Out of the Car, Ass-Ho

You have NO idea how many times me and my friends heard this command from a squad car parked behind us in Lombard and Villa Park.

The only way they ever addressed us was, “Asshole.” On Friday nights, we’d drive around trying to nurse a six-pack and a few loose joints and make them last and figure out where all of the young women of questionable virtue would be doing the same thing.  This is before texting, sexting, and even cell phones.

Our best chance was the Ski-Hi Drive-In, which was also a respite from cops.  They’d roll through once or twice a night, but it wasn’t nearly as perilous as driving around town where you knew the fuckers were looking for you.

Eventually they would find us, steal our beer or make us dump it and feel us up for drugs, which we would promptly eat the minute we’d hear the siren and see the lights.

It was cat and mouse.

Wint-O-Green Moth (for Etta James)

“All the good ones die or get murdered.  Jesus: murdered.  Martin Luther King: murdered.  John F.Kennedy:  murdered.  John Lennon: murdered.  Malcom X: murdered.
Ronald Reagan? WOUNDED.”–The late, great Bill Hicks on fate.The great Etta James has died. Her baby face and angel’s voice are gone.

The Sun came up.  The mail got delivered and life goes on, but the world is at least one shade more gray.  If her soaring, soulful rendering of “I’d Rather Go Blind” doesn’t break your heart, well. . .you don’t have one.  If  “At Last” doesn’t bring a sad, mournful smile to your face, then you’ve never been in love.

Miss Etta was the real thing. You know it when you hear it. It freezes you in your tracks and makes you stare at the radio. She was only like herself.

Jamesetta Hawkins faced no small amount of turmoil in her 73 years; addiction, obesity, poverty and finally Alzheimer’s and leukemia.  None of it could dim the thousand-watt smile or the spine-tingling contralto.  If one believed in the music of angels, Etta James was their evidence.

Winter has finally showed up in earnest in Chicago.  Nine inches of snow fell and again my fellow Chicagoans are running around with sparks shooting out of their asses, acting as if they’ve never seen the stuff before–driving like retards, putting all manner of shit in the streets in the name of “dibs” wherein, because you shoveled your own car out.  You now take over ownership of that part of the street; a basic “fuck you” to your fellow citizens and taxpayers.

Myself? I LOVE when people put out folding chairs.  I always need folding chairs.  Some of them even put out step stools which, as an artist, I’m always in need of.  I do like when guys with service industry trucks just run this shit over.  Was that your Lego table?  Sorry. Maybe you shouldn’t put shit in the street, asshole.It’s also fun to watch the Ukrainians swing shovels at each other.  Shoveling your walk in my neighborhood is a big deal.  I have my assistants or a couple of wine-soaked Mexican dudes shovel mine and the old Ukrainian ladies down the street a few houses…some of the Ukie’s get pissed at me.

“Why you not shovel your own fucking stoop, Meester Beegshot?  Why somebody else walking your dog and cutting your grass?  You too good for this jobs, huh?” I get this shit from Uli, who has lived here for 30 years and always shoveled his own walk.

I tell him he is right; I’m way to good to be shoveling snow out there with the cabbage-eaters.  Hell, somebody might see me and think I’m. . .Ukrainian!!!!

He laughs and tells me I’d have to have a bigger dick to be Ukrainian.  That the Irish.  . .”They are hung like fucking CASHEWS.  Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”

Uli is a funny motherfucker who is also not fond of people leaving stuff in the middle of the street.  On occasion he knocks back six or seven shots of Stoli and grabs his aluminum baseball bat and lays waste to some of the crap left out to preserve parking spots.  It is funny as hell because he shouts and swears while he is having batting practice and nobody tries to stop him.I don’t shovel snow for one reason.  Every year, the first time it snows heavily, all over the nation, there are 50-year old guys, red as a monkey’s ass, face-down in snow drifts, dead like a fucking hammer from massive heart attacks.

No thanks, Bunky.I want to die like my grandfather, peacefully, in his sleep. . . not screaming in terror, like his passengers.

It always fascinates me at the reaction.  This is Chicago.  We get an assload of snow every year, but people still drive like morons the first snow of every year.  Without fail, a senior citizen T-bones somebody at a stop street, or drives up on the sidewalk and kills some poor asshole from East Bumfuck, because they confused the brake for the accelerator.  Inevitably kids go “skeeching,” which is when you gab onto the bumper of a CTA or a school bus and slide down the street with it.  This, actually, requires real balls.  I’ve never done it.  There are a myriad of ways to wind up fucked-up or dead from skeeching.

When I was in high school, there was a kid named Tony Rogles who was the most fearless skeecher I ever knew.  He’d mosey up behind the bus and grab on, riding it a quarter mile until it intersected a really busy intersection, where the pavement had been plowed and therefore no good for skeeching.  I remember he’d go skeeching by as I walked to the corner to hitchhike home. He’s have this crazy smile and a Kool hanging out the corner of his mouth.  I don’t remember another thing about Tony Rogles except this.

On winter days, he looked into the icy face winter–and spit in its mouth.

The Assassination of Crazy Horse

“This is good.  He sought death and now he has found it.” – Touch The Clouds, Crazy Horse’s cousin, and witness to his death.
“No shot was fired, and Crazy Horse– a man who had lost his brother, his daughter, the woman he loved, several friends, his way of life, and even, for a time, his people, began his leaving as a man and his arrival as a myth, a man around whom stories that are like little gospels accumulate. A variation death of Crazy Horse would consist of at least a score of versions, all contributed or recollected by people, white and red, who were in the fort that night.” — Larry McMurtry, Crazy Horse

What I most admire about Crazy Horse is that he helped kill Custer; a stone, murderous, psychopath. The movie Little Big Man, I think, pretty much has Custer’s number. Custer pretty much attacked when he was sure he had a superior number to the opposition. Years ago, I traveled all over the West and stopped in a small town not far from where the battle of Little Big Horn occurred, Spotted Horse, Wyoming. It was basically a post office and a diner/bar, and the guy who ran it was an old cowboy who had a tank full of rattlesnakes out in front of the place and he wore a six-shooter in a holster. It was he who told me that Custer died slow. He said that Custer was “turned over the women.”  I was shocked. I asked Mark Turcotte, the Chippewa poet about this and he said, “Custer’s last breath wasn’t on the battle field.”

There are moments of history when I’d have liked to have been there; like when Custer was introduced to the Oglala nation. . .when he looked around and realized the Oglala had the ass over him and that he was truly fucked. The wet-ass hour.

Did he pray? Did he ask forgiveness? Did he ask for mercy?

Crazy Horse was born around 1840 to Lakota Oglala parents. His father was also named Crazy Horse. In his entire life, he was never photographed. He had curly hair and was paler of skin than other Oglala, leading other children to taunt him about the possibility of white parentage to which the boy took great umbrage. However, this taunting did not persist, as the young Crazy Horse routinely fucked-up anyone who attempted to bully him.
He was fearless and contrary and an absolute natural warrior; a tactician to equal some of the best generals in U.S. history. He was an expert decoy warrior, often using himself as bait. Such was the case in the “Fetterman Massacre” in which Crazy Horse personally lured Lt. Fetterman and 80 of his cavalry to their slaughter.

Crazy Horse painted his cheeks with lightning bolts and his forehead with hailstones, in honor of the Yakiwans (Thunder Beings) and, according to many eye-witnesses, was the most fearless of warriors; always getting very close to soldiers and screaming other-worldly battle screams to his fellow braves. Crazy Horse terrified even his own men.

Crazy Horse is one of those mythic American characters that entreats conflicting historical information at almost every turn. Even his death ( an assassination) is shrouded in mystery and varying accounts. After his death, a photograph of him was produced which was quickly proven a fraud. Crazy Horse believed that the camera stole one’s soul and, given the nature of celebrity, he was not all the way wrong. History is an odd creature. It tends to be the lie we all agree upon. Crazy Horse is a hero to the Lakota Oglala and actually to me, as well. History, for the longest time, regarded him as something of a terrorist. It’s an odd paradox; one is a terrorist until one wins, and then is proclaimed a patriot.

