Big Mike: My Sitcom Pal Sid

The mention of my old pal Frisbee Sid in my last post unleashed a torrent of memories. Some of them are so improbable that they could only have been products of some sitcom writer's imagination.

The vast majority of my recollections of Frisbee Sid are true. Those that aren't ought to be.

As a teenager in 1981, Sid won the Frisbee skills world championship (yes, there was such a thing - sponsored by Wham-O, of course.) He attended Evanston High School at the time and worked part-time for a window-washing outfit. An outspoken and impatient sort, Sid never hid his opinion that the company could be run better. His boss tolerated his impudence because he was such a stellar worker. You think you can run things better? the boss would say. Buy the company and run it yourself.

After making an ungodly pile of cash traveling the country to demonstrate his Frisbee skills, Sid did just that. By the time I met him in the early 90s, Sid liked to brag that he worked only 45 minutes a week. His duties as CEO entailed returning customer phone calls, assigning work crews, and depositing checks into his bank account, inclusive. He spent the rest of his time sleeping in, playing chess and golf, holding court in the late, lamented coffeehouse Urbus Orbis, and caring for his African Grey Parrot.

The day I met him, Sid strolled into Urbus Orbis with the parrot perched on his left shoulder. One of the other regulars, an old punk rocker known as The Dark Prince because he made Keith Richards look like a Brooks Brothers man, nudged me and said, "See that guy who looks like a pirate? That's Sid. You gotta get to know Sid."

That I did, going so far as becoming his roommate in the late 90s. By that time, the parrot was gone. Sid was never a stickler for details. He'd left the window open in his Milwaukee Avenue loft one hot July afternoon while he stepped out to buy a pack of cigarettes. When he got back, he discovered the parrot had flown out the window.

When we lived together, the parrot had been replaced by a Boston Terrier named Buckley, who had all the energy of his breed as well as that of a speed freak. Buckley sort of resembled Sid - both were round-faced, wide-eyed, and sinewy. Like his pooch, Sid was also a ball of raging fire. They even shared some nervous tics.

Once, I had to drive Sid to a Skokie pet shop to buy food for Buckley. The day before, Sid and I had purchased new fedoras. We'd set our new lids on our heads at jaunty angles and sneaked looks at ourselves in the rearview mirror. On our way back from the pet shop, inching down the rainy Kennedy Expressway during the evening rush hour, we hit upon the brilliant idea that since we both owned fedoras, we ought to become private detectives.

Even though we were grown men, we were dead serious. We started making plans. Sid knew a neon artist who could design a blinking-eye sign for us. We'd buy cameras with telephoto lenses, pocket tape recorders, and - just in case - false mustaches. It was perfect: Sid knew how to run a business and I knew how to dig up dirt on people. By the time we got to the old Dennis Rodman billboard near Armitage Avenue, we were talking out of the sides of our mouths.

My first task was to go to the State of Illinois building the next morning and purchase whatever licenses and certificates we needed. I figured they couldn't cost more than a few hundred bucks, all told. It was my sad duty to report to Sid that private investigators must be trained and sponsored by reputable law enforcement agencies. Damn.

We still had our fedoras, though. We sublet the basement of our rented house to a guy named Danny Sideburns, whose life was devoted to girls, pomading his hair, and the avoidance of gainful employment. Danny Sideburns never paid his rent on time but we didn't care - as I said, Sid never was a stickler for details. Besides, as a writer, I paid my own rent a day or two late now and again.

Danny Sideburns started seeing the daughter of a deli-owner who billed himself as - no lie - The Bagel King. The girl was drawn to troubled punks, having thrown over a former high school dropout tough for our tenant. The jilted guy still had some of the girl's CDs and an item or two of her clothing. If she wanted them back, he told her, she'd have to meet him at a taqueria on Milwaukee Avenue where, she was sure, he'd start trouble. She begged Danny Sideburns to accompany her for protection. Danny Sideburns turned to us, panicked.

Sid and I exchanged glances. "Don't worry," Sid told him, "we're coming with you. We've got fedoras."

We looked intimidating as we followed the couple into the taqueria. Sid stood next to the door, smoking. I sat directly behind the erstwhile tough. He gave up the girl's goods without a peep and hastily made for the exit. Mission accomplished. But the guy turned around before he closed the door and yelled, "The next time you wanna talk to me, don't bring your old men with you!" The punk.

