Letter From Milo: Live and Learn

You’d think that someone who had heart surgery a few months ago would know better. You’d think that the person would have learned a lesson. You would suppose that someone who came this close to riding shotgun with the Angel in the Sharkskin Nightgown, would consider changing his wicked ways.

Well, I had open heart surgery recently and the only change in me is that my body has a few more scars to show off at the beach.

Against all common sense, against all medical advice, despite the anguished pleas of my wife and children, Ol’ Milo is at it again. Yes, folks, I’m drinking, eating red meat, sneaking the occasional cigarette, toking on the occasional joint and, once again, enjoying impure thoughts. Yes, sir, the Bum Gene (see one of my earlier posts) is in full roar.

Now, the obvious question is: How fucking stupid does a man have to be to continue a lifestyle that nearly killed him?

The obvious answer is: Very, very fucking stupid.

A short while after coming home from the hospital, my good friend, I’ll call him Bruce Diksas to spare him undue embarrassment, came by to visit. He brought along a few bottles of wine, a joint and a pack of Camels.

“You look pretty good,” Bruce said, uncorking one of the bottles. “Got some color in your face.”

“Yeah, I feel pretty good,” I replied, though I was still sore from the surgery where they had cracked me open like a lobster tail, then sewed me up like a hog being prepped for the barbeque spit. “Should be as good as new in a couple of days,” I added, lying.

“Here, have a drink. You’ll feel even better.”

“Good idea.”

As we sat at the kitchen table talking about the White Sox, the economy, pussy, the criminal incompetence of the Bush Regime, and Bruce’s upcoming trip the Bali, it occurred to me that just a few years ago Bruce had undergone some pretty serious surgery himself. I won’t go into details, but he came through it with his flag waving high.

It also occurred to me that many of our friends are suffering health problems. Granted, most of my friends have lived rather checkered lives, overdoing just about everything there is to overdo. But the undeniable fact is that they are all aging baby boomers, living at the tail end of the great post-war bubble . If our lives were basketball games, we would be entering the fourth quarter. Although there is always the chance of overtime, the sad truth is that you can’t count on it. I’ve had good friends die in their teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. In one case a good friend died at the biblical age of 101.

They’ve died in all sorts of ways — car accidents, gunshot wounds, explosions, diseases, drug overdoses, jealousy, broken hearts, suicides and poor judgement. The common thread running through all these deaths is that, except for suicide, most people don’t have a say in the time and manner of their passing. It’s a lottery where the main prize is oblivion.

So, I suppose living into your 60s is an accomplishment of sorts. Although it’s a piss poor accomplishment, at best.

As Bruce and I started on the second bottle of wine, toked on the joint and lit up Camels, we smiled at each other, both of us aware of the game clock but happy to still be in the game and able to partake of some of our favorite vices. We clinked glasses and made a toast.

“To your health,” Bruce said.

“And yours, pal.”

Big Mike: These Women’ll Kick Your Ass

Got an email photo from my pal Crystal the other day. Crystal works with me at The Book Case. She calls me Buddy. I call her Tough Guy. Every Monday through Wednesday, we spend some some five hours together lugging boxes of books, shelving them and trying to cajole customers to part with precious cash for same.

Sometimes, in the cramped quarters behind the checkout counter, we collide. When she’s in a rush or is otherwise determined to get where she’s going, she might give me a hip-check, the aftereffects of which make me feel as though I’ve been hit by a Bloomington Transit bus.

It’s not that Crystal is necessarily mean or unusually massive. It’s just her hobby that has turned her into the equivalent of a 14-ton vehicle.

Crystal has been working diligently for months trying to be drafted by a team in the Bleeding Heartland Roller Girls league.

Is it just me or is the sport of roller derby growing faster than the nose on Dick Cheney‘s face? I know a good half dozen women who skate in women’s roller derby leagues. For instance, there’s Tyler, a property manager who sits near me on most days at Soma coffeehouse. Tyler’s built like a greyhound — not the bus but the actual lean, sinewy, speedy critter — and possesses the single-minded determination of Madonna. I call her Type-A Tyler — and she likes it! She’s a coach for the Bleeding Heartland Rollergirls. She has frequent meetings at Soma with starry-eyed young women who want to spin around the track with their sisters.

