Roger Wright – Chicago

“Hey, look! Something tiny and green is growing in the tar!”

Popping my head through the open trap door to the roof. Pausing just for a moment before hoisting myself up. You, sprawled on your stomach in cutoffs and an old University of Wisconsin t-shirt of mine that you slept in a lot, peering over the side of the faded red blanket and staring at something green and tiny that I could barely see.

“So, mold is exciting to you?”

You flip over on your back, and stick our your tongue, “More exciting than you!” Then you smile big and hold open your arms. Coming to you, I exhale for the first time that day.

“So? Tell me, tell me, tell me! How was your day?” you ask with a wide-eyed urgency and full expectation that the answer will include, at the least, a Shakespearean legend.

That’s how it was. Up on that roof, where the only demands on us came from the mysteries of uncountable stars. Everything was possible. Starlit love right now, a golden path of endless tomorrows to come.

We were four floors up. An old red brick apartment building on the corner of Webster and Racine, on the north side of Chicago. Back when old Italian guys still sat on the street in front of corner grocery stores. Vic’s Sub shop across the street. The local tavern. Quiet neon. Down the block, you could get burritos and tacos homemade in the back of a Mexican market. Walk a few blocks south to Armitage and there was Romanos Italian Ice, those chunks of sweet sour lemon telling every story you would need to about a warm and windy summer night. We even had a storefront bookstore for awhile.

You and I, handholding young, had the roof.

There were five of us who rented the top two floors. Somehow the rambling big white house near the campus in Wisconsin had morphed into the Chicago apartment with the tall ceilings, huge windows letting in artist’s light, and access to the roof. I remember none of the details on exactly how that happened. Did I sign something? Pack a moving box? No clue.

The five of us were one couple, one almost couple, and me. Andy and Marissa were the couple. Andy was slight, funny, quick and most likely would do something someday that would mean lots of money. I guessed a lawyer. Marissa’s father was a famous political guy, something no one would ever guess by knowing her and her friendly, down to earth ways. Zak and Lucy, they were the almost couple. Both artists. Zak’s bedroom was the entire top floor. Unfinished. Unheated. Even in Chicago winters, unheated. His bed hung by four silver chains from the rafters, swinging in the drafts.

I was the odd man. A special ed teacher in a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, jeans and gym shoes. Part-time job at the bookstore, because Andy knew a guy. Eating breakfast at The Athenian Room, 2 eggs, bacon, toast and coffee for $1.99.

You? Almost didn’t recognize you, that first time I saw you in that loud, smoky place across from Wrigley Field. What you saw in me that first time, it must have been some sort of miracle. Because we were not the picture of a couple. You were an Old Town condo, designer business suit, the right shoes, cigarette-smoking girl who would say things like “I’m in finance,” to the barrage of wannabe-your-boyfriends; watching them run in the other direction, towards the girls who didn’t already have their number.

How did we happen? You told me you were in finance. I snorted derisively and said “Really, I’m in futures.” You laughed and that was it.

It didn’t take us long to discover the roof. The other two couples were never all that interested, so we almost never had visitors. Just us and the stars. The sun would drop in the western sky and the orange glow of simmering twilight would rise, blending with the city lights and in tune with the distant hue and cry of other people’s lives, so far down below. We’d lay on our backs, you talking through your day, popping up to swing around and ramp up the story, because a day was not complete for you until you talked it through.

In the night glow of the city, on the roof, just us, hidden from any other human eyes, the wild music of our love heard only by those stars, where I imagine the song echoes still.

On the roof’s the only place I know.

Where you just have to wish, to make it so.

That day I came up to find you staring at the green mold, I had news.

Looking in your eyes with that inner tremble I sometimes got when I thought about not being able to look in your eyes, I said, “I quit. I’m not a teacher anymore. I’m gonna do it. Gonna go corporate. I am sellin’ out, big time.”

“What are you talking about? You didn’t really do that. You’re a teacher!”

“I can do it. I know these things. I’m older than you.”

“Yeah,” you laughed. “And so much more well-adjusted.”

