Cash On Demand

My dad was originally from a small town near Birmingham, Alabama. he moved to Chicago sometime around 1960 and spent the rest of his life here. He changed quite a bit in that time--his Deep-South drawl softened; his attitudes toward minorities did a complete 180, to the point where, in the end, he counted some of his African-American and Hispanic co-workers among his closest friends; and he eventually gave up drinking and smoking, though too late to reverse the damage he'd done to his body.

Some aspects of his upbringing, though, never did go away. He liked pan gravy and biscuits. He put Louisiana Hot Sauce on everything, from scrambled eggs to perch to the aforementioned biscuits and gravy. He wore increasingly brightly colored floppy hats so that Mom could find him in a crowd. He enjoyed fishing, even if it was just spin-casting off of the then-abandoned Navy Pier with a transistor radio hooked to his belt and at least one of his young sons at his side. And that transistor radio was usually dialed to one of the local country/western stations, thus increasing the odds substantially that he would hear a Johnny Cash song.

Dad liked many C&W players, from Willie Nelson to Loretta Lynn to Hank Williams (Senior, NOT Junior), but he loved Johnny Cash. The only LPs I can recall him owning were discs like Live from Fulsom Prison. And when he got a CD player for Christmas, I bought him a collection of Johnny Cash's greatest hits (re-recorded in the 1980s, a curiously common practice then, but still close in tone to the original recordings), which he played more than any of the other C&W CDs he received afterward.

Dad's love of "The Man in Black" was not unconditional, though. In 1994, the year before Dad died, Cash and producer Rick Rubin collaborated on American Recordings, an album that featured songs (some originals, but mostly covers of other artists' songs) stripped down to the very basics: An acoustic guitar and JC's baritone and that's about all. Most of the songs were recorded in Rubin's living room and Cash's cabin, with a couple of entries taped live at the Viper Room in LA. The result? A collection of spare, darker-than-dark recordings that packed an extraordinary emotional punch capable of blindsiding the casual listener expecting good-ol'-boy country-fried sentiment. I bought the CD as soon as it came out, gave it a listen or two, liked what I heard, for the most part (though Cash's cover of Louden Wainwright III's "The Man Who Couldn't Cry" is a lousy way to end the album, if only because the song itself is so annoying), and passed it along to Dad, with the proviso that if he enjoyed it he could keep it for his own.

The next day, he handed the CD back to me, shaking his head. He hated it.

It wasn't that he hated Cash's singing or Rubin's production. It was the nature of the songs themselves, which focus so acutely on anger, sadness and violence that Dad just got worn out by the downbeat tone of the whole project. I understood what he meant, as did others: When the video for "Delia's Gone" was shown on Bevis & Butthead, one of them asked, "Is this Gangsta Rap?"

I can't help but wonder how Dad would have felt about Johnny Cash's more recent album's, though. I never bought or borrowed American Recordings II: Unchained, so I can't speak to its quality or lack thereof. However, I do own his last two albums--American III: Solitary Man and American IV: The Man Comes Around--and each has moments that can pry open the floodgates and reduce me to heaves and sobs (not as difficult a trick as it used to be, but still...).

Cash has suffered through numerous health crises the past few years: he was misdiagnosed as having Shy-Dager Syndrome, a neurological disease akin to Parkinson's; he's had multiple bouts of pneumonia, one of which dropped him in a coma for eight days; and he suffers from diabetes, glaucoma and asthma. All of these physical difficulties have informed his last couple of albums, making them thematically more meditative, reflective and, at times, downright angry--as if he knows that each album might be his last. His voice has also changed with age and illness: What once was a booming baritone how falters and wavers with regularity. Rather than detracting from the music, though, his vocal strain almost seems to enhance it, make it more emotional, more sorrowful. It sounds more often than not like either he's on the verge of tears or he's trying to get the listener on the verge--and, for the most part, he succeeds.

American III: Solitary Man, which was released in 2000, is an oddball mix of Cash originals, traditional hymns and covers of other artists' songs: He opens the album on a note of defiance with Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" (with Petty himself singing backup). Cash also borrows from Neil Diamond's songbook for the title cut and damn near takes ownership of U2's "One" and Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat." That latter song is what got me to buy American III in the first place: It's laced with pain, resignation, acceptance of fate, hope for redemption. Other titles--"I See a Darkness," "I'm Leavin' Now"--would suggest that, if this had indeed been Cash's last album, he was ready, if not entirely willing, to accept that.

Just before this past Thanksgiving, though, the Cash and Rubin team presented their latest gift to the music world, American IV: The Man Comes Around. Like its predecessor, American IV is a grab bag of new Cash songs, like the apocalyptic title tune and the sweet, sad "Give My Love to Rose," traditional ballads like "Danny Boy" and "Streets of Laredo," and more recent pop fare. Some choices work better than others. Cash's voice is almost too weak to do proper justice to the Beatles' "In My Life," cover of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" (one of my all-time favorite songs) just doesn't translate to Cash's country/folk style, even if it does fit thematically with the rest of the album, which touches on religion, redemption and passage from one state of being into another more than a few times.