Type-A Tyler (whose track name is Kaka Kaliente) slaps that starry-eyed-ness out of them before they can finish telling her how eager they are to lace ‘em up. She paints a lurid picture of grueling workouts, heavy investments of time and energy, and hard-nosed demands by none other than their peerless leader — her. Bill Belichick looks like a lily compared to Kaka Kaliente.

Then there’s an old pal named Rachel. I met her some fifteen years ago when she started dating another old pal of mine. At the time, Rachel was a delicate little redhead who looked upon walking her little pooch named Otter as the apex of physical exertion. Rachel was pale, pleasingly plump and sensitive. She designed hats which might have been worn by art students and other such impractical souls. I never would have guessed that in a thousand lifetimes she’d become competitive and, well, hard.

But today, Rachel — still redheaded but no longer delicate nor plump — is a member of the Gotham Girls Roller Derby league. When she was selected for a team last fall she crowed about it on Facebook as if she’d been named the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

One of my dearest pals, Anna, has skated for the Windy City Rollers under the track name C.H.U.D. We worked together for a few years at Whole Foods Market in Evanston. Anna was the store artist (yes, WFM is one of the few non-advertising corporations in the nation that employ full-time artists) and maybe tipped the scales at a hundred pounds. Maybe. Once I was lolling in her office with my shoes off. She decided to put my shoes on — while she was still wearing hers. We got quite a kick of her as she plodded around in my gunboats, looking like a nine-year-old. That night at roller derby practice, she went out and knocked several women on their asses.

Anna’s sister Heide got her into the sport. Heide’s facebook page once once carried a photo of her showing off her latest ugly bruise. In the pic, Heide — helmeted, elbow-padded, and blancing smartly on one skate — pulls down her tights just enough to display a hideous purple/yellow/green ecchymosis that covers her left hip joint. There’s no pain registering on Heide’s face — only pride.

I spoke with a number of skaters for the Derby City Roller Girls during my two years in Louisville. That gang was so popular they even put out yearly calendars.

You can have Megan Fox or Siena Miller. They’re perfect — if perfect’s your thing. You can find a vacuous, Photoshopped ideal of 21st Century male masturbatory fantasy in any edition of FHM magazine or on “One Tree Hill.” A lot of American men watch NFL games and hope to catch a glimpse of barely-clad cheerleaders. Who am I to criticize their tastes? I only feel sorry for their wives and girlfriends who can never achieve that level of pre-cast, surgically-enhanced, genetic lottery-winning perfection. I also feel sorry for those guys — they’re never, ever, ever gonna get one of those mythical creatures in their beds.

Oh, all right — I really don’t feel sorry for them. They brought it on themselves, the idiots.

Anyway, I’ve liked every one of the roller derby women I’ve met. They have brains and drive. They actually talk about things. They don’t spend every moment of their day in hopeless pursuit of the perfect body so they can attract lunkheads. And guess what — they’re really attractive, too!

That is if your tastes run to the models on suicidegirls.com or godsgirls.com (both NSFW.)

Funny thing is, I’ve never met a roller girl yet who has expressed even the tiniest amount of admiration for, say, Sarah Palin — who, like them, is driven and determined. I suppose it’s because the Palins of this world play to that lunkhead image of attractiveness — be cute, giggle, wink and never, ever let people think you’ve got a brain.

I suspect most roller derby girls don’t place too high a priority on whether they’re attractive or not — and that’s the most attractive characteristic of all.

Here’s my tip — go out and catch a roller derby match soon. It ought to be the next big thing in sports. The mainstream media should gobble it up in a nanosecond what with the excitement, the backstories, the reality-TV-ness of it all. That is, if the lunkheads who run mainstream media had any brains.

I have brains. That’s why whenever I see Crystal heading my way with a full head of steam on, I give her a wide berth.

