Chapter 25
It was Tuesday, September 11th. We had been on the road for eighteen days.
“Love makes you stronger,” Ingrid said to me in my dream. I awoke at ten thirty in the morning. I didn’t feel so well. We had been drinking beer with shots of vodka and screwdrivers before bed. Xander and Colin had gone off to work hours earlier. Luke and Decky were slow to rise like me.
“Stay positive,” Ingrid’s boyfriend Howie yelled up to me from under her fig tree back in my dream. “Fear only exists in our heads! Life is too great, too beautiful! Don’t ever try to miss a minute of it!”
“You need some ‘hair of the dog’ that bit you! That’ll chase those pains and the whole hangover away!” other voices inside were speaking to me now. It was what everyone used to say on those mornings after at Paradise Beach or after the all-night parties at UMass.
“‘The hair of the dog’ that bit you, just take a sip to ease the hangover, make it all go away, only a few sips, maybe even a whole beer will do the trick, but be careful; never take more than a full beer in the morning, lest you may really slip and end up a full-fledged alcoholic someday. Then the party never ends.” I remembered the alcoholic beer sages going over the drill repeatedly to me.
I thought about the age-old rhyme that we’d recite to figure out the night’s drinking routine: “Whiskey before beer, no fear; beer before whiskey, risky.”
With my own pitiful pitfall of the night before I rhymed: “Screwdrivers and beer, plenty of fear . . .”
Thoughts were flooding into my head. Had I relieved myself in a drunken stupor outside on the brownstone at the base of Xander’s building last night? What was I doing outside by myself? Maybe I was finally turning mad. I vowed to not have another drop of alcohol until that evening. We had about twenty-four hours to experience Chicago, and I desperately wanted to be sober.
We left Xander’s and walked to the corner of Demming Street and Clark. We were bus-stop bound, for we wanted to head downtown to see the famous Sears Tower. At the bus stop, an elderly lady, probably homeless, dressed in various layers of white clothing, slipcovers over old furniture, fished frantically through the metal meshed trash basket nearby. After a sigh of relief, she settled for a soiled section of the Chicago Tribune, brought it over to the bus bench, and sat sadly beside me, bringing with her a poignant smell; it was the overpowering smell of the lonely streets. She began studying the newspaper with intensity. I wondered if she was actually reading.
As she studied, I studied. I studied the hard lines of her weathered profile while she sat there looking at the pictures in the paper, turning the pages crisply and succinctly, almost like she was sitting in the living room of a Victorian parlor in old New England. I looked at her white, straw, unkempt hair, greasy and matted back over the top of her head, combed only by her cracked fingers, and I was suddenly taken aback at how much her features reminded me of my own grandmother, Lillian Hogan. I thought back to my own grandmother’s house in Lowell, all of her framed pictures of the sacred heart of Jesus in her hallways, the grandfather clock in the kitchen.
“Bless the Beasts and the Children”
I remembered that poem on a dorm room poster. It was written under the picture of a great bison standing in the middle of a prairie. The poster hung in the room of our friend Buffalo. Someone had taken it off of a wall at Fitchburg State College while we ravaged the campus on one of our weekend road binges, rolled it up and tucked it under Buffalo’s giant arm while he was asleep, maybe because of the Buffalo in the picture, or maybe because of the kindness of the giant beast.
The bus pulled up to our bench in Chicago, and we boarded with my grandmother. Strangely, she had the exact change for her fare. She brought the newspaper on board with her and sat by herself up front, impervious to the changing world around her. Luke, Decky, and I walked to the back of the bus; the many faces of the lonely looked up at us as we passed them by. I saw sadness in my nana Hogan’s happiness while she sat there up front; she was comfortable, excited for this brief warm moment as she traveled through life. Who knew what the future would bring for her? Did she even think as far ahead as the cold Chicago winter that loomed out there in the months ahead of us? Probably not, I thought, for it seemed that the comfort of the bus ride was all that she needed, all she had. Bless the beasts and the homeless.
