Chicago (24 page)

So it was that October that I haunted the blues bars along Lincoln Avenue, mostly Kingston Mines and Wise Fools and John's, and night after night sat in corners and
felt
the music more than heard it—does that make sense? Part of this was sitting close to the stage, which was easy to do in those old rattletrap clubs in the years before they became tourist destinations; Kingston Mines was such a hovel that part of the roof fell in one night when Eddy Clearwater's band was playing, and famously the band never missed a beat, even as water poured down in torrents near the pinball machines. But part of it too was the way with the blues you can safely ignore the lyrics and feel the tidal pull of the music, its thunderous chant and chorus, its moan and shriek, the way its repetitive nature, in good hands, becomes a sort of roaring meditative thing, lit up and sharpened and electrified by the piercing brazen needling ringing guitar.

I found, after many hours in dark corners nursing my whiskey and swimming inside the music, that I didn't care much about the singer or the song—it was all the same to me whether the singer was male or female, mumbling or shouting, whispering or roaring, charismatic or wooden, and it was all the same to me what song was being played, old standard or gleaming new original, updated classic or obscure nugget unearthed from a scratchy record or handed down from guru to apprentice. It was the music that I liked, and sometimes loved; the way you always knew the form, but were always surprised and sometimes delighted by the delivery and the passion and the skill, and even, occasionally, moved by something—the sharp sneer of a guitar commenting acidly on the tumult of the other instruments, the bar extended twice or three times by a band delighted by its flow that night, the rare haunting saxophone (saxes are uncommon in blues trios and quartets), the way a singer sometimes would stop singing words altogether and just hum or growl what was in his or her heart, beneath the words.

I know it sounds fanciful to speculate how a city's music might reflect something deep and true and real about the place; and also Chicago, of course, is filled with all sorts of other music, much of it certainly characteristic of some of the city—I mean, there's a lot of polka music in Chicago, understandably so, with such large Polish and Czech and Slovenian and Latvian and Slovakian populations. But with total respect for jazz and polka and rap and opera and rock and pop, I still think Chicago sounds like the electric blues, and the electric blues sounds like Chicago, and even if you hear a good blues band in Dublin or Dunedin, as I have, you are immediately in Chicago, in a dark corner, nursing a whiskey, hoping that the roof will not fall in, and being amazed by the mastery of the bass player, who is somehow playing chugging lines that sound eerily exactly like a night train through rustling fields of corn.

You might not also hear, in that electric blues, wherever it is being played, poorly or well, the faintest hints and intimations of traffic along the lake, and jackhammers and piledrivers pummeling the Loop early in the afternoon, and the thrum and rattle of elevated trains, and the bellow of tankers and barges far out on the lake, and the grim clang of descending winter, and the jungled sound of millions of people in one particular place in America arguing and laughing and singing; but you might. I do.

 

23.

SOMETIME THAT MONTH
I remember taking my worn shiny basketball and crossing Lake Shore Drive at rush hour, to do my hour of dribbling up and down the lakefront, when I realized with a start that I had not driven a car in months—a whole
year
, come to think of it. This was an amazing thing. It wasn't that I was a gearhead, particularly—unlike many of my friends and peers I had no interest in tinkering with cars, and racing them along the beach highway where I grew up, and puttering around in their innards, and proudly changing the oil myself with great ceremony and leakage, and knowledgeably discussing fan belts and gear ratios—but I had driven a good deal in college, back and forth across much of America to campus and back, and to realize that I had not been behind the wheel, whirring down highways and byways, stuck in traffic cursing gently and praying for something glorious on the radio, was … startling.

Thereafter for a while I found myself yearning to drive a car again, and I finally got the chance when a friend at work lent me her battered Pinto for a weekend; she was going away on a romantic adventure with her boyfriend, to a remote cabin in Wisconsin, to see once and for all if they could make it as a couple, which it turned out they couldn't, for all sorts of reasons, she told me later, some of them having to do with
someone
preferring to hunt deer rather than make love to his girlfriend, and
someone
preferring to drink copious shots of whiskey rather than discuss serious matters with his girlfriend, and
someone
blubbering about a hangover instead of snuggling with his girlfriend, who by the time they got back to Chicago was most definitely his former girlfriend.

