by Peter Orner
“Ah ha, Chevrolet. I knew all along there was something francophone about that car!”
“Please, sir, we’ll have no unseemly outbursts.”
“Oh, you and your Robert’s Rules of Order…”
“Bailiff!” Big Bill Thompson-Fox cried. “Where’s the bailiff?”
I made car noises to the effect that we didn’t have a bailiff on the payroll.
Longfellow would not be silenced. Big Bill Thompson-Fox and his car remained on the carpet. It was Longfellow who attained the heights of the prophet. My brother set the hippo on his head and intoned: “Taxidermy without representation is tyranny. If this be treason, you can kiss my ass back to the Zambezi.”
In 1990, I found Longfellow in a drawer in my mother’s house, along with some rolling papers (my mother’s), circa 1975. He’d survived my parents’ divorce, three moves, and two remarriages, the little shit. I held a summary trial. Longfellow stood accused of assault, slander, noise pollution, and a myriad of immigration violations.
“Any last words?”
“Yo, toothache, what’s with the shilly-shally? If you’re going to do it, do it.”
I popped his head off with a toenail clipper. And though there was ample evidence (the clipper in my hand, the severed rubber head on the carpet), I could not be prosecuted, because the municipality where the execution allegedly occurred no longer existed and local criminal statutes could not apply. Under the letter of the law, you can’t be found guilty of killing anybody in Atlantis unless you can dredge up that jurisdiction from the bottom of the sea. Same is true for Narnia, Bedrock, and Nimh, where the brave rats live. Nonetheless, legal niceties aside, there is the human heart to consider. The only certain thing is, you’ll be brothers forever, my mother used to say. Everything else in your entire life—health, money, sex—is all crapshoot.
I clip his head off and still—still, thy brother’s blood cries out in a high, high voice only dogs and myself can hear.
PADDY BAULER IN A QUIET MOMENT
DeLuxe Gardens, 403 West North Avenue, 1964
The clown prince had them. All his raucous talk, his famous quotable lines, and yet there were certain nights, late in his career, when, if there was no committee meeting or funeral or wake or wedding, the once-mighty alderman would shoo out the stragglers and lock the door. This particular boozing shed is closed. And the man himself would slump on a stool, quiet, and face himself in the mirror of his own bar. Mr. Bauler, sir, aren’t you on the wrong side of the slab? Think about it. A real conundrum. When you’re Paddy Bauler, you can’t go see Paddy Bauler. Where does this leave me? And he laughs. Not out loud, an inside laugh, the kind you can carry around for hours, days, years even, the kind of laugh you might carry to the end if you don’t take yourself too seriously. But here’s another conundrum. Lately he’s stopped laughing all that much, outside or inside laughs. A German, he’s been playing an Irishman so long he’s started to dream of his own boggy grave. Used to be that it was all laughs—and votes. Now, that’s how you run a city. A vote is loyalty and loyalty is a vote… a lifetime of them. See? Easy. From the cradle to the grave. (Casket courtesy of the Democratic Party.) And you’re either constant to the party or you aren’t constant to the party. No such thing as halfway. Independent? Ha! Go see Paddy Bauler.
Heal me, Ward Heeler.
A mammoth man, but soft all over. A. J. Liebling described him as more gravel pit than mountain. Alderman Bauler used to wrestle himself on the floor of the mayor’s office for the personal entertainment of His Honor Mayor Anton Cermak himself.
Cermak martyred, the lucky Bohemian. Pat Nash gone. Ed Kelly gone. Paddy Bauler? Is that antediluvian still kicking around?
Hey, Paddy, spot me a drink. You know I’m good for it. Don’t I always carry my precinct for you?
Paddy, my boiler’s busted. They want three hundred and fifty bucks.
Hey, Paddy, listen, Paddy. My son. Knocked his old lady around a little. Talk to Sergeant Itagopian for me?
Paddy, it’s my mother—the cancer—
Paddy, it’s Eddie Gabinik; don’t you remember me?
Paddy?
Paddy?
