Letter

Twenty-three years ago I was twenty-three years old. I’d just graduated from the Art Institute and moved back to Boston. I started driving a cab after a few months of not doing much of anything. I knew that my BFA qualified me for a job in the service industry and driving a cab seemed like as good a way to make a living as any. I knew I was a couple hundred years late to have any real impact on the culture if I was to continue making paintings of the people and things I saw around me. Painting of any kind had stopped being at the center of the national conversation decades before but it was the only way I knew to talk to the world, so what was I to do?

Two years later, after an abortive attempt at grad school and many, many cab miles, I had a show of paintings at a cafe in the South End neighborhood of Boston. It was by far the biggest success I’d had up to that point (or since). Buoyed by the couple thousand bucks in my pocket, I quit driving, figuring foolishly that I’d make a living from art from that point on. Broke a couple months later, I slunk back behind the wheel. Without an agent or gallery there was no way to sustain the art sales or public enthusiasm needed to keep collectors interested in what I was doing. So I drove the cab and painted and sometimes put the paintings up in coffeeshops and bars around town. Every now and again something would sell, but never nearly enough for me to entertain the fantasy of leaving the day job again.

Cut to 2012, when I finally walk away from the cab for good. I’m finishing up my second book (which will be published two years later) and I’m ready to try to get by on freelance art and writing gigs and art sales. Every day I open the laptop screen and try to shake a few bucks loose from an editor or art collector who’s never heard of me and is inundated by other cold-callers just like me, all of us trying to squeeze through an ever-shrinking door. Still, I do enough pet portraits, book reviews, and other miscellany to almost get by. It’s a grind and it’s often demeaning but I figure it beats driving a cab.

Then, this summer comes. Suddenly the book review editor who had been publishing a piece or two of mine almost every month is not returning email anymore. The newspaper’s book section is being eliminated. There is no longer any budget for freelancers at the other paper I write for either. So I’m left writing a few film capsule reviews a month, or rather, I write them and then have them mangled until I don’t recognize more than a couple words. There’s always a price to pay when you use creative energy just to pay the bills. It isn’t worth the humiliation in this case, so I decide to walk away. I take on a bartending shift at the bar at which I’d only been working door and start looking around for jobs which don’t involve art or writing.

I won’t give up trying to get my stuff out there. I’ll keep sending out the manuscript for my third book—finished a year ago and gathering dust in dozens of publishers’ and agents’ inboxes—and of course I’ll keep painting. It’s too late for me to try anything else, but I’m forced to conclude that at this point I can pay my bills better by serving drinks, checking IDs, stocking beer, and mopping barroom floors. I’m not the only one out there struggling to get acknowledgement for what I do, of course. 

A couple weeks ago I went to the Hideout to see Dexter Romweber play. Granted he was up against a Cubs World Series game, but still, a city of several million could barely muster an audience of twenty for one of the true originals of rock music. The man’s always seemed tormented but that night he looked on the verge of tears. It hurts to keep banging your head against a wall that will likely never give. Still, what else is there to do?

I’ve been mopping floors at Bernice’s Tavern a week or two now. There’s a simple satisfaction to this kind of manual labor which you rarely get from making art. The floor was dirty but then from your effort it becomes clean. And you’re given money after you’re done and don’t have to wonder whether someone who doesn’t know you and doesn’t have any reason to care will see what you’ve done and find value in it. If you do this job correctly, you’re paid for it and there’s nothing else to think about. This is what I’ve always liked about service industry work. It leaves the mind free. I knew this same thing twenty-three years ago instinctively. Now, all these years later it’s as if I’m back where I started. Has what I’ve spent all my time on been worthwhile? It’s not for me to judge. I’ll just keep stumbling on.

Last Tuesday was game one of the World Series. Most years that wouldn’t be a big deal in Chicago but this year’s different. Citizens who would never otherwise acknowledge baseball are covered in blue and red gear and baby bear insignia. Storefronts, lampposts, and every other available surface is plastered with sinister blue Ws to the point that some of us are having horrible flashbacks to the Bush years. No, the world isn’t ending. The Cubs have just made it to the Fall Classic for the first time since 1945.

