Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  I JUST TURNED TWENTY-SIX. April 14th. I’m married, no children. I’m a professional stand-up comic, and a writer, and an actor. I think you’re always looking for that big break. I’ve performed in Canada, all across the country, in the Chicago Comedy Festival. I think I’m getting ready to move to New York. I think once I move, that’ll really define who I am, because now I’m taking all my chips, putting them in one basket, and saying, “All right, I’m going to bet my life and my family on being who I am.” I’m betting on me.

  I’ve had every bad job you can possibly imagine. But I’ve wanted to entertain since I was a little kid. I did every play in grade and high school, and I wrote sketches and cast the other kids in them. I wrote comic books, poetry—but making people laugh, that’s my drug of choice.

  It just occurred to me that I’ve never lived with any member of my family for more than five years. My father died when I was six. Then I moved in with my mother. She went a little nuts, so I moved in with my grandfather. I lived with my mother for, like, four years—then with my grandfather for three years, and then he died. Then I moved in with my aunt and uncle for the last three years of high school, and then I moved out. So everything seems very temporary to me. My father died and I didn’t really know him that well, but my grandfather was the most important person to me. He still is, to this day, in my life. When he died, that was crushing. I was thirteen, fourteen. I grieve for him every day.

  Death is an odd thing. My wife—nobody has died in her family. To me, I’m not too afraid of life. Because my whole family is dead. I don’t have any brothers or sisters. My mother’s been missing now for almost a year. No one knows where she’s at. I guess death has made me impatient about things that I want to do and making sure that what I get done in my life will carry over into my kids’ lives. It’s just that you think you can do everything you want, but it’s hard to think that every day. It’s hard to believe in yourself enough to go, “I can do anything I want,” because the exact opposite of death is life. Every day you’re alive it reminds you that death’s coming so let’s get something done here, let’s do something with what we have.

  I feel that the older you get, the less you’re willing to take the risks, and I think that’s because of the fear of death. Even though death is at the end, it just seems like it casts a shadow that makes you afraid of life. You just fear it so: you start to slow down and you don’t want to do anything. You don’t want to go out there and attack the world.

  I feel old. I feel like I’m about forty-five mentally with all the shit I’ve been through. [Laughs] My grandfather died in my arms. I was the only one in the room. It’s a recurring nightmare that I have. He was seventy-two. He had a two-flat building on 26th and East Avenue, and we lived upstairs. It was the scariest thing ever. When my dad had died, it didn’t check in that it was death. I was six. And he was missing for three days before anybody even thought to go looking for him. So then someone decided to go down to see if he was in the morgue, and he had been in there for three days. He was electrocuted on the El. My parents were divorced, they didn’t live together. So then I moved back in with my mom—she lived downstairs from my grandfather, and I just started spending time with my grandfather and wound up moving in. When I was six I didn’t know what death was, I just knew that my dad was gone. I remember the wake, when they were showing the body, I walked up and I tried to open his eyes. Of course, everybody ran up and grabbed me and they were crying . . .

  But it really kicked in the morning my grandfather died. It happened early, like seven o’clock, he had a heart attack. It was a very hot night. I slept in the sunroom, and he had his own bedroom. But I would go in and sleep in his bedroom. I’d crawl into bed at night. I remember it was one of the hottest days of the summer, and I got into bed with him and I remember thinking how hot it was, how I should go back and sleep in my bed. We used to wrestle, so when he was having a heart attack, I was woken up by me thinking that he wanted to wrestle. So I was kind of wrestling with him and then I realized he was having a heart attack. He was blue and they couldn’t resuscitate him. It happened so fast, like that. [Snaps fingers.] It was the fastest life-changing event that I—I can never experience that again. Even if my wife were to die, I would be devastated, I would be heartbroken, but it can’t happen that fast because now I know that she has to die sometime. Of course, you always wish that you go first.

