Big Mike: A Kiss Is Just A Kiss

For the last 30 years, St. Patrick's Day has meant a lot to me. Not that I've ever given a shit about this quasi-religious bacchanalia per se, but something happened on March 17, 1979 that has stuck with me.

Back then I was an orderly in the surgery department at West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park. I'd been thinking that I'd work in the medical racket the rest of my life. I was already an Emergency Medical Technician and had taken EEG tech training. I figured I'd become a Physician's Assistant.

But life, as usual, got in the way of my plans. I was taking some science courses at Wright Community College in preparation for the PA program. I also took a composition course just for the hell of it. I discovered there that I was as superior to the rest of my classmates in the art of writing as Alex Rodriguez is to your seven-year-old T-baller. Quick as that, I decided to become a writer and have been one, come hell, high water, poverty, angst, bounced checks, and excessive navel-gazing, ever since.

I stayed at the hospital for about a year after making the decision, mainly due to the presence of a pretty young Operating Room Technician named Tami.

She was diffident and apparently as pure as the driven snow. She'd been raised in a born-again christian family but I sensed she'd be happy to throw off the chains of that peculiar madness. She had blonde hair, piercing gray eyes, a brilliant smile, and an hourglass figure that stood out even in her baggy hospital greens.

We started dating in the winter and by the time March rolled around we were madly in love. We both called in sick that St. Patrick's Day and rode the Lake Street el into the Loop to catch the parade. It was unseasonably warm so we were able to stroll slowly, hand-in-hand past the highrises and through the throngs. We were so smitten, we hardly knew anybody or anything else existed.

Tami and I jay-walked across Wacker Drive west of Clark Street and got stuck on the median island. As we waited for traffic to clear, we turned toward each other and kissed. Not a crazy mad kiss, but softly and slowly. As we pulled our lips away from each other, the sun shone gold around us. We were junkies on love.

That single moment, that kiss, became a touchstone for my life. Call me stupid, call me naive, but I thought from that moment on that love, true love, was that kiss. Months later, when Tami and I were breaking up, I pleaded, "But what about that kiss on St. Patrick's Day?" as if that could outweigh all the emotional craziness we'd laid on each other (alright, that I'd laid on her.)

Tami and I went to every St. Patrick's Day parade for the next few years, in homage to that moment on Wacker Drive. Fifteen and twenty years later, we'd call each other on St. Patrick's Day for the same reason.

For the next couple of decades, I took the fact that I'd never experienced that same high from a kiss as proof positive that Tami was the one true love of my life. I'd say this to myself even though I'd been married, divorced, and lived with a bevy of fabulous women in the ensuing years.

As I write this, I realize I sound like a junior-high girl with a Jonas Brothers fixation. And the truth is, that would perfectly characterize my outlook on love for most of my adult life. I saw it as a drug, a simcha, even a sacred ritual that would cleanse my conscience of sin and my heart of angst.

It took me until well into my 40s to realize that love has a tad more to do with things like commitment, compromise, understanding, mutual goals, forgiveness, and - shock of shocks - the ennui of everyday life.

Maybe I was lucky. Maybe, if I hadn't transformed love into a fix, I might have turned instead to some hard-assed drugs. I might be dead by now or have been a veteran of repeated stays in a rehab center had I not spent years trying to replicate the high of that kiss.

I like to think I'm better and smarter now. The memory of that kiss won't ever go away. I still talk to Tami on occasion. We're both married and as happy as clams with our respective mates. But I'll bet we can still turn each other into Jello merely by mentioning the median island on Wacker Drive.

But, as Barack Obama advised us in his inauguration speech, we must leave childish things behind. As soon as I finish writing this, I'm going to run over to Kroger and pick up a slab of corned beef. I'll boil it up tonight and have sandwiches tomorrow. That's how I celebrate St. Patrick's Day now.

Big Mike: The Spirit Life

People seem to think bartenders live a glamorous, exciting life. They meet fascinating people. They hear the most riveting stories. They're seduced by attractive members of the opposite sex.

