Big Mike: This Depression Ain't So Great

Visual and spoken word artists have joined forces for an exhibit on depression (the skull-jockey variety, not the economic kind) in the Dole Gallery at the Lakeside Legacy Arts Park in Crystal Lake, Illinois. The show, "Snap Out Of It... Don't You Hate It When They Say That?" which runs through May 15th, features deeply personal ruminations on the illness, which some 20 million Americans grapple with.

May is Mental Health Month in McHenry County. Lakeside Legacy Arts Park this month also features "Voice - Adolescent Allies," in the Sage Gallery, featuring works by teens exploring relationship power dynamics and sexual violence.

Here are images of some of the works from "Snap Out Of It."

"Social Phobia," acrylic on canvas, 2009,

by Sophia Anastasiou-Wasik

"I Would If I Could," computer graphics, 2009,

by Karen Roszkowski

"Addiction" (left) and "Obsession," both mixed media on Masonite, 2009, by Sophia Anastasiou-Wasik

"I'm Falling," prose poem performance, 2009, by Michael G. Glab

In case you're looking for this week's installment of Randolph Street, photojournalist Jon Randolph is missing in action today. To the best of our knowledge, he had pressing social and convivial responsibilities last night which kept him from his cozy bed until the wee hours. We trust he has an ample supply of aspirin on hand for when he greets the day.

Check in with us tomorrow. Hopefully, good old Jon will have rejoined the living by then. Come to The Third City every day for top-notch writing and terrific pictures.

Randolph Street: The World In Chicago

Photojournalist Jon Randolph owns Fridays on The Third City. Today, he offers us peeks at Chicagoans who've come from all over the globe.

Fatima Mohammed, a Somali, at Ronan Park.

A kid on a carousel at a Neighborhood Boys and Girls Club carnival, Irving Park Road and Campbell Avenue.

A worker in the meat market district, 853 W. Fulton St.

A man at El Pinguino ice cream company, 3244 W. Lawrence Ave.

A Little Leaguer at Horner Park,

Irving Park Road and California Ave.

Join us tomorrow for more hot air from the keyboard of Big Mike Glab. Look for a Letter From Milo the day after. Benny Jay opens the week Monday with more gas. And, of course, Randolph Street will be back next Friday. The Third City is here for your reading pleasure every day.

Randolph Street: This Business Is Full Of Hot Air

Photojournalist Jon Randolph takes us into a firm that boasts it has more than a million balloons in its warehouse. MK Brody Company has been selling novelties and party tchochkes since 1911. The company moved to the wholesale market district west of the Loop in 1960, when the area was a gritty, tough spot populated by men walking around wearing blood-soaked aprons.

The district, surrounding the CTA Green Line elevated tracks between Halsted Street and Ogden Avenue, still is home to meat, seafood, and floral wholesalers,

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but chic restaurants and clubs now dot the landscape there. And, of course, the area was granted its holy imprimatur when Oprah Winfrey opened her Harpo Studios on Washington Boulevard.

Brody sells everything from champagne glasses to breast cancer awareness pink ribbons to hand fans with Barack Obama's image emblazoned on them. But after the company bought out the giant 800-4-Balloons outfit in 2005, its business, well, soared.

See you here next Friday for another glimpse of Chicago brought to us by Jon Randolph. See you here tomorrow for more of Benny Jay, Big Mike Glab, and those all-too-rare Letters From Milo.

Big Mike: Everybody Has The Same Moon

Vincenzo Parello was my grandfather. My father and uncles all called him Jim, which I could never figure out. He lived with us until shortly before he died in 1966. He sat in an old, rickety rocking chair in the tiny back porch of our Natchez Avenue home, never rocking and never sitting back in it, either. He perched himself forward in the seat, his elbows on the arm rests, as if waiting to jump up and do something.

Not that he had much to do by that time. His days were occupied mainly by listening to the birds chirp on the utility lines along the alley next to the house. That and waiting for the garbagemen to come by. He was drawn to the garbagemen, as was I.

The sound of the garbage truck, still a block or more away, would prick up the ears of the two of us, separated in age by some 70 years. In those days, people threw their garbage into round, metal 55-gallon drums. After the garbagemen emptied each, they'd let it bounce on the ground, creating an echoing boom. I'd mimic the noise as the garbage truck came closer: boom, boom, boom.

Jim never failed to laugh at that. In his thick Sicilian accent, he'd say, "Mockie! Gah-bidge-ah can boom!"

Jim always had some tiny bit of garbage wrapped in a brown paper grocery bag. For reasons known only to himself, he kept his garbage separate from the rest of the family's. As soon as the garbage truck turned the corner behind our garage, Jim'd jump out of his rocking chair and toddle, bow-legged, through the backyard, waving. He'd hand his garbage to one of the crew and then engage them, whether they wanted to be or not, in a broken-English conversation - or more accurately, soliloquy.

Every once in a while, Ma would shake her head and ask, "Pa, why don't you leave them alone?"

Jim would look at her as if she were daft. "D'ey-ah my friends-ah!" he'd insist.

