Letter

I wake up way too early. It’s often that way when the next day is full of things to do. It’s not anxiety so much as anticipation. I’m not a planner so there’s no joy or fulfillment in working out details of a thing that’s about to happen in my mind. I want to get on with it. It makes the lead up or in-between time kind of unbearable.

Two or three days before the hang I mostly give up on getting much done and just watch movies and do chores. I’m so focused on the layout of the show there’s no room for much else. It’s just treading water until I go pick up the minivan from a surface lot at Prairie Shores Sunday morning.

I sweat through my t-shirt on the ride over. It’s soupy humid out. This is only the beginning. Three more months of this shit to live through. I’m in a lousy mood because I got up at six in the morning. But there’s nothing to be done about that now. Now I steer the car—which smells like a carton of cigarettes—back home, pile the art in, and go get breakfast.

At the Duck they’re grumpy as well. Everyone’s drenched in sweat, then a shower drives the patio eaters inside. A few amateur meteorologists argue with the staff about the storm passing quickly and try to remain outside. Nothing worse than entitled diners. Those of us who’ve worked in the service industry know the customer’s always wrong. Servers, bartenders, and management vent but I just laugh and laugh, happy not to be on their side of the bar. It’ll be my turn again soon enough.

I get the show up in under two hours. It would’ve been faster but twenty minutes are wasted unraveling some ancient picture wire because I think it will be faster than removing a couple screws in the wall from the previous show. The trouble with being the way I am is that once I decide on a track, it’s reach the terminal or crash and burn; switching gears or thinking of alternate options is such an awkward and conscious effort that I practically have to list choices to myself out loud to seriously consider them. I tell Mike I’ll see him in an hour and drive the minivan back to Prairie Shores.

Back at Rainbo a couple minutes before 4pm, a couple friends are waiting outside already. We duck in and I run to the bathroom to swap my sopping t-shirt for a button-down. It is an opening after all.

My problem with events that center on me is splitting attention. I only know how to truly connect with one person at a time so jumping around from one person to another feels both exhausting and hollow. I feel like I’m cheating them and cheating myself. I don’t know how people can enjoy that. It’s why I never go to parties. Yet, at the same time of course, I invited all these people to be here and I’m grateful they showed up. I’ve had many other occasions—some much higher profile than an art show in a bar—with much worse turnout.

The main thing is to get the pictures out of the house and hope some or all of them don’t come back. I sell three out of eleven this first day. The show’s up five weeks. It’s a promising start.

If you refuse to visit the Rainbo Club, here’s a list of what you’re missing.

Made a poster for a thing next week.

Talked Dream Demon with Mallory.

How to make a poppyseed roll according to my mother

I send a bunch of postcards out inviting friends to my Rainbo show. I don’t expect most of them to come. After decades of doing this thing, I know to temper expectations. Whenever anyone shows up or even responds, it’s a happy surprise.

Lucy writes that she’ll come to mine if I come to hers. There’s a flyer attached to the email for something called the Deep Water Literary Festival in a town called Narrowsburg. After a couple more messages back and forth, I’ve talked myself into a weekend roadtrip.

The festival is dedicated to George Orwell and Lucy’s on a panel about city life with Down and Out in Paris and London as a nominal starting point. A local gallery is hosting a show of Lucy’s collages. Seems like enough reason for a twelve-hour drive. I borrow the audio version of Franzen’s latest epic of American family unhappiness, Crossroads, to ride shotgun.

I get to my motel before 9pm but by the time I settle in the only dinner option is McDonald’s. My next-door neighbor greets me on the second-floor landing with his cigarette hand. He’s got a lawn chair and overflowing ashtray by his door. He clearly lives here. My door doesn’t have a number. The clerk downstairs showed me the plastic and wood number sign that had fallen off during a recent repainting. Inside the room, the carpet is frankensteined from remainders and the bathroom light switch is covered with black electrical tape. The bargain rate I paid is well-deserved.

Early the next morning I drive the twelve miles to Narrowsburg. It’s a quaint two-street town on a dramatic drop to the Delaware River. There are boutiques, galleries, bistros, a coffeeshop, and a bookstore crammed ass to elbow on the little main street. At the end of the block is a granary Ernst and Hilla Becher might’ve designed. It’s all postcard-perfect and a lot unreal.

The coffeeshop where I eat breakfast wouldn’t be out of place in Brooklyn or Wicker Park or Berlin or any other place where cultural appreciators gather. The view of the high-hung bridge into town from the patio is majestic.