Other choices, however, blindside you with their power. It might seem mad for Cash to cover Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt," but as you listen to it you realize that Cash's voice lends move validity to the pain, regret and frustration expressed than even Trent Reznor did. His baritone is just right for "Danny Boy" and Streets of Laredo," giving each song the right mournful pitch. His duet with Nick Cave on Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I could Cry" is a great meshing of two rough-edged voices, and closing the album with "We'll Meet Again" implies hope, at least on the surface. (Cash could just as easily have been making sly reference to Stanley Kubrick's use of the song at conclusion of Dr. Strangelove, thus giving American IV apocalyptic bookends of two very different kinds.)

But the song that gets to me the most here is one that's always been able to get to me anyway: "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Cash and Rubin take the Simon & Garfunkel classic and transform it into something closer to a hynm, Cash's voice lending uncanny authority to the sentiment expressed--who would know more about "troubled water" than someone who'd sailed on it so many times and survived? Cash is joined here by, of all people, Fiona Apple, whose breathy, almost ethereal backing vocals don't seem right at first, but blend better upon repeated listens; the two dissimilar vocal styles manage to complement and support one another like the emotional support offered in the song. The pairing also fits the thread of passage that runs through American IV: A music rebel from one generation passing a sonic baton to another

I'm not sure what Dad would have thought of either of these albums; he may have been too turned off by the first American Recordings to give the subsequent albums in the series a try. I do think, though, that he would have found things to like here. Dad spent many of the years after he quit drinking and joined Alcoholics Anonymous trying to make up for what he'd done or hadn't done for or to his family in the years before. His regrets, his experience, his pain--they all informed his journey to redemption, acceptance and forgiveness. When he died, he and I were at peace with one another, even if neither of us talked about it much and neither of us wanted him to go as soon as he did. And I believe Johnny Cash is at peace with himself and his kin now, too, though he doesn't sound like he's ready or willing to go just yet.

Today would have been Dad's 68th birthday. So I'm going to play American IV: The Man Comes Around sometime tonight, and Dad can listen in from whatever vantage point he'd be listening from. And maybe, when Johnny Cash gets to "Bridge Over Troubled Water," we can all have a good, hard cry together once more.

A Christmas Casa

There's always an annual self-debate within the walls of La Casa del Terror: to decorate for Christmas, or not to decorate? That is the question. Do I lug out the storage container full of ornaments, garlands and figurines, or do I spare myself the bother? After all, I live alone and don't get many visitors (at least not after the Halloween Movie Bash), so the only person who will see these festive knickknacks will be me and the Girlish Girls, who could not possibly care less--unless I roll the tree in catnip, they'll not be roused to action.

But then I take a walk around my neighborhood, and the debate rapidly ends.

There are a lot of single-family homes in my hood, and many of the owners go all out at Christmastime. From sequential lights rimming the rooftops to inflatable snowmen tucked onto too-small front porches to life-sized illuminated figures of Jesus, Joseph and the Virgin Mary, these homeowners charge into the holiday season with admirable, even enviable vigor. If they can go all out like that, can't I spare a minute or three to dig in my closet and set up a tree? Especially since no one else in my particular apartment building seems to have decorated at all?

So the debate, then, boils down not to whether or not to decorate for Christmas, but the degree to which I decorate: shall I dust off the artificial pine, or will some vintage figurines suffice? Last year, the latter was the case. I set up a small display in the living room, smiled at it occasionally and dismantled it before the sun had set on New Year's Day. But this year, when I could sincerely use some extra cheer and would rather spend the whole season in bed? It would have been easy to blow off decorating entirely. Really, it would have. And it wouldn't have been a network television first, either.

Instead, on Thanksgiving Day, when I was home alone for the first time ever (because Mom's employers, in their eternal wisdom, scheduled her to work both Wednesday second shift and Thursday first shift, thus delaying any cooking till Thanksgiving evening--and don't even ask me why I didn't cook for her: she really enjoys making holiday meals for her sons and likely wouldn't touch any poultry I roasted for her benefit), I lugged out the three-foot-tall wire tree (still haven't upgraded to an antique aluminum tree), popped the top off the clay-green storage container with the Christmas decorations and popped on appropriate holiday music--A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector, in this instance. And, over the course of a couple of hours, I transformed La Casa del Terror into a winter wonderland.