Maybe.

I spent a year setting 'em up for the Nardini boys at Club Lago in the tony River North neighborhood earlier this decade. Mind you, if a bartender were to live a glamorous, exciting life, River North would be the place to do it.

We had our share of celebs. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins loved the place. The painter Ed Paschke held frequent dinner meetings at a corner table. Photographer Marc Hauser blustered in on a regular basis. News anchor and television producer Bill Kurtis ate there a couple of times a week.

The elder of the Nardinis, Giancarlo, once walked Kurtis to the door. "I hope you liked it," Giancarlo said. Kurtis turned to him dramatically and, in that famous authoritative, stentorian voice, issued the proclamation, "We love it." Giancarlo scratched his head as he came back behind the bar. "He was alone," the boss said. "Was he using the royal we?"

The restaurant even was featured in a key scene in the movie "Mad Dog and Glory," a Robert De Niro vehicle that was about as memorable as a case of hiccups.

Since it was a good Italian eatery in a trendy district, Club Lago drew its share of sports stars. One night, the head coach of the Blackhawks came in with his wife. Giancarlo, a maniacal hockey fan, almost screamed like a teenaged girl at a Jonas Brothers concert. Patrons and staff were puzzled by the fuss. As a Chicago celebrity, the coach of the Blackhawks ranks between the Recorder of Deeds and the ice cream man. I don't remember his name; for all I know, his wife forgets it too.

Former Bears quarterback Bob Avellini once graced the joint with his business. For the sports-impaired, A Chicago ordinance bars the pro football team from employing competent quarterbacks. Avellini was as pedestrian as any passer in Bears history. Still, customers flocked around him at the end of the bar. Avellini stood as erect as a victorious Roman general charioting back into the city.

Baffled by the idolatry, I pulled aside a fellow named Mr. Darby, one of the most fevered of the flock bleating around the retired jock.

I quietly asked him, "You know that's Bob Avellini, don't you?"

"Of course," he gushed, "isn't it great?"

A brief tangent. That night's Avellini-mania was further proof that Americans value celebrity above all things. If a person is somehow lucky enough to be caught, even briefly, on a television camera, his or her life is deemed fulfilled. To wit: my nice Sheila brought her 12-year-old son to the Barack Obama victory rally in Grant Park on election night. One of the ten bazillion CNN camera crews found the kid and asked him his thoughts. He told the nation that it was an historic occasion. Cut to commercial. The rest of the family hasn't stopped talking about his six seconds of fame since. I expect him to be using the royal we soon.

Back to the point. Despite the romance engendered by caricatures like Billy Goat's in Chicago, the fictional Cheers in Boston, and Joe Bell's from "Breakfast at Tiffany's," a tavern is really nothing more than a church for drunks. I swiftly adopt a local bar in every neighborhood I move into. For the first few months, I'm giddy over my new friends whom I can depend on seeing any night of the week. Like the ideal family, they're always there for me. Eventually, though, I realize that they're not there for me but for the booze. I become disillusioned until I discover a new bar family.

So, where can I go to be surrounded by kindred souls? I haven't the foggiest notion but I continue to look. The only other place in the modern world where people regularly gather and commune is, well, church itself. I can't figure out which is the sillier addiction: god or alcohol.

As for the glamor of a bartender's life, by the time I left Club Lago, I was sick to death of stinking like cigarette smoke and being told what a great guy I was time and again, time and again, time and again. In a bar, a compliment can be nothing more than a verbal tic.

I'd been able to buy both a laptop and a car in cash, though. Paid my rent that way too. Pocketing a thick wad of bills every night is a powerful draw for the profession. Money, like sex, drives us.

Speaking of sex, I never was seduced by a ravishing beauty when I was a bartender. It didn't seem quite fair, capitalizing on the fact that she might have had four cosmopolitans in her. It reminded me of the old Woody Allen line: I never like to play to a roomful of people high on pot - they'll laugh at anything.