Letter

I don’t understand cats. In fact, I often find them kind of unnerving. They are like invaders in your home. They stroll about like they own the place and nap through the days, then run up and down the hallways like maniacs all night. The way they look at (or through) you is disconcerting. I always think of Don, who lived above the Blue Light. His cats began eating him a few days after he was dead and could not feed them anymore.‌
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‌I’ve only lived with them myself for a few years. The first time, they belonged to a neglectful roommate. I wound up the one feeding them many times, but could only watch in horror as they tried to lick cadmium yellow out of their fur; living in an apartment with two painters, that kind of thing was par for the course. The second time was much better. Gustav was Shay’s cat and mostly did his own thing. He was old and sick at the end. I dug a hole to bury him in the back yard of her house in Beverly.‌
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‌Despite these contrary feelings, I’ve always enjoyed painting them. There’s a reason cat videos rival porn for taking up most space on the internet. They have personality to burn. When my Sunday coworker Jesse asked if I’d do one of his and his wife’s little fuckers, I didn’t hesitate. Like every other cat owner everywhere, they have ten million photos to chose from. He sent me dozens. I collaged the best of them into a source image for my painting.‌
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‌I framed it and brought it into the bar a couple weeks ago. We hung it up on an empty bit of wall for the night. Jesse would go over to it occasionally and walk away smiling throughout his shift. I doubt I’ll live with any again but will probably be immortalizing many more cats in the years to come.‌
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‌I can live with that.‌

Kelly’s friend Mike is a clown. I don’t mean that as a character judgment but as a statement of fact. His name is Mike but once he puts on the greasepaint he’s Puddles. On Thursday, on the rooftop of the Prudential, with Millennium Park and Michigan Avenue for a backdrop, Mike held my wrist, gazed into my eyes, and sang me Happy Birthday to You. It wasn’t Puddles serenading me but it was pretty damn close.

Kelly, Mike, his wife, Shannon, and I left the Prudential and went for dinner at Club Lago. Mike not only picked up the check (after only meeting me a couple hours earlier) but invited me to come see his show Saturday at the Genesee Theatre in Waukegan. The only thing I could offer in return was to drive them there and back.

I pulled up at the Waldorf at 11:30am and we piled Puddles’ gear and merch into the back of the Jeep Grand Cherokee I’d just picked up downtown. We drove to Lincoln Square to hang out with Kelly and her dogs, to shop for shaving and other toiletry products at Merz and to pick up Puddles’ manager, Stuart, then we continued on to Waukegan.

I hadn’t heard of Puddles before a month or two ago when Kelly showed me some YouTube clips of him singing a song on America’s Got Talent and some other places. She had talked about her old friend Mike for years but watching him as Puddles was another thing altogether. I didn’t know what to make of it because he was a clown who doesn’t talk, yet he sings with not an ounce of irony or eye-winking involved. I had no idea what to expect from his live show.

We pulled up to the back of the theater and shlepped all the gear inside to two dressing rooms; one was for Shannon, Stuart, and me, the other, for the clown. There was a veggie tray, some beer, bottled water, and a bottle of Templeton Rye on a side table and a Kuerig coffee machine on another. An overstuffed red couch and armchair completed the furnishings. There was a concert shot of REO Speedwagon in action on one wall, along with a couple of other photos of acts I didn’t recognize. We’d been told that the theater was maintained and supported by the family behind Uline, so it was no surprise to find no shortage of paper products on hand, highlighted by a veritable pyramid of toilet tissue in the closet.

While Puddles was soundchecking, I sat in the armchair reading Tree of Smoke and chatting with Stuart, who had set up shop next to the Kuerig machine. Turns out he’s also Tom Waits’ manager, so I told him one of my all-time show regrets was not going to see Frank’s Wild Years at the Orpheum in Boston back in ’87. Stuart said that was the first tour he worked with Waits. Then he tried out a card trick on me. He’s a lifelong devotee of magic and both he and Mike are members of the Magic Castle.

A few minutes before showtime I wandered out to the lobby to take in the crowd. They’d sold 1500 tickets. Puddles’ biggest show yet. And in Waukegan of all places. A town neither Mike nor Stuart had ever heard of. (I had tried to think of the Tom Waits set near Waukegan and Stuart said Johnsburg, the town his wife was from.) The people streaming into the beautiful old theater ranged from eight to eighty. Everybody looked happy to be there and eager for the show to begin. I heard a roar from the audience behind me before even settling in my seat. Puddles was making his way down the aisle toward the stage.

