Big Mike: When I Get My Hands On Milo…!

I’m mad!

I’ve been dialing Milo‘s cell phone every 15 minutes for the last week. The son of a bitch won’t answer. He won’t return my calls. What the hell’s going on around here?

That pansy Benny Jay says, “Lay off ‘im, he’s having it rough.”

The femme.

I even emailed Milo’s long suffering bride to find out why the bum’s been dodging me. It took her a good two or three days to get back to me. And get this — she rolls out the hankie on me and starts boo-hooing! “Oh we’re so worried,” she says between sniffles. “It’s touch and go.”

Come on people! We have a blog to run here. You didn’t see me take a day off when I had that earache about three weeks back. And how about the time I ran out of coffee? Yeah, I posted that day too. So enough about open heart surgery, ventilators and morphine drips. It’s a damned new day and age. Now they send you home at night after you had a baby that morning. My Uncle Tony had a double hernia repaired and he was lifting huge forkfuls of mostaccioli within six hours.

But no, Milo’s gotta rest and take it easy for a couple of months. A couple of months!

Well, we don’t have such luxuries around here. So today we’re replaying one of Milo’s old posts. Here it is:

Letter From Milo: High On The Hog

I’ll eat almost anything. The word “omnivore” doesn’t do me justice. If it walks, crawls, flies or swims – as long as it doesn’t have opposable thumbs – I’ll try it.

I’m not saying I’m as adventurous as Andrew Zimmern, the nutcase who hosts “Bizarre Foods” on the Travel Channel but I’ve eaten some pretty odd meals. I’ve eaten bugs, rodents, pig and cow testicles, raw beef and raw fish. I’ve tried fungi, mosses, weeds and leaves from trees. I’ve eaten food that looked great but tasted vile and food that looked disgusting but was absolutely delicious. I’ve had food that’s gotten me stoned (hash brownies) and food that’s sent me to the emergency room (tainted chicken).

That said, there is one meal that I prefer over all others. It is the meal I would order if I was on Death Row and it would be the last food I’d ever taste. I’d go to the gallows with a twinkle in my eye and a song in my heart as long as my face and hands were smeared with sweet, sticky and spicy red sauce.

Yes, folks I’m talking about barbecued ribs, God’s gift to the human taste bud.

I’ve eaten ribs in rib hotspots all over the country - Chicago, the Carolinas, Memphis and Kansas City. Each of these places claims supremacy in the art of barbecue. And each has a valid claim. My good friend Bruce Diksas, tells me that there’s even a rib joint on the island of Bali, where he lives part of the year. The place is run by an American ex-patriot and advertises Chicago-style ribs.

One day Bruce decided to try the Balinesian ribs. Now, Bruce grew up in Bridgeport and knows a thing or two about ribs. When he finished the platter, the bar owner asked Bruce how he liked them.

Bruce shook his head sadly and said, “Sorry, pal, these ribs would never make it in Chicago.

One of the first times I ever tasted great ribs was in a small storefront in Gary, Indiana, called Shoe’s Ribs and Chicken. Shoe’s specialty was a rib sandwich, which was nothing more than two or three rib bones slapped between two slices of Wonder Bread, drenched in sauce and served on waxed paper. I don’t recall if napkins were made available. Anyway, those rib sandwiches were delicious. Man, a couple of those and a cold bottle of Blatz and you were set for the day.

When I settled in Chicago, I thought I found rib heaven. There were good rib joints everywhere. My favorite was a small spot off North Avenue by the Chicago River called Edith’s. In my opinion, Edith’s ribs were close to perfect. Edith used baby back ribs and the texture was just right. They weren’t wussy ribs that fell off the bone if a slight breeze passed by. You had to work them a bit but it was well worth the trouble.

The best ribs aren’t always found in restaurants. Some of the best ribs I’ve ever tasted have been at backyard barbecues. Two stand out in particular. One old friend, a college buddy named Way Out Willie Bauer, was and probably still is, a rib master. He took infinite care with his ribs, hovering over the grill like a card shark over pocket aces. He constantly adjusted the coals, carefully turned the slabs and watched for flare-ups as intensely as a California park ranger watches for brush fires. When it came time to add the sauce, Willie’s brushwork was every bit the equal of Picasso’s. And Willie would accomplish these magnificent rib feats while consuming huge quantities of booze and reefer.