There is a powerful kind of atmosphere around that part of the country. It is as if the land knows and that the scene of the American genocide of its first citizens still carries its ghosts. Montana and Wyoming are places where nature is, to say the very least, formidable. One doesn’t curse the snow, the rain, the dust, the hail, or god, because here; it is all the same thing.

When I was a kid, I thought thunder was something that walked the earth. Maybe Crazy Horse did, too. I don’t try to explain what Native Americans mean when they speak of these things. I’m not meant to understand it. The more I read about Crazy Horse, the more admirable he is to me.

There is a mountain being carved up as a monument to him; something he’d have probably found obscene. Russel Means, the former leader of AIM, has spoken out against it on the grounds that it is contrary to the spirit of Crazy Horse. While meant as a tribute, Indian peoples realize the mountain, itself, is triumph enough.

Public political assassinations are not a new American story. In my own lifetime there have been the brazen and shocking murders of JFK, his brother Robert, Martin Luther King, and Malcom X. In all cases, there were plenty of witnesses and one thing can be said of all of them; nobody ever tells the same story of the same killing. Such is also the case of the assassination of Crazy Horse. Many claim he was held by fellow red men while bayoneted by a white soldier. Little Big Man, his betrayer, claims he stabbed himself. There are many versions; so many, any is impossible to believe. What is known is that for the interests of the Army and some Indians, he could not be allowed to leave the fort he was murdered at. He was onto them.

When Crazy Horse witnessed the filth and conditions his fellow Indians were subjected to, for him, all bets were off.

Early in Larry McMurtry’s account of the life of Crazy Horse, the author is clearly puzzled by the perceptions of Crazy horse by whites and by Native Americans: “They depict Crazy Horse as a kind of being never seen on earth: a genius at war yet a lover of peace; a statesman who apparently never thought of the interest of any human being outside his own camp; a dreamer, a mystic, and a kind of Sioux Christ, who was betrayed in the end by his own disciples–Little Big Man, Touch-the-Clouds and the rest. One is inclined to ask, what is it all about?”

Crazy Horse is certainly an American kind of enigma; a man many would build monuments to and then sneer at clay feet of their hero. The more I read about Crazy Horse, the more fascinated I am. Every account I’ve read seems to be about a different person. He defied type and was his own man.

The Chain-Gang Dreams of Kryptonite

It has become easy to think of the American Political Parties as two mammoth and unending chain gangs, most Americans belonging to one or another and blindly cheerleading for each group’s particular brand of mediocrity.  I watched the Republican debates the other night and thought the American body politic could be done a great service
if one were to roll a grenade or two into the green room about five minutes before the scheduled event.

The rest of them ganged up on Romney, the Hair-Gel candidate with the Rotarian smile and better suit.  He is the presumptive frontrunner, meaning that eight Iowa farmers liked him better than the cement-head, Rick Santorum, an off-the-rack walking pile of Republican cannon-fodder whom,  I suspect, is only there for the base to hector Romney with.  In their hearts, Republicans know Santorum cannot win.  They allow him to run because they want Romney to move further right in order to court their support.

Every four years we are reminded of the Zero-Sum-Gain American Party politics really are.  It is a massive experiment in the idea of negative capability.  Just HOW loathsome must a candidate be in order for you to support our guy?  What would more repel you as a voter–your guy being caught red-handed with a live boy or a dead girl?

The other day I posited the idea on Facebook that I might not vote.   Jesus.  You’d have thought that I’d pissed into baby Jesus’s manger.  I actually had people I know tell me I didn’t have the RIGHT not to vote.

Huh?

If our Constitution means anything, it means you have the right to do whatever the fuck you want–provided you not infringe on anyone else’s right to pursue happiness.  This is what I love about the Constitution.  If you want to walk around your house with a lobster hanging from your sack, you can.  It’s legal.  This is America and you are free to get your freak on, however you want to, and nobody can bust your onions about it.

One of the unwritten tenets of the Constitution is that however,  understood–Loud and Clear is,  “Mind your own fucking business and we’ll get along fine, Butchie.”

I have every right in the world to vote or not vote no matter what the squeak-heads say.

It always amazes me how susceptible our culture is to thinking as a group.  All it takes is one fuck wrench in a bar somewhere, floating an idiotic thought or opinion, and the next thing you know, people are pouring Redbull into
perfectly good vodka and grown-ass men are wearing ‘Crocs’ and Axe body spray like 15-year olds hoping to finger-bang a cheerleader.

It is as if our heads are chained together.

One hundred and forty years ago or so, the Transcontinental Railroad was built by slaves; Chinese and Mexican and newly-freed Africans. . .Confederate veterans of the Civil War. . .the newly-indentured Irish immigrants;  you name it– whomever was at the bottom of the American economic scrotum pole.  The railroad was built on the backs of the poor and destitute and was built with as much thoughtless cruelty as the captains of industry could muster.  The amount of discretionary power the railroad had even superseded that of the government.  At a certain point, they had their own police force–actually a collection of mercenary goons called the Pinkertons who were, by and large, the slobs who couldn’t become legit peace officers.   The same assholes you see at Wal-Mart with the spray and the stick.

There is a pretty good TV show about it right now called Hell on Wheels.  It follows the murder of Indians, and anyone else who gets in the way, with a necessary brutality.  When we teach our children how we “settled” and “built” America, it is important they have an idea about just what those words are code for.

It means we stole and murdered our way to ownership.

There are scenes where Indians look positively fierce and heartless when attacking Whitey.  And as well they should. They were being murdered into submission by colonialists who regarded them as less then human.  The wholesale slaughter of the Plains Indians and every other First Nation tribe is still–along with 400 years of brutal slave trade–part of our country’s original sin; a country built by people in chains.  We forget this when asked about rightful things like reparations and creating equitable economic change for those we enslaved and stole from.

When we go to vote, this is never what is on our mind.  We think what our friends think, and this is dangerous.  History is an ongoing narrative. . .
it didn’t happen 100 years ago , or 10 years ago or even yesterday–it is happening now.
And now is our best chance at making it more just. Ask yourself,
if anyone your voting for? –has any of this on their minds.

A Ghost is Born

In Catholicism, ghosts are part of the Liturgy.  We are taught that the holy trinity is the Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost.  Combine that with  Irish ancestry and you have someone fairly willing to acknowledge the unseen, the invisible.  In religious practice, it is meant to drive home the premise that the eyes of God are on us always.  It is an imperative, I think, in order to get one to believe in God, that he be invisible.  One of the odd ironies of Christianity is that while it forbids “pagan” worship and idolatry, it furnishes a host of spooks and idols to worship in its own practice.

The spirit world is a big deal in other cultures and faiths as well. I spent part of 1987 in Haiti, where people practice voodoo and Catholicism in equal measure.  In Native American culture, the Spirits surround us and manifest themselves in nature.  The sun is often ceded the entity of the almighty, with water and rain and wind, and hail and thunder also occupying significant spiritual primacies as well.  The First Nation people don’t curse floods or hurricanes, fires, dust storms or God.  To them, they are all the same thing.

Many of us believe that our dead and departed relatives, or friends or lovers, send us missives from beyond.  The presence of  birds, objects, music– you name it– we will attach great spiritual significance to as a function of grief and wish fulfillment.  Our desire to maintain some tether to something or someone we deem precious, encodes all manner of cognitive associative images attached to the object of our longing.  The rational part of me KNOWS this.

The Artist doesn’t. He lives with the unseen–the invisible.

I’m always ready to believe that the past, the dead, and history possess a memory and they walk with us.  Fuck, I believe the birds speak to me.   I’ve heard it said, behind my back, when the person thinks I’m out of earshot, “You know, I hear he’s not. . .all there.  He isn’t quite right.”  More than once I’ve heard this.  Of course I hear it from people who wear ties and get up at six in the morning.  You tell me who is nuts.

