mugs of Old Style. I wonder if they kept coming once it changed hands and the flatscreen TVs were installed. I have no idea what kind of bar it became, but I doubt it was one where it was okay to put a gun down next to your drink.

All that was twenty years ago. Now I work at a different bar across town.

My life is totally different.

I’ve been reading Art Pepper’s Straight Life. It’s a junkie jazzman’s memoir which is more talked than written. It’s credited to Pepper and his last wife, Laurie. I imagine she turned on the recorder and he talked and talked and talked. There are many recollections from Pepper’s family, friends, and fellow musicians. It’s mostly interesting because of the period he’s talking about, all the great people he played with, and for being white playing a style pioneered and dominated by black musicians. Pepper is definitely a white man of his time—his views on race, not to mention women, reads pretty backwards now. The junkie/recovery aspect will be familiar to anyone who’s heard addicts talk. It’s a weird mix of boasting and contrition. They’re sorry for what they put those around them through, but can’t hide their pride in how far out they went without dying.

Pepper played with major figures like Dexter Gordon when he was still a teenager. Reading his book spurred me to listen to Gordon again. I wanted to rewatch Round Midnight—the great 80s Bertrand Tavernier film which stars Gordon as a fictional version of any number of expatriate American junkie jazzers in France—but could only find it on Vimeo in what looks like a copy straight from VHS. It was still worth seeing. It really nails what a chore it is to babysit an addict musician when he’s off stage. The art is no problem, it’s all the in-between time. 

I went to Target and bought some 5×7 inch frames and knocked out ten portraits of jazz heroes. I’m no historian and have no interest where the borders of that music is. I chose people whose music was important to me and whose image wasn’t so iconic that a new portrait could look like nothing but a shitty copy. The first was of Pepper. Then Gordon. Then Anita O’Day—who wrote a junkie memoir similar to Pepper’s which is well worth reading—then Art Blakey, Ran Blake, Ornette Coleman, Fred Anderson, and Donald Fagen.

I rode to Reckless Records to sell some CDs and DVDs which I found in the last of my unpacked boxes. I don’t have a CD or DVD player anymore so I went through the box and took everything with no personal or sentimental value to see if I could get a few bucks for it. I made enough to buy a Lounge Lizards and a Dexter Gordon record.

Then I went to Rae’s house to paint her portrait. After a while her boyfriend, Khadi, came out from his office where he’d been teaching via computer. He saw the Dexter Gordon record and asked if he could put it on.

The next day was Juneteenth. I spent the morning making a couple more jazz portraits—Jeanne Lee and Roberta Flack—then rode to 47th Street to an ice cream place I’d been meaning to try. They were running a special—peach cobbler and vanilla ice cream for $6.19—in honor of the day. The sun was merciless and the line was barely moving, but I stayed. It was a festive atmosphere. Many people waiting were wearing shirts marking the occasion—FREE-ISH SINCE 1865—I DIDN’T ASK TO BE BORN BLACK, I JUST GOT LUCKY—and some that were a little off-topic like BLACK THIGHS MATTER. The owner of the shop went down the long line and personally thanked each of us for being there. Then her son came out and asked for permission to film us as part of the seemingly endless queue. Just before making it inside the store after standing over an hour and a half, a little boy asked if he could skip ahead of me in line. I told him he could if he bought my ice cream. He didn’t understand but his mom laughed.

There was nowhere outside the shop to sit in the shade so I rode away a few blocks until I found a stoop of a shuttered store on 43rd Street and sat to eat. The cobbler and vanilla ice cream were delicious. Were they worth waiting two hours for? Who knows. I’m glad I did it.

That night I read some more of Pepper’s book. It made me grateful I never tried heroin. I bet I would like it as much as he did. The mistake all the addicted artists make is to expect to maintain the high of doing their thing when they’re not doing it. Down-time dooms so many. There’s no way to truly feel good when you’re not working. Some people can deal with the let-down, others can’t. It’s a mystery. But I’m sure that those heroes of jazz were able to make beautiful things in spite of smack and booze not because of it. It’s a wonder anything worthwhile got done while they were impaired; I need all my wits about me just to put pen or brush to paper.

