Vanishing Chicago: The Hub

Back in the days when I could better tolerate going to movies alone--unlike now, when catch the likes of Identity or X2: More Pretty People in Form-Fitting Leather, I'm pretty much on my own (makes the after-movie discussions over pints of cider rather one-sided, it does)--the theater I spent the most time haunting was the Hub.

The Hub was conveniently within walking distance of home--"home" then being in Ukrainian Village--on Chicago Avenue just east of Wood. It showed Spanish-language versions of first-run movies for a while (I still regret having skipped the experience of Return of the Living Dead en espanol) before becoming a second-run venue. And, best of all, it was incredibly cheap--on Tuesday nights, you could catch a double feature for two dollars. Less than it would have cost to rent the damn movies at Blockbuster.

It wasn't a great theater. It was small. The screen had holes in it. The seats were hard and uncomfortable, and one whole section of seats was blocked off because they were unsafe to sit in. The place smelled like a popcorn-scented sweatsock. And I always expected to see a rat come scurrying up the aisle, but never did. (Oddly enough, the only time I saw any rodent activity in a Chicago movie house was in one of the more expensive downtown venues, where they charged three times as much for seats just as hard.)

But the Hub was a throwback to a time when nearly every Chicago neighborhood had at least one --and usually several--movie houses. The popcorn was cheap. The service was friendly. And the price allowed me to catch movies I might otherwise have skipped altogether. Like Delta Force 2 with Billy Drago as--surprise!--an evil drug lord. Or Exorcist 3, which wasn't a bad idea for a movie (a serial killer capable of carrying out his crimes by possessing others) and had one of the best "jump" moments in any horror film ever, but it would have been better off not being touted as a sequel to one of the classics of the genre when it had, at best, peripheral ties to the original and opaque, leaden direction by Exorcist author William Peter Blatty. Or Blind Fury with Rutger Hauer as a blind Vietnam vet/martial arts master (aren't they all?). Not all movies have to be great or even good to be fun. And I had plenty of fun at the Hub.

TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE HUB
The four year old with
the black crewcut does
laps around the theater
while the teenage girl
up the aisle from me
points out the narcs in
the audience to her friend
who nods attentively and
eases down in her red
vinyl seat not nearly as
gum-crusted or cracked
as you would expect at
a dollar double-feature.
The Roger Rabbit short,
whose print is so grainy
that it almost looks like
the Forties cartoon it
strains to imitate, pops
onto the taped-together
screen before the house
lights are flipped off,
before the man with his
next three changes of
clothes in the shopping
bag under his arm and
the pastel-flowered fishing
cap screwed on tightly
over sharp and darting
eyes can settle and wrestle
down the seats he needs.
Finally, the lights fade
to black, the fishing cap
stops bobbing from row to
row, and the first show
booms Danny Elfman licks
out of buzzing overhead
speakers and spills primary
colors onto the cobalt
ceiling as Warren Beatty
yanks on his comic-strip
yellow trenchcoat and
fedora and huge matte
skyline paintings answer
the question: "What if
the Tribune Tower and
the Merchandise Mart got
together and had lots
and lots of children?"

All good things must end, it's said, and so it was with the Hub. It closed as a theater about ten years ago and was converted into some kind of storage space for Catholic Charities. At least they didn't tear the porr thing down--you can still go there and dig on the primitive faces carved into the facade (for now, anyway), even if the marquee, hard seats and cheap popcorn are long gone.

Bet it still smells like a sweatsock, though.

One Good Turn

As I've grown older, I've become more cynical and less charitable.

I don't think this is particular to me, even though, thus far, 2003 has been an even bigger black hole of suck than 2002 was, and God and I aren't on the best of speaking terms (if, in fact, he/she/it exists at all--I have my doubts). Maybe it's because the world as a whole has taken a downturn--especially the U.S. economy, which hasn't been helped in the least by the latest war, which has yet to turn up any of the seemingly mythical "Weapons of Mass Destruction"--and most of us have become less charitable because we have less to give.

