Big Mike: I Am Neda

I can’t get the image of Neda out of my mind. I’m not too proud or macho to admit that yesterday night, as I thought about her sprawled on the Tehran pavement, I cried.

Neda is the young woman who was shot by Iranian thugs near a protest march Saturday. Last night, CNN ran the video of her immediately after she took a bullet to the heart (man, these jackbooted theocrats sure know how to make a dramatic point.) I was struck by the look on her face as her chest cavity filled with blood. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining what she was feeling and thinking.

I am Neda. This is the story of the rest of my life.

It is beastly hot in Tehran today. This car feels like an oven. We are headed to the protest at Amir-Abad. Mr. _____, my music teacher is driving. My dear friend, _____, sits in the back seat. The traffic on Kargar Avenue is at a standstill due to the turnout. I am excited – not even the threats and warnings of the authorities can silence us.

I wish we could leave the car right here. I can poke my head out the window and see the throngs up ahead.

“Let’s go!” I say.

“Be patient,” Mr. _____ says, but I can’t.

I turn to _____. “Shall we walk?” I ask.

_____ seems hesitant; he shrugs. Mr. _____ is worried. “No, please. Let’s stay together,” he says.

“I’m sorry, Mr. _____, I can’t sit here. I’m going to get out for some fresh air until we move again.”

I step out of the car. It is no cooler out here but I feel better for being able to move. Still, there’s not a hint of a breeze. Some protesters are running away from the square, gagging from tear gas. _____ opens his door and joins me. He grabs my elbow.

“Watch it!” he nearly shouts as security forces on scooters zoom toward us. They are chasing protesters and swinging their batons indiscriminately. As they pass, _____ points toward the nearby rooftops. “Look,” he says. “Snipers.”

Indeed, snipers seem to be on every rooftop. In fact, the man on the nearest building is looking directly at us! Now he aims his rifle. Is he mad? I think he is pointing it at us!

I can see his deep brown eyes. His right eye squints as he focuses through the rifle’s sight. The fools – if they are trying to frighten us, they are succeeding!

A brilliant arrow of orange-white light emanates from the barrel of his rifle. He grimaces against the recoil. As such, he appears distraught, as if he wishes he hadn’t really pulled the trigger. My heart is filled with compassion for this man who seems powerless in the face of forces much greater than he. I want to touch his face, to console him. I want to tell him I love him.

Someone punches me in the chest. Can this be a single man striking me? It is more like the collective might of ten men! My heart is burning. The pavement begins to undulate. What inconceivable madness! Can you imagine that an earthquake is striking Tehran at this moment?

_____ screams in my ear. I want to say, “Stop screaming, you’ll break my eardrum!” But rather than chide him I am thankful to him, for he has caught me before I fall. He holds me close and gently guides me to the pavement. His face is contorted like a gargoyle’s.

My chest is on fire. “I’m burning,” I whisper. “I’m burning.”

Suddenly, many men hover over me. They have their hands on my chest and are leaning with all their weight on it. I want to tell them to stop but I can’t. My throat and mouth are filled with warm liquid. If they don’t allow me to sit up, I will choke on it.

Time has nearly stopped. Everyone moves in slow motion. But the burning in my chest has stopped. I’m swallowing the warm liquid, as well. That is a relief. I won’t choke to death now.

Although I really don’t care. I am so tired. I could close my eyes and go to sleep right here on the pavement. Isn’t that strange?

For an instant, I feel distant panic. The world – even though it moves in slow motion – is moving without me. The world, I fear, is leaving me.

There, to my right, people are standing on the opposite curb, watching us, pointing. Some are crying. Something is horribly wrong. A frisson the likes of which I’ve never experienced causes me to shudder uncontrollably. They are pointing at me.

I wish I weren’t here. God, please don’t let me be here anymore! I wish I were anywhere else in the world. I wish I were back in the hot, hot car. I can’t stop staring at the people on the curb. I want to be with them, pointing and crying. I want to be them, not who I am.

