Letter

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.

Irvine texted to see if I’d fancy a movie. He’s from Scotland so he uses words like fancy as verbs. I was free but had seen most of what was out there that I’d wanted to see. I suggested Thor: Ragnarok only because it was directed by the guy who made What We Do in the Shadows, but he’d already seen it, so we went to LBJ. 

Irvine was sawing logs before the fifteen minute mark—just about the time I was fighting the impulse to leave—but his gentle snoring kept me put. So I was forced to keep watching poor Woody Harrelson try his darnedest to emote through the various prosthetics plastered to his mug. It was hard to believe that this snoozefest was made by the guy who made This is Spinal Tap, but then again both films are send-ups of something or other.

Afterward, we wandered around downtown looking for a place to eat and wound up at some new-fangled taco joint on Lake. We talked a bit about the movie, both agreeing it was a dog but also remarking on how even the worst racist Dixiecrat on screen came off as a dignified statesman compared to the parade of assclowns we’re subjected to these days. We talked about the sex scandals. He said there’s a photo of him hugging Harvey Weinstein out there somewhere. I bet there are thousands of photographs like that being burned, erased, or deleted as we speak. Weinstein made a lot of people rich and famous and no amount of distancing will make that history go away. We saw a preview for the J. Paul Getty movie before LBJ. That’s the one which is now being reshot with Christopher Plummer replacing Kevin Spacey. It’s a weird Orwellian thing that we’re doing, trying to scrub the past and present clean.

Irvine has his own fish to fry. He was in town because he’s going through a divorce and lawyers are in the process of divvying up property and assets which include his soon-to-be-former Chicago home. It’s a shame I won’t see him much anymore but that’s the way life goes. This is what he tweeted about our dinner: 

I’m with a friend who has been off social media for three years. And the fucker is 500 times happier. And thinner. Cunt.

He exaggerated both my happiness and any weight loss, but he was sweet to do so. It got 1.5K likes and a couple hundred retweets. Glad I can still be good fodder for the old social networks.

As bad as LBJ was, something about those outsize historical figures kept eating at me. Maybe it’s because we’re in another one of those periods where powerful people are being felled. In a few decades there will be a boring biopic about the Trump Years too, but for now it’s all too raw and fresh and seemingly-important. I don’t know what will be remembered and what will be forgotten but I hope we stop trying to obliterate and obscure the sins of our disgraced leaders and heroes. There are lessons to be learned from their failures which will not be learned if we pretend they never even existed.

This is in no way an argument to defend Weinstein, Louis CK, Spacey, or any of the dozens of other men whose careers will justifiably be ended because of the way they abused their power. But condemning what they did and removing them from history are two very different things. I ran into my old friend Andrew at the Bottle a few days after seeing Irvine and he wanted to talk about the scandals as well. He didn’t like the desperate efforts at a do-over either but seemed more concerned about whether someone might come forward and accuse him of harassment. He said he felt he was safe but had a worried look in his eye. As for me, on this account my conscience is completely clear.

What these men have done, worse than any sexual assault, is abuse their power. They took advantage of their position to force others to pleasure them and they’ll burn in hell for it. I have no clue how I would have acted in their place. I’ve never felt in control of another human being in my life. To be honest, I hope I never have to find out.

In Rob Reiner’s movie, LBJ is portrayed as a tragic, power-hungry monster and elicits sympathy. But none of our current monsters make me feel that way. They need to pay for what they’ve done but we shouldn’t forget them, because they’re our monsters and they did not spring from the earth fully formed. We made them and we’ll make many more before we’re done.

p.s. I wrote one last time about Vivian Maier...

p.p.s. You can now buy one of those Mute Duo CDs I designed on this page.

My friend Bill has lived in the same building for twenty-five years but now has to move out. It’s a fourteen-story brick high-rise steps from the lake in Rogers Park. The only time I visited him at home a few years back, the apartment and the building as a whole reminded me of my first place in Chicago. It was a mile and change south of Bill’s, at the corner of Foster and Sheridan. Like his, mine had patterned carpeting everywhere and vaguely Orientalist fixtures and decor. If you’ve been to the Music Box Theatre, picture that but as a building full of tiny apartments. Mine was once a residential hotel and, in 1990-91, when I lived there, had a run-down seedy David Lynch vibe too it, down to flickering hall lighting. 

I don’t know if Bill’s building was ever a hotel, but he was forced to move from his apartment on the twelfth floor because of water damage. Now, barely a year later, he’s moving out altogether.

The obvious selling point of places in this building is the view. Depending on which way the windows face, one is afforded vistas of water to the east, Evanston to the north, or the seemingly endless grids of Chicago to the south and west. Bill has taken a photo out his window nearly every morning for the past few years.

Yet, even with a collection of hundreds of photos, he wanted some more permanent or tangible way to memorialize what he saw out his windows all these years. So he asked me to make a painting. Over three afternoons last week, I worked up the picture you see above. I put the finished version first, then process shots of the previous two sessions, so you get some idea of how it came together. 

It’s strange to spend time in someone else’s place when they’re not there. All the more so when that place is in a state of transition. I asked Bill before starting whether he wanted any of the interior incorporated in the picture but he said he didn’t. If he had, there would be packing tape, cardboard boxes, and half-empty shelving. It was not yet someone else’s home, but it was beginning to no longer be Bill’s.

Even though I haven’t lived with this view for twenty-five years, looking out these windows these three afternoons made me feel like a part of this particular place at this particular time. This is why I prefer working from life to anything else. Even if the view is someone else’s, there’s no replacing the experience of taking it in with your own eyes.

Bill’s new pad doesn’t have a vista to enjoy. He told me he plans to hang my painting next to the living room window to remind him of the old place. I hope what I came up with will serve as the reminder he was hoping for. Having spent a little time in his old place, the view he knows better than anyone has, in some small measure, become mine as well.

 

—Got some marker drawings of Pilsen up for sale at Pilsen Community Books. Ring them if you’d like one.

—I wrote about two very troubling art shows which celebrate the centenary of the Soviet Revolution.

—I’ve been invited to read from my cab books at this reading at Taxi Town on Wednesday. Have no clue if anyone will show up, but it’s already been worth it because I got to see their amazing website. In case you’ve ever doubted the importance of apostrophes, it will set you straight. (Though I’m glad they’re so concerned about cabbies’ orgasms…)

—RIP Fred Cole.