Letter

I’ve seen the man on the #8 Halsted Street bus for years now. He gets on in Greektown and gets off in Bridgeport. Sometimes, if he’s on the northbound, he’ll get off at the Orange Line instead of staying on till Jackson or Monroe. Every time I see him I think of Ray Milland in Lost Weekend. I can’t help making stories up about him.

His skin is sallow and he has rheumy, far-away eyes. The clothes he wears are sometimes in clashing patterns, always many decades old. This is what Milland’s Don Birnam would look like if he’d waited twenty, thirty years to go for the cure. Years lost, but still alive somehow, trying to pick up the pieces.

One time he had an accordion file full of documents. He settled into his seat, then started pulling papers out, examining this or that one with a magnifying glass. Had he come from court? Is he some kind of detective? Another time he had a worn, sun-faded box with a long-obsolete PC advertised on it. Was he going try the internet after his typewriter finally gave out?

I’ve never seen him smile or talk to anyone. He looks preoccupied and bereft, like he saw it all slipping away. But I’m making that up. I don’t know anything about him. I’ll never ask him anything, I know that much. I wonder if anyone else on the bus notices him or thinks he’s unusual. Most are glued to their screens. I keep looking and wondering if he’s some kind of presentiment from the past or a harbinger of the future. Like he’s visible to me in order to receive a message. But what could it be? The stories I make up about him never resolve, never end.

The last time I saw him, a few days ago, he had a fur hat on with ear warmers underneath. He could’ve been a minor member of the Politburo, gone to seed. It was a cold day. His coat and scarf weren’t frayed but looked past their prime anyway. He had a smudged blue laptop bag. Maybe he’d upgraded his technology? It’s the way he always looks. I can see the flicker of a handsome young man in a business suit strolling confidently toward a bright future. But that was way in the past. How did it all go wrong? Where is he going now? Is there still time to make it right? To salvage some of what might’ve been?

It was a hopeful ending for Birnam because he was in a movie and movies call for happy endings. My guy on the bus is not on screen. The snippets I get of others’ lives in public often have this capacity to be dramatized in my mind. But what’s their true story?

He got off the #8 and walked toward the Orange Line. Everything is a complete fabrication.

The printer wrote to say that my books were ready. I didn’t expect them for another month. A book no one wanted to publish was now out in the world. I rented a car and drove to Michigan. It’s the same trip I took in March for Music to My Eyes but felt very different. It seemed like an ending rather than a beginning.

As I drove I thought about what had changed in the intervening months. The music book was the first I’d designed so I was excited to see the result. I had some hopes that it would connect with people that liked some of the same music as me. I foolishly thought it would change something. But what would that be? Fame and fortune isn’t in the cards. The audience for what I do is small and I’m ok with that. I just need to know that I’m not completely delusional, spitting in the wind, with this stuff. It doesn’t take much to get that bit of validation. 

I’ve been wrestling with Soviet Stamps for about five years. Basically since the second cab book. It’s about immigration, childhood, and my beginnings as an artist. I thought it was done about four years ago but everyone I showed it to except my editor had no interest, so I shelved it. Then, after completing Music last year, it started eating at me. I decided to put it out myself, to purge it out of my system, as a way of moving on. That’s why this trip to the bindery was different than the last. I was at peace about a thing I’d been carrying around and there’s no anticipation of what will come of it.

There was no one to meet me a Dekker Bookbinding when I arrived. The receptionist led me through the facility to the loading dock, where a young man helped me load the twenty-four boxes into my rental. The whole thing took about ten minutes. I went for lunch at the same weird family restaurant as last time. There were no elderly ladies bemoaning the absence of their favorite pie this time. I was served by the world weariest waitress. She actually harrumphed when I asked for a refill of water. I tried to order their ‘famous’ apple dumpling but she informed me in an exasperated tone the truck with those wouldn’t arrive till the next day. I wasn’t prepared to wait that long. I had the apple pie instead. It was delicious, despite the fact my waitress had dropped the check before I could take a bite.

I was back in Chicago within six hours of renting the car at the airport. I borrowed a dolly from the bookstore, drove home, and started schlepping the boxes up the stairs. Halfway through, I gave up on the dolly and carried a couple boxes very slowly up the three flights. It was exhausting but felt good when I was done. I celebrated with dinner and drinks at the Duck Inn. It felt like a day I’d accomplished something. 