The bus ride lasted about a half hour. We got off at Adams and followed our stretching necks toward the tallest building in the city. At the top of the Sears Tower we walked around and checked out the panoramic skyline of the great Midwest and the enormous Lake Michigan. It must have been an ocean to the Native American Potawatomi with its marvelous shoreline. We looked out at Indiana below us, Michigan on the distant purple horizon, and Illinois and Wisconsin pushing out to the great north. The city, from a hawk’s-eye view, was much the same as any city skyline view . . . Boston from the top of the Prudential Building, or Manhattan from the top of the World Trade Towers, or earth from heaven.
At the base of the building we bought a few postcards at the tourist stand and wandered into a nearby bookstore. Bookstores were always a safe haven for me, timeless places graced by the likes of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemmingway, and John Steinbeck. You could cross dimensions by reading the thoughts of the great writers; their light was still amongst us. You could be right there with them, your own problems on hold, shelved away until you stepped out of the trance of the written pages. I often tried to see beyond the words and put myself into their mind-set as the great ones recorded their thoughts. What were they thinking of? I had to get lost in order to find myself. At the entrance, I walked by end caps filled with books on Einstein’s Theories of Relativity and Frank Abagnale’s Catch Me If You Can. Luke headed for the New Age aisle and looked for the new book by Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever. It was still only out in hardcover.
“Maybe I’ll buy it in New York if it is in paperback by then,” Luke declared. Then he pulled Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts from another shelf.
“I still find it kind of strange that she just died,” I said.
“But the spirit is infinite, Mike,” Luke said. “She’s somewhere else now in full consciousness. I’m going to buy this for my own road copy.”
I looked on the bottom shelf at Out on a Limb by Shirley MacLaine, another book that Luke had with him on the road. I noticed that Shirley was staring back at me from the cover, the sunset behind her highlighted her stark red hair. She stood there in a white pullover and put me into a trance. I moved back and started to walk away, but Shirley’s eyes followed me. She continued to stare me down. I had to leave the aisle.
We ate fast food at Wendy’s and took advantage of the free salad bar refills. From there, we moved on to an old record store, where we looked through collections of albums for about an hour, perusing the greats of rock-and-roll history. I wondered if my own apple crate collection (shipped via UPS) had made it back to Massachusetts yet as I stood there flipping through the covers in the store. Covers of The Beatles, The Yardbirds, Blind Faith, Cream, The Doors, The Stones, Carly Simon, Gordon Lightfoot, and Don McLean. “American Pie” was certainly Don McLean’s magnum opus if ever there had to be one. I was in the eighth-grade when it was released. I had heard that this magnificent ballad was purportedly about Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper perishing in a plane crash in Clear Lake, Iowa, in 1959. Nothing in McLean’s lyrics said anything about the event. The poetry, they said, told it all.
Lost in the record bins, I continued to finger through the stacks of album jackets like a music junkie. I remembered hanging out at fourteen years old in the music department of Truitt’s Department Store on Bridge Street in Lowell just like this, looking at albums, reading their back covers for hours in order to stay out of the winter cold. Back then, the crotchety department store manager eventually got fed up with Ray Champeaux and me; he chased us out to the parking lot and the dirty snow.
“Beat it! You guys don’t have five bucks between you!” he shouted at us as we got outside the doors.
“Thwappppp!” Ray Champeaux hurled a slush ball at the old store manager as he was standing there.
“I’ll call the cops on you little bastards! I will. I better not see your faces in here anymore!” The old man yelled as we laughed and ran away. That was 1972.
In 1984, it was liberating to be able to walk out of the Chicago music store of our own free will. In 1984, it was liberating to be able to walk out of the Chicago music store of our own free will. Of course, we didn’t buy anything, not so much as a simple cassette to play in the Fairlane. We needed to squander every cent for essentials like beer, food and gas…..and maybe an occasional movie.
Luke and I wanted to see Gremlins, Spielberg’s new film that was showing just a few blocks away. Decky wanted no part of it; he still needed to absorb all of Chicago. We could watch a film anytime, he told us. We let him go. I wanted to see the special effects and to study the screenplay itself. There wasn’t a lot of time to do this if I was going to be making these films someday. Thinking back to my screenwriting classes at Orange Coast College, I sat down in the dark theatre with Luke and had the full intent of noting the plot points throughout the entire film. I even had my notepad with me. So I sat there resolved to look at my watch for the timed twists, as if through the director’s eyes . . . the fade-ins, the fade-outs, the cuts, the rack focuses, all of the camera movements, the dialogue, and maybe even the lighting. But it was only a matter of a few minutes before I was completely immersed in the story on the screen, forgetting my commitments. I got lost in Spielberg’s amazing knack for special effects. These gremlins were little magical creatures, small animated puppets that turned evil when they were allowed to eat food late at night. And it was weird, for exposure to water seemed to make them multiply, but exposure to sunlight made them die. The credits rolled, the lights came up, and my notepad was empty.
