At first we were just PALS, the acronym for the Lincoln
Park library discussion group I was involved with for much of the 70’s and
80’s. G. always admonished me against even casually calling the group a “book
club” because our discussions ranged well beyond the pages of any popular book.
In addition to being a venue for lively literary conversation, we also hosted
some notable speakers, giving them a place to air their more private thoughts -
thoughts they’d reserved for just such an intimate group. My biggest guest-speaker
triumph was Stuart Brent, who talked to us about the state of literacy in this
society. It was one of the last such speaker appearances made by this most
independent of all independent Chicago booksellers.
As I’d found to be the case with most librarians, these
branch librarians were curiously incurious about anything pertaining to
reading. They would only stick their noses in our meeting room briefly to
remind us that we had to vacate the premises by 8:50 sharp, no matter if
Shakespeare himself had reincarnated to appear before us. And mind – “Be sure
to pick up all coffee cups and snack wrappers after yourselves!”
Although the librarians usually operated under the
primacy of such strict time constraints, G. himself never had any such limits. He
was usually late to meetings, but once he got there, he wanted to linger
indefinitely. After the library closed, many of us, aspiring poets and writers
ourselves, would extend our conversation out into the Seminary Restaurant that
then occupied the corner of Lincoln and Fullerton. There we’d get into such
earnest debate about the meaning of life, we’d often have to prolong our
meetings further yet by going to the apartment of one of our nearby members.
G. never invited the group as a whole back to his house.
It would have been so convenient to us, I often wondered why – until I finally
saw the place. When we two had been the last to linger chatting on chill street
corners enough times, G. finally extended a privileged invitation especially to
me. It was to be for lunch the following week. I was intensely curious to see
how this pixilated book-lover lived.
I was in for a shock that first time I entered his inner
sanctum. I immediately saw that G. was a hoarder, although back then, I’d never
heard the word used to refer to a “condition.” This was before there was a TV
show featuring the clean-up and organizing of the homes of inveterate
clutterers. This was before the compulsion was widely recognized as being in
the spectrum of OCD disorders.
There were magazines and books teetering, toppling from
every surface. But mostly there were computers. Well, there were fragments of
computers. Very few were actually up and running. In these earlier days of
computers, most of them were still little more than bulky word processors. However
G. was not interested in doing much word processing, even though in his youth
he’d written a lot of poetry. Now he just liked to tinker with the computers
and all their accessories. He liked to make the ink jet printers spit out
bigger, bolder italics in mauve. He was proud of the early Sinclair computer he
had assembled himself. Such parts and projects were scattered everywhere.
Like most hoarders, he didn’t see much wrong with his living
conditions. He felt he was recycling; he was making use (or would someday) of
all these scraps that other people had so foolishly, so unimaginatively
discarded. He had rescued them for some higher purpose. For example, G. was
gleeful about the use he’d found for all that extra beet juice in cans, all the
liquid that most people just pour down the sink. On the one hand, he’d seen his
threadbare, faded carpet. On the other hand, he had that beet juice. Why not
put the two together? He showed me the spot where he had poured the beet juice
onto his carpet, dying that area back to what he insisted was a vibrant, lush
maroon color. Well, maybe…
He’d promised to make a fabulous lunch for me to
celebrate my inaugural visit. As it turned out, he opened a can of tuna (with
the edgy remains of an electric can opener he’d salvaged). Then we sat in front
of his flickering TV (another salvage) and watched Buck Rogers. Everything
stopped for him when the Buck Rogers TV serial starring Gil Gerard came on the
air. The series was already in re-runs, but G. didn’t mind. He could see each
episode over and over with the same enthusiasm he watched it the first time. His
enjoyment didn’t diminish because he hadn’t ever really seen the actual
episodes the first time around. He’d only seen his own projection of plot and
motive, and he never tired of himself.
So there I was with a clump of tuna fish on a chipped
plate, roped into watching Buck Rogers.
It wasn’t quite my idea of an ideal date, or party, or get-together, or
whatever we were having. But in those days, I was still charmed by G.’s outlook
on life. I wanted to believe, at least partially, in his conviction that we
might all be simulacra, holographic projections of someone’s dreaming. Or we
might be more purposeful. We might all be part of an elaborate drama that some
unseen cabal of mad scientists was staging for their own amusement. Those
puppeteers were apparently very prone to boredom, because they relished setting
all of us to fighting with each other. They contrived all sorts of conflicts. As
soon as they tired of one drama, they’d script a new sensation. And the play
would go on, spinning off in new directions. But in G.’s mind, none of it was
real. No one was really fighting with anyone else; no one was really dying.