At least once a week I wake up sitting up, on the side of my bed and I’ve been having  a conversation.  My wife and kids tell me I hold whole conversations in my sleep.  A couple months after my father died, I had a dream so viscerally real, it shook me up.  I dreamt that me , my dad and my pal, Nick were standing in the shallow surf in Miami Beach drinking martinis with our linen pants rolled up.  I remembered thinking we were drinking the good shit because the gin had the juniper sting in it that the better stuff has–Bombay, Tanqueray—and I swear the tops of my feet were a little sunburned.

Longing and imagination are powerful things. Combined they project us fitfully into the reality we search out–the narrative we wish to be real.  Still, I am one of those who puts some faith, rational or not, in the idea of the Spirit world; that maybe the dead and the past walk with us through this world; that 100 years ago is happening, still, at the same time this current moment is, just in a different world.  It is very hard for me to articulate or defend.

I realize I sound like a full-on drool case when I try to explain this, but I come by it honestly.  As a kid, I would see smoke or steam and think it was ghosts.  My mother enjoyed my imagination and she indulged it, and so I went to great lengths to tell her elaborate stories and would insist to her they were all true.

You see, the Irish believe in all manner of supernatural, happy horseshit–faeries, Jenny Linds, bog-trotting goblins and leprechauns.  The latter, I suspect, to explain midgets (The Little People”) when some not-terribly-bright Mick got snot-flying drunk.  More likely, we believe these things because life on this slimy rock full of drunks is rainy, cold, more-often-than-not impoverished and mercilessly unfair and short.  The faeries, leprechauns and red-headed nymphs?  Well. . .they give us something to smile about.

Even now when I see steam rise from the ground or the Northern lights, I think of these as missives from the other world, what Haitians referred to as “The Gray World.”
A year ago, I heard something funny and immediately picked up the phone to call my father.

My father died September 17th 1998.

I put the phone down and went to pieces.

For him.  For my friends no longer with me.  For the awful and real fact that we get one life and it is as tenuous, as elusive, as fragile and fleeting as the end of a kite string.

Snake Pussy

“Tone. . .I can’t go in there wit’cha.  The joint creeps me out.  I walked down the hallway and there’s nothing but Wicca broads, goth bitches, and gypsy types.  The joint is crawling with snake pussy.  The whole place gives me the willies.”–The late Ricky Viscosi, on a Halloween night at the Limelight, 1989.  Chicago

Some time around 1985 , New Yorker Peter Gatien blew into town and opened a Chicago franchise of the Limelight, the notoriously cool New York nightclubthat attracted such downtown luminaries as Blondie, Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and a host of other famous and near-famous denizens of the downtown, Lower East side demimonde.
In New York, the club was fabulously cool and featured art by Julian Schnabel, Basquiat, Kenny Scharff and others who were hot during the mid ’80s.  The Limelight in New York was a less avaricious and toxic place than Studio 54.
Oh, it had a VIP room like 54, it was just full of cooler VIP’s than Barry Manilow, Sylvester Stallone, and Liza Minelli, who were your dipshit-cousin-from-Long Island’s VIPs.

Studio 54 ruled the night-time club scene of the previous decade.  Oh, there was no shortage of drugs, there was plenty of sex of every variety–boy/girl, girl/girl, boy/boy– you name it; plus a lot of guys getting down with women who were men.  Even with the alarming rise of AIDS cases, it was still pretty wide open.  There was more heroin than cocaine–the boy drug never having fully ever lost its cachet in the go-go ’80s.  It was exciting, dangerous, culturally polymorphous and strangely necessary; a kind of last hold-out of Bohemia, before the real estate creeps started carving up the Lower East Side in earnest.

The Chicago Limelight wasn’t quite the same. We don’t really have movie stars or rock stars in as evident abundance as New York.  Who wants to notice the local weatherman getting blown in the VIP room, or the Morning Zoo radio  guy puking up his toenails over the balcony?

Christ.

There are just some things one cannot UNsee.

They tried women dancing in glass booths and cages, art exhibits, cool liquor promotions, lingerie nights, book parties and a cool revolving art project in the Dome Room.

The place didn’t die for want of creative people trying to make it cool.  Very good nightclub people ran the joint.
and they worked like sled-dogs promoting events there and eventually, none of it worked  and for one good reason:  We don’t stand in line like assholes.

For some reason, in New York, people will stand in line to spend their money.  They will also endure being looked over and appraised like a veal shank at Whole Foods.  All a joint needs is a velvet rope and a couple of hipster-shitheads with clipboards to start a line.  Nevermind the joint can be a low lit shithole that smells like cat piss.  In New York, this is cool.

I went to a joint called the Blue Angel there one night with the collector, Mickey Cartin.  It was kind of a faux-Brechtian kind of deal with strippers and a guy dressed like a rabbi who, at the appropriate time, would whip out his cock and tell jokes.

People waited, like assholes, for hours to get in this place.  We knew somebody there, so we just walked in, but what a shithole.  It was the kind of place I was always afraid I’d be found dead in back in my drug and alcohol days, yet here they were, lines of New Yorkers. . .the women skimpily dressed in keeping with the thematic premise
of the “Blue Angel”. . .standing out in 10-degree weather waiting to get in.

When Limelight opened in Chicago, we weren’t used to standing in line and being looked over.  Most of us didn’t bother with the place.  I had carte blanche to come and go because I was an artist and they sought out this community for their events.  Actors, artists, media creatures, the walking catalogs of the Ford and Elite Model agencies–this community was always welcome.

Joe Six-pack wasn’t.  Regular, everyday working people were herded outside behind the rope and Chicagoans were creeped out by it.  Standing in line to spend your money was for douchebags and pretty soon, if your friends spotted you standing outside of Limelight, you were pegged for a sucker and an overreaching shitheel.  It didn’t last here, and in some ways it was a shame.

The Halloween party alone brought out the freak in everyone–naked girls lying wrapped in snakes, acrobats, crazy vampire girls, transgender, other-world girls giving hand jobs to confused LaSalle street brokers–it was a bacchanal worthy of New Orleans, or the way-out-of-hand Halloween parade in New York.

I brought my friend Ricky Viscosi.  This was not his scene.  He liked biker bars and dance clubs, but Limelight on Halloween freaked him to no end.

“Tone, I was in the Piss-te-jool (men’s room) and a broad walks in an whips out her crank.  Tone, like a fuckin’ tree-trunk.  You could beat a cobra to death with a joint like hers.  This broad was packin’ and, don’t tell anyone. . . but she had a beautiful face.  Like a Playboy broad and jesus, I start to stiffen’ up.   Fuck.  I’m coppin’ wood.  I’m harder than Chinese algebra an’, if I’m honest, I’m thinkin’ I want to fuck this girl.  I want to pound her like milk-fed veal. . .like a filthy animal, y’know?  Barnyard shit.  And this broad is a GUY!!!! Maroooonnneee. . .I’m fucked up here.”

For years I teased him about getting in touch with his wild side.

He owned a pizza place and would regale his friends with stories of that night, always finishing with, “Ya gotta BE CAREFUL.  The broads might not be broads.  Joint like that?  Snake Pussy everywhere.  You could fuck up your whole alignment, capeesh?  An’ you might find yourself. . .liking it.  Then, whattya’ gonna do?”

Limelight lasted five years here–just long enough to remind us of who we are.

The Ascension of Crazy Frank in the Big World

“There is nothing one man will not do to another.”–Andre Gide, The Immoralist

There are men who are walking proof of evolution.  Those whose knuckles hover, just barely, over the ground.  The guys heavy of brow that just radiate “Cro Magnon.”  Men with short legs and long muscled bodies like primates. . like apes.