The beer truck drivers were also his friends. Jim's ears would prick up every other day when he heard the Hamm's truck come by, stopping at all the bars and restaurants across the alley. Again, he'd toddle through the backyard, waving. This time, though, he'd press a couple of dollars into the driver's hand in exchange for a case of beer. He never needed to explain his relationship with the Hamm's drivers to Ma.

At night, Jim would sit in the rocking chair and sip beer after beer out of a heavy, clear glass mug. Often, I'd stand between his knees, my butt leaning on the edge of the seat, as he imbibed. The aroma of the beer was intoxicating. Every once in a great while, Jim would let me take the tiniest sip out of his mug. I felt like the luckiest kid in the world.

It was odd that I remember the smell of the beer. Ma tells me that poor old Jim smelled like a goat. I don't remember that. She'd fight with him for days on end to take a bath. Once, he'd been working in the garden and Ma refused to let him sit at the dinner table until he washed his hands. He did so, in what seemed record time. Suspicious, Ma marched into the bathroom and fetched the erstwhile clean, white towel upon which he'd wiped his hands. She held it in front of him. "Look, Pa! Look! It's black!" she exclaimed.

Jim was defeated. After dinner, he sat in the tub. He refused to use soap, though. He claimed the smell of soap made him nauseated. Ma still shakes her head when she recalls scrubbing the ring he left.

He came from the rural outskirts of Agrigento, where daily baths and deodorant soaps were unheard of. As a nine-year-old, he went to work in the local sulfur mine. The sulfur dust was so corrosive that it could eat away at his clothes in a matter of days. Nobody could afford that so he and the rest of the mine crew - grown men and children - worked in the nude.

By the time he was 20, he found himself in an arranged marriage to an energetic girl named Anna Lazzara. The couple moved to America, settled in Little Sicily around Grand and Ogden avenues, and opened a corner grocery. Jim ran a bathtub gin and wine operation in the back room. Eventually, he began to take a jug of his homemade wine into the basement, where he kept a cot, and drank himself to sleep.

To Anna, Jim was a cafone. The mere sight of him turned her stomach. Still, they had seven kids. She divorced him after the kids had grown up. He always carried a torch for her, though.

One night, Jim, Ma, and I all sat in lawn chairs in the backyard, watching the dark sky and hoping to catch a glimpse of Telstar or Echo, early artificial satellites. A thumbnail moon was about to set in the west. Jim didn't know much about geography but he knew that Anna was in the west. She'd moved to Pasadena after the divorce because its weather reminded her of Sicily.

Jim stared at the moon for a few minutes and then broke the silence. "Susie," he asked Ma, "does-ah you mother have-ah the same moon in Kahleefornyah?"

He never learned to read or write. But one day, curious, I rifled through his belongings and found an orange booklet resembling a passport. It had his picture in it and his X on the signature line. The cover read "Enemy Alien Registration." For a hot minute, I imagined my beloved, simple Grandpa was a spy. What was I to do? Turn him in? I'd never get to sip his beer again. Tearfully, I confronted Ma with my discovery.

Ma roared. Grandpa had never become a citizen, she explained. During World War II, Japanese, German, and Italian nationals had to register so the government could keep tabs on them. She assured me Jim was a true-blue American. What a relief!

Vicenzo Parello died on April 9, 43 years ago. Every time I see the garbagemen, I think of him.

Randolph Street: Westward Home

If it's Friday, this must be Randolph Street. Photojournalist Jon Randolph takes us on a tour of the West Loop, a neighborhood bounded by the Eisenhower Expressway on the south, the Metra commuter rail lines on the north, the Kennedy and Dan Ryan expressways on the east and Ashland Avenue on the west. The area is home to a dizzying variety of residents and...

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Willis Tower from the 200 block of N. Peoria St.

The Palace Grill, 1124 W. Madison St.

In the meat market district,

800 block of W. Fulton St.

The Lyon & Healy harp factory loading dock,

near Ogden Ave. and Lake St.

The Chicago Boyz Acrobatic Team,

practicing at Union Park,

Randolph Street and Ashland Avenue

Looking north from W. Fulton St.

Whitney M. Young Magnet High School,

211 S. Laflin Ave.

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... businesses, from the meat and seafood wholesale markets near Lake Street to the chic restaurants on Randolph Street, and from the young professionals near Grand Avenue to the single-room-occupancy hotels around Union Park.

Jon Randolph shares his peeks into Chicago life every Friday on The Third City. Join us every day for the (take your pick) well-reasoned observations or fanatical ravings of Benny Jay and Big Mike Glab. And, hey, don't forget our frequent Letters From Milo, penned by Gary's Greatest Writer.

Big Mike: Stupidity Is A Tough Stain To Rub Out

Here's a personal story in honor of the recent anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination.

Growing up in an absolutely segregated neighborhood - Galewood on Chicago's Northwest Side - I never went to school with a black kid until my freshman year of high school. Even then, out of a class of some 250, only two were black.

One was named Dennis, from Maywood. He was the nerdiest character in the world. He wore Coke-bottle glasses and spoke in a precise King's English that would make Steve Urkell look like Jadakiss. He had no interest whatsoever in sports, frustrating the hell out of the school's football and basketball coaches who hounded him daily to try out for their teams. They simply couldn't wrap their brains around a young black man who wasn't a wide receiver or a point guard.

