April 23rd, 2009
For our Saturday night movie, I rent “The Pianist,” Roman Polanski’s film about the Warsaw Ghetto. I didn’t want to. I got this thing about unspeakable horror. I don’t handle it well. I still haven’t watched “Hotel Rwanda.” Almost walked out of “The Killing Fields.”
But with “The Pianist,” my wife insisted. She’s been wanting to watch this movie for years. She says it’s ’cause Polanski’s such a great director. But I think it’s cause she’s had a thing for Adrian Brody ever since she saw him kiss Halle Barry at the Oscars.
Watching the movie with us is my good buddy Ed, who’s in from out of town on business and is sleeping in the spare bedroom opened up when my Older Daughter went to college.
So the movie starts and within a few minutes I know why I didn’t want to watch it. It’s relentlessly disturbing — thousands and thousands of people herded to death. There’s no good guys rushing in to save them. Madmen rule the world. I close my eyes. I can’t bear the sights and sounds. Oh, why, oh, why did I rent this?
In the midst of the carnage, Ed starts to snore. Not too loud. But you can’t ignore it. I find it sort of reassuring — a break from the slaughter. After about five minutes, he stops snoring.
Midway through the movie, its tone changes. The Adrian Brody character — the pianist — slips out of the Warsaw Ghetto. The parade of death stops. At least, we don’t see it ’cause he doesn’t see it. The movie, after all, is viewed from his perspective. It becomes less a tale about genocide and more a story about one man’s heroic efforts to stay alive. I can handle that.
At the climax, when the central character’s almost out of his mind with hunger, he finds, of all things, a piano. He starts to play. It’s a moment of iconic heroism and triumph, a symbol of man’s fierce determination to survive.
And right in the middle of it all, Ed — my good buddy from out of town — starts snoring. Only this time it’s not a gentle buzz like before. Aw, hell no — man sounds like a chain saw. Gzzachachazzzz — like a parody of Curly in the Three Stooges. If you put a towel on his face, it would flutter up as he exhales.
“Ed, Ed,” says my wife.
“Huh? Huh?” says Ed, lost in sleep.
“You’re snoring….”
“Snoring?”
“Snoring…..”
“Okay….”
He opens his eyes. Sees the pianist playing the piano. And falls back asleep. “I hear the TV,” he says, “but I’m asleep…..”
A few minutes later, he’s snoring again.
When the movie ends, Ed wakes up long enough to go to bed. Pretty soon I’m the only one awake in the house. How the hell these people can sleep after watching the extermination of thousands of people is beyond me.
I look at the clock. It’s two in the morning. I’m wide awake — no sleep for me. I put on Stony Island, Andrew Davis’ classic flick about a soul band trying to make it big in Chicago in the 1970s. I love this movie — takes me back to the time I moved here a billion years ago. Near the end they play “Ooh, Child, Things are Gonna Get Easier.”
Damn, I love that song. I sing along. I can’t sing, but what the hell — there’s no one around but the dog. And the dog never complains: “Ooh, child, things are gonna get easier, ooh, oh, child things’ll get brighter….”
By 4:30 I think I’m ready for sleep. I trudge up the stairs and climb into bed. I close my eyes. But I hear a noise. Sounds like a buzzing. Maybe an alarm clock. Or a rodent in the wall.
I get out of bed and walk toward the sound. It’s coming from my daughter’s bedroom. I walk closer. It’s getting louder. I push open the door. It’s Ed — freaking Ed! He’s snoring. Sounds like water rushing down an unclogged drain.
He’s dead asleep. Oblivious to it all. Some guys have all the luck.
April 22nd, 2009
Back in the good old days when I used to smoke a bit of
reefer (I developed
glaucoma at a young age), I paid about $40 an ounce for a bag of decent
Mexican weed. Out of that forty dollars I figure about $10 went into the pocket of the
dealer, another ten went into the dealer’s supplier’s pocket and the rest of the money found its circuitous
way back to Mexico.
At the time,
in the early 70s, there was an epidemic of glaucoma in the USA and there were literally millions of folks who had to smoke reefer to gain some relief from the affliction. That meant that there were millions of $40 transactions taking place every week. That also meant that a lot of money was going into the dealers’ pockets and a huge amount of money was flowing back to Mexico.