It was several years before I really started to become
impatient with such a philosophy. Eventually, I came to see it as just a way of
shirking responsibility. I’d get downright angry when G. would stoutly deny
that the Holocaust had ever happened. He didn’t maintain that for the typical reasons
that “Holocaust deniers” advance. His belief was simply a further elaboration
of his conviction that nothing bad ever happened. None of those Jewish people
were really dead. They had all just been temporarily ushered off into the wings
by some Master Manipulator. They were all still there, waiting to come back on
stage to play different roles for the entertainment of that experimenting
psychologist in the sky – as were we all.
But this belief relieved G. of any social involvement, of
any obligation to spend his time on this earth trying to make it a better
place. He could be content to just tinker, to stay in his merry mishmash and
turn the print-out generated by his rejuvenated printer from mauve into shocking
pink.
He cluttered the outside of his property as much as the
inside. He took special delight in rescuing discarded stuffed animals he found
in the alleys and arranging them around his yard in various tableaus. Come to
think of it, this might have been his way of becoming a minor sort of Master
Manipulator himself. At least within the confines of his rickety fencing, he
was staging the play, he was casting the characters in kinder, gentler
relations. Except for Kermit the Frog. He had found a bedraggled stuffed
version of Kermit and proudly hung it from a rope off the crumbling sill of his
second story window. G. fancied the frog was rushing forth in eager greeting of
visitors. But it looked to me as if, thoroughly beaten by life, Kermit was
hanging himself. However such was the power of G.’s ability to project his own optimism
onto the world, that he would never have seen Kermit as a suicide.
I got into the spirit of this collecting. Whenever I saw
a child’s stuffed animal thrown on a garbage pile, I’d snatch it up and bring
it to G. One day, just before G.’s birthday, I scored a real coup. There was an
enormous panda, bigger than I am, propped against a dumpster. It was rather
stained, with what childish excretions I could only imagine. But that sort of
thing never bothered my friend. I wrestled the huge bear into my hatchback. Since
we were both inveterate night owls, I drove over to his house to deliver the
big hug of a bear to him at two in the morning, confidant that he’d be up and
chipper at that hour, ready for any adventure that might present itself.
When I first met G., his neighborhood around Halsted and
North Avenue had been a sketchy area that cab drivers were loathe to go to at
night. G.’s rickety house fit right in with the general deteriorated state of
the street then. But in the 80’s, the area had rapidly gentrified. G. suddenly
found himself surrounded by upscale restaurants, boutiques, and theaters. A
ragtag person now stood out in these surroundings and could be assumed to be a
non-resident.
A squad car drove up just as I had tugged the panda out
of my trunk and was attempting to walk it across the street. The police paused
suspiciously and shone a flashlight at me. I wondered how on earth I could
explain myself if they started to question me. Why would anyone be waltzing an
immense besmirched panda across Halsted Street after midnight? Was this perhaps
my outrageous way of concealing a mother lode of narcotics destined to be cut
and sold outside the nearest school playground? After a few moments though, the
police apparently decided I must be engaged in some harmless eccentricity, and
they rolled away into the night.
G’s house stood out for reasons other than the fact that
it was no longer in keeping with the circumspect wealth-behind-frosted-glass atmosphere
that the street had come to represent. G’s rickety relic was one of that
minority of old frame houses that somehow hadn’t gotten placed at the new
elevated street level when most Chicago buildings were hoisted to rise above
sewage effluent. As a result, what might once have been G.’s first floor and
front yard were now below sidewalk level. With his usual unshakeable
positivism, G. viewed what some might have perceived as this unruly pit of a
front yard as a “sunken garden,” an added touch of opulence that he was sure
made his property extra valuable.
You had to traverse a plank suspended about eight feet
above this chasm to get from the sidewalk to what was now G.’s front door. This
plank, like the rest of G.’s life, was always in dangerously bad shape. But G.
protested vigorously against the idea that it posed any hazard. Didn’t he keep
that plank in perfectly good repair, what with the strips of rubber he’d pasted
down at intervals along its length – tire peelings that he’d found along the
shoulders of roadways?
