Letter

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.

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I’m a faithful listener of Out of the Blocks, my old friend, Aaron Henkin’s, great hyper-local Baltimore podcast.‌ So when I heard at the tail of the last episode that he would be in Chicago, recording some episodes in the North Lawndale neighborhood, I dropped him a line. He wrote back and we made plans to meet and catch up.‌
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‌I met Aaron in 1997, when I moved back to Chicago for good. He was part of a crowd which revolved around a band called the Country Melvins. If you want to know a little about them, pick up a copy of my book. In 2000, Aaron posed for a portrait which was part of a show at the Rainbo Club. Most of the sitters were part of the Wicker Park art and music scene (or at least worked in the bars, restaurants, and coffeeshops in the neighborhood.) Most have long since moved away.‌
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‌When Aaron showed up at the Skylark on Friday, sitting for that portrait was one of the first things he mentioned. He recalled it being a snowy day and that having to be still for a few hours like that was one of his favorite Chicago memories. I asked him if he had the painting, but then remembered that friend liked it so much that she bought it. She’s since passed away, so who knows where that picture is now.‌
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‌Aaron moved away from Chicago with the fiddle player from the Country Melvins. They went to Baltimore so she could go to med school. He thought he’d wait tables and play in bands. Instead, their marriage dissolved and he backed into a career in public radio. I would love his show even without our personal connection, but it adds an extra little something every time I tune in.‌
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‌He told me he was thinking of walking past his old Wicker Park haunts before he left town but I advised him against it. Aside from the Rainbo and Myopic Books, it’s more or less a moonscape over there these days. That’s not a nostalgic dig at that over-gentrified neighborhood, just a statement of fact. Sometimes it’s best to leave the warm memories of the past just as where they are.‌
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‌We talked about Baltimore—a city I haven’t been to since my early teens, when me and my best friend strolled through a ghetto neighborhood blasting Def Leppard from our boombox until an older black man got up from a stoop and told us we should turn around and go back immediately. For Aaron, Baltimore has become home like Chicago has become home to me.‌
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‌Seeing an old friend thrive is one of few fringe benefits of getting older. On leaving, Aaron invited me to visit his city so he could show me around. I think I’ll take him up on that.‌
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‌ ‌‌—I wrote a review of Unquiet by Linn Ullmann for Hyperallergic.‌

Last Wednesday, I drove to Wyoming. Wyoming, Michigan, that is. Just short of Grand Rapids. I was there to pick up my books. Marc met me there and we loaded twenty-five boxes into the rented SUV. I’d been corresponding with Marc for months about this thing, so it was strange how quickly it was all over. Marc was off to his next appointment and I drove around the corner, down the main drag, to find lunch before heading back to Chicago.

The family restaurant I chose was pretty forgettable. The green beans that came with my chopped steak were boiled so long there wasn’t a hint that they’d once been a living thing. I was a couple decades younger than most of the clientele. At the next table, a couple ladies bemoaned the unavailability of pumpkin pie on the dessert menu. They went over and over all the choices but kept returning to pumpkin. One asked the other if she’d chosen something and the other replied that they didn’t have what she really wanted.

Back in Chicago I lugged about fifteen boxes up the three flights before collapsing into the armchair. An hour later I hauled the rest of them up as well. It’s times like this that I really wish I had an intern. I’d set up a folding table in my mud room in preparation for the arrival of all these boxes and, after another breather, I ripped open the first box and started signing and numbering. 

I took a break to go hear Emmett Kelly and Rob Mazurek play a few blocks from my house. There are drawings of both of them in the book. Then I walked back home and quickly fell asleep.

I started signing and packing books at 7am the next morning. By the afternoon I had the rolling suitcase filled with fifty books and headed off to the post office across the street from where the stockyards used to be. I kept looking back down Halsted for the bus, but it never came so I walked the whole way. I dreaded the attitude I’d get from the postal worker tasked with serving me, but lucked out and got a lady who was pleasant. Not that she was thrilled to process fifty pieces of media mail, but she was cordial about voicing her displeasure. The woman waiting behind me loudly and repeatedly complained about hot flashes, so I must’ve been a joy in comparison.

The next day I hand-delivered copies to some stores and a couple people who had pre-ordered. Everyone seemed happy to receive them. I felt like Santa Claus.

There’s still a lot to do, but it feels like I’m finally over the hump on this thing. If you’d like a copy, you can still use this link, or just write me and I’ll send you one. They’ll stay $25 until we start to run out, then we’ll see what happens. I think they’ll all be gone fairly quickly.

—I wrote about a new movie set in Chicago for the Reader and about all the other movies I saw this week, as usual.  

—I’ve been a fan of Pete Prescott’s bands since the 80s, from Mission of Burma on. He’s featured in my book. It’s a sad commentary on this culture that someone who has done so much still has to come to fans hat in hand to fund his work, but that is where we’re at. Last week in news reports on the death of surf guitar legend Dick Dale it was noted that he had to keep touring just to pay his medical bills. We value all the wrong people around here.