Chicago (20 page)

After that the deluge: the
Sun-Times
film critic Roger Ebert went, and wrote a soaring review; music and drama journalists rushed to cover a production hardly any had bothered to attend initially; the oratorio became a popular date destination not only for Chicagoans but for visitors from other states (especially, for some reason, Minnesota); three colleges made it required for coursework; the Chicago public television station WTTW not only taped a performance but aired a documentary about its creation, starring the librettist as witty talking head; the run was extended once, twice, thrice; there was talk of taking the production on the road, and licensing independent productions; and the librettist remembers getting a letter from a Harvard freshman named Peter Sellars inquiring if he could mount a production on a boat in Boston.

In short, the oratorio was a smash hit, and by the middle of August the librettist was, if not a rich man, a man quite sure of his financial security for years to come. A careful soul, he had taken the precaution of preserving both his copyrights and the right to approve and profit from subsequent productions by any other entity, “in any media heretofore known or henceforth invented,” as he said with a smile, quoting from the contract.

He told me this in the stands at Comiskey Park; on a whim he and I had caught a Monday-night game against the hated New York Yankees, who weirdly had hit three home runs but only scored three runs, and lost 5–3, because good old Oscar Gamble had singled in the winning run against the Yankees' terrific relief pitcher Sparky Lyle, who had the biggest mustache I had ever seen on a human being. It was so big it looked like he was wearing otters on either side of his face, as the librettist said. The librettist was in a particularly cheerful mood, which I took to be a result of his professional success until I found out the next day that he too, like the late actress Eugenia in 3C, had given Miss Elminides a check for a great deal of money, with a note saying he was most grateful for her kindness and patience and faith in his work, and she would be doing him a further kindness if she would accept what he viewed as an investment in
her
gift for communal warmth and trust, without which no culture or people can long abide or persist.

 

20.

I DID GO BACK UP TO THE BASKETBALL
court where my nose was broken, a couple of weeks later—partly from stupid defiance, and partly because I had genuinely liked the quality of play there; some of the runs I'd had with Bucket and Monster had been basketball at just about the best I could play it, the sort of games where your skills mesh with the skills of other guys and everyone gets lifted up a level. I loved games like that, when you and your teammates are playing better than you usually are. Games like that are fun, and exhausting, and creative, but there's some deeper thing in them that I don't have words for, quite—some kind of joy, I guess. Games like that get bigger than the score, and you are awfully glad you got to play in them, and you feel a sort of half-conscious vestigial tiny sadness when you play in games that are not at that level. Not
too
much—I mean, ball is ball, and there's never a bad game of hoop, unless guys are preeners or thugs, or “flexers,” as my sons say—but after playing in games at the deepest level you always unconsciously measure the game you're in against the great games, and you never forget the great ones either.

But it wasn't the same, that August. Bucket showed up occasionally, but Monster never returned, and after a while I grew weary of having to endure Not My Fault, whose manic chatter and overweening ego, without the slight cause or reason or excuse for such ego, increasingly got on my nerves. Plus the play seemed chippier, and there were new guys who seemed to be more interested in making statements about manhood than playing the sort of loose fast generous games that I loved. For a while I kept going there because I liked the forgiving rims, and playing with Bucket was so much fun that it was worth dribbling up Broadway on the chance he was at the park, but after one evening when three fights broke out in one game and Not My Fault shot every single blessed time he got the ball, I walked home knowing I wouldn't be back.