Benny Jay: The Crimson Tide

I’m not crazy about college football, but this is the Championship Game, and my guys are watching it at J Dub’s, so what the hell – might as well join the party….

Problem is I don’t really care who wins. In fact, if it were up to me, both teams – Alabama and Texas –- would lose. Cause I hate `em both….

But since only one can lose, I’m left with that age-old dilemma: Who do you root for if you hate both teams?

I decide to go with Texas, cause I hate Alabama even worse.

Norm goes the other way – for the flip side of the same reason.

Thus, we’re set for great debate….

I ask Norm how he can support Alabama, given that it brought us segregation, Governor George Wallace and state troopers beating the crap out of civil rights workers?

And he says that Texas brought us George Bush.

Uh – well, hard to argue against that point.

We watch Alabama’s running back run for about twenty yards.

“Yeah, `Bama,” yells Norm.

“Hold it, Norm,” I say. “I can understand you going against Texas – but how can you say that?”

“Say what?”

“Yeah, `Bama….”

“Cause they’re my team tonight,” he says.

“But to say `yeah, `Bama’?”

He laughs and says: “Go Crimson Tide!”

“Wait, Norm, hold on — I can see quietly wanting them to win, but to say it out loud?”

“I told you, dawg – I hate Texas.”

“But how can you like Alabama?”

“I didn’t say I liked `em, Benny – don’t get that twisted.”

Then he proceeds to tell us a story about how he spent the better part of a year studying at some college in Alabama. Hated every minute of that year. Couldn’t wait to get out. Wasn’t nothing but rednecks and assholes in that state….

“Exactly,” I say. “So how can you root for Alabama?”

“Cause they ain’t Texas….”

“But they’re worse….”

“How many times I gotta tell you, Benny – ain’t nothin’ worse than Texas.”

“Oh, yeah,” I say. And I proceed on my own righteous riff, talking about how I never liked Alabama’s crusty, old legendary coach Bear Bryant. Took him how long – the 1970s? – before he finally put a black guy on the field. Can’t  stand Forrest Gump cause they got that scene where he plays football for Alabama. Even hate the song, Sweet Home, Alabama — when the fat guy sang it on American Idol, I started rooting for the gay guy to win. Don’t like anything to do with Alabama. Well, wait, hold on. Steely Dan’s got the song where they go, “Alabama’s got the Crimson Tide – call me Deacon Blues.” I do like that — but that’s it!

When I finish, Norm takes a sip of his beer and very calmly says: “How many times, I gotta tell you, Benny. This ain’t about me loving Alabama — this is about me hating Texas.”

This gets J Dub going about the year or two he actually spent in Texas — lived in San Antonio. “There were some pretty good dudes in San Antonio,” he says.

“Your point?” asks Norm.

“I’m just saying not everybody in Texas is bad….”

“I don’t care. I still hate Texas….”

“You can’t hate the whole state,” I say.

“Why not?”

“Cause, cause,” I stammer, desperately trying to think of an answer. “Cause it’s a big state….”

“Fuck, Texas, Benny – how many times I gotta tell you that?”

The game goes on. Alabama wins. I have to sit through their post-game jubilation. Waving that state flag. Running around the field with their hands in the air. Whooping it up. Throwing Gatorade on their coach….

“This sucks,” I say.

“At least it ain’t Texas,” says Norm.

“I still don’t see how you can take Alabama over Texas,” I say.

“I told you, dawg – George Bush comes from Texas.”

Well, like I said, it’s hard to argue with that….

Randolph Street: Love Of The Game

These pictures were taken in a late summer league game at IIT.  This Legends tournament consisted of city players from the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s.

All photos © Jon Randolph

Big Mike: Sex With Someone You Love

I taped a sheet of paper to my front door with this message written on it: Please wait. I’m in the shower. Sorry.