Dennis and I partnered up in Fr. Motl's speech class the first week of school. Fr. Motl felt that the first asset a public speaker should have was the ability to remember people's names. So he instructed us to create a set of mnemonics for each other. In this way, Dennis and I got to know each other and we became the fastest of friends, as 14-year-olds are wont to do.

I forget the name of the other black kid in my class because his time at Fenwick was so short. Let's call him Luke. He was tall, strong, and rangy. The football and basketball staffs had stood on their heads to recruit him from the time he was in sixth grade. He was the greyhound they expected every human of dark complexion to be.

By November, whenever Luke passed a coach in the hall, the coach would gaze upon him as if he were a prized poodle. When Dennis walked past them, they simply shook their heads.

Dennis and Luke had nothing to do with each other since their interests were so wildly divergent. Dennis had joined the debate and forensics team, for pity's sake! This mystified most of their classmates who wondered aloud why these two black guys wouldn't even sit together in the cafeteria.

They didn't have to wonder too long because Luke failed most of his classes the first semester, going on probation. After he failed most of his second semester classes, his scholarship was rescinded and he transferred to a West Suburban hoops powerhouse. I remember reading his name in the papers time and again.

I never read about Dennis in the papers even though he eventually graduated near the top of our class. Things have changed a lot since I was in high school but one thing hasn't: today more Americans know who Plaxico Burress is than Neil deGrasse Tyson.

I wish I could say that Dennis and I celebrated our graduation together. By that time, though, we were no longer friends.

I'd fallen in with a tough crowd that didn't attend Fenwick, which was ironic considering the fact that my parents had scraped their pennies together to send me to the private school just to keep me away from the neighborhood's bad element. We drank booze and fought and passed ourselves off as gangbangers. After every weekend, I couldn't wait to get back to school to show my high-toned classmates what a hoodlum I was becoming.

One day during sophomore year, on the stairway between classes, some poor freshman accidentally bumped into me. I was compelled to set him straight. I put him up against the wall and told him I'd fuck him up with a nigger-knife. See, I'd just learned the definition of the term in my impromptu street classes around Amundsen Park: in an alley fight, a guy who's too poor to own a nice switchblade has to use a broken bottle to achieve the same end. Ergo, nigger-knife.

The kid was duly petrified and I let him loose as though I now owned a significant portion of the world. I might have begun to strut down those stairs save for one thing - Dennis had sneaked up behind me to say hello just before the incident. He'd heard the whole thing. He froze me with a disgusted look. He never said another word to me the rest of our time at Fenwick.

I've related similar tales in these pages and elsewhere. I had to learn my lessons about racial sensitivity time and again. Even though I revered King, Julian Bond, Andrew Young, and even Dick Allen and Marvin Gaye, I still had a vestigial stink of bigotry within me.

It wasn't easy to wash myself clean of the influence of my all-white neighborhood. I'd still lapse into using slurs into my early 20s. It's a lot easier to remain stupid than to grow.

This whole thing came back to me because the other day All-American Bob and I had a debate at Dick's Pizza about affirmative action. All-American Bob said, "Isn't it time we dropped all this silliness? It's over. The fight's finished. They won the battle. They've got a black man as President. Let's move on."

A lot of people probably would agree with him. Few would notice, though, that he repeatedly referred to black Americans - his fellow citizens - as they. It ain't so easy just to move on.

Big Mike: I'm Not The Babe

Occasionally, even this sensitive artist must lower himself to actually take a job outside the world of letters. Whereas I contend the world is in scandalously short supply of literary geniuses, brutes such as landlords, grocers, and CTA bus drivers care little for my trenchant satires and imaginative fictions, preferring that I fork over to them cold, hard cash.

That's why, in the spring of 1998, I took a job with the Chicago Trolley Company. I was a natural: I know the city like the back of my hand and I have a booming voice.

The company was run by three fellows who'd gone to college together and then made piles of dough in commodities trading and horse racing. Dreaming of running their own business, they bought a run-down trolley, leased it out, and watched their newborn firm grow until they owned dozens of shiny trolleys and were carting wedding parties and tourists by the thousands all over Chicagoland.

I'll concern myself with two of the bosses for the purposes of this story. There was Tim, whose father was a former Heisman Trophy winner, and Rob, who'd run an OTB or two. Tim was a soft-spoken, gentle man who, like the Kennedys, appeared always on the verge of starting a game of touch football. Rob was an enormous amalgam of audacity and testosterone, given to insults and accustomed to getting his way.

I rose quickly within the company, starting out as a part-time tour driver and then, within six months, being promoted to operations manager trying to get a fire truck tour off the ground.

One March Saturday afternoon in the old trolley barn on South Prairie Avenue, since replaced by towering condo developments, Tim, Rob, some off-duty drivers, and I were hanging out. Somebody found an old Wiffle ball and bat lying around. Naturally, a game commenced.

I was eager to show the bosses what an ace I was at baseball. They'd be wowed, I figured, by my precise knowledge of the top home run hitters ever, my tales of Cubs history, and my anecdotes about noted bleacherites.

