Letter

I gave up on football a couple years ago. All the CTE stories and Steve Almond’s Against Football were the last nails in the coffin of an interest which was fair-weather at best. I don’t care to admire multi-million dollar commercials or overblown corporate music spectacles either, so Super Bowl Sunday is just a regular work day to me. This year, the wrinkle was I was covering the afternoon shift in addition to my regular hours, so I bartended for ten hours.

The first couple were painfully slow. A few of the regulars—the ones who come every single afternoon—showed, but otherwise it was crickets till about 8:30pm. I was so bored I texted Brian the doorman at ten past the hour, thinking he was late; he wasn’t supposed to be in till 9pm. Then a bunch of people I’d never seen in the bar before piled in. Most were pretty far along already, doubtless turned out of some place which has wall-to-wall flatscreens. They wanted bombs, shots, and to start tabs on their credit cards. 

A lot of pent up testosterone and frustration in the room. After hours of idling they had me running around and it was a challenge to switch gears so fast. I don’t mind when the bar is busy, I can handle it, but this night had a bad vibe, an angry edge to it. Maybe they were all mad Tom Brady won another ring or were just mean drunks, but in any case, serving them brought me no joy.

A guy came up irate that the pint of PBR he’d let sit at his table fifteen minutes before taking a single sip didn’t taste fresh. I offered to replace it but he acted put out, as if I was disrespecting him, told me he’d been coming here ten years, that I couldn’t do him like that. I told him to leave. Brian had to escort him and his embarrassed, apologizing friends out the door. I missed it, but a guy started choking out another guy at one of the tables, so Brian had to bumrush him as well. There are often months when I don’t have to 86 a single drinker.

A couple on an internet date kept trying to monopolize my attention, making me part of their conversation. It started when she asked me whether, as a newly-single woman, she had the right to tell dates that she was up for flirting (which she never defined) but not down to fuck. He got mock-angry that I took her side. Later, she insisted on touching my beard, making him unhappy for real.

Later, a very young, very inebriated and disoriented young man kept asking to use our phone. The trouble was he didn’t know the number he was trying to dial or even how he’d got here. We repeatedly gave him directions to Simone’s on 18th, where he said his brother was, but he kept coming back in and trying to use the phone. The last time he came in he came up to the bar and ordered two Modelos. We don’t serve Modelo. Eber made him give him cash and pushed him into an Uber. After closing time, we went out to the back lot and found the kid’s car, one of the headlights smashed in, all four tires flat. It’s a miracle he didn’t kill anybody. 

Nights like this remind me that I’m dealing a controlled substance. A lot of the people who indulge can’t handle it, especially on “special” occasions like the Super Bowl. The desperate chasing of mirth on holidays is one of most depressing things in the world to me. Watching it play out in front of my face and feeding it by taking money for booze this night was a real bummer.

When I got home, I watched a dumb comedy called Waiting... on Showtime. It was a caricatured Hollywood version of my night. Just the thing to wind down from a shift I’d like to forget.

The weather is what we talk about when we have nothing to say. That said, nobody in Chicago could shut up about the historic/apocalyptic cold snap which hit the city Wednesday. I worked at the bar the evening before and it’s all I heard about. The teachers were happy to get a couple days off—CPS canceled classes Wednesday and Thursday—and most others who came in anticipated staying inside their homes for at least the next day. I was just annoyed.

I love winter and the cold doesn’t bother me. I told anyone who would listen that I planned to do nothing different. I was looking forward to taking a walk to see if Mother Nature could live up to the hype. Most didn’t believe me or thought I was just being contrary. I left the bar around 9pm Tuesday night and caught the bus home like any other night.

I woke up early Wednesday and looked out the window. It looked like a typical winter day. Sunny. I puttered around a bit, then called the coffeeshop to see if they were open. No one picked up. I sighed, then dug out the long-johns I hadn’t worn in years and prepared to head outside.

The first few minutes didn’t feel any different than any cold winter morning. The streets were deserted, aside from the occasional passing vehicle. It was kind of like Christmas. After some time outside, I could feel my nose hairs stiffening with each intake of air. I popped some CDs into the overnight drop at the library (which was supposed to be open but wasn’t), then continued south down Halsted to the Bridgeport Restaurant for some breakfast.

Inside, all anyone could talk about was the weather. I read my book awhile, then texted Jimmy to see if the bar was still standing. He was there but said it wouldn’t open this day, which meant I’d have to make alternate dinner plans. You know it’s serious if the Skylark is closed—that place doesn’t close for anything.

I walked back north hoping to pick up a package at the UPS Store but the doors were locked, so I continued on to CVS for provisions. There I stocked up on snacks and got some weird gluten-free pizza for dinner. Passing back by UPS, I saw the lights on and a clerk inside waving her hands to beckon me in. The package turned out to be the proofs for my book; now I’d have a project to occupy me when I got home.

I flipped through the book-to-be for awhile, made a few corrections, then emailed the printers to see if they had time for a phone call (unless they were taking the day off like most of Illinois.) I guess Michiganders are made of hardier stock, because my phone rang within half an hour. With business concluded and plenty of daylight left, I pulled a chair up to my bedroom window and made a quick gouache of the view. It didn’t look unusually frigid out there, just a sunny, clear day, roofs covered with snow.