Maybe it's because the need seems overwhelming. It's damn near impossible to come downtown without encountering someone on nearly every corner, in front of every convenience store, drug store, coffee house and bar, each with their own spin on why they're asking for whatever change the passerby can give. I used to give more often than not, but not anymore. Maybe because I've been burned a few times.

Like the time a guy came up to me in the South Loop and said he'd locked his keys in his car and needed change to catch a busride home. Sounded plausible. I gave what little I could--I was a college student at the time and didn't have much to give--and went on my way, thinking I'd helped somebody in need. Until a couple of days later, when I saw the same guy laying the same line on someone else. I suppose he could have locked his keys in his car again--they don't give IQ tests at the DMV--but, more likely, he'd fed me a line and I'd gobbled it up.

Or the time outside Wrigley Field as I was leaving a Cubs game, when a guy selling a newspaper for the homeless (not Streetwise, but some short-lived competitor) approached me and asked if I'd buy a copy. The smallest bill I had in my wallet was a five, and I asked if he could break it. He said he could. Fair enough. Then, as soon as the Lincoln landed in his hand, he turned with almost military precision and disappeared into the crowd. "Never again," I vowed. (I vow this often, in many aspects of my existence, and have yet to hold to it once, to the best of my recollection.)

Just last year, two well-dressed women in Lincoln Square asked for a buck or two. They were from out of town, they needed money for gas and the younger woman's cash station card had been swallowed whole at a Dominick's. Shit happens. They were friendly and well-spoken. I checked my wallet. Nothing smaller than a twenty. All three of us walked up to Lawrence, where there had been a currency exchange. Not anymore, though--it had closed and merged with another exchange three blocks away. Screw it. I gave them the twenty. They thanked me profusely, which was nice, and the older lady wrote me a personal check, insisting that she add an extra five dollars because I'd been so charitable. I took the check, tucked it into my wallet and let them go their merry way.

My first instinct was to just rip up the check and let it go. After all, if I'd given anything to just about anyone on the street, I wouldn't get anything in return but a "thanks, you're so kind" kind of thing. But no. I had a check in hand. Might as well cash it at my bank, right?

And, of course, the check bounced higher than the Sears Tower. To add injury to insult, my bank assessed a penalty nearly equal to the check amount, thus doubling the amount I was out.

I'm sure regular readers could share similar stories of altruism gone wrong, no doubt. This long-brewed cynicism, combined with other recent events, must make me look like nothing so much as a character from a Charles Schulz cartoon, dark cloud perpetually hovering over furrowed brow.

And this past Friday, the dark cloud went absolutely black.

It was a quiet Friday at work. Not much going on. Little to do but file and watch the clock move ever so slowly toward five. I had no plans for the weekend--not even the usual pretense of apartment cleaning. And all I had to do for the day, really, was make three credit card payments at lunchtime. So out I went, crossing a bridge over the pea-colored Chicago River toward a currency exchange and, maybe, a Veggie with Cheese sandwich from Mr. Submarine.

On the other side of the bridge, though, I made a horrifying discovery: The bills weren't in my jacket pocket. Nor were they in any of the pockets on the jacket. Nor were they in the pockets of my jeans. I retraced my steps a couple of times and found nothing. I went back up to where I work, hoping they'd fallen out in my cubicle, which bobs in a sea of cubicles. Nope. The three bills were just...gone. Must have fallen out of my pocket somewhere along the way.

Remarkably enough, I didn't panic, lose my cool or start breaking shit. I just planned to send payments to the credit card companies sans the accompanying bills. My only hope was that they'd fallen somewhere where no one of a nafarious mind could get a hold of them--down an elevator shaft, into a sewer, down the pea-green river, whatever. If someone did find them, though, and was of less than stellar character, my credit rating could be wrecked beyond repair. True, one of the cards in question is nearly maxed out--that being the one that all the dental bills landed on--but the other two cards had more than enough room to grow on. I had to just hope.

And, this time, hope won out, in a most curious way.

Saturday morning, I headed out the door of La Casa del Terror with the intent of mailing off payments to the various credit card companies, still trying to believe that the bills were out of the reach of anyone with a mind toward larceny. And, in truth, they were. They were perfectly safe, in fact.