The first time I saw Crazy Frank I thought someone had shaved a gorilla.  He moved with intention and malice, rolling his shoulders from the years of
yard swag he’d cultivated.  Like a walking land shark.  Franky was built like an ox.  Franky was built for hard physical work.  Franky was built for violence.
There are men who possess a genius contained in their physicality; W.C. Fields comes to mind, light on his feet, a fleet and brilliant physical comic, despite (or because of) his size.  Almost certainly Marcel Marceau, Roberto Benigni, Muhammad Ali, Frank Gleason– no relation to Jackie.

Frankie was a leg-breaker, an enforcer. . .a man who’d forgotten more about dispensing pain than you will ever know.  He worked for bookies, bar owners, disgruntled husbands, wives, lovers; anyone who needed their fellow man tuned up and taught a lesson, and had a few hundred bucks to reinforce the learning experience of their transgressor.

Like Crazy Frank used to say himself, “Pain is a language everyone understands.”

There were ominous stories: “Frankie t’rew a guy off a 10-story building to see if he would bounce.”

“Frankie walked a guy into a propeller in Mexico.” La-la-la-la-la.

We knew some of these to be bullshit.

Then there were the stories that were true:  “Frankie broke Ricky’s arm from the elbow–BACK.”

I knew that story to be true because I watched it happen.  Ricky owed a bookie named Freddie Le Gare and when Frankie went to collect, Ricky decided to condescend to him, telling him he’d go get the currency, if Frankie could spell the word “currency” for him.  I believe Frank’s last words to Ricky G. were,
“Can you spell broken fuckin’ arm, Asshole?”

Frankie ended the lesson with a vicious kick in the ribs.

Frank was illiterate.  When he cashed his checks at the bars, he just made an ‘X’ on the back.  Nobody didn’t cash Frankie’s checks.

When he wasn’t doing his fellow man grievous bodily harm, Frank worked muscle jobs; construction labor, concert security and once in a wile, moving trucks and landscaping jobs.  He wasn’t allowed to drive so very often he rode a weird three-wheeler bike around. He drank a lot and did whatever drugs were offered him.

Frank’s biography is weird and patchy. He grew up around Villa Park and was in and out of juvie and foster homes his whole youth.  He would alternately say his mother gave him up for adoption because she was poor; others said she abandoned him.  Oddly, this illiterate man kept finding his mother and tried to
re-establish something of a relationship.  I once did a portrait of him wearing a white tux and a fedora, (“Like Sinatra”) and this forever cemented our friendship. vThis made me feel better because there have only evervbeen two things on this planet that genuinely scared me and Frankie was BOTH of them.

When I tended bar at Brennans. Frankie would come in and have a beer or two and then fall asleep with his head on his folded arms on the bar.  Me and a guy named Donnie Wright would flip coins to see who had to wake his ass up.  When one woke Frank, he would come up swinging and he knocked one of our doormen out one night.

There was a bar owner in Villa Park who ran the bookmaking around town.  Frankie did his collections,  If a guy hadn’t squared his Monday night football debts by Wednesday, he got a visit from Frank.  Often, Jimmy (the bar owner/bookie) would send someone to drive Frankie and “make sure he don’t get stupid and go too far.”  One time, this guy was me.  I was perplexed as to what Jimmy thought I could do to stop Frankie.  I soon found out.  Nothing.

We had been dispatched to a house in Oak Brook Terrace.  The guy was a big deal car dealer who was also a degenerate gambler on football, basketball, ponies, how far you could piss.  You name it, he bet on it.

He owed Jimmy three grand.  Because he was wealthy, he thought he could shine Jimmy on and roll his debt into his next week’s wagers.  The presence of Frank should have told him he enjoyed no such grace, but he had to be a hard-on and told Frankie to go around the side of the house and wash himself with the hose because he smelled.

Bad move.

Frank grabbed him by his hair and kneed him in the face.  The guy’s nose went like a cherry tomato, then Frankie dragged him across his own living room and found a bathroom, where he commenced stuffing the guy’s head down the commode.  I was guessing that this was the point Jimmy would have wanted me to make sure Frankie didn’t “go to far.”  In fact, we were way past that point.  I touched Frank’s back and said, “Hey calm down,Frank” to which he told me
to fuck off and that this asshole was going to pay or drown.  When Frank lifted his head out of the water, he promised immediate payment in no uncertain terms.  He had also shit himself and was bleeding out of his ears.  I wanted to throw up, but instead I just walked outside.

After the guy paid, Frankie grabbed him by the hair again and said, “When you lose, you pay, Asshole.  Those are the rules.”

Frank then suggested he go around to the side of the house and clean the shit off of himself with the garden hose.  I couldn’t help it.  I laughed my ass off when he said that.

I lost touch with Frank after that.  I never worked for Jimmy again and have tried hard to forget that day.  On the rare occasions, I ran into Frank after that.  It seemed like he’s shrunk.  He’d had two strokes which left him even slower of speech and he never did move down to Florida to live with his mother.  I always think of him this time of year because it was on Christmas Eve in 1984 I made the drawing of him for his mom.

Frankie was flush and insisted I take 50 bucks I really badly needed.  It is still one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

I found his obit the other day .  A friend on FaceBook ran it down for me. It damn near only said he was born and 49 years later, he died.  Newsprint had rendered him into one of the unknowable.  Well, I knew him and oddly enough, I liked him.  He wasn’t a good man, and I believe, also, he wasn’t a bad man.
He was a tragedy.  He never stood a chance and was never blessed.   He’d spoken his own epitaph a long time ago.

Frankie Lost.

And Frankie paid.

The Blue Buckeye

The new ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ movie opens today.

I saw the Swedish films from this series and they were great. But I’m a huge fan of David Fincher–ever since Seven, a movie that actually scared me, as did ‘Zodiac‘, even though I kind of knew the ending since it was based on a true crime story. Fincher seems to always get the right cast, the right atmosphere and, like last year’s The Social Network, the right script. As great as Fincher’s pace, actors, and cinematography are,the star of this film will always be Aaron Sorkin’s withering script.

What appealed to me about these stories–and I’ve read hundreds of thrillers and crime novels–is the setting, Scandanavia. Cold, gray, bloodless and austere on film, your Swedes and Norwegians almost seem like the “other” white people: milk-pale, blond, humorless and quiet. Let’s put it this way; there are no Scandanavian hillbillies. No Chili’s, no Cracker Barrels in Norway,just lot’ of nice fuckers named Ollie and Sven and two nations’ worth of really beautiful women.

In fact, people from this country are so pleasant, it’s hard to find ethnic slurs for them. I managed to, but it wasn’t easy.  Swedes are referred to as “herring chokers” and Norwegians? “Box-Heads.”  One of my unofficial rules is: You can tell how likable a group of people are according to how many ethnic slurs are available to describe them.  Your Box-Heads and Herring-Chokers are pretty likable motherfuckers.  Polite and not snotty like your Swiss– there is a reason those fuckers make clocks.  Swedes and Norwegians go through life being useful, inventing helpful shit like Ikea stores and the good meatballs and not culturally getting up in the rest of the world’s balls like the fucking French.  I like to think of them as the Europeans who don’t annoy the fuck out of everyone else.

For ten years I reviewed movies for a radio station in Chicago.  Me and my pal Buzz Kilman, we sat in the old downtown, rat-infested theaters like the Dearborn and the State and Lake, when they were on their last legs.  So downscale were these venues, me and Buzz thought nothing of firing up cigarettes
while watching the movie–nobody said dick to us.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would have been right in our wheelhouse.  We only reviewed relentlessly violent horror and crime movies and to
our ever-lasting cultural credit–we coined the term “Quality-Kill.” A “quality kill” is as it sounds; something sublimely inventive in its homicidal execution, like when Stephen Lack makes Michael Ironsides’ head explode in Scanners.  Fuck, was THAT cool.

Or when Denzel Washington pounds a grenade up the bad guy’s hole and walks away in Man on Fire.  Ouch.

