Letter

I made a mask from an old ripped up Roky Erickson t-shirt. It was in the pile of rags destined for wiping brushes with, but now I’ll wear it near people in public. It makes me look ready to rob a stagecoach. My childhood dreams of becoming a highwayman can finally come true.

My apartment is mostly empty now. I’m bringing some fragile stuff over to the new place right after I send out this letter. My record player, the TV, a bunch of clothes. Shit that’s easier to carry unpacked rather than stressing out the movers on Saturday.

The fewer souvenirs and decorations there are here the more removed I feel. My landlady called to ask if I was still moving and to ask what the place needed in terms of repairs. She’s elderly, locked in in the ‘burbs. Who knows when she’ll make it here to see the place for herself. I hope to leave it as clean as it can be, but I’ve been here over five years so there’s no way it can be restored to a pristine state without some serious effort. I’ll probably leave the keys with the downstairs neighbor and hope for a return of my security deposit sometime months down the road.

It occurred to me the other day that I haven’t been inside a vehicle—car, bus, or train—since this thing began. On nice days I’ve taken bike rides. A few epic ones, but mostly within a couple miles of my place for simple errands. I’m renting a car Monday to move but wouldn’t be heartbroken if I never drove again. If there’s anything good that could come out of this plague time it’s some elemental changes to societal behavior. If it makes people walk and bike more, that can’t be a bad thing. But then again people are capable of forgetting catastrophe and strife of any scale. Forgetting is a proven coping mechanism.

Paul commissioned a painting of his son, Adam, at work at Blue City Bikes. It’s a few blocks away from my place and I’ve been a customer since I moved to the neighborhood. Designated an essential business, they’ve been open these past six unreal weeks. I stop by to see how Owen and Chris and the rest of them are doing every few days.

I met Paul while putting together an article about a documentary he and my friend John were making about the Roseland neighborhood of their youth. While interviewing him we realized that his son, Adam, had bought a painting of mine a year or two before. There’s a tragic backstory but it’s not mine to tell.

I’d planned to bike the picture Paul ordered to his Pullman home, but he insisted on driving over to pick it up. The back door of his SUV was open as I walked up, so I placed the painting on the seat. He gave me a check in an envelope and thanked me, said it was the first visual evidence he’d had of his son in a month. I went back upstairs to get ready for that day’s bike ride, which would now include a stop at the bank. I’ve been using the drive-thru (and its pneumatic tube) since the lobby’s been shut all this time.

The fact that archaic technology like the pneumatic tube is newly-useful is a comfort in a way.

Bill asked for a painting of the Jane Byrne Interchange. It’s the clusterfuck just south of downtown Chicago where the highways meet. It used to be called the Circle Interchange, then the “improvements” started and it was decided that the name should be improved as well. It was rechristened in honor of the city’s first female mayor. I think she was still alive when this happened. 

I stopped driving regularly long before the construction began and thank my lucky stars. The area where the Dan Ryan and the Eisenhower meet has always been a nightmare but since it became the Jane it has gone next level. Especially if you’re approaching it eastbound on the Ike, the lane configurations change seemingly day to day. It’s a standstill day and night. Yet construction crews keep adding looping ramps through the airspace above. Some even connect to the existing roadway.

I packed a fold-up chair, fastened it to my bike rack and pedaled north up Halsted to scout out spots to paint. The first day was windy and there were stray snowflakes but it was a joy to be out of the house for a few hours. I set up on the Van Buren ramp over the highway and got to work.

I’ve passed this area a million times over the last few years but rarely lingered. Until Bill asked for a painting there was no reason to. I wonder why he chose this as subject-matter for me. His big thing is infrastructure, that must be the connection. The part-formed steel and concrete parts in the process of becoming landscape is a thing to think about. If this project is ever completed (it’s estimated to be years from done) the way it looks now will be forgotten. If cars get through the loops and ramps without slowdown it will be taken for granted that it’s as it should be. But I’ll always remember Marie texting me at the bar that though she left her house an hour ago she’s stuck in gridlock and will be late to work. 

