Note: This essay is very different than everything else I’ve written here, or anywhere else for a long time. It’s about the years I lived (2000-2007), worked (2000-2011), or hung around in (2011-2019) Chicago. I have consulted some primary sources, and have not fabricated anything nor knowingly made any composites. A few names have been changed, or invented because I forgot them. The next newsletter will be more normal.
Update (5/4/23): I originally wrote that the lecture by Marilynne Robinson appeared as an essay in The Givenness of Things. While my journal from 2001 confirmed the name of the retiree and that the singer at the Checkerboard performed “Love the One You’re With,” my memory apparently fabricated a cover by Al Green. I was very likely imagining the version by the Isley Brothers, and the text has been changed accordingly.
I have created a playlist of songs referenced here, as well as others whose stories I didn’t tell this time around.
A harmonica player named Mr. Blues was hosting the open mic at Mother Fools down on Willy Street and I played with him. He would ask the key of the song I’d chosen and I’d tell him an obvious one, using open strings. “Another lazy guitar player,” he lamented in a stage-whisper aside to the sparse crowd after I called out my second tune. “I am a lazy guitar player,” I acknowledged, “but I’m not the laziest guitar player. That was a guy named Hound Dog Taylor.”
“Don’t you rip on Hound Dog,” Mr. Blues retorted.
“I love Hound Dog,” I insisted, “but he was lazy.” Then we played “Freddie’s Blues” by Hound Dog Taylor.
When I moved to Chicago a couple months later, it was, obscurely, because of Hound Dog Taylor. The city where I had watched Michael Jordan play against Dominique Wilkins in 1993, seen the big Monet exhibition in 1995, spent a day trip wandering around downtown with my girlfriend in 1997—the metropolis hovering at the intimidating edge of my suburban Wisconsin world—held no particular attraction for me. The place that drew me in was one I’d only heard about, or more specifically, heard, on the first track of a compilation from Alligator Records: “Give Me Back My Wig.” The artist died years before I was born, and played most of his gigs at Florence’s, an Englewood bar that was long gone when the compilation came out. The voice was not especially strong, the musicianship limited, the music itself not original in any way. Taylor’s gain-blitzed guitar could have come straight from a pawn shop to the studio. But the sound was its own perfection. I knew about, and loved, the big names in Chicago blues, but none of them transported me to a small room where people were making music just like falling out of bed. Stevie Ray Vaughn and George Thorogood, both more accomplished guitarists than Hound Dog, could only produce failed covers, with none of the calligraphic stutters and sways that Hound Dog played around the basic shuffle pattern. I didn’t come to chase a lakefront, skyscrapers, or any next rung on a Midwestern boy’s ladder to anywhere. I came to chase the ghosts of Hound Dog, Florence’s, and all the people and rooms that could make that sound.
***
2000
Three weeks after moving into a spare room in the Ukrainian Village, my roommate has moved to Phoenix and the phone service has been cut. Brian and I weren’t buddies—he called me “a book reader” because I showed up with three or four boxes of books and the only reading material he had was end-times magazines—but we got along fine and the place was adequate and only cost me $275 a month. The neighborhood west of Western was sullen and a little thick with broken bottles, and the Chicago Avenue bus took forever to arrive and then get you to the El. Or at least it felt that way in March. But the waitress at the Black Beetle pretended to misread my ID and never checked again, and the catatonic line cook down at the Litehouse would do you eggs, hash browns, and toast at any hour of the day or night. I had watched my first state primary night in that apartment. I envisioned the new clerk of courts, Dorothy Brown, storming to Carol Moseley Braun’s old Senate seat. Some state senator had taken on Bobby Rush in the House but gotten stomped. Sounded like an interesting guy, but an odd name. But a few days after Brian moved, the building manager showed up—I didn’t even have his number—cursing and kicking the pigeons out of the open foyer, and while he mostly glowered around rather than at me and didn’t say in so many words that I had to leave, I took the hint. Now I go down to the Osco to call the ads for roommates, and I finally find one in Andersonville. I also need to lay out $75 I can’t really afford to get a guy with a van I found in the phone book to move my stuff up there. When the van door flies open on Chicago Avenue and my boxes of books tumble out into the street, he does pull over and bob through the traffic to pick most of the books up.
The second hand crossed the twelve and I turned legal in a Sheridan Avenue liquor store. The clerk on Sheridan laughed but rang up our twelve pack and Wild Turkey 101. Our apartment sits above two unoccupied floors, and after a firm but friendly initial visit, the police just shine their searchlights into our front windows when my roommate and I are playing our guitars too loud and too late. Last month Koko Taylor closed the Blues Fest and I got off work at the Caribou just in time to catch the Red Line down and stand at the edge of the seats for “Wang Dang Doodle.” For an encore, she torched “Big Boss Man.” You ain’t so big, you just tall, that’s all. I got to see Buddy Guy at Ravinia, too. The gallery owner who had Sugar Blue at her opening made me solemnly promise I would not jeopardize her business by drinking when she bent the rules to let me come in, though in the event I was too nervous to ask to play with Sugar after I met him. But now I can go down to Lilly’s and watch a guy named Z.Z. Hill, Jr. (no relation to the original Z.Z. Hill) from the very eccentric second-floor gallery. It’s a brave man who will take on Wilson Pickett’s “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You,” but he does it. During a set break, sitting at the bar, he empties the dregs of a pre-made ten-gallon bucket of Long Island Iced Tea (on special that night) into my plastic cup.