I used to love going to the movies.  When I was a kid, me and my friends would smuggle Schlitz tall boys in our girlfriends’ purses and watch classics like
The Hills have Eyes, Last House on the Left and Deathrace 2000 or The Outlaw Josey Wales and we’d bet on how many guys Clint Eastwood would air out.  We’d even have an over/under option.  I say bet the “over” every time.

When we were young delinquents, the movies were one of those sanctuaries where parents, cops, teachers and other assholes had to leave you the fuck alone.
When Sissy Spacek wastes her whole high school and her dipshit jesus-freak mother, in Carrie, ot was an annihilation fantasy we could get behind.  Me and my friends started cheering, and clapping, and whistling really loud during that part.  A whole segment of the audience got up and left, just to get away from us.  It was cathartic.  It was also the mid 1970′s, a golden age for films in this country.

When we saw Taxi Driver we walked in shit-faced and walked out cold-stone sober.  It woke us up a bit….The world was an ungentle place and there is enough hate to go around. The Gomorrah of that New York City  was the world our country deserved.  After Watergate.  After Viet Nam.

One learns a lot about people while viewing movies with them. People who talk back to the screen are sometimes people who feel like nobody listens to them in the world.  Then there are those who deplore violence in films; while eating dinner in front of the real-world reportage from Iraq and Afghanistan.  Those limbless bodies don’t seem to bother them that much.  They also hate seeing people banging away on screen, but are not appalled by the presence and obscenity of hungry people with nowhere to live in their own city.

So tonight, I’m going to go watch some shit blow up and Lisbeth Salander fuck up some bad guys.  Remember: the family that watches shoot-em-up movies together ain’t out killing people in the name of god and country.

Merry Christmas.

Hard Candy Moth

“The Prophets? Nostradamus? The Horoscope? They don’t know dick about the end of the world.  Let me tell you something, Home-Slice, somebody’s world end every fucking day. Believe that.” –  Overheard at the wake of Kerry ‘Dooms’ Emery
New Orleans, October, 2008

This late in the year, one sometimes thinks of the  scorecard. The tally, of what has been lost, what has been gained and what has been forever altered.

This year has been cruel. It has divided our country along the lines of class.  The long-festering, 800-pound gorilla in the room, is now entirely visible.  We’ve found out that our most cruel inequities and most visceral divides lie not among races, creeds, or colors, but along the lines of the distribution of wealth and resources, and how unjustly this bounty is distributed.

This  crisis has Americans staring each other down across an economic chasm and as the days go by, we painfully discover that the collateral resentments and pain are every bit as personal and wounding as conflicts of race and gender are.  What one cannot have, it seems, is every bit as entombing as what one cannot be, especially when that thing is a job or an adequate place to live.

2011 made visible the bruised soul of America.

This was the year that Egyptians threw off their shackles and, via Twitter and Facebook, brought down a dictator.  It was also the year Occupy Wall Street and its hundreds (maybe thousands) of sister organizations entreated Americans to find the courage and the stomach for justified dissent and civil disobedience.  In many cities, the cops kept their cool and observed (and sometimes participated in) the dialogue.  In New York and Oakland, the cops demonstrated their fealty and obsequiousness to the wealthy classes by brutalizing protesters.

It was also the year I genuinely felt like I had some common ground with the Occupy movement.  As a small business owner with eight employees, I feel like I did what our President asked of us, which was to create jobs.  Between my studio and my gallery, we created  four.  He also told the banks to take the TARP money and loan money to businesses such as mine, in order that we might create  more jobs.  It makes sense.  Stimulate the economy by putting more people to work and thus, more money moving around.

Because we have a Constitution, the President could only strongly suggest the banks do this with their hand-out.  He could not ORDER it.  Thus, a great many of the banks sat on the cash and continued to pay themselves bonuses while the rest of our nation took it in the ass.  These are the same tools who are intimidated when they now look out the window of their bank and see legions of dissatisfied and pissed off Americans of every race, creed  and social strata staring back at them.  It is like the Nietzsche quote that warns us of looking into the abyss. . .that the abyss looks also into us.

This year, the banks and financial gatekeepers began to fear us; and this is a good thing.  Every once in a while it’s good to let the powers that be know that we can take this place any time we want to.

*

This is the year we lost Smokin’ Joe Frazier, one of boxing’s faithful.  The bruising heavyweight forever throwing the punishing left hook that put Muhammad Ali on his ass and shut him up–briefly.  Joe was from Beaufort, South Carolina tobacco country and hailed from the working-poor upon whose backs the wealth of this country was built.  Joe Frazier actually walked behind a mule, pushed a plow, and with his own two fists, extricated himself from poverty.

Ali’s characterizations of Joe were thoughtlessly cruel and a real betrayal.  Frazier campaigned actively so that Ali’s boxing license might be reinstated after refusing induction to the army.  He even lent Ali money  when things were tough.  Ali’s subsequent taunting of Joe as a ‘Tom” and likening him to a gorilla was ugly and undignified.  Ali’s defenders will tell you this was just showbiz; something Ali did to goose the box office and create excitement, but they know better.  What Ali did was culturally cruel. He separated Joe Frazier from the admiration of other people of color and, at the very least, Joe Frazier of Beaufort, South Carolina had earned this. Frazier never forgave this and I don’t blame him.

Sadly, it is only now that Joe Frazier is gone that we are able to discern his history as his own as opposed to merely being tangential to Ali’s.  What is fascinating is how much more complex the portrait of Joe Frazier becomes once we view him fully–apart  from Ali and the zeitgeist of the 1960s.

In Chicago, we buried the great Hubert Sumlin a few days ago.  Whenever you hear that snarling guitar in Howlin’ Wolf’s Wang-Dang Doodle or those wrenching passages behind Muddy Waters, you’re hearing the incomparable Mr. Sumlin; and this man earned his dough.  He and Wolf often quarreled and, on occasion, knocked each other’s teeth out.  Howlin Wolf was a huge guy with a nasty temper who took no shit. Hubert often said, “I couldn’t let Wolf know I was afraid of him.  He’d a killed me.  So every time he hit me, I hit him back.  Harder.”

To hear Hubert Sumlin play was to hear one of the last echoes of Robert Johnson–Hubert and Honeyboy Edwards being the last living conduits to the man at the Crossroads.  My pal, Todd Park Mohr of Big Head Todd and the Monsters, played a tribute at Sumlin’s graveside on Tuesday.  It was lovely in its acknowledgement of just what we, who grew up with Rock and Roll, owe those generations of black men with box guitars, who took what was sad and mundane and made it transcendent.

Godspeed Mr. Frazier.
Godspeed Mr. Sumlin.

The Dust and the Ache

This time of year, the colors become more of the earth–mud, sticks, grays, silvers, and pink sunrises and sunsets.  As the leaves fall off the trees, the skeletal picture of winter begins to render itself in this city. It gets dark at 4:30 and the cold becomes even more biting. It is to remind you that winter is cruel and winter is coming.  Getting old is not for pussies.

I always notice the people who work outside in this weather–the Streets and San guys, the mailman, the U.P.S. drivers, the cab drivers.  There is a middle-aged man who walks dogs in my neighborhood.  He got downsized out of his corporate job some years ago and I notice him because he is so close to my age.   He tells me that he was no longer “relevant.”  He says this without acrimony or bitterness.  He tells me it is what it is.  He tells me it is the best thing that ever happened to him; that he walks dogs for a living, mostly for cash that he doesn’t have to report and he lives a simple kind of life.

“I’ve learned gratitude.  I’ve learned it from the dogs.  I take them to Wicker Park and sit on the bench and we watch the world change minute by minute and it is not bad.  I got off the Hamster wheel.”
I’m sometimes uncomfortable around him because he is so close to my age. Selfishly; I feel like irrelevance might be contagious .