Frisbee Sid often tried to counsel me on matters concerning the opposite sex. I'd just experienced a string of disastrous affairs and was moping around the house. "What are you looking for in a woman?" he asked. I described certain qualities that seemed to dovetail precisely with those of a mutual friend of ours named Art Teacher Sharon, who, Sid pointed out, was awfully good-looking as well.

We'd been invited to a party at Art Teacher Sharon's house that Friday. "Now's your time," Sid advised. "A man has to take what he needs. She's ready. She's open. She's waiting for a man to come along and take her."

Yeah, I thought, why not? I arrived early at the party and stayed late. I helped Art Teacher Sharon serve appetizers and mix drinks. I made her laugh. "You're great, Big Mike," she said, touching my arm.

Sidney was right. She was ready. She was open. She didn't sleep alone after the party. Next to her lie a tall Rastafarian who, like Danny Sideburns, eschewed gainful employment.

I wonder if it was because I hadn't worn my fedora.

Letter From Milo: Fake Tits

Every once in a while my brother-in-law sends me porn in an email. It's usually a bit of fluff that someone sends him and he forwards it to me. Now, I'm not saying my brother-in-law is a pervert - you'd have to ask my sister about that - but he does enjoy a bit of porn on occasion.

The porn he sends me is actually pretty tame stuff. It usually has a humorous bent to it. For example, this past holiday season he forwarded me an attachment that had a Christmas card from the then-President. The subject line of the email read, "Greetings from George and Laura's Bush." The picture was of President and Mrs. Bush, full frontal naked, smiling and waving from one of the doorways of the White House.

It was obviously a Photoshop job and not very well done. I looked at it for a few moments before deleting it. The computer I use is accessible to my wife and children and I don't like leaving anything on it that would offend their tender sensibilities. They have a low enough opinion of me anyway without adding porn freak to their list of grievances.

In my youth I was as intrigued by the nude female form as any sex-deprived young hetero male. In those days opportunities for seeing naked women were rare. Along with my equally horny young friends, we made every effort to satisfy our sexual curiousity. As teenagers, we snuck into burlesque houses in the dying days of the art form (see my earlier post about the Follies Theater on State Street.) We hoarded magazines like Playboy, according them the same respect and awe that a baseball nerd reserves for a Honus Wagner collector card.

A few years later, when social mores loosened, I saw "Deep Throat" starring Linda Lovelace at the Tivoli Theater in Gary, Indiana. A couple of years later I saw "The Devil in Miss Jones," starring the great Georgina Spelvin at a theater in San Francisco.

When home theater technology became available I rented a couple of VHS tapes at the local video store (pre-Blockbuster days) but found them, on the whole, pretty boring. By that time I had experienced a bit of the real thing and, like most sportsman, I preferred to participate rather than watch from the sidelines.

Years later, when the great Internet explosion occurred, I was pretty much bored with the whole concept of watching other people copulate. I generally paid no mind to the filmed shenanigans of bored housewives, mustachioed UPS drivers, horny cheerleaders, naughty nurses, pizza delivery boys, errant nuns, French maids and doctors with unorthodox bedside manners.

One thing I did notice, however, was the proliferation of fake tits. It seemed that all the ladies in these films were as inflated as Michelin tires, their breasts grotesquely large and sometimes misshapen. They seemed to defy all known laws of physics and gravity.

Fake tits weren't restricted to porn stars. The popped up everywhere. From Hollywood and Vine to Main Street USA, fake tits became as common as coffee shops. I read an article in a legitimate newspaper that trumpeted the fact that some parents were buying breast implants for their daughters as high school graduation presents. Every once in awhile my dear wife, who works in an industry with a preponderence of women, will tell me that so-and-so just got a boob job. She will say this as casually as if mentioning what were were having for dinner that evening.

"Why would she do that?' I asked. "I thought she looked pretty good."

"Well, she's had three kids."

"So?"

"Maybe she wants to look better. Improve her self-esteem."

"How old is she?"

"I don't know, 50 maybe."

"Jesus, who's she trying to fool."

"I guess she just wants to feel better about herself."

"If she want to feel better she should get a dog. Dogs always make you feel good."