My baseball acumen was known far and wide. Benny Jay readily admits that he knows never to question my knowledge of the game. My long lost friend, the author and poet Achy Obejas, once informed me that I was known among her sisters in Chicago's lesbian nation as Mr. Baseball. And from March through October, I was a Sunday fixture at the diamonds in Lincoln Park at Addison Street, manning first or third bases and stroking blistering line drives.

Tim and Rob were the captains. Rob, choosing first, picked me because I was tall, broad, and - back then - in game-shape. He even tabbed me to hit first. The pressure was on.

Tim pitched for the other team. I came to the plate, an oil spot in a corner of the barn, and squeezed the bat so hard I was afraid I'd crush it. Relax, I told myself, relax. I took a deep breath, stepped in, and took a couple of practice swings.

"You ready?" Tim asked. I nodded. He wound up and delivered. The Wiffle-ball, as all backyard players know, pretty much defies the laws of physics. Throw it with all the effort you've got and it floats through the air. Tim's first pitch took some two and a half hours to cross the plate. I swung with such might that I almost cork-screwed myself into the concrete floor. Strike one.

Rob's gravelly basso profundo boomed behind me: "Take it easy, Glab! Y'doan have ta hit it into the fuckin' lake!"

Now I was really nervous. Tim wound up and threw again. I waited, and waited, and waited. I swung, this time in a more controlled, intelligent, efficient manner sure to demonstrate to the boys that I was coachable. Strike two.

Tim took the return throw from the catcher and began advising me in comforting tones. "Don't swing so hard. Just put the barrel on the ball. Stroke it easy," he cooed.

"Oh great," Rob snarled, "now yer gettin' sympathy from the other team."

The third pitch floated toward me. I took all of Tim's advice into account and swung precisely as he'd counseled. Strike three.

"Nice fuckin' at bat, Glab," Rob barked, disgusted.

Now I was desperate. I needed to at least show them that I could play the field. Rob made me pitch. As I waited for Tim to step into the batter's box, I became terrified that I'd flub the first ball hit to me. Please god, please, I'll start believing in you if you just let Tim hit it to somebody else. Let the other guys make the first error. I squeezed my eyes shut and pleaded, Hit it to Rob, hit it to Rob, hit it to Rob.

I wound up and delivered. Tim took a perfectly measured, relaxed, intelligent swing, just as he'd advised me. He whacked a sharp one-hopper - to me! Aaargh! Yet, it was the ideal ball to field. It came to me at belt-level, without any odd spin or flutter. It was as though the god I don't believe in had deigned it. Of course, I fumbled, juggled, and eventually swatted the ball underneath the old trolley that served as third base.

"Glab," Rob announced, "you suck!"

Tim's team won the game. Rob just shook his head at me as we trudged into the offices afterward. I said to him, "You know, Babe Ruth struck out more than any player before him."

"You ain't fuckin' Babe Ruth," Rob responded.

Well, at least Chicago's lesbian nation knew me as Mr. Baseball.

Big Mike: Fathers And Sons

Benny Jay's post about his daddy-o's mini-medical emergency sure gave me a start. Reading the first few sentences, I felt certain the tale would come to no good. I'm happy it didn't.

I've met the old bird once or twice in my life. I know he'd been a prof, teaching a ridiculously esoteric subject at a high-toned university. He seems as smart as Tolstoy and Sakharov put together. Any topic is fertile ground for his musings. He once lectured Benny that I mispronounce my own last name.

That's why it was so shocking to learn he'd been a paratrooper. For pity's sake, those guys are the toughest, boldest bastards to wear a uniform!

So not only does Old Man Jay possess a cerebrum that weighs more than the unabridged Old English Dictionary, he has a touch of Lee Marvin in him as well. That has to be a tough act to follow.

Benny Jay is more a combo of Royko and Alinsky. That's a terrific exacta but still, it pales in comparison. I wonder if, in his private moments, Benny Jay curses his luck that he'll never be able to live up to his father's standards.

The whole father-son thing rubs the rawest of my emotional lesions. My old man, to belabor the metaphor, was a mix of Archie Bunker and the Sphinx. The similarities between Old Joe and the protagonist of "All in the Family" are jarring. They were of similar age, both were high school dropouts, as philosophically attuned as two unlettered Depression-era babies could be, and prone to lash out at anything that threatened their provincial views of the world. I kid you not, they even had the same jobs - both were shipping/receiving dock foremen.

Whenever anybody waxes poetic about how brilliant the sitcom was, I roll my eyes. They ask, Didn't you think it was the funniest thing? I respond, Why the hell did I have to watch it on TV when it played out every night at my family's dinner table?

As for the second half of the tie-in, suffice it to say that if Old Joe and the Sphinx were pitted against each other to determine who could be the more mum, the contest would end in a draw. That is, except for when Old Joe was moved to howl to the world about how his family wasn't worth a nickel.

One day, during a period of family stress, he instructed me to set up a meeting of my siblings at his house because he had something important to tell us. Young Joey, Good Old Franny, and I arrived at my parents' Berwyn penthouse at the appointed time. (Charlotte was absent, having moved to Florida years before.) We sat around the kitchen table with Old Joe at the head.