The tiredness is overtaking me. There is a harsh glare in my peripheral vision. I must avert my eyes but it is impossible. The people on the curb have become smaller and quieter.

Now I am bathed in the most delicious sensation. I have never felt so relaxed. It is almost sexual. My eyes move without me willing them to. Where are they going? I see sky, I think. I think. I….

Benny Jay: Happy Father’s Day!

I get up early, pour some coffee, page through the Sun-Times, and wind up reading an essay by Roger Ebert about “Cinnamon Peeler,” a poem by Michael Ondaatje.

It makes me curious to read the whole poem, so I go to the computer to look it up. Only, you know how it goes, one thing leads to another and I end up reading a completely different poem: “Well Said, Davy” by John Fuller.

Never heard of the poem, or the poet. But that means nothing. You could fill the universe with the stuff I don’t know, and I know it all.

I’m not sure what the hell is going on in this poem. I stumble over a few lines. I lose track of where Fuller’s at and where he’s going. I hit a line that makes no sense: “The law was a devil to cheat as you pleased, as we knelt on the back of the city girls’ knees.” I give up.

The thing about a poem is you can’t panic. You have to take your time. The meaning’s down deep, it won’t always be obvious. But I’m in a hurry. I got stuff to do. So I forget about “Well Said, Davy” and get on with my day. I bike to the library, and look for a book by Studs Terkel. It’s not on the shelf. I ask the reference librarian and she looks it up in the computer and tells me it’s lost.

“Lost? How can a book be lost?”

She offers no explanation. But she calls a nearby branch. They keep her on hold for five minutes, and then they hang up….

I go to the video store. I ask the guy: “Is `Candyman’ a good movie?”

He pauses to think about it and says: “It’s a scary movie.”

Hmm — he didn’t answer my question, but I get the movie anyway….

I go home to eat lunch, and wind up on the phone talking to Daddy Dee about track and field….

I go to the park and run along the lakefront; then I sit in the field, watch some kids play soccer, call Milo on my cell phone and talk about Joakim Noah….

I meet my wife. We walk to a restaurant. I eat chicken and watch the White Sox game on the TV that’s above the bar. We go home and have this intense discussion about why I do some of the stupid things that I do — like crossing the street when I see other people coming my way….

My wife goes to bed. But I don’t feel like sleeping just yet. So I lie on the couch and read “The Night Gardner” by George Pelecanos until my eyes get droopy. I close the book and get up to go to bed, when — wham! — it hits me like a jolt.  Out of nowhere, Fuller’s mysterious line returns: “As we knelt on the backs of the city girls’ knees….”

Why, of course! Duh! They were doing it doggy style. You know, the Greek way. Coming at it from the back, so to speak.

Oh, my God, it’s so obvious — why didn’t I see it right away?

I want to call Milo and tell him all about it. I think he and Fuller have a lot in common. But it’s long past the Pussy Magnet’s bedtime.

The clock tells me it’s a new day — Father’s Day, to be exact. I walk to the bathroom and study my face — all fifty-something years of it — in the mirror. It could be worse. Happy Father’s Day, big feller….

On the way up the stairs, I think about Fuller’s line. It took awhile, but I figured it out. Amazing things can happen if you wait all day…..

Letter From Milo: Mrs. Milo Has Her Say

Okay, alright, so maybe I went a little overboard with my last post. I’ll admit it was crude, profane and sexist. I’ll even go so far as to say it was far beneath my normal standards and, believe me folks, my normal standards are pretty low.

But, honestly, what did you expect from something titled “Pussy Magnet?”

Not only were my readers outraged, the honchos of this site were deeply offended, too. That scabby fucker, Big Mike, the Barn Boss of this outfit, suspended me for three days, fined me a substantial sum of money and threatened to pistol whip me if I ever post anything like that again. His cohort, that rotten bastard Benny Jay, was also upset. He called me a disgrace to the blogging community and disinvited me to his NBA Draft Party and Poetry Slam. Even that low-life Jon Randolph, the guy that poses as the photographer for this site, was disgusted. He threatened to release some rather embarrassing photos he took of me at the Chippendale’s Alumni Reunion party in 1983.