  You know what death does? It makes you impatient and hesitant at the same time. I don’t know if that makes any sense. I’ll give you an example. I’m impatient to love my wife. I want to do everything for her, but then you think, Man, do you remember that experience?! How much I loved my grandfather and how much that hurt when he was gone? It’s irreversible—it’s a done deal. Here’s his license I keep for good luck. I still have his mass card from the wake in my pocket. Here’s a card from the wake: [Reads] “In loving memory of Thomas McDonnell. At rest, June 15th, 1987, Mass of the Resurrection, St. Odilo Church, burial at Mt. Carmel Cemetery, June 19th, 1987, 9:30 in the morning.” And this is a mass card: “May thy soul and the souls of all the faithful departed . . . God rest in peace, mercy of God.” I had it laminated. Gone except for memories.

  So I want to love my wife and give her everything that I can emotionally, but will I be able to go through that again? Can I do that again? Can I possibly mentally deal with that and go through that whole thing again? But you have to.

  I think that’s partially why I enjoy comedy so much. Laughter is a quick fix of somebody loving you for a moment. It’s an intrinsic response and you get that, you get an association with people, but you don’t need to have an emotional connection with them. You have a relationship for ten minutes, half an hour when you’re on stage, and then you’re done. You could still be by yourself and you’re not emotionally invested in anything. I love making people laugh. Even at work, I’ll fall off a table in the middle of a meeting just to have that shock laughter. It’s addictive.

  You know how people are so afraid how if they die and that’s it, and there is no Heaven or Hell—that petrifies people. To me, I don’t care. If this is it, that’s fine. I can’t imagine Heaven and Hell—there’s too many questions.

  There’s a dead squirrel in front of your house, I don’t know if you know that. Is that squirrel in Heaven or Hell? Does that squirrel have a soul? Can that squirrel tell the difference between good and evil? If so, does he go to Heaven? There’s just too many questions that you can’t possibly answer.

  I was an altar boy and was taught that the altar is the most holy of places, it’s the window to God’s soul. The priest is the mediator. So if that’s the case, then why do you have eight-year-old kids up on the altar? They are the farthest from the most holy sanctuary. I mean, you’re making fart noises by the tabernacle. It just didn’t make any sense to me. It made almost like a joke of it. I tried to be very serious, but you know, you goof around with your buddies. It was like seeing The Wizard of Oz: pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Now that I do shows and I perform in front of people, I know what’s behind it. You know how to inflect your voice to manipulate somebody. So I just saw the incense and I’m like, This is a lot of smoke and mirrors going on here. Bring out the dancers . . . [Laughs]

  When I was a kid, I would write out these arguments to test myself and talk to people. I’d bring them to teachers, especially in high school, the religion teachers. I went to Fenwick High School on the West Side—Dominican Brothers. It’s never that I stopped having faith in God or anything like that. I have no problem testing that faith and talking with people and saying there’s no reason that we’re hurting anybody’s feelings, especially God’s, by delving in deeper and trying to find out what’s going on. One of the people that I would argue with and have these debates with was Father Peddicord, at Fenwick. I asked him the same question that you asked me. This is somebody that’s devoted his life to God. I said, “Father Peddicord, what do you think is going to happen to you after you die?” He said, “Hopef
ully, I’m going to go to Heaven.” And I said, “Well, what if there’s no Heaven.” And he says, “I’ll be pretty pissed.” [Laughs]

  I love life more than anything. I want to be one of the greatest comedians ever. I want to be up there with Martin and Lewis, and Richard Pryor. I don’t want to have a stupid TV show, I want to be known as a great entertainer. I want to make people’s lives fun, give them a little break from their busy day. I see a lot of people are complacent, but because of my grandfather’s death I just feel like I’ve got to do these things because death is there.