What was the big news? Were he and Ma planning to move to Florida or Arizona? Had they won the Lotto and wanted to share some of their winnings with us? Old Joe looked at each of us before he spoke. Finally, his voice cut the silence. "The Glabs," he announced, "are shit!"

That was it! His big announcement! Young Joey and Good Old Franny sat gaping. My ears turned red. I leaped up and lashed out at him. All I remember was a torrent of invective that seemed to go on forever. Each of us gave as well as he got. As Old Joe and I bayed at each other, Young Joey and Good Old Franny sat stunned.

I don't regret flashing daggers in response to Old Joe's pronouncement although I realize now he'd suffered all his life from a horrifying clinical depression. He was never officially diagnosed but I don't need to be a shrink to know that he had the disease.

Whereas Benny Jay must surely grapple with his perceived inability to accomplish one-tenth of what his daddy-o did, I wrestle with my own perceived potential to live down to Old Joe's direst predictions. There were all too many of them.

Each of us - my sibs and me - has borne the scars of being raised by a man who utterly despised himself and anything that came from him (meaning us.) Old Joe never needed to make a formal announcement that I, a member of the accursed Glabs, was shit. He conveyed that message to me through subtle words and deeds all my life.

He died nearly fifteen years ago. His aorta burst and the surgeons spent an entire night attempting to sew it back together. They did this knowing that the odds of him surviving were infinitesimally small. How ironic that at the end of his life, a life lived wholly without hope, Old Joe's loved ones and those talented doctors clung only to the merest of hopes to keep him alive another day.

After the surgery was finished, I went back home to shower and change clothes. As I stood under the hot water, crying as deeply as a five-year-old, the phone rang. Old Joe had emerged from the recovery room on life support. There was no hope left.

I dashed back to the hospital to join the family around his ICU bed. Old Joe's organs were shutting down one by one. The consensus was to pull the plug. They only wanted to give me an opportunity to make the vote unanimous.

I couldn't bear to see him in such pitiable condition. Of course, I said, let's let him go. His heart monitor line went flat some 20 minutes later.

The funny thing is, he'd been in a coma since his aorta had ruptured half a day earlier; for the first time in his life, he wasn't suffering.

Big Mike: Loneliness And Marriage

My visitors of last week - my oldest pal Sophia, her husband Danny, and their two kids, Matty and Arianna - left yesterday afternoon. While they were here, the place was a madhouse. From Sunday to Sunday, only the Louisville Zoo hosted a more cacophonous symphony of barking, roaring, whining, giggling, guffawing, meowing, and flatulence.

The Loved One was only able to take part in the distemper for one full day and parts of two others. As noted here previously, she drives in from Bloomington, Indiana on Friday nights and leaves on Sunday afternoons.

Now I'm alone.

Solitude is more indicative of the writers' lot than all the pens, pencils, word processing programs, or alcohol in the world. Good old Benny Jay has constructed a book-lined garret in his North Side manor. He pounds out his political pieces and books there as well as opuses for this communications colossus. He's tied in to all corners of Chicago, taking calls on separate phones like a bookie with two minutes to go before the starting bell. He's greeted every morning by an avalanche of emails. He's constantly communicating with the outside world. Yet, he's pretty much alone all day long.

Conversely, Milo, Gary's Greatest Writer, does his work in the basement. He's banging on doors constantly (and electronically,) trying to convince business owners that his advertising copy will make them jillionaires. Again, by the end of the day, his throat is sore from all the yakking he's done. And again, he's been all alone.

Me? I pound away at the keyboard in the basement, just like Milo. Except for last week, my Murray Hill Pike ranch house is normally as quiet as a Chrysler showroom. Every couple of hours or so, one cat or the other will steal into the litter box positioned behind my office area. The sudden sound of scratching usually makes whatever hair I have left stand on end.

We've all learned the last few years that one of the most pernicious methods of torture is the imposition of solitude. Enforced, extended loneliness makes human beings crazy. Some of the effects include visual hallucinations, the hearing of voices, self-mutilation, and a grab bag of other psychoses.

Yet guys like Benny Jay, Milo, and I have elected to sequester ourselves all the live long day to gather the pennies that society showers on us literary craftsmen.

Solitude won't make us crazy; we already were crazy.

Big Mike's Marital Bliss Update

Last week, if you recall, I opted for domestic tranquility over the First Amendment. I concluded my Saturday post by writing that the question of whether The Loved One would be compelled to revisit our dispute over my Tuesday post (not linked because it no longer exists) was one of those definitive challenges of marriage. In essence, I was holding my breath as I signed off on Saturday.

You'll all be happy to know (although not in a million years more so than I am) that The Loved One didn't utter a peep about the affair while she was home for the weekend. Whew - I finally get to exhale.

Allow me to crow. I would have had neither the smarts nor the discipline to finesse the situation as I did had it happened even as recently as ten years ago. It's a good bet The Loved One wouldn't either. Sometimes I wonder if marriage isn't an operation best undertaken by those past the age of fifty. And why isn't a written and practical test mandatory before a couple gets a marriage license? We do it before people get drivers licenses. I'm willing to bet that lousy marriages have caused more death and destruction than all the auto accidents since World War II.

