Letter

The first thing I put on when my shift starts is “Damn the Torpedoes”. I’ve been taking out CDs from the library and copying them to iTunes ever since I started bartending at the Skylark so I could have a wider range of music to play Sunday nights. They let you take ten out at a time and I figure they’ll probably eliminate them altogether before too long so I better take advantage in the meantime. It’s a chance to listen things I don’t know, forgot, or don’t like enough to pay for.

Tom Petty was already around when I first began choosing what music to listen to on my own. He was on MTV dressed as the Mad Hatter, singing for me not to come around there no more. Before that he was getting out of a dusty spaceship singing about how I got lucky. He looked like a praying mantis skulking around. Even in close up it felt like he was far away. The wide-set eyes, pencil-thin nose, and big mouth full of teeth was sort of skull-like, but not menacing exactly, just remote and knowing. Spectral. His songs were on the radio all the time back in the 80s, which was the last time I listened to music on the radio.

I got a couple of his CDs from the library after he died. I never bought any before and figured now was the time to give them a shot. The songs stand up a lot better than much of the roots-rock Americana he’s usually lumped in with. I doubt I’ll be going back to Springsteen or Mellencamp when they pass. The working-class hero act doesn’t age so well in my book. Petty was always his own thing. His laconic tunes became anthems without trying to be, the way some of those other guys’ ones often seemed to overreach and oversell their authenticity.

A young man sitting by the taps, nursing a Schlitz tallboy, slurrily sings along from the first verse of “Refugee” on. He asks if I like Petty and I nod sure. Says he got to see him live a couple times and is shocked when he hears I never did.

—Those guys are like athletes. They really cranked it out.

He goes back to singing along badly as I walk away.

—I can’t believe what a big deal everybody on social media makes when famous people die these days. I mean, he was like sixty! I’m thirty now and I probably won’t make it to forty.

Be careful, I tell him, you might surprise yourself and live to old age the way Petty did. He asks how much the Pabst is and orders one when I say it’s $2.

—I’m poor.

I ask Jesse if he saw Sam doing shots with the guy. Jesse shrugs and says Sam does shots with everybody. The next time I pass him he seems a lot drunker than he was moments ago. He asks how much the free shots are. I say at our prices we’d go broke giving away the bar.

—But you know the bossman’s getting rich, right?

He doesn’t believe me when I assure him the bossman really isn’t getting rich. He’s teetering on belligerent now and takes forever gathering his belongings to leave once it sinks in he won’t be getting one on the house.

Petty’s record ends and I put on something else. The guy takes another five minutes fumbling with his zipper by the door before finally walking out.

RIP Tom Petty.

On the Orange Line downtown the other day a woman caught my eye. I think she got on at LaSalle or Quincy. She had corkscrew curls which went blond at the ends and wore a furry black coat. But the first thing I noticed was the ornamental button on her cuff. It was a large ceramic thing, glazed shiny turquoise like Southwestern tourist pottery. She sat down and immediately buried her nose in a Facebook scroll on her phone. I didn’t even see her face until several minutes later, after she’d felt my eyes on her.

Her gaze was direct and she sort of half smiled, then buried herself back in her phone. She glanced back a few more times before my stop came. I made sure not to stare but enjoyed having her eyes on me in the periphery of my vision. Nothing else happened. I got up at State & Lake, looked back at her one last time and walked off the train. 

I go to the coffee shop nearly everyday and eavesdrop on moments much like I had with the girl on the train all the time. The staff all know me by now so I can’t be a true stranger there anymore. But customers, even regulars, rarely take any notice of the guy with the book and paints at the table closest to the counter. I’ve done about twenty paintings at Jackalope over these past three years. Only one or two have a person in them. I prefer to focus on stacks of cups, wall decor, the espresso machine, or the riotous combination of primary colors of the wall paint. But to me these paintings are all about the passersby who shuttle in and out of the place in a nearly uninterrupting stream throughout the hours of my visits.

The framed rock posters, dueling tip jars, community flyers, and various tchotchkes sketched or fully rendered in my painting all remind me of misheard bits of conversation, awkward first dates, asinine opinionating, and a thousand other fleeting glimpses into others’ lives.

I suppose I was after that same thing doing marker drawings on the CTA all summer. But I didn’t have my gear as I looked at that girl on the Orange Line, so there’s no painted record of our non-meeting. I’ll just have wonder whether I left any impression on her the way she left one on me, or if I was just another of the thousands of passersby she—and we—encounter every day in the city without a second thought.

When Skyler and Sam asked for some art for the CD they were putting out, I didn’t think twice. I’ve listened to both of these guys play with dozens of different bands over the years and it’s almost always worth it. If either is on the bill you should go. Mute Duo is quiet and kind of spacey/atmospheric but it isn’t easy-listening. This isn’t that wallpaper kind of instrumental pap. The slow build of their sound makes me think of places. Like I’m about to arrive somewhere, or just glimpse it in the distance. I could see this stuff being used in movies.

When we got together at the coffee shop to talk about which drawings to use, it quickly became obvious I should just do the whole design. The front and back are parts of the Excavation series of drawings I did in the garage in back of Bernice’s last year. They had been up at Rainbo in the spring, so Skyler, who works there, got to look at them for a month and liked them enough to want them on his CD. The inside is from a sketch I did of them playing one Saturday at the Empty Bottle. The text was typed on my Smith-Corona and the track “titles” are just altered fragments of drawings. They didn’t want word names for them and I’d remembered that the Butthole Surfers had used drawings for names on Hairway to Steven. So that’s where that came from.  

Mute Duo will have their record-release this Friday at Elastic. They only made a hundred copies of the CD and they’ll be on sale that night. If there are any left after Friday, they’ll be available here.

As a special “bonus”, I’ll be reading a few pages from the bar book I’ve been wrestling with lately. Sam, Skyler, and I have all worked in bars, and the bars I’m writing about are ones we all know, so hopefully it’s sort of relevant. I don’t do many readings these days but when Skyler asked I didn’t wanna say no. We’ll see how it goes.

p.s. I wrote about the centennial exhibition of Nicolas Carone’s paintings and drawings for the Reader. Good show.