My attempt at a synthesis of T.S. Eliot and Richard Prior, “Sobriety Journal: Day 5,” turns out to be less of an aesthetic coup than I had hoped
There are a number of ways to get from our South Shore apartment to the campus in Hyde Park. The Metra stops up on 71st and the Stony Island and Jackson Park buses drop me about a half mile from my classes. But while the weather is decent, I’ll try to bike. I nurse enough of a crush on Death to bike home down Stony Island in the evening, in a black hoodie and no helmet and after a few rum-and-cokes at Jimmy’s, but not enough of a crush to do it again. I’ll stick to the side streets. When the weather turns cold, or I’ve been at Jimmy’s too late, I can get a ride back in Vitaly’s car where we can bellow along with “Anywhere I Lay My Head.” At least it’s a New Orleans-style funeral march.
2001
At Bret Harte Elementary on 56th Street, my fellow undergraduate “student teacher” and I are doing some creative work with our after-school fourth graders on fairy tales. Goldilocks is being confronted by the Three Bears on Jerry Springer. The smallest girl in the group stands on her little chair and holds a stapler like a microphone. “What I want to know is, why couldn’t she get a JOB? Why couldn’t she take some RESPONSIBILITY FOR HERSELF” Goldilocks: “I was cold! I was hungry! I WAS NAKED!” We switch the scenario to Montell Jordan to try to lower the energy a bit.
“I do not encourage you to play the religious voyeur,” Professor Yu said, but if you want to see what T.S. Eliot is on about in “Ash Wednesday” you can go to church this week. So I am at church that week. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return” says the dean of Rockefeller Chapel as she traces the ashes on my forehead. I hadn’t really planned on this, I think, but I guess I’m a Christian now.
There’s a retirement party for Willie Mae at the Checkerboard Lounge on 43rd. The food is from Alma’s on the block and they’re sharing. The singer is rotund and gap-toothed, no name on any bill that I saw, but he is working the Isley Brother’s version of “Love the One You’re With.” Best live music venue and worst bathroom I have yet seen in Chicago.
One can never understand a city before spending a hundred hours on its buses. The Stony Island Bus is slow but it gets the job done. On it I can hear what happened to someone named Mario (“They shot Mario up on 46th street.” “Mario was fast lane, man. Fast lane.”) And one day, waiting with supplies from Moo and Oink on 67th for the dinner I cook at the divinity house on Monday nights, a guy asks me what I study and launches into a history of Christianity after Constantine when I tell him I’m studying “Religion and the Humanities.”
“You are molding the barstool to your ass!” William tells me when we see each other at Jimmy’s for the second night in a row, explaining that it is an idiom in the land of his birth. Moving to Hyde Park for the fall came with some regret, but I ended up living with one of my few close friends, a friend good enough to bring me back a signed copy of Salman Rushdie’s Fury when I was too hungover to go with her to his interview at WBEZ. The apartment is equidistant from Sammy’s, where I could get cheeseburgers cigarettes, and Jimmy’s where I normally got my pints of Leinie’s Red and glasses of Dewar’s (they also have cheeseburgers that would do in a pinch). On Mondays, a pick-up ensemble of faculty plays jazz standards in the back room, though the mathematician insists on battering the skins so hard that there is no escape. They do a rather good rendition of “Blue Bossa” though. My church, whose choir can actually pull off an Anglican chant version of Psalm 19 at the Easter Vigil, is conveniently right across the street. We are near the southwestern edge of the archipelago of University-owned off-campus apartment buildings, where parties pour out onto ranks of wooden back porches and the genteel centenarian interiors play host to readings by aspiring undergraduate litterateurs (my attempt at a synthesis of T.S. Eliot and Richard Prior, “Sobriety Journal: Day 5,” turns out to be less of an aesthetic coup than I had hoped). It was also close to the heart of campus, so I could easily take a class on Four Quartets taught by an autumnal legend of the faculty on Tuesday nights. There, in the great unofficial smoking patio at the Cobb Hall entrance, is where I made William’s acquaintance. I can’t stand him because he’s better read, better looking, more charming, and more cosmopolitan than I am. “There’s always one more in the soft pack,” he said to me, as he bummed from my Camels. In a few weeks, he’ll be one of my best friends. When I graduate in the spring, he’ll play piano with the Jimmy’s band and add “Confirmation” to the lineup because he knows I particularly like it. By then I will also have stopped resenting his wide grasp of American music.