Anyway, I feel that The Loved One and I both aced our own test. Congratulations, Kitty - we did it!

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: I'm A Lucky Guy

The Great Gun Battle continued at Dick's Pizza last night. Oh, okay, I'm being overdramatic, as usual. Whenever there's an opportunity for me to be alarmist, panicky, hyperbolic - you name it - I'll take it. Ask The Loved One. Heck, even my nephew, Jittery Jimmy, had to reel me in the last time he was down here to visit. We were standing in the backyard and I heard a woodpecker.

"Quiet!" I commanded. "Listen to that! It's a woodpecker. Isn't that amazing!"

"Uncle Mike," Jittery Jimmy said, firmly, "it's not amazing."

So no shots were fired nor were harsh words even exchanged. But I like the sound of The Great Gun Battle so there it is. Last week, I recounted a log-rolling chat between Printer Bob and All-American Allen about guns. My point was, it's hard for us Chicagoans to understand how the rest of the country feels about firearms. The gun is as dear to many people in this great land as pizza or the Cubs are to me.

I felt self-satisfied for recreating their discussion fairly. I thought I'd acquitted myself well, not portraying them as loons or wild-eyed survivalists. I even closed the post with All-American Allen saying, with a hint of pride, that he'd never shot a human being and hoped he'd never have to.

Man, I thought, aren't I magnanimous?

The answer, I learned last night, is not so much.

Weatherman Loren and his pop, Bandleader Leo, came in to watch the Kentucky men's basketball team play a first-round game in the NIT. During an early timeout, Loren ambled by and patted me on the back.

"I read you're post about guns," he said.

Immediately, at least three nearby heads turned our way. One of them asked Loren what it was all about. He tried to be kind but as he hemmed and hawed through his explanation, it became clear he felt I'd wronged the good folk of Kentuckiana.

"Well," Loren finally said, turning toward me, "I gotta tell you. It read pretty much like you were telling us what a bunch of hillbilly rednecks we are."

I was crushed. I'd meant nothing of the kind. Loren said he understood that but still....

"Lemme put it this way," he continued, "if we were 60 miles south of here, youd'a got your ass kicked."

I felt lucky indeed. Even luckier as the night wore on. I chatted at length with All-American Allen, as Republican as a man can be. He feels about Barack Obama pretty much what I felt about George W. Bush - this is one lousy president. No matter. Rather than tear each other's throats out, All-American Allen and I made our respective cases without a hint of mayhem. Hell, our talk was so civil most people today wouldn't even consider it a political discussion.

All-American Allen is about my age but - damn him - he's tall, good-looking, strong, and trim. His imposing stature was on my mind as we tentatively waded into our conversation. All-American Allen appears capable of lifting even this pasta-stuffed bovine and hurtling me through a plate glass window.

Had I been sitting on a barstool next to a Goliath like All-American Allen 60 miles south of Dick's Pizza, I might have bit my tongue. The Bourbon Trail is about 60 miles south of these precincts. It's a gorgeous landscape with rolling hills, broad vistas, and the occasional passing Ford F-150 pickup in whose loadbed compartment is stored who knows what variety of ordnance. Even if a fellow from the Bourbon Trail lacked the sinew to heave me through the nearest window, it's a good bet he might use me for target practice.

So now I have a bond with All-American Allen. We're not going to convince each other of anything but we came away from our chat at least respecting each other. And I neither flew through a plate glass window nor took a round of buckshot in the ass.

Big Mike's Dee Brown Update

I met a man two weeks ago at Dick's who claimed to be former NBA all-star and 1991 Slam Dunk Champion Dee Brown. When the man and his partner, a woman named Natasha, departed, the citizenry in Dick's seemed skeptical he was who he said he was. I was as dubious as anyone. I did a little digging and found that the two were the real thing. Natasha is Brown's business associate and the two are in town to open a Louisville location for his The EDGE basketball training facility.

Big Mike: Aiming For Freedom

Startling fact: I'd never held a gun in my hand until I moved to Kentucky.

When The Loved One and I came down to Louisville two years ago, I found a massive outdoors store across the Ohio River in Clarksville. It bills itself as the largest of its kind east of the Mississippi.

What struck me first about the place, after I'd noted that it's only slightly smaller than NASA's Vertical Assembly Building, were the homey, ye-olde-shoppe-type signs on the front door directing customers to check in their weapons at the information desk. This policy, I'd learn after a few weeks in town, is rather liberal compared to those of grocery and liquor stores as well as government buildings here, all of which post prominent signs prohibiting people from carrying concealed firearms inside - period. Their policies regarding shotguns and rifles are left to the imagination.

Anyway, the outdoors store had a firearms department that would do for an NRA member what Viagra does for me. I'd never imagined that so many guns could be in one place outside of al Qaeda headquarters or the office of a hip-hop record producer.

I spent an hour and a half just looking at the guns. When I came to a case full of Glocks, the clerk asked me if I wanted to hold one.

