Sure, it’s useful to know how much the battle will cost, but it would be more useful to know when it will begin and how much the bail bondsman will charge.
(Also, those draft 16-ouncers seem a little pricey.)
Blog
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I Was a Camera
May, 2000: Mt. Prospect Illinois. I’m standing on a sidewalk near a Metra rail line near a stopped train near a bundle on the tracks. A 23-year-old male, it later turns out, intentionally stopped his car, left the door open, and stepped in front of the train.
The phrase blood on the tracks, always lurking somewhere inside my skull, is finally applicable to real life.
Policemen, looking unhappy, walk the siding, marking bits with little flags. Firemen stand around in groups. A cop finds a sodden red tennis shoe at least 100 yards from the point of impact. “Won’t they let you get any closer?” asks a bystander.
“Why would I want to get any closer?”
A photographer from the Tribune shows up, says he remembers a dog that was hit by a train in Vietnam and survived with two legs. A photographer from the Herald arrives. We all make the obligatory nervous jokes, snap a few pictures. The Herald guy says his pictures won’t run anyway. “I don’t know what your photo policy is, but we don’t run suicides.”
“You have a photo policy?” I ask. “Cool.”
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Greetings
I wanted a Spiritually Dead card to send a friend, but that rack was sold out. This will do in a pinch.
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Downhill Fast
At age 12, soon after Christmas, a major snowstorm hit, nixing school. My neighbor Virgil and I, both at home alone, trudged across the nearby golf course in high spirits, him sporting a pricey shearling coat, his main gift.
The course was bounded by a creek, which we found to be frozen. Or partially, as we realized when Virgil crackled through and plunged to his chest. I extended a tree limb to drag him out.
The trudge back was subdued. Only my legs had gotten wet, but I was shivering uncontrollably, and Virgil’s white fleece trim, now caramel, had frozen solid. At home he discovered he was locked out. I had my key, but our place had no laundry dryer, and he was in a panic about the coat. Luckily, he knew a way to break in.
Our houses, built at the end of the Depression, each had a long-disused metal door, roughly three feet wide, built into the foundation at ground level. In those earlier times a guy would deliver coal by shoveling it through the opening and down a chute to a boiler, now long gone.
The actual portal!
Virgil managed to pry the hatch open but hesitated to squirm through on his belly and cause even more damage to the coat. Then he hit upon a solution: He would lay face up on a cheap toboggan and carefully scooch forward until he could reach an overhead water pipe in the basement and swing his legs inside.
I was still deciding where to grip the wet plastic for support when he shot through the hatch with a shriek and crashed to the concrete floor. He landed on his head yet broke his leg.
It took me several minutes to squirm inside without stepping on him, and another ten to get him upstairs, where he phoned and asked his no-nonsense father to leave work early. He wouldn’t let me wash the coat, and there was nothing else I could do, really.
The next time I saw Virgil his cast was covered with signatures and due to come off any day. He never told me how he explained the incident to Dad.
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Other People’s Kids
(Because at small newspapers that’s what you did.)
ROTC chin-ups, Chicago, 1995/ by Mark Dillman -
Rattled
Foto-Rabe via Pixabay We’re parked at the Picture Rocks trailhead in Saguaro National Park, sorting water and supplies into a backpack for a hike in the 85-degree midmorning heat.
As we’re finishing, a grizzled older man parks a pickup and unloads a noticeably hissing, sealed five-gallon bucket from the bed, along with aluminum snake tongs. I ask, Is that a rattler? It is. Sounds big. A big one, he confirms, and sets off on foot.
A few minutes later we follow down the trail, which quickly narrows into a canyon. A quarter mile along we find him rising from a crouch, the bucket now empty. He gestures to spot roughly three feet off the trail, indicating a shadowed cleft at ankle level. Indeed, we can see eyes and a flickering tongue. A head as large as my fist.
While hiking, it occurs to me that neither his truck nor clothes specified any official status.
Hours later, at a visitor center packed with kids, I can’t help but wonder what made a seemingly competent local guy bypass dozens of roadside turnouts spread across thousands of acres to release a big one on a trail popular enough to be included in every guidebook.
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Expired Humor
A perfectly good joke that occurred to me 7 years too late:
Q: How come Louis CK no longer has a penis?
A: He followed Marie Kondo’s advice to hold each thing he owns in his hand and ask, “Does this spark joy?”
Check back for upcoming boffo gags about Eleanor Roosevelt, muttonchop sideburns, and airplane food.
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Shrink-wrap
In the nineties I covered a Chicago-area press conference held to announce a successful drug raid. Back-slapping officials took turns making statements at a lectern next to a table bearing the usual assortment of guns and knives. The drugs were elsewhere, but the display included a shrink-wrapped pile of cash about the size of my Sony Trinitron. A half-million, I think.
For months afterward all of my job-escape fantasies involved stumbling upon shrink-wrapped money. Hiking in the woods, say. Or in the trunk of the Rent-a-Wrecks I was fond of.
Both scenarios were plausible. Narco pilots were known to heave bundled money from Cessna windows if being pursued, and Rent-a-Wreck was notorious for barely cleaning its returned cars. I once picked up a dented Corsica and the passenger side floor was covered with M&Ms. Hard to overlook, one would think, against dirty blue carpet.
Psychologically, the shrink-wrap was key. If I had found an envelope or bank deposit bag stuffed with money, I would have felt duty-bound to look for the owner. But shrink-wrapped cash is tainted cash, and fair game.
Alas, the closest I ever came was a twenty-dollar bill used as a bookmark in a library copy of “London Fields.”
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Welcome home
The essential problem with the modern airport is not congestion, unhealthy food or belligerent drunks. It is not eight-dollar coffee, inaudible updates or endless TSA roped stanchions. It is not the lack of a sign at pre-check specifying whether your laptop should be in or outside your carry-on.
The essential problem with the modern airport is not the gate with seating for 40 passengers yet chosen for an overbooked flight carrying 100. Nor even the inevitable flyer who hasn’t heard — Like, dude, you serious? Since when? — that you haven’t been allowed to bring a Big Gulp through security since W was president.
No, the essential problem with the modern airport is that, due to practical concerns and the sheer volume of passengers, it is now impossible for a traveler returning home from, let’s say, a visit with Midwestern relatives to deplane, get down on his knees and kiss the goddamn tarmac.
Copilot (hilarious name, considering) suggested I had made a mistake, and the correct phrase should be: belligerent drinks. “But I didn’t punch nobody, officer! It was them belligerent drinks.”
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Free Admission
Tacoma Art Museum May, 2006: A birthday trip to Tacoma.
New to the area, we prepare with maps and clippings as if it were a weeklong road trip. It’s free day at the art museum, for an excellent show of early 20th Century American works.
A stylish hat and dress which belonged to Georgia O’Keefe are on display. A visitor refreshes her friend’s memory: “You know, she painted those things.”
There is a photo by Alfred Stiegletz — O’Keefe’s passion, mentor, and torment — of a horse’s groin, titled “Spiritual America.”
“Modern art is too modern for me,” a man tells his companion.
A woman looks at a Stuart Davis canvas. “That’s very painterly,” she says.
“Aren’t you going to write that down?” Sara asks me.