On the way out, I stopped at my mailbox to check for more incoming bills or junk or rejection slips from publications. None of the above. All there was in the mailbox was one long, slender envelope with a Zora Neal Hurston postage stamp on it and the words "LOST BILLS" written in big block letters in the upper left-hand corner. Inside were, of course, the missing bills, along with a note written on a large yellow Post-It: "I found these on the street!", followed with an emoticon-style smily face.

No name. No address. No attempt to claim credit for a good deed done. Just the items lost, returned to their owner. Nothing else.

So maybe that black cloud needn't hang perpetually in place. Maybe the road can smooth out a bit. Maybe there are a few people left out there with charity in their hearts. Maybe there's hope after all.

A lot of "Maybes" there, true. But far better than outright negatives. And, for now, I'll take that.

The Cruelest Month

To my mind, Tuesday is the worst day of the week.

On Monday, your body is still recovering from whatever flavor of debauchery you chose to overindulge in Friday night,
Saturday and Sunday; hence, your body never really wakes up to the fact that it's back at work, doing the usual bump-and-grind. By Tuesday, though, body and mind have not only recovered enough from the weekend to realize that the weekend has, in fact, ended, but that the next weekend is little more than a speck on the horizon, no more than a pinpoint of light at the end of an seemingly interminable tunnel.

I feel the same way about April. For the first quarter of the year, a slight hangover from the holidays, in concert with the numbness of winter, prevails. By April, though, the holidays have worn off, there's enough of a hint of warmth in the air to fool you into thinking that winter is finally, completely, entirely over (ha), and the passage of time becomes alarmingly apparent: "What the fuck do you mean it's fucking April al-fucking-ready?"

April is a lot of things--most of them bad.

It's when one day warms up to 70, only to drop to 40 the next day (as it did the morning of the day I'm writing this). It's when when the trees begin to bud and the green grass tries to force its way through the brown (and as dry as this past winter was, there's plenty of brown to go around). It's when what's left of the "too, too sallied" mounds snow at the edges of parking lots have melted, leaving the residue of dark gray behind as a reminder of the least pleasant memories of months--not days or merely weeks, but months--now past.

April is the month that my own personal childhood cat--a medium-sized gray girl forever known as "Gray Cat" because she was certified by a competent veteranarian as a male and named "Smokey Junior" (after Smokey, a handsome Russian Blue and the finest rat catcher I've ever known, though I wish he hadn't been so proficient because he loved bringing, er, "trophies" home to show his appreciation and affection for us) until she went into heat and the testicles the vet thought she'd seen turned out to be tiny twin mirages--finally had to be put to sleep.

Gray Cat lived to be 20--an amazing span of time for a feline, to be sure, spanning from elementary school through college and into my so-called "adult" life. And most of that 20 years was spent in remarkably good health, except for a bout with a burst blood vessel in her left ear, which looked more like a potato chip than an ear for her remaining years.

But seven years ago (was it really that long ago? Damn...) in the middle of April, she started having trouble walking, then started staggering, then...you know where this is going, don't you? Gray Cat lived with Mom after I moved out of the house (since Mom and my brother were home more than I was and could take better care of her), and one April day Mom called me at work to say that she'd made "the appointment" with the vet--Gray Cat had tipped over over in the litter pan and couldn't stand back up again. The time had come.

As "work" at that point was a evil publishing company in one of Chicago's northern suburbs, getting to Mom's in time to go with Gray Cat seemed an impossibility shy of a sudden genetic mutation that would cause arms to fall off and allow wings to grow in their place.

But then, a coworker volunteered to drive me down to Mom's (said coworker had endured a similar situation with her beloved dog and felt I should be there for he old girl) and our department head, a pet owner herself, gave her blessing.

I made it.

When I came into the living room, Gray Cat rose with effort and tried to cross the couch to come to me one last time. I caught her before she fell, held her against my chest and whispered over and over that it was all right, everything was all right. I held her the whole way to the vet, through the procedure (tearfully apologizing to her the whole time for having to do what had to be done) and all the way back to Mom's house, where she was laid to rest in the backyard and had a yellow rose bush planted over the spot--a yellow rose bush that blooms every spring, sometimes even in April.