But not one cent went into the coffers of the United States government. In fact, the government was actually losing billions of dollars trying the
suppress the marijuana trade.
As I understand it, the price of marijuana has skyrocketed over the years. The same bag that cost me $40 now sells for several hundred. Yet, the government still does not make a penny from this multi-billion dollar business.
It is estimated that marijuana is
California’s largest cash crop. Yet
California – which is in the throes of a terrible budget crisis, and has to borrow money from the feds just to maintain basic civic services – refuses to even consider legalizing and taxing marijuana. This strikes me, and quite a few
other commentators, as the height of fiduciary irresponsibility.
The government taxes and regulates tobacco, alcohol and gambling. Why can’t they tax and regulate marijuana? Let the
potheads help pay the salaries of our city and state employees. Then we might hear conversations like this:
Cop: Did you know you were going the wrong way down a one-way street?
Driver: (
giggling) Didn’t realize it, officer.
Cop: Young man, are you stoned?
Driver: Chill, dude, who do you think is paying your salary?
Cop: Ah, sorry boss. Didn’t mean to inconvenience you.
I won’t even try to argue the
ethical,
moral or
health issues of marijuana, but from a strictly economical viewpoint, the continued prohibition on marijuana makes no sense. It is a
costly, ineffective program that has proven to be a complete failure. Marijuana is as
popular as ever. It is a multi-billion dollar business with the potential to bring in billions of tax dollars. I just don’t get it.
While I’m at it, I’d like to propose the legalization of all
drugs. Legalize everything – coke, heroin, meth, crack, cough syrup, model airplane glue, banana peels – everything.
Alarmists might say I’m crazy: Milo, are you nuts? The streets would be crawling with depraved junkies.
I say, So fucking what? The streets are already crawling with junkies. I doubt if the number will increase just because drugs become legal. A certain percentage of the population will always be drug addicts. Oh, there might be a spike in useage at first, but once the novelty wears off people will come to their senses.
Besides, there’s nothing as harmless as a junkie when he’s loaded. They pass their days staring at TV, dozing or picking lint from their belly buttons. Junkies only become dangerous when they don’t have any junk. That’s when they break into your home, rob you on the street or commit senseless murders.
I say let the junkies register in a national addict program, then they can visit their MD, get a prescription, walk down to their neighborhood Osco and pick up their drug of choice. It works with methadone programs, and it will work with other drug programs.
Besides reaping huge amounts of tax dollars, legalizing drugs will have added benefits.
With the stroke of the legislative pen we could empty our prisons, which are
filled with people serving time for drug-related offenses and costing taxpayers billions yearly in upkeep. We could break the power of the
narco states in South America and Asia. Terrorists who
rely on drug money to finance their schemes will have to get day jobs. The
Mexican border gangs, who have created their own mini-states along the Rio Grande, will fade away.
If history has proven anything, it’s that vice can’t be stopped.
Prohibition is the prime example. Did people quit drinking liquor because the government banned it? The only thing Prohibition did was to
enrich organized gangs and entrench them in society, so that even now, 90 years after Prohibition was enacted, mobsters are
still a force to be reckoned with. Had it not been for Prohibition, mobsters would never have been anything but a historical footnote in American history. No
Godfather, no
Goodfellas, no
Untouchables.
April 21st, 2009
The usual suspects, plus some new ones, are screaming bloody murder over Barack Obama‘s invitation to address Notre Dame‘s graduating class next month. You’d be excused for thinking he’d submerged a crucifix in urine for all the outcry it has aroused.
Obama is wishy-washy about
abortion, a stance not good enough for the extremists among the
right and the
Catholic church. They want our elected leaders to equate abortion with
the Holocaust and the
genocide of Indians in the Americas, something Obama won’t do. Of course, there are probably quite a few who are a lot less agitated about the latter two issues than the first.
I’ll make one pronouncement about this whole tempest before I go on to the meat of the post. I’m all for people hollering their fool heads off about Obama’s invitation. I hope they protest, stage prayer-ins, and wave placards as passionately as if an ND quarterback had been jobbed out of the Heisman. That’s the strength of the United States – our freedom to tell the President to his face that he’s full of shit.