I do another painting looking north from Harrison and the last looking west from Des Plaines. I think about Jane Byrne and wonder if she was proud to have her name attached to this. I bet thousands of drivers curse her daily and will continue to for the foreseeable future.

After I got home from the first day of painting I looked her up. Her time in office was before I came to Chicago. The story goes that she got elected because the previous mayor failed to get the city open after a snowstorm. She looks defiant in most of her photos. It couldn’t have been easy to run this city. We have a female mayor now too. I wonder what they’ll name after her? Maybe by then the robot cars will have taken over and the Jane Byrne Interchange will be a public park. Here’s hoping.

—I reviewed The Dairy Restaurant.

—RIP Lee Konitz. 

—I made art for Joshua Benjamen Johnson’s The Radio Engineer. Listen and buy a digital copy or message him to get an LP or CD. 

I had no in, so I did what suckers do: I signed up for a class advertised in the Reader next to massages and unwanted household goods. Had to borrow $200 from my folks to pay tuition.

The ABC Bartending School is above a liquor store in a lonely building in the West Loop. A makeshift classroom holds tables covered with bottles of yellow, red, orange, blue, pink, and green water and different glassware. Twenty students take turns making Pink Squirrels, Harvey Wallbangers, Fuzzy Navels, Sex on the Beaches, Kir Royales, and dozens of other cocktails we’ll never make if we ever land an actual bartending gig.

Our instructor is a tired-looking old fellow. He goes through the motions. What landed him at this sorry place is likely the same thing which landed his students here. No clear direction. No prospects. No way to pay for what we do because we have to. Bills due but the current gig is killing our insides. A half-hearted Hail Mary.

The ad in the paper promised an income of many hundreds of dollars a week and job placement upon graduation. After pouring many dozen ersatz forgotten cocktails into brandy snifters, cordial glasses, flutes, and Collins tumblers, we’re given a diploma and a hotline number updated every Friday morning.

For the next month I sit by the phone Fridays as 10 a.m. approaches, fingers ready to dial. The first half dozen places on the recording never change: Pizza chain, suburban hotel bar, Tex-Mex joint. I don’t have the heart to try them. I know I can’t handle a place with a uniform or a corporate employee manual. I’m too old for flair. I keep hoping for some neighborhood spot. A mom-and-pop.

Sharon’s message gives little description of her bar but I call anyway. She answers as if I’d interrupted something important. Like she’s running very late. We set a time for me to come by.

The Blue Light, with its standard-issue Old Style sign waving slowly in the wind, looks like every other Chicago tavern I’ve passed a million times without a second look. All have their own crowd for whom it is a home away from home, but unless it’s yours, it’s indistinguishable from its neighbor down the street or miles across town. Through the diamond porthole in the front door I see a rail-thin woman with curly brown hair and eyes popping out of her head running around a fiber-board-paneled bar decorated with peeling beer ads and neons. I push the door open and introduce myself.

After confirming I graduated from the bartending school, Sharon launches straight into training. I’m hired.

She shows me the grey lockbox under the bar filled with cash for poker machine payouts, stressing in no uncertain terms not to pay out to anyone I don’t know. Strangers are to be told the games are “for amusement only” like the stickers next to the screens of spinning slots say. Every other bar along that stretch of Western gets raided. The Two-Way, just up the street, closes down for good after they get busted. But the Blue Light is spared. So many of the regulars are cops and you don’t shit where you eat.

She shows me what to set the pizza toaster oven to and how the popcorn popper works. She tells me to add fifty cents to all drink prices after 2 a.m.—a kind of unhappy hour premium. Most of the business is transacted in those two unhappy hours.

I never ask Sharon about where the bar’s name came from. Did she and Kenny name it or inherit it from the previous owner? The Old Style sign swaying in the whipping wind above the door, likely from the 70s or before, hints at the latter.

Did whoever it was name it after the 1932 Leni Riefenstahl film? Or, perhaps, after Cherenkov radiation—the phenomenon responsible for the blue glow in nuclear reactors?

Maybe it’s a tribute to the sprawling police station across Western Avenue.

As one cop put it, “Blue isn’t the greatest color for visual perception but it works just fine for things that really matter.”