Letter From Milo: Wife Beaters

Recently, I’ve been giving serious thought to killing someone. I’ve never met the person I’d like to murder, don’t know his name or what he looks like. The only thing I know about him is that every few months he gives his wife a savage beating. Sometimes he hurts her so badly she needs to be hospitalized.

The victim of the abuse is a woman who I’ll call Carla and we work together in a North Side office. I met Carla on my first day at work. She welcomed me to the job by asking if she could bring me a cup of coffee. After that, whenever I came into the office Carla offered to get coffee or perform some other small service for me. She was friendly to the point of meekness and extremely eager to please.

I also noticed that Carla was abnormally attuned to the moods of the other people in the office, frequently making comments like “Len’s kind of testy today” or “Jack’s having a bad day.”

I later came to understand that Carla’s personality traits – docility, eagerness to please, sensitivity to moods – were actually survival mechanisms.

Despite what I considered to be her quirky behavior, I developed a liking for Carla. So, naturally, I was shocked when she walked into the office one day with a badly bruised and battered face and a gash under one eye that had required stitches.

“Jesus, Carla! What the hell happened?”

Louisville sluggers….

She wouldn’t even look at me when I asked the question. She just said “Car accident,” then walked into her office and quietly closed the door.

A little later, I was talking to a co-worker, named Chuck, and mentioned Carla’s car accident. Chuck shook his head sadly and said, “Yeah, Carla’s accident prone. When she’s not getting banged up in car crashes, she’s walking into doors or falling down in the shower.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that Carla is married to a drunken loser who beats the shit out of her every couple of months. I expect he’ll eventually kill her.”

When I was 12 or 13 years old, my family lived next door to a wife beater. He was a big brute of a steelworker and he was in the habit of getting crazy drunk every few weeks and terrorizing his family.

It always began the same way, with angry shouting, terrified screams, and the sound of breaking glass. “Ah shit,” my father would mutter in disgust. “The crazy bastard is at it again.”

In a little while, the wife and two very young daughters, usually clad in nightgowns and pajamas, would appear at our door, in tears, nearly hysterical, in desperate need of a safe place. While the terrified little family huddled in fear in our kitchen, and my mom tended to their imjuries, the husband stood in our front yard, raging, screaming insane threats at his wife. “I’ll kill you, bitch. I’ll put you in a fucking grave. I’ll…”

As bad as I felt for the wife, my heart truly ached for the little girls. What memories would they have of their father? What horrors did they relive in their dreams? How would their lives be affected? Would their scars ever fade?

There was also something else I had to worry about. My father had gone out to the front yard to try and calm the madman down and I felt I had to cover his ass. I went to my room and got my baseball bat, a fine piece of Kentucky hardwood known as a Louisville Slugger. I stood by the front door, baseball bat in hand, waiting on developments. If the drunken wife beater tried to attack my father, the Louisville Slugger would come in real handy.

Of course, the maniac never laid a hand on the old man. People who batter women and children rarely try their luck with grown men. In all honesty, I was disappointed that the bastard didn’t try to assault my father. I was hoping to take a few whacks at him with my bat. I was young and naive at the time, and knew nothing about human nature. I foolishly believed that if I hit him hard enough and often enough, he might change his monstrous behavior. Regretfully, I didn’t get a chance to test my theory.

Back at the office, I could see that Carla had begun to heal. After a week or so the bruises began to fade and the swelling went down, although the gash under her eye would leave a lasting scar. Still, a flash of anger came over me every time I saw her. The thought of some drunken bully brutalizing the poor woman kept me tense and edgy. I lost sleep wondering if there was something, anything, I could do about the situation. I hated feeling helpless.

When I ran into my co-worker, Chuck, again, I asked him if Carla’s husband ever showed up at the office.

“He comes around once in a while,” Chuck said. “He’s insanely jealous. He parks his car out front and waits for Carla to come out, just to see if she talks to any men.”

“Do me a favor. Point him out to me next time you see him.”

“Sure, no problem.”

On my way to work, the next morning, I stopped at a sporting goods store and bought a baseball bat. It was a Louisville Slugger.

NOTE: Carla is a real person. She needs help. Leave a comment if you have any suggestions.

No Blaise: Beauty Bar

TimeOut Chicago has become my new best friend.

It tells me all the best places to go eat, drink, and, most importantly, dance.

Last night it did its best work thus far, leading me to “Another 90s Party” at Beauty Bar on Chicago Ave.