Okay, so my apartment isn't quite ready for a presidential visit or scrutiny by Martha Stewart--unless Martha is really into The Nightmare Before Christmas or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, in which case she might actually dig it. Under the lamp in the living room, Jack Skellington and Sally dolls keep watch over Clarice, Yukon Cornelius and King Moonracer figurines. In the kitchen, a blue-and-silver garland with gifts evenly spaced dangles over the windows while the resin bass ornament (given to me by Mom to remind me of Dad, as if I could forget him) guards the doorway and an angel in gold lame watches from atop the fridge and the Frankenstein Monster, resplendent in a Santa cap, holds down the microwave.

And then there's the bookcase in the southeast corner of the living room, which is currently covered, from left to right and left again, with holiday cards from friends near and far, with animals decorating a pine tree, a Victorian girl writing Santa, purple and silver snowflakes, a pair of imposing nutcrackers, a serene waterfall, a collection of festive puppies, shining deer, a bow from a "Bettie Page in Bondage" alarm clock (which now resides atop my SuperDisk drive, quietly ticking away the time), and lots and lots of snowmen (can one ever have enough?).

And on the top shelf of this bookcase, where Mom's tin dollhouse can usually be found, stands the Christmas tree, such as it is. There are many little figures surrounding it, from hand-painted Santas to elves to Mom's favorite childhood toy, Molly the Dolly. But the tree itself is small--only three feet tall--so I usually have many more ornaments than I have branches. A couple of themes, then, must be selected from the assortment in the storage container. Carousel horses? Cartoon characters? Kittens? Nothing more than shiny balls? All have been past choices, and all served me well. This year, though, I went with an eclectic selection of superheroes (Batman, Wonder Woman, the Tick), personal faves (a holiday unicorn, a chrome-plated Kris Kringle) and a new addition or two (Bettie Page in a leopard-print bikini).

Oh. And angels. Lots and lots of angels.

I've always liked angels, and my Christmas trees have always reflected that--from small porcelain angels found in department stores to angels way too big for this little tree but too pretty to keep in storage to tiny gold cherubs to a cookie-colored angel, cradling a dove in her delicate hands, that had been intended to be given as a gift to a woman I thought I loved at the time, but which wound up staying with me anyway. (Time has healed that, if not all, wounds.)

The most special angel on my tree, though, is also arguably the cheapest: a small cardboard girl, covered in what looks like silver chain mail and holding a tiny candle in each of her pipe-cleaner hands. She's not the largest angel on my tree, nor the most beautiful, nor in the best of shape, her wings held on by Scotch tape. But this humble girl, Angelique by name, always gets the center spot on the front of the tree in those years when I bother to put a tree up, because she was found in a tin can in the wreckage of Grandma's house after it had burned to the ground on a cold February morning. The can contained many decorations that make the tree every year, and more than one angel.

But Angelique is a dead ringer for the angel my parents put on their tree every year--an angel purchased at Jules Five & Dime on Milwaukee Avenue, where Mom had worked as a teen and which is still in business just down the street from the Congress Theatre and just up the street from White Castle. Angelique was a sister to my parents' angel. She was family and deserved to be honored as such. And so she is.

I may be the only person who sees my holiday decorations this year, it's true. But as light my pine-scented candles from Walgreen's (best to be found, I tell you) and go through my demented collection of Christmas programs, from the recent Saturday Night Live clip show to Mr. Krueger's Christmas, a strange half-hour sponsored by the Mormon Church and starring Jimmy Stewart (he has a cat named George--get it?), to the joyfully painful experience that is The Star Wars Holiday Special (if you ever want to feel better about your life, watch this show and be glad you had nothing to do with it), I'll look up from time to time and check out my surroundings, if only momentarily. The tree. The angels. And, for those moments, at least, I'll smile and give myself a damn break. And if this is as good as my life gets, though I certainly hope for more and for better, I don't have too much to complain about. So I won't. For a change. My gift to you. And to myself.

Peace to you and yours this holiday season.

Dad's Winter Coat

Lately, I've been restless, prowling. I don't like to go straight home after work anymore. I have to get there sometime, of course--at least until Lottie and Ms. Christopher figure out how to open the tins of Friskies Senior themselves, anyway. But these days, I make stops on the way home: at book stores, record shops, movie theaters, bars. (Yes, restlessness can get expensive.) But last night, after a quick sightseeing tour through Borders at State and Randolph, I wandered over to Daley Plaza.

Daley Plaza, named for the longtime mayor of Chicago (and father of the current longtime mayor of Chicago), is best known for the Picasso sculpture that stands there--a sculpture so initially befuddling to natives that there was a strong temptation to send it back for a refund. In the summer, farmers markets are held there--great source for fresh apples, spices and catnip (not to be used all at the same time, you understand). And at this time of year, an enormous tree (itself composed of 80 or so smaller trees) stands at the south end of the Plaza with a German-style marketplace occupies much of the rest of the space. The marketplace consists of small shops selling seasonal goods, traditional foods and drinks to either warm you (cider) or make you not care so much that you're cold (beer).