Another rib master is my neighbor, John O’Connor, who works as an attorney in order to finance his rib habit. John prefers a dry rub to sauce. Although I’m a sauce man I have to admit that John’s dry rub is the best I’ve ever tasted, spicy but not overpowering. He hosts a backyard cookout every summer. I always try to be on my best behavior at his cookouts because I don’t want to get drunk and do something so stupid that he won’t invite me back. His ribs are that good.

A while ago I wrote about visiting Kansas City with Bruce Diksas. We went for a reunion of our old army outfit. Now, Kansas City has a lot of things going for it. It’s not Milwaukee or Indianapolis, for one thing. But in my mind Kansas City’s greatest asset, it’s municipal pride and joy, is Arthur Bryant’s.

For years, Arthur Bryant’s, along with the Rendezvous in Memphis and Lexington Barbecue in Lexington, North Carolina, has been ranked as one of the top rib joints in the country. There was no way on Earth we were going to Kansas City and not visit Bryant’s. It would be like going back to your home town and not visiting Mom.

We were not disappointed. Bryant’s served superb ribs, meaty, al dente and with a wonderful sauce. It was everything I’d hoped it would be. We each had a slab accompanied by French fries and a scoop of slaw. I doubt Bruce and I spoke a word while devouring those fantastic ribs. We just grunted, groaned, belched, slurped, licked our fingers and guzzled beer. When we finished, we leaned back in our chairs, patted our distended bellies and sighed with pleasure.

“Well, what do you think?” I asked Bruce.

“You know, Milo,” he said, “I think those ribs would make it in Chicago.”

Benny Jay: A Visit To The Doctor & A Message From Milo

I’m sitting in the lobby, reading the newspaper and waiting for the doctor to call me in for my exam.

In my pocket, I got a little jar containing the calcium pellet that popped out of my cheek the other day.

This is my big moment to have the experts examine it to see – well, I’m not sure what they’re supposed to see. I just know that my parents and sister have been bugging me – take it doctor. So here I am….

The nurse calls my name, leads me to an examination room, tells me the doctor will be by soon, and then out the door she goes.

I’m all alone. I sit in a chair and look out the window. The clock says it’s a little after eight in the morning. Still early for me. I nod off….

The door opens. In walks Dr. G, followed by a medical student, who’s learning from the pro.

I hand the doc the medicine jar and launch into the story about how it popped out of my cheek at three in the morning. They’re really getting into it. I mean – it is a damn good story and I’m telling it with gusto.

At the end, I open the little jar. They lean forward, almost clanking heads, peering in to see a little caramel-colored piece of flaky calcium. Looks like a piece of clay.

“So that’s it,” says the doctor.

“That’s it,” I say.

“Hmm,” says the doctor.

The medical student scribbles some notes.

“You want it?” I ask.

“Want what?” asks the doc.

“The, you know. The – this….”

The doc looks at me like I’m nuts.

“Ugh,” he says. “We could take it….”

“I mean, to study it,” I say.

He looks at the medical student as if to say: See, this is the kind of the weird stuff you’ll have to deal with when you become a real doctor.

Then he tells me: “Yes, well, that’s not my specialty, but, ugh….”

Pause. As in: What’s to study, you nitwit? It’s a freaking piece of flaky calcium!

“Yeah, sure,” I say. “No, really, that’s all right.”

And I put the jar back in my pocket….

Back at home, I take the jar out of my pocket and put it on the top of my book shelf, in between a picture of my kids standing on a dock on a lake up in Michigan, and a bottle of Old English lemon-flavored wood moisturizer.

I’m not kidding – wood moisturizer. How the hell that got here I don’t know. I pick it up, as if to move it somewhere else. Then I think – where is it supposed to go? I put it back and make a mental note to ask my wife: What’s with the wood moisturizer?

I take one last look at that little jar with the calcium deposit — it will probably be sitting there for years….

———————————–

Just as I was gearing up to post this bit, the phone rings and a familiar voice says: “Hey, Benny….”

It’s Milo — back from the ozone! Man, it’s good to hear his voice.

