P.S. (13 page)

“All the citizens of Chicago, not just the politicians or the highway lobby or urbanologists, should make a decision on such projects. There should be public hearings in each ward about a comprehensive plan. Haven’t we had enough of piecemeal measures?

“The State Street Council and their associates are worried about downtown. They should be. At night, you can shoot a cannon and nobody will hear. There may be young black people seeing black exploitation films, but that’s about it. When I was young, that’s where everybody came to have a good time—downtown.

“The big money has drawn up a fantastically expensive and incredibly stupid plan for the central area. It’s jazzy. But they show no interest in what’s happening north of the river or west or on the South Side. The Loop cannot live without the rest of the city. Planning must be for the city as a whole, not something piecemeal.

“They envision the Loop as a garden shopping center, with two levels for pedestrians: a street and an overhead walkway. Oh, boy, can I talk about that! At the Circle Campus are walkways the students hardly use. They’re not protected from the wind and the rain and Chicago’s elements. I know. I’ve walked across them. The students use the ground level only, because it’s protected by the buildings.

“The central area plan throws a few crumbs to the middle-income and working classes. They see the railroad yards south of Harrison for middle-income housing. Superblocks. Superbuildings. They will be nothing more than a jazzier kind of Robert Taylor Homes.”

“Surrounded by us, the people on the outside. The lake on one side, the Loop, and then
us
. The plan has nothing for the people who are worried, the people who are hating, the people who are sick—all of us on the other side of the tracks.”

A STREETWORKER BROUGHT ME TO a conflict going on near a public housing project about to be wrecked. A swimming pool is what the shouting was all about.

There were Puerto Ricans, African American kids of eleven or twelve, Irish, Italian, and an Asian kid or two. The stereotypes and insults were in abundance.

“What would God do in a case like this? What does he look like?” The Puerto Rican kid takes over. “If I were Italian, I’d say God is Italian, because he looks like him. If I were black, I’d say God is black. I’m Puerto Rican, I’d say God is Puerto Rican. Don’t you see? You always want somebody great to feel like you, look like you—so you could feel great.”

“If you were God, how would you handle this situation?”

“Are you crazy? I wouldn’t want the job of God. Never. He can’t do a thing about it. Give that job of God to somebody else, not me.”

The reason Hopper’s
Nighthawks
always astonished me when I visited the Art Institute is that there was an all-night diner down below the Wells Grand Hotel and I recognized those people. The man sitting there eating by himself could be having his big meal of the day, “graveyard stew”—it is toast dunked in hot milk. He could be Sprague, from the Wells Grand, whose teeth were knocked out by the vigilantes during the 1918 general strike in Seattle.

 

EACH OF US—depending on luck, circumstance, or a rainy day—may encounter a work that reveals and exhilarates. For fortunates passing through Chicago, it is Hopper’s
Nighthawks
, quietly exploding on the south wall of the Art Institute. The scissor-faced customer, his seared companion, and the boneweary counterman hold you; the slightly hunched back of the loner, whose face evades you, haunts you forever. Yet, that alone isn’t what Hopper is about. It is the light that is the hero. Or is it the darkness of the street outside? One is artificial, the other natural; both are given equal weight. As Alexander Eliot observed, “The dark is less lonely.” Here are all the open allnite
beaneries you have ever experienced. Here is everyman’s lonesome valley.

You are offered one man’s vision of America, with his profound attachment to the familiar: the city, the town, the countryside (no idyllic landscapes here, the rural past being overwhelmed by the industrial present, the captured moment of change). And it is all luminous. His was the singular American light as distinguished from, say, the Parisian light he had discovered in earlier days.

Whether it be
Room in New York
or
Hotel by a Railroad
or
Sunlight in a Cafeteria
or
Office at Night
or those old houses, the aloneness is deepened by the light. Remote from the person, it would appear—his men and women being so often in shadow and featureless—and concerned with the environment, Hopper overwhelms with a feeling for both. As his persons, in the light, sun or electric, turn away one from another, he is telling us of alienation without uttering a syllable.

The cold of the city was touched by Hopper as by no American painter, before or since. The woman, nude or half-dressed, usually near the window, was his most intimate human.

Hopper once said that truth in art is what’s truly modern, so that “Giotto [could be] as modern as Cézanne.” It certainly makes Hopper infinitely more contemporary than any Now darling you can name. Renewed wonder and humility—the artist’s own phrases—are what he’s all about.

On one occasion, he cited Emerson, regarding an earlier painter: “In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” That goes for Hopper. And all he ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

WAS IT THE CHRISTMAS SEASON OF 1933 I best remember? I had reached my majority. It was a blessed year for other reasons. The Volstead Act had been repealed. Bootlegging was out. Pimping was in. Alphonse Capone, our city’s most distinguished entrepreneur, aside from Sam Insull, had switched from the craft of alkie running to the fine and lively art of Pandarus. His was among the first conglomerates of the flesh. The Lexington, the Winchmere, and God knows how many cribs in Cicero had become a home away from home for the girl from Bloomington, Cedar Rapids, and Fond du Lac.

Small-town madonnas were, by some grotesque alchemy, transmuted into big-town magdalenes. Quicker than a trembling, pimply faced boy could hand over a two-dollar bill. Eros was getting a bad name. Yet, on that Christmas Eve, Virtue triumphed. And the God of Love smiled benignly.

At the time, the Swede from Galesburg was chanting plaintively:

Nobody knows where she’s gone.