I still nurse enough of a crush on Death that I did not wear a set belt when the girl from the Eliot class who smokes unfiltered Pall Malls and has uncommonly pleasant eyes drove me up to the North Side in the rain. This is not, by prior stipulation, a date. Just a trip to the Bourgeois Pig for coffee. I nurse a small enough crush, however, that I put on the seatbelt as she skids around Lakeshore Drive on the return trip, a few minutes before she hits some standing water and spins out, slamming us into the S-curve. She is fine and my inability to turn my neck will prove temporary, but as the ambulance takes us away to make sure, I notice that all southbound traffic is stopped as far as I can see. I feel perversely significant, an idiot grandee of the city. Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah never saw it quite like this.
2002
An Arthur Anderson wristband crew is being treated to a night out at Buddy Guy’s Legends. “What can you tell me about Shhtevie Ray Vaughn?” a white shirt blubbers to Buddy. Stevie was a wonderful man, Buddy says. I’m angry. This is Buddy Guy you’re talking to here, champ. Ask him about Buddy Guy. He signs my copy of a live album with Junior Wells.
“I was removing asbestos, making lots of money, but it was my girlfriend that shot me and I thought I would die that day. But the Lord kept me alive for a purpose.”
“Who do you look up to?” I ask the Lawndale sophomore in an interview for a mentoring program. Pause. “The only person I look up to is God,” she tells me. “He’s the only one who can make all this right.”
David Grene, the irascible emeritus who taught Four Quartets and then The Tempest last fall and winter, went away for the spring and died. Bond Chapel is at capacity for the memorial. His colleagues and students in the Committee on Social Thought, where a University president stashed him after the Classics department tried to fire him in the 1930s, are sharing memories. “In those days, to get into the Committee, you didn’t need a proposed course of study, you just needed to share a good recipe for oxtail soup with Ed Shils,” one Quad Club waiter-turned-academic recounted. The service ends with Grene’s voice reading the last section of “East Coker”:
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling
2003
On city primary night, the 47th Ward Regular Democratic Organization, commonly known as the “Fighting 47th,” is making its last stand. One compensating benefit of moving back to the North Side has been living a five minute walk to church, where my pastor is a professional violinist who can play the “Laudamus Te” of Mozart’s Great Mass on Easter, three minutes from the Brown Line, and just as close to the neighborhood bar. The regular bartender there is also the precinct captain in the Fighting 47th and got me involved in the alderman race. Ed Kelly, the committeeman of the ward since Daley sent him there in the 60s to run out the council’s last Republican, ran a candidate against the incumbent, a former protégé who beat that last Republican in the 70s and turned on Kelly in the 2000 committeeman race. I distributed some campaign literature, a circular of Kelly’s splenetic meanderings that barely mentioned his candidate. “In the old days, we’d have beat him up, left him bleeding in a gangway,” one of my fellow barflies-cum-engaged-citizens said of another guy out dropping literature (it turned out he was on our side, he just ran late). This candidate had not fared well. Kelly says something conciliatory about the alderman. “Fuck him!” someone calls out from the large and well-lubricated crowd. “Hey, there’s kids here!” another voice answers. Here is the duality of the old, payroll-and-union-patronage Chicago Machine, its precinct armies gradually lost to the Shakman Decree, the suburbs, and coronary disease. “This guy used to fight professionally,” yet another guy I know from the bar tells me, pointing out Dominic Longo. “Imagine what the guys who lost must look like.” I have nothing particularly against the alderman, a creature of the new contract-patronage machine, or his ward organization, but I highly doubt his victory party has shouted profanity, kids, or former prize fighters.
After a too-long night that started with passing a busker who played “Misty” on an electric guitar on State Street so poignantly that I wanted to give him all my money, my agency has drafted us into a float in the annual Bud Billiken Day parade. We will wave and cheer and encourage everyone to show up for school the next week. We are stuck behind the Clerk of Courts Dorothy Brown and her marchers, with their original campaign song:
Dorothy Brown Brown, Brown Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy Brown Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy Brown
William is with me for his first baseball game, in excellent seats donated to my employer. “It is customary for first-time visitors to Comiskey Park to charge the field and tackle the opposing team’s third base coach,” I explain helpfully.
2004
Once or twice, back when I had food stamps, I used them to by Albert lunch at Whole Foods after the noon Mass at St. James Cathedral. Today I have to use my own money. He’s explaining his philosophy of life over soup and rolls:
There are two kinds of people in the world, those that got it and those that don't, and I don't got it but I'm not gonna do anything bad to get it. I got shot in the back three times with a .38 pistol in 1990. I was removing asbestos, making lots of money, but it was my girlfriend that shot me and I thought I would die that day. But the Lord kept me alive for a purpose. I used to make a lot of money, now I live in the shelter. But as long as I got Jesus and I got my health, I'm happy.