Maybe that’s what made them geniuses—that they could do it no matter how badly they fucked themselves up, no matter the obstacles.

Folly greeted me at the door like a long-lost friend. Her eyes, divots in her boulder-like pitbull head, took me in as if from centuries past. Her welcome told me I was in the right place.

It was my second date with Callie. Fourth of July. An unbearably humid Chicago summer night. Callie’s block was a war zone of fireworks. A haze hung over the whole street. But upstairs, after I closed the door, I barely noticed the explosions. Or, rather, they seemed to be muffled, as if miles away rather than directly under the window. I don’t know if it was Callie’s willful magic or a side effect of attraction.

*****

I met Callie at a party I meant to avoid. A fundraiser for a film magazine I used to write for. I felt an obligation. My plan was to poke my head in, wave hello if I saw a familiar face, throw a few bucks in the hat, and get out of there. Then I saw her.

I’d biked past the building a million times but never been inside. A lonesome structure along an overpass, surrounded by multiple railroad tracks; the Amtrak yard sat to the north, giving on to the Chicago skyline. The building had housed some industrial concern at one time; now it was a rabbit warren of art studios, small businesses, and marginally-kosher live/work spaces. My destination was a film post-production facility.

There was a bottleneck by the door. A woman at a table was soliciting donations in exchange for raffle tickets. A group bunched up by the narrow entryway agonizing which prize to donate towards. Beyond them, I could see the room filled with people. Anxiety spiked. I knew I’d only last minutes. Maybe just drop a few bucks in the jar and turn around and leave? Then I saw her.

She stood just beyond the donation table, next to a couch that was likely a family castoff. An old man was chivalrously offering to refresh her glass of wine. She glowed. Or, perhaps, everyone around her looked half-lit by comparison. A light-color floral summer dress and cork-heeled sandals showed off toenails painted seafoam green. Dark auburn hair, likely a dye-job, took nothing away from her beauty. Her face, once she turned my way, was stunningly asymmetrical. Almost cubist. A Modigliani come to life.

The old gent returned with a plastic glass of white wine, bowed, and turned to greet someone he knew. I sat down on the couch and she sat down next to me. She asked what brought me here. She said she didn’t know why she was here, then remembered a friend had invited her. Her job was picking music for movies. She’d been in this space before for work. I told her I’d just written a book about music and pulled out a copy from my bag. A smile spread across her mouth as she flipped the pages. She insisted on buying it. We kept talking when she wasn’t looking through the book. Her praise was effusive, outsized. Almost like she was putting me on.

Callie’s friend arrived. She wrote down her number, said she wanted to see me again, then turned away. I walked over to where the raffle prizes were. DVDs, posters, and gift certificates for classic movies, I couldn’t focus on any of it. I looked out the window at the Chicago skyline, in a daze. I snuck a few looks her way but didn’t try to meet her eye. I didn’t want the spell to break. I left without talking to anyone else.

We made a date for Saturday. She wanted to try a bar in my neighborhood. I agreed without saying I hated the place.

“This isn’t what I imagined,” she said, looking around. The bar had a reputation as a place for cool kids but was in fact a haven for tattooed douchebags training for yuppiedom. I suggested we walk down to the Albatross. She didn’t realize it was so close. She’d taken an Uber to meet me. I’d soon learn she had absolutely no sense of direction.

Our conversation was easy, like we knew one another a long time. Because I work at the Albatross, Callie asked whether bringing her there would be awkward, like inviting someone to meet family. There could be judgment, the stakes raised. I told her Of Course. I wanted to show her off.

