Benny Jay: Saturday Night Movies

It's Saturday night, which means we're watching a movie, 'cause we almost always watch a movie on Saturday night.

I go to the video store to make the selection and come home with Spike Lee's latest -- "The Miracle at St. Anna." I figure you can't go wrong with Spike. I love Spike Lee. I've seen almost every one of his movies. Some of them -- like "Crooklyn" and "Do the Right Thing" -- at least three times.

The pressure's on 'cause my Wife and I have this thing about movies. Bring home a bad one, and you're gonna get roughed up. I mean, the trash talking gets fierce. And the last movie I brought home was a Class A stinker. It was called "Wristcutters" and I don't even want to talk about it -- it was that bad.

The thing is -- it wasn't all my fault. I was set to rent "Papillon." Had it in my hands and everything. I had a taste for Steve McQueen -- love him about as much as Spike Lee. But my wife has this policy where she doesn't want to see the same movie twice -- even if she hasn't seen it in thirty years. It's a ridiculous policy when you think about it 'cause you can't possibly remember what happened in a movie you saw three decades ago -- so it's like seeing it for the first time. But it was out of respect to her policy that I put down "Papillon" and picked up "Wristcutters"....

So we're watching "Miracle at St. Anna" and after a few minutes I can tell it's not going to be that good. Definitely not up there with "Crooklyn" or "Do the Right Thing." The problem is that the movie's not sure what it wants to be. It's about these black GIs in World War II who are fighting the Germans in Italy. Mostly, it's a remake of "Saving Private Ryan." But every now and then Spike sneaks in a scene from "The Godfather." And then out of nowhere he starts to redo "Jungle Fever." You got this sexy black GI coming on to this really hot-looking Italian peasant girl who lives up in the hills and yet has somehow or other learned how to speak English. And it's amazing how curvaceous and well-fed she looks even though the village is surrounded by Nazis and there's no way to bring in food and everyone else is just about starving to death. Anyway, the black guy tells her something like, Baby, you gotta try it -- cause once you go black you ain't goin' back. And she's like, Ooh, let me see. So he takes her up to this tower and it's like he dims the freaking lights -- I think they might have even lit a candle. (Remember, they're under Nazi siege.) He rips off her sweater and she's panting with expectation. And when they cut to the next scene she's got this dazed smile on her face, like she's thinking -- Yes, it's true, it's true. And he's walking around with this cocky strut, like he's thinking: Told you, girl. I mean, it's as about as hokey as you can get -- and still be in a Spike Lee movie.

After the movie's over, I can tell that my wife's getting ready to let me have it, so I try to cut her off by saying: "I liked it." And she says: "It's not very good." I get a feeling she's going to bring up "Wristcutters,"so I say: "Wasn't `The Wackness' good?" There's nothing she can say because "The Wackness" was great. It's about this 18-year-old kid who just graduated from high school and he's selling reefer out of an ice-cream cart he's pushing all over Manhattan. He hooks up with the girl of his fantasies whose freaky step-father is played by Ben Kingsley and, oh, just see it.

The best thing about "The Wackness" is that I picked it out. My wife had never even heard of it until I brought it home. As a matter of fact, when I put it on, she was saying: "I'm giving this movie ten minutes. If it's not good, I'm going to bed." That was over a month ago -- and I'm still talking about it.

So, anyway, back to our post-"Miracle at Santa Anna" conversation on Saturday night....

"Yeah," she says, "'The Wackness' was good...."

"And who picked it out?"

"You did...."

"Oh, yeah," I say, as I get ready for bed. "That's what I thought...."

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.

Letter From Milo: Alas, Poor Tommy

Every year toward the end of summer, I raise a glass and toast the memory of Tommy Granger. It was 367 years ago that Tommy became one of the first people executed in the American Colonies. He was also the first juvenile to suffer capital punishment. Tommy Granger was just 17-years-old when the Pilgrim Fathers of the Plymouth Colony sent him to the gallows.

Now, you might wonder why anyone would execute a teenager. Was Tommy a murderer? Was he America's first serial killer? Did he commit treason? Was he a kidnapper, a thief, an arsonist?

No. Poor Tommy Granger was hanged because he got caught fucking a sheep.

I contend that Tommy's execution was an egregious miscarriage of justice. You see, I am of the unshakeable opinion that it was not Tommy's fault. He simply could not help himself.

The instinct to copulate, the urge to enjoy life's most basic pleasure, won't be denied. Men and women will risk everything - their reputations, their fortunes, even their lives - in pursuit of the sexual act. In certain nations and cultures where God's name is used to condemn the very instinct that God has given us, adulterers are routinely sent to the stoning field. Despite the risk of gruesome death and public humiliation, there is never a shortage of adulterers. I suspect they'll run out of stones before they run out of fornicators.

In the absence of members of the opposite sex, heterosexual men will turn to other men and women will seek pleasure with their own kind. Other humans aren't even necessary to satisfy the sex drive. Farm boys, like poor Tommy Granger, have been known to dally with their livestock and shepherds sometimes grow overly fond of their flocks.

