Letter

I make a not insignificant chunk of my living painting pet portraits. I can’t recall how I got into that racket but it’s been good to me. There are many more people out there who want their dog immortalized than people who want to look at pictures of somebody else’s cluttered bookshelves. I’m not happy about that but I’ve made my peace with it; I have no other choice if I want to survive. I can knock out most of these commissions in a few days. The pet owners are happy; I get paid; everybody wins. I’ve rarely had any trouble completing or delivering these pictures. They’re usually gouache, watercolor, or ink on paper, and rarely larger than 15×20 inches. Most customers live in town so I hand deliver and thus don’t have to deal with the perils of the post office.

I know Heather from back when I was on Twitter. She came to my reading in Massachusetts a few years back. She wrote to me a month or two ago about ordering a painting of Cabiria, her cat. But unlike the many who came before her, Heather wanted an oil painting, and a good-sized one at that. We settled on a price and I got to work. A couple weeks later it was done. I packed the 22×30 inch painting carefully into the box my flatscreen TV had come in and walked it to the UPS Store.

Because Heather had had trouble with USPS deliveries just like I had, she gave me a p.o. box as her address. But, in a bit of cruel irony, this meant that I had to use USPS to ship her painting because UPS doesn’t deliver to p.o. boxes. To add insult to injury, it wound up costing more than double what I’d quoted her. I offered to knock a bit off the grand total and sent her the tracking number. Then we settled in to wait and hope.

Three days after I’d dropped the painting off the USPS site still indicated that only the shipping label had been printed and it was waiting to be picked up. I went back to the store and was assured that it had been taken the same evening I’d come in. This meant that the postal worker hadn’t bothered scanning it and the painting could be anywhere or nowhere by now. I’d mailed it on a Monday and the ETA was Friday, but Friday passed with no change in status. Heather and I emailed back and forth about it a few times but there was nothing either of us could do but wait.

Monday came with no changes, so I filled out a missing mail form on the USPS site. I have yet to get confirmation that they’ve received that either, but I guess I should know that’s par for the course. I kept checking the tracking status several times a day. I know the adage about insanity being to do the same thing over and over expecting a different result but I have a one-track mind, so until whatever’s obsessing me is resolved or crashes and burns I will keep banging my head against that wall. This is a good attribute for art, less so for life, as I’m continually taught.

I started forming contingency plans. Heather had sent me a downpayment which didn’t quite cover what I’d payed to ship the lost painting. Would she accept a smaller painting on paper as a replacement? Should I just send her back the deposit and call the whole thing off so I could battle USPS full-time? But these and another half dozen options dissipated from my mind when, late Tuesday night, I looked up the tracking (for about the sixth time that day) and saw it changed to IN TRANSIT. After wandering for eight days, my painting had arrived at a regional facility in Springfield, MA before being dispatched north to Heather’s town in New Hampshire.

A couple days later it was marked delivered, so I could stop obsessively checking the USPS site and move on to wondering whether the painting arrived in one piece and whether Heather likes it.

For the entire eleven days of this ordeal the thought of Cabiria’s painting lost somewhere out there ate at the edges of everything else that was going on in my life. But now it’s time to switch gears, get a buck up my ass about something else. It shouldn’t be long.

It was great to hear Chris Brokaw play in Janet Bean’s living room last Friday. You should go buy all his records if you have any sense of decency at all.

Nobody at the Trib had answered an email in about a year, so it came as quite a surprise when they asked me to write a review of The Hunting Accident. I took a quick look at the synopsis and wrote back I’d do it. If nothing else, getting hired to write a review is good motivation to read a book I might not have otherwise. They asked if there was any conflict of interest—if I knew the authors, publishers, etc.—but I couldn’t think of any, so it was a go.  

The Hunting Accident is a book-length (over 400 pages) comic about Matt Rizzo, who was blinded during a botched armed robbery, roomed with Nathan Leopold, then devoted the rest of his life to writing an epic text on a brailler in the style of Dante Alighieri. It is also the story of his son, Charlie, who came to live with him in Chicago at age 10.

As I flipped page after page over the two days it took me to get through this sizable tome, I wondered why I was assigned to review it. Was it because I write about Chicago and also make art? I didn’t grow up with comics and often have a hard time even knowing how to read them. I love Chris Ware, R. Crumb, and Ben Katchor’s work, but they are by no means traditional practitioners of the form. Often over my time with The Hunting Accident I couldn’t decide whether to look at the pictures or read the words, because more often than not the two didn’t cohere.

Approaching the last few pages, I flipped to the credits at the end and a lightbulb went on: a few years back, I had a meeting with an agent representing Charlie Rizzo. She thought I might be the one to write his father’s story. But I never even met Charlie and the agent stopped answering follow-up queries. They had moved on and this thing I was now about to write a review of was the result.