So once again on this late night visitation, I walked the
plank to G.’s doorbell. I rang, with no confidence that it would issue any
alerting sound. G. was always experimenting with alternate ways of wiring and
cross-wiring his many phones and electric apparatuses. Consequently, he was
usually left huddled inside under a few guttering lights, with no way of being
reached by ringing anything ostensibly connected to his house. This time proved
to be no exception. His doorbell was obviously out of commission. I was forced
to walk the plank back and go around so I could knock on one of his side
windows.
Aha! That raised him. I heard a furtive scuttling inside
and got back to the front door just as G. was cautiously opening it a crack.
When he saw it was me, bearing a bear – his slightly watery blue eyes lit up
with a warming Irish twinkle. There was no gift that could have pleased him
more than this stained panda I had in tow. I thought of a song sung by Rod
Stewart to the accompaniment of a sensual MTV video that asked, “Who else is
going to bring you a broken arrow? Who else is going to bring you a bottle of
rain?” And to whom else besides G. could I bring such a thing, with the
assurance that it wouldn’t be viewed as a disgusting discard, but rather as a
rare offering filled with magical imports?
The panda got a place of honor in G.’s sunken garden,
among all the other stuffed and grittily stifled members of his animal family.
I was to see it out there rain or shine on all my future visits, getting more
stained with each passing year, but bravely holding its post under the weedy tree-of-heaven
that G. kept chopping back, but that, also with brave persistence, kept growing
to sidewalk level. However, on that night of the panda’s introduction to its
new home, we were all as pristine as we’d ever be. G. welcomed me in for a
feast. He didn’t open tuna this time. He was on a strict Pritikin diet kick,
which he interpreted to limit him to eating bulgur. So he heated up a bowl of
bulgur for me in the old microwave he kept running by plugging its holes with tin
foil. Yes, he assured me, it actually WAS all right to put metal in a microwave
that way, as long as you kept it out of the directional of the unit’s
magnetron. Or something like that. And miraculously, this time at least,
nothing caught fire.
We literally talked of cabbages and kings that time. The
cabbages were also high on Pritikin’s list of approved foods, while the kings entered
the conversation in connection with G.’s observation of the splayed deck of playing
cards he had in front of him. He called my attention to the mysteries lying
latent there in the pictures on the cards. G. had his own theory about who that
King of Diamonds represented. No, he wasn’t holding an axe behind his back, as
so many historians claimed. It was an attacker sneaking up on him. We were
seeing the oblivious King in the seconds just before he was about to become the
victim of a murder most foul – just before he was to be whacked. Someone who
envied his power and possessions was about to give him the axe. G. could
identify with the King’s plight, because he also often felt he might be the
target of envious others up and down the street.
I soon learned that G.’s compulsion, like that of many
hoarders, came with a good dose of paranoia. He lived in fear that people were
just cultivating him in order to gain access to all the obvious valuables he
had. When a scruffy alley cat he’d adopted disappeared out the door for good
one night, G. was sure the creature had been abducted. He was sure his
neighbors had been watching him, burning with envy at the sight of his
beautiful cat. Finally able to restrain themselves no longer, they had lured
the animal away. Of course there was no possibility that the hapless creature
had simply left for greener pastures or gotten run over.
G. went on to talk about his real-life role model, Nikola
Tesla, the “mad scientist” who, in the early part of the 20th
century, gave startling public demonstrations of his experiments in harvesting
energy from “empty” space, and in projecting energy wirelessly over vast
distances. Tesla had reportedly rocked distant buildings to their foundations
with the energy waves he’d loosed upon the world. G. had briefly taught
electronics and knew all about Tesla’s more serious, grounded inventions, such
as his advance of alternating current against Edison’s insistence on direct
current. Still, it was the wilder side of Tesla that G. naturally identified
with - his assertions of being hot on the trail of making telepathic
communication a reality and of communicating with space aliens.
G. abandoned most of his ambitions at the tinkering
stage. But there was one practical project that G. actually finished, one that
might have been partially inspired by his interest in Tesla. A few years after
that initial visit in his house, G. bowled me over by presenting me with
something that was actually presentable. He gave me a Theremin. He’d built it
himself, from discarded parts - naturally. But it was newly assembled and ready
for use. A Theremin is an exotic musical instrument. It was invented by Leon
Theremin in 1920, but it’s right in tune with Tesla’s experiments in exercising
“power at a distance.” You don’t have to actually touch anything to play a
Theremin. You just wave your hands in the air in its vicinity – and you can
produce a quavering, eerie series of sounds. Whenever you see any Grade B movie
of the 50’s involving space aliens or ghosts, you can be fairly certain the
accompanying sound track is employing the metallic vibrato of a Theremin.