Mr. Bauler?
Sir?
GERALDO, 1986
He warns us that what’s inside might not be appropriate for children and other sensitive viewers. Al Capone’s lost vault. They’re tearing down the Lexington Hotel, once the Big Tuna’s headquarters, and have discovered a vault that’s been sealed for decades. Who knew he lost one? Who even cared? But now that Chicago knows it, the city is awash in hysterical anticipation. And Geraldo’s got the exclusive. Live. I’m alone in front of the TV with a joint and a hunk of cheese. There’s a team of hard-hatted workmen with jackhammers and high explosives. There are wafts of dust and lots of noise, and Geraldo whisper-shouts into the microphone. We’re making history here. It goes on for more than an hour and a half, with frequent commercial breaks.
At one point Geraldo says, “I feel like Jeremiah walking among the ruins.”
Look, Geraldo, just open the thing already.
Finally, they blast the door off. Geraldo coughs, gasps, says something inaudible—there’s an enormous crash. The camera jumbles and the screen goes blank. Cut to another commercial. Geraldo’s dead and they’re selling antacid. And Oldsmobiles and Mountain Dew. And then he’s back, undaunted. Geraldo Rivera knows no daunted. Wait. He’s holding something. A bottle. Ladies and gentlemen, citizens of Chicago, interested parties around the world, we’ve made a discovery. Pause. Swallow. Alphonsus Capone—alias Scarface alias Big Tuna alias Jolly Fellow alias Snorky—may have once drunk from this very bottle before carrying out yet another despicable act, the likes of which have made this city infamous around the globe. Go to the deepest Amazon, as I have, Geraldo says, and there you might meet, as I did, a little native boy, naked, nothing but a loincloth hardly covering his burgeoning private parts, and tell him, as I did, that you are from Chicago, and he’ll say, Chicago! Chicago! Capone! Pow! Pow! Kill! Kill! Kill! Yes, the lips of such a man may have once touched the phallic spout of this very bottle…
The camera zooms in on the bottle’s label. Ernest and Julio Gallo, 1981. Pans back to Geraldo’s stricken face. Maybe someone back at the station was thinking, Now at last we’ll get rid of this chucklehead. Geraldo looks as if he wants to eat the microphone’s afro. Not much can leave this man wordless. But I keep watching, we all keep watching. The wonder of live television—even after nothing’s happened, it keeps happening. Plus, there is always the chance that Geraldo might spontaneously combust. Soldier on, Geraldo, we’re still with you.
“Friends,” his voice rising to a squeal. “Friends, how on earth did this bottle, this vessel of Dionysus, find its way through the impregnable walls of a sealed vault? Only in a city as diseased as this one, where vice still flows like milk down an sinless child’s throat, like blood in the veins, like sewage in the drainage canal, could one of the greatest robbers in the history of the known world be himself robbed, the thief thieved, the boodler boodled. Oh, my friends, mystery begets mystery begets mystery—it’s the very fornication of existence in this modern Gomorrah we call Chicago.”
What were we expecting? That the vault would be our King Tut’s tomb? Pompeii in the Loop? Maybe we were just heartened that, even here, something could survive, something remain. In a city where all is knocked down and all is replaced, maybe we just want to know something has been here all along. A solitary man holds a bottle and a microphone amid plumes of old dust. Nobody gives a damn what’s in the vault, Geraldo. Times like these all you want is to hear a voice, any voice. In the afternoons, I bag groceries at the Dominick’s on Skokie Highway. I’m seventeen. When I get fired, which will be soon, the manager will say, Listen, putz, you’ll never work at a Dominick’s again, anywhere in the Chicagoland area and northern Indiana—you got it? You’re not competent, you lack basic competences. Mostly, though, I’m just lonely, a new kind of lonely. I’d think about all the eyes that woul
d never look my way, all the eyes that were always turning away. Do you remember? When all you had was your own sweaty needs, your own endless furious needs?
