Letter

Sunday, a few hours after I take down my art from the Rainbo Club, Jimmy calls to ask if I can fill in as second bartender. The doorman’s sick and no one else is available. It’s a call I’d expected many months back but had mostly given up on. It comes nine months after I quit bartending at the Skylark. I thought I was done with all that. I’ve settled into a routine revolving around freelance work, personal projects, and the occasional short-term side-gig. I’m about to turn fifty-two. Is there any place for me in the service industry? Do I want or need that?

After quitting the Skylark, I told people who asked if I’d pour drinks again that I had some conditions: no TVs, no drinks with more than three ingredients, preferably cash-only, and I pick all the music. This eliminates about 99% of current Chicago bars. What I was saying was basically Rainbo or bust and Jimmy wasn’t calling. That didn’t upset me. Working at my all-time favorite bar is a double- or quadruple-plus-edged sword. No surer way to ruin the magic and mystery of a place than going in the back and finding out what’s in the closets, the attic, the cellar.

I filled in as second-doorman once and the guy I worked with never remembers me, cards me every time I come in. I sort of like that. If I start bartending here, he’ll eventually start to recognize me. I’d rather be a stranger.

All these misgivings and others race through my head but I hear myself not hesitating and saying yes to Jimmy on the phone. He seems kind of surprised. Maybe I am too. But I don’t want to pass this up. It may be my only chance.

Biking north on Damen, I pass Mike, the afternoon bartender, going south. He wishes me a good shift, calling out over the traffic. Mike’s probably the reason this is happening. After running through everyone on his list, Jimmy likely asked his bartenders if they had any friends who could step up. I’d told Mike and the others more than once that I’d be up for it. The Rainbo’s not the kind of place you fill out an application or have a formal interview. This is how it happens. A gap needs to be plugged and a call is made. If you answer the call, it could become a thing.

Matt shows me what’s where. It’s quiet and doesn’t ever get hectic. He doesn’t really need me there but it’s not safe to have just one person running a bar all night and this is the perfect way for me to get my feet wet. I’m rusty but after a few hours it starts coming back to me. The rhythm of scanning the room to check how low the glasses are getting. Gauging how much or little to say to drinkers. I’m second-banana and don’t yet know the ins and outs, so not very much is expected of me.

A few people who come in do a double take when they see me on the other side of the bar. I don’t blame them. I feel the same. It may never happen again. If it does, I hope I get to pick the music.

—Wednesday my talk with Scott McClanahan goes up. While you wait, listen to the one with Matt Lux. Or check out Mallory and I dissecting Vampire’s Kiss.

—Listen to Onda Vaga.

Old friends sit around a picnic table in a pocket park in Pilsen. I ride up on my bike. It’s a few minutes before the dance class is to start. Wendy has been leading them out here a few years. Pieces of particle board are spaced a few inches apart to give dancers the chance to tap, stomp, and click their flamenco shoes. But I’m not here to dance; I’m here to draw.

Capturing motion on a flat, static surface is a challenge. It’s a thing I’m always conscious of when putting marks on paper. Even if the subject is a stack of books sitting on a shelf. Because even inanimate objects move due to incremental changes in light and the scanning moves of my eyes, every small tilt of my head, when I slouch or sit up straight. Nothing I look at is ever frozen or static.

As Wendy puts her charges through their paces, I look at the buildings and foliage past them and the slow-floating clouds as often as the dancers. The shapes they carve through space by their moves expand and contract everything in my field of vision.

I haven’t used the markers in awhile. It’s the same set I used for CTA drawings four years back. Some have dried out and died. I throw the cashed ones down on the grass by my bench and dig through the old lady purse for subs and replacements. The colors never quite match what I see but they never can. It’s only ever a crude approximation, just as the marks I make are only vague analogues for the motion before my eyes.

Afterwards, the dancers gather to look at my efforts. Each points at clusters of marks to find themselves. Which one is me? They want to know. I haven’t disengaged from the mind-space required to do this work so I have no answers for them. I won’t even when the spell wears off, but then I can lie about it or come up with some pat, placating answer. But not yet. It’s not for words. No pinning it down any more than any chance to make anything or anyone sit still.