Warm flesh isn't even a requirement to achieve sexual release. Inanimate objects - plastic, wooden, natural and manmade, electrified and manually operated - have all been used to simulate the sex act. If there is any possibility for sexual pleasure, no matter how remote or inconceivable, no matter how perverse or disgusting, you can be sure that someone has tried it.

The uncontrollable urge to copulate is not restricted to the young. Older folks have their needs, too, although certain delicate problems arise when the urge strikes someone of advanced years. As the great writer, Jim Harrison, once wrote, "The older a man gets the more weird things he has to do to get his dick hard." That's why Viagra is one of the most prescribed medications in this country. That's why ads for erectile disfunction remedies and male enhancement nostrums are all over the TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. When it comes time for older men to act on their fevered fantasies, they want to be able to rise to the occasion.

The lower orders are not exempt from the most basic of instincts. Animals will fight to the death for the privilege of mating. Once in rut, some animals will copulate themselves into states of total exhaustion, becoming easy prey for opportunistic predators. Certain insects live for just a few frenzied days, long enough to mate, if they're lucky, and create more single-minded insects. Salmon make epic journeys, swimming across thousand of miles of ocean to reach their spawning grounds, the only places on earth they can breed - and then they die.

So, this September, join me in raising a glass to the memory of Tommy Granger, a martyr to the cause of uncontrollable lust. He was a true pioneer in his field, a man who, by all rights, should be as well known as the Marquis de Sade, Caligula and the Mitchell Brothers.

And when you toss down that drink in Tommy's memory, say to yourselves, as I always do, "There, but for the grace of God, go I."

Note from the author

If you agree that a terrible injustice was done to Tommy Granger, please join me in a letter writing campaign to our Senators and Congressmen. It's high time that Tommy Granger's good name and reputation are restored.

Benny Jay: Parent-Teacher Conference

I'd been on the phone for a half hour non-stop -- lost track of time -- when I looked up and noticed it was three. Had to hurry -- didn't want to be late for the parent-teacher conference.

Funny thing about parent-teacher conferences -- when my kids were young, they were mighty big deals. My Wife and I listened to every word the teachers said, as if they were special views into the souls of our children.

You learn as time passes -- they're just snap shots. Nothing more, nothing less. Glimpses of where a kid is at particular moments in life.

Still I gotta go. My wife's working so it's up to me. I zip up to the school and promise myself I'll be in and out -- just grab my Younger Daughter's report card, let `em see my face, and skedaddle.

But, you know how it goes. I walk in to the school and first thing I see is my daughter's friend Allory. She tells me she got an academic four-year full ride to Wash U in St. Louis.

"You mean full ride as in -- for free?" I ask.

"Yes...."

"Dang, girl -- when did you get so smart?"

She smiles and shrugs, as if to say: What can I tell you, Mr. Jay....

I turn the corner and bump into Jackie. Give her a big hug. Haven't seen her in ages. Her daughter, LaQuita, and my daughter played on the same basketball team. LaQuita had a deceptively quick first step. Freeze the defender with a short head fake and be half way to the basket before the defender knew what's up. Her father, Leonard, and I used to sit together at the games. Damn, he was good company. Cheered the team, teased the referees and laughed at my jokes. I loved watching basketball games with Leonard and Jackie.

"`Quita's captain of the team," Jackie tells me.

"You're kidding me," I say. "That's sensational. You tell `Quita congratulations...."

By now its over a half an hour and I still haven't met with one teacher. Got to pick up the pace. But Ms. Garcia, the physics teacher, has a little time on her hands and she's a good story teller. Starts telling me about the time she was teaching at Gage Park, this tough-as-hell high school on the city's Southwest Side, and some kid hit her in the face. Didn't mean to. Took a swing at someone else and caught her by accident. "It didn't hurt as much as it surprised me," she says. "I couldn't believe it."

I head over to see Mr. Loucks, the English teacher. It's hard to call him Mr. Loucks. I've known him since he was a 15-year-old high-school sophomore who refereed the itty-bitty basketball league my daughters played in at Welles Park. I take a seat at his desk and we start talking baseball. The man loves baseball. He plays it, coaches it, watches it -- even sells beer at Wrigley Field. We could talk baseball all day, except there's a line of parents waiting at the door.

Off I go to Ms. Reist-Jones, who teaches African-American History. The woman's a trip. Reminds me of me. Starts talking about A and winds up talking about B. Not really sure how she gets there, just sort of stringing stuff together.

She's telling me they're studying African rhythm and she mentions Bernard Purdie. I cut her off: "You mean, the Bernard Purdie?"

"Is there another one?"

"As in the Purdie-shuffle drum beat?"

"You've heard of him?"

"Have I heard of him?" I go into this whole thing about how I read this article in the New York Times about how Purdie played with everyone -- from James Brown to Frank Sinatra. How he used the Purdie shuffle on "Home At Last" by Steely Dan. One of my favorite songs. I start singing it: "Well, the danger on the rocks is surely past...."

She shows me a video of Purdie on the New York Times website. I tell her there's a better video on youtube. But we can't get to YouTube cause the Board of Education's got it blocked from the school computers. I tell her we should be able to figure out someway to get beyond the block. We bend over the computer. Then I notice parents waiting at the door. Maybe another time.