“You know what I make. Teachers never make money. I get some sort of corporate job . . . I don’t know. Think about when we’re really old. Like 50, or something. Who’s gonna have the money, the corporate guy or the teacher? I mean, c’mon, you’re in finance!”

“You’re gonna be what, a solutions consultant? A branding manager . . .”

“Rodeo clown . . .” I said. . .

“ I guess it could be worse, I could be in love with a mime. You don’t have any mime plans do you?”

Which made me laugh, and then you caught it, and we almost forgot what we were talking about.

“Hey,” I said, “Should we all say a prayer for shareholder value?”

“I guess being safe . . . not having to scramble in our golden years. . .I guess that’s not a bad thing, is it?” you said, very quietly. “Maybe a corporate job is what you should do.”

Then you gave me a very long look, punched me in the arm and took my hand. Laying on our backs, on that roof.

Under yesterday’s stars.

There was about to be a moment. One of those tiny moments one never forgets.

I was out for a head-clearing walk after spending some hours producing some unusually muddy writing. Thinking about how I really didn’t need the Popeye’s Chicken calling me across the street from Lakeview High School. The neighborhood high school.

Suddenly some cars pulled up and a woman popped out with a smile and radiance, which, even from 50 feet away, would make even the most stubborn spring flowers bloom. Here’s her picture.

All thoughts of Popeye’s gone, my eyes 3 times their normal size, next out on the sidewalk was a slight, friendly looking man in a blue shirt, with his sleeves rolled up, who looked like he could be some sort of Ambassador for World Harmony. Somebody that everyone would want to know.

Lakeview is not some elite bastion of the super rich. The late Tom Bosely, Richie Cunningham’s Dad on Happy Days, went to Lakeview. There is a movie called “The Bodyguard” (not the one with Whitney Houston) that was filmed at Lakeview. One of the best movies ever shot in the city. But more than anything else, Lakeview is a neighborhood school. And these two magnetic people were not from the neighborhood. These two belonged to the world.

As the small group surrounding the two made their way inside, I recognized the man. “Hey! That’s Yo Yo Ma!” What’s he doing here??

Walking home, the woman’s identity came to me. That’s Renee Fleming! (Of course I had to confirm that by checking out pictures of Renee Fleming on the Internet for an hour or so.)

Through a collaborative project, courtesy of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Lyric Opera, and The Merit School of Music, Fleming, Ma and Damian Woetzel, former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, were at Lakeview simply as a way to connect the arts to the way people live.

That’s it. Nothing more. It wasn’t sponsored by VISA. No political favors were exchanged. Instead, these world-class artists spoke with the kids, sang and played. And they listened. The Poetry Club got up to recite as Yo Yo Ma played Bach. Fleming sang with the choir. As the kids looked on in amazement that a human being could really sing like that.

There was even a moment when, in the auditorium filled with normally leaping and fidgeting teenagers, the crowd of kids went totally still. Turned off all their phones. Because Yo Yo Ma was playing Rachmaninoff.

The kids working on the performing arts knew that there was a chance for a trip downtown to see some sort of performance. But instead these world renowned artists came to them.

In addition to the trip to Lakeview, Fleming and Ma also gave an impromptu concert in the atrium of a downtown office building yesterday. Again, bringing art to the people.

While back up in the neighborhoods, heads still reeling from the visit, more than one young boy or girl had the same thought.

They were thinking, “Someday. Someday, I’m gonna do that too. Someday, when I’m an artist and the world knows my name, I’m gonna remember what happened at my school when Renee Fleming and Yo Yo Ma dropped by. And I’ll go back and visit with some kids.”

Just like Renee Fleming and Yo Yo Ma.

(Originally published in the now gone “Open Salon”. March 2012)

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Born on the crowded, cobblestone hills rolling down from the giant white Basilica of the Sacre Coeur under rainy gray Parisian skies; the book I meant to write would, of course, have been a novel.

It would have been based loosely on the early years, before Cristina left me for that bond trader named Ralph. It would be a classic tale of love lost and rebirth, offering plot twists that, even in repeated readings, delivered surprises.

Perhaps it would have taken the reader walking through the ancient cobblestone streets of Montmartre, inviting the reader to stumble upon a hidden cheese shop run by Monsieur Joee LeBlanc. Monsieur Joee would offer a taste of a nutty, ripe old cheese, first made centuries ago in the Alsace-Lorraine by a forgotten band of monks.

