Letter

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A couple Fridays ago I went to a fundraiser for a film site I used to write for and met a woman. The room—a suite for a film production company—was cramped and ill-suited for a party. I threw some money into a glass jar and got a raffle ticket, then squeezed my way toward the windows. She stopped me cold. Then she came up and started talking to me. A few minutes later, her friend arrived and she excused herself but asked for my number so we could meet again. I left the party in a daze.‌
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‌My college girlfriend, Caroline, moved to town to work as an assistant director on the final season of Empire. We had dinner downtown at the chichi hotel they were putting her up at before she moved into an apartment. Then, a few days later, I was carrying an Ikea mattress up the stairs to her new place. She found it through my classmate, Noah, who’s lived in the building twenty years. It feels like a weird time warp for her to be here. We haven’t lived in the same city since 1993, when I left town to go to Boston and become a cabdriver. ‌
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‌I rode my bike to the Rainbo on Saturday and sat in the corner watching young people pile in from some summer street fest down the street. I watched a guy order his very first shot of Malört—an ironic rite of passage for Chicago yuppies. He crinkled up his face after the vegetal concoction went down his throat, then him and his knowingly-laughing pals had a long discussion about what Malört was. A version of this scene plays out at millions of Chicago bars multiple times a night. It makes me sad when I see it because I know the people for whom this is a ritual have no true interest in this city and are just passing through. They’ll recount it decades later, sitting comfortably in whatever cookie-cutter suburb they were always destined to settle. They’ll describe Malört as the most disgusting thing they ever drank. ‌

I pedal to the Hideout and catch the Nick Mazzarella Trio’s record-release gig for Counterbalance. It’s beautiful music with enough ruminative moments to allow my thoughts to drift. As it has every spare moment the last two weeks, my mind returns to the woman at the film party. We’ve met up a couple times and I think we’ll see each other again. At least I hope we will. As I leave the bar, I pass a cluster of people discussing the music they just heard. “Will you be humming that on your way home?” one asks sarcastically. I didn’t hear his friends’ answers, but I hummed some version of it all the way back to Bridgeport.‌
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‌—RIP João Gilberto.‌
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A while back, Aaron from the Dial Bookshop asked me to do some more Chicago author portraits for the store. I had done one for each month last year, but the wall they hang on had some room near the ceiling, so, out of horror vacui or completism, Aaron thought we should fill the rest of it. The six subjects I came up with are a mix of dead and living writers. Some I know well; others, hardly at all. Ben Hecht is probably closest to my heart for his 1001 Afternoons in Chicago and for The Front Page (even more so for the film His Girl Friday, which was inspired by that play.) Hecht is an outsized Chicago personality and a fun subject for a painting. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Leon Forrest, a writer I’ve always meant to read but haven’t gotten around to. Searching around for reference photos, I could only find two or three of the man. It made him that much more inscrutable. I took his epic, Divine Days, out of the library after finishing the painting, but have been a little intimidated to crack it open. 

Congress Parkway, which runs south of the Fine Arts Building (where the bookstore is), was recently renamed after civil rights activist and journalist Ida B. Wells. Aside from that link, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Wells is a dim memory of picking up cab passengers in the remnants of the housing project named in her honor. They’re all gone now. 

All I know about Sara Paretsky is that she’s a famous and successful detective/mystery writer and that she’s a snappy dresser. I know there was a Kathleen Turner flick based on the heroine of her books, but I can’t recall a thing about it.

Alex Kotlowitz is a writer I admire very much. I loved his last book. It’s a little weird to switch gears from rendering someone like Paretsky—whom I never met and probably never will—to Kotlowitz, who I’ve talked to a few times and who may actually read this letter. But he’s one of the best writers this city’s got, so I couldn’t leave him. 

Stuart Dybek is another complicated one. I count him among my favorite writers from anywhere and I had the privilege to illustrate one of his stories awhile back. We’ve corresponded a bit too. But I couldn’t or wouldn’t call him a friend. He exists in a hazy in-between region—drifting from unapproachable master to humble and witty penpal. I don’t know how to think of him but think everybody should read his stories. Few have evoked Chicago more poetically or precisely.

I finished a painting the other day and kept thinking it looked so familiar. And not in the usual way. By now, thirty-plus years in, there are several recurring motifs. Books, window views, rooms, coffee shops, public transportation—these and a few others are what I do. Variations on a theme. Repeat repeat repeat.

The new painting is a doorway view from the mud room to the living room to the kitchen to the bathroom. A few years back I drew its opposite from the kitchen. But it was more than this current setting which was causing the déjà vous. It was the doorways.

Here’s one from twenty-seven or -eight years ago. The apartment was in Logan Square and I was still in art school. As a symbol or a metaphor, a doorway is pretty fucking obvious. But I’ve never imagined that my work plumbs depths, so I don’t mind whatever meaning there might be being right there on the surface.

Here’s the opposite view of the previous one. That apartment was a lot bigger than my current one. I was living with other people, which required more doors, hallways, rooms. The funny thing about this one is that soon after I learned how to use a computer, I decorated my MySpace page with it (among many other paintings) and a few months later a guy from the other end of the world—Australia maybe? Don’t remember—sent me a snapshot of his forearm with a crude rendition of this doorway covering shoulder to elbow. You start walking up and down halls, no telling where you’ll end up.

Back in high school, I mostly stayed in my room when I was home, so all I could see out the door was the door to the hallway closet. Still, that need to look past, to what’s beyond, has always been there. As I said before, there’s nothing profound about it. It’s natural. It’s what I imagine we all do.

These pictures of portals are also a way to look back. To ask why thirtysomething years ago I was trying to depict the same damn thing as just the other day. It’ll take someone a lot smarter and with a lot more critical distance than I can muster. Looking at these ancient images doesn’t fill me with nostalgia. I don’t have the slightest impulse to wanna become who I used to be. I don’t have a big enough shovel to dig up what I was thinking and feeling sitting on my bed in my parents’ Babcock Street apartment drawing with charcoals on newsprint. 

This is the oldest one I could find. A homework assignment from my art teacher, Sasha Okun. He drew in that lightbulb. He was (and still is, I think) a theater set designer, so he had a tendency for the illustrational and dramatic, which I never did. Still, the framework is already there: walls, floor, doorway, doors, and on, and on.

If I’m still writing this newsletter in ten or twenty years, you’ll probably read about how I just finished a picture of a doorway and how it ate at me. How it reminded me of something. Some close reader will dig up this letter and helpfully send it back to me, maybe hoping to help me break a pattern.

But what would be left if I didn’t have my patterns?