As every reader of this blog knows by now, Milo went in for open-heart surgery last week. I’ll let him tell you the harrowing details when he’s back at the blog, but the bottom line is this: They opened him up to repair one thing, and wound up repairing that and something else.

That’s right — they found something else to repair while they had him on the operating table. All in all, eight grueling hours under the blade. God bless those surgeons and nurses.

Anyway, he sounds pretty good given all he’s been through. Says the pain-killing drugs are good, but the food’s terrible. Reminds me of a joke I heard from a nurse many years ago. There’s two phases to hospital recovery — complaining about the food and then eating it. Clearly, Milo’s still in phase one.

“They opened me up like a lobster,” he says.

“Wow — we’re you completely knocked out?”

Soon as I ask it, I know it’s a dumb question. I hesitate to call it the dumbest I’ve ever asked, but only cause it’s got lots of competition.

Milo pauses. And then, with just a splash of sarcasm, he says: “What do you think, Benny?”

Ah, the maestro’s truly on the mend….

Randolph Street: Highway 61–Road Roaming

Hunter–Mississippi

Cheerleaders–Keokuk, Iowa

Lake–St. Paul, Minnesota

Hotdog–New Orleans, Louisiana

Demolition Derby–Sturgeon Lake, Minnesota

White Horse–Missouri, near the Arkansas border

This is a personal look at mid-America that I shot between 1976 and 1985.  These were taken along the approximately 1700 miles of US Highway 61 that roughly follows the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Minneapolis, then juts northeast to Duluth and along the western edge of Lake Superior to Thunder Bay, Ontario.  All photographs © Jon Randolph.

Big Mike: Lookin’ Fer A Friend

Now I’m learning the lay of my new land.

Bloomington, Indiana, to my surprise, is home to more twangy drawlers than Louisville, Kentucky, is. I spent a morning at the laundromat the other day and thought for a moment I’d landed in a Tennessee Williams play. There are, it seems, two distinct types of people here. One is an urbane, cosmopolitan group that is proud to share sidewalks and square doughnut shops (a Bloomington delicacy) with people from all over the world. The other gang has fewer international acquaintances and — dare I say it? — teeth.

Might there be a certain hostility between the two?

I figured I’d find out in quick order last night as I drove south some four miles from my home to a joint called The Cabin. The place is a restaurant and lounge set high on a ridge overlooking Lake Monroe not far from the lakeside estate of Bloomington’s most famous residents, John Mellenkamp and Elaine Irwin.

People here talk about “John” and “Elaine” as if they’re next door neighbors and, to a certain extent, they are. The rock star shops at the Kroger and the hardware store and the super model gets her nails done at the local salon — just like anybody else. The consensus has it that both are the nicest people you’d ever want to meet even without the caveat that they’re world-wide celebrities.

When The Loved One and I were at Sears the night before last purchasing our new washer and dryer, all the salespeople had a Mellenkamp and/or Irwin anecdote, generally along the lines of “Call me John/Elaine.” Of course, there’s always the one guy who has the “real” inside dope. This one, a salesman who wandered over from the vacuum cleaner department, swore his cousin’s girlfriend’s brother once dated Mellenkamp’s son and, well, the old man was an egotistical, imperious terror who’d make Kanye West look like a shrinking violet. He winked at me after telling me this as if to say Now you know the true story.

On my way to The Cabin, I fantasized meeting Mellenkamp there and sharing a beer with him. I’d treat him like an everyday Joe, listening sympathetically as he recalled the horrors he’d endured in the music business. I’d say “Y’know, John, you oughta write a book about it all.” He’d respond, “Well, Mike, you’re the writer, why don’t we work on it together?” It’d become a big best seller and the two of us would travel the country to promote it, appearing on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross and then Oprah.

Sigh. It’s good to know I can still entertain silly dreams.

Anyway, I pulled into the little gravel lot and parked my tiny Prius among pickups the size of earth-movers. A small clot of people loitered around the front door. They were two couples, the females being waitresses who still had their little black aprons tied around their waists. The waitresses paced like caged jungle cats while their boyfriends leaned sleepily against the log wall and the wooden railing, respectively.

One of the waitresses angrily hissed into her cell phone to a third waitress. From what I could gather, the third had insulted her to the second, who dutifully passed on said insult to the first. Now the first was arranging a site and time for the fistfight that would settle the matter.