(Side note: Yes, she should have had a more formal, more fitting name than "Gray Cat," but I freely admit to having no talent whatsoever for naming pets: our first family dog, a female black lab, was, I'm told, named "Hey, You!" because I continually yelled this at the poor animal and each time I did, she came to me. So the name stuck. Poor old pup. Good thing Lottie and Ms. Christopher were already named when they came to me.)

April is when baseball season begins in earnest. And when the pain begins in Chicago.

April is when Christ was crucified. (Okay, he came back from the dead a couple of days later, but still...)

And this April will be the first full month of the current war in Iraq. And yes, I think it'll last through the month, making April more literally cruel than usual, and it may last for many months to come.

I don't suppose we could just skip April altogether and head straight into May, could we?

Just Killing Time

I know my feet are still there. I can see them from all the way up here--ridiculous boats launching out of the ends of improbably long, skinny legs. Tonight they wear faux bowling shoes, the right of which has a gouge in it left over from a New Year's Eve party spent shuttling up and down steep concrete steps between a crowded, frosty basement where bands were to play and a dark, muddy rectangle of yard where a crowd five deep surrounds a defenseless keg and the chain-link fence is lined with drunken young men taking a group whiz.

I know my feet are still there. I can see them from way up here. I just can't feel them.

My own fault, really. I could have gone straight home from work, surfing the serpentine Brown Line past projects soon to be razed and stations soon to be rehabbed to my stop, then walked the few blocks to the apartment formerly known as "La Casa del Terror," now just called "that place where I sometimes sleep." Could have stopped by my local Pallid Poultry for a gallon of skim milk, a pint of Ben & Jerry's Mint Chocolate Cookie and a gander at the recently hired cute alternachick behind the counter. Could have been warm by now.

But no. Hardly ever go straight home anymore. Too quiet there. Too much time to do nothing but think. Usually wander around downtown shops to kill time, occupy mind. Sometimes Borders. Sometimes Virgin Megastore. Tonight, I went local. Laurie's Planet of Sound. Cool little record shop in Lincoln Square, with an eclectic music selection, from Dido to Dennis Wilson to the Damned. Also sells DVDs (that copy of Can't Stop the Music still calls to me) and obscure videos (the idea of watching Jackie Gleason take LSD in Skidoo appeals to me; the idea of watching Carol Channing seduce Frankie Avalon does not). Tonight, I hit their used video section, buy a couple cheap horror films: The Valley of Gwangi (a Ray Harryhausen-animated T-Rex stomps Mexico) and Island of Terror (Peter Cushing vs. tentacled creatures that suck your bones out). The collection grows. Spreads. Makes the time at home less quiet.

Could also just walk home from here rather than waiting for the notoriously slow Montrose bus. Done it before. Not that far. "Just a good stretch of the legs," as both John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara say in The Quiet Man. (Mmmmm...Maureen O'Hara...) Instead, I stare east. Then straight ahead, playing the game of counting the number of drivers talking on cell phones. (Once saw a driver on a cell phone nearly run down a pedestrian on a cell phone at this very corner.) Then down. The feet are still there. Then back east again. And wait. Wait. Wait some more.

Do buses still run on this street? Did CTA cancel the route and forget to take down the signs? The five other travelers, all packed into the bus shelter, all craning their respective necks east as if taking turns, appear to be thinking the same thing. What. The. Fuck.

A bright yellow moving light cuts the darkness. Finally. A bus is coming. Slowly. Struggling up Montrose against late rush-hour gridlock. And, Pavlovian predictable, I can suddenly feel my feet again. Not the best thing. They hurt now. Like they've been pounded with bricks. Or cartoonishly large mallets. Ow. Ow. Ow.

And still the yellow light grows brighter. Closer. An inch at a time. Closer. To me. To them. To home.

Hitting the Books

Most of the toys have been put away in La Casa del Terror in a vain attempt to make my apartment look less like a teenage boy's bedroom circa 1975. (Maybe now, girls will like me!!! Or, um, not). Not all of the toys have been put away, of course--I'm not sure I have room in my closets for all of my toys, and I just don't have the heart to shove my Mego Supergirl, my Sean Connery James Bond or my Christopher Lee Count Dooku figures into a box--and all the monster toys will crawl back out of their respective graves come Halloween.