That wasn’t the worst thing that happened, however. No, the worst thing was that my wife found out about the post and, man, was she pissed. I don’t know who ratted me out, but I suspect it was one of her slutty girlfriends, probably Kathy Ivcich. She always had it in for me.

Anyway, I was sitting at my computer, writing a letter of complaint to the Swedish Dick Extension Company, when my wife confronted me. I had just typed in the words “Dear Sven” when she screeched in my ear. 

“Are you crazy! Have you lost your mind!”

“What is it this time, dear?”

“That crap you wrote in your last blog. I’ve never been so humiliated in my entire life.”

“Which blog was that, angel? I’ve written several of them, you know.”

“Quit being an asshole. You know what I’m talking about.”

“Oh, you must be referring to Pussy Magnet.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

“I take it, heh, heh, you didn’t care for it.”

“I loathed it. Were you drunk when you wrote it?”

“I may have had a smidgen of wine.”

“Liar!”

We carried on in this manner for a while and then things started to get ugly. The only way I could pacify my wife was to turn over the rest of this blog to her. She wanted to personally apologize to the readers of the The Third City. So, ladies and gentlemen, here’s Mrs. Milo:

I’m Mrs. Milo and I want to say that I’m terribly sorry for that piece of trash my husband wrote. It’s so nasty that I can’t even bear to repeat the name of it. I don’t know what got into him but I believe it was a bottle of Cabernet.
The whole blog  was nothing but a pack of lies. To be honest, he’s not the stud he claims to be. In fact, he’s a complete dud in bed. He knows as much about sex as he does about quantum physics. The only reason I married him was because I felt sorry for him. And that nonsense about his “God-given attributes” is just pathetic. At best, he’s below average in that department, even on his good days.
I’ve already made an appointment with a marriage counselor and I’m checking into some sort of therapy. Rehab is not out of the question, either. Plus, I’m considering talking to a lawyer, just to see what my options are. Believe me, if I had known what I was getting into when I married him, I would have stuck my head in an oven a long time ago. God, what a loser he turned out to be.

Big Mike: Voting – The American Way

The electoral hijinks in Iran have caused politicians here to wring their hands. Americans are howling for a simon-pure democracy in that Middle East theocracy. If only, we cry, the Iranians could have an honest vote.

Like ours.

My parents hosted our precinct’s polling place a few times in the early- and mid-60s. Several weeks before each election, a gang of 36th Ward patronage workers would dolly heavy, dark green polling machines into our basement. They were pot-bellied, grunting brutes who pushed and shoved the contraptions as if they were made of granite. The workers raised a frightful racket, slamming the machines into door jambs and walls. Watching this, I figured the machines could withstand a direct hit from the nuclear missiles President Kennedy had recently forced out of Cuba.

“Mike,” Ma warned in her gravest tone, “stay away from those machines! Don’t touch any buttons or levers. Don’t monkey around with the innards. If they find anything wrong with those machines, they’ll press charges against us!”

Ma, for most of her life, lived in constant fear that someone, somewhere, would press charges against us. This despite the fact that her scrupulous honesty would have made a young Abe Lincoln look like a chiseler. Plus, she believed with all her heart that elections in the United States, in Illinois, in Cook County – in Chicago, for god’s sake! – were as pure as new fallen snow. Heaven forbid her son would muck up the machinery of democracy.

Invariably, election day was overcast and bone-chilling cold. Ma would get up long before the sun rose to let 36th Ward sachems in. Within minutes, our entire house was would be redolent of strong coffee and precinct captain Barney Peluso’s cigar smoke.

