Letter From Milo: The Bum Gene

Some people inherit great wealth. A select group of inbred Europeans inherit noble titles and vast estates. Some people inherit beauty, brains or great physical skills. Hair color, eye color, freckles, height, weight, even some diseases are embedded in the DNA. Every generation inherits something from the previous generation.

In my case, I inherited the Bum Gene.

The Bum Gene, as my similarly afflicted friend, Bruce Diksas, explains it, is the component in the DNA that compels a person to make stupid choices, opting for instant gratification over delayed satisfaction. Faced with a choice between a brief moment of pleasure or doing something constructive, a person with the Bum Gene will choose fleeting pleasure, every time. Faced with a choice between being a productive member of society or giving in to your worst instincts, the Bum Gene-afflicted will always opt for the latter, no matter the consequences. In Aesop's fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper, the grasshopper was the one with the Bum Gene.

My father used to enjoy the old Rip 'n Roar. He drank, smoked, gambled, ate red meat, cursed freely and, for all I know, had impure thoughts. If the stories I heard are true, so did my grandfather. And I, to borrow a line from Hank Williams, Jr., am carrying on the family tradition.

I started smoking at about the age of 13. I remember my first drag from a cigarette very clearly. It happened in Jefferson Park, in Gary, Indiana. There was an older kid, maybe 15, named Pete, who offered me a puff from his smoke. It was an unfiltered Lucky Strike and he handed it to me with the admonition, "Don't niggerlip it."

I took a drag, held it in my mouth, then quickly blew it out.

"No, man, that's not how you do it," Pete told me. "You gotta suck it into your lungs. Like this."

Pete showed me how to inhale. and in a moment I was hacking, couching and gagging, while Pete was laughing his ass off. It tasted terrible, burned my throat and made my eyes water. Within a week I was a confirmed smoker.

I started drinking a couple of years later, along with a few of my buddies who had also inherited the Bum Gene. It's funny how people with that particular gene seem to find each other. Anyway, since the drinking age in my town was 21, we had to find older people to buy our booze for us. Then we heard about Mr. Lucky's.

Mr. Lucky's was a bar and liquor store in Midtown, which was the black section of Gary. It was rumored that Mr. Lucky's would sell booze to anyone of any age. Since we were paying a premium to obtain alcohol from older folks, who sometimes marked up our purchases 100 percent, we made the fiduciary decision to try Mr. Lucky's. Since I looked the oldest, easily passing for 17 or 18, I was chosen to make the buy.

There was a large black man behind the counter when I walked in. He smiled when he saw me and asked, "What can I do for you, boy?"

"I'd like two sixpacks of Blatz and a pint of cherry vodka, please."

"You 21?"

"Yes sir."

"Any ID?"

"Darn, I left my wallet in my work clothes, in my locker, at work."

"You a workin' man, are you?"

"Uh huh."

The man regarded me suspiciously for a moment, then said, "Next time bring your ID. We can't be breaking no laws here."

"Sure, no problem. Oh, and can I get a pack of Lucky Strikes, too?"

When I started college, what do you think was the first thing on my agenda? Did I spend my time productively, buying books, sharpening pencils, scoping out my professors, figuring out where the library was? No! My first day at college was spent cruising the local liquor stores, trying to find one that would sell booze to my thirsty, underage ass.

As the years went by I went along my merry way. I was a child of my times, subject to the illicit enthusiasms of my age. I smoked, drank, toked and joked my way through life. The Bum Gene would not be denied.

If there was a party, I was in the middle of it. If there was a card game I had a seat at the table. If there was a joint being passed, it usually passed in my direction. If there was a way to avoid honest work, I found it, most of the time.

Don't get me wrong. A lot of people inherit the Bum Gene and still succeed in life. Ulysses Grant was a drunkard. Bill Clinton was a serial womanizer. Dostoevski was a degenerate gambler. Keith Richards, well, let's just say that he must have inherited Bum Genes from both sides of his family.

In my opinion, the main problem with the Bum Gene is that no matter how much you personally enjoy the condition, the last thing you want to do is pass it down to your children. I've got two lovely daughters and both of them seem to have avoided their father's propensity for the high life, or, more properly, the low life. They are two hard-working, responsible young ladies. I'm very proud of them. But if I ever catch them with a pack of Lucky Strikes...