Before I left I picked up a pebble from the edge of the court, where the asphalt was crumbling into what looked like cake crumbs, and tucked it in my sneaker. I still have it, too, in a little bowl of talismans from courts where I had been lucky enough to be inside the deeper game—a court in Boston, in a park under elm trees; a court in Brooklyn, where we swept broken glass off the court with huge push brooms before we played; a court in Harlem, where the unspoken rule was all weapons were left with a silent burly man by the gate; and that court in Chicago, where Bucket slid though tangles of guys like he was a shadow and Monster set picks like sudden walls. I played on many other outdoor courts—meticulous new courts, and battered old courts, and courts with grass sprouting from cracks, and courts enclosed in wire mesh, and courts perched along beaches, even once a court composed entirely of close-cropped grass; but I only have prayer beads from a few courts in that bowl, and only the ones from Chicago are black, so when I see them from across the room, or pick them up and smell them like a truffle hunter, I am immediately transported back to that hot crumbling schoolyard court, where I am trailing Bucket on a fast break, knowing as well as I ever knew anything that he will drive right to the basket, and flip the ball back over his shoulder at the last possible second, even as he pretends to follow through on his layup, so that the defender will be taken completely out of the picture, and I will catch the ball and lay it in all in one smooth unconscious motion, and turn to hustle back on defense, and point to Bucket to say thanks, and he will grin that slight small smile, and we will not say a word, and that will be glorious and perfect and unforgettable, and somehow somewhere it will always be a hot evening in Chicago, almost dusk but not quite.

*   *   *

It was back in February when I had gotten into the habit of rising very early to catch the first bus downtown along the lake, the Sound Asleep Bus, driven by the dignified and gracious and eloquent Donald B. Morris, and by August he knew me well, and let me sit behind him in the first seat on the lake side, and I would ask him questions, and he would tell me stories. During the winter and through the spring he told stories mostly about his time in the war, and about religion and the Chicago Bears, his two favorite topics in life. When summer came, though, he began telling me stories about passengers he'd had on the bus, and how he came to be driving the bus, and how driving the bus was like being the mayor of a small town for a little while, with all the conundrums and pleasures of mayoring, such as “One time a
baby
was born on the bus, lady was quite overdue, and foolish me, I hit the curb pulling away by Melrose Street, and she have the baby right in her seat. Gentleman comes up to me
as the bus is moving,
which is against bus rules, and tells me lady having the baby, so we pull over and get some blankets I keep for emergencies and we take care of that. She name the baby Justus. Also a lady died on the bus one time, a
very
cold winter day, two feet of snow, she die somewhere between Belmont and Dearborn, everyone else get off the bus except her. I thought she was asleep but no. I have been asked to marry passengers, which I did not do, but I was honored at the request, which was heartfelt and genuine. We have never had an accident, no. We
have
had flat tires. We have never had fisticuffs, no. We
have
had altercations. Some drivers
very
worried about gunplay and theft and such but not me. I trust in the Lord to care for us. Plus it is
very
early and people not violent before sunrise. I have been driving for twelve years come winter which this year begins on a Wednesday. There
was
a time early on when I was first driving this route when I thought about assign seats, because
some
people very annoyed when someone sit in the seat they think
their
seat, but assign seats is too much trying to be in
control
of things, you cannot
control
all things, you must let things happen, within bounds. So one morning after my regulars are all on the bus I stand up and say we do
not
have assign seats on the Sound Asleep Bus, and we will
not
have them in the furthermore, so do not ask me about this again, but we
will
get along, and we
will
be civil, and we will
not
put bags and parcels on open seats to reserve them, but treat each passenger as you would wish to be treated, which is to say with civil behavior, and this is scripture also of course. I did not say that, because religion is a private matter, of course, but people
know
that, and abide by it, for the most part. This is Dearborn Street. Watch your step. God bless. Go Bears.”

*   *   *

Late that August I had the urge to climb and see the sights again, and I spent many hours sprinting up stairs in apartment buildings and towers, and surreptitiously climbing fire escapes on old hotels and tenements, and taking elevators to the tops of office buildings and trying to figure ways to get out on the roof. I climbed out onto the roof of the old convent around the corner, on what must have been its last days in that form in this world, and while you could indeed see for about a mile in every direction from up there, you could also see some serious holes and worn places, and twice I found tremendous nests, which I hoped were hawks or crows rather than members of the order Rodentia.