It’s a frigid January Friday and I’ve been brooding all day about a kindergartener in one of our programs who has sickle cell and no winter coat. There was an email going around at work asking for one. William has invited me and a couple others for dinner at his Scholar’s Corner apartment, urgently asking one friend by phone to pick up the candles. I can live without candles for dinner with friends, I think to myself. She arrives with candles and he hands me a White Sox hat, putting a straw Panama on himself. What’s the deal with the hats, I think, before the friend lights the candles and William says the evening blessing. It’s Shabbat.
“Call that guy. Tell him I sent you. He’ll be so mad.” Chuckle. “Call that guy too, but don’t tell him I sent you. Someone knows why this is happening.”
“They’re shaking in their boots,” Ms. Wilkinson at the high school tells me the morning after the primary, after I’ve cleared the metal detectors. I had known when the city turnout numbers were announced that Obama had won the senate nomination but had not guessed the overwhelming margin, not just in the city but statewide. I was in the ballroom with a friend as the big names in Black Chicago politics (and Jan Schakowsky) all crossed the stage to raucous cheers. Then the candidate himself entered from a side door, parting the crowd a few feet to my right, mounting the stage, and giving the most poised, thrilling political speech I had ever heard. The halting, cerebral state senator I’d seen in a North Side church and a DePaul lecture hall was nowhere in evidence. “John Kerry should have him give the keynote at the convention,” I told my friend. All the old establishment politicians had lined up for Hynes and gotten wrecked. Even my alderman, a Hynes guy, saw his own precinct go for Obama. I was poll-watching there with one of the alderman’s guys, a ward superintendent who asked me who I owed that I was working there and looked at me like I had two heads when I said I was volunteering because I liked the candidate. A shot across the bow of the power structure, we agree in that Lawndale high school as I wait to check in on my mentoring program kids. Change is coming to Chicago.
“Carol’s Pub belongs to the alcoholics,” a friend had written in the Chicago Maroon. Remember that you’re the one visiting. When Casey started bringing me up for the 25-cent draft special after we were done cooking on Monday nights, we were near the tip of the gentrification spear for this last great legacy tavern of Chicago’s Appalachian diaspora. Now I’m just one of a dozen Ezra Klein lookalikes here for the music and the atmosphere. The singer for Diamondback, the house band, has some instructions: “First you PUT THE TIP ON THE MIC STAND and THEN you make your request.” They obviously don’t want to do “Folsom Prison Blues” for the millionth time. It’s not their best song. They really kill “Rocky Top,” for example. But I have paid my tip.
William calls from Cairo’s wee hours to rave about the Senate nominee’s convention keynote speech. Even the barfly/precinct volunteer down at the Time Out, the kind of Democrat who hasn’t voted for a Democrat since the 1980s and who has argued with me about Obama, practically shouts “did you SEE that SPEECH?” when I come in.
After two years, it’s back to Hyde Park student housing and the Divinity School. I got a job that will end up lasting me all three years, researching local history through the lens of the University’s relationship with its neighbors and the production of “civic knowledge” within the neighborhoods themselves. I work my hours but oversight is lax and I go wherever the broad topics lead me. I get to read scholarly local history on the clock, the pioneers of sociology, and the devastating report by an early Black scholar at the University on the 1919 race riot. I get to read the fictional narration of the South Side, from James T. Farrell’s street kids to Gwendolyn Brooks’s rent parties. At one point I ended up playing some old-time music with local music history buffs at a reunion of a demolished Robert Taylor Homes building, to the polite neglect of those assembled. I learned that Sun Ra once wrote a now-lost jazz musical called “Chicago, USA” based on Ulysses. I found something that I don’t think anyone had seen since it was stashed in an unsorted box in the Bessie Coleman branch library in Woodlawn: a script for a community play from 1960, author unnamed, dramatizing the racial transition of the neighborhood in real time. It had unscrupulous real estate agents and exploitative landlords, and ended with a song of hope that Woodlawn residents would join hands across racial lines to protect and build the neighborhood they shared. I could barely wait to share it with my boss and her boss, to see if it could be edited and published, which never happens. And I got to meet Gerri Oliver, whose Palm Tavern was opened as a high-end jazz club in 1933 by an old-time policy baron and had been recently and forcibly closed. I made it to one the last shows there, a shaggy, heavily improvised revue called I Was There When the Blues Was Red Hot. Now, working with local preservationists to halt the demolition, I’m trying to get the story on the closure from a city worker who prefers not to talk in his office. “Call that guy. Tell him I sent you. He’ll be so mad.” Chuckle. “Call that guy too, but don’t tell him I sent you. Someone knows why this is happening.” The Palm Tavern, which had played host to Louis Armstrong and Count Basie, would be demolished by the end of the year. No one will ever say why. The site will remain empty.
