I
In December 1988, very early in our friendship of 35 years, give or take a few when he wouldn’t speak to me, John McClure said something that felt both self-evident yet unknown—in a word, revelatory—until he said it: “People like you and me can’t go home, because we don’t know where that is.” As a midwestern boy from the Chicago area, I had been complaining about being stationed in an eastern time zone for my adult academic life, first at UNC-Charlotte, then at Rutgers, where John taught in the English department along with Bruce Robbins, another new friend and colleague.
Left to right: Jacob, Miles, John, and Mallory (my niece), July 10, 2023
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I thought about his declaration as I made my way to and from Chicago last week, on a visit to meet my brother’s two grandsons, ages 3 years and 13 months (see pic above), to hang out with my girlfriend’s family, which congregates in the city, and, if possible, to record some music in the hand-made studio of Robert Rose, who runs Peregrine Recording on Berteau Street in Elmhurst, just outside of Cook County.
I grew up in Lombard, also in DuPage County, when it was a fledgling suburb of the 1950s, a treeless plain where all construction was new—the oldest structures were the bars, the gas stations, and the movie house, and they always seemed to be in some stage of renovation. Even the train station had been recently rebuilt, in ignorance or defiance of the new expressways (part of the interstate system completed in 1956) that allowed my father’s commute to and from his white-collar job in Bellwood. I left that “hometown” of Lombard involuntarily, when my parents moved suddenly to Wheaton, a suburb further west, when I was freshman in college—I had to call home for directions to the new place, which they found as a way to keep my little brother (yeah, he’s the grandfather) out of “reform school,” what we now call juvenile detention.
It was a typical suburban existence, right down to the detail of insanity induced by the desolation of housewifery Betty Friedan would diagnose in The Feminine Mystique (1962): my mother was driven mad by the routine idiocy of shopping, cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing. So the only real difference between me and my friends, the guys who would grow up to be dumb jocks like me, was that I knew I’d be a writer when I grew up. My first long-form reported opinion piece was a totally fictional trip to Disneyland which I wrote in second grade for Mrs. Resmondo. I was also the illustrator.
The trip to Chicago was a kind of pilgrimage for me. I had invited myself to where I haven’t been welcome, to my brother’s house in Glen Ellyn, where his younger daughter, her husband, and their kids were visiting from their permanent residence in Spain (he plays basketball in European professional leagues). My sister-in-law wants nothing to do with me since I blew up my marriage and alienated my own kids in 2009. That’s perfectly understandable, as is my brother’s ambivalence, or bewilderment, about the repair and maintenance of my moral compass. But for some reason—probably a primitive, deferred desire to claim some stake in my own blood line—I wanted to meet those two little boys. So I pitched the trip to my brother, and he said, OK.
I drove straight to his house in Glen Ellyn from O’Hare, wondering over 15 miles what kind of welcome waited—or if there’d be one. How would my sister-in-law behave, and how would I in her presence? What could we say to each other? Moot questions, as it turned out: she left the premises for the day, a gracious move on her part, I must say. I got to sit around and watch the babies flop like stranded fish in a wading pool, talk to my brother, meet the niece’s husband, and reacquaint myself with her after 12 years of absence from her life, since I was barred from attending her college graduation by my own daughter, who made it known through my brother that she wouldn’t attend if I did.
Andy and I did our Zoom open mic that night from his basement; it’s a monthly event that includes 14 people, off and on, from Vancouver to Toronto and Tennessee, on toward Virginia, then north unto Harlem, where three of us reside. We’ve been doing this since May of 2020, when the bars and coffee shops shut down, but my brother and I were playing together in person for the first time in six years. We did “Independence Day,” the Martina McBride version, and “For What It’s Worth,” Buffalo Springfield (Stills) style—I capo “Independence Day” at 5—in honor of the July Days that celebrate two of the countries that compose North America. I drove to my stepmother-in-law’s place on the Gold Coast feeling pretty good about my visit, and looking forward to meeting my brother at Peregrine the next day.
II
Andy Livingston wearing the washboard, Peregrine Recording, July 12, 2023
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Robert runs a tight ship, because he knows exactly what he’s doing, and he’s got all the equipment his clients need to effect the sounds they want (by my count, 22 stringed instruments, all of which resemble what I’d call a guitar, from a balalaika to a zither, many Guilds among them, not to mention the electric sitar; 4 drum kits, 1 keyboard, 3 tambourines, and an industrial-strength washboard (see Andy bearing its weight above).
Assorted stringed instruments, Peregrine Recording, July 12, 2023
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Plus plenty of amps, microphones, one of which cost as much as a used car in today’s market, cords, stools, and music stands.) But he’s got a light hand on the tiller—he’s open to suggestion, also to whining of the kind I do well in the presence of technological apparatus and skill.