  I don’t live my life recklessly, although I did get boozed up last night. [Laughs] I don’t live my life like tomorrow’s never going to come. I work basically eighteen, nineteen hours a day, pretty much usually six days a week. So I’m working hard at what I want, I’m investing a lot in life, but I’m not afraid to die. I wouldn’t want to, but I’m not afraid of it. I work for the city of Chicago—I’m a teamster. And when I get done there I usually take an hour nap and then I’ll write, and then I’ll go out to the nightclubs and perform. I’m thinking about moving to New York in a couple of months. I just got offered a really nice apartment here, three bedrooms, new floors, carpeting. My wife’s a travel agent, but she doesn’t have something burning in her heart that she has to do. She wants to have a family. But I have something that I feel I have to do. I’m going to put everything on the line. I’m going to quit the city job, which is the best job that I’ve ever had in my life, and I’m moving to New York. I’m betting my family’s life that I’m going to make it as a comedian.

  A friend of mine who was a great painter, an artist, when we were in high school together, always said that he was going to move to France to paint and write and live his life like an artist. To live to be an artist, not to be a waiter who wants to be an actor, that’s what I want to do. I ate dinner at his house the other night; he’s married and he has a kid. He works as a mechanic where I work. We were all eating dinner and his hands were filthy. He cleaned them, but you know, as a mechanic you can’t ever get all of that off. And the food that he was eating was getting dirt on it and his daughter was watching this. What he had let come into his life was now in his life permanently. He can’t get it out of his hands. It’s in the food that he eats. That’s not the life he wanted to live, but another life crept in there because he wanted to play it safe and not go after what he wanted—no risks, no nothing. Now it’s in his skin. He can’t get it out. It’s taken him over. I saw it and I said, “I don’t want that to be me.”

  I gotta beat the clock. Yet I play it safe. What am I sitting around another year for? You may think I’m nuts saying twenty-six is getting up there in years. If you’re a smart kid when you’re nineteen or twenty, they go, “That kid is smart, look at him.” Maybe he’s driving his car across the country just trying to see what’s going on. “That’s great, that takes a lot of balls. Look at that kid, he’s going out there . . .” But you take that same kid who’s twenty-nine and they go, “This kid is a bum. He doesn’t have a job, he’s driving across the country. Why?” Why the big difference of opinion on that? They call the kid of nineteen a prodigy: “He’s sucking the marrow out of life—look at him go!” Not even ten years later, that kid’s a bum, he should get a job, he should get whatever he can to put food on the table, he should start saving up for retirement.

  Here I am, working for the city. When I tell my in-laws I’m quitting the city job and I’m going to move to New York and not get a job, but every day go on auditions and try to make it as a professional entertainer, most likely they’ll be very supportive of me—but I’ll still be a bum because I’m married and I should be staying at this city job, maybe getting another part-time job. But I want to be with the best of the best.

  Death has been around me since I was a little kid. I had a friend in college commit suicide. Two of my good friends, both of their sisters killed themselves—it was a double suicide in Oak Park. Everybody’s thought about killing themselves at one point in their lives. You feel like you’re backed up against a wall. It’s easier for people to commit suicide that don’t really care about this life. They don’t feel like they fit in, they don’t want to fit in, they don’t need to fit in. Suicide, that’s it. When you’re dead, it’s over. When I first got married I thought, man, I’m never going to be able to . . . For me to provide an average life, after what I feel that I’ve gone through, would be an injustice to me and an injustice to my wife. It would be stupid because I know I can do more. Now I would never do it, but this is just the mentality of saying: Get out now before you hurt anybody. My wife’s going to invest her life in mine . . . Get out before she does it. Let her find somebody else and live the life that she wants to live. Get out of town by knocking yourself off. But that’s a fleeting thought.

  My friend whose sister killed herself and I went out drinking last night. He was really angry. She was sixteen or seventeen. His dad died when he was a junior in high school. Death surrounds him too, so we have kind of the same opinion. We lived very carelessly from, like, eighteen years old. We both got kicked out of college. We drank our skulls off for three, four years, just boozed it up, didn’t care about anything. We were going to die anyway. Just because the fragility of life, it was exposed to us at such an early age. My wife, she’s never seen death ever, which is great. It’s weird, too, because I always say, “You know, your parents are going to die.” Which is a weird thing because, why should I tell her that? I don’t need to remind her of that—but to me that’s always there.