2005
Daniel Barenboim is suffering from the grippe to which maestros seem peculiarly susceptible and taking a three-week hiatus from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In his place, Helmuth Rilling has been brought over to conduct Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. Rilling has recorded Bach’s complete choral catalogue, an accomplishment I find nearly unthinkable, and appears in a shirt with an almost-clerical collar. I have heard him shush the critic on the radio who suggests that Beethoven’s connection to the Mass itself was anything less than sincere. He conducts the orchestra like a professor giving his favorite lecture. It is a marvel that the sopranos aren’t tumbling out of the chorus section during the majestic, punishing “Gloria.” Student tickets are absurd, perhaps $14. So I’ll go to see the program twice.
Pastor Chuck Infelt, a local legend who came to Cabrini-Green to coach basketball and ended up as pastor of Holy Family Lutheran Church, gives me his regrets. “I’ve had students for thirty years,” he tells me as I plead my case on Ash Wednesday. “If I were to take another student, I would take you. But I’m done supervising students.”
I’m on a break from boundaries training at the seminary, grabbing lunch at Rajun Cajun. Barack Obama stops in to say hello to the owner. “Hey Senator!” we call out brightly. “Hey guys,” he replies, subdued. It’s this thing we do, us and Barack.
Saul Bellow is being remembered at Rockefeller Chapel, and I’m there with William. On the day of Bellow’s death, he got on the Clark Street bus and rode the length of the North Side, reading Herzog. He got off at a used bookstore where, a few years before, he and I had seen a signed first edition of Mr. Sammler’s Planet. It seemed expensive at the time, but that day he was able to buy it at its still-living-author price, to the frustrated admiration of the owner. Not many of Bellow’s colleagues are left, but one tells the story of a wife leaving him and putting colored dot stickers on everything in their downtown apartment she considered hers. “She went dotty,” Bellow told the colleague. We are in the twilight of the age when telling the deceased’s own jokes about their ex-wives will fly. I am inspired to read Ravelstein on the clock.
James Baldwin, while I sit otherwise unaccompanied in the upper deck for a listless Sox-Diamondbacks matinee: “my father, who having taken his own conversion too literally never, at bottom, forgave the white world (which he described as heathen) for having saddled him with a Christ in whom, to judge at least from their treatment of him, they themselves no longer believed.”
Why is the singer-guitarist at this event heckling me, I wonder. “Anyone tell you you look like Willard?” I take a shot in the dark: “Hey, did you ever play with a harmonica player who goes by Mr. Blues?” “Sure, I know Mr. Blues. How do you know Mr. Blues?”
2006
Marilynne Robinson has lectured, dispatched a prissy, sanctimonious political philosopher during questions, and stayed until the last hand-shaker and well-wisher in the lecture hall goes home, and my two classmates and I are the last hand-shakers. While the impatient committee chair hovers, trying and failing to drag her away to a dinner in her honor, my future son’s godfather tells her that we’re in school for ministry and thanks her for writing a book that makes ministry seem like a good thing to do with one’s life. She nods gravely, says something appreciative, and signs our three copies of Gilead. Then she goes to dinner.
I did, after all, find a supervisor in Pastor Ruth VanDemark. The first day we met, on the first Sunday in Lent last year, she preached about Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor chapter and a profoundly devout-seeming parishioner who spoke no English gave her a cake for Valentine’s Day. She was a former appellate lawyer, originally from South Dakota, who would try things like having the congregation of fifty or so chant the Great Litany in procession around the sanctuary. For Holy Week this year, she’s in the hospital with cracked ribs and collapsed lungs. I was drafted into preaching on Maundy Thursday and leading the service on Good Friday. She was back, wincing in pain, to asperse the little Easter Vigil with water from the font. But today, after Easter, Lyle the organist is practicing “The King of Love My Shepherd Is” on the church’s circa 1907 “Mighty Möller” organ, which is somewhere along an interminable upkeep and rebuilding process. If the look of evening light on burnished church-pew wood had a sound, this would be it, all glowing middle-range tones. I don’t think he knows I’m here. No one else is. I’ll mention it later.
I am too disgruntled to join my divinity school classmates in the line for Barack Obama’s book signing at 57th Street Books, but they bring me a signed copy anyway. “You should run for president,” one of them told him. No he shouldn’t, I reply, don’t be ridiculous.
“There wasn’t much fun in him,” Mr. Jackson tells me of Malcolm X. We’ve been over his time jumping trains in the 1930s, when he once accidentally ended up in Canada and received an official escort back, his years as a small-time boxer, his quartermaster corps service in the segregated army and the man who died of seasickness in the Atlantic before they reached the Pacific, which was just “like glass.” Of his cardiac arrest: “Everything was just…nothin.” He spent time with the Nation of Islam, where he knew Elijah Mohammed and the stern Malcolm. Drifted away, but kept hanging out around Stony Island with the old-timers who played checkers. They were so good, much better than me, he marvels, bedridden all those years later, as he beats the student hospice chaplain in about three minutes.