The lack of action figures, however, has created a lot of extra space for books, an alarming number of which relate to bad movies, which would explain how I know so much about the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space, Robot Monster and Can't Stop the Music.

Here, then, is a sampling of reading materials from your humble correspondent's less toy-intensive shelves:

The Golden Turkey Awards and Son of Golden Turkey by Harry and Michael Medved. Most people don't remember these books because they've been out of print for some time, but the original Golden Turkey Awards may have been the single most infuential text in the history of the appreciation of so-bad-it's-good cinema and may have been the first book to declare Plan 9 to be "The Worst Movie Ever Made" and its director, the immortal Edward D. Wood, Jr., to be "Worst Director." I recently landed a copy of this after years of trying (eBay is my friend), but I'd read it cover to cover years before while freelancing as a proofreader at an audio/visual company that made 35mm slides for corporate presentations. (Such freelancing was necessary after I quit my first job out of college because "I didn't like it" without having another job lined up, right on the cusp of a recession--yes, I was young and dumb.) And while waiting to read slide after slide of boring corporate earnings (or lack thereof), The Golden Turkey Awards gave me hours of entertainment. And please don't hold it against the book that one of the authors is Michael Medved, co-host of the excruciatingly lame Sneak Previews (after Siskel & Ebert left to go do At the Movies, which they left later to go do Siskel & Ebert & the Movies, which Siskel left because...well, because he died, which made it hard for him to see new movies and thus review them).

Classics of the Horror Film and More Classics of the Horror Film by William K. Everson. To be honest, Everson's more than a bit of a tight ass, turning his nose up at modern classics like The Exorcist ("a cheap and shoddy picture") and The Wicker Man ("overrated"). But without his first book, which I read over and over again during study period at Lane Tech instead of doing actual homework, I'd never have sought out the likes of James Whale's Brilliant black comedy The Old Dark House or Carl Dreyer's strangely hypnotic Vampyr or The Ghoul, a Boris Karloff flick that's neither brilliant nor hypnotic--just good old creepy fun.

Graven Images by Ronald V. Borst. Not only is this book filled with gorgeous horror film posters from the silent era through the '60s, but it also has lots of tasty tidbits of trivia: Did you know that Bela Lugosi was the first choice to play "The Monster" in Frankenstein, but turned the role down because it wasn't a speaking part, even though he didn't speak English and had to memorize his lines for Dracula phonetically? Or that H.G. Wells hated both Island of Lost Souls and Metropolis? Neither did I.

Nightmare of Ecstasy by Rudolph Grey. Ed Wood may have been talentless--at least his movies don't betray any discernable gift for telling stories, writing dialogue or even being able to tell night from day--but he was, first and foremost, a dreamer who worked his angora-clad ass off to make those dreams come true. And, to a certain extent, he succeeded: while other, better directors have long since been forgotten, Ed Wood's name is instantly recognizable to damn near every movie fan. Gray interviews many of Wood's close associates--his wife, his friends, actors and drinking buddies--and uses Wood's own words to paint as compele a picture of an artist as you're ever likely to see, even if it's not a pretty picture.

The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film and The Psychotronic Video Guide by Michael Weldon. Throw these two books together and what do you get? More than 6,000 reviews of weird, wild, wonderful movies--from Abbott & Costello Go to Mars to Zontar, the Thing from Venus and lots and lots of strange shit in between. Weldon introduced my mind to benders like The Manster, in which a man grows an extra head (not too Freudian) and Soul Vengeance, in which a convict takes revenge on those he blames for putting him behind bars by sleeping with their wives and then strangling the men with his dick (no, I'm not kidding). Both books celebrate the great, the bad and the just plain odd. And I love 'em all.