Editor's Note: Still haven't purchased Milo Samardzija's masterpiece, "Schoolboy"? Whaddya waiting For?

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: 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!

Letter From Milo: Street Fighting Men

I haven't lived in Gary, Indiana since the late 1960's, but the town still has a grip on my imagination. There was a time, in my early teens, when I thought it was the greatest place on earth. It was a crude, tough, smelly, violent town, open 24 hours a day to accommodate the shiftworkers at the local mills and foundries. A person, if so inclined, could find a meal, a drink, a card game, a joint, uppers or downers, or a piece of ass any time of the day or night.

Both my Parents worked odd hours so parental supervision was close to non-existent. I had the run of the streets and I took full advantage of my freedom. I wandered around at all hours of the day and night, going places and seeing things that no 13- or 14-year-old should go or see. My favorite part of town was the tavern district, a wild and woolly neighborhood where anything went. It was a decadent, noisy, chaotic neon wonderland of saloons, greasy spoons, poolrooms, private gambling clubs, whorehouses, pawnshops, and of course, a bail bondsman.

There was even a clothing store I'll call Tom Smith's. It sold the cheapest, ugliest clothes imaginable. The only reason the store was succesful was that it would give anyone credit. Any unemployed mope with a bad credit history could walk into the place, agree to pay 225 percent interest compounded daily and walk out wearing a purple shark skin Nehru jacket, pointy-toed patent leather shoes with Cuban heels, and a stingy-brim hat with a jaunty feather in the band. The only reason I mention the store is because of its garish neon sign. In my opinion it displayed one of the great advertising slogans. It read, Tom Smith's Fashions, Rome, London, Paris, Gary.

As I mentioned, Gary was a tough town. Steelworkers took pride in working hard, playing hard, and fighting hard. In fact, the best street fighters attained the status of local heroes. Their exploits passed down for generations (a Gary generation lasted about five years). Great street fights were recounted endlessly, dissected, and analyzed the way Big Mike and Benny Jay can break down a Cubs game.

"Pete would have had him if Don didn't kick him in the nuts."

"Well, that's part of it. No rules in a street fight."

"That's not the point. Don just got lucky. Pete was kicking his ass."

"Final score is all that matters."

"If they fought 10 times Pete would win nine of them."

"Unless he got kicked in the nuts."

"You're full of shit."

"You are."

"Well, fuck you."

"Fuck you, too."

"You wanna go outside?"

"Anytime, punk."

Every tough town idolized its street fighters. In his wonderful book "Manchild in the Promised Land," the great Claude Brown devoted pages to rhapsodizing about Harlem's storied street fighters. My friends and I would spend hours talking about our local heros - who was tougher, who could kick whose ass, was size more important than speed, how important was getting in the first punch. Street fights were our epics, our Trojan Wars and Waterloos. In our minds, the combatants were idealized and adored, blue collar Achilles and Hectors, who worked at U.S. Steel and drove Chevys instead of chariots.

When I was a kid I could count on seeing a good street fight once or twice a week. But times have changed. I haven't seen a street fight in years. Men don't settle their differences with fists anymore. Nowadays they're more like to settle their disputes with Glocks or assault rifles.

It's a different, more dangerous world. I remember when it all changed for me, back in the early 1970's. I didn't personally witness this incident but I got the story from several occasionally reliable people who claim to have seen it.

Crazy Ray Volk and Skinny Johnson had a beef. They were both infatuated with a go-go dancer who worked in a bar that Skinny Johnson managed on U.S. 20 in Gary. It was a love triangle played out on a very mean stage. The dancer led both men on, apparently enjoying the attention. The two men, however, weren't satisfied with sharing the dancer's, ah, charms. Each wanted her for himself. The they had several confrontations, exchanging insults and the direst threats.

One evening Crazy Ray showed up at the bar with a pistol. Skinny Johnson saw Crazy Ray coming at him and dove behind the bar where, coincidentally, he also had a pistol. Crazy Ray began firing at Skinny Johnson. He must have been drunk because he was fewer than 10 feet away and missed all six shots, firing until the pistol was empty. When he realized that Crazy Ray's pistol was empty, Skinny Johnson stood up and fired twice, hitting Crazy Ray in the chest with both shots. Skinny must have been sober because it was a fine piece of shooting

As Crazy Ray lay dying he uttered a few last words. Legend has it he said, "Damn, I wish I would have brought my other gun with me." RIP Crazy Ray.