HAROLD WASHINGTON WALKS AT MIDNIGHT
Out at Midway Airport
No one in this city, no matter where they live or how they live, is free from the fairness of my administration. We’ll find you and be fair to you wherever you are.
—HAROLD WASHINGTON, 51ST MAYOR OF CHICAGO
Of Harold Washington, people used to say that as long as he had political combat on his hands he’d never be lonely, and that was all well and good while he was alive, but it caused problems for the mayor in paradise. After a few years of paying his dues in heaven’s trenches, he challenged Gabriel for archangel and nearly pulled it off with 47.6 percent of the vote. Disgruntled and jealous cherubs supported him in droves. Finally, God’s chief of staff, just to get rid of him for a while, let Harold Washington come home for a small, unannounced visit.
It was Martha who spotted him by the baggage claim, long after the last flight had come and gone. She was sweeping up, the last hour of her shift. She said his face had the haggard look of someone who has been crying for years, one way or another.
“Do you know what I mean?” she asked her friend Lucy, the only person she told this to, the only person who would believe her. The two of them were having lunch in the employee cafeteria. Lucy said she knew what she meant. She understood that a man’s dry face could have the look of weeping. She mentioned her uncle Jomo. “He had the look, too. Uncle Jomo’s wife died while he was still in his thirties. He put his grief on with his clothes every morning. When did you see the mayor?”
“Last Thursday,” Martha said.
“Did he say anything?”
“Not at first. I went up and told him that the Orlando flight came in an hour ago. There’s no more bags, sir. You can contact the luggage office in the morning. Everybody from Delta’s gone home. Then he turned to me with a finger on his lips and I knew.”
“How’d he look?” Lucy asked.
“Thinner.”
“No! When that man was done eating chicken, he’d start in on the table legs.”
“All of it gone. And his shoulders were stooped—bony, really,” Martha said. “His trench coat looked like it was hanging off two doorknobs.”
Lucy watched her friend. She had that good way of listening—with her elbows on the table and her hands propping up her face like two bookends. Neither of them was eating anymore.
“Our burdens,” Lucy said.
“Yes,” Martha said.
“My God, remember,” Lucy said. “They wouldn’t let the man do a thing. The mayor would want to take a leak and Eddy Vrdolyak would vote against it.”
“I remember, I remember,” Martha said. “How could anybody not remember?”
“You forget how people forget.”
“Mmmmm.”
“What about his eyes?”
“Still beautiful.”
“So what’d he say?”
“He said Midway looks like a real airport now. Richie Daley, I said, and he looked at me with those eyes. I said, I hate to break it to you, Mr. Mayor, but Richie is king now, and he shouted, Richie Daley, that unworthy dauphin? The father was one thing, a cretin but a man with innate political talent, even brains, a man who somehow—somehow—kept his own nostrils clean while the putrescence of corruption oozed around him. No, the father was one thing. But if Richie Daley is the second coming, I’m Annette Funicello.”
Martha gasping, laughing. “The Mouseketeer?”
“That’s what he said. Even made those ears behind his head with his fingers.”
“And he laughed? He laughed?”
“Half laughed, half didn’t.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Then he cleared his throat, all mayoral, and asked if the pay was any better now that this is a real airport. I said, ‘Sir, there haven’t been any other miracles besides you.’ And then he did laugh, Luce. He laughed until what was left of his poor body wasn’t there anymore.”