“Mrs. Glab, I dunno howta t’ank you fer d’is,” Barney would holler as he pumped my mother’s hand. He knew no way to communicate other than to holler. He wore a narrow-brimmed fedora and horn-rimmed spectacles as big as picture windows and thick as bullet-proof glass. “I mean it. Any time you need anyt’ing from us, you just ask. Louie really appreciates it.” Louie was Louis B. Garippo, the Democratic ward committeeman and, as such, the most powerful man in the neighborhood (other than the Outfit bosses, of course.) “He’ll be here later, after he goes to d’e other polling places. D’is is his fav’rite place!”

Ma would swoon. For years afterward, she’d tell relatives, neighbors – even the checkout lady at Dominick’s Finer Foods – that Louie Garippo liked the Glabs better than any other polling place hosts.

I’d watch from the basement stairway as neighbors, cops, men in suits and more pot-bellied patronage workers passed through our basement door. One time, Joe Martini staggered in, drunk, and promptly fell face-down next to the washing machine, bloodying his nose and the front of his jacket. Barney and a cop helped him to his feet. “What the hell’s goin’ on?” Joe Martini yelled. He was a hard man who, I was told, worked for the unions. Only later I’d learn that he was really a thumb-breaker, dispensing justice to scabs and malcontents.

“Yer awright, Joe,” Barney said, brushing him off.

“I gotta vote,” Joe Martini said. He took a step forward but his legs buckled beneath him again. Barney and the cop caught him and started walking him to the door. “But I gotta vote!” Joe protested.

“Doan worry,” Barney said, “we’ll take care of it. Ya wanna cup’a coffee to go?”

“Bah, coffee. It’s poison.”

Barney instructed the cop to give Joe Martini a ride home, then he turned around and directed one of the judges to pull Joe’s voter card out and mark it. “He’s fer us,” Barney explained. “We’ll put his vote in.”

Our basement door would slam a thosuand times on those election days. Once, though, the slamming stopped for an uncomfortable few moments. A little old Italian lady shuffled in and spoke broken English. The judges and poll watchers looked at each other and shrugged. Barney dashed up and asked her, “Nonna, che cosa e il problema? (What’s wrong?)”

The old lady told him she didn’t know how to use the voting machine.

“O, Madonna! Quello e niente! Mostrero (Oh, mother of god! That’s nothing! I’ll show you,)” Barney said, laughing. He led her to the machine and pulled the straight Democratic ticket for her. Seeing this, an unfamiliar cop who’d just arrived for duty grabbed Barney by the arm.

“Lock that door!” the cop ordered the judges. “This polling place is closed until further notice.” He turned back to Barney. “I’m sorry, sir, you can’t do that. You’ll have to come with me.” He slapped the handcuffs on Barney and led him out to the squad car. As the cop pulled away, Louie Garippo arrived. The judges quickly filled him in on the incident.

“The son of a bitch!” Louie hissed. “Mrs. Glab, pardon my French. Can I use your phone?” Ma led him upstairs. He dailed a number and spoke. “Commander? we got a problem….”

Fewer than 15 minutes later, Barney was back and the basement door was unlocked again. The cop, I would hear later, was subsequently assigned to the paddy wagon detail, hauling dead bodies and drunks. The last I heard, he’d left the force and had become a barber.

The Democrats, as expected, won big that day.

Randolph Street: The Road to America, redux

Chicago’s finest photojournalist has returned from piscatorial heaven. Jon Randolph, his belly full of walleye and northern pike, brings us back to US Highway 61. His trips up and down the road that divides the American map and unites the American nation have netted a priceless photographic record of the places and times.

Click here for larger view

From left: “Cornfield” Bluegrass, Iowa; “Xbooks” Minneapolis; “Boxes” Lancaster, Wisconsin

Road-tripping and shooting from 1975 through 1986, Jon gathered hundreds of images. This installment is the fourth in the series to run on The Third City. The first three installments ran on our old site (view the archive.)

From left: “Women” Boscobel, Wisconsin; “St. Charles Avenue” New Orleans; “Grand Slam” Bluegrass, Iowa

Join us every Friday for more Randolph Street. We’re here every day with new The Daily Blog posts and more on The Third City.