Before he let me walk out his door that time with that
unexpected completion of an instrument, we had a good time taking turns waving
our hands dramatically around the Schrödinger-like little black box of the
thing. We waved together and danced around the Theremin (as much as anyone
could be said to dance in those close, clustered quarters). We made strange music
together. But it was those kinds of moments that so enchanted me at first, and
kept me fighting my way back to G., through all his craziness and clutter.
Meanwhile, G.’s true love was always whatever
improvisation he could call a success. And of course, he deemed almost all his jerry-rigged
contraptions to be successful. Whatever kind of make-do he flung into the
breach to nominally keep something running, was a triumph in his eyes.
I remember the first time G. allowed me down into his
basement, the most restricted and private part of his generally very guarded
quarters. It was a tour he reserved only for those most trusted in his circle
of acquaintances, a circle which by that time had pretty much shrunk to a party
of one – me. Even though I’d known G. for over a year by that time, I was still
a little fearful of following this strange man into his basement. But I warily
braced myself and groped my way down the inevitably rickety steps to the
foundation of his fantastic life.
As it turned out, the only legitimate fears I need have for
going down there were small ones. The place was even more cluttered than his
upper floor, but in addition, it apparently harbored tinier proliferations – of
mites, fleas, and spores. I immediately began to wheeze; my skin began to
crawl. In characteristic fashion though, G. was cheerfully oblivious to there
being anything amiss down there and I soldiered through the tour he was eager
to give me.
He immediately conducted me over to his premier success
story, the wash machine his mother had bought when she was married and which,
over sixty years later, he congratulated himself on having kept perfectly
functional. Of course its agitator had long since ceased to agitate. But no
matter. Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he triumphantly pulled a
toilet bowl plunger out from behind the machine, and showed me how he manually supplied
the requisite pumping action to harry the dirt out of the clothes he jammed in
there. Why buy a new washing machine when there was nothing essentially wrong
with this one?
He felt the same about his car, the 1967 Chevy he had
crammed into his garage during the first years I knew him. The car was
similarly bristled with Rube Goldberg contrivances that kept it running. The DIY
repair I liked best, the one that always made me laugh when I thought about it,
was the one he’d made to keep his windshield wipers operating. Since the
electrical power to them had long since been severed, he had rigged a rope
running from them, through the slightly bent-out-of-shape wing window on the
driver’s side. He had only to repeatedly pull on that rope to make the wipers
sweep off whatever rain or snow was falling. And really, this arrangement was ever
so much better than the original set-up which had been dictated by the car’s
electrical system – didn’t I think? This way, G. was in control. He proudly
showed me how he make the windshield wipers move as fast or as slow as
necessary, just by how rapidly he tugged on the cord.
G. didn’t often venture outside his neighborhood. He
always insisted that I lived much too far away for him to contemplate visiting
me. He never considered that the ease with which I made it to his neighborhood
might work both ways. I privately thought he might have a touch of agoraphobia
to go along with his other phobias. But he did visit me and my mother a couple
of times, when he still had the car. I have an indelible memory of him
navigating away from our house one rainy late night - his right hand on the
steering wheel, his left hand pull, pull, pulling, on that windshield wiper
cord. Off he went, a cheerful Santa at the reins of his sleigh.
Soon after that, his car became permanently imbedded in
his garage, incapable of being moved in less than several hours lead time
because of the accumulation of junk that barnacled its sides. During the years
it was stowed in there, most of its remaining wiring got gnawed away. Its tires
went flat, and its roof became notably concave with the weight of all the
additional stuff stockpiled on top of it. But G. still insisted it was a
valuable antique that he wouldn’t let go of for less than top dollar. Now it
probably would be valuable. But back then, I couldn’t share his conviction of
its being an “antique classic.” Miraculously though, he did eventually find a
buyer for it. Although come the moment of the tow truck, he almost wasn’t able
to relinquish it. But he did.
That sale left him with only his succession of salvage
bikes as a means of transportation. He couldn’t go any farther than the wobbly
wheels of these vehicles could carry him. Still, he did manage some amazing
feats of cartage on just two wheels, even though most trips included the delays
attendant upon one, or both bicycle tires going flat. Once he even balanced a 32-inch
screen TV on the handlebars of his bike, all the way home from the thrift store
he haunted a mile or so away. He also bragged about the enormous tonnage of
Pritikin-approved food he was routinely able to haul away from the nearest grocery
store on each run.
