Letter

I have no intention of getting on a plane ever again but a $300 credit from 2020 is about to expire so I book a flight to New York. I’d read in the Times about some Polish guy in Greenpoint running a video store/micro cinema and want to see it for myself.

I look up the schedule and pick a day when the little movie theater has a screening. Then I write to Steve at Quimby’s NYC to see if he needs a restock of my books and write Gil to see if he wants to meet up. MOMA has a little show centering around Matisse’s Red Studio painting. 

New York doesn’t hold any huge significance for me anymore. It did when I was young because it might still have been the center of art and culture then. But that moment—when New York, or any other city—was a center of anything is long gone. Now it’s a place with some good museums, stores, and restaurants that I can be ready to leave within a day or two. It would be different if I’d logged more than six months as a resident, but I’m just a tourist there, and that’s a state that gets old fast.

The flight from Chicago is entirely unremarkable. I don’t miss being on a plane. Same wedged-in feeling as I remember from before the plague. LaGuardia’s fancied-up though. Looks like a contemporary shopping mall rather than a crappy construction site now. Bonkers to me that there’s still no train line to get there. But if there were, I’d miss one of my favorite parts of the commute, which is arriving at the Jackson Heights train station. Here is one of the few places where New York still feels like a real city rather than gourmet Disneyworld. Some day I’ll come here and just wander around. Skip Manhattan and Brooklyn altogether. But not this time. I have an itinerary. 

The surprise of the Matisse show is that one of my all-time favorite paintings is there. I’ve probably spent as much time trying to make my pictures have illusionistic space and acknowledge their flatness at the same time, the way he does, as any other technical/compositional problem. But it’s not just the formal thing that attracts me. It may be corny or gauche now, but to be a guy sharing a small room with an unclothed woman, a large window overlooking the city, is as close to an ideal as I can come up with.

It’s sweltering when I reach the little video store on a residential corner in Greenpoint. There are no other customers but the guy behind the counter does little but grunt a greeting when I come in. I browse through his collection of obscure foreign cinema and extreme horror. When I ask about the movie screening at seven, he says, in as few words as possible, that he knows nothing about it. He’s rented out the theater to some kids. Ask them. I buy a box set of Penelope Spheeris’s Decline and Fall of Western Civilization and wait.

A couple sweaty randomly dressed people come in carrying boxes. They sell me a ticket, then nothing happens for a while. Eventually more young people filter in. They all know each other. It’s a celebration to premiere their movie. Bad Summer is a grubby low-budget story of aimless friends back in their home town for the summer, working shitty jobs and doing a bunch of drugs. One of them may or may not be a murderer. I loved it. Afterwards, I bought a cassette of the soundtrack and wandered out into the soupy night.

I spend Thursday morning at the Whitney. I sit in the café and check email, then spend some time drawing Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning—another all-time favorite. This one for the way it conveys both stillness and motion. An old man sits down next to me. He says something nice about my sketch but I tell him the point of it is just to slow me down, to stay and really look, rather than scanning and saving while walking by, as people mostly do in museums (and everywhere else).

I meet Mick at his record store and we go to Union Square on his lunch break. We talk about maybe collaborating on something: his writing, my drawing. I hope that happens. My afternoon flight has been canceled so I still have hours to kill. I walk downtown to the Angelika and see an interminable artsy dystopian fantasy, then go to Katz’s for a pastrami sandwich. I keep getting texts from the airline about delays. 

By the time I get to LaGuarda around 9pm, the departure time is past 1am. We don’t take off till 2:30. I had no idea a flight could leave at that hour. The gate agent says they got a special dispensation from the Port Authority. I read the back half of a book I’m reviewing while I wait to get home. The cabbie at Midway pretends not to know where Archer Avenue is. I enlighten him.

Might be another three years till I get on a plane again. Might be never.

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.