Let Her R.I.P. - The Art of the Epitaph

I've seen many collections of witty or telling epitaphs, and I've known people who make a hobby of roaming cemeteries to find interesting epitaphs. Sometimes they make rubbings of epitaphs that give funny or historically enlightening send-offs, or that are on the gravestones of famous people. So when my parents died - first my father and then two decades later, my mother - I gave a lot of thought to epitaphs for them. I didn't want to simply have them lying their labeled with their expiration dates.

I think I managed  distinctive, arresting summations for both, summations they'd probably approve. But when I've visited at their separated graves (the cemetery didn't have adjacent plots available), I've found no sign that anyone has ever come over to take a rubbing. That's despite the fact that my father is in a high-traffic, high-visibility area of the cemetery, in a spot my sister-in-law, then a new mother, initially greeted with the enthusiastic relief of, "That's great! It's near the washrooms!" But even though at least one of my parents has such a prime location, no one ever seems to have noticed the epitaphs. No one has ever contacted me to inquire further about their meaning or applicability. So I'll tell the story of them here.

My father lies under the rather jaunty, enigmatic assertion:

The Bright Ones Can Stay Home

That derived from an instruction one of my college professors issued, and that became a byword and family joke among the three of us. I didn't go away to college. I attended the school that had sprung up just down the street from me. There, at what is now Chicago's Northeastern University, my math teacher decided to have a review day for the students who were still lagging.. She said that those who already knew the material needn't attend that class session. Then, less tactfully, she rephrased her instruction as, "The bright ones can stay home."

That had been the only major class I'd had that day, so I indeed stayed home - the whole day. When my father saw me lounging about the house, he was curious. He asked why I wasn't in class as usual. "Oh," I told him, "the teacher is having catch-up review. She said 'The bright ones can stay home.'"

It was one of the few times I ever saw my father laugh with genuine warmth - at something that wasn't simply the slapstick cruelty of a Three Stooges gouge-in-the-eye. He was laughing at the alacrity, and perhaps the downright chutzpah, with which I had assumed myself into that charmed circle of "bright ones." My mother soon caught the hilarity of it. It became a catch-phrase and family joke among us three. After that, whenever one of us was spotted shirking a duty or simply lazing about when there was work to be done, another of us was bound to chide, "The bright ones can stay home, eh?"

When my father died, I thought of our family joke again and realized it could have a larger encapsulating applicability for him. My father had been quite a gad-about in his youth. He'd worked briefly for Al Capone, designing and printing labels for the bottles of booze coming off Capone's distillery assembly lines. My father had been a minor bootlegger himself, greeted as the life of the party wherever he went. He partied all night, every night. He was a high roller living the high life.

But by the time I came along, several decades later, he had completely reversed course. His experience after the Roaring 20's dwindled to a beaten growl soured him on people. As soon as Prohibition ended, he was persona non grata among all his old pals. He realized how empty all those old associations had been. They'd never wanted him - only the booze he brought. He turned his back on going places and seeing people. He became something of a hermit. He was content to stay home in the circumference of our family printing business. Since we had our business attached to our living quarters, that meant he hardly ever traveled farther than the little candy-and-cigarette store at the end of our block.

Although he wouldn't have recognized or acknowledged any "exotic" philosophy such as Buddhism, he in effect became an advocate of the wisdom of staying home in contentment with and appreciation of whatever a person had in the here-and-now. Unlike most youths who at least initially want to fling themselves out into the larger world, I was generally disposed to follow that more inner path myself. Oh, after high school, I would occasionally become roused by a notion to go somewhere other. I once saw an invitation to Americans to attend college in Japan and I actually started to make serious plans. I got a book on the Japanese language and made lists of "things to take."

My parents would have supported any decision I made, but my father was a little deflating. He wondered why I would want to go all the way to Japan when there was still so much of Chicago I hadn't seen. When I would argue my case in favor of Japan, he would say, "Yes, but have you seen 55th and Halsted?" I really don't think he knew or had any interest in what was at that particular Chicago intersection. I think he just chose the spot at random, perhaps because that conjunction of number and name had a certain poetic ring to it.

I groaned, and continued to champion the advantages of Japan, but much more feebly. I could see his point. In the end, and with quite some relief at not having to go through the trouble of packing and departing, I did stay home and happily attended the college in my neighborhood. But "55th and Halsted" became another catch-phrase in our household, advanced whenever one of us started to entertain some infatuation with the far-flung, instead of pursuing a more deep, abiding familiarity with our own home ground.

So in the end, "The Bright Ones Can Stay Home" seemed the most apt way to summarize my father's last, best philosophy of life.

I'm not as pleased with the epitaph I finally settled on for my mother. It too has a certain summary aptness, but it has a cynical, sour cast that perhaps shouldn't be a person's parting shot to the world. I often think of having her stone re-carved with a more upbeat afterthought, but in the end, her stone will probably remain as it is.

My mother majored in languages at Northwestern University (which is east of the misnomer Northeastern I attended). She especially enjoyed her Spanish classes and the classical Spanish poetry that was assigned reading. She memorized some of the stanzas of Romantic poet Adolfo Becquer, and remembered them. In lieu of lullabies she would soothingly recite them to me years later when I was a child….

             "Volveran las oscuras golondrinas

              en tu balcón sus nidos a colgar,

              y otra vez con el  ala a tus crystals -

              jugando llamaran."

Freely translated, that says, "The black doves will come to hang their nests on your balcony and will once again call to you, playfully tapping with wing on your windows."