I walked around the Plaza for a while, the scents of brats and cinnamon weaving around me, the sight of glass angels tempting my wallet and my heart, the sound of couples cooing over the size of the tree sending my hands ever deeper into my pockets. Snowflakes tumbled down around the Christmas tree, through the ribs of the Picasso and onto the Plaza, its booths, me. I barely noticed. Maybe because I was lost in thought. Maybe because the smells, sights, sounds distracted me. Or maybe because of Dad's winter coat.

Dad's winter coat is an ugly brute. It must have been a deep blue bordering on navy at some point in its distant past, but now it's faded almost to the point of pastel. Its lining isn't much better: what had once been dark red was now more of a medium-rare pink. And the overall condition of the coat? Like its wearer had tumbled down a hill, gotten up, and repeated the process--a few thousand times. Small rips in the corners of the pockets. A bit of insulation dangling from the medium-rare lining. A 90-degree gash on the left shoulder (more on that in a moment). And the right armpit has a split that I have yet to sew. (Yes, I can sew. Why do you ask?)

Overall, the poor thing is by no means fashionable and looks like the Salvation Army would reject it.

Then again, it doesn't look that much different than it did 30 years ago--when Dad stopped wearing it entirely.

Back then, Dad worked as a switchman for one of the major rail lines, usually pulling second or third shift. Even with that schedule, though, he always found an open bar to spend some time at before coming home and having a few more brews. Sometimes the bar was a neighborhood joint, like Tuman's Alcohol Abuse Center (no, really, that's what it's called), but sometimes he'd sit in whatever was open at those less-than-godly hours. He was an alcoholic, and it cost him big time in the end, with his body giving out on him at age 60, even though he had been clean and sober for more than a decade beforehand. The damage had been done--it just took that long to catch up.

But his drinking cost him in the short run, too, putting him in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time.

One winter morning after finishing his shift, Dad was in a bar on the South Side--don't ask me the name of the place, because if I ever did know it I forgot it long ago--when a fight broke out, as will happen after too many hours of too much drinking among too many with too few brain cells when they're sober. Dad wasn't the barroom brawl type. Just not his style. No doubt, he was just drinking quietly and not bothering a soul when the fists started to fly.

And it didn't matter a damn anyway. Somebody still grabbed him and threw him head-first out of the plate glass window at the front of the bar.

He didn't spend much time in the hospital. Didn't need to. He got cut up pretty well on his hands and was still pulling stitches out years later. His face didn't get slashed, but a piece of glass found the optic nerve of his right eye and severed it. (At least I think it was his right eye--he didn't lose the eye itself, so no one would know he was blind in either eye unless he told them.) The rest of his body was fairly well protected--by the winter coat. Only that 90-degree gash on the left shoulder remains as evidence of what happened to Dad that cold morning.

Without the sight in his eye, Dad couldn't work as a switchman anymore. Never mind that the man could see better with that one functioning eye than most folks can with two good ones--he somehow always saw the bus coming before I did at the stop and could eye a storm on the far horizon hours before a single raindrop fell. But rules are rules. Dad got a pension and went on to do other things with his life, chiefly working jobs in factories where his lack of vision wasn't an obstacle to doing good work. And he did well enough, helping to support his family and put one child all the way through college.

But the winter coat? It didn't fare so well. After the incident at the bar, it was relegated to a hanger at the back of the closet in his bedroom. And when we moved into our house, the same coat stayed on the same hanger and went to the same position of the new closet, which is where Mom and I found it after he died in 1995.

I guess I understand why he didn't want to wear the coat anymore after that night. The coat as a whole, and the gash on the left shoulder in particular, no doubt reminded him of what had happened, what he had lost, what that night had cost him--even though the coat had likely saved him from further debilitating damage, if not death itself. Why, then, didn't Dad just throw the coat away? Or donate it to charity? Or give it to one of his strapping sons? Was it a reminder of good times as well? Did he not want to throw the good away for the sake of the bad? I'll never know--Dad took that tidbit, and so many others, to his grave.

Once Mom and I had found the coat in the back of that bedroom closet, though, she had no objections to letting me take it, if I wanted it. And it wasn't like I didn't have winter coats of my own. But it was his. It had history, both good and bad. And it was warm.

So as I did circles around Daley Plaza last night, I might have felt melancholy or restlessness or happiness or whatever. But I sure as hell didn't feel cold.

Thanks, Dad.

Grandma's House

I still see it in my dreams, when exhaustion, background noise from the box fan or the Girlish Girls chasing phantom mice in the middle of the night conspire to bring dreams on--the house on McLean Avenue where Grandma used to live.

Now, I admit that calling it a "house" might be overstating things a bit. It was really a small, gray cottage on the edge of an empty lot used as parking space for the cleaners across the alley (thus inviting injudicious drivers to occasionally bump the brick wall and knock chunks of gray brick and mortar out). A thin rectangle of yard flowed behind it, with a lilac bush tucked against the enclosed porch and various stumps and pits dotting their way back to the garage, which had never been used for anything but lumber storage for as far back as I could remember and which always had a curious, though not precarious, lean to the east, as if inclining toward the rising sun.