"I swear, sometimes you sound like a complete idiot."

"I love you too, babe."

Maybe I'm being a boob about this, but I hate fake tits. I hate the mindset behind them, the pathetic attempts by some women to re-engineer their bodies in the hopes that their lives will magically change for the better. That's a lot to expect from bags of saline solution or petroleum byproducts.

Maybe I'm a dumbass, but why are fake tits considered sexy and false teeth are not? Why are fake tits deemed an asset while a prosthetic leg is considered unfortunate? Why are fake tits considered good for self-esteem while a glass eye is basically good for nothing.

I guess I'll never figure it out. Ah, well, whoever said, Vanity, thy name is woman, might have been on to something. Wait a minute, the doorbell just rang. I hope it's FedEx. I recently ordered a Swedish Dick Extender on the Internet and it due to arrive at any time. Gotta run.

Benny Jay: Track Talking

Oh, man, life is good. I wake to a bright, sunny day -- a little cool, but not too windy. Perfect weather for the opening of the outdoor high school track season.

Other folks welcome spring with the crack of a bat against a baseball. For me, it's the echo of a starter's pistol -- 'cause I just love track `n field.

I drag my bike out of storage -- haven't used it since November. Stop by the bike store to fill the tires with air, and bike down Lincoln Avenue to Ainslie Street and over to River Park for the Mather High School meet.

It's a big field filled with kids wearing uniforms in all shades of yellow, green, gold, blue and red. It's too warm for my wool cap, so I replace it with a baseball cap and raise my face to feel the rays of the sun.

Right away I'm looking for someone to talk to, 'cause for me half the fun of watching sports -- any sports -- is talking. I don't know if university researchers have done any type of sociological study on this topic, but for some reason track seems to draw the best talkers: Older guys, forty to sixty, standing on the sidelines, stopwatches in hands, talking politics, weather, the Bulls, things we should have done in our lives, girls we used to date, fights we won and/or lost, and, our all-time favorite: Why things were better back in the day.

I spot Alonzo -- pay dirt. In the pantheon of great guys to talk to while watching a track meet -- an illustrious list that includes Daddy Dee, Ray and Lavinia's Uncle John, just to name a few -- Alonzo is right at the top. It would be an interesting study to see who talks more -- him or me. I say me. But, then, I'm biased.

It's Alonzo's first meet of the year -- his daughter just finished basketball -- yet he's already in mid-season form. The truly great ones don't need a warm up. Within a few minutes, we're well into an intricate and passionate discussion about coaching strategies in a girls high school basketball game we saw about, oh, 15 months ago. I'm telling you, this is serious stuff.

While we're talking, the hurdlers take the track. I love the hurdle races at the Mather meet -- it's like a demolition derby. This being the first outdoor meet of the year, a lot of coaches are experimenting, just to see if they have anyone who can actually compete. I mean, some one's got to do it. A lot of these kids have probably never even seen a hurdle in their lives. Coach's fed them a line: "I think you'll be good at -- you got the body for it. Try it, you'll like it...."

The wide-eyed rookies take off with eager determination, running as fast as they can, and then -- wham -- they crash into that first hurdle, hit it hard, cause, let's face it, this is way harder than any coach will tell you. By the time they get to the final hurdle, they're practically limping, ankles and shins screaming in pain, and looking like they can't wait to quit. As in retire from sports, go home, have a cold one and watch it all on TV.

At last year's Mather meet, there was a boy -- I think he hailed from Roosevelt High School -- who crashed over the final hurdle, landed on his face and just crawled off the track. On the sidelines, the other old timers and I were yelling: "Finish the race, finish the race!" As in, back in the day we woulda never have walked off the field. The boy said: "Fuck this shit." Daddy Dee and I busted out laughing when he said that -- laughing so hard, we damn near fell over. "Fuck this shit." What more can you say?

It reminded me of the time I came in dead last in a high school cross country meet. As I came around the back stop, head down, wheezing in agony, for the final fifty or so yards, I saw David Simms, a kid from my freshman algebra class. He had his wry smile, almost a smirk, as he watched, like he was enjoying my misery. Within a week we were best of friends. Later he explained that he had thought I was stuck up 'cause I came from the richer side of town. But after he saw me running dead last, he figured I was no better than anyone else. So you see, there are some benefits to finishing last.

