Letter

My mother called to say her mother had died. Tsylia hadn’t recognized anyone in about a decade, so I’d said my own goodbye to her long ago, but with the plague my mother wouldn’t be able to travel to Israel to bury her, so I rented a car and drove to Boston the next morning. All I could offer was to be there. I don’t know if that did any good, but I tried. You only get one mother. Even if she was 95 and in deep dementia there’s no way around the deep loss now that she’s gone. My relationship with Tsylia was complicated. This is what I wrote about her in my book: 

When I was born, my grandmother was forty-five. She had badly wanted a third child just a few years before. It didn’t happen, so she transferred all that ardor and attention to her first grandchild. Whatever difficulties one has in their other familial relationships, a new child is a chance to start over. To present oneself anew. I think that’s what I represented to my grandmother: a chance to put her best self forward. I was always my grandmother’s favorite and rarely knew what to do with it. Love is rarely about equality, especially when it’s between grandmother and grandson. There’s just no way of reciprocating such gushing waves of feeling.

Tsylia worked as a physicist but her real occupation was connecting people and getting things that couldn’t be gotten in the Soviet Union’s controlled economy. She used the force of her personality, her charm, and her powers of persuasion to broker deals of various kinds in the black market. For many people in the Soviet Union, but particularly for the urban Jewish intelligentsia my grandmother belonged to, there was one’s official public life and then there was the covert private life where the real action was. Amongst her various dealings, she took a great interest in artists, often having whole collections of this or that forgotten or mistreated painter squirreled away in closets and under beds in her apartment. Perhaps the fact that so many paintings and drawings were around in my first years had some influence on what I ended up doing with my life.

My grandmother treated me to my first stick of gum as well as my first video game——both treats unheard of for the average Muscovite in their daily life. She made it seem that she could get just about any- thing I asked for. When we left the Soviet Union, much of her attention, love, and gifts stayed behind. There were letters and phone calls, but they paled in comparison to our connection back in Mos- cow. Many of the phone calls and letters consist- ed of her attempts to remind me of the way things used to be. But it’s hard to keep an emotional bond strong and stable at thousands of miles’ remove, especially with a seven-year-old boy who’s changing all the time.

All along I felt overwhelmed and slightly embarrassed by her unreserved love for me and rarely knew how to reciprocate. Over the crackly, long-distance connection between Brookline and Moscow, I felt like I was talking to a stranger from the past. I had to humor her if for no other reason than my mother’s guilt-giving glare as I held the receiver to my ear in our kitchen on Babcock Street. But with each passing year, I knew my grandmother less and less while her image of me remained as if frozen in amber. I would always be that little boy in Moscow whom she showered with gifts and attention. The one she took everywhere and told everything.

My brother, Boris, remembers my grandmother very differently. He was only four when we left, so he didn’t form the same bond with her back in Moscow. He got to know her in Jerusalem after my grandparents were finally allowed to leave the Soviet Union in the late ’80s. He describes an old woman prone to fantasy and exaggeration, having a hard time finding her place and a way to be useful in her new country. Everything my grandmother had been back in Moscow was gone once she got to Jerusalem. She was used to being the center of her social circle, of having people come to her for favors and to make introductions. But in Israel she was just another elderly, newly-arrived refugee. Her younger daughter, my aunt Galia, had been in the country for some fifteen years by the time my grandparents arrived, so she made most of the important decisions. Without enough to do, my grandmother fell into depression and stopped taking care of herself. Always prone to take comfort in food, she let her diabetes get out of control and eventually began to suffer from dementia.

I did a few portraits of her over the years. She would praise them in my presence but loathed them in private. She’d tell my mother she didn’t recognize herself in them, that they were pictures of an old lady. I could never see her the way she saw herself.

No one could have.

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.