I had an encounter with a man in downtown Chicago on Saturday night. Most people from the suburbs or from out of town would probably describe him to their friends or co-workers as a homeless man. I suspect he was something that started with an “h”, but the word that came to me when I first saw him was “hustler.”
He emerged from the shadows on the south side of Jackson Boulevard as I was walking east toward Michigan Avenue. I had made my way over to the Federal Center, looking for a post office box, and was going back to my car, which was parked in the Grant Park South garage. I noticed him about mid-block between Wabash and Michigan. He was wearing dark clothes—dark green pants, a dark blue jacket, a dark gray knit cap.
I first saw him when he stepped off the curb, angling across Jackson toward the sidewalk on the north side of the street. I was the only other person walking on the street, and I knew immediately he was angling to intercept me. Rather than speeding up in an obvious attempt to get past him, I kept my stride. As it was, he hopped up on the curb just ahead of me. Then he turned and faced me as I walked by, but made no attempt to stop me.
“Got bless you,” he said.
“God bless you, too,” I replied.
“Do you have any change, anything at all?”
I knew I had nearly two dollars in change. As so often happens in these situations, my decision about what to do was made in an instant, and I didn’t hesitate. I stopped, dug into my pocket and pulled out what I had. “Here,” I said. “Be safe tonight.”
He examined the change, and closed his fist around it but didn’t immediately put it in his pocket. I turned and started walking again toward Michigan Avenue. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him start, hesitate, and then begin to follow me. Then, unexpectedly, he called after me with a strange question. “Have you ever done anything bad?”
I slowed and half turned back. Even with his dark skin, I could see in the street light that his brow was furrowed, and his mouth was slightly open. It was an earnest look, and he expected an answer. “Sure,” I said. “Absolutely.”
I kept walking and was nearly to the corner when he called out again, “You’ve done bad things? Things you regret?” He paused. “I have and I don’t know what to do. That’s why I’m out here. I’ve made bad decisions in my life.”
I stopped and turned and looked him in the eyes. He was about 10 feet from me. “Of course I’ve done things I regret, things I wish I hadn’t done. I’ve hurt people. But those things don’t have to define you, man. You can stop doing them, you can try to fix them. Make your reaction to what you’ve done define you.”
With that I turned and started across Michigan Avenue against the light. There was no traffic coming and I thought at least I could get out on the traffic island. He didn’t say anything else. Halfway across the street, I turned and glanced over my shoulder to see where he was. He was walking slowly up Michigan Avenue, looking at the sidewalk.
Sadly, I had reached my limit of casual stranger conversation. On a better night, in a different mood I might have asked him if he wanted a cup of coffee, or something to eat. I sensed there was more he had to say, or maybe other questions, but I also believed that if I indulged him he would eventually ask for more money to catch a train or a bus or rent a room in an SRO because all the shelters were full. I just wanted to go home.
So I ditched this fellow and his strange but earnest questions. The whole encounter was odd. Maybe it was the fact it was just the two of us on that block at that moment, but looking back on it, the episode seemed almost like the end of an evening shared by two acquaintances. As one leaves, the other, emboldened by an understanding of friendship, asks an unexpected question that truly seeks an answer. With a short answer given, there is an inflection point, at which the conversation either continues or ends.
I ended it, but I wonder where it would have gone had we continued. Would it have degenerated into a panhandling hustle or was there some other reason he intercepted me on that sidewalk? Maybe he just wanted to talk and felt asking for money was the introduction he needed—the opposite of what most panhandlers do, which is engage in bullshit conversation first and then get down to the real business, which is asking for money.
This guy blessed me, asked me for change, looked at the change, and then asked me a question that, had it come from someone I knew, might have led to one of those conversations where you find a restaurant to sit at and talk, get kicked out of there when it closes and find a coffee place, get kicked out of there when it closes and then walk the streets until you realize the trains aren’t running any more and you have to find cabs.
Maybe he wasn’t a hustler at all; maybe he was just being human, and looking for someone to share that with. Instead maybe I was the hustler, hustling away.
Happy New Year.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
So This is Christmas. . . .
Christmas is so funny now. There’s so much bullshit tradition and commercialism wrapped around it these days, I can’t even remember why it used to be my favorite time of year. In recent years, for the most part, the Christmases I’ve enjoyed the most have been the most non-traditional: Christmas in Las Vegas one year, in Italy another.
I once ranked Christmas at the top of the list of the best times of the year ahead of fall. But now fall is so clearly the winner and Christmas is falling behind … I don’t know … spring for instance, that it’s almost to the point where I wish we could just skip from Thanksgiving to pitchers and catchers reporting.