By the time I get out, it's been more than an hour. I go to my car and turn on the radio. I'll be damn -- they're playing "Deacon Blues." My favorite Steely Dan song of all time. From Aja, the same album with "Home at Last." Probably got Bernard Purdie playing drums. I turn it loud and sing along: "I cried when I wrote this song, sue me if I play too long...."

For some reason, it makes me think about a parent-teacher conference for my Older Daughter back in 2004, when she was a sophomore in high school. She was screwing up big time back then, making life miserable for her chemistry teacher. He let me have it when I came to talk to him. Told me she talks too much, is rude and a distraction. I just about dropped to my knees seeking forgiveness. I said she was going through a particularly difficult stretch of adolescence and I predicted that one day she would grow out of it. It was just a shame that he -- of all people -- had to bear the brunt of it. I profusely apologized for that.

I don't think I got through to him. He didn't smile. I understood. She was making his life miserable -- why should he care about what might happen down the road?

The thing is my older daughter did turn it around the very next year. She got her act together and never looked back. Found her way to politics of all things. Went to work for the Democrats and got hundreds and hundreds of white Iowans to vote for Barack Obama. Helped elect the country's first black president. How `bout that?

But that's the thing about parent-teacher conferences. They're just snapshots. They don't tell you what kids got in them.

I turn down the radio and put the car into drive. Man, I wish that chemistry teacher could see my older daughter now....

Randolph Street: The Bronzeville Age

Our man with the unflinching lens, photojournalist Jon Randolph, took his camera to Bronzeville recently. An historic old Chicago neighborhood just south of McCormick Place and extending down to the old blues, doo-wop, and commercial mecca of 47th Street and beyond, Bronzeville is being rediscovered these days.

The Mahogany dress shop

260 E. 35th St.

Illinois Institute of Technology

Campus Center

3201 S. State St.

One Stop Foods

4301 S. Lake Park Ave.

The Negro League Cafe

301 E. 43rd St.

The Mahogany dress shop, again

108 E. 35th St.

The arbiters of all that is hot and cool in this town may be rediscovering Bronzeville as if it somehow went away for a few years. But, as Randolph's pix illustrate, this community has never stopped being vibrant.

Once dubbed "The Black Metropolis," Bronzeville is home, in addition to IIT with its remarkable Mies van der Rohe architecture, the Illinois College of Optometry, VanderCook College of Music, Shimer College, and Wendell Phillips Academy. 

Back in the 1930s, newspaper editor James Gentry popularized the new name because it accurately described the skin color of its inhabitants.

Be here next Friday for more Randolph Street. The Third City is here everyday for your reading and dawdling pleasure.

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.

Benny Jay: He Jumped Out Of Airplanes

I'm talking to my Dad on the phone and he doesn't sound good. He says he has a crick in his neck and it's very painful. He sounds tired. He's 83. I worry something's wrong.

So I drive to his house and I walk in as my Mom and he are finishing dinner. He doesn't look good, a little too pale.

He says he has to lay down. But he's too tired to move. He slumps in his chair. My mother stands at his side, to keep him from falling to the ground.

She gently pats his face and asks: "Are you all right?"

No response.

"Can you hear me?"

He starts to snore.

"Is he sleeping?" I ask.

"Who falls asleep like this?" she responds.

She calls 911. An ambulance and a fire truck show up, red lights flashing. Four paramedics walk into the house. They call out his name. He's still slumped over. They lift him from the kitchen chair, put him in a wheelchair, and strap him in. It scares me to see him helpless in that wheelchair. "He was in the paratroopers," I tell them. "He used to jump out of airplanes." They wheel him out of the house and into the ambulance....

By the time I get to the emergency room, he's sitting up in bed, wide awake. It turns out he drank two Scotches on top of taking a painkiller -- Vicodin -- and that's what knocked him out. My mother's taking the blame cause she gave him the pill.

Everyone -- especially me and my mom -- is relieved to see him strong. As different doctors and nurses enter the room, my parents repeat the story.

"It started with that crick in his neck," says my mom.

"It hurts," says my dad.

"He shouldn't have taken the painkiller with the Scotch," says my mom.

"Ever hear of anything like that?" I say.

"It's still painful," says my dad.

"You know what you do for a crick in the neck?" I say. "Take a tennis ball and rub it where it hurts."

The doctors and the nurses leave the room. It's just me and my parents.

"They're talking about you in the hallway," I tell them.

"No they're not," says my mother.

"Yes, they are. Hold on -- shh."

I put my head out of the curtain lining the room and pretend to be listening to a conversation in the hallway. I bring my head back into the room and say: "They're saying: `Who would take Vicodin and Scotch for a crick in the neck?'"

My dad ignores me. "The crick is painful," he says.

"Try the tennis ball. I'm telling you -- it loosens up the muscle...."

Another doctor comes in and my dad asks her what she would do for a crick in the neck. "Apply heat," she says.

"Heat's good," I say, after the doctor leaves. "But, the tennis ball's better."

My dad looks at me with exasperation and says, "Benny, stick that tennis ball up your...."

I can't tell you how good it is to get back to normal.