I'm all set to tell Alonzo the story. But we get sidetracked by a coach who wants Alonzo to give some avuncular advise to a great runner who's goofing off in class. The kid comes over and Alonzo -- a former track coach himself -- talks about how life is short and you have to make the most of it and if you have the gift of speed that you have -- well, son, you got to run your race! The whole race -- class work too.

It's a great speech. Has me fired up. Wish to hell I had someone like Alonzo pumping me up way back when.

By then the meet's over and the sun's going down an the wind picks up. Typical Chicago weather, changes on a dime. I replace my baseball cap with the knit one.

Alonzo and I walk over to my bike. We're still talking. His daughter, Ashley, stands off the side, patiently waiting. I can see she wants to go home. Just as I say, "I'll let you go," I remember that I never got around to telling him about running last in cross country. Oh, well, I can save it. We have another track meet in week. I'll get to tell him all about it then.

Big MIke: Not Angels, Not Gods, Only Humans

Sports media types, led by the ESPN frat boys, are wearing the mask in the aftermath of Los Angeles Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart's death Wednesday in a car crash. The TV sports suits have toned down their normal snarkiness, putting on somber faces and wondering on-air, What It All Means. By Monday, they'll have returned to considering some scrub's sore elbow with all the passion and gravity of international public health officials discussing AIDS in Africa. Right now, though, they're behaving like 12-year-olds at a wake, as they should.

The death of a 22-year-old kid at the doorstep of what could have been a long big league career is rightly seen as a sort of tragedy. But it wasn't the only tragedy in the Angels' world this week. A young man who'd attended the team's home opener on Monday was killed in a fistfight as fans poured out of the stadium following the game.

According to a report in the LA Times, a poor sap named Brian Powers was involved in a melee with another man in a stairway leading out of the bleachers. As the two grappled, a third man slugged Powers from behind, causing him to fall and hit his head on the concrete. He died about four hours later. Neither of the other two men involved in the fight has been found.

Too bad Powers wasn't a righthanded pitcher possessing a good fastball and even better curveball and change-up, as Adenhart was. Because he lacked those vital assets, Powers' demise was noted only in a 185-word blip of a story in his hometown newspaper.

That's an apt little juxtaposition for this Easter weekend. Even though we're nearly three centuries past the Age of Enlightenment, we're still held in sway by messianic figures. We view big league athletes as gods descended from the heavens. When they deign to saunter into a restaurant or a Starbucks, the other patrons feel as though they've been blessed. They'll talk about the sighting for the rest of their lives.

Athletes aren't the only ones we revere, of course. Movie actors and pop stars are equally venerated. Study the coverage of Angelina Jolie, for instance, and you'll come away convinced that when her time on Earth is at end, she'll be assumed into heaven rather than experience something as mundane as merely dying.

Since I'm constitutionally incapable of being anything but contrary, I've repeatedly resisted the urge to fawn over celebrities. Once, I took my mother for lunch at Water Tower Place. After we ate, we strolled through the shops. In Rizzoli bookstore, I noticed a familiar-looking man walking in the front door. It was Sonny Bono with his daughter Chastity in tow. I immediately put on my own mask, that of blase cool, and nudged my mother. "Look who just walked in," I said, casually, as if it was her next door neighbor.

Ma's face lit up. She dashed toward the man with all the agility of a woman one third of her age She extended her hand and Bono shook it. Poor Ma. In all the excitement, she couldn't think of his name.

"Aren't you..., um..., uh...," she fumbled. Now she was panicked. "Oh dang it, aren't you... Chastity's father?"

Sonny Bono rolled his eyes slightly, then recovered his poise. He nodded. Ma came back to me humiliated. I'll bet she still remembers the incident and cringes.

Years later I was living with my old pal Frisbee Sid. While a student at Evanston Township High School, Sid was pals with classmates John Cusack and Jeremy Piven. He claimed to have worked with them on ambitious theater projects even as they were teenagers. Sidney crowed about his Cusack/Piven connection well into his 30s, implying often that anytime he so desired, he could pack up and move to Hollywood and become a member of their clique.