But G.’s social circle didn’t shrink as a result of his
lack of wheels. It actually started to expand again. As his neighborhood became
a more and popular destination for Yuppies, the restaurant next to him had to
hire parking valets. G. and the predominantly Spanish-speaking valets proved to
be natural allies. They were outsiders together in this brave new world of condos
decorated with faux coach lights. G. fancied that he could speak some Spanish,
although in a rare moment of accurate self-appraisal, he once joked that
although he’d studied dozens of languages, including ancient Egyptian – he
really didn’t know any language well enough to speak it. Including English,
haha.
I don’t know if some of the valets might have made mild
fun of this “dotty old man” behind his back. But they were always polite to his
face, and if they did privately think him a bit ridiculous, he never suspected
it. For a while, he brought old chairs out in front of his house for the valets
to sit on, but that accommodation was short-lived. The restaurant owner didn’t
like the look of his valets lounging around out there. It made it look as if he
was running a lax establishment. He ordered the valets to stand at the ready at
all times.
But G. continued to slip snacks to them sometimes,
although these still usually had to be something bulgur-based, and therefore I
thought it likely he was imposing repeated tasks of discrete disposal on the
valets. Overall though, G. and the valets formed a convivial coterie. G. would
actually stop talking long enough to learn a little of the men’s lives and
ambitions. He took an interest whenever one of them announced a birth in his
family – either here or in Mexico. Each of these new arrivals would send G.
delving back into his treasure trove to come up with some trinket he thought
the infant might enjoy – a musty copy of Wind
in the Willows or one of those stained, stuffed animals. These probably
went the way of the bulgur.
When one or the other of the young men was able to save
enough money to go back to Mexico and support a family there, G. would
sometimes keep in touch. He even managed to send off an occasional note to that
distant land. The main purpose of these missives was still to exercise his
rejuvenated printers to render type in a hodge-podge of as many colors, sizes,
and fonts, as conceivable. Any actual communication was secondary.
Nevertheless, some information did get exchanged. G. learned when the wife of
one of the former valets had twins. He learned when one of them managed to buy
a “top-of-the-line” juicer and start his own business selling smoothies and
chilled fruit drinks from the cart he pedaled up and down the streets of
Monterey. Congratulations! The young man had moved up in the world to become an
entrepreneur himself. He could sit down with impunity, on his bicycle cart, as
long as he wanted to now.
Since G. had this social outlet, I didn’t feel quite so
guilty when I eased off answering his calls. More and more, I would let my
answering machine pick up, and then wouldn’t get around to returning his call.
I still phoned G. on the dot of midnight every New Year’s in order to foolishly
honk some horn at him. Or, I should say, I would try to phone at midnight. I almost never could get through until
well after the hour though, because G. would have experimented with hooking up
his phone line through some fantastic series of intermediaries. He was sure
these elaborate riggings would get him “better reception,” whereas in actuality
they rendered conversations with him a crackling series of disjointed syllables,
probably reminiscent of early trans-Atlantic calls.
Our conversations became trying for me for other reasons
though. G.’s paranoia was carrying him farther and farther out to sea. He
thought his neighbors, principally the theaters that had moved into the
district, had mounted their own electrical experiments against him, setting
their neon lights expressly to create interference with his power supply.
Although he generally kept up polite enough conversation with the neighboring
restaurateur, G. privately thought that individual had aimed the downspout from
his gutter so that G.’s basement would get the brunt of water run-off. Finally,
G. turned off all heat and water service to his house so he wouldn’t have the
likely hostile intrusions of meter readers coming onto his property every
month.
He sank back further and further into repetitions of his
theory of simulacra and also of how he had conquered his youthful bouts of
depression by swearing off smoking, wild partying, sugary-starchy foods, and
mostly by embracing the visitation he’d had from God. I got to the point I
didn’t want to hear it any more. I didn’t answer his last call.
When I hadn’t heard any more from him for a few months, I
thought I’d take another of my late night drives over there. I expected to see
the usual guttering light coming from his kitchen window, at which point I
thought I’d decide whether or not I wanted to tap on his pane and incur another
all-night fusillade of philosophy, which lately contained fewer and fewer
twinkles of genius. But as things were, I didn’t have to make the decision. Instead
of any flickering light coming from a window, I saw a monitory yellow police
tape flapping across his front door. And I knew.