The book is a mess. The drawing is incompetent and the writing is disorganized. I’m surprised it was even published. I was convinced of this before realizing my very tangential connection, but, knowing it, would my harsh judgement be seen as sour grapes? I turned in my review over a week ago and haven’t heard back yet. I have a feeling it won’t be published. The only other negative review I wrote for the Trib was killed. There aren’t many reviews of The Hunting Accident to be found online but the ones I’ve read are damn near rapturous, so mine would be an outlier. We’ll see what happens.

Knowing that in an alternate universe this might’ve been my book is an odd thing to think about. I would’ve done it very differently. Of that I’m certain. The best example of this kind of thing which comes to mind is Jodorowsky’s Dune. I don’t mean to imply I was born to tell Matt Rizzo’s story the way Jodorowsky certainly was to tell Herbert’s, but in a very small way what I experienced after reading this comic was a similar glimpse of what might’ve been. 

It’s 6:15pm on a Wednesday and Taxi Town is a ghost town. I look through the windows and see a blond woman working away on a laptop in an otherwise empty room filled with desks and work stations. She’s towards the back, by some couches and a coffee table, some sort of waiting area. This former auto dealership is now the headquarters for a new taxi affiliation. The lot is filled with dayglo green cabs. I’m here because I’ve been invited to read from my cab books.

I haven’t read from them in at least two years. I beat my head in trying to promote my second book in 2014 to very little avail. By mid-2015 it was clear even to me that it was time to move on. When this invitation came I wasn’t sure what to make of it. A poet named Kevin Coval had put out a book called The People’s History of Chicago and was trying to read in all seventy-seven neighborhoods of the city. Tammy, the woman who wrote to me, had been referred by Amy, who works at Northwestern University. We know each other from book events. Tammy had never heard of me or my books but seemed excited and enthusiastic. The idea of a reading in a cab barn was too weird to turn down.

The door to the lit showroom indicated it was locked after 6pm so I walked north along Western to the next entrance of the building and saw a familiar sight. A lobby with newspapers and crumpled wrappers scattered among some tables and a bank of glassed-in teller windows. This is where cabbies pay for their leases. I’d spent innumerable hours in rooms like this one over my twelve years driving. I entered through the glass doors and went to the men’s room, which was located just to the left of the pay windows. There was no one inside, but seeing the cheap plastic pitcher and bowl Muslims use to wash their feet as part of their daily prayers was like another time machine trigger for me. The peoplessness made it feel like a dream flashback. I went out to the lobby, then to the street. A few minutes later Amy pulled up.

She had party trays of samosas and a couple bottles of wine. I helped bring them inside. We walked down a dimly lit hall illuminated only by the ghastly glow of a flatscreen TV hung toward the ceiling. The blond woman I’d seen through the window turned out to be Tammy. She had Kevin’s books spread out on one of the tables so I added the books I’d brought to the display. We stood around a few minutes drinking wine from plastic cups. Then a guy from the cab company came over and said he was leaving and told Tammy what to put away and where when we were done. A driver or two passed by on his way to or from his taxi, looked at us a second, then continued walking.

All anyone needs to know about the taxi industry in 2017 can be summed up by a glance at the lot full of idle cabs here at Taxi Town. In a few years Uber, Lyft, and the rest of them will likely be the only game in town. And the cab companies have no one but themselves to blame. By not keeping up with technology they’ve put themselves out of business. I have no nostalgia for any of this, least of all for the people who ran places like this one. I stuffed another samosa in my mouth and waited to see if anyone would show up.

Kevin came a few minutes later. He told me his father is a top ten Uber driver in Chicago, so he knew a little about this business as well. A couple of Amy’s coworkers showed up, as well as her husband, who brought along a bottle of Bulleit bourbon. We all arranged chairs around the coffee table. Since there were only about eight of us, Kevin asked everyone to introduce themselves. Then I read a couple pieces from each of my books. Kevin followed with some poems. Halfway through his reading an older white guy carrying a taxi meter and some bags came over and asked what was going on.

He said he’d been driving since the 90s but had quit until getting laid off from a job a couple years ago. The government told him he had to work longer to get his full pension so he went back to hacking. During the discussion after the reading was over we got into whether the industry had any hope of surviving. The man insisted traditional taxis would prevail, though he had nothing to back up that hope, and the look in his eye indicated he knew otherwise. Nevertheless he bought a copy of each of my books. In fact all six copies I’d brought were claimed.

We all said our goodbyes, then Amy offered to drive me all the way back to Bridgeport. It was kind of her to chauffeur an old cabbie home. The whole evening felt like a memorial ceremony. Speeches and drinks and snacks in an empty edifice. If Taxi Town isn’t bankrupt in a couple years, I’ll be shocked. I just hope cabs survive a little longer because I don’t have a smartphone and thus can’t use rideshare myself. I call for a cab every now and then after a shift at the bar. I never tell them I drove for twelve years. In fact I rarely tell the driver anything but my home address. It’s been five and a half years since I was a cabdriver but it feels like it’s been decades.