I grew up an only child, and even extended family was thousands of miles away. My Christmas memories are of going into the mountains and cutting a fresh Christmas tree with my dad in early December. We’d go to the Bureau of Land Management office and buy our Christmas tree tag and map for $1. Then we’d drive my mom’s 1972 Volkswagen squareback up the muddy logging roads of the coast range. We would hike through the logged areas until we found a good full tree. We’d cut it down, lash it to the car and drive it home. Inevitably upon arrival the tree would be too tall by a matter of feet, and we’d cut it down to size and use the leftover greens to line the deck railings and front stairs.
There was the ritual of dragging the tree up the outside stairs, through the double doors, up the half-flight to the top floor of the house, through the dining room and into the corner of living room behind the couch. Furniture had to be moved and every year we’d bump the chandelier that hung from the ceiling in the dining room and watch anxiously for a few seconds to see if this year it would fall. Once the tree was up in the stand and as close to vertical as we could make it, my mom would begin vacuuming all the pine needles out of the brown shag carpet. Then we’d place that same white sheet around the base and my dad would fill the tree stand with a mix of water and vitamin B-1. This was supposed to keep the tree fresh, but inevitably by the week after New Year’s the thing was brittle and needles would fall off every time one of us would walk by.
Once the tree was up, my mom would drag out the same beat-up old moving boxes filled with all the Christmas trappings, including about a dozen boxes of Shiny-Brite ornaments from the 1960s; assorted plastic bags full of other random ornaments—some of which I made in school and others like a little wooden airplane and a blue-and-red papier-mache drummer boy holding glued-on gold cymbals acquired in odd shops over the years; light strings that up until my sophomore year of high school used actual colored light bulbs, before they were deemed a fire hazard; a sandwich bag full of wire hooks that we would dump into the same round smoked-glass ashtray every year; and various wreaths, table settings and window decorations.
These would all be unpacked carefully and inspected for damage. No matter how carefully the Shiny-Brites were repackaged at the end of every Christmas season, one or two would always be broken the next year when we opened the boxes. Then on some weekend night, with a fire in the fireplace, my parents would put on the Firestone Christmas LPs featuring Bing Crosby or the Boston Pops or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and we’d decorate the tree.
Later my dad and I would put up the outside lights, spending several hours alternating blinkers and non-blinkers and ensuring randomness in the order of the colors—no blues next to blues, or reds next to reds. Then Christmas would run its course, culminating with Christmas eve at midnight mass and opening the handful of presents on Christmas day.
It seemed normal enough, even though most of my friends’ Christmases involved virtual mountains of presents, traveling to see grandmas and grandpas, or having family in from out of town. Every year, it was just the three of us. Money was tight the last couple of years of high school, and my recollection is of lower-key Christmases that started later.
After I went to college, my parents moved. In the ensuing years, we kept up the tradition of decorating the tree, having a fire in the fireplace and listening to the Christmas LPs, only now the tree came from the parking lot at the nearby Albertson’s grocery store. It wasn’t a Douglas fir any longer, it was a noble or some other kind of pine tree that didn’t look the same or hold the ornaments the same way. And I didn’t live there; I was visiting.
For the most part, the players remained the same, although during my senior year of college I spent part of Christmas with my girlfriend at the time and her family, which was a much bigger and more traditional celebration. The following Christmas I was living on my own for the first time and working about three hours and one mountain range away, and could only spend a couple of days home for Christmas. It might have sometime around then that I began to feel the tradition of Christmas slipping away
At first I missed it. I moved to Chicago, where I spent Christmases with my fiancée’s family. We tried to do the traditional family thing with my fiancée’s step dad and his family, but in reality the two sets of kids didn’t mix well and that part of it ended up feeling awkward and forced.
Then we moved to New York, and in 2000 it was just the two of us in our one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. We bought a little tree from in front of the green grocer a block away, plopped it in the living room and strung little white lights on it. When we were finished, we turned off all the lights except the tree and went across the street to see what it looked like from outside. I liked thinking about New Yorkers … Brooklynites … walking by in a hustle and seeing the tree in the window.
We attended midnight mass at a little Catholic church off Henry Street with about 25 other people. They asked us to bring up the gifts. In 2001 we spent Christmas in Las Vegas, which was cool in a bizarre way. There no outward signs it was Christmas. Down on Fremont Street, I saw a sign in the window of a souvenir shop that said “We will be closed Tuesday, Dec. 25. We will reopen Wednesday, Dec. 26.” That was it, no mention of why the store was going to be closed on Tuesday. We flew back to New York on Christmas day. The airport and the plane were empty.