The Cabin is really a triptych of a place: a cozy restaurant to the left (empty, when I walked in), a poolroom (packed) in the center and, to the right, a dimly lit tiny bar populated by a taciturn bartender and a lone, equally taciturn, customer.

As I walked in, everyone in the poolroom ceased what they were doing and turned to stare at me like a gang of meerkats. There were about a dozen or so men and women holding cue sticks or just watching. One man, about 55 or so, was gaunt and wore an Amish chin beard. Another had long flowing salt and pepper hair, a magnificent beard, and wore an enormous black cowboy hat. The women all held long-necked bottles of domestic beer in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other.

Real country music emanated from a jukebox in the corner. None of this Carrie Underwood nonsense — there were steel guitars, fiddles and deep-voiced male singers crooning about love, marriage and unemployment. One song, whose title I gleaned was “This Honky Tonk Heaven (Makes Me Feel Like Hell),” featured the line, “Here I am, sittin’ with all my friends, talkin’ to myself.”

Accordingly, I commandeered a barstool near the jar of pickled eggs and sat by myself. I ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon and whipped out my crossword puzzle book. A craggy-faced, barrel-chested bird wearing a blue baseball cap and a button-up workshirt prowled the premises as if he was the owner. He carried in his breast pocket a thick, biker-type wallet as well as a fistful of pens and pencils and countless folded slips of paper, all of which unbalanced his shirt to the extent that one side of it hung about six inches lower than the other.

He stomped behind the bar, grabbed a Tom Collins glass, loaded it with ice and poured himself some Seagram’s VO, straight. He gulped it like a kid slurping Juicy Juice. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, turned to me, let out a loud, satisfied sigh and winked a welcome.

A few minutes later, he returned to put in a new roll of register tape for the bartender, who was too busy watching “CSI:NY” to attend to it herself. “Gol-dang,” he hollered to no one in particular as he threaded the paper into its slot. “It sure hotted up in here, ain’t it?” He glanced over at the bartender and continued, chuckling: “Must be some kinda woman thing.” The bartender pointed at the space heater near the front window. “That thing’s on plus the heat’s on, so don’t blame me!” The man nodded. “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

Later, a middle-aged woman dashed into the bar and made a hurried request. “Hey Sweetie,” she said to the bartender, “can you mix me a gu-u-u-ud Bloody Mary, real quick?”

“You gonna drink that here?”

“No.”

So the bartender mixed the cocktail, poured it into a Ball jar with a handle, screwed a cap on it and handed it to the woman who then left as suddenly as she came.

I left after I’d had my fill of PBRs and Jerry Bruckheimer’s TV gore. Never did meet John Mellenkamp.

Benny Jay: Gee Pee’s Gift

I was having a conversation with someone else, when Gee Pee walked into the room.

We were talking about my kids and Gee Pee cuts us off to ask:

“You got kids?”

“Yea….”

“Damn — white people be fuckin’ too?!”

Then he laughed.

I guess I might have been offended, but all I could do was laugh. He had a funny intonation, like the revelation truly surprised him. Besides, he had a point:  How else did my wife and I have the kids?

That’s the way it goes with Gee Pee. He’s one of the great Truth Tellers I know. If he’s got something to say, he’s gonna say it — no matter who he offends.

But the thing is he hardly ever offends anyone because he always makes you laugh. It’s a gift, I guess.

Anyway, that all took place a few years ago — hadn’t seen him in a long time, when he calls me up, out of the blue. We get together, have a bite to eat. He starts talking — the words just burst out. It’s not even a burst, more like a cascade, or an eruption. I wish I could tell you exactly what he says but I can’t cause he’s talking too fast. He starts talking about this and winds up talking about that and somehow or other he ends right where he wants to. I’m not sure how he does it. I make a mental note — next time bring a tape recorder.

We wind up on 57th Street, across from Washington Park. While he’s talking, this homeless-looking guy walks up.  Oddest thing you ever saw: He’s wearing a polyester jogging suit and track shoes, and holding two cans of energy drink — one in each hand.

“Hey, man,” he says. “Can you lend me two-twenty-five? I gotta catch the bus to 115th Street.”