The yard needed frequent weeding, if only to keep city inspectors from issuing tickets or gangbangers from crouching in wait until the cops had passed them by, and I spent many a summer afternoon with shears and hatchet in hand, laying waste to mint and dandelions and young but sturdy sumac trees.

Once, while clearing brush from the empty-lot side, I found what appeared to be a thick mound of spider web, only to discover that it was really the remaining fur of a long-deceased cat. Another time, I found a spider web (a real one this time) stretched between a particularly large stump and the aforementioned lilac bush. And in the center of this web resided the largest spider I have ever seen outside of a Bert I. Gordon movie: to my prepubescent perspective, its black-and-yellow legs appeared to span at least a foot, though it's a good deal more likely that it measured no more than six inches from tip to tip, still a considerable size for something that clearly wasn't native to this, if any, hemisphere. (My attempts as an adult to describe this enormous arachnid to friends have been universally met with cries of "No fucking way!" or "You must have imagined it"; I regret that I was not into photography at that time, so that I could provide an image of reality to accompany the image that has rested in my all-too-vivid imagination to this very day.) Needless to say, not much foliage got trimmed in Grandma's backyard that day.

The interior of the cottage was modest as well, with mint green or canary yellow paint on the walls, embossed tin on the ceilings (long since painted over in layers of white latex) and linoleum on the floors. The rooms were mostly small, but Grandma didn't need much space. Since Grandpa died in 1968 (his wake a vague sepia memory in my adult brain), she'd lived alone with two or three cats, the last of which were a long-haired calico named Squeaky (for the sound she made whenever she opened her mouth) and a thin, skittish gray male known most popularly as "The Rat" (because...well, he looked like one.) There was a space heater in the modest dining room (which replaced the coal-fueled heater that ran into the 1970s until home coal deliveries finally stopped), two unused bedrooms (Grandma preferred sleeping on the couch in the living room) and a tiny, frigid room that passed for an toilet. (There was no bathtub--Grandma washed herself at the kitchen sink.) A wedding portrait of her and Grandpa hung on one of the living room walls, and a crystal chandelier that was just low enough for me to walk into face-first dangled from the ceiling. And even though her house was small, Grandma didn't need a lot of room anyway: her legs were badly swollen, so she never strayed far from home and, in most of her later years, never went beyond the front gate, and even then only to put down food for the neighborhood strays.

We visited Grandma--Mom, my brother and I--once a week or so, with Dad tagging along sometimes, usually on holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas Day or whenever Grandma needed a handyman about the house for plumbing or carpentry or electrical work. (Dad was quite the "jack of all trades"; I sometimes wish I knew half as much as he did about repair work and half as little about writing and movies and action figures--I might be less interesting that way, but more employable.) Grandma would always offer us food, no matter what time of day we visited or what Mom said about when we'd last eaten. She'd always offer us oranges or bananas or Easter ham--whatever she had to give. She ate off of small tin tray tables and drank her instant coffee or tea with honey from cups with elaborate, pink Japanese designs--odd china for a small, stout Polish woman to have, it seemed. But Grandma had many such odd things, accumulated over years of buying things from catalogs or department stores and rarely if ever using them.

In other words, Grandma was a master packrat. So much so, in fact, that until she took ill and had to be hospitalized in 1975, her house was piled floor-to-ceiling with all manner of dark, dusty items, with one narrow pathway through the middle of it that allowed her to get about. During that hospital stay, though, Mom decided to do something "nice" for Grandma: she decided to clean Grandma's house. And so we did. My brother and I spent the better part of three weeks excavating the site, with "shovels and rakes and implements of destruction," as Arlo Guthrie would say. Had we known about collectors markets then what we know now, we could have made a buck or two off of some of the "trash" we hauled out that summer, like cereal boxes from the '50s or newspapers going back decades, touching on the events that shaped world history (then and now).

Some of the stuff mysteriously survived the purge, like two huge old radios that hadn't worked in decades or the can of vintage Christmas ornaments, or the movie magazines dating back to the dawn of the Sound Era (including one with a stunning painted portrait of Barbara Stanwyck), or a tin dollhouse in more or less playable shape, or hundreds of 78s and a hand-cranked portable turntable to play them on. Maybe Mom just couldn't part with these things; maybe there wasn't enough time to toss them out before Grandma got home and Mom just shoved them into closets to avoid dealing with them; maybe some (like the radios) reminded her of Grandpa, by all accounts a gentle soul who was never, ever sick until the end, when he went quickly and far too early.

Whatever the reason, Mom and I found all of these things in Grandma's house after she died in 1990 after a lifetime of varied illnesses--so many that Grandma, a devout Catholic, was given the last rites nine different times (appropriate for a woman who loved cats so much). And yet, the woman lived to be 85--tough old bird, that Grandma.