I love baseball but only watch it on TV at this time of year. The game isn’t suited to the small screen. The odd diamond fields don’t ever look quite right within its flat rectangle and the leisurely, stop-start pace doesn’t fit easily with the regular commercial interruptions inherent to the medium. Still, I always try to catch at least a couple of the games, whether I have a rooting interest or not. It’s a fall ritual which means something to me, unlike the procession of holidays which occupy so many of us this time of year.

I decide on the Gold Star, figuring that although it sits in the middle of a strip of Division Street which has basically become one continuous sports bar, it is a relic from an earlier era and might be handling the mania for the North Side team with a modicum of self-respect. The place is sparsely peopled when I arrive halfway through the bottom of the first. I take a seat a couple down from the day bartender who was working a couple weeks ago when I put my paintings up on the walls. He and a few others are cursing at the screen. The Cubs are down 0-2 before I even take a couple sips of my bourbon. They never recover.

An inning or so later, a young woman carrying a heavy-looking, oversized duffel bag walks in and takes the barstool next to mine and orders a can of Blatz. I ask if she cares about baseball and she says she doesn’t.

She tells me she’s packed for a trip to Nashville with a guy she’s been seeing a couple months. They’re supposed to leave early the next morning but he’s not answering his phone. She waited at the Starbucks down the street for two hours, then came in here to drink and worry. He’s never pulled anything like this before. Just yesterday he was telling her about all the things he wanted to do once they got there. He’d booked the AirBnB and car rental. She’d been excited about it too. She tells me she’s from Aurora and I say, “You’re from Wayne’s World,” and she says that everyone says that and rolls her eyes. She’s been couch-surfing since summer while cocktail-waitressing at a Lincoln Park nightclub and apprenticing at a Rogers Park tattoo shop. She shows me her knuckles which spell out D-E-A-D L-O-V-E. She says she did them herself. I tell her that it’s a little fatalistic for a twenty-two-year-old. Then she tells me about the guy she moved down to Tampa to live with. At first, everything was good, but then he started getting jealous, and before long he was knocking her around. She didn’t understand what had changed. Now this new guy, who had seemed so normal, had pulled a disappearing act on her.

She keeps texting her girlfriend to come out and get drunk with her, then goes toward the back of the bar where the pool table is to see if she can get a game in. I buy her a beer and tell her this night will be a funny story one day even if it really sucks right this moment. She’s not sure whether to believe me but it gets her to smile. She has completely distracted me from the game on TV. I sneak looks every now and then but the outcome doesn’t look in doubt. I’m thankful to have a story to listen to rather than feign interest in two teams I don’t much care for.

She finally convinces her friend to come meet her at some other bar, thanks me for listening, says she’s sure she’ll see me around, and leaves. The game is now out of hand with an inning left so I decide to go as well. Home is a train and a bus ride away. For months I’ve been joking that if the Cubs win the World Series, Trump will become king, and the world will end. For this one night at least that particular apocalyptic domino effect is averted and I can get a good night’s sleep.

I’ve been a fan of my good friend Kelly Hogan’s singing a long, long time so when she invited me to make some paintings as her band, the Flat Five, recorded their record, I jumped at the chance. 

The kind of harmony singing the Flat Five traffic in is not normally my cup of tea but for some mysterious reason when they do it, I listen. They’ve even gotten me to appreciate the songs of groups like the Beach Boys, though I usually like their covers better than the originals. 

I’ve heard some of this stuff in the past and been completely unmoved. In others’ hands these songs can come off as easy or sentimental but somehow these five voices make the feelings real. How one person can sing the same thing as another and come out with completely opposite reactions in a listener is one of the great magical mysteries of music. 

Their record, which was just released and you should buy multiple copies of, is a collection of songs by Chris Ligon. Chris is the older brother of Scott, who plays keyboards and guitar in the band. It was a great honor to be a fly on the wall as these amazing musicians did their thing. 

—A reedited and slightly expanded version of the thriftstore Rembrandt story I shared with you a couple months back has been published by the Chicago Reader, And a review of Melanie Finn’s vivid ghost story of a novel, The Gloaming, is up at Vol.1 Brooklyn.