Letter

A couple Saturdays ago, my friend Tracy moved to Cleveland. She doesn’t drive stick, so I offered to follow their 26′ truck in her boyfriend’s SUV. She’d buy me a plane ticket to get back in time for my Sunday bar shift.

I got to her place at 2pm, as she was doing the last of the sweeping and mopping. Her terrified cat peeked out at us from the crack of the opened bedroom door. We carried the last of her belongings down to Justin’s car and waited for the landlady to come and approve of the condition of the apartment and promise to return Tracy’s deposit, so we could get going.

Justin and I decided to wait downstairs so we wouldn’t have to keep listening to that suburban trixie whine about some dust on the window pane. She was not the one who’d rented out the place three years ago, when Tracy moved in, and was obviously new to the landlording racket. I’ve moved into many apartments in much shabbier shape than the way Tracy left this one. We hit the road around 5pm.

The six-hour drive passed uneventfully, aside from Justin heartbreak over the bizarre fact of the rest-stop Sbarro being closed at 9pm. No calzones would be enjoyed on this trip. We pulled up to their new house around midnight, Eastern Standard Time. I watched Justin confidently swing the 26-foot Budget truck into the narrow drive between two houses, then stop after scrapping something about ten feet down. What followed was a tense ten minutes of inching forward and backward, trying to squeeze back out of the spot he’d wedged himself into. What happened was that he’s smashed into the awning of the side door, changing the shape of the rotting wood and shingle structure into oblique angles. A nosy, likely inebriated neighbor with a tattooed tear on his cheek offered unsolicited assistance. Tracy and Justin waved him away. He told me he’d be happy to help unload the truck for a c-note, then retreated to the porch of his house across the street to watch the show.

We unloaded the couch and mattress, then drove to a gas-station Tracy knew for sandwiches.

Tracy’s sister showed up the next morning and the four of us unloaded the rest of the truck. There was a couple hours left before my flight, but I had Justin drive me to the airport so I could get out of their hair and get some work done on the computer. No sooner had I settled into a seat with a coffee and some airport junk food then an email informed me that my flight was canceled. It was snowing in Chicago. Their website was unresponsive and hold-time on the phone was 81 minutes, so I trudged to the gate to get an update. A long line snaked away from the service desk. A few minutes later, the PA announced there’s be an announcement in 45 minutes; for no, due to poor visibility, all flights were grounded.

I called Tom and Sherry to see if they could cover my shift, but no dice. Then I called Brian and asked him to book me an Enterprise car from Cleveland to Chicago. I called Sam to say I’d be a couple hours late, then ran for the rent-a-car shuttle. It was 3:50pm EST when I hit the road west.

The highway was mostly deserted as I sped through pockets of blinding rain, rarely dipping below 80MPH. As the milemarkers shrank to zero at the Indiana state line, then reset to count down again, I kept checking the clock. By South Bend I knew I could make it to the Skylark by 8pm, in time for my shift.

I walked into the bar at 7:30pm, reeling a little, but happy to know that years of driving for a living had left me with the ability to do the crazy thing I’d just done. Cleveland to Chicago in four-and-a-half hours isn’t too shabby.

I’ll miss Tracy, but always remember the battered awning on the side of her new house and my frantic trek back to Chicago. When I think of Cleveland from now one, this is what I’ll think of.

I got off the plane from Boston last Saturday and headed straight to Constellation for John Corbett‘s book-release/concert. Evidently, running around pushing my own book isn’t enough for me; I need to watch how others do it. The real reason I was excited about it is that Doug told me that he and most of Eleventh Dream Day (plus Azita) would be covering 70s tunes mentioned in Corbett’s book.

Before I could settle into my seat, I saw my old painting professor, George Liebert, but I before I could get a hello out, I was buttonholed by a Bridgeport guy who wanted to talk about my book excerpt, printed in that week’s Chicago Reader. Then Doug came up and offered kindly to put my suitcase in the green room for safe-keeping. Then Rick came up to congratulate me on my book. He showed me a cellphone photo he’d taken of me drawing at the Hideout Block Party a couple years ago. I asked him to email it to me, as I’m not on Facebook. “I’ve noticed,” he said. I recognized a couple others and said hello. It was a lot more socializing than I’d bargained for. Still, it’s shitty to complain when people are happy to see you. No matter how surprising it always is. 

Corbett read a bit, then introduced The Marker, a Ken Vandermark band I’d never heard. They were killer. Two guitarists, keyboard, drums, and a variety of reeds. During intermission, after their set, I caught up with George. We both agreed that music is the greatest art. There’s no competing with it. He told me he liked running into me at shows. It’s been happening more lately, after not having seen one another for years at a time. George was a great dissenting counterpoint to Dan Gustin during my art school years. It’s really important to have a voice in your ear while learning who doesn’t really buy your shit. I mostly disagreed with George but I’m grateful he was there anyway.

The great Chicago playwright Mickle Maher followed with a funny excerpt detailing Corbett’s drug-enhanced appreciation of the band Yes. 

Then, Corbett’s wife, Terri Kapsalis, read a chapter about his sexual awakening which belonged in Penthouse Forum, rather than a book. I wished I’d never heard it and it made me not want to buy his book. 