2007
The high school student asks the church secretary: “You know those jackets the white folks wear?” Turns, sees my quizzical expression. “You know those jackets the caucasians wear?” I will never find out what jackets she is referring to. No sooner do we move to the suburbs than I turn around and commute back to the South Side for internship—Ike to Dan Ryan by car, or Metra to Green Line by train down to Englewood. This is not my first time in the neighborhood, but I entered with some trepidation. The area has a reputation. Still, odd rock-throwing aside, I’ve been greeted with nothing but warmth. “Good job, good job [clap clap]. Good job, good job [clap clap]. G-O-O-D-J-O-B, good job, good job [clap clap]” was the Freedom School’s greeting on my first day after I just read a story book (the chant actually continued from there). The congregation is not large, and neither is the space, but the organist is a straight-up killer and when everyone gets into “One Day at a Time” or “Old Rugged Cross,” the whole place feels like it could burst into the flame of divine love. I mentioned Mahalia Jackson to my internship supervisor, whom I’d been obsessed with since I heard the recording of “Sweet Little Jesus Boy” on Exploring Music the previous winter, while I was driving down Congress to our old apartment. “I went to her funeral,” he told me. For some reason, I mentioned James Baldwin to my predecessor intern. “I went to his funeral,” he told me. Someone’s eulogy, maybe Amiri Baraka’s: “JAMES BALDWIN WAS THE VOICE OF GOD.”
2008
For Black History Month, I’ve decided to preach on “Black History and My History.” I tell the story of B.B. King saying that he didn’t sit down in concert because he was old, but because he wanted to reminisce. I want to reminisce, I say as I place a chair in the middle of the sanctuary and sit down to talk about being from a sundown town and needing to learn the truth of my world and the world that had been excluded from it. “He sat down because otherwise his legs would have been shaking,” Mr. Burton says afterward.
He has whatever the opposite of magnetism is, a force field repelling his constituents at the bar or in the men’s room. He exchanges no words with anyone.
My wife takes a Sunday off of church and brings our first born, not a month old, to my farewell. I’m given a copy of the new Evangelical Lutheran Worship book, so that I’d know “how they do it.” Something happens and I light off all the fireworks left in the stash for that last sermon, talking about how the day will come when we will look at each other and see the face of God. Two weeks later, I’ll be back on the North Side, in a church I know and love, and it will feel like preaching on the moon.
It is Election Day and my wife’s birthday. The crowds flowing to and from Grant Park are unreal, an ebullient, gregarious, peaceable wave of humanity. “Hey Jesse!” a few of us holler at Jesse Jackson as he tilts into our hotel lobby. He waves back. There was a conciliatory speech and then the rally broke up to the piped-in sound of “Sweet Home Chicago.”
2009
There is a line of musicians the length of the New Apartment Lounge waiting for a turn to sit in with Von Freeman. You didn't see that even a few years earlier when William and I started coming, but things change. As far as I know, Freeman is the last local link to Chicago’s post-war jazz heyday, a hard-bop survivor who played with Bird back when the Beehive made Hyde Park, of all places, a significant stop on the national circuit. The University swept it all out, but Von never left and now he plays no-cover jam nights in an inconspicuous 75th Street tavern. A woman less than a third his age sits down and gives “Embraceable You” a hearty go. He watches her with wary appreciation, big eyes like a naughty child. He’s one of those gorgeous old men you see once in a great while. I never quite took to his recordings, but the tone of his horn, then and there, with him looking at her and at us like we just have to give him that extra cookie, will stop your heart. “The only Eye-talian in the ghetto,” he says, introducing his bassist during a solo. Then again, in case we missed the significance: “The ONLY Eye-talian in the GHE-tto.”
We’d been out for a while serving hot dogs in front of the mobile clinic in Humboldt Park when the man came up. He’s a journalist, he says; he sees us out here every week and wants to know what we’re doing. I explain The Night Ministry to him, then he gives me his card: John Conroy. This is one of the best journalists in Chicago, I tell my volunteers. He…well, he broke the story of chronic torture in the Chicago Police Department.
“Christmas was always about what I lacked,” a young man emails me after we try a “Longest Night” service at Wicker Park. We used W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being as the text, punctuated by a Chopin Impromptu from the pastor’s husband, a vocal ensemble doing some Leonard Cohen and Vincent Guaraldi, and me trying some Bob Dylan and Tom Waits. Somehow it all worked. Even Pastor Ruth, whose skepticism tiptoed to the edge of hostility, was thrilled.
2010
Two hours after I handed him $40 without his even asking, it hits me that the guy was simply the most brilliant grifter I’ve ever met. He put on an absolute command performance in the hour after church, ranging from prison to a real Southeast Side club owned by a gang to hiding out in a basement. I even administered confession and absolution for outrageously fabricated sins. It was a one-man show with the fourth wall utterly demolished. I couldn’t even begrudge the money or the feeling of foolishness. As a theatrical experience in Chicago, it had ranked just below the Court’s productions of Arcadia and Travesties and above pretty much everything else.
2011
No one wants to be the last one in the church basement, ever, especially not at 10:30 , p.m., and especially especially not washing out the scorched soup pots from the Night Ministry feed in Pilsen. But here I am, and for once it’s ok. Prophesy to the pots, Son of Man.