It was pushing ten o’clock and the service guy was due to arrive at that time to give us an estimate on insulating our attic. I’d been rushing around the house all morning trying to get my chores finished before the guy came but, naturally, the time slipped away. Still, I had it all planned out perfectly — shower, start working on today’s post, let the service guy in and then dash out to catch the 12:30pm bus to get to the radio station in time for my shift.

Only I’d be in the shower and wouldn’t you know it, the guy would probably come precisely at that moment. Ergo, the sign.

As I taped it up, I thought of what might have flashed through my mind had I been the service guy.

The key word is guy. I’m a guy. I guarantee you that the first thought to pop into my braincase would have been that the author of the sign was a ravishing, knowing brunette, sponging herself off sensuously with bath oils in her steamy shower. I’d ring the bell, she’d jump out of the shower, wrapping a thick towel around her, open the door and coo, Oh, come in.

Now it wouldn’t have mattered whether I was married or not. No amount of legal, religious or cultural conventions could have prevented that thought from jumping into my head. For the 23 or so seconds it would take for the homeowner to answer the door, I would have created a complex scenario wherein we — the knowing brunette and I — would sit on her comfy sofa, she still in nothing but a towel, her hair up in another towel, lighting a couple of cigarettes simultaneously, passing one to me, apologizing coyly for her informal appearance, and then, in a breathy voice, saying, I’m so glad they sent such a nice, burly serviceman like you. I’ll bet you can take care of my needs.

I would have taken the cigarette — even though I don’t smoke; hey, I’d want to be a good sport — and replied, Yes, ma’am, the attic.

She’d counter, Oh, that….

And, well, you know the rest.

That’s what male humans do. We fantasize. All day long, every minute of the day. From the time we’re nine or so years old until the moment the last breath slips out of us, we picture in our minds some form of coupling (or, for the more adventurous of us, tripling and quadrupling.)

Starting at that very young, pre-adolescent age, the fantasy sex life of guys far outpaces their actual practice. Of course. Then again, there’s really no time in a guy’s life wherein his real, honest-to-goodness sex life catches up with his imaginary one. Not even Wilt Chamberlain could have kept up with his fantasies. He’d never have had time to palm a basketball.

Male humans, like bonobos, have developed a trick or two to relieve some of the stress this disparity between fantasy and reality causes. In fact, nothing so much illustrates the creativity and ingenuity of the human male as his ability to conjure up new and improved tricks of this sort. Not the Great Wall of China. Not the Mona Lisa. Not the Apollo program to land humans on the Moon. Not even the Internet…, no, wait, I mean especially the Internet.

Anyway, Philip Roth famously wrote about the teenaged Alexander Portnoy one afternoon alone at home discovering new and effective uses for his family’s dinner entree that he’d found in the refrigerator. Since reading “Portnoy’s Complaint,” I’ve never eaten beef liver without thinking about that kid.

Not long after reading Roth’s book when I was 13, I gigglingly told my older brother and his best pal — we’ll call him Tommy Mags — about Alexander Portnoy’s descent into meat fetishism. Tommy Mags, who oozed coolness out of every pore — he wore a leather jacket and drove a Shelby Cobra Mustang — saw nothing to titter about. Apparently, he’d done a little experimental research himself. He told me about the possibilities of both french bread and watermelon. I was a rapt listener.

Benny Jay and I talk about this very topic when we’re feeling nostalgic for the glory days of our youth. He agrees with me about guys, their fantasies and the lengths they go to get the disparity between fantasy and reality, as it were, in hand.

Benny, though, suspects women have no idea about this state of affairs, which I find preposterous. That would be like claiming ignorance of dogs’ fondness for fire hydrants. He also tells me he’s too repressed to write about it all, which is really too bad because he has a great story about an old high school chum who once made an ambitious promise to himself when his family moved into a spacious new home. Like beef liver, I’ll never look at the rooms of another person’s house the same way again.

I hope this serves to loosen Benny Jay up.

As for the service guy who came to give us an estimate on insulating our attic? Maybe it’s my imagination, but I swear I sensed a flicker of disappointment cross his face when I opened the front door.