All this was not my concern, however; I spent the weekend with the Pinto, which cured me thoroughly of my yearning for cars. The Pinto was a tinny rattling moist smoking roaring garish lurid rusting foul-tempered wreck which started only when it wanted to and lurched from one gear to another with an audible moan. It yawed terribly to the left, so much so that my arms were sore after driving it for ten minutes; the left rear tire was congenitally flat, and had to be refilled every hour or so; the license plates hung by a whim, and rattled ferociously in the wind when the car, coughing desperately, achieved twenty miles an hour; the right taillight was long gone, the hole covered by years of layers of duct tape; something had clearly expired in the trunk, possibly a horse, from the persistence and volume of the stench; there were something like a thousand sandwich wrappers and paper coffee cups and cigarette butts and tampon boxes strewn around the interior; there was a crack the size of Venezuela across the front windshield, and a hole as big as my fist in a side window; the only music was a cassette of a woman being stung by a thousand hornets, and shrieking about the experience; the gear shift was missing its knob altogether, so that when you shifted gears you lost skin on the palm of your hand; and there was a huge bumper sticker reading
HONK IF YOU ARE HORNY TOO
! on the rear fender, which caused no end of cacophony and gestures from other drivers. Also it was, no kidding, painted in orange and white stripes, apparently in a tiger motif, perhaps by the boyfriend as some kind of unconscious scream of passive protest about their affair.

I drove it anyway, of course, wincing as I shifted gears, and returning lewd gestures here and there to other drivers. For the first hour or so the experience was not unpleasant—I drove north along the lake all the way to Zion, almost the Wisconsin border, and it was a gentle afternoon, cloudy but warm, with ducks and geese whizzing past, and vast armadas of cloudbanks over the lake, and pretty girls bicycling and running along the shore, their lithe loveliness not yet completely hidden by parkas and hats. But then the car started sputtering and cursing, and I had to buy gas, and refill the declining tire, which entailed rooting in the trunk for a valve cap (missing from the tire, of course), which entailed breathing in the toxic fumes from the dead horse, which caused my eyes to water terribly. By the time I got the car back to Chicago it was amazingly out of gas again, and the tire was, of course, flat. I put another twenty dollars in the tank, filled the tire, parked it in the church lot with a note on the dashboard pleading a spiritual emergency (as per instructions from my friend, who used this dodge to park in church and temple lots all over the west side), and walked home. I don't think I was ever quite so happy to be on foot as I was that day. It was twilight and I saw an owl, too, near Clark Street, which made it, all in all, a good day.

*   *   *

By pure chance one day late in October I discovered where Miss Elminides went all day and what she did for work; she was a second-grade teacher at, unbelievably, Saint Demetrios Greek Orthodox School, where the festival had been held. I had spent the morning at Saint Matthias Catholic Church on Claremont and at the Catholic Worker House on Kenwood, working on my series of articles about spiritual practice, and at lunchtime I was strolling past the schoolyard at Saint Demetrios, looking for a gyro shop, when a fusillade of small bright children poured out of the school doors into the playground, followed by, to my astonishment, Miss Elminides, looking as calm and elegant as always.

For an instant I thought about not calling out to her, and respecting her privacy—she never had actually told me or anyone else what she did all day, and I suspect only Edward and maybe Mr Pawlowsky knew she was a teacher—but she saw me first, and smiled, and gestured for me to come through the gate. We shook hands gravely and she introduced me to the four or five children leaping around her eagerly like brilliant birds; clearly they worshipped her, and they regarded me with fascination, as someone who knew Miss Elminides well enough to be welcomed with a smile, and invited into The Presence!