In fact in the art world, I’m pretty damned irrelevant–a dinosaur, a guy who makes pictures, which is SO last century.  So not post modern.  In Chicago, for years, there has been an effort to imbue the pantomime of art-making with the same definition as actual art-making.  In some circles, talk is the same as art.

Yeah.

Really.

Blow me.

To all you “conceptual” theorists, tell me how that works out for you

Culture moves fast,  usually faster than we do. It’s HOW one is rendered irrelevant.  What one generation considers important, or considers art, or literature, the next doesn’t.  One minute you are the next big whisper, the next, you’re talking to dogs.

I kind of get it and oddly, I accept it.

I’ve never functioned well in the art world.  I always had more in common with the Teamsters and cops assigned to art fairs than the art world mout breathers. Twenty years ago, when Chicago had the biggest art fair in the world, I remember talking with the Teamsters and kind of seeing this silly world full of self-important douchebags through their eyes.  One of my favorite lines came from my pal, Pirate, who has been a Teamster at Navy Pier for years.

“Hey, Tone. . .who dresses these motherfuckers?”

You’d have had to have been there to notice the absolute earnestness in Pirate’s face when he offered this query.

The truth is, I don’t belong here.  I’m a statistical aberration; one of those square peg, oddball cases.  I love making art and I hate the world one must traffic in to exist while doing this.  It is full of boot-lickers, ass-kissers, dilettantes, wankers, paste-eaters and pukes and sadly, these dopes?   They are necessary and as much as I would like it to not be true, these twat’ push the discourse forward, like it or not.

I never liked the contempt the collector class had for working class people.  People like the long line of them that I come from.  I remember once hearing a dipshit dealer complain about the working class’ enclave near where he “summered.”  He was pissed that the “service industry people” were
clogging up the supermarket on the weekends.  In fact, he thought they should have their own, on their side of town.  I’ve always been ashamed that I didn’t say anything.  I was new to all of this and didn’t want to upset anyone.  Needless to say, I soon got over this.

It is this time of year I’m extra nice to the dog walkers, the mail people, those who lift, push, carry, and build things, because I know I’m supposed to be out there in the winter weather with them,pushing a wheel-barrow, carrying an 8-pound sledge, building or pouring a form; the jobs I used to do before I refused to do anything seriously except draw pictures.  I remember the ache of physical work and sometimes I miss it.  It was a fatigue earned in the dust.  In an animal kind of way, I understood.   These are my people and this was my lot.  It was simple and honest and elemental.  Creating things is a burden and it fills you with strange, onerous fires that change who you are and how you carry your pain and your joy in this world.  It is the curse we are blessed with. . . those lucky enough to be afflicted with Art.

The Atlantic City Moth

Everything dies baby, that’s a fact
but maybe everything that dies, someday comes back. . .
Put your make-up on, fix your hair up pretty
and meet me tonight in Atlantic City. –Bruce Springsteen, Atlantic City

There is a huge set piece in the Green Point neighborhood in Brooklyn.  It’s right on the water, and from a distance it looks a bit like a palace of some kind, or an urban mirage.  It is the set for Boardwalk Empire, the hugely entertaining tale of Prohibition-era Atlantic City on HBO.

It stars Steve Buscemi as Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, who is based on the real-life politico and racketeer of the ’20s, Enoch “Nucky” Johnson.  It is thinly-veiled fiction and is filled with a lot of very good actors doing some of the best work of their careers, most notably, Dabney Coleman and William Forsythe, playing a couple of homicidally despicable motherfuckers, and the great Chicago actor, Michael Shannon, as a Prohibition agent with a bad case of Jesus.

Its plot line is dense and rewarding and historically somewhat accurate, even though it claims to be fictional.  If only the real Atlantic City were still somewhat like this.

The first time I ever went to Atlantic City, I was struck by the sheer polarities of its landscape.  Donald Trump had just built a huge, glittering obscenely fucking-ugly casino there (the Taj Mahal, I think) and directly across the street was the most austere ghetto I’d ever seen in America.  The people of New Jersey had been sold that “casino gambling” cultural band-aid. You can damn near forgive them.  It was 1978 and Atlantic City had to do something.  Like the saying goes, “A drowning man will grab a snake,”
which is precisely what Atlantic City and the state of New Jersey did.

Casino gambling was supposed to be the cure-all for schools, jobs and housing for the Jersey shore.  What it did was provide a lot of shitty service-industry jobs or make-work jobs and opened the door for organized crime to come in and loot the profitable elements; slots, dealers, food concessions, linen services, and garbage collection to name a few.  Atlantic City was a shithole with casinos.

Everyday the buses full of the geriatric trade would pull in from New York, Philly, and North Jersey and wheelchair-bound old, blue-haired ladies would pile off of them with their jars of nickels and play the slots for a few hours.  It wasn’t sexy like Vegas and, unlike Vegas, nobody in Jersey knew how to smile.  It was a city of gray, desultory old age limping through the sequential lights, or young men in SUVs, packing ‘nines’ in their waistbands, plying the crack trade on and around the Boardwalk, speeding down Ventnor and Atlantic Avenues being chased by squad cars and blaring rap music.

But boy, what it had once been!  Like Coney Island, it was one of those places wherethe playful American imagination took hold; a P.T. Barnum-type of place, complete with spectacle and architectural curiosities like “Lucy,” the six-story elephant ensconced on the 9200 block of Atlantic Avenue–kind of a knockoff of the one on Coney Island except, ’til this day, through a lot of local boosterism and fundraising, it still stands. . .like a  Looney Tunes Trojan horse for the American promise.

The spoils of the new gambling fortunes in Atlantic City were bitterly fought over by the Jersey, Philly, and New York mobs.  The “Chicken Man” in Bruce Springsteen’s sad, beautiful and elegiac song that bears the city’s name was Dominick Testa, a Philly gangster who tried to muscle in, along with the Bracco family on the Jersey and New York outfit’s turf.  They blew his house up–with him in it.

Casino gambling breathed new life into the organized crime of the East coast, including the nascent Russian mob who quickly took over the “street trades of drugs, guns and prostitution.  The Italians still had gambling, garbage and labor, still after all of these years, the best things to have.

Boardwalk Empire has also generated new interest in this place.  A lot of the Boardwalk is being renovated to old-timey, amusement-theme places and no doubt they will fuck it up.

My favorite images of Atlantic City come from the elegant Louis Malle film from the early ’80s that starred Burt Lancaster, in the best role of his life, and a ripe Susan Sarandon who, at one point, squeezes lemons all over her delightfully naked upper body to rid herself of the scent of seafood, while Lancaster surreptitiously  watches.  The look on his face is one of sadness, regret and animal longing.

A few scenes later, Lancaster is trying to explain this place to a young, idiot wannabe coke dealer. As they are walking down the boardwalk, Lancaster, resplendent in a wintery white overcoat and fedora, suddenly stops and looks the punk in the face and tells him, “See that ocean, kid?  Now 30 years ago, that was something, that was an ocean.”

The dope doesn’t understand, but at this point, we sure do.  At one time, this was a place of dreams; and Lancaster remembers because he now knows he is this dream’s last, faithful inhabitant.

The Atomic Hobo

A funny thing happened at Sotheby’s the other night.  The consumers in this rarified marketplace, met Occupy Wall Street.  I wasn’t there, but from what I’ve gleaned from those who were, the OWS crowd showed up in support of Sotheby’s striking art handlers, Teamsters Local 814.

The august auction giant beefed up the security and escorted the bigwigs in under guard and, as Dennis Miller once said, “It was the sharpest bit of choreography since the Oswald prison transfer.”  The auction-folk were shocked, shocked I say, to realize that the art market too, is considered a valve in the malignant heart of the 1%.  If you notice, I didn’t say “art world,” though one can make a fairly decent case that many of its inhabitants are also the dreaded one per-centers.

And you know what? The OWS folks are right.  In that atmosphere, for that activity, the goosing, cajoling and casual brutality of the market mentality, i.e. rich imbeciles measuring dick-size.