I was moved almost to tears just a few years ago when (against anything my father would have wholly approved), I took a whirlwind tour of Spain. Our guide was a young woman, seemingly barely out of college. So I had no hopes of her having any familiarity with Bequer or with the Spanish writers my mother studied in the 1920's. But I was wrong! The young guide lit up the moment I mentioned Becquer's name - and she immediately started to recite in unison with me his poem about the lost love to which the doves were witness. When my mother died, I thought I would never hear those lines again - or in fact meet anyone with any memory of them. It certainly would be hard to find any young Americans who could recite whole poems by classic poets so readily ("The Dead Poets Society" notwithstanding). But perhaps they take a different educational approach in Spain - one that puts a slightly nationalistic emphasis on honoring their noted writers, even from centuries past, with remembrance of their words.

However, it was the last line of this Becquer poem, this "Rima" from the 19th century, that my mother invoked most often, not as lullaby but more as lesson. The English translation of that last line reads roughly, "Disenchant yourself of the idea that anyone will ever love you as I have loved you."

That might seem a cruel, even a psychotic thing to say to a young girl who is so eager, so hopeful of finding romantic love in the world. I can see any psychiatrists who might read this shaking their heads in dismay at what they'd probably interpret as signs of a Norman Bates mother with a cripplingly jealous attachment to her child. But it wasn't like that at all.

Well, perhaps there was just an iota of self-concern in my mother's occasional interjection of this bitter line from an old poem. She had a mild form of agoraphobia and doubtless was afraid that I would leave her, and she would have to struggle out into the terrifying world on her own.

But for the most part, she was just putting into words what I myself could perceive but might be too dangerously needy of companionship to acknowledge. She might mutter the words when she saw me inclined to pursue an indifferent youth who came late to our date, who honked his car horn hurrying me out to him rather than bestirring himself to come up to the door, and who gave every sign of only grudgingly buying me dinner if he was assured of my delivering what he inevitably wanted. Looking at this parade of calculating, appraising peers, I had to admit what so many foolishly refuse to admit - that unconditional love will be hard to find once you move outside the sphere of good parents. "Oh yes, he slaps me around, but I know that deep down, he really loves me." I was impressed with the destructive illogic of any such attitude early in life, by the reminder of the line from Becquer's poem.

The line might just as well have been delivered by my mother to the world at large though. She did everything effusively for free, while others were always bent over their calculators, figuring what they'd charge. She excitedly considered every potential guest as a State event - while, at best, they squeezed her in between other appointments. Little did they know how much they meant to her as they hurried out the door on their way to somewhere else.

So there her epitaph is carved, hiding its rue behind the original Spanish which I thought it unlikely any relative could decipher and resent:

Como yo te he querido, desengáñate - así - no te querrán

Then how about me? I think I might have settled on my own epitaph. Once again, it's a line provided by someone else. It was suggested to me years ago by Stuart Brent, Chicago's famous bookseller. Brent had his little shop, which often served as salon for the literati, on Michigan Avenue, part of the City's "Magnificent Mile." He became one of the last independent booksellers, holding his own against the chains, the mega-bookstores, and the warehouse operations. He did it by maintaining his personal interest - in every book and every customer.

Sometimes his habit of voicing his own, often crusty, opinions about his customers' reading preferences ran contrary to what most merchants would consider good business sense. When an acquaintance of mine once failed to find L. Ron Hubbard's then best-selling Dianetics anywhere in the store, he rather accusingly asked Brent why he didn't stock such a popular book. Brent roundly rebutted that he didn't want pseudo-scientific drivel like that taking up room on his shelves. However Brent finally relented and agreed to order a copy to satisfy my friend's persistent desire to read "that hack junk." Another, even more antagonistic exchange occurred when Brent called my friend to tell him his order was in, and my friend informed him that he hadn't been able to wait - that he had already bought the book elsewhere. In the wake of the verbal abuse that Brent then dished out, my friend never patronized Brent's store again in its fifty-plus years of existence.

I never quite made it plain, but frankly, I was on Brent's side in this scuffle. I felt on Brent's side in most things. While many of my peers were swooning over the Beatles, I became a Stuart Brent fan. He had a local weekly TV show devoted to book reviews. My mother and I would both watch the show faithfully.

If pinned down, we would have to admit that all his reviews sounded much alike. Whether he was reviewing what was then the latest book of social critique, Riesman's The Lonely Crowd,  or whether he was reviewing a classic such as Eliot's Middlemarch - Brent would trot out pretty much the same observations. He would simply use whatever book he selected for his morning talk as a hook on which to hang his dissatisfactions with modern society.

Brent would even work the same phrases into most of his reviews. He was sure to find in each book-of-the-week some support for his blasts against "mass culture," "group-think," and our current educational system intent on producing merely "educated fools." My mother and I, as alienated as we were from popular culture, reveled in these criticisms.

If Brent couldn't find direct support for his contrarian views in whatever book was under discussion, he would freely go off on a tangent. He always introduced these tangents in the same way. He would preface any digression with the fetching admission - "Apropos of nothing…"

Thinking back on those old TV reviews, I realized that Stuart Brent had handed me my epitaph on a platter. I've never really had a job, and certainly not a career. My school attendance was desultory at best since I mostly learned at home. Therefore, I've never felt had any strong affiliation with a school, a class, a team. I've never attended any religious services. I have mostly eschewed collecting things or having a hobby of any sort. I've generally lived beyond the pale, completely irrelevant to the worldly doings and lives of others. So the phrase will suit me perfectly:

Here lies Marlene Vorreiter

Apropos of Nothing

Buck Rogers Meets Zod on a Midnight Street in Chicago

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 20^th 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.