I only wonder if these same
right-to-lifers were as outraged when
Ronald Reagan and
George W. Bush spoke at Notre Dame commencements months after their elections, considering their giddy infatuation with
capital punishment, a practice the Church considers as
evil as abortion. I think I know the answer already.
Anyway, I was raised Roman Catholic. My parents sent me to
St. Giles elementary school and then
Fenwick High School, both in
Oak Park. My parents and I attended church every Sunday at St. Giles.
The
mass lasted an hour, which to my seven-year-old brain was the equivalent of the
Holocene Epoch. I spent that near-eternity resisting the urge to giggle, enduring one or more waves of nausea induced by a nearby worshipper’s excessive perfume or body odor, kicking my legs, staring at the pew back in front of me, and waiting for the blessed end of the ordeal.
That was signaled by the glorious moment wherein the
priest would announce, “The mass is ended, go in peace,” to which the proscribed response was, “Thanks be to god.” Sometimes I’d be sitting within yards of my school chum
Albert DiPrima. The two of us after a while started responding
Thanks be to god in loud voices of dramatic relief, after which we’d giggle surreptitiously to each other. One day, though, we must have gone too far because I received a sharp rap on top of my cranium from my
father‘s knuckle and
Albert’s father led him out of church by the ear.
After mass, we’d come home, Dad and I would strip out of our jackets and ties and
Ma would shed her
girdle and begin frying up bacon and eggs. My brother
Joey would join us for breakfast. He’d reached the age allowing him to skip mass, a passage I anticipated as deliciously as receiving my first drivers license.
We’d sit around the kitchen table as Ma served up the grub, my father busy buttering four slices of homemade bread, one of which I’d invariably snatch away from him, which – now that I look back on it – must have been his plan all along. Those breakfasts were among the fondest of my childhood memories mainly because the torture of church was over at least for another week.
I never could figure out this religion business. The
nuns at St. Giles taught me in
catechism class that my first duty as a Catholic was to love
god. Hmm,
love god – what the hell did that mean?
I’d seen pictures of
Michelangelo‘s fresco on the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel portraying god and various other hallucinations. So I adopted that image of the old bird. I was still left with the question,
How do I love him? I tried hard to make it happen when I went to bed at night and said my prayers. I didn’t exactly know which prayers to say so I silently repeated the mantra,
I love you god, I love you god, all the while imagining I was kissing the cheeks of Michelangelo’s deity.
One day, the St. Giles principal,
Sister James Mary (don’t ask me why she’d adopted a male saint’s name – suffice it to say that catholics are just
whacked when it comes to sex), visited our catechism class and informed us that loving god was the greatest feeling we’d ever experience. This was at odds with my own empirical observations based on my tentative forays into more immediate gratifications under the covers.
That moment completed a process that had begun a few years earlier when
Sister Jerome (another gender-ambiguous nun – it’s a wonder I’m not even more sexually fucked up than I am) ordered us never to watch or listen to the
Beatles because, well, just because.
I knew that Sr. Jerome had to be wrong because the Beatles with their
long hair and
Beatle boots and
cool suits were, well, cool. And if Sr. Jerome was wrong about the Beatles, what else could she be wrong about?
So, by the time I was 12, I’d quit the party, er, the church. Thank Michelangelo’s deity I did, otherwise I might be one of those blowhards hollering about Barack Obama’s invitation to speak to the Notre Dame graduates.
April 20th, 2009
I wasn’t gonna watch game one of the Bulls-Celtics playoff series. After the Bulls looked awful losing the last game of the regular season to the dreadful Toronto Raptors, I sent Milo an e-mail announcing that I was officially through with these worthless bums — forever!
Plus, I had a track meet to attend. So I’m sitting on the aluminum bleachers of Hanson Stadium watching the 4/200 meter relay when Norm calls.
“You watching this?” he asks.
“No, I’m at a track meet,” I say. “How bad are we losing?”
“We’re not losing — we’re winning. In Boston — we’re beating them in Boston, Benny….”
“No….”
“Yes….”
“How much?”
“Up three….”
“Oh, my God — call me back. Keep me posted!”