In 2002 we bought a tree in a pot, a rosemary bush, I think, and put one or two ornaments on it. We placed it on the table in the living room. In 2003 we were back in Chicago doing the weird step-family thing again, which convinced us to plan our trip to Italy the next year at Christmastime. Being there was refreshing, there was so much less commercialism. We went to midnight mass at the Vatican, and Pope John Paul II said mass. The next spring he died.
Why am I recounting all this? I was thinking about that in the car tonight. I had started writing this in the afternoon. It’s now after midnight, and I think the point is that for me, traditional Christmases ended when the tradition I had known as a child ended. I’ve tried hanging on to elements of that tradition, re-creating it in various ways in various places, but it’s gone. There’s no point in trying to hang on to something that’s gone; it’s a lot of work that ultimately ends in frustration.
I’m much happier channeling my energy into enjoying these “post-tradition” Christmases, an exercise that may be its own new tradition. Christmas will never again be what it was, but there is promise in the possibility that it can always be new. If I embrace that notion, maybe it can again become my favorite time of year.
I once ranked Christmas at the top of the list of the best times of the year ahead of fall. But now fall is so clearly the winner and Christmas is falling behind … I don’t know … spring for instance, that it’s almost to the point where I wish we could just skip from Thanksgiving to pitchers and catchers reporting.
I grew up an only child, and even extended family was thousands of miles away. My Christmas memories are of going into the mountains and cutting a fresh Christmas tree with my dad in early December. We’d go to the Bureau of Land Management office and buy our Christmas tree tag and map for $1. Then we’d drive my mom’s 1972 Volkswagen squareback up the muddy logging roads of the coast range. We would hike through the logged areas until we found a good full tree. We’d cut it down, lash it to the car and drive it home. Inevitably upon arrival the tree would be too tall by a matter of feet, and we’d cut it down to size and use the leftover greens to line the deck railings and front stairs.
There was the ritual of dragging the tree up the outside stairs, through the double doors, up the half-flight to the top floor of the house, through the dining room and into the corner of living room behind the couch. Furniture had to be moved and every year we’d bump the chandelier that hung from the ceiling in the dining room and watch anxiously for a few seconds to see if this year it would fall. Once the tree was up in the stand and as close to vertical as we could make it, my mom would begin vacuuming all the pine needles out of the brown shag carpet. Then we’d place that same white sheet around the base and my dad would fill the tree stand with a mix of water and vitamin B-1. This was supposed to keep the tree fresh, but inevitably by the week after New Year’s the thing was brittle and needles would fall off every time one of us would walk by.
Once the tree was up, my mom would drag out the same beat-up old moving boxes filled with all the Christmas trappings, including about a dozen boxes of Shiny-Brite ornaments from the 1960s; assorted plastic bags full of other random ornaments—some of which I made in school and others like a little wooden airplane and a blue-and-red papier-mache drummer boy holding glued-on gold cymbals acquired in odd shops over the years; light strings that up until my sophomore year of high school used actual colored light bulbs, before they were deemed a fire hazard; a sandwich bag full of wire hooks that we would dump into the same round smoked-glass ashtray every year; and various wreaths, table settings and window decorations.
These would all be unpacked carefully and inspected for damage. No matter how carefully the Shiny-Brites were repackaged at the end of every Christmas season, one or two would always be broken the next year when we opened the boxes. Then on some weekend night, with a fire in the fireplace, my parents would put on the Firestone Christmas LPs featuring Bing Crosby or the Boston Pops or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and we’d decorate the tree.
Later my dad and I would put up the outside lights, spending several hours alternating blinkers and non-blinkers and ensuring randomness in the order of the colors—no blues next to blues, or reds next to reds. Then Christmas would run its course, culminating with Christmas eve at midnight mass and opening the handful of presents on Christmas day.
It seemed normal enough, even though most of my friends’ Christmases involved virtual mountains of presents, traveling to see grandmas and grandpas, or having family in from out of town. Every year, it was just the three of us. Money was tight the last couple of years of high school, and my recollection is of lower-key Christmases that started later.
After I went to college, my parents moved. In the ensuing years, we kept up the tradition of decorating the tree, having a fire in the fireplace and listening to the Christmas LPs, only now the tree came from the parking lot at the nearby Albertson’s grocery store. It wasn’t a Douglas fir any longer, it was a noble or some other kind of pine tree that didn’t look the same or hold the ornaments the same way. And I didn’t live there; I was visiting.