But it wasn't for the things in Grandma's house that we went once a week or so--not for the cats, not the Japanese teacups, nor the various other things tucked into gray/brown corners of gray/brown rooms. No. We went to see the woman herself, always kind to us, the kids, even when she and Mom were going at each other over one thing or another. Both were stubborn and set in their ways, and many a visit turned uncomfortable as they argued back and forth over something Mom wanted Grandma to do and Grandma didn't want to do at any cost.

Yet, even this arguing was an expression of love, of sorts: would they have bickered so if they didn't care deeply for one another? Would Mom have visited every week? Would she have gone to the trouble of making Grandma dinner, including kidney stew--the most foul-smalling food product on the planet, whose stench permeated our house whenever Mom simmered it--for each visit? Or would she have decorated Grandma's house for the holidays with garlands and ornaments and a small, lighted tree that she put up in the center window every Christmas?

Grandma's house still stands on McLean Avenue, albeit barely. A fire broke out in the house about six months after Grandma died, though the cause was never determined with any certainty. (The house appeared to have been broken into at least once, if not several times, and someone smoking on the living room couch may have started it, though whether this was intentional or not was unclear.) The front of the house suffered the worst of it: the living room was all but destroyed, the wedding portrait consumed, the crystal chandelier ground to dust beneath the collapsed tin ceiling. I spent two of the most miserable days of my existence in that house, hauling out whatever was deemed salvagable in 20-degree February weather. I've never felt an ache like that, before or since: a weariness and sadness well beyond the bone and marrow down to whatever limp dishrag passes for my soul.

Maybe that's why the house still haunts my dreams--because I parted company with it on such bad terms, especially since I wanted to buy the house from Mom, if only to rehab it and sell it again (unlikely, though, since the admittedly sentimental idea of carrying it forward as some sort of ancestral home appealed to me then), but she would not hear of it. We never spoke of why that was--maybe the memories were too much for her and she wanted no direct connection with it anymore. Whatever the reason, she sold it quickly after the fire, and the new owners rehabbed it, gutting the interior and adding a second story. But these days, it sits boarded up, probably awaiting a backhoe to clear the plot for one of the ugly, cheap, concrete block-intensive condo developments so prevelant on the North Side these days.

But even though Grandma has been gone for a while now and her house has been out of family hands for about a decade, reminders of her surround me in La Casa del Terror: the huge old radios are on a bookshelf; the tin dollhouse stands on another; the 78s and turntable are in a closet just off the bathroom; the Japanese teacups are in the kitchen cabinet. And the small, lighted Christmas tree? It gets hauled out every holiday season and sits in the center window of my living room.

Being a packrat is genetic, I guess.

All Hallow's Eve

I never really got into the dress-up aspect of Halloween. Not that I didn't have the desire to be someone else as a child--when you spend as much time getting your ass kicked at school as I did, you spend most of your time wishing you were anyone else but that goofy-looking kid with the corkscrew teeth and the Jerry Lewis crewcut staring back at you from the mirror every morning. The costume choices of my misspent youth, however, did little to alleviate the situation--somehow, hiding yourself in a Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp costume just made the bigger kids want to chase me down the block that much more.

Even my one arguably successful costume--a homemade getup intended to bear some resemblance, however slight, to Elwood Blues--still brought more grief than reward, since the one question I got all day long was, "Where's Jake?" Telling the other kids that Jake was "still in the joint" or that he was "on a mission from God" just didn't do the trick. At least I got to wear sunglasses and a porkpie hat in school all day long.

So, perhaps understandably, throwing on a mask or makeup has little to no appeal for me, even as a relatively burly adult.

But decorating my swingin' bachelor pad for Halloween and watching funny/frightening/frighteningly funny movies with my friends? Does that appeal to me at all?

Oh. Hell. Yeah.

So if you are ever, um, unfortunate enough to be walking through La Casa del Terrorany night immediately before All Hallows Eve, you're likely to see any or all of the following:

Rubber bats dangling from the ceiling and affixed to the bathroom mirror (though, to be briefly fair, the bats on the mirror are there year-round); Godzilla duking it out with Gamera atop the refrigerator (which is decorated with old-fashioned Halloween postcards) while King Kong and Fay Wray look on in fascination/disgust; a glow-in-the-dark paper skeleton taped to a closet door; Mars Attacks lights wound around the shower curtain pole; a skull with a Weiner Whistle clenched between its teeth; a Bride of Frankenstein doll whose hair looks more mussed than usual (maybe she and the Monster had been vigorously shagging the night before? are my action figures getting more action than I am?); 18-inch tall figures of Bruce Campbell and Bruce Lee standing back to back under the living room lamp, with the Tick and the Terminator guarding them from behind; an honest-to-badness Ouiji Board, vintage 1937, with a crystal ball and a tarot deck before it, all waiting for the wrong person to ask the wrong question at the wrong time; pumpkin lights strung across the living room windows; a tin dollhouse, played with by Mom in her misspent youth, now desecrated with Blade climbing out of the chimney, Skeletor and the Shadow leaning out of the windows, and Winona Ryder and a Dalek on the balcony; posters for The Exorcist and The Blair Witch Project bookending the living room; and more monster toys, movies and postcards than you ever thought one person could reasonably possess.