One day, Sidney called me in a state of near frenzy. He was at the Third Coast Cafe on the Near North Side, sitting with none other than John Cusack and Jeremy Piven. The Third Coast was my writing headquarters at the time and I was headed to the joint anyway. "Hurry up," Sidney almost yelled.

I walked into the place with a distracted look on my face, as if I were contemplating only the literary gems I was formulating in my head. Sidney, Cusack, and Piven sat at the bar/counter. Sid, rather unsuccessfully, was attempting to hide a case of hyperventilation. I took my sweet time setting up my laptop at a table in a far corner of the place. Finally, I moseyed over to the bar/counter. Sidney was clearly thrilled to be able to introduce his two buddies to me. "Big Mike, this is John, that's Jeremy," he said, grinning.

It was a dead heat as to which of the three of us looked most bored. I shook their hands with all the vigor of a man meeting his ex-wife's new husband. Rather than stand around and ask the two what it was like to have descended from the heavens, I quickly excused myself and retreated to my laptop, clearly conveying the notion that I was hard at work on next year's Pulitzer prize-winning novel. In truth, I placed my fingers on the keyboard and stared at a blank screen for ten minutes.

I suppose it's in our genes to adulate and idolize celebrities. Sometimes we go so far as to elevate them to a divine status. Silly, isn't it? So silly that we trip all over ourselves mourning the death of a baseball pitcher while ignoring the death of some poor schmuck fan.

So this Easter weekend, rather than celebrate the mythical resurrection of a messianic figure, I'll do my best to remember a guy named Brian Powers. He was a nobody.

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...

continued below the images

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.

continued from above images

... 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.

Benny Jay: A Couple of Old Goats from Gary

It was Milo's idea to get together with Monroe -- I merely set it up.

I've known Milo since forever and I've known of Monroe for at least as long. When I moved to Chicago back in 1981, Milo and his wife, Sharon, lived in the downstairs flat. Monroe was writing for the Tribune.

They both come from Gary, Indiana, which to me was nothing more than a stinky stop on the train going east to Washington, D.C. In fact, pretty much everything I know about Gary, I learned from Milo. He told me all about it, while we sat on the front porch watching the people walk by. He'd be smoking cigarette after cigarette and telling me story after story. He had dozens of stories about Gary's quirky characters and the oddball things they did. I loved listening to Milo's stories about Gary -- though I didn't care for the cigarette smoke. I'd tell you a few of them, but I'll leave that to him. He tells his stories better than I can.

Anyway, Milo wants to meet Monroe, and Monroe's game. So we get together at this restaurant in Lincoln Park. I order chicken -- 'cause that chicken is good. I'm trying to eat slow, to make it last longer. But it's hard to do cause it's so tasty -- all juicy inside. Man, I love that chicken.

Milo's explaining how he went to Horace Mann High School back in the mid 1960s. The school board integrated it when he was a freshmen -- he's not sure why -- and all these black kids came in. There were daily fights 'cause, you know, what else are black and white kids gonna do but fight?

And Monroe says the idea of fighting white people never crossed his mind -- even though he came out of Gary at roughly the same time -- mainly because there were no white people to fight. He went to Roosevelt High School, which was on the black side of town -- across the railroad tracks, the racial line of demarcation. (I guess the Gary school board wasn't about to send white folks into Roosevelt High.) Monroe says he never even saw white people -- at least up front and personal -- until he went off to college.

Somehow or other they start talking about the Patterson sisters. Turns out both of these old goats lusted after them. "The prettiest girls in Gary," says Milo.

"They were fine," says Monroe.

They also discover they both knew another pretty girl -- named Hirsch. I think they lusted after her as well. They also knew Dr. Yokum. They didn't lust after him -- but his brother is a character in "School Boy," one of Milo's finest novels.

"How can you know the same people if you live on opposite ends of town?" I ask.

"Gary's a small town, Benny," says Milo.

Right there and then the whole notion of blacks fighting whites just because, you know, that's what they do, never seemed so strange.

It reminds me of a street party I attended a few years ago at Cabrini Green. A bunch of old gang bangers from rival gangs got together. They called it Old School Monday -- 'cause it took place on a Monday night.

"Twenty years ago we'd be trying to kill each other," they said, as they hoisted beers and listened to Marvin Gaye blasting over the loudspeakers.

The notion seemed so bizarre they wondered why they ever let it happen.

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.