If there's a lesson to be learned here it's that street fighters can lose a fight and live to battle another day. Losers of gunfights are generally one and done.

Letter From Milo: A Misspent Youth

It was either Mark Twain or Herbert Spencer who claimed, A proficiency at billiards is a sign of a misspent youth. If that's the case, then my formative years were a colossal waste of time. Between the ages of 15 and 18, if I wasn't in school or at home, I could be found in a poolroom called The Club on 5th Avenue near Broadway in Gary.

At the time I didn't consider playing pool a frivolous activity. In my neck of the woods, learning to shoot pool, smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and acquit yourself honorably in a street fight were hallmarks of a well rounded education. I never did become a good street fighter (something about a yellow streak) but I did excel at smoking and drinking, a skill set that has served me well to this very day.

I also became a pretty good pool player, not great, but good enough to hustle a few bucks now and then. I played all the games, 9-ball, 8-ball, straight pool, rotation, one-pocket, and pea pool but my money game was snooker. At the tender age of 17 I won $52 in a marathon snooker contest against an old man we called The Admiral, because he always wore one of those cheesy yachting caps favored by Elvis and Count Basie.

I lost interest in playing pool around my 18th birthday. There were three reasons I gave up the game:

• I got seriously interested in girls. It's tough enough to get laid under any circumstances, but it's almost impossible when you hang around a poolroom all day.
  
• I had gotten as good as I was ever going to get. I had hit the proverbial wall and rather than trying to break through it or go around it, I decided to avoid it altogether.
  
• I came to the realization that being a "pretty good" pool player would have absolutely no effect on my future. Why waste any more time with such a silly game.

Boy, was I wrong about reason number three.

About 12 years later I was living in Chicago, scuffling to make a living as an editor, proofreader, and freelance writer and failing miserably at all three. Desperate for work, I answered a blind ad in the Chicago Tribune looking for an editor for a sporting magazine. To my astonishment, I got called in for an interview.

Let's call the person who interviewed me Bob. He was the owner and publisher of a group of poorly written, cheaply printed magazines that dealt with fringe sports like archery, table tennis, pinball, and, lo and behold, billiards. The position I was interviewing for was managing editor of Billiards Gazette.

Bob was an odd little man - twitchy, shifty eyed, and affected. The walls of his office were covered with autographed photos of celebrities, like Sinatra, John Wayne, and Raquel Welch but I noticed that all the autographs seemed to be signed by the same hand. He considered himself a titan of the publishing industry, a first cousin to Bennett Cerf. In reality he was a low-rent hustler. His publications were mainly vehicles for attracting advertising revenue. I doubt if circulation of any of the rags was more than 2,500 and those went mainly to the specific industry. I don't recall ever seeing any of them on a newsstand or gracing someone's coffee table.

Still, I desperately needed a job, and running a shlock magazine seemed to be as good a gig as any.

After a few moments of idle chatter, Bob asked, "Do you know anything about playing pool?"

"As a matter of fact I do."

"Are you sure?"

"Why would I lie?"

"To get this job," Bob smirked.

"You'll just have to take my word for it."

"No I don't," Bob said. "I'd rather see for myself. You have to know the game to run my magazine. Let's play a game of 8-ball."

It turned out that Bob had a pool table in his warehouse, a Brunswick that was in pretty good shape. He also had all of the accessories: chalk, hand powder, a bridge, and a rack of cues hanging on a wall. Now by that time, I played pool only four or five times a year, usually on tavern tables and usually when I was drunk. I was still a decent player but nowhere near the cocky young pool shark that I was at 17. I assumed Bob had to be good.

Nervous, I was relieved that Bob won the lag and went first. He broke, ran a few solids but missed a bank shot on the 4-ball and it was my turn. I suspected that he missed on purpose. It wasn't that hard of a bank shot and he seemed to be a better player than that. But the purpose of the game was to see if I could play, not to show off Bob's skills.

"Let's see what you've got, "he said, stepping away from the table.

