Letter

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)

New Year’s Day I met my brother and his wife for brunch at some new spot on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain. When you haven’t lived in a town in over twenty years every corner of it you once knew becomes more and more unknown. After we were seated, I tried to recall the breakfast spot I liked along this stretch in the 90s but couldn’t remember its name nor address. Model rockets were suspended over the length of the small room and menu items were all galactically-themed. But Boston itself is becoming like outer space to me now.

I visit once or twice a year because my parents live here. I have dinner with Harry and Amy and maybe do something with my brother; otherwise I’m mostly at my parents’ house till it’s time to go to the airport. They’re getting older so there are errands I can run to make their lives easier and I’m happy to do so. The New Year’s Eve celebration—a mainstay of any Soviet Jew’s childhood—has dwindled down to just a few friends now. I hardly ever get baited into the political conversations that go on around the table but fell for the trap this year. An ignorant statement about Mexican illegal immigrants overrunning the US border with narcotics made me blow up a little. I felt the need to remind the gathering that we were all immigrants. It was kind of pointless but this is no time to let hateful and flippant pronouncements stand. Afterwards I did dishes till past 3am just like most other years.

After brunch with my brother I had a few hours to kill before an afternoon show at Lizard Lounge. A few weeks ago Thalia Zedek had played Chicago and told me she’d playing at this Cambridge spot New Year’s Day. I was so happy to have something to do in Boston that I promised her I’d be there. I drove my parents’ car in a meandering route from J.P. to Cambridge. I was searching for a coffeeshop to park myself at for awhile and eventually located one in Inman Square. College kids to my left had spread out some board game over two tables and were trading first-love stories, while on my right a poorly-matched Russian-speaking couple were trading monosyllabic banter in the few second intervals each wasn’t glued to their phones.

I thought I’d been to Lizard Lounge before but ended up driving up and down Mass Ave three or four times before spotting the sandwich board by the door to Cambridge Common indicating the entryway to the little basement club. I was early as always so I went into the sprawling bar and grill upstairs and ordered a Bloody Mary. At 3:30pm I was third in line waiting for the club’s doors to open. Downstairs the couple ahead of me quickly took over the prime tables so I was forced to take one to the left of the stage. If I’d been in this place before I had no memory of it, but it was snug and comfortable and quickly filled with people. Most seemed to know each other. I waved hello to Thalia and got some rye with a couple ice cubes.

My table was right by where David Curry—Thalia’s viola player— was setting up. He nodded my way but I figured he’d recognized somebody behind me. I mean you he pantomimed. I’m not sure whether I’ve ever talked to him before but I have at least half a dozen drawings of the guy. Sitting off to the side ended up a good thing as I could watch both the band and the audience. There were fifty people tops in the place but it felt like a full house. After they were done I talked to Thalia a minute. I thanked her for the music and asked if she’d be into playing a show to celebrate the release of my book in the spring. She seemed into it. I left before the next band started, not wanting to spoil the good feeling.

I met Harry and Amy at a drafty Asian food court in Allston. I’ve known them since the 80s. Harry was my manager at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and Amy rented the ovens at Edibles (where I worked) for her dessert business. They’re basically my only Boston friends and a trip to town wouldn’t be the same if I didn’t break bread with them. Even in that oddly unwelcoming environment I was glad to see them.

Driving back to my folks’ place afterwards I was struck by how little emotional charge this town retained over me. I spent eleven years of childhood and then three more in my twenties here but I might as well have been driving through the place for the very first time. I’ve reflexively said I hate Boston almost since we arrived here in 1978 but now I can no longer call up the vitriol to even say that much about it. Whatever negative power it once had is now mostly gone. It’s just a place where some family and friends live. If they weren’t here I’d never come again. But as long as they’re here I’ll keep coming back. Finding my way around will become harder and harder. Maybe that’s for the best since this isn’t my home.

Marie lent me her Showtime password so I was able to finish watching The Chi  this week. I saw the first three episodes as they aired, but chose not to keep paying for a subscription to the channel just to watch this one show. This is a common quandary these days. You watch one thing on an app, another on a channel, a third on your wristwatch, a fourth in a movie theater, a fifth on a network. It’s a neverending Tower of Babel to traverse just to find a good story or two. 

Chicago is a city overflowing with stories. Yet, as far as the larger culture is concerned it’s still Al Capone/Wrigley Field/deep dish pizza/gang violence/political corruption and little else. On TV in particular, the representations of the city have been atrociously one-dimensional, from the late, unlamented The Chicago Code to the sick and seemingly endless Dick Wolf franchises. Shameless was fun for awhile but it never had any clue about the city and Boss had its moments but was cancelled before it really got its sealegs. 

Movies haven’t done much better but there are occasional glimpses of the city I know. My friend, John McNaughton, has made several movies which show off the city and suburbs—particularly Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Normal Life, and Mad Dog and Glory, as has Andrew Davis in Stony Island, The Fugitive, et al. But recently, Spike Lee’s Chiraq made a grotesque and simplistic caricature of the city’s (and country’s) very real problems and dumb rom-coms like The Breakup present a place I’d never want to live in. 

I’m reminded of The Breakup regularly because tourists and yuppies from outside Pilsen regularly poke their head into The Skylark, where I bartend, to confirm it’s the bar from that movie. Many TV shows and movies have been shot there over the years, but The Breakup is the one which the place is identified with more often than any other. I’ll watch anything shot in the city, particularly in places I’m intimately familiar with, so I was really happy to see the bar in an extended sequence in the final episode of The Chi’s first season. 

What I love about the show, aside from the nuanced characters and compellingly complex storylines, is that its creators obviously know Chicago is more than El tracks, the Sears Tower, and the lakefront. Watching the show, I recognize many places presented with enough of their actual context intact that, though of course the geography and much else has been reedited to suit dramatic ends, I still see the city I know. 

By using places like the Skylark and HaiSous on 18th Street as settings the show allows me to suspend my disbelief enough to follow along, while not questioning the underlying premises the way I do when I suffer through something like Chicago P.D. 

It’s fun to see the way they redid the decor in the bar too. In the screen cap above, for instance, there are two dartboards which don’t usually hang on that wall. I regularly field calls asking if we have a dartboard or pool table, so seeing them on the show made me laugh. Seeing make-believe made in a real place which means something to me adds an extra level of resonance to a show that I enjoyed already. Hope they come back and shoot at the bar again next season.

Maybe they’ll put in a pool table this time.