Bad Movies We Love by Edward Margulies and Stephan Rebello. It's remerkably easy (and fun!) to kick around below zero-budget celluloid trainwrecks like Plan 9 and Robot Monster, but these guys go after people with actual talent--Oscar-winning actors like Gene Hackman, Bette Davis and Al Pacino, and lauded directors like Otto Premminger, John Huston and Douglas Sirk (whose color-saturated, hyper-melodramatic style Todd Haynes so ably imitated in his Oscar-nominated Far from Heaven)--who just happen to have made some really shitty movies. Most of their choices are high camp trash like Mommy Dearest ("Tina--bring me the axe!") and Valley of the Dolls ("You've got to climb Mount Everest to reach the Valley of the Dolls"), but they also love disaster movies with lots o' stars (The Towering Inferno), needless sequels (King Kong Lives, Staying Alive) and terrible musicals (Xanadu). And any book that gives an extra kick to Exorcist II: The Heretic is required reading for me.

Then again, all of these books qualify as "required reading" for me. Any one of them can be found at my bedside at any given time, and all of them are heartily recommended, though some of them are out of print and might be a bit hard to find. They've taught me a hell of a lot about good movies, bad movies and "what the fuck was that?" movies. And they've taught me that even the most miserable losers can be loved.

There's always hope, then. Always.

Home

I knew you when we were both
something like younger, Chicago.
Big urban brawler pock-marked
but proud, muscular electric
Downtown spinning "You don't fuck
with me, I don't fuck with you"
through fine-ground S-curves and
Why avenues where Algren and
Sandburg spat off curbs and
Mayors Richard the First and
the Second reigned, past corner
dime stores and bungalows face
to sagging face remembering
the Maketown they had known--
The Stockyards, street cars,
Riverview Park and strip bars,
World Series bunting, Black Sox
and Blue Cubs, blood-soaked
Twenties, gin-soaked Thirties,
acceptable wars before TV flicker,
Blackhawk and Airboy all over
the newsstands, Betty Grable and
Bettie Page on gas station walls,
sandlot players swinging cracked
bats wrapped back together with
electrical tape in neighborhoods
where everybody on the block
knew everybody on the block and
Suburbia was no more than a myth.


All gone. Like all the movie
houses speckling the city's
decaying downtown doughnut hole.
The United Artists. The Woods.
McVickers. Michael Todd. State-Lake,
Roosevelt, Loop, Monroe--all gone
but for the one named after you,
Winded City, and even that solid
old marquee was just barely spared
the lick of the wrecker's ball
and doesn't show flicks anymore.
The dead mice in the lobbies
have been swept away along with
the popcorn, Milk Duds stuck
to the bottoms of creaking seats
pushed all the way back to catch
black action bombs and kung-fu
comedies, the marble staircases
scrubbed for tidy Disney crowds
and the walls somewhat thicker
than the paint covering them.


Gone. The Oak. Family theater
in Mom's childhood. Porno house
in mine. Drive-thru bank now across
the street from Margie's Candies
where the Fab Four ate sundaes
before plying old Comiskey Park,
now a parking lot with a marble
plate staining the spot where
Nellie, Little Louie and Big Klu
rounded the bases on steaming
afternoons, picked it and gunned
on Autumn nights, played their
souls raw in the last baseball
championship chance you've had,
former Hog Butcher, long before
the modern know-betters tore
down the Baseball Palace of
the World and propped its shiny
stiff successor up across the way
on 35th Street. Not that long
before Pat and Bud brought up
their baby in the tenements
hugging part of Superior Street
where a golden-domed Ukrainian
Orthodox church now stands.


Not that all you are, ever were,
ever will be is mortar and
memories, old dear. It's just
harder to find a pulse, a thrust,
a trust in a place slapped onto
deep reaches of swampland,
drilled into the curve of a
a finger-shaped lake. City on
the Fake. A space massacred
by the native landlords, burned
down, snowed in, flooded out,
full of doubt that there is any
honor for the past, any prayer
for the future, anything in
the present to glare at through
rosy haze and even mistake for
hope, when what little we can
make out are silhouetted empty
evening porches, morning sidewalks,
mourning parents not warmed by
memories of the Good Ol' Days
when Bugsy Moran and Scarface Al
never accidentally whacked kids,
dads, husbands or friends--they
delivered lead presents in the name
of St. Valentine and sculpted fine
widows and orphans from perfectly
formed families and blunted streets.


