Letter

A couple Sundays ago—maybe the hottest day of the year so far—I went to 18th Street to get a tattoo. My last was nearly ten years ago—a Noah’s Ark adapted from a Russian block-printed tapestry I’ve had on walls of places I live since childhood. The new one came from a newer source but still from the past.  

The Spindle was a sculpture which stood on the corner of Cermak and Harlem in Berwyn for twenty years until it was unceremoniously leveled to make way for a Walgreen’s in 2008. To me, it was a Chicago landmark. I’d drawn two versions of it on coffee bags while working at Hardboiled Coffee a few years back. The cars suspended on a spike seemed like a good way to memorialize my cabbie career, as well as paying tribute to a symbol of the city now gone.

Justin is dating my friend Tracy and works out of a shop in Pilsen, which is close to where I live, so I asked him about doing the Spindle tattoo and he agreed. I got to Studio One at 5pm, then walked with Justin down the street for a cup of coffee before getting started. We talked about the other shops he worked at, other artists I’d gotten tattoos from, and about Tracy, while he was getting the stencil and his gear ready.

The needle didn’t hurt much but made my mind wander. I’d forgotten that about getting tattooed, you sort of drift away, maybe to remove yourself from the low-level but persistent pain of the process. Tracy walked in when Justin was about halfway done. We talked about grabbing a bite afterward, since I had about an hour before my Skylark bar shift.

We decided on the newish Vietnamese diner down the street but it turned out to be closed, so we went back west up 18th to a new spot next to the tattoo shop. It was a cavernous place named after a no-doubt made-up person. I recognized a regular from the coffeeshop as one of the waiters. We put in our order and waited. After about half an hour I ran out and Divvy’d it to the bar, Tracy and Justin agreed to bring my food later in a to-go box.

A few minutes into my shift I carded a young woman named Natalie Wood. I asked whether her parents were fans of the dead actress and she rolled her eyes and nodded. She knew about the investigation into the death being reopened as well. Her own Robert Wagner showed up a few minutes later—a poetry professor type probably twice her age—and they retreated to one of the booths. Tracy texted to say they were on their way with my chicken and to expect an apology phone call from the GM of the restaurant.

The next morning the GM left a novella-length voicemail and a text message to match. He’d comped our entire meal and repeatedly intruded on Tracy and Justin’s conversation after I’d left to prostrate himself before them, sending out desserts and drinks one after another. Now he wanted to give me a $50 gift certificate to come back. I texted that it was unnecessary, that I hadn’t budgeted enough time for the meal, but he was inconsolable. I wouldn’t give him my email so he left the gift certificate at the host stand. I asked Tracy to have Justin pick it up and give it to one of the neighborhood borrachos.

I’m already planning another tattoo but will be careful to cross the street when approaching Justin’s shop from the west to avoid getting sucked back into the vortex of that eatery. Maybe by the time I return that place will be history already.

A couple Mondays ago I got on the Blue Line to O’Hare and took a night flight to Florence. My parents have found a place in the hills above that city which they’ve returned to enough times that my father has taken to calling it their dacha.It’s a house down a dirt path, in the middle of an olive grove, and the view of the valley out the second-floor bathroom’s window will remind one of countless backgrounds from Italian Old Masters.

My first trip to this house was on the occasion of my father’s 65th birthday six years ago. I went with Shay and we did a bunch of tourist/cultural things like climbing the endless circular staircase to the top of Brunelleschi’s Duomo. She’d made a list of sites she wanted to see and dragged me along, kicking and screaming. On my next visit, a couple years back, both my brothers came as well. There was a day trip to Venice and I remember doing a lot of driving. This time no one else was coming. It would just be them and me.