Benny Jay: I Know Basketball

On the day before New Year’s Eve, Norm and I get on the expressway and drive way, way west to some Godforsaken suburb to watch the final two games of the Proviso West High School Christmas basketball tournament.

It’s an annual tradition for us – we’ve seen great teams from all over the area, city and suburb, play in this tournament.

In the final game Whitney Young beats Foreman to win the championship.

As the game unfolds, I’m thinking: Man, I’m good at watching basketball. I don’t mean Xs and Os and coaching strategy – don’t really care too much for that stuff. To me, it’s always been about the characters….

Like Anthony Johnson, the string-bean guard for Whitney Young. He’s got the sweetest rainbow jump shot. He loves to launch it and watch it drop, like he can’t wait to see it fall through the net.

When it hits, he bangs his chest with his fist. When it misses, he winces and looks at his hand, like there’s something wrong with his wrist. A lot of the old timers up in the stands can’t stand his shtick. There’s nothing wrong with that kid’s wrist, they say — at least, it never seems to be hurting when he makes his shot.

But, I don’t know. I like his game. He reminds me of Reggie Miller, one of the great showboating shooters of all time. I once saw Reggie hit a three-point shot to give the Pacers a one-point lead in the tail end of a game against the Bulls.

Reggie bowed after he hit that shot. Got the fans in the old Chicago Stadium all bent out of shape — the boos were just raining down.

Only thing is — Reggie shot too soon. He left enough time on the clock — no more than a second — for Toni Kukoc to hit the game-winner.

The place went wild. People on their feet raging at Reggie. One guy was yelling: “Bow now, mother fucker….”

Me? I love Reggie for bowing. If you don’t have anybody worth cheering, its good to have someone you can hate. And Reggie Miller was well worth hating….

Anyway, this kid, Johnson, reminds me of Reggie Miller. That’s the great thing about watching this game. It’s a passing parade of players with one guy reminding you of someone who went before him.

On the way out of the gym, I bump into Fred Jackson who went to grammar school with my kids. He’s now the backup point guard for Von Steuben High School, which played Glenbrook North in the consolation game.

I remember him as a first grader, hanging out in the gym with his best friend, Jalen, while his brothers played on the team I coached. I used to make Jalen and Fred stay out of the way by sitting in the corner so the bigger kids wouldn’t trample them.

Now Fred’s even bigger than those bigger kids.

“Want me to put in the good word to the coach?” I ask him.

“Yeah,” he says.

“Watch this….”

“Hey, Carter,” I call out to the coach, who’s walking by. “You gotta give my man, Fred, a little more playing time – he’s the best back-court defender you got….”

“I put him in, didn’t I,” says Carter, a little defensively.

I give Fred the thumbs up and he laughs. “These coaches need to know someone’s watching,” I whisper to him.

On the long, drive home, Norm and I talk about Alex Dragicevich, Glenbrook North’s six-foot-eight-inch forward.

“He’s the best player we saw tonight,” I say.

“Yeah,” says Norm. “But he’s got to work on his ball handling….”

“He reminds me of Dirk Nowitzki,” I say.

“He sure shoots like him,” says Norm.

“He’s good — but he’s no Jon Scheyer….”

“Aw, hell no — there was only one Jon Scheyer….”

We saw Scheyer – Glenbrook North, class of 2006 – light up the Proviso West tournament for fifty-something points in a game back in 2005. As I recall, Scheyer had something like twenty points in the last minute or so. Now, there was a shooter!

Yeah, I know basketball. So does Norm. We ought to – been watching the game our whole lives….

Big Mike: The Whole Foods Messiah

John Mackey was something of a messiah to a lot of people at Whole Foods Market. In fact, I saw him as a messiah as well. Of course, in my pecking order, messiahs rank beneath astrologers, Republicans and those who steal candy from babies.