Benny Jay: Keep on Running

I’m running along the lakefront on a glorious summer eve. The sun’s setting on the lake, the boys on the rocks are smoking their weed, and I’m having one of those I-love-you-man moments for Big Mike and Milo.

It’s cause I just got off the phone with Big Mike who’s telling me everything I have to do with the Blog now that we’re moving to our own site. He’s so excited he wants to send out an email to tell the whole world. He’s scaring me with all the details. I’m frightened by anything vaguely high tech. I’m not sure why. If I ever get around to getting the psychological assistance that I so clearly need it will be just one of the things near the top of the list….

I follow the gravel path as it edges around the golf course. I see a raccoon — this is the time of night when they come out.

As I jog along, I’m trying to remember when I met these guys. Let’s see Milo? Oh, yes. April 1981. Sunday morning. At a restaurant on Lincoln Avenue. He was having breakfast with Sharon, his wife. My wife knew them. She introduced us. I was new to town, and hanging around with this really depressing artsy-fartsy crowd. Milo showed promise. He was into the Bulls. That day we watched the Bulls play Boston in round one of the playoffs. The Bulls had Rickey Sobers and Artis Gillmore. I thought they were going all the way to the finals. Boston kicked their butts. I was devastated. Brooded all night. Milo pretended he didn’t really care. As you can see, nothing has changed….

I pass a bunch of kids — 18, 19, 20 years old — sitting on the rocks smoking their weed. They’re watching me run and they’re laughing. Can you imagine that? Laughing at me! The old guy, waddling down the path.

I think about Big Mike. Let’s see — where did I meet him? I can’t remember a precise moment. It had to be way back in the early 80s, around the time I met Milo. Must have been at a party. We were always going to parties. He’d be telling jokes. I thought he was the funniest man alive. One time we were driving down the street and he looked out the window and said — “there goes my second wife.”

You’re second wife? I didn’t know there was a first! Man, we were like those boys on the rocks — laughing our asses off….

I go by the Waveland running tower and double back. I pass this weird looking dude who’s wearing layers and layers of clothing. Like he’s got everything he owns on his back. There’s a family of five — a man, a wife and kids — feeding Dorito chips to a raccoon. Don’t see that everyday. And then there’re my boyz, the weed smokers. Looking out at the lake, higher than a kite, still laughing, though at least not at me….

I think back to when this whole blog thing started. One cold day in November. I was riding my bike on Clark Street and I had this idea. Journalism as we know it was crashing down all around us. Every dumb fuck in the world had a blog. Why not me? So I called my two friends. And one thing leads to another….

I kick it into high gear. I’m tired but I tell myself to keep running. I sprint for the tree at the end of the path. I touch it and stop. Bend over, hands on knees. Chest heaving….

Damn, the whole world is changing. Crashing down all around us. Half the time I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going and sometimes I fear I’m too scared to make a move. But I keep running — me and my two oldest friends….

Big Mike: My Drug Problem

Allow me to crow a bit here. Monday night I absolutely kicked the living crap out of the opposition in the weekly Trivia competition at Dick’s Pizza. Man, I was a superstar. Playing alone against one team of seven people, another of four people, and several other teams of varying sizes, I won the game by 31 points.

I felt like a victorious general parading into Rome on his chariot, a captured slave holding a laurel wreath above his head and whispering the words Memento mori (Remember, you too must die) in his ear.

I wish I could earn a living playing Trivia. I’d be as awash in cash as the sub-prime mortgage pimps of the last 15 years. The Loved One would be thrilled. For the moment, though, I had to be satisfied with my $25 winnings, meaning I’ll drain that much less out of the checking account. If that doesn’t necessarily thrill The Loved One, at least it ought make her fret a little less this week.

This is all a self-indulgent set-up for what happened next. Basking in my glory while sitting next to Trombone Skip at the bar, I noticed a woman named Heidi Montag on Larry King’s show up on the overhead giant flatscreens.