The aforementioned cover band closed out the evening with killer versions of Pretenders and Neil Young tunes, among others. As they were closing with Lou Reed’s “Satellite of Love”, my chair collapsed and I landed with a thud on the floor. It would’ve been hilarious had it happened to someone else, but it hurt and was really embarrassing. Corbett himself took the broken chair away. Afterwards, standing with Doug outside as he smoked, I mentioned what happened and he said, “That was you?” The sound was loud enough for the band and the entire room to hear. I’ve never had a thing like that happen before. It was the cherry on top of a long day. 

Wednesday, I finally got to see the great Ex Hex live. Read this excerpt from my book to find out why I missed them four years ago. They make some of the happiest sounds going these days, so it was a bummer to see the place only half full.

I left the house with a rolling suitcase filled with books. I was going for a haircut and found out the kid who’d been cutting my hair the last two years had left the barbershop for a higher end spot. It’s strange how a small thing like that can throw you off. I’d come to depend on him being there, but now he was gone. I got my hair cut by a different barber who did a perfectly fine job, but it wasn’t the same.

I got to the Hideout around 6pm. The last Soup & Bread of the year was going full blast, with children of all ages running in and out of the place, carrying drinks, bowls of soup, cake, and slices of pizza. I was supposed to meet Kelly to eat before my book-release thing, but she was running late. So I nursed a drink on the porch and tried not to eat anything before she got here. The new plan was to go eat at a restaurant down the street.

Musicians started arriving, hauling their gear in, before the soup-servers had packed up their crockpots, creating a Grand Central-type traffic situation inside. It really stressed me out because I could do nothing to help ease the congestion. Kelly texted me to meet her at the restaurant, so I walked away from the chaos, down the street. 

While I waited for her to arrive I kept thinking about what was going on at the bar. I started texting her to cancel dinner, but then she was in front of me and talked me into at least going inside for a drink. Three-quarters of the way through the first glass of rye, I started to calm down. Kelly is a good friend and knows me well. She knew to keep me away from a situation I couldn’t help. We caught up a bit, ate some delicious food, then I left to go back to the bar to set up my books.

When I walked in, I saw right away that Jerry from Tortoise Books had already laid out his entire catalogue of books in the merch nook, so there was nothing for me to do other than circulate and greet people. Not a strong-suit. A roomful of strangers is much easier to deal with than a roomful of people who want to say hello to me.

The first band started and that helped a lot. Now I could just focus on the stage. They were doing an improvised thing that I was really into. I wondered from time to time whether the rest of the people here were enjoying it, but then the sounds would drown out the doubts and questions. Every band thereafter was different than the one which came before. It was a pretty fair representation of the different kinds of music I like, but I’m pretty sure it was unfamiliar or confusing to various people as the evening wore on. Typically, bills at clubs are booked to complement one another, to appeal to one kind of audience; this was all about contrasts.

I was very gratified that so many musicians I’ve long loved agreed to help celebrate the release of my book. We sold a bunch of copies too. But it’s really difficult to enjoy events where something I’ve made is being promoted. I love making art and books, but everything about marketing the stuff is like pulling teeth. 

The next afternoon, I flew to Boston. I borrowed my folks’ car in the evening and drove to Providence to interview Pete Prescott for an article. I thought I’d be there an hour, but we talked for nearly three. I’m very eager to share the interview with you in the next week or two. Pete is one of my heroes and it was a blast to shoot the shit with him like we were old friends.

Thalia Zedek put me in contact with a place in Cambridge called The Lilypad to host a Boston book-release. There were a lot of rules and restrictions in dealing with the place which I didn’t have to confront at the Hideout. The worst part was the tight window we had. Doors opened at 7pm, which was also when musicians had to load in, and we had to all be cleared out of there by 10pm, because there would be another event following. We managed the best we could.

I opened the night by introducing the musicians. When I left the stage, Thalia whispered in my ear that I had called Chris Brokaw ‘Chris Connelly’ up there. I was really embarrassed and texted an apology from across the room. His answer was a threat to play all Pigface songs. But when he got up on stage, he played Chris Brokaw songs, which I was very happy about.

The audience was an interesting mix of family friends, fans of the musicians, and young Cambridge types. I was happy to see my old friend Harry and also a woman named Heather, who’d come to my last book thing in the area, five years ago at the New England Mobile Book Fair. She showed me a cellphone photo of the painting she’d commissioned from me a couple years ago, hanging in her house. She’d added post-it note eyes to a chaotic section of it. Gotta love when people customize their art!

I was glad I could pay the musicians and that I would be going back to Chicago with a lot fewer books than arrived with, but these evenings take a lot out of me. I don’t like feeling exposed and examined in the way which is inevitable when you are the focus of an event. I much prefer being in the audience. That’s one of the main themes of my book.

Still, I wish I could learn to enjoy it a little.

—The teeth which illustrate this letter were made for this. I wrote a review of Alex Kotlowitz’s powerful new book about the effects of violence on some people in Chicago. Reviewed a good play and wrote a few sentences about some movies I saw.