The OWS people, as well as Local 814, the Teamsters striking at Sotheby’s for a living wage, or a living in New York wage I should say, the OWS contingent could not have picked a better target.  And the art world should get its head out of its ass and ask themselves just how the fuck they got there.

I think 50 years ago the artists would have been right out there in the streets with the myriad other folks,  carrying signs and fighting back.  Somewhere along the line we just got too damned complacent.  The work of an artist became about “career” and “career path” and we forgot that the creative world was part of the larger world.   Art people turned from scholarship to the market place.  A good curator was no longer who knew the most but who could raise the most money.  Museums started seeking out CEOs rather than scholars.  To their credit, the Art Institute of Chicago just reversed this idiotic trend by selecting a solid art man in its appointment of Douglas Druick, rather than a human cash register.

Mr. Druick is a long-time curator at the museum, with decades of impeccable scholarship under his belt.  Let’s hope other museums take the hint.

By all accounts, the Sotheby’s honchos were terrified at the prospect of some Adam Lindemann or Dakis Joanu-type encountering some unpleasantness with the great unwashed out in the street. So Sotheby’s did what the 1 % always does to protect its interests–they sent men with guns.  AFTER, they twittered themselves silly boasting of the most profitable number ever fetched for a Clyfford Still painting, did they think the striking art handlers weren’t going to see that?

Somehow saying they called the police doesn’t quite define it in this discourse.  When big business is pushed back (and make NO mistake, Sotheby’s IS big business), they send men with guns.  Just like Halliburton.  Just like the railroads and their Pinkertons a century ago.

Thirty years ago there were exhibits like Artist’s Call to protest the U.S. incursions into Nicaragua and El Salvador.
The artist as an agent of social change seemed alive and well.  And then the 1980s happened.  The culture of celebrity artists began in earnest.  Young artists as rock stars.  Instead of being reviled by wealthy assholes, they (and curators–their cultural caddies) sought proximity to the power-tit.  Dollar bills became more important than bain cells.  More important than content.  More important than beauty.

The Marketplace became a beast unto itself and artists worked assiduously to assure themselves a place in it.  Last Thursday at Sotheby’s was the morning-after moment; the place the market and fashion creeps have led us to. We have the art world we deserve.

A few nights ago, I watched Vik Muniz’ towering and humane Wasteland on cable wherein Mr. Muniz helps people working in a mountain of garbage, cull beauty and meaning from that which surrounds them–helping them gently realize the transcendent moments in their own lives.  When it ended, I was near tears and moved beyond words.  Right at a time that I’d felt artists had forgotten how to engage and include the world  in their work, Mr. Muniz’ film restored my faith a bit.  In a mountain of garbage, he elevated dirt poor people out of furious loss and despair.

It can be done.

Three years ago, I participated in the first New Orleans Biennial, Prospect 1, wherein curator Dan Cameron did much the same thing–lifting that beleaguered city’s art community into celebration and renewal against formidable odds, namely the city of New Orleans’ political structure, which barely lifted a finger in it’s own best interests.  Prospect 1 changed the way I thought about what artists can do for a community and what,
regrettably , we’ve not done.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is a wake-up call.  We can play tag-ass in the art world, or be part of the larger conversation which wants badly for the participation of artists; our communities. Who knows, we might learn something. . .besides what the Clyfford Still painting sold for.

Winter Night Moth

It is the time of year when the moths die; when, on window sills all over the world, the first chill has laid them, on their powdery sides.  A perfect mirror of each other.

This fall I’m performing  my play, Stations Lost in Brooklyn, New York.  We’re performing it in The Boiler, a performance and exhibition space in the Williamsburg section of North Brooklyn.  It is kind of a perfect room for this show.  A one-time actual boiler where citizens of this borough worked for 100 years.  It is a grimy and hard-scrabble reminder of the hard labor done in this great city back when our country actually MADE things.

There is also an odd juxtaposition in that the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are occurring just across the East River.  I walked through the demonstration  on my first days in New York before we started our technical rehearsals.  My play is very much about the country we find ourselves in now, with its blighted economy and missed opportunity, greed, and unfocused bigotries.  As I walked through Occupy Wall Street, I was amazed that this was no ‘youth’ protest.  I saw all kinds of people; firemen, construction workers, teachers, mothers, veterans, and many, many more of the educated and unemployed new underclass created by the greed and mismanagement of our financial institutions. I feel, for maybe the first time, that I have a bit of skin in this argument.  I employ eight other artists.   I have a gallery and a printmaking shop in Chicago. My partner, Adam Seidel, and I have invested over six figures each to start a fine art company focused on  small edition etchings, as well as books and job creation.   My other partner, Stan Klein, and I have a theatrical production company and a publishing house.  After depositing 100,000 dollars in a business account we found out that even with this capitalization, we’d not be allowed to  borrow more money to expand our business and create more jobs.  In fact, this deposit did not even avail us to a line of credit.

I seem to recall the President telling the banks that in exchange for their TARP money–their bail-out–they were to lend money and stimulate the economy and, more importantly, create jobs.  These little etchings support eight people. And, truth be told?  They could support a whole hell of a lot more were we allowed to grow.

Performing this  show in Brooklyn has been a lot of fun.  Though our houses have been smaller we’ve had great audiences.  Last Saturday night while performing the first act, I noticed an elegantly dressed gentleman with white hair in the third row.  I took me a few moments to realize it was David Byrne, the true renaissance man of  New York–musician, visual artist, activist for biking and all around cultural catalyst.  It was cool to see him in the audience.

Our opening night we had the great Lou Reed, and the director of MoMA, Glenn Lowry, as well as a whole host of my fellow Brooklyn artists who’ve been amazingly supportive.

The Boiler is the performance and arts space fostered into existence by Pierogi Gallery, also of  Williamsburg.  They went through no small amount of bullshit getting this space up to code, so that we could perform this show and I appreciate it.  New York audiences are a little different than Chicago; a bit more reserved. . . quieter.  They really listen.

I’ve been staying with the painter, Greg Stone, the mordantly funny and exceptionally gifted visual artist who is the best roommate one could imagine.  He  is in possession of the dryest of wits and has a wise-ass, hard-boiled and no bullshit view of the world.  We’ve laughed our asses off.

One of the most lovely things is being in New York for autumn.  It is a season that loves this city.   Everything that seems timeless and classic about this city only seems more so, preserved in the amber of autumn light.  I went to a farmers market in McCarren Park in Brooklyn and the nip in the air, the changing colors of trees and the general goodwill were the ingredients of one of those perfect New York days that keeps people wanting to live here.

There is something to working as an actor in New York , that makes one feel more for real.  And that there is more at stake.  No matter what theater one works in, you are surrounded by the ghosts of giants.  This is one  of the places where people come to be measured against the best.

Angel of the Riptide Lounge

There are joints.
There are dumps.
There are gin mills.
Watering holes.
Saloons and dives.

Jilly’s was a joint; upscale full of well put-together cabaret goombas and big-haired girls with after market jugs and enough botox to seal the Liberty Bell.

The Mutiny is a dump.  It smells like piss from the front door and gets worse with every step with the Pine-Sol kicking in to try and cover the other aromas.

Stop and Drink was a gin milll; the kind of place where guys  knock back hard liquor drinks quickly to stave off the shakes.

The Billy Goat is a saloon; a no-nonsense place to hammer back a few shots and beers at lunchtime to maintain one’s sanity.  It has regulars and a sense of raucous camaraderie come payday.

Marie’s Riptide Lounge is a dive, in the best sense of the word.

The proprietor of this dive, the late, bouffant-crowned, Marie Wuczynski was ten days older than dirt when I met her in the late ’70s.   The Riptide was where you went if, at 2 in the morning, you just weren’t drunk enough yet or if you were still looking for “love.”  The Riptide is your bar of last chances.  Marie herself would pour you shots and have one with you.  She liked a jigger of Jaeger with a Pespi back.  Only old Polish ladies drink like this.  She was not above a bawdy joke.  In fact, she relished them.   To put a finer point on it, She was a dirty old broad.