For the most part, the players remained the same, although during my senior year of college I spent part of Christmas with my girlfriend at the time and her family, which was a much bigger and more traditional celebration. The following Christmas I was living on my own for the first time and working about three hours and one mountain range away, and could only spend a couple of days home for Christmas. It might have sometime around then that I began to feel the tradition of Christmas slipping away
At first I missed it. I moved to Chicago, where I spent Christmases with my fiancée’s family. We tried to do the traditional family thing with my fiancée’s step dad and his family, but in reality the two sets of kids didn’t mix well and that part of it ended up feeling awkward and forced.
Then we moved to New York, and in 2000 it was just the two of us in our one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. We bought a little tree from in front of the green grocer a block away, plopped it in the living room and strung little white lights on it. When we were finished, we turned off all the lights except the tree and went across the street to see what it looked like from outside. I liked thinking about New Yorkers … Brooklynites … walking by in a hustle and seeing the tree in the window.
We attended midnight mass at a little Catholic church off Henry Street with about 25 other people. They asked us to bring up the gifts. In 2001 we spent Christmas in Las Vegas, which was cool in a bizarre way. There no outward signs it was Christmas. Down on Fremont Street, I saw a sign in the window of a souvenir shop that said “We will be closed Tuesday, Dec. 25. We will reopen Wednesday, Dec. 26.” That was it, no mention of why the store was going to be closed on Tuesday. We flew back to New York on Christmas day. The airport and the plane were empty.
In 2002 we bought a tree in a pot, a rosemary bush, I think, and put one or two ornaments on it. We placed it on the table in the living room. In 2003 we were back in Chicago doing the weird step-family thing again, which convinced us to plan our trip to Italy the next year at Christmastime. Being there was refreshing, there was so much less commercialism. We went to midnight mass at the Vatican, and Pope John Paul II said mass. The next spring he died.
Why am I recounting all this? I was thinking about that in the car tonight. I had started writing this in the afternoon. It’s now after midnight, and I think the point is that for me, traditional Christmases ended when the tradition I had known as a child ended. I’ve tried hanging on to elements of that tradition, re-creating it in various ways in various places, but it’s gone. There’s no point in trying to hang on to something that’s gone; it’s a lot of work that ultimately ends in frustration.
I’m much happier channeling my energy into enjoying these “post-tradition” Christmases, an exercise that may be its own new tradition. Christmas will never again be what it was, but there is promise in the possibility that it can always be new. If I embrace that notion, maybe it can again become my favorite time of year.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Filling the Half-Empty Page
“The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep.”
— Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys
Don’t read too much into the title of this blog; my worldview is generally optimistic. Lately, though, writing has become for me like trying to squeeze frozen toothpaste through a pinhole. It’s exhausting, and I seem to be tired all the time. When they come at all, the spurts of creative energy arrive at awkward and inconvenient moments—at midnight when I have to work the next day, on the el when I can’t reach my notebook or steady myself to write, in the car on the way to the Jewel to scratch my weekly sourdough bread itch.
I have always been a writer, but never a disciplined one. I kept a journal as a kid and I would go through phases during which I would write every day, and then not touch pen to page for months. Being a journalist for the better part of the past 15 years has forced me to write something every day and provided me with a convenient excuse not to write in my free time. “I’ve been writing all day, I’m tired,” I would tell myself as I turned on the electronic doping agent known as the TV.
I’m still tired, but as I approach 37 years of age (in five days) I feel a renewed sense of urgency to respect the craft I fell in love with as a child and to incessantly prick the creative/artistic side of myself until I start bleeding out something worthwhile.
Recently I started taking group guitar lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music. There is something about the art of making music—good music—that is immediate and gratifying in a way that writing is not. I can’t make good music yet, but being around people who can is such a creative rush. I think it has flipped the artistic switch inside me and that the writing light is starting to flicker on again. One thing that practicing guitar has forced me to do is turn off the TV in the evenings. I feel like I have been freed from the luminescent sedation of the boob tube. I have moved my writing table to a place from which I cannot see or hear the TV. It’s wonderful.
I also feel like I have something to prove, to my insanely talented and extremely patient guitar teacher, to the rest of the class … to myself. I believe I am an artist, in the same way that the musicians I know are artists, but I have nothing to show to prove it. When my guitar teacher asks me, “What do you write?” I have no good answer. But that’s gonna change. Starting now.
I want to use this space as a forum for experimentation, practice and exchanging ideas, thoughts and frustrations. Sporadically since 2005 I have maintained an alter-ego blog, The Indignant Citizen. It’s not right place to write about writing, though. The IC is more about politics, planning and griping about the waves of stupidity we find ourselves paddling through every day. For a variety of reasons I haven’t had a lot left for indignation of late. There have been more pressing matters into which I’ve plowed the limited energy I’ve been able to save up.
Now’s the time, though, to start filling the half-empty pages.
CEC
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