A friend I met during her her summer internship when I was new to Chicago, and who went with me to see Buddy at least once, is back in town for a post-doctoral fellowship. Marilynne Robinsons is back too, for a lecture on “The Freedom of a Christian” with the Lumen Christi Institute in a bigger hall. So we go together. This one feels a bit more like a draft (a lot of it will turn up in an essay in When I Was a Child I Read Books), and some of the pointed questions find their mark. I wait for a signature on Absence of Mind. She does not seem to recall our last meeting, though she’s gracious about it.
All day on campus and I saw three people smoking, one person sobbing out in the open, and a whole lot of people doing it wrong.
Two brothers fresh into foster care are staying with us for the duration of their new foster family’s ten-day spring vacation. I’ve left them with my parents (my wife, our son, and the girl we are long-term fostering are out of town) while I go in to preach and preside at St. Luke’s in Logan Square. From pillar to post to our house they have arrived, trash bags of belongings in tow, the five-year-old’s teeth in frightening ruins and the one-year-old’s lungs a thicket of wheezing. The little choir of this little church is warming up with “The Lord’s My Shepherd, I’ll Not Want,” to the tune of Brother James’ Air. I should be getting ready, but all I can do is stop to listen:
Thou hast a table richly spread In presence of my foes My head thou dost with oil anoint And my cup overflows My head thou dost with oil anoint And my cup overflows
Back at Wicker Park, someone has made lasagna and brownies for me to take home. “I heard you may have been having a hard week. I thought you could use some food.”
2012
The church is packed and stifling for Pastor Ruth’s funeral. I’d gone to see her in the hospital, when she was already unconscious, to read a few psalms, give her a blessing and tell her I loved her. Tomorrow, the girl we’ve fostered for two years is going back to her mother. The bishop preaches, the unofficial dean of local liturgists presides, and the organ falls away for the best verse of “All Creatures of Our God and King.” The denuded congregation pushes through:
And you, most kind and gentle death Waiting to hush our final breath, Oh, praise him! Alleluia! You lead to heav'n the child of God Where Christ our Lord the way has trod Oh, praise him! Oh, praise him! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
2014
After teaching a class on worship and preaching in the morning on campus, I open up Marilynne Robinson’s new novel Lila during a solo lunch downtown:
Let us pray, and they all did pray. Let us join in hymn number no matter what, and they all sang. Why did they waste candles on daylight? Him standing there, talking about people dead who knows how long, if the stories about them were even true, and most of the people listening, or trying to listen. There was no need for any of it. The days came and went on their own, without any praying about it. And still, everywhere, meetings and revivals, people seeing the light. Finding comfort where there was no comfort, just and old man saying something he'd said so many times he probably didn't hear it himself. It was about the meaning of existence, he said. All right. She knew a little bit about existence. That was pretty well the only thing she knew about, and she had learned the word for it from him. It was like the United States of America—they had to call it something.
2016
I don’t often invite friends to church and my success rate when I do is under the Mendoza Line, but this year’s Chrism Mass is at the church in this friend’s neighborhood, right across the street from the place I lived during my first summer here. I even went there one Sunday that summer, the first time I ever voluntarily stepped into a Lutheran church and the only time I went to any church for years, probably after I had a dream that I died in a Damen Avenue bus crash and met God. My friend is game, but after the stand-up bass, piano, and drum trio has grooved its way through the liturgy, he says “you didn’t tell me it would be a jazz Mass.”
2017
William, in town from Europe, and I are at the Court Theatre for Tom Stoppard’s The Hard Problem. So is Rahm Emanuel. An unpopular politician may still banter and shake hands with his constituents, but Rahm is not so much contingently unpopular as defiantly unlikable. He was my congressman when I lived on the North Side and I saw him perform normality pretty well at a community forum at my church. But the years and their politics have perhaps taken a toll and today Rahm has whatever the opposite of magnetism is, a force field repelling his constituents at the bar or in the men’s room. He exchanges no words with anyone. Daley would not have gone to the Court for love, money or a play called “Richard M: Better Than His Old Man,” but he’d have talked to people wherever he was.
2018
When I was in South Shore, the building’s owner lived upstairs. She had to call down periodically to tell us to knock off the guitars when it was late, but she was always really nice about it, especially as we were a couple of 21-year-old knuckleheads who stood out like the sorest of thumbs. When we moved in, she brought us down the street to a Labor Day cookout with her friends, two city police. A homicide detective calling himself “Touchdown Tony” (because he “always scores”) was freely imbibing and hamfistedly flirting with her. Now she’s sitting across from me in the adult education room at Augustana Lutheran Church in Hyde Park while I lead a discussion of my about-to-be-released book. She’s asking good questions and my answers suggest that, all the years between notwithstanding, I still don’t quite know what to say to someone reasonably asking me to turn the amp down. I sell and sign a few books. The pastor who taught my confirmation class when I was in my last year of college is down the hall; she left the campus ministry position in Hyde Park for a suburban parish and is back. A lot has changed since I knelt on the chancel for my confirmation alongside the eighth graders. People have died, retired, moved away and the building has been remodeled and renovated. But the recessed skylight still fills the monumental Brutalist sanctuary with light from an unseen source, like the essence and power of a hidden God filling the universe.