The place was always big with my musician friends.  My pal, Buzz Kilman, years ago, answered the phone one Saturday morning, bleary of thought and speech and he told me , “Dude. . .I had a long night.  Whatever was supposed to happen today, will not happen today.  I ended the night at the Riptide.  .I feel like I’ve been shot at and missed and shit at and hit.”

There is a word for people who cannot get sufficiently stinko by 2 A.M.  A cynic might surmise that they just aren’t trying hard enough.

The front-door of the Riptide empties one right into the on-ramp from Armitage Avenue to the Kennedy.  Everything about the place warns you in advance, before you walk in, to go the fuck home.  Once you break the plane of the front door, it’s over.  You aren’t going anywhere, Sporty, unless it is to the bar for
another shot of Jaeger and to pet the light-up Spuds MacKenzie, because you’re hammered, Bucko, and you think it’s a real dog.

It always seems like it is a Twin Peaks version of Christmas in here.   You may not find the girl of your dreams, but you will find the 40-year old lass, who is, for probably very good reasons, still single, out for the night, and wants nothing more than to be pounded like a milk-fed veal chop; and only a drunken, miserable bastard like you will do.

It is a nice antidote to all of the dipshit bars that have opened in Bucktown over the last few years.  Every swinging dick in the Village has a bar you don’t want to drink in. You know the ones.  Twelve-dollar martinis with all manner of shit in them. Chocola-tini?  What kind of pussy shit is that?  Even saying word this can turn you into a Ken doll.  Apple-tini ? Dirty Martini?  I know, I know. . .these are for chicks; get them drunker, therefore more malleable,faster.   Still.  The pussification of a perfectly good bar?  this is some sad shit.

There is also the issue of 20-dollar beers.  Huh?

Now look.  I quit drinking 28 years ago.  Back then you could get a longneck Bud and a shot of Beam for three bucks and during “Happy Hour,” they’d back those bitches up with a two-for- one which served as a guarantee that you’d walk out of the joint hammered to the bone and trying to string noun and verb together.

Now there are these really primo Belgian ales and artisan beers.  I know guys who are brewers and they are VERY serious about making beer as an art form.
So I don’t doubt for a minute that their beers are worth every dime you pay for them.  Hell, if these brews were around when I drank, I’d have never been able to afford being an alcoholic.  It IS a substantial investment.

At Marie’s Riptide there are no “beer snobs;” just guys who want their Old Style or Bud and maybe a shot of something to stop the hands from trembling.  It is a last-chance kind of place.  Like I said before, the dive you choke down your last drink of the night in at 4 in the morning so you can maybe forget why you’re there.

This past February, Marie passed away.  Nobody is REALLY sure how old she was, I’m guessing 82 or so.  I’m also guessing she went with a with a shot of Jaeger in one hand, a Parliament dangling from her lips, under a new perm.   She was the best reason to find yourself on the ass end of Armitage at three in the morning.

My Pony Drugs

“If you’re snorting smack when you’re 21, you’re crazy. But if you’re 80 and you’re NOT snorting smack, well. . . then, you’re really out of your mind.”
– Alan Arkin’s character, Little Miss Sunshine–2006

Every year for the past 28 years October 5th rolls around, and I have a quiet thought about my sobriety.  It is the thing I am most grateful for in this life.  All else would not have been possible but for it.   On this date in 1983, I stopped drinking and doing drugs.  My last bender was an all out hurricane  involving whiskey, alcohol, cocaine, heroin, and what is now called “Ecstacy.”  We called it MDA, but it was your same basic happy-happy, warm and fuzzy fuck-drug that kids used to pop at raves.

There are some days I honestly miss the hell out of drugs.  There are also days when I tell myself I’m glad I did them.  Then come the days when I’m by myself and shake at the thought of how close I came to killing myself.  Drugs are like that–confusing and deceptive, wily and beyond discipline (at least, for me) or definition.

There are also people who are just better off stoned.  Reality is way too poisonous for them.  As cynical as this sounds, we all know someone like this; people for whom we are grateful there are Ddrugs to channel their unpleasantness into.  As sad as it is, there are those who are hungry for the grave , or the coma and do not care who they take with them.

Teachers, parents, nuns, and other authority figures would always tell me, “Drugs are for people who cannot handle reality.”  All of these years later, I realize they’re right.  It’s true.  Not in the way they suspect, but these mulch heads are absolutely correct.

In our own country, right now, “reality” sucks the big, blue vein.  The banks, the politicians, and our government have systematically fist-fucked the average citizen.  Whenever Joe Sixpack walks into a business office, or their former place of employment or the local chicken franchise and empties a clip into the inhabitants, am I surprised?  Truth be told? I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.

I think, sometimes, people make a choice:  “Go home, roll up a fatty , and try to put today behind me?” or “Go home, clean my guns, come back, and toe-tag as many of these mother-fuckers as humanly possible before the cops get here and park one in my brisket.”

I think this choice is considered WAY more often than we suspect.   I know perfectly normal, friendly, next-door neighbor-type, regular slobs who harbor annihilation fantasies that would curl your hair.  I have an acquaintance you’d swear is the sweetest guy in the world (and he is) who once, with a smile on his face , told me he’d wanted to pound a barb-b-que spit up his ex-wife’s ass and slowly turn her over a fire.

No shit.

I don’t want there to be any obstacles between this guy and whatever stash of chill pills he might need to put this thought out of his head.   Vicodin? Oxycontin?  Percocet?  Here you are,Bro. . .take two.  And have a cocktail.  Jesus.

However much crime drugs account for, I’d hate like hell to think of how much there would be without them.

If you want an example:  Prohibition.

It provided the venture capital for the rise of the most powerful criminal enterprises in the world.  Without Prohibition?  Al Capone would have been just another bartender in Brooklyn.  A great many in our country would like to legislate our morality for us; tell us what we can drink, smoke, snort. . .where we can live, who we can fuck.  These are the imbeciles who think the government should be your fucking mom.  There is NOTHING in the Constitution that says it is the job of government to protect you from yourself.  The founding fathers did a fairly good job of asshole-proofing our basic freedoms.

Were it up to me, drugs would be legal.  All of them.  You’d be able to walk into Walgreens and buy crack,  ten rocks for a buck.  Smack, ludes, acid, hash, shrooms, opium.  ALL of it, Bunky.  The whole shooting match would be as legal as Girl Scout cookies.

The war on Drugs has been a war on the poor. It has monetized a criminal empire that make the bootleggers of the 20′s and 30′s look like rag pickers.  Would a lot of people kill themselves with legal drugs?  Yeah.  the same ones who are practicing suicide on the installment plan now.  It is sad and it is true.  A certain and specific part of the population would not be able to handle this much freedom, just like now.

The alternative is to continue the fruitless , foolish, and racist “War on Drugs”and guarantee another generation of 15-year olds will be on corners spraying the rest of us with 9 millimeter rounds.  So either teach these fuckers how to shoot. . .or remove the need.  Legalize drugs and you break the back of a black market and reduce gun-related crime by at least half.  Prisons would be for violent criminals instead of unlucky potheads.

I suspect this won’t happen anytime soon.  There is WAY too much money in incarcerating people–mostly people of color  The next squeak-head politician you hear promising to get tough on drugs?  Know that guys hasn’t a clue.  In the early ’90s the Mayor of Baltimore, Curtis Schmoke, was run out of office
for suggesting legalization.  Mayor Schmoke, at the time, was presiding over a city with the most pernicious homicide rate in America.  He had tired of passing caskets containing teen-agers.  So he suggested something smart, bold, and brave.  In the American political theater, nothing gets you killed faster than this. The truth, in our political discourse, is still the most dangerous drug one can traffic in.