I have a few bookstore things planned in January, but otherwise, I intend to keep promotion of this book pretty low-key. It won’t be on Amazon or Ingram, so it will likely remain pretty much invisible to the book industry. What’s important to me is that I made a thing on my own terms. Maybe it’ll find an audience, maybe it won’t. I plan to move on to the next thing. That’s what keeps me going. 

If you’d like a copy, it’s here. Or just ask for one when you see me. I’ll have copies on me (and the music one too), until they’re all gone.

—I wrote a profile of Christian TeBordo and his great new story collection, Ghost Engine, and reviewed an astounding production of Hans Christian Andersen’s Steadfast Tin Soldier at Lookingglass.

Bill and Katinka needed a driver for a couple weekend gigs out of town and asked me. Milwaukee, then Iowa City. I haven’t made money driving in over seven years and had told myself I’d never do it again. But this was different. I’d get to help a couple great musicians do their thing. Plus: being the first person at the show, I could choose where ever I wanted to sit. I said I’d do it.

My old Sunday doorman Brian works at Enterprise and has hooked me up with cheap rentals. I go in and pretend to be his cousin and get the family rate. The trouble with favors and special treatment is that it’s harder to complain when things go wrong. When I come in to pick up the SUV for the Milwaukee drive, there are no SUVs. Evidently Brian’s plan was to upgrade me from a sedan at the last second to knock another $10 off the rental, but the coworker tasked with the switch didn’t get the memo. It all got straightened out, but it meant a couple wasted hours and a promise to myself to stop asking Brian for ‘family’ deals.

The drive was easy and Acme Records was a great place for a show. Ken, the owner, even bought some of my books for the shop—purely because of the Mick Collins blurb, he said. His band, the Black Lake Ensemble, opened with a trancey set of guitar and cello drones, performed in near darkness, the illumination from some flickering candles placed around the stage. I’d have made a sketch but could barely see my hands, let alone the paper.

I’ve heard Bill and Katinka play many times and each performance is different. I know there’s improvisation involved, but the room and the audience alter their shows more than other bands. That night’s set was warm and intimate, which reflected Acme. It felt like a concert for friends, played in a lived space. Katinka remarked that talking with people before playing made her more at ease. It felt relaxed, but not in a lazy way, more like their playing reflected the comfort they felt. 

The next weekend we drove four hours west to Iowa City. I’d done a reading at Prairie Lights and had an art show in that town a few years back, so I didn’t need directions. We were planning to stay overnight at an Airbnb the promoter arranged, but when we arrived at the building there seemed to be no place to unload. So we idled in the parking lot of a neighboring building while Bill waited for the guy to arrive with further instructions. Some fifteen minutes later, a harried man with a beard and a beanie emerged from the apartment house. Seems he couldn’t determine which apartment was ours and had been running up to random doors trying the code the host had given him. The host wasn’t answering his calls. He suggested we go find something to eat and he’d join us at the venue. After lunch, a variation of the same comedy repeated itself. The place where Katinka and Bill were to play was the Old Capitol Museum and there seemed to be no way to get a motor vehicle up to its doors to unload our gear. After waiting for a call for further instructions for sometime, we were directed to drive up on the footpath on the grounds and back up to the side door of the old building.

At some point during the process, I floated the idea of driving back to Chicago after the show rather than spending the night. 

A nervous young woman with curly haired fiddled with a wireless microphone as Bill and Katinka set up. She was a visiting poet from Latvia tasked with opening the show. She was very, very nervous even before her mic started making Bill’s amp emit high-pitched whistling feedback. They decided to perform acoustically while backing her reading. But between her heavy accent and inexperience holding a microphone, few of her poems registered. There were many references to breasts and something about her heart going through a garlic press, I think.

The music this night was very different than at Acme a week before. More prickly and echo-ey. A reflection of the room and, perhaps, some of the minor technical glitches which led up to showtime. I enjoyed it as a reflection of the experience of that day. Bill and Katinka never play the same way twice because no two days are alike. I felt lucky to be in the front row both times.

On the drive home I wondered whether being a roadie could be a good way for me to make a living at this point. The art and books aren’t going anywhere, but the audience seems to shrink rather than grow. There are fewer and fewer publications that want to pay me to write and my art prices have gone down rather than up. Perhaps it’s time to stop expecting money for my work altogether and go back to just doing jobs. Between bartending and hauling musicians to gigs maybe it could be a living.

There are worse ways to get by.