Alsace-Lorraine would have been Cristina’s ancestral home. That she was really descended from a lineage of royalty, and that she was in fact a bona fide princess, were things she wouldn’t tell me until the morning after that all important third date.

I would stumble out of bed to throw open the shutters and let in waves of Paris street sounds and sunlight (hey – this was my book, and I’d cliché all over the place if I wanted). I would see Cristina, sun-drenched blonde hair flying, marching regally down the street with our coffee and croissants.

Then, listening to her footsteps on the stairs, I would be thinking of the walking we’d do that day, the bookstore visits, the hours I’d have to write, and she would make her entrance into my little room to proclaim, “Roger. I’m a princess. I thought you should know.”

This being fiction, I’d make her funny and wild. A minor TV actress, from a suburb of LA. Looking to be the next Lucy, but still a princess. At least until we took that trip to Paris and Ralph the bond trader, who would likely take her away forever, showed up at a smoky jazz joint in Montmartre where it was said that Picasso, Einstein and Steve Martin used to hang out.

Across the years, across all the gin joints, facebook mutterings and tweets, in all the world, I would try to get her back from Ralph.

And in all those times I got knocked down, all those times just looking for a “like” or a smile at a song from an absent friend . . . all those times I would stand right up again. Just like Paris. I would stand right up again.

Find the story. Sing the song

That was the book I meant to write.

And just like Paris?

I will.

https://youtu.be/GamwdGNUBmY

Staring hard into the deepest night of the Wisconsin forest, wondering if I had become like Barry just after he and Pam had bought the tiny cluster of simple, screened in cabins on the deserted beach in Tortola where, word had it, Madonna used to stay.

Cocktails at sunset for the nine couples who were guests at any one time. Simple dinners pulled from the sea minutes ago. There was no menu. And no one cared.

Pam was the hostess. Welcoming and warm, she could talk as long as you’d listen. But Barry was a different kind of guy. Polite, nodding hello as he’d tend to gardens and grounds during the day, then come sundown, he’d pour himself a gin and tonic, squeeze his lime wedge, then he’d walk by himself to the table closest to the water, pull out a chair and spend the next hour or so just staring out to sea. Speaking not a word. Neither happy nor sad. He just kept looking. He just was.
As if staring off into the dying light of an ocean sunset was all that mattered.

I’m not sure what he saw. This was the early nineties. Things were so very different then. Traveling the British Virgin Islands, I had no idea that I was getting to eat life’s desert first.

Didn’t everyone go on trips like that? Everybody was a vice president or CEO or something. Sure there were vulnerable, downtrodden people in the world. And you knew that . . . but what could you do? This year it’s the Caribbean, next year the Canadian Rockies. Assuming of course that the stock options kept growing.

Income gaps were for people in other countries then.

And as for our hosts? Barry and Pam most likely never really had a questionable past. But there are quiet corners of the world where people go to hide. And I always wondered if Barry was hiding from something as he sat and looked out on the water.

When I was a teenager, my parents took us kids on one last family vacation in a deep green forest on the western shore of Puerto Rico. The host couple there would blast Wagner into the jungle every night and I remember my parents wondering, half joking but only half– war criminals?

Which I, at 16, thought, “Cool!”

And then back to right now. As the rain came down on the dark, yet bursting with life night of Peninsula State Part in Door County Wisconsin: as the fireplace crackled, as we somehow held hands even though she was standing at the kitchen counter 10 feet away.

Back to right now. To this dark night and to every dark night in this forest I could feel the gravitational pull of this place. As if we were out there in the wetland marshes next to the Bay and Fish Creek, out there with our ancestors singing to the night in the rain.

Just like Barry, I kept looking out into the dark and murky distance. Knowing no real answers, not even sure of the questions. But this time remembering, that I could find a mystery when I needed one.

Find it in the nick of time.

“Listen hard,” I asked all ten of them sitting around the table. “What’s the first thing you hear?”

“Guy playing the piano.” several of them said at once.

“What else? Listen again.”