I think I have a pretty good relationship with my parents. They’re very supportive and we rarely fight. So when they invited me to come, I hemmed and hawed for a bit but then accepted. My hesitation had nothing to do with them or with Italy but with travel in general. I hate it and have to trick myself into doing it, even when it’s to places I like with people I love. Because travel, to me, equals banishment. I can’t help feeling I’m being forced to leave, rather than being excited to visit some place that isn’t home. My parents, on the other hand, live to leave town. Trips have been the highlight of their lives as long as I can remember. And as the years pass I wonder how many more trips they have left. So when they asked I knew I had to go.

Upon arrival my father asked what I wanted to do during my five days there and I honestly hadn’t given it any thought. Had they been in Boston these five days, my thought process would be exactly the same—I was coming to spend time with them, the venue didn’t much matter. Because this was my third time at this house in Fiesole, there were the beginnings of routine that I require to get anything done. But though I had hopes of making some headway on a new book, I got no writing done at all. The only art I accomplished was five sumi ink postcards done on watercolor paper which fought my every brushstroke. If the Italian postal system is merciful, a few of them will be arriving in the States sometime soon.

I did a lot of the driving again and plugging my iPod into the car stereo had a grounding effect. My folks liked the Dos Santos record I’ve been wearing out ever since I got it a month ago. I rewatched Repentence on my laptop. It’s one of my favorite movies and an appropriate one to watch in another age of totalitarian dictators. I finished reading Molly Antopol’s The UnAmericans and passed it on to my mother. I went back to Gerald Murnane’s epic story collection, Stream System. I have to take breaks from that book to digest some of the stuff that goes on in it. In the last story I read, he goes on at length about his idea that there’s no such thing as time, but only place. Or rather an everchanging array of places. That all we can truly experience is the scenery we see before us. I can’t wrap my head around it entirely but something about it rings true.

I know in my everyday life that I need to keep seeing the same people and places to begin finding the minute changes and differences which make up the subject-matter of my art and writing. When I say I hate travel it’s not entirely the truth. I can’t imagine life without the CTA, for instance. Getting on buses and trains is as meaningful to me as reading a book, hearing a band, or talking to a friend. 

I’m glad I went to Italy because my parents were there and seemed happy to have me, but left to my own devices I may never go back. There’d have to be some compelling, concrete reason. Otherwise I’ll be perfectly satisfied riding the CTA to scratch any stray travel itch.

Over the past month or so I’ve been working on an article about Roseland in 1970. It has caused me consider how I view my own past, to ask whether my younger days were formative or memorable the way Paul’s, John’s, and Bob’s obviously were to them. 

A couple days before I had to turn a draft in, I met with Paul and John at John’s place to watch a twelve-year-old DVD of the footage they’d shot forty-eight years before. They took turns pointing at people and places flickering by on the screen, each triggering memories, stories. They were twenty-year-olds at the time, with their whole life ahead of them. I wondered sitting there whether I’d be as happy watching footage of myself at that age. Then again, 1990 was no 1970, so maybe that’s not a fair question.

Freezeframing scenes from the video to use for my article, I was struck by the many older people dressed in styles more in vogue in the 40s or 50s than in 1970. The generational split was loud and clear in shot after shot. I doubt the 1990 version would seem nearly as stark. By that time there was already a sizable contingent of older people acting and dressing young. It was already difficult to tell generations apart. It’s virtually a lost cause today. I doubt it’s possible to tell ages apart anymore, except for in the broadest terms. 

Meeting with John a few days later, I remarked that though I’m pushing fifty I can’t point to a single moment in my past I’d want to return to. I’d love a twenty-year-old’s metabolism but not much else. That’s not to say that my entire life up to writing this sentence has been an abject, miserable slog; only that I can’t imagine reliving to any of it. 

One of the great fringe benefits of sharing other people’s stories is how it causes you to reflect on your own. Just the name Old Fashioned Days makes one fall into reverie, to think of some far-in-the-past time. To be sure, not all of John’s, Paul’s, and Bob’s memories are rose-colored, but they sat on this old footage nearly fifty years to save it for today.

I hope that when I reach their age I’ll have a relic or two to look back on fondly as well.