“Skip, old man,” I asked, “who in the hell is Heidi Montag?”

“Damned if I know,” came the rejoinder.

Now, I’ve seen her name time and again. My online source of gossip, dlisted, follows her every move. I know, for instance, that she was on the same brain-melting reality show – “I’m A Celebrity: Get Me Out Of Here!” – that Patti Blagojevich is on. Only I couldn’t figure out why Heidi Montag is a celebrity. So, I turned to the bartender, Rock Star Zach.

“Who’s Heidi Montag?”

Rock Star Zach is best described as a rubber band pulled dangerously taut. He bounces from one end of the bar to the other (except when he’s called upon to perform his professional services – then he becomes as ponderous as a tree sloth.) He often takes umbrage at imagined slights. This was one of those times. He glared at Skip and me and then loudly crashed some glasses and plates into the sink.

“Are you guys trying to piss me off or what?” he demanded.

Skip and I recoiled in shock. Eventually, we learned why Heidi Montag is a celebrity from a passing waitress. (Trust me, it’s for no good reason at all.) Then we watched Rock Star Zach stomping to and fro behind the bar.

“The rumor is,” Skip whispered, “that he’s got a little problem.” The implication, of course, is that our faithful server likes things he can put into his nose.

“That wouldn’t surprise me,” I said, shrugging.

I’m aware that bartenders are particularly susceptible to using drugs that give them bursts of energy. Cocaine is one. Methadrine is another. It’s no secret among people who spend time on either side of the bar.

When I was slinging cocktails for the Nardini boys at Club Lago in Chicago, dashing about like a pinball, it became obvious to me why a bartender might want to give the old adrenal glands a boost. I’m no prude but I’ve always drawn the line at heavy-duty specifics like cocaine and speed.

Under the critical eye of the younger Nardini, Guido, I ran like a madman. I was hired at the joint because I was a pal of his older brother Giancarlo. I surmised early on that Guido resented me because of it. He never failed to bust me over shortcomings, no matter how trivial or even merely imagined by him. Every time Guido was on duty, he cracked the verbal whip. I’d be racing around like an ant, yet he’d still be chiding me. Speed! he’d shout. Speed! I never had any idea how I could do things any faster.

One night we were slammed. Customers stood four-deep at the bar. Drink orders flew in my direction from every possible angle. If I were an octopus, I’d still need another arm. Covered with sweat, I shoved drinks out and made the boys’ antique cash register ring like a carillon. Still, Guido stood near me, pointing out customers, yelling Speed! and clucking his tongue as if I were moving in slow motion.

As this all was going on, my roommate Tim sat with his boyfriend at the time in a booth on the other side of the room. The two of them watched me as if I were putting on a show for their entertainment. At one point, the two of them stared at me, shaking their heads.

That night, Tim knocked on my bedroom door and asked to speak with me. He wore a face of concern and sadness.

“Mike,” he began, dolefully, “are you having any problems?”

“Me? No. Well, yeah, maybe. My back and feet hurt.”

“No. I don’t mean that. I mean…, I don’t know…, are you doing things you maybe shouldn’t be doing?”

“Huh?”

“C’mon, Mike. This is hard for me.”

“Whuh?”

“Steve (his boyfriend) thinks you’re on meth.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“Why?”

“Have you seen yourself at work? You’re running around like a madman! It’s obvious what you’re doing?”

“It is?”

I spent the next half hour trying to convince my dear friend that I wasn’t a drug fiend. He left the room unconvinced. The next day he told me he’d spoken to his boyfriend about our late night chat.

“Steve says of course you’d deny it.”

“What?”

“Mike! C’mon! Using meth!”

“Oh, that. Well, I’m not.”

“Mike, you’ll never get over it until you come clean with yourself.”

And so began another half hour of denials. And again, Tim remained unconvinced. Only years later did he come around to the belief that I’d never done methadrine. I hated to disappoint Tim – I’d denied him the successful intervention he could have crowed about to his friends.