Decky caught up with us outside the theatre all exuberant, and we all jumped on the train toward Fullerton Street. En route, with a firm grip on the floor pole, I noticed a beautiful girl beside me in a business suit. She wore a wedding band and casually read the advertisements posted over the seats of the train; she studied the faces below the ads. I followed behind her as she went from face to face; I quickly looked down to the floor when she abruptly turned to catch me. She gently smiled. Across the car, a tall, bearded, bald man talked to another short, bald guy with glasses on. He told him about his bookbinding night course. It was obvious; the men showed affection toward each other, almost as if they were flirting. The tall guy pulled a book out of his blue backpack, all thick with empty pages. It was bound for his class. He told the short guy how it had taken him two hours a night over the last three nights to complete the thing. Love was in the air; it was all around me. But Collette was still gone.
Somewhere around Fullerton Street, the three of us jumped off and walked about a mile eastward toward a convenience store where we bought orange juice and eggs. We then went to a liquor store right next to it in order to buy three six-packs of beer.
This liquor store was a weird, peculiar place; it was almost like I knew everyone inside her doors. It was very surreal, almost dreamlike. When we walked in, I noticed a tall, thin androgynous David Bowie lookalike on the phone in the corner. Richard Pryor’s double bought lottery tickets at the counter and old Willie Mosconi, the pool shark, stood behind me in line. But it was a hard-featured, white-haired, seventy-year-old Irishman on a stool behind the counter that haunted me the most. He looked just like Grady, the usher from St. Matthews who worked at Nealon’s Packy on Bridge Street. Grady always sat on that same low stool right inside the front door of Nealon’s, greeting everyone as they entered. Grady made beer deliveries throughout the city of Lowell all of the time, delivering beer to the masses; he was an extremely hardworking old man. He delivered beer up until the day he died.
I can’t stop thinking
That Grady’s dead
With his murderer still at large
They hit him
With a baseball bat
Behind St. John’s garage
I can’t stop thinking
That Grady’s dead
What constitutes this fear?
To kill a man
On hallowed ground
For delivering a case of beer
I can’t help but think that Grady’s dead
His funeral was sad
Two small girls stirred as a casket passed
And cried for their granddad
I keep hoping
That I’ll see him again
On his stool inside the door
I never said good-bye to him
Take my order just once more
On his deliveries, he always carried a brown paper lunch bag full of small bills in order to make change for people. It was a bitter cold January when the murderers did it. It was a setup; two punks beat him to death, luring him out to a remote place behind the hospital so they could steal the cash that he carried. When the police found Grady, he still had a tight grip on that bag and all the money was still there. Grady died without ever letting them get a hand on it. God bless him.
And here in Chicago, old Grady was back. He said to Richard Pryor at the counter, “Shit, Deacon, when you win the lottery, you’ll have to write a book on how you did it!”
“Man, I ain’t writing no book. I ain’t telling anyone how I did it!” Richard Pryor laughed and turned to me.
When I got up to the counter, Chicago Grady smiled just like he knew me. I couldn’t believe how much he looked like the real Grady, more than anyone had ever looked like anyone else before. I had this warm feeling that he was well again, but had to keep telling myself that this really wasn’t him.
“Three six-packs? Is that all?” he laughed aloud with me.
Decky had a theory about how so many people looked alike. He believed that there were only so many formulas for a face out there, so they all had to be repeated everywhere about humankind, all over the earth, probably several hundred times, maybe even thousands of times. Outside the liquor store, Decky reasoned with me that this was the real reason that David Bowie, Richard Pryor, Willie Mosconi, and Grady from Lowell were all there with us in the small Chicago neighborhood.