I worked at Whole Foods Market for a few years in the early part of this decade. I started off peddling wine and cheese on the weekends, another in a series of part-time jobs that have supported my writing career. I learned plenty about cheese. My favorites were Ossau-Iraty, a sheep’s milk cheese made by Basques in the Pyrenees Mountains, Parmigiano-Reggiano (natch), and Dubliner, an Irish concoction that tastes like a mix of cheddar and swiss. As for wine, the greatest lesson I learned was that people who know a lot about it are full of shit.

After about a year and half at the Evanston store, hard by the Northwestern University campus, I discovered there was an opening for In-Store Educator, the person who introduces new employees to the corporate culture, gives them lessons on food safety, organics and merchandising, and sets up continuing ed classes for existing employees. Only we didn’t call them employees — they were Team Members; the term employees, I suppose, implied some horrifying master-slave relationship. We wanted everybody to feel as though they and John Mackey, the founder and Chairman of the Board, were teammates, buds even.

I went for the job because it entailed all the things I do as a writer — research, learning, communicating and, yes, even clacking the keyboard. I got the job and moved from the sales floor to the rarified air of administration, where we, the elect, came that much closer to the messiah.

John Mackey is indeed a special kind of a guy. As a young hippie in the 1970s, he ran a little Austin, Texas, health food shop where he lived in the back room among the green peppers and sacks of quinoa. Mackey eventually started taking over other health and natural foods outlets until he eventually stood atop an international, multi-billion-dollar operation.

Throughout his career as a grub baron, he’s espoused the causes of environmental stewardship, fair play for employees (oops, I meant Team Members) and the overall good health and welfare of his fellow human beings. He’s a big supporter of guys like Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner who has spread the micro-loans concept across the Third World, helping to lift women out of poverty.

John Mackey is a good guy. Naturally, some people on the fast career track at Whole Foods went a little further and saw his life’s work as evidence of, well, a sort of holiness.

But those who possess the characteristics that enable them to create multi-billion-dollar operations have to possess a quality or two of ass-holiness.

The shoppers at Whole Foods Market, many of them true believers, revere John Mackey, too. People who really, really, really go in for natural foods — vegans, macrobiotics and the like — seem to me to be rather puritanical. Heaven forbid they should ever put something soiled into their bodies, their sacred temples here on this fouled Earth. To these people the mere existence of the Big Mac is evidence we are a doomed species. Ronald McDonald is Satan but it isn’t some old fashioned deity who’ll strike us all down for his sins. No, our comeuppance will be environmental and epidemiological cataclysms.

Even those who aren’t so fervid as vegans seem obsessed with their body functions, just like Puritans. I remember once approaching a customer on my way to lunch.

Me: “Can I help you?”

He: “I’m looking for a good tasty cereal with a lot of bran in it.”

I pointed a few brands out but he shook his head.

He: “No, I mean a lot of bran. I need something for bulk. My stool is too soft.” He moved closer to me. “You know what it’s like when your stool is too soft, don’t you?”

It took me a brief moment before the feeling that I’d pass out went away. I nodded and pointed out some brand of cereal that, if I recall correctly, was made of cast iron ingots.

Me: “This ought to do it.”

The customer thanked me as if I’d handed him a winning lottery ticket. I passed on lunch that day.

Anyway, there’s a certain religiosity to the whole natural foods movement. Chemicals are evil. Preservatives are evil. White sugar is evil. Bleached flour is evil. Pesticides are evil. There’s almost as much evil in natural foods magazines as there is in the Bible.

And, like the New Testament’s protagonist, the messiah of the natural foods movement is rife with contradictions. John Mackey opposes governmental regulations of business, is a fierce opponent of labor unions, actually thinks capitalism can solve the world’s problems, speaks out against health care reform, was a fan of Ronald Reagan and (good grief!) admires Ayn Rand. All this from a man whose work force and customer base is overwhelmingly squishy, gooey liberal.

John Mackey was profiled in the New Yorker last week. In the piece, he states that Climate Change is an hysteria, that there is no scientific consensus on Global Warming or even any lesser ill-effects of billions of people burning fossil fuels over the last 175 years.

Sheesh. I knew messiahs were full of crap. But now I know even plain old good guys can be idiots.