2019
After seven years in the distant reaches of Lake County, our trips to the city have dwindled. A half-dozen White Sox games, an evening out in Jefferson Park every couple months with some old friends, and taking the kids to the Art Institute is about all that’s left. Live music, whether at Symphony Center or one of the few tenacious blues clubs, is long gone. I taught for the last time in 2014 and just this April, in the city’s annual puncture wound of beauty and hope, I attended my last alumni council meeting. All day on campus I saw three people smoking, one person sobbing out in the open, and a whole lot of people doing it wrong. Churches in Chicago and Evanston turned me down, wrapping up my attempt to take on a new professional role while keeping our foster placement intact and getting closer to the city than the hem of her garment. It’s a long hem, too, stretching out to the lakes, forests, and farm fields. There are no good routes or quick trips in. But I have to go to Lurie Children’s Hospital because the two-year-old we’ve fostered for the last year needs another swallow study. In just a few weeks, we’re moving to Dallas and she can’t come with. I am rethinking my unwillingness to threaten or blackmail the judge who told us no. I am asking myself what would really happen if they fail to find a home for her and I just drive off with her. For a year, we have thickened every liquid she gets, nursing her through a dreadful bout of pneumonia after her birth mother ignored this requirement and gave her unthickened juice. In my lead tunic, I’m watching the screen. The liquid starts to penetrate toward the windpipe but the muscles are contracting and it’s going down her throat. I’m going to cry in front of this radiology tech. She doesn’t know any of it, but she is better. She will drink normal liquids like a normal child at her next home. This calls for a celebration, and she demands a bus ride. I select the Chicago Avenue bus. She wants to meet the pigeons. She wants to meet the dogs. We get off under the tracks and go to Starbucks for a drink.
My last day at church is behind me. I go downtown, cursing the traffic and the parking, to the Blues Heaven Foundation. John Primer and many others are playing there in the open air stage and a church member’s son’s photography is on display. I’ve had, and missed, the chance to see Honeyboy Edwards, Hubert Sumlin, and I don’t even know how many more, both locals and people passing through from Memphis or Texas. I finally go into the museum in the old Chess Records site, where the great ones all recorded, where the Stones made an early pilgrimage (to find, according to Keith Richards, Muddy Waters painting the ceiling; bad record sales, apparently), where their date at the Checkerboard with Muddy is playing on a video loop and Willie Dixon’s bass stands sentinel upstairs. The photographs of the living, in the places where they still make music, vibrate with life, but the place belongs to the signed memorabilia and the shades of the great ones. We come and go but they remain, and while we are here we feed on each other, the crowds on Maxwell Street when it was still Maxwell Street, Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy playing the corners, the victims in the 1919 riot, the worshipers filling the Gothic revival monuments in their Sunday best, the ward-heeling politicians and street radicals, professors at their lecterns and student preachers at their pulpits. They left their fading signatures and their ambivalent embraces for anyone who comes looking for them, and for whatever it is that held them here.
Postscript: 2023
People arrive and people leave. Your Bellows, Jordans, Obamas—they leave. Chicago does not deserve the frequent hysteria, and occasional denial, aimed at it from within and without. But this much is true: if you reach the center of the city’s sprawling labyrinth, you’ll become too big for it to keep you. Or you can, as I did, simply step out of an exit and never find another way in. Ed Kelly and Gerri Oliver left, too, after all. But there’s no replacing it. No one is interested in the New York depicted in Bellow’s novels, in wherever Michael Jordan has been after Chicago, in the Obamas’ Martha’s Vineyard. No one will go looking for those places. We may or may not think of it as an especially sweet home, though I do. But it is often the last home. The demon of retrospect plays its tricks behind a transparent but permanently locked door.
Not that one’s debt to such a place could be paid in the longest lifetime. I could say that I came to Chicago looking for Hound Dog Taylor and found Jesus Christ instead, and as much as I may regret the many drops of dew I left ungathered from the last dawn of Hound Dog’s world, I can’t regret that. It wasn't even really a detour. Kierkegaard wrote that the religious stage of life is a repetition of the aesthetic stage, and maybe that’s what he meant. A small room is a small room, whether it’s got a full bar or an altar. An instrument is an instrument, a voice is a voice, a greeting is a greeting. If there’s anything to be said for chasing a vanished sound, it’s that you’ll end up with the chance to find something just as perfect, with people more willing to share than a whole city of ghosts.
This year, I’ve taught that child who first went to church in Englewood some classic blues progressions. We made a playlist of different stylistic touchstones. When “Give Me Back My Wig” came on, I sat down to write this essay. I knew I wouldn’t be able to write anything else until I did.
I wanted this essay to go on forever.