I took a deep breath, stepped up to the table and played the game of my life. Like Toni Kucoc used to say, I vas in da zone. I didn't miss a shot and some of them were tough. I made long cuts, bank shots, and a combination. I felt like a kid again, on my way to beating some chump out of a few bucks. When I leaned over the table to line up my final shot, Bob reached over and picked up the 8-ball. He looked at me, nodded his head in approval and said, "When can you start?"

I ran the magazine for nearly a year. It was one of the more interesting periods of my life. I met a lot of pool hustlers, earned a decent buck and heard some great stories. My favorite story concerned Jackie Gleason and Paul Newman.

Gleason was a genuine pool shark. He learned to play as a kid on the mean streets of Brooklyn. As he used to tell it, his skill at pool helped him survive some very tough times. Paul Newman learned to play pool during the filming of "The Hustler," one of my all-time favorite movies. The director had hired Willie Mosconi, arguably the greatest player ever, to coach Newman. Newman actually became a pretty good player under Mosconi's tutelage. Unfortunately, he wasn't as good as he thought he was.

Shortly after Gleason's death, Newman was interviewed by a reporter who wanted to discuss the film and Newman's memories of Gleason. The interviewer asked if he and Gleason had ever played pool for money.

"Yes we did," Newman replied. "And I beat him two out of three games. I won the first two games for fifty bucks each and Jackie won the third game for five hundred."

A classic hustle, if you ask me.

Letter from Milo: The Old Man Misses A Great Game

Most of the people I knew in Northwest Indiana were White Sox fans. It was a geographical thing. Comiskey Park was closer to Gary than Wrigley Field. You could jump in your car and be sitting in Comiskey Park's cheap seats in about half an hour.

One day in the summer of '66 I asked the Old Man if I could use the car.

"What for?"

"Yankees are in town. I wanna see the game."

"Fucking Yankees," the Old Man muttered.

Like any diehard Sox fan the Old Man despised the Bronx Bombers, and for good reason. They regularly beat his beloved Sox, relegating them to second place or worse throughout the '50s and '60s. Some of those Sox teams had records good enough to win pennants in most eras, but the Yankees were always just a few games better, sometimes a whole lot better.

"OK, just drive careful," he said, tossing me the keys to his 1964 Chevrolet Impala.

I was a few months short of my 17th birthday and had just gotten my driver's license. Until I could scrape together two or three hundred dollars for a beater, I had to rely on the family car for transportation. I stopped to pick up a couple of buddies, the Kaiser brothers, Dickie and Danny, and Sandy Bordeaux, who were also diehard Sox fans. We made a pit stop at Mr. Lucky's Tap, one of the places in town that catered to underage drinkers, to pick up some quarts of Schiltz and a couple of half pints of flavored vodka before heading to Chicago and the big game.

We were excited, brimming with nervous energy. The closer we got to Chicago the more excited we became. The beer went down easy and we were tipsy by the time we neared 35th Street. All of us cheered and waved and wished the Sox luck as we passed Comiskey Park and continued on toward the Loop.

Our true destination was South State Street - the Follies Theater to be exact, one of the last Burlesque Houses on what had once been a notorious stretch of strip joints. In the days before "Deep Throat" and "The Devil in Miss Jones," before VHS and internet porn, there were very few places where a horny young man could see naked women. Unless you were lucky enough to have an accommodating girlfriend - which I wasn't - you were restricted to magazines like Playboy which only showed bare tits. To see the real thing, honest-to-God live women, shimmying and shaking, baring luscious tits and fabulous asses to the beat of a four-piece house band, you had to go to a Burlesque House.

We found a parking spot and staggered up to the box office. The scabby old ticket-taker took one look at us and cackled.

"You boys 21?"

"Yes sir," we replied.

"I'd ask for some ID but as you can see I'm real busy right now. That'll be five dollars... each."

"Wait a minute," one of us protested. "The sign says three dollars."

"I know what the sign says. You boys are getting the special price."

We paid the five dollars... each.

Although the theater had a capacity of three or four hundred, I doubt if there were 30 people in the house. There was a noisy group of sailors from the Great Lakes naval base and maybe another dozen scattered men. We had our choice of seats and sat as close to the stage as we could. I believe we were in the second or third row. We had saved the half pints of flavored vodka (cherry and grape) and started passing the bottles. By the time the show started we were happily drunk and giddy with anticipation.