A few minutes later, he calls back: “We’re down one. Nine seconds left. Derrick at the line….”
“Oh, my God!”
“What?” says Daddy Dee, who’s sitting next to me.
“Rose on the line,” I tell him.
“Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” says Norm.
I interpret this as a made free throw. “Bulls tied it,” I tell Daddy Dee.
“Whee! Yeah!” says Norm. “Derrick Rose….”
I interpret this as another made free throw. “Bulls up one,” I tell Daddy Dee.
“Celtics call time out,” says Norm. “I’ll call you back….”
A few minutes later, my cell phone vibrates. “Yeah?” I say.
“Damn,” says Norm.
“No,” I say.
“What happened?” asks Daddy Dee.
“Noah fouled Pierce with two seconds left,” says Norm.
“No!” I say.
“Yes!” says Norm.
“Damn!” I say.
“What?” asks Daddy Dee.
I fill him in: “Noah fouled Pierce. Two seconds left. Pierce on the line. If he makes `em both, the Bulls lose….”
“Tied,” says Norm.
“He made the first,” I tell Daddy Dee.
“He missed,” screams Norm. “He missed! The Truth missed, Benny!”
“Overtime,” I tell Daddy Dee.
“Keep me posted,” I tell Norm.
My phone vibrates — Norm again: “We’re up two in the OT….”
“Just stay on the line,” I say. “I can’t take this anymore. I need the play by play….”
“Okay, Rose has the ball,” says Norm. “No. Agh! Ugh! Man….”
“What? What? What?”
“Agh!”
From the anguished tone of his wail, I gather something bad has occurred.
My phone vibrates. It’s my sister. “Hold on, Norm — I got another call. I’ll put you on hold.” I switch to my sister. “Are you watching this?” she asks.
“No, I’m at a track meet,” I say. “But I got my friend on the other line giving me the play by play. What’s going on?”
“Well, there’s three minutes and four seconds left and the Bulls have the ball. Now it’s three minutes and three seconds, three minutes and two seconds, three minutes and one second….”
“Stop counting down the time — tell me what’s going on!”
“Three minutes left….”
Oh, brother. I love her dearly, but she’s the absolute worst at play by play. I switch back to Norm. Apparently, he never knew I had him on hold cause he’s in the middle of yelling: “Damn, Benny….”
I’m just about bellowing: “What? Is it good? Is it bad? What? What?”
“You got to calm down,” Daddy Dee tells me.
“Tyrus hit a jumper — Bulls up one,” says Norm. “Celtics call time out. They got a last chance!”
“Call me back,” I say.
I watch the runners. I hunch over and remind myself to stay calm. I’m surrounded by people and I don’t want them to think that I’m any weirder than they probably already think I am. I cross my fingers. I actually cross my fingers. I have officially lost my freaking mind.
The phone vibrates. It’s Norm. He has this tone of wondrous satisfaction: “We won, Benny….”
“Yeah?”
“Thirty-six points and eleven assists for Derrick Rose, Benny. I told you, dawg — Dee Rose is the real deal….”
The phone vibrates. It’s my sister. “They did it; they did it,” she says.
“I know, I know….”
The phone vibrates. It’s Young Ralph: “Did you see this?”
“No, I was at a track meet….”
“Tyrus Thomas won it with a jumper — Tyrus Thomas!”
Daddy Dee’s phone rings. It’s his son, Jordan. “Yeah, I know,” I hear Daddy Dee saying. “Hold it.” He tells me: “Jordan says the Bulls are gonna sweep `em!”
All around me I heard the sounds of people officially jumping on the Bulls bandwagon, as calls come in telling people the unbelievable news: Bulls win! Bulls win!
My phone vibrates. It’s Milo: “Did you see this?”
“No, I’m at a track meet. But I heard.”
He can’t resist. He says: “Why would you care, Benny? I thought you were through with the Bulls — remember?”
Ha, ha, ha. Funny man — a regular George Carlin. As the gun goes off for the start of another race, I tell him: “Well, Milo, I guess I changed my mind.”