This time the woman heard it. “There’s somebody on bass.” She said.

First time there had been a woman in the Wednesday night “Job Talk” group. They were all here for the weekly meal in the basement of the church.
“Job Talk” was something to do while they waited for the food.

The woman was the only one who caught the bass. Layered into the piano. As if the crystal notes came from just one instrument.

“That Bill Evans on piano?” she asked.

I tried not to let the surprise light my face. “Yep. Sure is.”

Four bars into the piece, and she says: “That’s Scott LaFaro on bass. Paul Motian on drums.”

We were in a small room off of Fellowship Hall in the basement of the church where 100 or so come inside from the streets every Wednesday night for their best, warm, good tasting and healthy meal of the week.

The people had started gathering outside in the 5:00 winter darkness. Lining up on the sidewalk in front of what used to be storefronts, but are now condos. There used to be a butcher shop right next door. The German immigrants making a go of it before the last depression in the 30’s and then the war. Building businesses. Raising kids. Now there are hungry people lined up in front of half million-dollar condominiums, waiting to get into the church basement.

The line gets longer each week. The people come in from the streets for that one meal an hour early just to stay warm. Kathy, a quiet angel who, with her husband Erwin and their son Jeff run the place. Trudi, Penny and Inge and some of the other ladies of the church serve the piping hot delicious meal at 6. Kathy makes the announcement of “Job Talk” as the clients file in from the street.

“Okay, if anybody wants to go in and do Job Talk with Roger—you’re welcome to go into the Sunday School room over here!”

“He got jobs in there?”

“No,” she answers, “just some new ways of thinking about how to get some work. Maybe sharing some stories of how you got some work.”

“Sure, why not,” says one guy.

“I did this last week,” says another.

“This dude’s alright,” I see a chin waved in my direction. “He got nothing going on either”

“No shit?”

“Yeah… he ain’t got no job either.”

First guy to sit down at the end of the table is Jobo.

Jobo, as always, is doing everything fast. Permanently bent forward as if there was always a wind blowing hard against his frame. Teeth that had never known a dentist, scraggly beard.

All the guys lived on the street, but Jobo was the one who was really making it on the street and had been for a long, long time. Animal eyes that could spot food, spare change or a warm place to stay from 100 yards away. Quick hands. Fought against everything the street had to offer. He had known the orange neon glow of the 4 a.m. sidewalks when everybody else had found their way home for the night and all the buses and trains ran empty. Known it for decades.

Whenever I asked a question to prompt the group to talk, Jobo was usually the first one who answered.

But not this time. This time it was the woman.

Her eyes like a memory of a long ago smile: “Yeah, that’s Scott LaFaro.” They played here once. Him and Bill Evans. Paul Motian. Motian was on drums.

“You all know Mary?” Jobo nodded at the woman. “She used to sing.”

That’s when I remembered her. It had been four years since she’d been around. She’d come to see a small production of Amahl and the Night Visitors put on by a bunch of folks from the church.

It was Mary; sitting there recognizing Scott La Faro’s bass on a cold winter night, which had once provided us all with a moment of true mysterious grace at that production of Amahl.

One of those moments you’ll miss if you if you blink your eyes. Here’s what happened:

A collection plate had been passed. The plate was full. It was being carried up the center aisle of the church and just as the plate – held high above the usher’s head – reached the first pew where Mary sat scrunched down on the aisle, she reached up high and gently tossed one more coin into the plate. Leaving every single soul in the room to wonder if that coin was her last.

The performers – stunned by this simplest of moves, took one more bow. I looked to the side and saw the Pastor’s jaw drop. Later he said to me, “Those are the moments that keep you going.” Then we all we all filed out into that cold winter night.

Later I learned a little more, from one of the ladies of the church, about Mary’s life as a singer. Playing the small clubs on Lincoln Avenue back in the day. She was a local favorite. Had a following. Then, when that ended, came the years sleeping in the park on Fullerton near Children’s Memorial Hospital, taking meals at the church in that part of town.

But this was over 30 years ago. A lifetime.

Now she sat here in a group of men, being the first to hear the sound of the bass.

“So why the bass? I asked the group. What could that possibly have to do with getting jobs?