In the days that followed, I made calls to the neighboring
restaurateur and to a quasi street-person whom G. had occasionally employed to
do yard work and whose cell phone number I had. Between the two of them, I
learned that G. had been found dead in his house, already gone about five days
when the itinerant handyman, suspecting something, had got into the house
through an unhinged, rotting back door. And there was G. He wasn’t buried
underneath his clutter as those phenomenally hoarding New York brothers had
been. But he was embedded in the mess, dying in the embrace of all his
valuables, probably just as he would have wanted to go.
I later heard that a consortium of twenty-two of G.’s surviving
cousins materialized and sold the property to that next door restaurant owner
with the offending downspout. G. had always maintained that he’d been a target
of City inspectors because his neighbors had coveted his beautiful home. In
actuality, only the land in his now thoroughly gentrified neighborhood carried
any value. The presence of the house had actually reduced the value of the
property, because it only had to be torn down, its contents carted off to the
dump. Gone all the computer parts; gone the books and magazines; gone the wash
machine and those stuffed animals and all the other fragments of the elaborate Rube
Goldberg contraption that had been G.’s life.
The new owner raised the property to street level and extended
his restaurant to include an outdoor dining patio on what had been G’s land. It
was about a year before I drove over that way again to look at the transformation.
As usual, I made it a midnight ride.
As I pulled up in front of those old stamping grounds, I
saw the restaurant owner coming out of his place, locking up for the night. We
stopped and chatted a while, reminiscing about what a character G. had been. I
agreed that for all his aggravating habits, he had a loveable quality.
The restaurant owner and I weren’t alone on the chilly
autumn street for long though. I soon saw one other person, a man recognizable
even from a distance, come weaving towards us. Unbelievable! It was a Hollywood
actor, a man whose intense, slightly off-kilter gaze had won him the role of
Zod, Superman’s arch villain in the latest installment of that superhero’s
adventures. By amazing coincidence, I had just rented two other movies
featuring this actor. In both he portrayed a gripping derangement. But at the
moment, so astonished was I to see someone like that making his way towards us in
facilitated double-jointed ease – I couldn’t think of the name of any movie I’d
seen him in or indeed, the name of the actor himself.
But I was spared having to search for his name. As soon
as the actor got closer to us, the restaurateur hailed him over like an old
familiar and introduced me to him. It was Michael Shannon who joined our little
huddle. Shannon has his roots in Chicago theater and often comes back to play
in or cheer on current productions at the Royal George or Steppenwolf Theaters.
He’d also clearly been a patron of Gianni’s, the restaurant we were standing in
front of, because the owner slapped him on the back, congratulating him on how
well his career was going. Since I still couldn’t think of the name of any of
his movies I’d recently seen, I was reduced to just gushing inanely at him. The
encounter reminded me of that episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show in which
Mary is introduced to Walter Cronkite. All she could sputter out was “Nice,
nice, soooo nice to meet you.” I don’t think I was even that articulate.
But Shannon didn’t seem to mind. He was too well
lubricated from what might have been some cast party he’d just attended to take
my ramblings with anything other than polite acceptance. The restaurateur rescued me from my loop of lavished
pointless praise. He took up the slack in the conversation by explaining to
Shannon the occasion of our reverie there on the otherwise deserted midnight
street. He told him all about G., who had been such a maverick fixture on
Halsted for so long.
Although G. was not generally an admirer or a fan of any
living person other than himself, he would probably have been at least mildly pleased
that Zod was there, acknowledging the quirky contribution he had made to the
neighborhood. Next to Buck Rogers, G. had most appreciated Superman’s caped
escapades.
Gianni told how he himself had contributed to G.’s collection
of stuffed animals. He conjured the ghosts of all those bygone furry hanks for
Shannon. The three of us stood there, imagining what had been G.’s proud playpen.
We stood in silent, bleary, slightly baffled, homage to the man who had been such
an integral part of Halsted Street, from its slumlord days to its current
sparkling glass facades.
Then the spell was broken. We wished each other the best
and said our farewells. The restaurant owner and I went to our respective cars.
And Zod veered, a little unsteadily, off into the night, newly regaled with the
dancing, dangling fictions of G.’s life.
As I pulled away from the curb after this fantastic
encounter, I could almost hear the faint wafting tremolo of a distant Thermin. And
the thought - maybe we are just simulacra – holograms – figments of someone’s
imagination after all.
