Letter

At Village Thrift, looking for frames, I come upon a boxed jigsaw puzzle that catches my eye. It’s a two-sided job. One side is a small town with lots of people and activity, kind of poor man’s Richard Scarry-style. The other is a police lineup with the townsfolk attacking the suspects with tomatoes, a rake, a bicycle wheel, and a purse that looks more like a turkey due to poor draftsmanship. The label says Grand Theft Auto but it looks nothing like the popular video game. It’s $5 so I buy it.

I tell K about it and she’s as baffled as me. We assemble it the next time she’s over. Now it hangs in the bathroom, perp lineup side out. Almost all the decor in there is from thrift stores—couple paint-by-numbers, some embroideries, an old print, a silly vintage PSA illo about wiping your ass.

I float the idea of going to estate sales sometime. A half hour later we’ve got a list of stops in a rough loop around Chicagoland and I’ve booked a car from Hertz for the next day.

The first stop is a very yuppie Lakeview house, the second, a gay couple’s pop-culture-filled treasure trove, the third, a Glenview home overrun by aggressive suburban bargain hunters. Each one a little microcosm. We don’t feel like we belong in any of them.

It’s not till the fourth place that we get our sealegs. I swipe a “Papa’s Lounge” matchbook from the old Polish house for K. At our next stop she takes a little chef pig fridge magnet in return. She scores a wool winter coat while I only find a couple pieces of silverware and a decorative gravy fat separator.

We eat a late lunch at the Red Apple Polish buffet way up Milwaukee. I feel very old complaining about how much their prices have gone up, recalling for the millionth time how I could eat five plates when I was in art school and that it cost $7. That was a long time ago. Two plates is pushing it now, even at $35 a pop.

The Hertz receipt says we traveled a hundred miles. Six sales and several suburbs. A lot of it was going back and forth on Harlem Avenue. Going into strangers’ houses is worthwhile, even if I didn’t find much. It’s a window into how others have lived and, at this point, I make a conscious effort not to buy things. It’s more amateur anthropology. Even though the occupants are very recently deceased or just moving, there’s a palpable sense of death in these dwellings.

Whatever we buy or swipe from these houses brings a trace of loss into our own lives.

You can now buy art from The Sound and the Fury or Winesburg, Ohio even though the books won’t be out till next year.

Speaking of stealing, I very much enjoyed Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, though thievery’s not really what it’s about.

Feels like I haven’t worked on anything new for months. It’s only been a couple weeks but I don’t have any firm concept of time. I overcompensate by being early everywhere, but, really, only right now ever feels real.

During last week’s trip east, talk got to the cupboard in my folks’ basement. It’s filled with maps and notes from decades of trips taken and not taken. My father and K agreed that planning for and anticipating travel, then reviewing and recalling it after is better the actual thing itself. I don’t understand any of that. But I always just wanna stay home.

The couple weeks before this trip I’d decided not to start anything new so as not to be frustrated by having to pause while I’m away. Intentionally not working on things is pretty damn frustrating but I got through it and, just as we were about to head back to Chicago, I got a green light I’d been waiting for.

Stan texted me with dates for a show we’d been discussing over the past few months. He’s been trying to sell his building, so all plans were up in the air. He’d hoped to be done with this a year ago but with the berserker wreaking havoc with the economy, real-estate enthusiasts are uncommonly skittish. He may have to hold onto the place a few more years. Having art shows in the frameshop showroom will hopefully not scare off would-be buyers.

The following Monday I hit Unique looking for small frames. Unfortunately, a middle-aged couple have gotten there before me. For ten minutes I stare daggers through their backs as they methodically pick through every available frame multiple times, their cart nearly tipping over with some fifty they’d already selected. The woman finally turns her head and innocently inquires whether I want access to the shelf. Having scored only scraps, I pedal up to the other Unique up on the Northwest Side. By the end of the day I have about ten new old frames.

The show will be a continuation of what was up in the display cases at the Rainbo in August. Sumi ink, graphite, and ballpoint illustrations from Moby Dick, Babbitt, The Marvel Universe, The Suicide’s Grave, The Sound and the Fury, and Winesburg, Ohio.

More details as they become available. It’s just good to be doing something again.

I wake Saturday morning to find a UPS box by the back door to the side of the bikes. It must have arrived sometime Friday. This is where the landlords leave my mail when it is delivered to them.

I’m not expecting a package but judging by size and weight I have a suspicion about what it might be. Squinting at the label, spotting ISBN numbers, confirms it.

I wrote here in late summer about the bad turn my dealings with Arcade Publishing took. I’ve done a pretty good job of not fixating on the way a thing I had high hopes for going all to shit. There are plenty of other things for me to get obsessed with besides this one particular failure. But a box on a doorstep will snap one’s attention right back to what was far from mind.

When I effectively ceased communications with the editor in New York, I told him the only thing I expected out of his company going forward was the back half of my advance. I suppose somewhere in the back of my skull I knew they’d send the books anyway. Now they’re here. I can’t throw the box in the trash. I have to open it.

I flip through one, then the other. There’s nothing glaringly wrong. They didn’t put the author’s name and book title on every page like they did in the horrible excerpt they’d shared in August. The books look approximately the way I intended them to. I won’t pick over them too carefully because that just begs for disappointment and anger.

It’s a relief that they’re acceptable. I still have no intention of working with this publisher again but I won’t pretend these books don’t exist like I’d planned.

If you’d like a copy of Suicide’s Grave or Marvel Universe, just follow the breadcrumb trail. Both will be officially published November 4th.