Robert Rose at the helm of Peregrine Recording, July 12, 2023
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We recorded the guitar tracks for two songs I wrote in the throes of personal disaster, one in 1978, another thirty years later, and a third that got written—I use the passive voice here advisedly—more recently, when I made a mistake by moving the shape of a D chord to the third fret and finding a very spooky sound that could be complicated by walking the index finger up three strings per bar. Then I sang the songs with the headphones on, following myself on the guitar and watching Robert through the glass for any cues or cuts.
That third song is called “God Auditions (for Dick Wolfe).” It got written in the voice of a God who wants to understand the strange species he thinks he created, and decides that acting in “Law & Order: SVU” is his best bet, because everybody on earth watches it, compulsively, and seems to learn the difference between legality and morality by doing so. He makes an audition tape in which he plays the role of a sexual predator explaining his vocation. You can listen to it with nothing but my guitar and voice here:
III
I don’t drink anymore, but I can’t stay out of bars, either, not when I’m traveling. Unlike the rest of airports, they’re comfortable, and the music is usually better because the bartender takes an interest, and can switch play tapes if you ask. More important, they’re the right place to learn from perfect strangers, who become more confident, expansive, loquacious—better story tellers—as they finish that second drink. Propositions get personified, ideas get dramatized, “I was” or “It is” becomes “I ‘bout pissed my pants” or “She’ll just spit you out, that one, goddamn, she gets loaded, now you got trouble.”
Right across from American Gate L2A, Terminal 3 at O’Hare, there’s a bar with no name, a place crowded with white leather chairs and stools, white laminate tables, all held up by spiky chrome stilts, so I half expect the “Star Wars” crowd to gather and start grunting. I park my luggage and order a coke from the bartender, the poor guy is caught up in what seems at first to be an argument between two very large dudes, who are talking at each other around a skinny white guy hunched over a Bloody Mary; he’s resolutely still even though the dudes are getting louder, and leaning across him as their gestures get bigger.
I hear the words “football” and “martial arts,” and sense that it’s one of those verbal contests that are interminable because the duelists specialize in different genres— they’re comparing apples and oranges, as we say when we hear people taking up incommensurable positions that produce different domains of fact. The dude on the left is, or was, the football player, the dude on the right is, and very much is, a boxer who used to be a wrestler in college. I gather this much from their conversation.
I turn to the right, and ask, So, you in town for a fight? He says, “Nah, I was just going around to the gyms, seeing what I could learn. From Atlanta, goin’ home in a hour, that’s where I fight, mainly, in the ‘Independent League.’” Is it sanctioned, you know, like officially—you going for a title of some kind?
Deondre Evans, a.k.a. “The Blacksmith,” across from American L2A, O’Hare Terminal 3, July 13, 2023
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“No, I don’t care about no championship.” Why not? I’m astonished, I mean, who does this for fun? I ask him, You make any money doing this?
“A little, here and there, depends on the venue. I got paid in Seattle, Portland, was there last year.” So you do this for the hell of it?
“Yeah, I guess. I’m just learning the science of it now, been doing it for two years. Started with ‘Fight Night.’” The other dude bellows, You say you learn from a video game, what the fuck is the matter with you?
That’s a video game? I ask, And yeah, you learned boxing from a video game? What’s your name, if I may ask.
“Deondre Evans, they call me ‘Blacksmith’ because I’m a beat on you. I know I’m the best, nobody can beat me. You may'‘win,’ you know, by decision, but I’ve never lost ‘cause I learn every time. I get better, gonna win next time I see you.”
Jesus, you got a referee in these fights?
“Yeah, we go three rounds, 3 minutes each, same rules as the WBA, this ain’t no bare knuckle ‘Fight Club’ shit, you know what I’m sayin’? 16-ounce gloves, tape our hands and everything.
“Fight Night’, I was playin’ and losin’ all the time, so I went off and found some videos—yeah, on YouTube—and they started breakin’ down the footwork, and that was the difference, once you see how that works, that’s all it takes, I went back to ‘Fight Night’ and started winnin’, so I said, why can’t I do this for real, you know, like in person? I got the science down, see what I’m sayin’, why not try it, do it out there. That’s what I been doin’.
You got a trainer? “Yeah, welterweight, a little guy, not like me, I go 280, six-one. He’s faster than the super-heavyweights like me, so that helps. He’s got me doing more conditioning, too, so I don’t care how big you are, I’m a beat you. I can take a punch, you see what I’m sayin’? Guy, six-five, about my weight, he’s coming after me, and I let him, I’m teasin’ him with the jab, just flickin’ it out there, like this, you see that, keep him away, and then he catches me with the right, but I don’t blink, and now he’s backin’ up, he’s wonderin’ what he’s got here . . . .
“Hey, man, I gotta go, gotta get that flight, all right, nice to meet you.”
Nice to meet you, Deondre. I’ll look you up on Facebook.
This one was very entertaining Jim. Thanks!
Pete Hamill talks in A Drinking Life about how hard it was to feel that bar sociality was a never-again thing. In some locations, some bars, it might be one of the few places left where strangers form a kind of temporary public where the real conversations across class, race, experience, that a certain kind of high-minded liberal is always hankering for actually happen.