Having few prospects for dinner, I got myself invited over Bill and Cheryl’s place. The Bus Tracker assured me that the Halsted buses were coming every seven or eight minutes, but when I got to the stop the wait suddenly jumped to twenty-four minutes. I started walking north. It was cold for sure, but nothing next level or extraordinary. The only annoyances along the way were that my breath moistened the scarf and my iPod conked out about a mile into my walk. I got to Cermak without a single bus or cab going my way. The Cermak bus was allegedly eight minutes away so I walked a couple stops west, then caught it the rest of the way.

At Bill and Cheryl’s I ate spaghetti for the first time in months and drank more than usual. It was a good time. I called a cab to take me home but it never arrived, so Bill generously ordered me a Lyft.

It was a good, fairly ordinary day. I don’t know what all the fuss was about. It’s just winter. I like it.

My friend Tom died around 6am Friday morning.

Tom was a professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute for many years, but I never took any of his classes. I got to know him eight or nine years ago, when Shay and I got together. She had been taking care of him for years by then.

We used to drive up to his place in Evanston from Beverly and go out to eat. Every now and again he’d take the Purple Line downtown, then the Rock Island Line out to Beverly. Tom hadn’t owned a car in decades and the one he mentioned most often was his first, a used Model “A” he got as a young man in Nebraska, where he’d grown up.

What had occupied Tom most of his life was his collection. Or, more accurately, collections. A visit to his place was invitation to fall down an endless series of rabbit holes. If you had even a marginal interest in either of Chicago’s World’s Fairs, the English Arts & Crafts movement, Scandinavian design, Roycroft furniture, rare books of various kinds, Disney figurines, menus from the Cunard Line, or dozens of other types of art and ephemera, you could happily lose yourself at Tom’s for days.

After Shay and I broke up, Tom was the only one of her close friends I stayed in touch with. I’d take the train up to Evanston every couple of months and we’d walk from his place to have lunch, usually at either the Celtic Knot or Mount Everest. The two restaurants were a couple doors down from each other. Tom often brought clippings from the New York Times that he thought I might enjoy. Our conversation moved easily between art, politics, literature, and Shay.

After she moved out of town she asked that I look in on Tom from time to time and I was happy to do so. He was a solitary and eccentric guy, but very easy to like. At least it was easy for me to like him. That’s not a thing I can say about many people.

Sometime last spring, Shay took Tom west to visit his childhood haunts in Nebraska. She would text me, exasperated, that he was getting confused or wandering off. Another friend got him an iPhone in the hopes of keeping better track of him, but the device caused nothing but chaos and frustration. He invariably pushed the wrong thing, dialing up the internet when he was trying to call someone, for instance, insisting a news story was a personal communication he was baffled by.

We celebrated his 80th birthday at a friend’s house in the West Loop in the fall. Soon after that, Tom’s health declined quickly. A series of falls landed him in the hospital and forced Shay to rush back to town to figure out how to make his living situation sustainable. He had lived alone in his apartment for twenty-eight years. The two flights of stairs alone now posed a real challenge. 

I visited him at the rehab facility where he was recovering from internal bleeding after one of his falls. Then I visited when he was back at the hospital. Then back at the rehab. That time was the last one we had a more or less coherent conversation. “I’m afraid all the news is bad on my end,” he told me, then covered his face with his hands. Each time there was a little less of him—physically and mentally, he was withdrawing.

The scene at hospice was grim. A half dozen frail old people were parked in the lobby before a flatscreen, which was blaring Mean Girls at an earsplitting volume. I held Tom’s hand awhile and got the nurse to bring him some water. His voice was barely a whisper. Not much of what he said made much sense. He said he saw me in a movie. He kept reaching up for something, grasping for a thing only he could see. At first I thought he had his hand up to block the setting sun, which was glaring through the windows just then, but that wasn’t it. 

I got up to use the bathroom and as I was passing by an old woman talking to a friend I heard her say, “Pretend you don’t care and you won’t care…” I don’t know what she was talking about but it seemed a fair coping mechanism for the situation in that place. No one would ever want to be there. 

The night before Tom died I came for a last visit. His eyes were closed, his mouth open, he made occasional gurgling, choking sounds. Shay was there. She had candles going and music playing. He was covered in a quilt from home and some of his favorite stuffed animals surrounded him. Tom had elaborate years-long relationships with these and many others. We drank a toast with smuggled-in beer. 

I will of course remember these last sad moments of his life. But I will also remember many other moments. The one that sticks most is the recurring scene of Tom and Shay bent over a book or a print or some tchotchke as they work to catalogue his endless collection. She often got exasperated in the face of this monumental and seemingly endless task, but kept going nonetheless. They got pretty close to the end before he was too frail to continue. Whoever ends up with the job of dispersing these thousands and thousands of objects will have the very long spreadsheet she created to use as an indispensable guide.

Shay told me that in the last years Tom often told her his life had been a waste, that no one cared about the esoteric searching and accumulation which consumed him. Perhaps he wasn’t the happiest guy I ever met, but he was a man with a passion and a purpose. He was utterly devoted to the subjects he loved, and that, in my book, made his life a meaningful one.

I’m glad I got to know him a little and I’ll miss him.

In his memory, please consider donating under the name Beerbohm to one of the following charities:

International Crane Foundation: https://www.savingcranes.org/

Polar Bears International: https://polarbearsinternational.org/ 

Native Youth Leadership Alliance: https://nativeyouthleadership.org/ 

The Arbor Day Foundation: https://www.arborday.org/ 

RIP Tom Sloan (1938-2019)