FROM THE COLLECTED STORIES OF EDMUND JERRY (E. J.) HAHN, VOL. IV
E.J. dead now too, still talking. Telling me about his yellow-and-purple-daisied ’69 VW bus, about piling in fourteen friends, acquaintances, and a few folks he never laid eyes on before and driving from Sheboygan to New York to see Joan Baez at the Fillmore East. Motherfucking Manhattan, I’m telling you. From our little cow-shit college in Wisconsin it was like landing on a ring of Saturn. We didn’t know our mothers’ names. I don’t remember a thing about the ride except the fog. Outside the van and inside the van. E.J. nudging me. Nirvana highway, brother, Heh, heh. And that Carrington drove through Ohio with his feet. Tried it in Pennsylvania with his dick till he drove us off the road. Carrington with a name like some Earl of Edinburgh, though his parents were Christian Scientists from Rhinelander. Carrington, Carrington, Carrington. Whose idea it was to buy the refrigerator for Chuck and Kathy D.? I told you about the refrigerator? About Chuck and Kathy D.? How they got married sophomore year and were so poor they couldn’t afford to rent a place with a fridge, so to keep food from spoiling, Chuck would leave sausages and cheese and eggs outside on the porch all night and then run out there at dawn, naked, grab the stuff, and throw it in a pan on the hot plate for breakfast, then nosedive back into their single little-boy bed and make fast and furious morning love to Kathy D. Oh, Kathy D.! One day Carrington and I were shoplifting in Sears and we saw this Frigidaire on sale for sixty-five dollars, and Carrington goes up to it and starts licking it, saying, My dearest, my dearest, till the salesman came over and said, What in holy name? And so we borrowed ten bucks from the salesman, who only wanted us lost, another seven from a woman in the sewing machine department, a five spot from the stock boy, another couple from a little old lady clutching her handbag in Housewares. We made the down payment. This was in ’74 and we were Sheboygan’s hippies. So unique in town we were almost a source of pride. Oh, Sheboygan: city of cheese curd and churches. The rest we got on credit. That fridge is still unpaid for, wherever it is, rusting away in oblivion. Our accounts will never balance. Of course, the problem with Carrington was he never stopped. The best hustlers can’t. It was always something else. He started eight different folk bands our senior year, founded a commune on his cousin’s farm in Oshkosh, asked for handouts, saying it’s not a cult, it’s about love, brothers and sisters, love. By then he was using heavier than the rest of us. The year of Our Lord, the Bicentennial. Jimmy Carter’s buckteeth and Alfred Joseph Carrington the Third on a float in the Fourth of July parade. God knows how he got up there, but there was Carrington, strung out in General Washington’s boat crossing the Delaware, Cub Scouts dressed like elves straddling his legs and whacking him with paper muskets like he was some favorite drunken uncle.
He vanished for good the day after graduation. Not that he graduated. But he did dance across the stage wearing the empty diploma case on his head like a tepee. In ’82 I got a letter from his lawyer brother. Carrington dead in Houston, a broken needle jammed in his arm. Our Duke of Cornwall bled to death in a motel room shower. The lawyer wrote his death was a blessing, not very disguised. Can you beat that? His own brother. You run out of time is what I’m saying, is what I’m always saying. Whether you waste it or not. Some people you never shake. Carrington, what, dead fifteen years now and still he’s egging me on? We dumped the fridge in the yard in front of Chuck and Kathy D.’s. We’d crammed it full of Schlitz and watermelons. And Carrington, the maestro in a tux, and Kathy D. running barefoot across the snow, wide mouth, shocked, tits bobbing, yelling, Oh my gods! like she’d just won a convertible on The Price Is Right, except we were in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, my friend, and it was February and we were doing the hula around that sacred appliance in the snow, and oh how fucked up, oh how gloriously—never again—fucked up we were.
THE GATE
None but the wind should warn of your returning.
—TOWNES VAN ZA
NDT, “NONE BUT THE RAIN”
It wasn’t visiting hours. They let me in anyway, after I begged from a wall phone on the first floor. She was on the third floor. I needed a special code to work the elevator. After I buzzed, I was led into the TV room, which was also a lunchroom. She was waiting there, holding a book. I can’t remember what the title was, but I remember staring at the cover. It had a drawing of an ornate iron gate. Beyond the gate was a gray sea. We sat across from each other. She laughed. She told me about a guy who earlier that morning had called his mother from the phone at the nurses’ station and shouted, so the entire floor could hear, could she please get him out of here so he could kill himself in peace. She pointed to a boy—he couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen—sitting at one of the lunch tables listening to headphones, peacefully drumming the table with his palms. That’s him, she said. He’ll be all right.