He settled himself in a chair and started chewing an ever-growing wad of gum. He would take out the gum and stick it to the door of his suitcase, then pop it back in his mouth throughout the night. He never talked—communicating with winks, grunts, and gestures—in other words, being a real clown. But then he would sing and the temperature in the room would change. Whether it was “All By Myself”, “Where Is My Mind”, “Major Tom’, or any of the other dozen or so numbers, he delivered them all straight. His singing was no joke either. But then he’d finish singing and take three minutes straining his back while trying to push a plastic chair a few feet down stage.

At the end it was announced that Puddles would be taking pictures in the lobby next to the merch table (or souvenirs as Mike had insisted on calling them). The line stretched back into the theater and lasted an hour or more, but Puddles made sure each fan had a real human moment with him, even chasing a disgruntled middle-aged man outside and taking extra pictures after the man had cursed out security for trying, quite reasonably, to move him along so others could take their turn. In all, they shuttled nearly 600 people through. I was almost as impressed with his equanimity during this invasion of his personal space as with his jaw-dropping stage act.

Back in the dressing room a few minutes after the last of the fans had left, Puddles was packed back up into oversized rolling cases and Mike had reappeared. We said goodbye to the theater staff and Stuart, who was heading to O’Hare, and drove through the quiet Waukegan streets back to Chicago.

Clowns get a bum rap these days. Between the mediocre Stephen King one killing it at the multiplexes and the bumbling Bozo in the Oval Office, it’s easy to forget that clowns exist to spread joy. Go see Puddles and he’ll set you straight. 

The literal translation is round number but what it really means is a significant birthday. My mom was always talking about them when I was growing up but now it was her turn. I won’t say how old she turned but it was significant enough for me to come to Boston to help celebrate it.

Max picked me up from the airport and by the time we got to the house there were already plates of food being put out on the dining room table. It’s the same table as in the painting above (done almost 30 years ago) but with two leaves added to lengthen it so it takes up most of the room. The official reason for this get-together was Rosh Hashanah but I had only shown up to mark my mom’s birthday. I imagine many of her friends felt the same way.

For as long as I can remember, there has been a war between my mother and father about entertaining. My mother loves cooking and having people over while my father hates it. Over the years I’ve witnessed screaming matches, tears, and many ugly scenes over this. But as time has past, my mother has more or less won my father over to her side. I remember being shocked to see him in the kitchen helping with the salad one time. But that was a couple decades ago now. He still bitches and moans but mostly goes along with it these days.

Helping in the kitchen is one of the few ways I feel I can participate in these celebrations. I can’t shoot the breeze with people I don’t know well (even if I haven’t known some of them well for over thirty years now), but I can definitely clear their plates, refill their glasses, and clean up after they’re gone. For me, the most active, engaged parts of these evenings are before the guests arrive and after they’ve left.

This night I was struck by all the young people at the house. The children of my parents friends brought their children or, at the very least, their significant others. I spent much of the night on the back deck with my brothers and a few of these younger people. I mostly listened to their conversations. I hadn’t seen some of them since they were children so it was weird and interesting watching them as grownups.

Back in Chicago there was another kruglaya data on Saturday at the Hideout. The guitar player Rick Rizzo had recently turned sixty, as had a few of his music friends, so he invited them all to come play. It was also the sixtieth anniversary of Sputnik to give the day a coherent theme. Some of my favorite bands played. 

I missed the start of 75 Dollar Bill’s set so when their plywood box-playing co-leader, Rick Brown, handed me a flyer for an after-gig at Co-Prosperity Sphere, I told him I’d be there. It didn’t hurt that the place was blocks from my house. 

 I ran into Matt there. Turns out he lent his standup bass to the guy playing with the band. We talked about what a mindfuck age is. He was as weirded out by Rick Rizzo and other people he’d played music with turning sixty as I was. When I was a kid, I thought of sixty as OLD, he said. He pointed at Rick Brown setting up his gear in the middle of the gallery and asked—Is that what sixty looks like?

The crowd was a mix of young people and middle-aged types like me and Matt. I pointed at myself, dressed in a bright orange t-shirt and shorts, beard, tattoos, and asked Matt—Is a forty-seven-year-old supposed to look like this? 

He had no answer and neither do I. Fortunately, when I turn forty-seven in a few days, it will not be a kruglaya data. There will be no guests to greet or food to prepare, then put away. I’ve organized my life to avoid celebrations and get-togethers whenever possible. Over the last few years I’ve reluctantly begun to enjoy marking my birthday in some low-key way. It usually involves eating an expensive piece of meat. I imagine that’ll happen again this year too.