Letter

It’s Super Bowl Sunday and Mike has the game on. It’s jarring to see a TV flickering in this room. Mercifully, the sound is off. There are a few drinkers but no one but him is watching. I brought dinner from the Turkish place across the street and eat while the halftime show runs. Preston and I discuss the outfits of the singers and dancers. Mike wonders how much of what we’re looking at is a special effect or hologram. I tell him the guy is performing from home to an empty stadium.

My shift starts and almost everyone clears out. Mike lingers because the game has gone into overtime. Katherine comes in and gives Mike shit for having the game on. I insist she has money riding on the outcome.

The next day the newspaper says it was the most watched television program in history. Wherever those billions watched, it wasn’t at this bar.

It’s been extra slow since the start of the new year. That’s par for the course. It’s not the going-out season. It’s the season for bartenders to watch clocks crawl.

Around 11pm—almost three hours to go—a bald guy with a big beard comes in. He sits by the door, next to a couple who have been here a couple hours. They’re not together but clearly friends. From work, I think. The new guy keeps trying to make eye contact. Clearly wants to talk. I rack my brains for ways to avoid that.

The woman next to him is narrating her scroll through Bumble to her friend and laughing. She asks me and the new guy to join in. Soon we’re all making fun of her romantic prospects. Or, rather, the way these prospects present themselves.

Why are there so many group photos? How do you even know which one he is? Why can’t they manage to light their damn faces properly?

Her no-fly list includes any mention of ‘spirituality’ and ambivalence about children. She says repeatedly she wants them. That’s why she’s on the site. I ask if she’s just looking for a sperm donor but she insists she’s looking for love.

The new guy tells us he’s just moved in around the corner. He was born in Poland. I tell him about how this started as a Polish bar. I’m grateful I don’t have to talk to him solo. He’s telling the woman about his experiences on dating sites. I tell her I’ve never been on one. Filling out the profile was always a non-starter. I don’t know or want to know the answers to most of those questions.

Just before last call my brunch bartender and his crew come in. I always invite people from there to come visit but they rarely do. It’s a long way across town. I don’t blame them. His friends complain about his dragging them to a cash-only bar. Our ATM is busted too, but they have enough for one round.

Preston turns up the lights a few minutes later. The new friends and the old ones say goodbye and go. I wonder biking home whether the woman will match with anyone to have children with. It’s a thing I haven’t thought about for myself for a long time.

I’m grateful that ship has sailed.

I reviewed an art show, a movie, and a book. Then talked Talk to Me with Mallory.

I read the preamble of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual into a microphone.

RIP Dex Romweber. One of the all-time greats. Go listen to some Flat Duo Jets. If you’ve got Apple Music, here’s a playlist I made.

This is what I wrote about him in my book:

The first time I saw Dexter Romweber play guitar was in the Flat Duo Jets in 1990, opening for the Cramps at Cabaret Metro. I went to that show with Kent. He took photos of the headliners but didn’t take any of the Flat Duo Jets, and I wasn’t taking a sketchbook to shows yet, but Romweber left enough of an impression that I still usually try to catch him when he comes to town.

When he played the Hideout in October of 2016, 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. Still, what else is there to do?

There weren’t many people inside. Game 3 was on the TV and aside from places which had TVs, Chicago was a ghost town. I sat at the bar and ordered a drink and watched the game. Next to me was a tall guy in a newsboy cap, flannel, and arm tattoos. He had to be Dex’s opening act. Sure enough, a few minutes later he got up and wandered back to the music room to set up. He went by One Trip Little and he played a bunch of drinking, fighting, praying, and wandering tunes. My favorite was a cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Hard, Ain’t it Hard,” a song I knew best done by my friends, the Country Melvins, about twenty years back.

At the merch table after his set, I went up to Little and showed him the sketch. He liked it enough to take a cellphone pic. I told him I was sorry it was such a sparse crowd and pointed back at the TV in lieu of an excuse. He seemed to take it in stride, or at least pretended to. Dex wasn’t on stage yet so I went back to watching the game.

There was still no score and it was getting late. I looked outside and saw Dex sitting on the steps with his head in his hands.

He didn’t have a drummer with him like he usually does. Just his old Silvertone guitar and cheap over-sized shades which Jackie Onassis might’ve worn if she shopped at Walgreen’s. The great thing about seeing Dex is you don’t ever know what he’ll play. A Link Wray instrumental will follow a crooner ballad, then a show tune, and finish with a piece of classical music. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of song. Even though there were only about twenty of us listening, we tried to make enough noise in between numbers to make him know he was appreciated.

In all the years I’ve been going to see him, Dex has never been much for acknowledging the audience, but this night he did something I’d never seen him do. As his set was winding down he suddenly put the guitar down and took the mic from the stand with a trembling hand and started talking. He said he was weary and didn’t know if it was all worth it. People shouted encouragement but he waved them off as if to say, “Thanks, but the problem’s bigger than you know.” Then he told a story about being bullied by a big black kid in school and how it scarred him enough that he was still going to therapy to fight the racist thoughts it inspired. Then he went back to playing guitar. A few minutes later he stopped again and told a story about he and his buddy getting in trouble in high school for mooning a bunch of elementary school kids. He played one more song, then said goodnight and disappeared out the back door.