Silence.

“Well, what does the bass do for the music?”

Silence.

“Let’s listen again.”

“Anyone,” I ask, “know the name of the song?”

This time Jobo spoke up: “Sure, that’s ‘My Foolish Heart.’”

Then from the corner, Tim – an ancient, plodding African American man, as deliberate and thoughtful as Jobo was quick – looked up. Tim never spoke. But Tim had made it on the streets for just as long as Jobo. He didn’t need to talk to get that across.

“One time I heard Oscar Peterson play that song. Him and Ray Brown.”

Mary just nodded and said, “Ray Brown.” Her eyes floating back to some smoky club, glasses clinking, as far away from the church basement as she could possibly be. “Ray Brown. Like Scott LaFaro. ‘Cept Ray Brown lived.”

Then I asked again: “Now, listen to the bass. What does it do for the music?”

“It’s like some sort of story it’s telling,” Jobo said.

“But it’s a story where nobody really know the words.” said Lab Tech Guy. Lab Tech Guy never wanted to tell anyone his name. Only that he had worked as a lab tech in the old Vienna sausage factory, doing quality control. So he never talked much either. But this time he said. “A story where nobody knows the words.”

“Sure,” now Jobo was on a roll. “It can help you remember the words.”

“What do you mean?” I asked the group, “How can the bass help you remember the words?”

That’s when Mary brought grace to the room one more time.

Hunched in the corner, still dressed in the heavy down parka that was her home against the wind, even though the room off the dining hall was very, very, warm…Mary, almost whispering said:

“When I can feel the bass, I remember the words to the song. Like in ‘My Foolish Heart,’ and she sang:

There’s a line between love and fascination, that is hard to miss on an evening such as this . . . .

The memory of her voice as a trained clear instrument prompted the thought, just for a moment, the winter had ended and the birds had returned. The room glowed in a deep blue holy kind of quiet for just a beat.

I then asked: “Anybody ever do something to try and get a job . . . . . . and feel like you just forgot the words? You just didn’t know what to do? What to say? Who to say it too? Feel like you were lost before you even started?”

Every single person around that table nodded their head. All eyes wide. Energy just buzzing across the room as the stories started to flow like they were all part of one giant electric grid.

“This one time? When I was standing in line for 6 hours. . . . .”

“And then she asked me how many babies I had. . . . .”

“And he told me he knew I was carrying a knife!’

Then I asked:

“So what about the bass? What can the bass do? What can listening to a bass player – dead now at the age of 25 in 1963 I think it was – how can the bass player help you with this?”

Jobo, as was usually the case, gave the room the answer.

“It’s like the street,” he said. “You can be walking down the street. Not just now when it’s cold, but summertime too. And you stop and you listen, and you just know there’s gonna be trouble on the next block. You can hear it. You don’t have to see nothing. You can hear it!”

“It’s like that bass is beating out what will happen in your head. You don’t need no words. Sometimes I can even hear a drum inside me. Beating along. Saying, ‘Watch out!’ The bass, the rhythm, helps you remember where you’re going. The rhythm, the bass, that’s the street. The floor. The part where your feet hit the street! You hear that. You keep walking.”

“That ever happen to you with a job you were trying to get, Jobo?” I asked.

“Well, you know the CITGO over on Addison and Ashland? I know those guys. Two brothers, they own that place. They own lotsa places. So I’m talking to the one guy, he’s talking about his brother and he keeps telling me how I gotta make sure to do what his brother tells me to do. He keeps saying that. He keeps telling me about his brother will be watching me real close. So the bass line I’m hearing—”

“Yeah?”

“The bass line I’m hearing is: these two brothers. They talk a good game. But they really don’t like each other very much. Now they never told me that. I just heard it in the way this one brother told the story.”

“So the bass line was…” I asked.

“The bass line was the REAL story. The truth. Didn’t matter what somebody was saying. I could hear the real story. I know it sounds like crazy talk. But when I heard the real story, I got…well…”

“Confident?” I asked.

“”I’m thinking you can’t get no more confident, Jobo!” drawled Tim, smiling for the first time. The whole table chuckled.