The show opened with a 20 minute movie of a volley ball game in a nudist colony. It was a grainy, soundless movie, and the participants were mainly flabby old men and overweight women with sagging tits and wrinkles in all the wrong places. Still, we were spellbound. It didn't matter how old and unappealing the women were, they were naked and that's all that mattered.

When the movie ended, Dickie Kaiser said, "Hey Sandy, that one woman looked like your Grandma."

"I don't think so," Sandy replied. "The movie was probably made in Sweden. Grandma lives Crown Point."

Then the band started to vamp and it was SHOWTIME.

There were eight strippers on the bill and they all had gimmicks. There was the Tiger Lady, who wore a tiger-striped gown and prowled around on her hands and knees as she disrobed. There was Simone, who wore a French maid's costume, followed by Nurse Nellie and Cowgirl Lil, Queen of the Rodeo.

Sad to say, a couple of the strippers had seen better days. Simone had to be at least 50 years old and Nurse Nellie wasn't much younger. The sailors in the audience were rough on the older women, booing, catcalling, yelling for them to get off the stage. The women were professionals, however, and ignored the abuse. They were troupers and carried on in the grand showbiz tradition of The Show Must Go On.

Although all of the women had gimmicks, their acts finished in the same way. They stripped down to pasties with hanging tassels and skimpy g-strings (none was ever totally nude.) They gave us ample views of their fronts and behinds, then strutted to the side of the stage and covered themselves coyly with a part of the curtain. As the house band hit a crescendo, the strippers took off their g-strings and tossed them onto the stage. The drummer hit a couple of rim shots, the stage lights went dark, and two minutes later the next stripper came on.

After the sixth stripper finished her act there was an intermission while the stage was set up for the comedy act. I remember the act very well because I laughed my ass off. The set was a hotel room and the comic, who the term baggypants was invented for, and his foil, who looked suspiciously like Nurse Nellie, were trying to pack a suitcase. The suitcase was hard to shut. It was overfilled and there was always a shirt sleeve or trouser leg popping out as they were trying to shut it. Here's some of the dialogue as I remember it:

"Oooh, it popped out again."

"OK, I'll stick it in again."

"Maybe if you push a little harder."

"Damn, I got it in the wrong end."

"Maybe we should grease it up."

"How about if you sit on it."

"Oooh, it popped out again."

"Try blowing on it."

"I know, I'll get on my hands and knees."

"Damn, that's a tight fit."

After the comic finished his bit, there was another unremarkable stripper and then the star of the show came on. Her name was Ineeda Mann and the reason she was the star was that she could swing her tits in such a way that her tassels rotated in opposite directions. As far as we were concerned, this was an amazing feat and we hooted and applauded in appreciation. She did the tassel swinging trick a couple of times before finishing her act with the ritual tossing of the g-string. A moment later the houselights came on and the evening's entertainment was over.

None of us realized, as we stumbled out onto State Street, that an era was passing. Burlesque was as dead as Vaudeville. Within a year the Follies Theater would be torn down to make way for condos and townhouses. By 1970 I doubt if there was a Burlesque House left in the City. I sometimes wonder what happened to the Tiger Lady or Nurse Nellie. I hope they weren't reduced to demeaning jobs or the welfare rolls. Although I'm sure that Ineeda Mann, with her unique skills, managed to thrive.

It was time to go back to Gary. There was a problem, however. When I got home the Old Man would ask me about the Sox game. I knew that he had watched the game on TV and would want to talk about it. The guys with me had the same problem. So, we drove to Bridgeport and found a few stragglers still hanging around Comiskey Park. We asked them about the game and they gave us enough information to get by.

The Old Man was snoozing on the couch when I got home. He woke up when he heard me come in.

"Hey, how about those Sox!" He was happy. The Sox had beaten those rotten, no-good Yankees 6-3.

"Tommy John looked real good," I said.

"Yeah, I was watching."

"Pete Ward hit a three-run homer."

"I saw it, barely cleared the fence."

"Smoky Burgess had a pinch hit."

"Shit, I wish I could have gone with you. Must have been a great game."

"Yeah, you would have loved it."

(Get Milo's book, "Schoolboy," now. - The Editors)