The patterns repeat. Old is new
is old again, but still the beat,
the jarring heat of your sometimes
staining breaths, my love, goes
on across miles, changing styles
of words and music and quality
of light and life in and out
of subway stations freshly
tattooed and redecorated with
gradiated spray-paint murals,
of parkland just muscled enough
with softball diamonds and
tubular benches to beat back
the seaweed and prairie grass
they replaced way before
they became Playlands for
the dealers and deadmakers,
of neighborhoods patchworking
the whole damn quilt together
till down go the lights, the lives,
the eyes that can't stop tapping
through tears and breeze and
straining stained forearms and backs
till up go the cracking chants
of Chinatown and Little Italy,
Ravenswood and Englewood,
Back of the Yards and Bucktown,
Canaryville and Streeterville,
Logan Square and Lincoln Square,
Rogers Park, Humbolt Park,
Hyde Park, Albany and Wicker Park,
Grant Park on so sweet June afternoons...


Oh no. You are none of these.
You are all of these. Your head
lowered not in shame or pain but
weariness cuts on through southbound
rain, night-spark train cradled
on rust-flaked creasing palms ever
opening. Fisting. Fighting on as
always. Hoping. Always knowing for
absolute certain that you're phantasm
and fantasy and a city that turns
to grin and wince and shrug and
wink just enough every once in
a God-great while to let me
be a believer. A Lover. Alive.

Three Poems about Valentine's Day

I started writing poetry when I was in sixth grade. In the intervening years, I've scribbled verse about damn near every woman I ever wanted to go out with. But I've said precious little about St. Valentine's Day itself, most likely because I've had little reason to celebrate it; I usually just take the day off of work and hide until it goes away.

Here are three poems that relate to the holiday in one way or another, whether they're directly about the day or not. I can't say that they're the most cheerful words that've ever dripped out of my blue ballpoint Parker pen. (Yes, I still write these things longhand--got a problem with that?) But I'm hopeful that someday I'll write a flat-out happy poem about V-Day; I imagine that would feel quite nice. In the meantime, however, I'll be under this rock over in the corner if you need me...

ONE
Let's not even pretend that
the approach of The Day of
the Winged Child doesn't
set me off, doesn't get me
pimpled head to clenching toe
and ready to duck and cover.
The telephone will be flipped
off, the answering machine
unplugged, the brilliant box in
the living room unelectrified,
my overhung body unhugged.
Oh fuck, I'm rhyming and
bobbing my head to the beat
of bent meter, to the tickle
of long-haired cats rolling
at my feet whenever I read or
shit, to the attention of dawn
near--anything except what's
going on around me, in me,
through me from the time
the gunshots fade to echoes
on early New Year's Day to
the Ides of February when
the pressure's off again.


TWO
Every morning,
a cardinal
perches atop
the maple tree
beside the alley
beside the
Francisco
CTA station
and lets loose
his call into
the a.m. air.
This morning,
his call was
answered.


THREE
Don't get me started on
why I ignore raw nerve
endings mined all over
my scape which tend

to thrum on chilled
drizzerable mornings
like this, when the why
of the Go-from-Point-A-

to-Pointed-B-to-Pointless-
C just doesn't get to
me, doesn't drop-kick
the faith I had back in

the inchworm days of
playground baseball
afternoons, tunes bounded
off unlevel backyard

patio brick where Dad
raised worms for fishing
and I flattened his empty
Old Milwaukee cans

until my All Stars split
--back before all I had
saved up to offer any
interested in accepting

are organized erections,
puppies in therapy,
cardiac kisses to the
eyes and mind and deep

that unclench emotional
toes, slip on boots made
for talkin' and dance
a slow, close, swaying

fray that takes only
decades to unfurl but,
once the colors are
bright and stiffened in

the northeasterly breeze
a silence thick enough to
spread on crackers will
liquefy and slide through

the grate, end the obnoxious
weight and all will be me,
I will be we, we will be won.
Tip over the glass. It's done.