Not long after my ex Deborah and my brother Boris built my website in late 2003, I found out about Statcounter. It was a program that counted how many people looked at the things you put online. It told you which pages people looked at the most and how long they spent looking at them. It told where they lived. It showed pie charts in different colors depending on what was being measured. I was hooked almost instantly.

The first place that hosted my site was run by a couple of artist/entrepreneurs. I remember the guy’s name was Mason Dixon. Guess he was into US history or borders or conflicts maybe. I think I traded a year or two of hosting time for a painting. We made the deal at Jinx Coffee on Division Street. I don’t recall how it worked when I needed something changed or fixed on the site because Mr. Dixon and associates were hard to reach. I moved the site to a couple other hosts before settling it in the Hong Kong domicile in which it has resided since 2008. My new hosts could answer any dumb technical question I could come up with. They were the ones who showed me how to add code to every page on my site so Statcounter could measure even more precisely whose eyeballs were on my work at any given moment.

I spent days cut-and-pasting that code into what was by then hundreds of unique html pages, each connected to a photo of a painting or drawing. Then, each morning, I’d log into the control panel, and over my morning coffee and cigarette, scrutinize the numbers. I did this every day for several years. Not once after one of these sessions did I alter a brushstroke or pen mark in response to that morning’s data. Yet I kept checking. Sometimes in the afternoons too. What was I hoping to find? Was there a figure or sum that would prove I was on the right track? A number that equaled success or accomplishment? 

A few years into this hollow ritual, I decided to scrap it. That meant going through now over a thousand pages and deleting the Statcounter code. It took days. The mindless motion of opening a file, highlighting code, pressing ‘delete’, then ‘save’, then uploading a batch of fifty or a hundred updated files to the server, was somehow satisfying. It was the opposite of what I did with a brush or a pen, a kind of time-out for my brain and my heart, whatever other appendages and organs I used for art.

It’s the same impulse that makes me decide to redesign my podcast site or change this newsletter. Each time it’s like coming upon a mountain in my path, feeling both dread and the inevitable. Because I know the only way past is through it. And I know I can’t stop myself and take an easier route. It always builds and builds until I have no choice.

But ever since I learned how to turn on a computer, this stat thing has been the bane of my existence. One of the healthiest decisions I ever made was quitting social media in 2015. That eliminated a ton of numbers and metrics from my everyday. Now I didn’t have to ‘like’ anything ever again. By then I had no idea how many visitors my art site had. Unless someone took the time to write me an email or say something in person, I didn’t know if anyone was looking at it and that brought me peace of mind. Every new service or app I try comes with some kind of stat component. The internet makes it very difficult not to quantify your every move.

When I moved my newsletter—which I’d been sending sporadically from my Gmail account—to Tinyletter, I had a weekly breakdown of ‘opens’ and other reader data. Each Monday I could look at a page that compared that day’s performance to previous weeks. I couldn’t not look at it even when I knew full well the knowledge gleaned was doing nothing good for my mental health. At Substack there were even more granular figures. I could practically find out what the reader was wearing and what room of their house they were in while reading my letter. The more information I got the more I longed to know nothing about any of it.

It wasn’t until the newsletter moved here to Ghost that I found a way to disable the stats. As of a couple months ago, I don’t know how many people open a letter or reread it. I have a ballpark figure of how many subscribers there are but only know for sure about the ones who pay monthly or yearly. I’m grateful for those but I don’t plan on doing anything specific to increase their cohort.

The new podcast setup gives me even less data. I know nothing about my listeners or even if I have any. A few times every week I catch myself opening the page that used to have the numbers only to recall I’d wiped it clean. Then I forget all about it and go work on actually making something.

I feel lighter. I know I have to keep consciously away from the numbers to feel even remotely sane. It’s the opposite of everything this thing is built for.

—Wednesday I talk to musician Matt Lux. But you can listen to the one with Tom Shannon or the one where I read from some books or some others while you wait.