I like his choice of the word “lending,” like he plans to pay us back.

Gee Pee says: “Man, forget the bus. You got those nice track shoes and shit. Drink the mutha-fuckin’ energy drinks and walk there….”

This is clearly not the response the guy was expecting. Again, we’re at 57th Street. That means 115th is fifty-eight blocks away. Since there’s eight blocks to a mile in Chicago — let’s all do the math now — we’re talking over seven miles of walking….

Pee Gee goes off on this whole riff about how it’s a nice day and he’d be walking with him if he could. And how come he’s got enough money for a couple of energy drinks, but he doesn’t have two-twenty-five for the bus? And, well, I can’t recollect half the stuff he says cause I can’t possibly keep up.

The homeless guy looks at me. I shrug. What can I do?

He turns to his right, heading north.

“Hold it,” says Gee Pee. “You’re going the wrong way, brother.” He points to the south — “A hundred `n fifteenth street’s that way….”

You know, like the guy’s really intends to walk the seven or so miles to 115th, but he just started off in the wrong direction.

The guy laughs, keeps walking north and Gee Pee goes back to what he was saying. Another ten or so minutes pass. Gee Pee’s still talking. And, guess what?, the guy comes back! No lie. Like he’s going to have better luck getting that two-dollars and twenty-five cents. Or maybe he’s bored and he finds us entertaining.

“Look, man,” he says. “The bus….”

He comes closer and I see he’s missing several front teeth. That inspires Gee Pee to tell him he looks like Leon Spinks — you know, the boxer from the seventies. The guy grins. And Gee Pee does this whole bit about Leon Spinks, doing impersonations of Leon Spinks being interviewed by Howard Cosell and talking about “toothless mother fuckers” and all sorts of things.  It’s like having a live comedy show right here on 57th Street.

The homeless guy and I look at each other in amazement. I’m laughing. He’s laughing. Everybody’s laughing!

Like I told you — it’s a gift….

Big Mike: Get Old With Me, Milo!

Bill Haley died in February, 1981, of brain cancer. He was 55 years old.

Back in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, Haley was bus-touring the country with his band, the Saddlemen. Between sets one night in Nashville, Haley popped into the joint next door and caught a bit of the Treniers. Haley and his band had been playing a rough-hewn western swing. The Treniers combined swing with jumped-up blues. Haley was mesmerized. He went on to rename his band Bill Haley and His Comets, recorded “Crazy Man, Crazy” and “Rock Around the Clock” and rock ‘n’ roll was born.

The story may even contain a morsel of truth. In any case, it’s one genesis myth of The Music That Defined A Generation. So my identity, according to a few cultural navel-gazers and other bullshit artists, was established by Haley a few years before I was born.

Still, I considered Haley a dinosaur when I was a teenager in the early 70s – a dinosaur worthy of reverence though. I looked upon him as the Babe Ruth of rock ‘n’ roll. They both, after all, wore funny clothes, used spit to smooth their hair, and were seminal figures in two of my passions.

I was 24 when Haley died. Reading the newspaper accounts of his passing, I formulated an arrogant, smart-assed young man’s equation: 55 years old + brain cancer = an old man’s death. Previous rock ‘n’ rollers who’d passed away did so because they’d ingested too much heroin, booze or their own vomit. Haley, I concluded, was the first rock star to die of old age.

I’m going to be 55 in a little more than two years. My colleagues Benny Jay, Milo and Jon Randolph all are pushing that landmark as well. Old men? Hah! We’re still kids!

Except one of us isn’t feeling so much like a kid today. A couple of doctors donned their hardhats yesterday morning and sawed their way into Milo’s ribcage to fiddle with his lousy heart valve. Now that makes two of us with a bad ticker.

Milo — he’s been happy to inform us — has put his own heart through the meat grinder, thanks primarily to his predilections for booze, fatty meats and late nights as well as his stress-inducing chosen profession. The way he tells it, he’s given himself the heart of an 85-year-old. Now that’s old.

There may even be a morsel of truth in what Milo says. He isn’t exactly known as the world’s truth-iest man. For instance, he portrays me in his posts as homely, mean, demanding, cranky, insulting, unforgiving and insensitive. How dare he call me homely!