  People should be allowed to do what they want. You can’t judge people. It’s too big of a place that we live in to try to judge. When you die, I hope you go to a place full of strippers and cold beer. [Laughs] My father-in-law had a good point. Say you’re married and you get in an accident and you die. You’re in Heaven, your wife remarries. Now both of them die. In Heaven, who does the woman spend her time with? The first husband or the second husband? What happens? Questions like that, you can’t answer them. That’s why there’s faith. People don’t want to have that insecurity of not knowing what’s going to happen—they can’t deal with it. There’s such a void in their lives. They denied themselves their passions and they’re trying to find . . . Some people don’t even have passions. These are the people that have faith because they think there’s got to be something other than this because I wasn’t given a passion, I wasn’t given a talent, I wasn’t given something. So who can give me something? God, God can give me something. What can He give me? Eternal salvation. I’ll go to church four times a week and I’ll put my money in that bank, and hopefully it’ll pay off.

  Day of the Dead

  Carlos Cortez

  He is a painter and poet living in Chicago. “I’m seventy-six, going on seventy-seven.”

  I REMEMBER WHEN I was a little kid, it bugged me, the idea of death. My mother said to me, “Hey, just think if you never did die, if you lived forever, that would be worse!” After all, nothing lasts forever—and it’s a good thing too. I remember my wife grieving over the death of her mother. An old friend said, “We have to make room for the next generations.” I’ve said to people, “Hey, don’t be afraid of death. If you’re afraid of death, you shouldn’t have been born.” I was somewhere between five and seven years old when I first realized what it was. People don’t like to accept the finality, but nothing is infinite.

  I spent some time with the Jehovah’s Witnesses during the war when I was incarcerated for my draft refusal—this was World War II. They would say, “How would you like to live forever, never die?” I said, “No, I don’t think I would care for it.” To see everything there is to see, know everything there is to know, and have nothing new, that would be terrible. I hope to be conscious when the time comes, because I’ve had a good life. I’m going to hate to leave it, but I think I’m better being sorry to leave it than saying, “Oh, at last it’s come, it’s over with.” I want to feel that there’s still more. If we live a good life, we will li
ve on with those who remember us.

  Mozart had a short life, what, thirty-two years? As an old conductor said—it was on your radio program—“He was but a moment in eternity.”* Well, that’s what all of us are. We’re but moments in eternity. But we’ve been a part of it. People have many ways of facing the prospect of death. Some don’t want to think about it. When you get to be in your upper seventies, you realize you got more behind you than you got ahead of you. There’s no time to be afraid of death anymore—you know it’s coming.

  Among the Mexicans—my father was a Mexican Indian—they sort of celebrate death. It’s a way of honoring the recently departed and honoring one’s roots. Without death, there’s no life: they’re mutually dependent. It’s just a process of the circle. The great printmaker José Guadalupe Posada used the death image a lot as a matter of caricature. He would depict the politicians and big people of his day as skeletons, which underneath they are. There’s a date now, the second of November, which is called el día de los muertos, the Day of the Dead. When the Spanish priests came over, it happened to coincide with All Souls’ Day, just the way it coincides with the Anglo-Saxon Halloween. It happens at a time of year when the last green has disappeared, and people are reminded of the impermanences of existence. At the same time, there’s a continuity to it. It’s a celebration that we’ve lived and that we’ve had a good life, that we’ve done our part. I would not know about the hereafter. The idea of the Heaven, the garden of Allah, the Happy Hunting Ground, is a reluctance to accept the finality of things. Everything has its limitation. As we say: even the mountains fade away. For the better, for the worse, life is what we make of it. Personally, I would not like to spend eternity on a cloud plucking away at a harp. I think I’d rather be where the gang is.