You're also just as likely to see good friends parked on the couches or the futon or walking about the apartment, marveling at the display and wondering aloud if it looks like this all year round. (No, it really doesn't. As I told one friend this past Saturday, "For Halloween, I dail it up to eleven.") They come. They watch movies with me. They share my joy. They share my holiday. And those bittersweet memories of bad Halloweens past? They fade away like a vampire at sunrise.

I like Thanksgiving. I love Christmas. But Halloween? That's my day. And I hope it's yours, too. Have a happy and safe one, kids. And eat much, much more candy than you should--the sugar buzz will do you good.

Nudge the World

As I compose this week's update at Polly Jean, the lime green e-mail machine, and sit in this desk chair whose springs have long since sprung and now threaten to depants me every time I sit in it, there is a coffee cup sitting on a Tiki-themed coaster atop my SuperDisk drive. Unfortunately, the cup does not contain coffee tonight, but, rather, Apple Cinnamon TheraFlu; I've been fighting a cold for the better part of a week, and as my sinuses remain jam-packed with fluids best not seen by human (or even nonhuman) eyes, I fear the cold is winning.

But it's not the cold, nor the coaster, nor the computer, nor the chair, nor even the sizable backside in the chair, that hold my attention tonight. No. It's the coffee cup, which came to me through a job I worked in one of Chicago's northern suburbs for just under five years (or about three years too long, depending on how you care to look at it) that has my eye--maybe even both of them.

Actually, though, even that's not entirely true: It's the words on the coffee cup that command me to stare at them in wonder. The cup itself is off-white (whether the "off-" part is by design or by age, I'm not certain) with a blue corporate logo on the side facing the Elizabeth poster (Ah, Cate Blanchett) on my "office" wall. (My "office" is really a bedroom which, since I now sleep on the increasingly uncomfortable futon in the living room, has been converted to house Polly Jean, the desk beneath her, the desk chair before her, and whatever other shit I can't fit into other rooms in La Casa del Terror--plants, action figures, free weights, comic books, clothing, porn tapes, a bicycle that hasn't been ridden in at least two years, etc.)

Facing me, though, are words in the same shade of pale blue as the logo. The words are attributed to the playwright Tom Stoppard: "...Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little."

I stare at those words often and remember that, when I graduated from college, I thought my fellow poetry mates and I were going to change the American literary landscape. No. Really. I thought that. Then I remember that, in one of my midterm conferences, my instructor told me, quite out of the blue, that the poet Wallace Stevens didn't have his first book of poetry published until he was 35. (Was he trying to tell me something?) The fact is, we didn't change the American literary landscape. Some tried, but failed. Others died before they could finish what they started. And still others abandoned the effort altogether and concentrated on children or careers or significant something-or-others. The arrogance and energy of youth settled into the bump-and-grind of everyday living.

And yet, even with all the years that have passed since then, and even with the time that has gone by since I left that job where I acquired the cup, its words keep coming back to me. "Nudge the world." Not "change." Not "reshape." Not "blow to fucking bits." "Nudge." Maybe that's how you go about changing or reshaping the world (though I'd rather not blow it to fucking bits, thank you)--with one little nudge at a time.

When I started this Web site exactly one year go today, I didn't go into it with the intent of changing anybody's world or mind or whatever; I really had no clue who would want to read what they'd find here (and I still don't); and I wasn't even sure how often I could get around to updating it (though, as it turned out, I posted 26 updates during that year, which averages out to one update every two weeks). More than anything, though, I just wanted a little corner of the Internet on which I could be somewhat creative--write, post photos, have a bit of fun. And if, in the process, I could "nudge the world"? Just a little? Even one tiny bit? All the better.

So here I am, sitting in a cluttered room, letting the springs in this chair eat my ass for dinner, and trying to gulp down the Apple Cinnamon TheraFlu before it goes cold. As good a way to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Adoresixtyfour.com as any, I guess. And if I have my way--which doesn't happen often, but, every once in a while, the very fabric of reality is split assunder and I do have my way--I'll be trying to nudge the world for a while to come.

Special thanks to JB, VB, Red Secretary, Mr. E, Sister Dee, the Fluffies of St. Joseph, the Grays of Dallas and everybody else who has encouraged, inspired, poked, prodded or otherwise given support over this past year. You all rock.