She told me about the abusive ex now in jail for attempting kill the woman he was with after Callie, about fetishes, about her engulfing love of music. Every now and then she’d pause, embarrassed at all she’d revealed. I asked her to go on. I wanted to know everything. She’d come to Chicago a few years earlier, hired as a backup singer for a local hip-hop producer. When it became clear the job offer was just a chance to get in her pants, she quit and struck out on her own, eventually landing a gig scoring an indie film. Now she spends her days searching cyberspace for sounds to match images.

Walking her home from the bar was when I learned her inner compass was out of whack. Though she lived a few blocks away, she insisted her place was in the opposite direction from where I knew it to be. After convincing her to trust me, we were at her door in minutes. We kissed goodnight. I don’t remember how I got home.

We worried how Folly would handle the violent bursts. She’d cower from time to time, but seemed to be holding it together.

I watched Callie finish cooking our dinner. We talked, drank wine, it felt like a fairytale. The decor was just so, a physical manifestation of her extreme care and taste. I could tell Callie spent most of her time the last years creating these enchanted rooms. She turned from the stove now and then and smiled at me, then quickly looked away. I never wanted to leave.

After dinner we moved to the living room. She played records and told me about her family. The history of mental illness. Her grandfather in Paris who changed his last name from his Russian Jewish given one to the French word for remember. Or was it recall?

I took out the pad of paper I’d brought and asked her to sit still. She’d never posed for a painter before and said she hated every photograph ever taken of her. Called herself unphotogenic. As I worked I kept trying to catch her eye. They met mine, then flitted away like birds momentarily alighting on a branch only to fly away at the slightest gust. She looked at the charcoal when I was done and acted flattered. Said it was what she felt she looked like.

I asked if she’d been uncomfortable posing. What would make her more at ease. She suggested taking off her clothes. But only if I did the same. She went into her bedroom. I’d shed all I had on before she had a chance to shut the door. She returned minutes later, lay down on the floor near my chair, took a deep breath and opened her robe.

We locked eyes whenever I wasn’t looking at the drawing. It felt like these glances lasted hours. I wanted to disappear into the point where our eyes met. After I couldn’t work anymore I lay down next to her.

*****

Callie was out of town for work the following week. We went to the movies when she got back, then to the Albatross for drinks. I talked her into the photobooth despite her insistence she never took a good picture. I’m looking at the photostrip now. In the ones where one of us isn’t blinking we look so happy.

She wanted to see my place. It had been years since a woman had slept in my bed. I got new sheets, cleaned the bathroom, tried to make my hovel habitable. I warned her I had nothing on her where homemaking was concerned. She was excited anyway.

She took it in with the same wonder I’d taken in hers. We drank and listened to records. Then she changed and sat in my armchair to pose for a painting. It went wrong from the start. While we locked eyes as before, the picture was stillborn and ugly. She snuck a look before I was done and couldn’t hide her disappointment. I wrestled with it for another hour, then we went to bed.

She called herself my girlfriend. We went to sleep in each other’s arms.

In the morning we went to the coffeeshop for breakfast. She was distant but not unhappy. She kissed me goodbye, promising to see me soon.

I never saw or heard from her again.

I knew she didn’t care for texts or email. After hearing nothing from her for two weeks, I decided to appeal to metaphysical forces. On a clear night, I climbed onto my roof and set the cursed portrait from our last night on fire—a sacrifice to return me to Callie’s good graces. It felt good to be rid of the horrible thing. It had taunted me, reminding me of failure and heartbreak. To watch it turn to dust and be blown away by a lazy breeze was a relief. But if Callie was affected by my little ritual I never knew about it.

My last text to her asked if she was alive. Crickets.

As weeks turned to months I convinced myself Callie was a figment of my imagination. A fantasy conjured by a lonely man. But then the Albatross calendar came out. The bar makes a collage of photobooth pictures to mark each passing year. There we are, mid-smile, close together, in love for all the world to see.

I rolled a calendar into a tube, slipped a note wishing her a happy new year, and left it on Callie’s doorstep.