"Oh, I don't know," I said nervously. "I've never held a gun before." The clerk's knees buckled. Once the shock wore off, he repeated his offer.

"In that case, you have to feel this," he said, pulling one out of the case. Gun aficionados seem to have a sensual relationship with their weapons. They talk about the feel of a gun in a way that makes it seem more like a sweetheart than a hunk of metal and polymer.

"Naw, that's alright," I said. "I don't have a license. I'm not a gun guy. I'd feel funny."

"C'mon."

"Really? Should I? You think it'd be OK?"

"Here."

He brought the Glock closer to me, like a pet shop clerk offering me a kitten. I tentatively grasped it. I actually curled my finger around the trigger and aimed the gun at a mannequin dressed in the latest camouflage.

"Isn't it beautiful?" he asked.

"Oh sure, " I replied, although I was lying. It wasn't beautiful. It wasn't anything at all other than a hunk of metal and polymer in my hand.

It took me moving to Kentucky to truly understand how deeply people in this great nation feel about their guns.

I listened in on a conversation between Printer Bob and All-American Allen at Dick's Pizza the other night. Barack Obama's face had appeared on the big screens and the two of them commenced lamenting the crumbling of our great nation. The talk got around to guns.

"I'll tell ya,"All-American Allen said, "when I went to the gun show in December, I never saw so much traffic in my life. You couldn't move."

"Oh yeah," said Printer Bob, who'd also attended.

"These people," All-American Allen continued, jerking a thumb toward the big screen, "they just don't get it. They don't realize that every time they say they're going to do something about guns, everybody goes out and buys more guns!"

"That's right," Printer Bob said. "Guaranteed. If they say the words gun control, the gun shows are packed for the next six months."

"Don't get me wrong," All-American Allen said, "I'm not like some of them. You see guys at the shows that have guns and ammunition buried in their backyards. I like guns but I'm not a nut."

"Same here. I only have the one gun," said Printer Bob.

"But look, if they come after my guns, they're never gonna get them. All I have to do is say I sold 'em to my friend. What are they gonna do about it?"

"You can never get rid of all the guns in this country."

"It's impossible! How are they gonna do it? The cow's out of the barn."

"This isn't France or Germany where they can just take 'em away."

"Whenever a country wants to take away your liberties, the first thing they do is take away your guns."

"We want our freedom," said Printer Bob.

"That's all," said All-American Allen. "That doesn't make us bad people. Believe me, I've never met a nicer, more caring group of people than gun owners. I mean it! If I had to take my wife to the hospital and I needed someone to take care of my kids, I'd call one of my friends - and they're all gun owners. All good people."

It's ironic that this exchange came a day after 26 people were killed in shooting sprees in Alabama and Germany.

"It sounds old but it's true," Printer Bob said. "Guns don't kill people; people kill people."

"I've never shot a person in my my life," All-American Allen said. "And I hope I don't have to."

Big Mike: We Can Rest Easy Now

The first week The Loved One and I lived in our current home, we witnessed a manhunt out our front window. That was two years ago. The manhunt, believe it or not, finally came to a conclusion last week.

We'd bought our house in June, 2007, in a little town called Murray Hill, population 630. It's a bedroom community built on the rolling hills of an old potato farm in the early 70s. Fences are banned, contributing to a more collegial atmosphere. Rather than chat with my neighbors over the fence, we mosey out in the middle of the undulating greensward between our homes. No one really knows where one property ends and another begins.

Murray Hill for a brief period of time had it's own little private police force even though the worst crime in these parts was when someone's dog left a pile of Lincoln Logs on someone else's lawn. The private police force was quickly voted out when it became clear the only thing the officers were doing was ticketing residents for rolling through the stop sign.

The place was considered so safe that many people kept their garage doors open and even left their back doors unlocked. That is, until recently.

That's why it was so shocking when, on a July Sunday evening two years ago, The Loved One and I were aroused by the sound of a police helicopter overhead. Murray Hill Pike was teeming with citizens carrying flashlights and holding back dogs straining at their leashes. One neighbor who's a Jefferson County Sheriff's deputy rode his bicycle up and down the pike wearing flip-flops, a T-shirt, cutoffs, and his holstered service revolver.

I asked my new neighbor Captain Billy what was wrong. "Ah, some little son of a bitch broke into somebody's house," he said. "The woman left her purse near the window and the kid musta saw it, broke through the screen, reached in and took it."

The Loved One and I chuckled. It was as though we were now living in Mayberry.

Ever since then. I'd been hearing about the Burglar Who Was Terrorizing The Area. Word circulating through the crowd at Dick's Pizza was that people were beginning to shut their garage doors and lock their back doors. It wasn't quite the reaction Chicago had when Richard Speck was on the loose for four days in July, 1966, but it would do for a small town.

Then one night last week as I sat at the bar at Dick's enjoying a diet cola, someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Mayor Judy. She's actually the garbage commissioner of the adjoining town of Goose Creek but she gets a kick of me calling her mayor.

"Didja hear?" Judy exclaimed. "They caught the burglar!"

Suddenly it was as if a cloud had been lifted from over Dick's. I could have sworn there was merriment in the air. Everybody started talking at once.