My phone’s not getting any reception so I email Lucy to meet me at the gallery but spot her vaping on a bench halfway down the street. She’s unhappy not to’ve met any girls here and doesn’t feel confident she will. We catch up on what each is working on. Her book comes out in February and she’s bracing for an extensive promo campaign; I talk about the three consecutive art shows that start next week.

At the gallery—which is an old house just past the Becher granary—we look at her collages and talk about the challenges of framing. The rest of the walls are covered in naive and self-taught art, bric-a-brac, and the occasional contemporary picture. I wonder to myself whether it’s possible to make a living with such a place or if it’s a hobby to pass the time. The young man who opened it has only been here a year. He has plans and enthusiasm. I wish him luck.

The talk is a lot about COVID-time New York, as another of the panelists has just published a book about his experience of the city then. Beforehand, there’s a screening of a Jem Cohen short with Lucy narrating Orwell’s essay, “The Moon Under Water”, about the perfect but imaginary city tavern.

Lucy says she’s driving home after the artists’ dinner that evening and I decide there’s no reason for me to stay another night at my no-star motel. I load up on salami, cheese, mustard, and apple strudel at an old-fashioned German deli and hit the road back west.

Franzen’s suburban Chicago preacher and his miserable clan are just getting warmed up tormenting one another. They keep me company all the way home.

Mallory interviewed me about paint-by-numbers for her non-horror-movie podcast.

Go watch Ben Kingsley ham it up as Salvador Dalí.

RIP Peter Brötzmann.

“The dead letter office predates the use of adhesive postage stamps.”  Rick Miller, Linn’s Stamp News

People were writing letters with little hope of their arrival since forever. Before there was a regulated rate established for their passage from one place to another. Before typewriters or ballpoint pens. Probably before most of the population could read or write. The impulse to spill your guts to or at someone specific has to be programmed in us way back and in deep. Perhaps the suspicion or maybe even intent that the target of our vitriol, affection, desperate lust, confusion, hope, whatever, will never read the letter we spent time, frayed nerves, and snapping heartstrings composing is baked into the process.

If the object of our (fill in the blank) writes back, it becomes a conversation, a back-and-forth, rather than a monologue  or diatribe or plea. A postmarked letter is like a thought-balloon that you watch fade over the horizon. You don’t sit staring down the vanishing point awaiting its return. The thing is to send it off and forget about it.

Over several decades, but most regularly from the 1980s to the early 2000s, I maintained regular correspondence with friends, family, and significant others. It was a cherished way to connect if for no other reason than the tangible evidence left after I’d read this or that message. I saved every letter and postcard anyone ever sent me. It was proof of my having mattered to someone sometime; a thing about which I often needed reassurance.

As cellphones and email overtook pen and paper, my archive of letters began to have the musty look and smell of the museum storage locker. I reread a letter from time to time, but as the senders faded from my life and I faded from theirs, these pages took on a blurry, fading aspect. As if I could no longer make out the words even as I held them inches from my face.

I hesitated to call this introduction “Dead Letter Office” because it is the title of an odds-and-sods collection by a forgettable 80s band. I won’t use their name here because that’s just free publicity. Thinking on it for some time I decided the term was rich enough to overcome this unfortunate association.

The idea of a room of forgotten or missent letters and packages is a useful way to think about my past. When I started rereading through my archive in earnest, it occurred to me that it might be a worthwhile exercise to answer a couple of them. I wasn’t interested in going back to whatever version of myself received the originals; I doubt I’d even recognize that person. I wanted to answer them as I am now, as if they showed up in my mailbox today. The hope is that the decades gap will make what I write resonate to someone or someones other than my old correspondents. That maybe I’ve learned something in the intervening years that could be of use to strangers.

USPS now calls their Dead Letter Office the Mail Recovery Center. I count this as a big mistake or at the very least a failure of imagination or appreciation for quotidian poetry. The one is a generic bureaucratic rubric while the other is a descriptor that inspires speculation and wonder. I guess sober practicality has won the day. 

I don’t plan on making any such error.

My Rainbo Club show opens Sunday, June 25th. I’ll be hanging out there 4 to 8pm. It’s at 1150 North Damen Avenue in Chicago. Come by.

Mallory and I talk Gretel and Hansel.

Don’t waste your money on the Art Institute’s odds-and-sods van Gogh show.

RIP Cormac McCarthy. Here’s a reading of a few pages from Suttree, my favorite book of his.