Jobo smiled, and then went on. “Yeah the bass line is what made it so I knew what to do.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, so just then his brother walks in and I say—for both of them: I say, so okay, every time, I finish one of the jobs I let both of you guys know?”

“So how did that help?”

“Well, then they both said, okay, we gonna pay you.”

“So you got them on the same page? Where they both wanted to pay you?”

“Yeah, the stuff the one brother was saying, it sounded alright. It was all the right words. ‘Tell this. Tell that.’ But neither of these guys trusted each other. I could hear the bass line running below all that. I could hear the real story. That’s like what you’re talking about, right?”

“”Say it one more time Jobo,” I asked.

“Following the bass line means you can follow the real story.”

With that—Kathy rang the dinner bell and they all went in to eat.

Excerpted from FINDING WORK WHEN THERE ARE NO JOBS. Think Different Press. 2013

Image: minkara.cavview.co.jp

A cleansing, windy warm summer rain, washed down Chicago on the morning after Ronnie Gilbert died, at 88, out in California. The smiling power in her voice still resonating. A voice from the past? A folk singer? Right?

Hardly. She was so much more.

There were three men in the Weavers, one of them was Pete Seeger. But they only needed one woman. That was Ronnie Gilbert.

Seeing her name on my screen I could hear that voice like it was wired into my very soul like some musical sign pointing straight towards justice. Straight toward hope. And I wanted Ronnie Gilbert to start singing to some of our contemporary bullies and scoundrels. People like our own Illinois Governor Hedgefund so frothing at the mouth eager to prey on the vulnerable. I wanted to tell her about the new plan that’s being floated to dismantle tenure and thereby curtail what can be taught. Bought and paid for by oil barons of evil, snickering in their self-righteousness with a wink, a nod and shrug of the shoulders as they say, “All we’re doing is balancing the budget” and then breaking out a giant guffaw as they slap their knees in greedy joy.

But then I remembered Ronnie Gilbert’s voice. And thought about how our evil doers of today, those that work to take away the right to vote, the right to organize, the right to live healthy, how none of them were really all that different from the McCarthy’s and such. The evil Ronnie Gilbert fought with the power and smile in her voice.

I remembered Ronnie Gilbert’s voice. How she used it for Good.

How she powered the struggle.

And how that voice of power seemed to always have a smile flowing strong as she sang us along.

Listen to her sing today. You’ll feel that smiling power too. The music goes on.

Five years ago today. The BP oil spill. And if you had even the most remote connection to the rhythm and rock water soul of the earth, you wept. Because it was as if we, all of us, had taken our promise to take care of the earth during our time, sprinkled that promise with gasoline and then lit the match that sprang forth this oily gooey mess that would smother any kind of hope or joy to come

I remember one of the Obama kids being quoted, “Daddy, did you fix the hole in the ocean yet?”

Then I remembered Teresa,

And as the oil kept killing the birds and the oysters and the shrimp and the souls of the fisherman, as it kept spurting and roaring and the fires kept burning, I wondered if Teresa, a love from so long ago,  had somehow gone back to Gulfport.

Perhaps she has set up shop to be a teacher. Spending her time with the children of fishermen who now spent their days glued to the TV cause there were no more fish. Maybe she went down to the gulf and somehow did something to get the oily sludge off the wings of the sea birds that no longer could fly.
Course that would likely be impossible. Even on the TV from far away, when you looked at the eyes of those birds, you knew, something larger than life itself had died.

Had she gone back to help? Perhaps there was a clue in where we started. Decades ago, she walks through the kitchen door of Paul and Betsy’s house in snow swept Champaign Illinois. Then later we all go ice skating. She starts to talk about James Joyce in that Gulfport drawl. Then the night lit up in Paul and Betsy’s living room. Lit in that way that only happens when the dancing is at home, and is music come alive in every color and tone imaginable. A fake argument about who would sleep on the floor and who would take the couch when the hour got late. Then the lights went out and I said to her let’s try. And when Paul and Betsy tip toed through their lving room in the sunny bright morning of the next prairie day, both she and I were snuggled up on the floor.