April 19th, 2009
I was born and raised in a little neighborhood called Galewood, part of the larger, officially recognized Austin neighborhood on Chicago‘s Northwest Side. The residents of Galewood were Italian, Polish, Irish and Greek, with a Jew or two for good measure. The men of Galewood were more white-collar than not – plant managers, insurance men, elementary school principals and so on. The women stayed home to vacuum.
We had a politician or two who lived nearby as well, including
Benjamin Adamowski, former Cook County State’s Attorney who challenged
Mayor Richard J. Daley in the 1963 election, and
Edward V. Hanrahan, another State’s Attorney, who
led the terror squad that whacked
Black Panthers Fred Hampton and
Mark Clark.
There were no blacks in Galewood. But the place was lousy with
Outfit characters, from upper-echelon bosses to low-level
juice loan collectors.
My old man, a shipping/receiving dock foreman, and my mother, a vacuumer, lucked their way into Galewood. Looking to buy their first home in the 1950s, they happened upon a comfortable bungalow on Natchez Avenue owned by an ancient dowager named Mrs. Alstead. Not sophisticated enough to squeeze every last penny out of her home, she offered it for a good deal less than $20,000. Ma and Dad snapped it up.
Even at that bargain-basement price, the house was too rich for my father’s meager salary so Ma had to go to work, first at a sandpaper company, gluing abrasives onto heavy-gauge cards while I floated blissfully in her womb, later for Frank’s Dime Store, and then for Sears. To this day, she brags about her magical way with money. She relies on a tried-and-true series of old financial saws guaranteed to make the eyes of her children roll like pinballs:
- I robbed Peter to pay Paul
- I made a penny do the work of a dime.
- I struggled to make ends meet.
When I was very young, I heard that last adage as “make ennsmeat,” which I assumed was some old country dish that she didn’t feel like preparing anymore.
Sadly, in part because Ma was a pecuniary tyrant, I rebelled and became a profligate spender. Oh, I won’t blame all my debtor woes on her; I possess, after all, a wide streak of compulsive narcissism. But one of my primary goals in life has been to show Ma that actually buying stuff isn’t fatal.
My Galewood neighbors attempted to impart many other lessons to me. Here’s a compendium of Galewood’s philosophies on black people:
- They wreck everything we give them.
- They’re comin’ after our daughters.
- Martin Luther King speaks with a forked tongue.
- JFK (or LBJ or any national Democrat) is a nigger-lover.
- The White Sox lose because they have too many niggers.
- They don’t want to work.
- Better watch out or they’ll take over.
Even as a dopey kid, I couldn’t figure out how a group that didn’t like to work would have the ambition or capability to “take over.”
Galewood’s actions were as alarming as its words. When, for instance, Ma refused to participate in an anti-
busing school boycott, our house was showered with raw eggs. And after King’s assassination, I took a schoolyard ass-beating after objecting to the prevailing opinion that he’d gotten what he’d deserved.
As mentioned here in previous posts, I had a hard time washing myself clean of Galewood’s racial muck. Even though I mourned King’s death and was outraged by those of Hampton and Clark, I still found myself uttering slurs now and again. It took me years to free myself of even unintentional racial loathing.
I compare my own growth in this matter to that of the nation’s. Sure, we’ve elected a partially black man as president. Yet, as the inane “
tea parties” of the past week demonstrated, we’re not totally free of racial fear.
Too many people bandied placards and words decrying our new “tyranny” and comparing Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler. They aren’t just suggesting that taxation or government spending programs are the moral equivalent of the Holocaust or Saddam‘s gassing of the Kurds.
It’s more cryptic than that. I suspect the “tea party” right-wingers are not as devoted to Ma’s brand of thrift as they are enslaved to Galewood’s old fears that “They‘ll take over.”
The tea party-ites still have a lot of racial muck to wash off.
April 18th, 2009
I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I’ve got a lot of things on my mind – the nation’s economy, my economy, the Bulls playoff chances, the White Sox playoff chances, my dog’s health, the undeniable fact that I’m not the #2 pencil I used to be – just to mention a few things. But the one thing that is driving me crazy, the thing that starts the snakes squirming in my head, is trying to find a
literary agent.