This Sporting Life: Foul Ball

(WARNING: This week's update is entirely about the sucky state of baseball in Chicago. If you don't care about sports in general or baseball in particular, then the following essay will likely bore the shit out of you....which may be a good thing, if you happen to be constipated. Otherwise, this one just ain't for you.)

I'm told that in cities as far apart and different as Atlanta, Oakland, Saint Louis and Minnepolis, base ball fans are awake and alert, cheering their teams on in the playoffs with the hopes that their city will host a World Series next week.

There are no such hopes in Chicago, where, despite the fact that the city claims ownership of not one but two major league franchises, fans have packed away their pennants and gloves, their caps and spring dreams, for a long winter's nap. In truth, though, these fans needn't have waited until the final week of the season, nor even the final month. They could have gone into hybrenation somewhere around the Fourth of July and not have missed a thing.

The baseball season just concluded in the Windy City could easily be described as typical, what with the Cubs finishing near the bottom of their division (and only escaping the cellar due to the epic awfulness of our neighbors to the north, the Milwaukee Brewers) and the White Sox stinking up their sanitary, bland stadium for much of the season, only to come roaring back toward the end to reach the coveted .500 mark--and by losing as many games as they won, they basically could have gone without playing any games at all.

But there were aspects to this excruciatingly long six months that were far from typical. First of all, there was the labor strife all of baseball had to deal with. The idea that millionaire ballplayers would go on strike against billionaire owners was met with a collective "meh" from sports fans everywhere, most of whom simply asked, "So...when does football season start?" This is indicative of the apathy felt toward the game since the last work stoppage in 1994. (Hell, I'm feeling pretty apathetic now as I write this...my reason for caring is what, exactly?) This is also indicative of how ineffective Major League Baseball has been in their attempts to get a grip on our collective attention: an extra round of playoffs, interleague play, brand new ballparks all over the place, etc.

On the North Side, there was the added spectacle of the ownership of the Cubs, the many-tentacled Tribune Company, trying to expand that ivy-covered shrine to all things good in the sport, Wrigley Field, at the expense of the views of some of the owners of apartment buildings across the street from the ballpark--building owners who've installed bleachers on their rooftops and charge big bucks to let people sit up there. When the owners kicked and screamed and filled community meetings with angry villagers, the Tribune Company responded in a mature, professional way--by putting up windscreens to block the sight lines of rooftop viewers, all the while claiming the maneuver was motivated not by pettiness, but by post-9/11 security concerns (like those screens could stop spitballs, much less bullets or worse). At season's end, no compromise or resolution had been reached. But did anybody but the immediate parties really care about this, another case of the rich being pissed off at the richer? Not really.

For added spice, the Cubs fired not one but two managers this season--it's not unusual for one to get whacked every couple years or so, but two in one year is kind of odd. However, it makes more sense when you look at how the team played: with the exceptions of Sammy Sosa, Kerry Wood and a few others (mostly younger players), the Cubs showed no hunger, no drive, no spark. And neither manager employed this year--Don Baylor for the first half of the season, Bruce Kimm for the second half--could inspire this sleepy bunch. I doubt if the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost could have gotten more out of these guys, most of whom played like they were anxious to grab their paychecks and walk (why show the energy to run?).

Not that matters were much better on the South Side. Aside from Mark Buerlhe, who won 19 games this season, and Magglio Ordonez, who made the All-Star team (again), the White Sox all looked like they needed compasses to lead them to a clue. The big off-season trade by general manager Kenny Williams of three young pitchers to the Pittsburgh Pirates for veteran Todd Ritchie turned out to be disasterous, as Ritchie lost 16 games and two of the three young pitchers entered the Pirates' starting rotation. And then, there was Frank Thomas, who sat out most of last year with an injury. He came back this year as grouchy and uninspiring as ever, refusing to talk to the media while also, apparently, refusing to figure out how to hit a baseball the way he did in MVP seasons past. His average and production climbed a bit by September--just in time for the team to watch the Minnesota Twins, who were supposed to be contracted out of existence this year, win their division by a wide margin and crawl to within a series, against the Anaheim Angels, of playing in the World Series.

Think about that for a moment, if you would: The Twins haven't been to a World Series since 1991, and the Angels have never been to a World Series. Meanwhile, here in Chicago, not a single World Series game has been in this city in my lifetime. Not. One. And not one World Series has been won in this city on either side of town since 1917. Not. One.

Why, then, do fans still turn out at all? I mean, Sox fans at seem a bit practical, showing up in dwindling numbers at the second Comiskey Park. But Cubs fans? They're like grocery shoppers buying gallons of milk, finding out that the milk is spoiled to the point of being chunky, and going back to the grocery store for more spoiled milk--over and over and over and over again.

But at least their self-inflicted pain is ended for another year, when eternal hopefulness and blind faith will again have a head-on collision with the weight of gloomy history. And who knows? Maybe hope and faith can win for once. Maybe.