She told me she had been a teacher there for nine years, and that her first day as a teacher was her thirtieth birthday, and that the very first poem she read aloud to her students was a poet's lovely poem about
his
thirtieth birthday:

The day that I turned thirty was a wintry

Day with summer and apples and hawks

In it and I realized that every day was an

Epic birthday if you think about it so I'm

Thirty today and ten and ninety and love

Finds me and there is a mink in the creek

And everything is happening all the time

Including backwards and we had best be

Attentive which I will try to be every hour

Henceforth and you too and let us burble

To each other about what we see, cousins

And sisters and brothers as we all are yes

I think I will always remember the way she essentially sang these lines, there in the jumbled schoolyard, with children bounding and leaping around her, two of them holding her hands and jealous of the others who wanted to touch her also; and the banks of vibrant green bushes and hedges behind her, against which her indescribably blue clothing also almost sang; and the way when the bell rang she said a word or two quietly and dozens of children instantly came to her as if summoned by a magician; and the way they walked before her, proud of their queen, and opened the door for her and her guest; for I was invited into the classroom also, to speak to the children for a moment about my work, Miss Elminides' conviction being that all manners of things and people were potentially lessons, and a brief visit from a working journalist might perhaps spark a child or two in directions unexpected and remarkable.

I did talk for a few minutes about stories, and why they were nutritious and even holy, and how we took them for granted, which we ought not to, because good stories were absolutely crucial to a good life and a good family and a good city and a good country, not to mention a good classroom. I talked about how my job was really to be a storycatcher, to wander around inviting people to tell me stories that mattered, whether they were funny or sad or sweet or confusing. My job, I said, was to catch and share as many good stories as I could, because stories are what we are, what we are made of, and if we don't share good stories, then we will drown in poor stories, thin and shallow ones, stories told by people who only want power or money, and there is so much more in life than power or money. The coolest most amazing people I have met in my life, I said, are the ones who are not very interested in power or money, but who are very interested in laughter and courage and grace under duress and holding hands against the darkness, and finding new ways to solve old problems, and being attentive and tender and kind to every sort of being, especially dogs and birds, and of course children, who are the coolest beings of all, and of course children in
second grade
are the coolest of the cool, especially if they have a teacher as cool as Miss Elminides, am I right?

In mid-sermon they had sat there staring politely at me (one boy gaping vacantly like a trout) but my last lines got them roaring, as I knew they would, and they shouted and danced between their desks for a moment until Miss Elminides gently said
all right
and back they flew into their tiny chairs, their feathers rustling and their faces glowing. Miss Elminides saw me out of the classroom and to the doors to the playground, and we shook hands gravely again, smiling, and she said one of her lesson plans in spring was to invite Edward into the classroom, to give her children a chance to meet an illuminated being. I said I thought that was a terrific idea and I would love to be there to watch what would surely be an amazing hour and she said she would consider it although it might be better to have the children encounter Edward wholly on their own, without the distraction of such an accomplished older man as myself. She said she would ponder this matter further, and meanwhile her most sincere thanks for sharing myself with the children, and what a fortuitous coincidence that I had happened by, and that indeed there was a wonderful gyro shop nearby, over on Washtenaw Avenue, I should ask for
keftethes,
which were tiny savory meatballs, the perfect thing for a light repast. The
keftethes
there were nearly the best in the city, topped only by those made by a grandmother on Green Street.
Those
meatballs made you a better
person,
that's how good they were. Edward, of course, knew the shop, which had no name or address, but he would lead me there sometime before Christmas, if I asked.

*   *   *

I had written to the Wyoming girl, at her new address in Boston, to tell her of my decision, and she had written back thrilled, using many exclamation points!!, and I had also called her twice on the phone, once briefly from the booth at the gyro shop (with Leah smiling at me from the counter; somehow she knew I was calling a girl), and she said she hoped I would be able to get to Boston as soon as possible, and she was waiting anxiously, but that I should take my time, as she understood my attachments in Chicago, and would be loath to influence my timetable, given the depth of my friendships there, Edward in particular.