Back to now. Knowing only those so long ago memories, I wondered if 5 years ago, went home home to Gulfport to help with the hole in the ocean. And if she did, was there a trace of memory of that forgotten Judy Collins song we both liked. It was called “Hard Times For Lovers.”

If we had a song, that was it. Which tells you something. Cause it really wasn’t all that good a song. But it had it’s moments. Had its lines.

And it bought to mind another song. Ian Tyson was the song writer. And if you listen to this, if you listen between the lines, if you listen really hard, you will hear what its like to be young. You will hear hope.
You will hear her singing “he loved his damned old rodeo, as much as he loved me.”

And as that steel guitar soars and then comforts and holds firm, you will see what I see. You will see her go back to Gulfport and simply do the best she can.

Doing what she can to help those bewildered gulf coast birds.

Dry mouth. No water after midnight. That’s the rule. But the appointment is early, 7:00 a.m., sun just coming over the morning concrete ribbon of the Kennedy expressway streaming into downtown Chicago over the cement shoulder of what used to be 1528 Wabansia, where Nelson Algren used to love Simone DeBeauvoir.

A few hundred yards south of the long gone, paved over 1528 Wabansia, a car dealership with no people, so you pull over to wait for the MRI joint to open. And you wonder if there was an old dive bar here where Algren and deBeauvoir might have stumbled out into a cold wind beyond belief just as it started to snow as they began walking on back to 1528 Wabansia. A warmth beyond any breathing soul’s belief.

And then just a few steps north, it’s time. So you slide on away from the new car showroom on to North Avenue, turn right on Ashland and just a few steps north of 1528 Wabansia, where you pull into the storefront MRI joint and begin about an hour of having someone tell you to take deep breaths and lie still, Just lie still. Without breathing. While the giant, million dollar magnet works the magic of seeing inside you. Sights you would likely prefer not to see.

But as a pal said today, “there is a reason they call it practicing medicine.”

When the joint first opened, the technician guy, who could not have been nicer, said that the company that makes the big machine had to come and install all sorts of magnet stuff because they wanted to make sure that the rhythm and dull roar of all those cars didn’t screw up the magnetic resonance imaging, make sure they don’t f—up the magnets that saw inside your skin.

And you wonder, when he tells you that, if Algren and deBeauvoir, could somehow see inside each other’s skin like the giant magnet did.

Or if they’d just laugh. Think that was ridiculous. And just wander back home in the snow to 1528 Wabansia.

And toast the giant magnet. Across time and brand new days. Looking out at that cold snowy night outside. Pulled by a giant magnet.

But, looking at the unknown straight in the eyes.

https://youtu.be/W9LGfXeoYII

And the blood burbled out

Dribbled down

Stained his shirt.

He dropped down hard head

Smacked the soot stained sidewalk

Shook loose slammed beneath the city street throng.

I did not see the moment

But I heard the sound of bone on concrete

Sprawling arms convulse then still.

Under brutal baked and cruel city sun

That said

There might not be tomorrow.

And the blood burbled out

While the circles of cell phones rose to attention

Then a slow motion time staccato crowd moan

And the yips and yaps of blind and impotent orders being given

“Be careful!”

“Don’t move him!”

“Give him room!”

“Just be careful!”

Then finally the siren.

Coming in an instant that felt like forever.

Then came the siren

Ripping through the heat

Life a razor honed knife through melted butter.

Here they come

The social safety net.

And with a lumbering certainty

Lights flashing parting seas

They disembark

Take positions

Checking vitals

Street science saviors seeing more

than the rest of us

Making the decision

He was alive enough to move.

Faded Hawaiian shirt, blood stained knees and a missing shoe

He looked like a worn out wandering beach boy

Gone too long from a sad distant ocean

Swallowed by the city

Dirty blond hair, and shocked grey eyes

Dreams of summer waves and a smiling surfer girl.

While those resolute plodding street science saviors

Secured their new charge

Lifted up the sleeping beach boy

That man and that woman who are the social safety net

Lifted him high

Above the glass cracked baked and tired Chicago sidewalk.

Slid him in their wailing flashing chariot

And I wondered if there’d be someone worrying

When the cracked head bloody beach boy

Did not make it back on time

Tonight.

https://youtu.be/PeJkbSi0vMA