If you couldn’t guess, it was a party devoted to 90s music, as well as being a chance to dress as people did over 10 years ago. I felt like I was in Clueless, a dream I never thought would come true.

We arrive with about 10 people, and there’s a line.

Womp.

Some people in front of us find a way to sneak in a side entrance, but when members of our party try, they get caught.

Double Womp.

About half way to the door, two of my friends have to go to the bathroom, so they walk to the front. I’m all, “they’ll neverrrrr get in!” and then two minutes later, they’re inside.

Well, they showed me…

Then, a few minutes after that, another friend fakes her contact falling out so she can cut the line and get in…nice move.

I’ve got no tricks up my sleeve, so I wait in line like everybody else. Which, actually, doesn’t take that long.

Bonus!

Once I’m finally inside, I get why it’s called Beauty Bar. They converted it from an old beauty salon, and some of the equipment from its days as one are still around. I also hear that they do manicures/martini days…

Helllllloooooo

Anyways, the music is key. All 90s, all amazing.

What a great decade..

In some ways, it made me sad I wasn’t older during those glorious years, my pre-pubescent self was definitely not appreciating the music around me.

Thank you Beauty Bar, for giving me a second chance at life!

Benny Jay: Darko Milicic is Jewish?

Get a call from Milo the other day….

He wants to know: “Did you see what my boy Darko did last night?”

Darko being Darko Milicic — the starting center for the Minnesota Timberwolves.

I say, “no,” though I know whatever Darko did must not have been bad. Cause I never hear from Milo about Darko unless he’s done something good.

Which means I hardly hear from Milo about Darko at all.

“He scored 20 last night,” Milo says.

Something else you should know about Milo — he scans the sports section every day to see how Darko did.

“That’s nice,” I say. “But he’s still a bum….”

“Yeah,” says Milo, “but he’s my bum.”

Can’t argue with that….

It was love at first sight for Milo with Darko cause Darko’s Serbian. As is Milo. Milo loves all the great Serbian basketball players — Vlade Divac, Pistol Pete Maravich, and, well, I’m sure there are others.

Just as I love all the great Jewish basketball players: Dolph Schayes, his boy Danny Schayes and, well, I’m sure there are others.

Milo loves Darko even when he bounces the ball off his nose….

When I was a kid, it used to bother me that there weren’t more Jewish basketball players to love.

But then the Reverend James Bevel told me something that set me straight.

Bevel was a demented genius — one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s top lieutenants during the fight against Jim Crow.

It was Bevel who came up with some of the most sophisticated strategies of non-violent disobedience in the civil rights movement — like filling the jails with young people in Birmingham, Alabama.

If you don’t believe me, look it up….

By the time I met Bevel he was starting to lose his mind — running as a Republican in an all-Democratic congressional district on Chicago’s west side.

He was wearing a yarmulke. I asked him: “What’s with the yarmulke?”

And he told me: “All Jews eminate from the motherland Africa. And all blacks descend from the Hebrew tribes of Abraham.”

In other words — “all blacks are Jews and all Jews are blacks.”

You might say Sammy Davis, Jr. was way ahead of his time.

I love Sammy Davis, Jr!

If you take Bevel’s theory into account, it’s been a pretty good run for Jews. In Barack Obama, we have a Jewish president. The world’s greatest golfer — Tiger Woods — is Jewish. As are the five greatest basketball players of all time: Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Well, until he converted to Islam.

Conversely, it’s been a great run for black people….

A black man — Albert Einstein — discovered the theory of relativity. Another black man — Sigmund Freud — invented psychoanalysis as we know it. And a third black man, Woody Allen, is arguably the funniest man alive.

My advice to Milo is to take Reverend Bevel’s world view to its logical conclusion. If all civilization started in Mother Africa and all religions descend from father Abraham — than all of us our black Jews.

Even white Serbian-Americans named Samardzija.

In short, Milo, it’s time you switched your allegiance to the great Jewish ballplayers of modern time — starting with most sensational Derrick Rose.

Or “Shlomo” Rose, as his Jewish brothers and sister call him.

Shabbat Shalom, everybody!

Randolph Street: Tarmac

O’Hare Field–Chicago

O’Hare Field–Chicago

O’Hare Field–Chicago

O’Hare Field–Chicago

O’Hare Field–Chicago

O’Hare Field–Chicago

All Photos © Jon Randolph