Here's the story as Mayor Judy told it: "Yeah, they caught him. Just a kid from down near Westport Road, you know, where it's not so nice. They got him on 61 counts. He's been doing it for years. He says he was doing it to support his family's drug habit. He doesn't do drugs himself. He wasn't hurting anybody, just reaching inside most houses to grab money or a purse."

Later, I caught the story on the local news. It seems the lad, 22, was less than superlative as a desperado. Toward the end of his reign of terror, he would swipe keys from some houses and then drive the victims' cars home. When the cops started finding the stolen cars in the same neighborhood, they figured they knew where he lived.

One night last February, he broke into a home in St. Matthews, sat in the living room, turned on the TV, and ordered some cable porn. He sat there for more than an hour hoping the residents, who were upstairs sleeping, would come down and shoot him. He was tired, he later told the police, of his life of crime.

The kid got tired of waiting for the residents to come down and put him out of his misery so he walked outside and hailed a cab to take him home. He paid the fare using money he'd grabbed from the house.

He's in custody now. Murray Hill, Goose Creek, Barbour Meade, and the other villages of the East End are now safe. Still, I don't think people are going to be leaving their back doors unlocked again.

Big Mike: "Do I Look Like A Liar?"

Tuesday was Trivia night at Dick's Pizza. Skip the Trombonist, my usual teammate, had to substitute for Andy the Trivia-meister, who was busy helping an old pal settle into alcohol rehab. I have a lot of trouble with Skip's questions whenever he fills in but I'm an ace when Andy runs the show. Andy and I must have similar interests. I do know this: we both have copies of the "New York Times Almanac" in the bathroom. Perhaps Skip doesn't read in the bathroom.

Anyway, I was happy to be out from under the sobriquet, Team Gorlock. The name was Skip's idea. He's a devotee of "The Colbert Report." Gorlock, a character on the show, is Stephen Colbert's lawyer.

Since I was playing alone against five other teams, I chose the moniker Frankie Machine in honor of one of Chicago's greatest authors. That was the lead character's name in Nelson Algren's book, "The Man with the Golden Arm."

I quickly found myself firmly ensconced in second place. Here's a sample question: What do Karl Marx, Bob Dylan, and Sonny Liston have in common? (Answer at the end of the post.)

I sat next to a garrulous young couple - a pretty woman and her athletic-looking partner. She'd struck up a conversation with me before the game started, asking about the crossword puzzle I was doing while I waited. She proceeded to tell me her name was Natasha, that she was an accountant, that she'd been born in Guyana, that she was highly ambitious, and that she'd lived in Orlando, Florida until recently.

Natasha asked me what I do. When she learned I'm a writer a lightbulb flashed on over her head. "Do you write biographies?" she asked.

"I'll write anything as long as the money's right."

"Have you ever heard of Dee Brown?"

The name sounded familiar. I remembered that Dee Brown had written "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," one of the seminal consciousness-raising Native American books of the 1970s. "Yeah," I said, "I think so."

She pointed a thumb at her escort and said, "Here he is."

I recoiled a bit. Dee Brown, I figured, ought to be pushing 100. Natasha noted my puzzlement.

"You know, Dee Brown," she said. "The basketball player. He won the Slam Dunk Contest in 1991."

"Oh yeah," I said, but not too convincingly. The fellow appeared too callow to be even the younger Dee Brown.

A few moments later, I pressed Natasha, "So he's really Dee Brown the basketball player?"

"Of course he is! Why would I lie? Do I look like a liar?"

I don't know what a liar looks like but I do know Dee Brown was a star for the Boston Celtics in the 90s. Natasha introduced me to him with the preamble that I was a fine writer and would like to write a biography of him. I was about to say I'd expressed no such desire when the fellow clasped my hand eagerly and began telling me he was in Louisville to start up a basketball camp for youngsters. "Write a story about me," he said, handing me his card. "Anything you can do will help."

He and Natasha decided to play Trivia. They called themselves Royal Crown. Skip insisted on calling them Royal Clown. During the first round, I moaned out loud about the difficulty of the questions. "They ain't so hard," the fellow said. "I got at least six out of ten."

"Six out of ten! You're shitting me," I blurted. I figured I'd answered only four correctly.

"Damn," he said. "This is easy."

Skip then announced the first round scores. The fellow and Natasha had answered only two correctly. "Aw, man!" the fellow moaned.

When the game was over, I'd finished in second place while Royal Crown was second to last. Still, the fellow pranced around the room high-fiving people.

And then, like that, the couple left. Someone told Jason the Bartender that the fellow was Dee Brown. Jason, a basketball fanatic, tilted his head. "Yeah?' he said. "Didn't look like him."

My mind immediately flashed to a story I'd read in the papers last fall. A New Jersey man was arrested after spending the summer telling people he was the New York Yankees pitcher Joba Chamberlain. Apparently, his summer was packed with free drinks and food and more sex than he'd ever had before. The man was charged with criminal simulation and theft of services.

I fingered this Dee Brown fellow's card. Could he be the real thing? I'll let you know in a future post.

(Trivia answer: all three appeared on the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album cover.)