At the merch table One Trip was selling records and I bought Dex’s new one. He asked whether I’d sketched Dex and I showed him what I’d done. “You should show Dex!” he said, and I nodded, but I knew I wouldn’t.

I’m playing another memory game. I want to recollect the books I’ve read. Because there are no diaries or commonplace books or journals to refer to, I start by listing the books I’ve reviewed. Then I go to my Chicago Public Library account and scroll through the history but it turns out to be 95% music CDs. My brain is mush. Why didn’t I keep track as I went? Now it feels like pawing through a field in the dark.

The internet gamifies everything. Faves and listicles help the robots sell us more and more crap we don’t need but somehow can’t live without. Then we get it and forget all about it minutes after cutting it out of the cardboard. Every social media platform is a turbo engine fueled by envy, FOMO, greed, etc. Having the thing isn’t enough; it’s that the other guy doesn’t have it but wants it that makes yours sparkle.

I try like hell not to get on those hamster wheels but I also don’t want to lose track of what I take in. It’s why I joined Letterboxd a few months ago. The site helped me recover over three thousand movies I’m pretty sure I watched at some point. I know a lot of them had an impact, shaped what I made in small ways. For the most part the Letterboxd experiment has been worthwhile. It’s a way of staying accountable. Now when I watch something, I log in and mark it. Sometimes I write a sentence or two. No stars, but I hit the ‘like’ button occasionally. The one thing that started eating at me was the followers/following business. I followed only a few people. All ones who I know in real life. Still, seeing what they watched and reading their ratings began to eat at me. It created an expectation of reaction. I’m happy my friends like what they like but I don’t really need to know about it on an internet platform. They can tell me when I see them or when I read their reviews somewhere that isn’t a social network. I deleted all my follows. Now I don’t follow anyone.

I’m a pioneer.

That was a joke.

I’m hoping they know me well enough by now not to be offended. I use that site for one purpose and others’ likes and dislikes isn’t it.

Doing the same for books is why I join The Story Graph. It’s sort of Goodreads minus Bezos or writer-on-writer drama.

Now you can read every book review I’ve written publicly in one place. I go to my bookshelves to remind myself of what else I’ve read and input the data. I’m not following anyone or seeking to be followed. Aside from my own purposes, I’ll be happy if my list of books is a resource for a few people. No public acknowledgement necessary.

The other day I go to Tangible intending to spend a couple hours shelving and completely lose track of time. It’s nearing the 7pm closing time and Joe is turning off the lights as I’m moving the last of the Horror section next to Paranormal—the place it should have always been. Before that, I alphabetize the Parenting section, move Myth next to Occult and put Chicago in Myth’s place in order to make more room in the Fiction area. Those newly free shelves before the A’s prompt a snail’s pace shifting of the letters that follow. I run out of room somewhere in L’s but now there’s a lot more room to maneuver.

I walk out of the store exhausted. A few hours later I’m home again with the computer open, trying to remember what books I read and when I read them.

The more I give away, throw in the trash, repurpose, the more stuff there seems to be. No matter what I do it just keeps piling up.

When I started making art and writing out of old letters and ephemera during lockdown, I thought it would keep serving as jumping-off points and inspiration for years to come. Then I wake up one morning and look over at the cabinet I’ve been keeping all this old crap in and see it as an overflowing pile of garbage. I sit in a chair and start sorting through it, hoping to maybe cull repeats or impose some kind of classification system.

My strategy before was not to sort the material much. My thinking was that I did not want too much predetermined narrative or idea when choosing this or that fragment to insert into a picture. I wanted there to be chance and surprise in the process. I knew already that this was not a random operation. The pile consisted of things from my own past one way or another. But where once I saw endless variation and possibility, I now see garbage. And not garden variety garbage but garbage specially selected from my own history.

Instead of thinning it out or organizing it, I just want to toss it.

I don’t have much room for storage here. I think carefully what I drag in from the outside world and routinely get rid of objects which have worn out their usefulness or welcome. This chiefly applies to records and books. I go through the shelves every few months and haul stacks to Pinwheel or Tangible. This is not garbage but at that moment it has lost whatever connective magic made me bring it inside in the first place. The good thing is I know each book or record is likely to still hold that charge for someone else. Just not me anymore.

The personal ephemera archive is different. No one but me or my biographer (insert laugh track here) will ever have any use for any of it. When I’m gone I don’t want anyone else to dig through my effects and happen upon anything I don’t want found. This is why, in the end, rather than putting any of the pile back in the drawers or bins, I fill two large trashbags to overflowing and drag them to the alley.

There’s still plenty of personal detritus left around here. Many of us are like snails that way, still leaving a paper trail with every move. More than enough to spark or accentuate new work. But the pile is gone and there’s room in the drawers to gather new material. I don’t know what it will be made of. There’s not too much past evidence left to mine so it will have to come from elsewhere.

Maybe I’ll build a time machine.

Wrote a review of Lucy Sante’s memoir about transitioning and talked to Mallory about Seconds.