Milo may indeed have put a lot of excess mileage on the pump. Still, when he hops off the recovery room gurney, he’ll be more an old coot than a middle-aged man. Nobody should be shocked when any man in his 50s needs heart repairs.

Like it or not, all of us here at The Third City are becoming old pricks. I, for one, have more things wrong with me than a 1992 Dodge Caravan. Let’s see, there’s my sciatic nerve, my congestive heart failure, my assorted hernias, my cataract (since surgically excised), my baldness, my paunch, my enlarged prostate, countless mystifying growths and lumps, and my inability to snap to attention every single time The Loved One walks into the room wearing that French maid uniform anymore.

Benny Jay and Jon Randolph seem to be the pictures of health. They’re both trim and relatively complaint-free. The bastards. Just wait. Any day now they’ll start to fall apart.

So maybe I wasn’t so rash when I concluded that Bill Haley was an old man when he died in 1981. Now that I’ve reached that general age, I’m hoping (begging might even be a better term) for a good thirty or forty more years. As Woody Allen once said, “Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.”

I can only hope Milo and I can complain about our health in the year 2045.

Benny Jay: Paperback Writers

At 12:30 on the button, Milo pulls up to my house to get me for our lunch with Dave, my friend the book seller, who knows virtually everything there is to know about selling books.

We head over to this little restaurant on Damen near Amundsen High School, to meet with Dave and pick his book-selling brain.

Here’s the deal: Milo and I have written two of the world’s greatest novels, and no one wants to publish them.

I’m not kidding. We keep sending our proposals to agents and publishers and they keep sending us their rejection letters. If this keeps up, we might have to take it personal.

So we’re thinking: Maybe we should just publish ourselves. No, seriously, we got this dream — gonna be a couple of Paperback Writers, like the guy in the Beatles song. “It’s a thousand pages, give or take a few, I’ll be writing more in a week or two….”

We ask Dave what he thinks. He takes a moment to eat a bite or two of his omelet and then he launches into a long, lucid and learned recitation on the recent history of the book-publishing industry.

It’s not a pretty story. It’s in the dumps. No, not strong enough — it’s in a depression. Agents, editors, publishers can’t figure out how to make money cause folks don’t want to read or if they do want to read they’re too cheap to buy a book. And, if that’s not bad enough, a few years back the courts erased the loophole in the tax code that gave publishers an incentive to publish books even if the public wasn’t buying them.

So should we self publish or look for a publisher?

Dave sort of smiles, as if to say maybe you weren’t listening. Bottom line: We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

And what do we say? Nothing, really. I mean, what can we say? Other than thank you for your time….

We get into the car and drive away. It’s quiet for awhile, the radio playing in the background.

Finally, I ask: “So, what do you think, Milo?”

He smiles. “Well, Benny, as the great Hunter Thompson once said: `When things get weird, the weird go pro.’”

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“Fuck if I know — but it sounds good.”

As Milo points out, Hunter Thompson always had gift for putting together inane phrases that somehow sounded wise, especially if you were drunk or stoned, as he was when he wrote them.

Anyway, Milo drops me off at home. I want to work, but I’m too tired to think clearly. It’s always this way after a big lunch.

I lay down on the sofa and think about the essence of Dave’s message. We have to invent a whole new way of selling books, coming up with a bold strategy that no one — not even the smartest minds in the industry — has ever come up with before. Keep in mind that none of us — not me, Milo, Big Mike, Jon the photog, Daddy Dee, Ricky Stone, Gee Pee or any of my other book-writing friends and partners — have ever shown even the slightest proclivity for creating a book-publishing business.

At that moment the road ahead seems so improbably long and impassable that, not knowing what else to do, I fall asleep…..

Some thirty minutes later, I wake up, drink a big glass of cold chocolate milk — damn, that stuff is good — and go back to my desk.

Gonna write a riff about a funk singer in Chicago, circa 1981. Man, it’s good stuff. Part of a novel I’m writing with Daddy Dee. You’re really gonna wanna read all about it.

And if you don’t. Well, it’s your loss, not mine. I keep thinking about Michael Jordan’s acceptance speech when they put him in the basketball hall of fame. The one where he trash talked all the doubters who questioned his ability to get it done.

As the great Hunter Thompson once put it — it’s time to go pro….