Maybe there was something more to it all, though, I wondered. Perhaps it all was a sign. Maybe Grady was an angel appearing to me. There were so many of these empty pages in this freshly bound book of life that needed to be filled, I thought. There were so many things to think about and to talk about. Every day was a blessing, every day a chance to be good to someone.
We got back to Xander and Colin’s place about six thirty. Colin was at the turntable. He was home from work when we walked through the apartment door, juggling some classic rock-and-roll platters, pulling one off, putting another on, and turned to greet us with a “Live-In-Concert” LP in his hand.
“Tunes, tunes, tunes, gotta have my tunes!” Colin warmly greeted us. He looked just like Gary Pare from Paradise Beach flipping those albums.
It was still only four thirty in the afternoon back in California. It hit me that I could still try to call the bank back there about my ongoing car-payment dilemma. I grabbed my notes and jumped on the phone to Bank of America. At first, the nervous customer service representative had a panic attack about how they were supposed to reach me if they didn’t get paid. I gave her my mother and father’s number in Lowell, telling the girl on the phone that Lowell was where I was ultimately headed.
“Don’t worry; I’ll pay it, calm down!” I told her. “Who do you think you’re dealing with?”
When Xander got home from work, we all ate dinner and drank the three six-packs of beer that we had bought. The old “hair of the dog” that bit me made me feel happy for a moment, especially the sound of that first crack of the tab on that aluminum beer can. We sat around the living room and talked about all kinds of things while eating dinner. The movies, great books, our love of rock and roll; we were the traveling bohemians of the modern era. Luke explained to Xander and Colin how eating well and working out throughout our trip was key to our survival in this bohemian life. We were determined to never work an eight-to-five job again; we might even shave our heads to wander the streets of Europe when we got over there, although I wasn’t sure why. We talked on with Colin and Xander about Decky’s love to jump into the middle of all of the tourists’ pictures as we traveled through these places of America. He wanted to be in everyone’s photo. He wanted to be looking out at them when they developed their film, smiling with that big Decky Brady smile. There was also Decky’s secret desire to swim in as many bodies of water as possible across our great country. We would all swim in Lake Michigan on our way out of Illinois, we said.
But what were we going to do tonight? Where should gypsies go? The Chicago nightclubs were calling out to us, this beautiful night full of beautiful women. Two beers into the night already, I daydreamed about hundreds of beautiful women and how empty life would be without them. I wanted to be forever a part of this great big beautiful unraveling reel of America. Where was the girl of my dreams? Did I know her? She was alive now, breathing, out there somewhere in the never-ending universe, perhaps a faint beacon in this huge, impenetrable, star-filled night. She seemed really far away from me now, but deep down, I knew that the light really did exist.
Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” played in the cab on our way to Rush Street. It was a popular new music ’80s song by a hip all-girl group from England about lost love. The black cabdriver, Sonny, talked to us about his eighteen-hour days while “Cruel Summer” played. He owned his own cab and was going to buy two or three more he told us, for he was a businessman and he was living the great American dream. Sonny told us how he loved talking to each and every one of his customers to learn as much as he could about life.
“Three of us here are gypsies, and we are never going to work again!” Luke told him.
Sonny just smiled and nodded back to him, looking in the rearview mirror at all of us. “Well, boys, I’ve never heard that one before!” He laughed.
Sonny believed that you need to work hard every single day of your God-given life if you want to make lots of money.
“I ain’t never gonna retire, boys! God willing, I’m gonna work till I drop!” Sonny smiled a gold-toothed smile at us, and we all smiled back, exiting the cab now to the crazy sounds of Rush Street.
“Hope you win the big one!” Decky yelled to Sonny as he pulled away into the bright night of life.
In a disco club on Rush Street, we were confronted with a wall of loud music upon entering. Tears For Fears’ Top 40 hit, “Shout” faded into a song by The Romantics “That’s What I Like About You,” and we talked louder in order to be heard across the roaring sound. Cigarette smoke floated everywhere; it was camping in the workingman’s leftover business suits. Some workers wreaked stronger than others. Bright flashing lights came down from above and trailed across our faces. Xander made his way to the bar and bought all of us endless beers. “Rock and roll will never die,” I yelled out to Xander, toasting him gleefully. Alcohol was the well of happiness here, and everyone drank from it.