I’ve written two books in the past couple of years and am in the process of writing a third. The first one, a poker-themed novel titled “
Schoolboy,“ I had to self-publish as an
ebook because I could not find an agent to represent it. It did very well as an ebook, lingering at the top of the
best seller list for more than a year. The second book is now being considered by two different agents, one who wants to give it “further consideration” and another who says it’s interesting and will get back to me soon.
Athough this may sound like a promising situation, it’s basically the same shit I heard about the first book, so I don’t have great hopes that either one of them will take me on as a client.
The problem with trying to publish a book is that most publishers will not look at a manuscript unless it is represented by an agent. Go to the web sites of the
major publishers and right there on their home pages they state, “We do not consider unagented manuscripts.” In other words, no agent, no publisher.
I can understand this on an intellectual level. Publishers are deluged by manuscripts. They need some sort of screening process to weed out the bullshit from the even worse bullshit. So they use agents to do their triage work. The thinking is that if legitimate agents, who work strictly on commissions, are willing to put in their precious time trying to sell a manuscript, then there must be some value in it. After all, why would an agent waste time on something unsalable.
Despite the fact that I hate leaving my fate in someone else’s hands, I had no choice but to play by their rules, So, when I finished my first book, I spent a long time sweating over a
query letter and began sending it out to agents. In due time I began receiving replies, both email and postal. I had a few good responses, agents who wanted to see the first few chapters or a
synopsis. The majority of responses, however, were flat-out rejections.
I haven’t been shot down so much since I was a single guy trying to pick up chicks in bars.
Initially, I took the rejections in good humor. I took consolation in the fact that even the greatest writers suffered
their share of rejections. After a while, though, I started getting pissed off.
It wasn’t the rejections that were getting to me, it was the way I was being turned down. Some agents were clearly sympathetic to my plight, writing personal notes expressing their sincere regret that due to their heavy consumption of martinis, their long weekends in the Hamptons and their incredibly convoluted sex lives, they simply didn’t have time to read my manuscript. That sort of rejection I could understand.
The agents that got my goat were the ones that waited months to respond and then replied with an automated response, like this one:
Dear Author:
Please forgive the impersonal nature of this rejection. Due to the overwhelming number of manuscripts we receive, we are simply not able to reject each author personally. This is in no way a reflection on the quality of your work. We wish you the best of luck in the future.
I immediately replied:
Dear Agent:
Please forgive the impersonal nature of this reply to your rejection. Due to the overwhelming number of rejections I receive, it is impossible to personally reply to each rejection. This is in no way a reflection on the quality of your rejection. I wish you continued success in rejecting authors in the future.
Needless to say, I did not hear from that agent again.
And then there was this snide reply to my query letter from some arrogant bastard of an agent:
Sorry, I never consider first novels. But I will say that your query letter is one of the best I’ve seen.
I stewed a while, then replied:
You cocksucker, if you like the query letter so much, why don’t you try selling it and picking up an easy 15 percent on that.
Needless to say, I never heard from that agent again, either.
Author’s Note: I don’t want to give the impression that all my dealings with agents have been problematic. There have been some very kind and helpful ones, who have offered advice, referrals, and digital pats on the back. Among the good ones are
Jim Fitzgerald,
Steve Gregory,
Henry Morrison,
Laura Strachan,
Jeff Kleinman and
Bob Mecoy. If any of you writers out there fall into their hands, you should consider yourselves fortunate.
April 17th, 2009
Photojournalist
Jon Randolph takes us into a firm that boasts it has more than a million balloons in its warehouse.
MK Brody Company has been selling novelties and party
tchochkes since 1911. The company moved to the
wholesale market district west of the
Loop in 1960, when the area was a gritty, tough spot populated by men walking around wearing blood-soaked aprons.
The district, surrounding the
CTA Green Line elevated tracks between Halsted Street and Ogden Avenue, still is home to meat, seafood, and floral wholesalers,
continued below images
continued from above images
Brody sells everything from champagne glasses to breast cancer awareness pink ribbons to hand fans with
Barack Obama‘s image emblazoned on them. But after the company bought out the giant
800-4-Balloons outfit in 2005, its business, well,
soared.
See you here next Friday for another glimpse of Chicago brought to us by Jon Randolph. See you here tomorrow for more of Benny Jay, Big Mike Glab, and those all-too-rare Letters From Milo.