 

I know. I found out on that Christmas Eve of ’33. She was a guest at my mother’s hotel. Herod led her up the golden staircase. He was otherwise known as Nick Stassiosous, proprietor of Victoria No. 2, the all-night beanery. He laid five dollars across the desk and said the girl was his niece from Terre Haute. A music student, he furthered informed us. As I stared at “her soft hair blowing careless / From under a wide hat,” he took the key and shut the door behind them. I had no idea he was a music teacher. Were they carols I was hearing? The bells of paradise, perhaps? My Adam’s apple was bobbing wildly, as though some piece of forbidden fruit was forever stuck in my throat.

And where was John the Baptist on this holy night? He was in the lobby, holding forth, roaring, “Woe unto them who call evil good and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter. Isaiah 5:20.” He reached a crescendo: “Prepare, all ye sinners, prepare!” This one was otherwise known as Steve Chch, the Croatian pearl diver.
³
Not only was he penniless; he didn’t have a vowel to his name. He was rich, though, in portents and warnings, shouting out hellfire sermons, Gideon Bible held chest high. There was room at our inn for everybody. Ours were the winking Gospels.

John the Baptist was forever prophesying the world’s end. Yet, his appearance was not that of your everyday nutty sidewalk Jeremiah. No glittering eye of the Ancient Mariner here. (Though he did once work in the galley of a Greek ocean liner and was fired for flinging a dish of moussaka at Aristotle Onassis’s uncle; such was the nature of his religious fervor.) No long black coat or long gray beard. His were the baggy pants of a burlesque comic and glasses thicker than George Zucco’s. (This last, you remember, was movies’ mad scientist.) The fact is he was as cockeyed as Ben Turpin and as myopic as a mole.

Regularly, his fever high, he posted special delivery letters to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Benito Mussolini, and Babe Ruth (who, he figured, also had clout). As well as to Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s prime minister. As well as to Alphonse Capone, who sponsored the biggest breadline in town. (Al, the Good Samaritan, was often applauded by the multitudes as he and his Roman battalion took their box seats at Cubs Park.) For good measure, he sent equally urgent communiqués to Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, and David Lloyd George. He was aware that Pontius Pilate was dead; no letter for him. I am certain his earnings as a pearl diver (five bucks a week plus free blue-plate specials) went in large part toward the purchase of stamps. They were impressively thick envelopes. We were, all of us, in awe.

As fate would have it, John the Baptist was sweating his life away in the kitchen of Victoria No. 2. Nick Stassiosous was his boss; a singularly abusive and exploitive one.

John the Baptist and I had tasted little of life’s forbidden, and thus delightful, fruits. He neither drank nor smoked nor, the other guests were certain, had ever known a woman. I had touched nothing stronger than Dr Pepper. Within one hour,
during this remarkable Eve (Eve?), our two lives were considerably altered.

As Herod and his niece from Terre Haute were engaged in a music lesson upstairs, the chimes from the Tribune Tower sounded “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” “Adeste Fidelis,” “Good King Wenceslas,” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” Though the effect on the pinochle players in the lobby was somewhat euphoric, their thirst was unslaked. Some son of a bitch had killed the last pint. They were still cold, cold sober. Distemper was in the air. Sprague, the journeyman carpenter, and Ed Duerr, the railroad fireman, were passing words. While the Prince of Peace was a-borning. Some celebration. Go tell it on whose mountain?

Enter Prince Arthur Quinn, holding high a fifth of Chapin & Gore. Placing the treasure carefully on the table, he proclaimed, “Merry Christmas, boys.” It was now official. Prince Arthur, son of Hot Stove Jimmy Quinn, was our precinct captain. It was his annual show of appreciation. Aside from Election Day, when Chapin & Gore had the persuasive powers of ward committeemen. Though our guests numbered fifty, they counted for one hundred at the polling place.

Beatifically, he smiled my way. I was, this year, eligible to vote. Poor old Cermak was gone by way of a goofy assassin’s bullet and ever remembered for his martyred mumble to FDR, “I’m glad it was me instead of you.” (Though his English teacher would have flunked him, he is immortal and she is dust.) Anyway, there was still an
X
or two or three to be marked beside the Gaelic names of Big Ed Kelly, Dorsey Crowe, and Botchie Connors.

The smell of sour mash pervaded the lobby and all spirits were buoyed. All except one: John the Baptist. He cried Damnation and predicted Apocalypse. “Woe unto them who
are mighty and drink wine; and men of strength to mix strong drink.” (On occasion, he was suspected of being in league with Mrs. Tooze of the WCTU.) Prince Arthur Quinn, his fedora a Kelly green and his face a beet red, grumbled, “Who da fuck is dis nut? T’row ’im out.” The other guests merely smiled. There were times past when they seriously discussed throwing him out the window. It was only a two-story drop. But propinquity has its way. Though, in the beginning, they had come to jeer, they remained, if not to pray, at least to nod and murmur, “Amen.”

The bottle was passed around. Eventually, it came my way. I hesitated. The men chuckled softly, nodding encouragement. All except John the Baptist. He howled. “No, boy. As the fire devoureth the stubble and the flame consumeth the chaff, so this root shall be as rottenness and their blossom shall go up as dust because they have cast away the law of the Lord of Hosts. Isaiah 5:24.” The words poured forth torrentially. Though I was uncertain as to their meaning, I had a hunch they bode no good.