Beer brought on the good times and the bad. I talked to Xander and Colin at the bar about how I considered myself a happy drunk, although sometimes, I found myself getting into pitiful skirmishes. But it was never my fault. Of course, there was the beer fight at our going away party in Huntington Beach. The cooler of beer that had been stolen from us and the bandit’s kick to my sternum, with full bottles whizzing by our heads, giant cocktail missiles, and pitiful me on my ass as the hoodlums ran into the alleyways of night. And then there was the fight in the backseat of Brian Kelly’s Mercedes that I got into with Michael Lewis. We were all on the way back from Sean Tarrytown’s brother-in-law’s San Diego mansion party (he supposedly used his yacht to run marijuana from Baja to San Diego). The fight started between Michael Lewis and Eddie Kinsley. I just happened to be sitting in the middle of them. With our arms locked, Michael Lewis landed an upper cut to my lip that bled out all over Brian Kelly’s backseat. Brian Kelly had to pull over somewhere near San Onofre. We pulled over right where the coyotes, the immigrant smugglers, pull over in broad daylight. It was right before the Camp Pendleton Marine checkpoint. A sign on the side of the road had the words “CAUTION,” with a cutout silhouette of a man, a woman, and a little girl running in flight. You see, the coyotes often ran to their trunks here to let their cargo out. These poor bastard immigrants were on their own to run across the freeway to the beach or into the hills of the desert. Sometimes they would run across the freeway and get killed. They had no voice, they had no choice. They were only looking for a better life. On that night, Michael Lewis and I shook hands right under that ghostly sign and crawled back into Brian Kelly’s backseat and behaved the rest of the way home.
In Chicago, we left the disco place and walked through two more dead clubs on Rush Street; both had a few buzzed stragglers holding up the bar, just standing around waiting for something to come their way on a Tuesday night. I was six beers into our night and cruising now, with the open night bohemian air ahead of me. I had no care or concept of time anymore. Xander and Colin had to work in the morning, but both vowed to press on and show us more. We stopped into the Clark Street Ale House after a $2.80 cab fare that Colin picked up. A drunk patron told us while we stood there ordering five draws and five baskets of popcorn that the place used to be called the Stop and Drink; it had been a local watering hole all the way back into the late 1800s, you know, those years that were sometimes referred to as the gay nineties, during the times of brothels and burlesque shows.
“It was always a drinking spot. The long bar along the south wall over there is new, but the trim and the ceiling panels are all original,” he told us.
“How does he know this?” Xander turned to us.
“Maybe he’s a vampire!” Luke whispered to us all.
The trim that was high above us was elaborate. It reminded me of the hand carved grooved wood around the doorways in my parents’ house on Eighteenth Street, our sweet Victorian house that Old Man Woodward had built in the late 1800s. Woodward lived there until the day that he died in the late 1950s. We were only the second family to ever live there over the span of almost 100 years. Woodward left behind all of his hand carved awls, drills, and wooden planes in an old tool chest in our cellar for me to discover. And his ghost still rocked in his invisible rocking chair at the foot of my old bed upstairs. When I was a kid, I was convinced that the creaking hardwood close to the window had to be his ghost, for my mother told me that when they bought the house in 1960, that an old rocking chair was in that very spot. I wondered if his ghost had ever gone down into the cellar to look at his old tools. Some summer nights, the floor would just creak away as I looked out from my bed across the fireflies along the edge of the driveway and beyond the darkness of the Merrimack River Valley out toward California. I always tried talking to him, but he just rocked away.
“You look startling!” Decky yelled to a pretty girl passing us by in the Ale House. He yelled to another, “You look like a nun who used to teach me piano in the fifth grade!” Nothing was working for him.
Xander called to me across the Clark Street Ale House, across the din of loud patrons and forgotten conversations. “Hey, Chrome Dome, order me and yourself another draw. I’ll pay for it!”
Later that night, we all stopped at the same convenience store we had been to earlier in the day to each buy our own pints of ice cream before stumbling back to the brownstone apartment complex. I shoveled down a whole pint of rum raisin in the living room before passing out on the couch.
I dreamed about gremlins. Gremlins were little magical creatures that turned evil when they were allowed to eat ice cream late at night. Exposure to beer made them multiply, but exposure to sunlight made them die.