I think now that what absorbed me, up on the heights in Chicago, was the sheer geometry of the city—the tumble and jumble of buildings splayed up against each other, at all different heights and volumes, so that sometimes the city looked like a vast array of children's blocks of different manufacture and color and ingredient, arranged by many hands over many years. And each section of the city had a different geometric feel—the near north, where I lived, was mostly buildings of two and three storeys, with the occasional vaulting cluster of condominiums or hotels, all interspersed by the spire of a church or the dome of a temple; the south and west sides were houses and bungalows and cottages and brownstones and sagging wooden flats of two or three floors where large families had lived for a century, succeeding each other every twenty years, the porches and tiny yards and back stoops filled with one language after another, the clotheslines in the alley filled with washing of one culture after another—greens from Ireland, reds from Italy, blues from Poland, orange from the Dominican Republic.

I also climbed trees, where I could find purchase and avoid law enforcement. I surfed tall old elms in Lincoln Park, and sweetgums and basswoods in Grant Park, and oaks in Skinner Park, on the west side—I remember tree-surfing in Skinner Park in particular because it was a day of incredible gusts of wind, and I was at the very top of a tremendous oak, and I was thrilled beyond measure because the tree was whipping back and forth with something like a sapling's silly glee, and I was terrified because it was an old tree and the chance was not infinitesimal that it would snap altogether and I would end up in several pieces in Iowa and Nebraska and points farther west.

It was easy to gain serious height in the Loop downtown, where height was a calling card and a marketing niche, but the vista there was mostly of other tall buildings, so mostly when I was atop roofs downtown I stared out at the sea of the lake, which went on forever east and north, and only dimly suggested a southern shore in Indiana. There was always shipping of some sort on the lake, day or night, and often there was weather out there wholly different than that of the city; more than once I saw a storm on the lake while the sky was clear and calm in Chicago, and once I saw a black wall of weather approaching so noticeably fast that I got down off the roof as fast as I could. That was the old Chicago Board of Trade Building on Jackson Boulevard, a lovely old limestone structure with a roof statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of farming, holding wheat in one hand and corn in the other. The Board of Trade Building was probably my favorite in the city to climb, not only because of its height (it was something like six hundred feet tall), and because it had hosted a famous hundredth birthday party for Abraham Lincoln in 1909, but because it had all sorts of corners and shelving, and very few security guards, and all sorts of odd beautiful sudden sculptures; I would wander out on one of the decks on the upper floors and encounter a statue of an American Indian holding a shock of corn, or notice suddenly, while approaching the building from the north, that there were enormous bulls carved right into the stone, twenty feet over my head.

*   *   *

It was also late in August that for no reason I could tell I was suddenly weary of the city, weary of the dense huddle of buildings, of stone and brick, of jostling pedestrians, of bus exhaust and tangled traffic, of the ubiquitous strut and splat of pigeons, of broken glass and puddles gleaming with oil, of the stench of trash bins and the arrogance of skyscrapers, of broken men slumped on steam grates, of the screech of trains and the grainy dust drifting down from the elevated tracks; and I wanted to be away, to escape just for a day, to sprawl and breathe someplace green and vigorous and silent except for birds and crickets; weirdly I suddenly wanted to hear a grasshopper startle from a tangle of brush along a back road. An odd desire, for I have never been a rural man, let alone an adventurer in the wilderness, but that one day I found myself starving for something not glass and metal and concrete.

By chance Sister Maureen, the leader of the nuns who were moving into the building over Labor Day weekend, was driving to Iowa, to visit her order's motherhouse in Dubuque and explain what was happening with the nuns in Chicago, and she offered to give me a ride out into the country, leave me anywhere I wanted, and pick me up on the way back; it was about three hours to the land of the Meshkwahkihaki, the people of the red clay, she said, and she thought she would leave at dawn and drive back at night, if I didn't mind spending the day on foot somewhere in the country along the way. I told her this was exactly what I wanted, for reasons that were murky, and so the next morning we left the city just before dawn, with a thermos of coffee and a pear each, gifts from the other sisters for the road.