Or so my brother-in-law said. Don't let the Infanticide word scare you off, they were like vampire aliens. Lobo himself was created to sort of mock Marve's Ghost Rider and cosmic superheroes. Well, for each of the four issue mini-series, there was some sort of contest. One was "Lobo Lookalike." Chris Turek suggested I send my fake mug shot photo, which at the time was hanging in the comic shop window with a WANTED FOR MURDER sign above it, this was to scare off would be robbers when they saw me behind the counter. Simpler days. Mike Dunleavy calls me at home weeks later, there I was in the Lobo comic. Could have been worse, I could have been on the ad for Joker Comics.
Lithuanian Plaza is not what it used to be. Between 68th and 70th, it runs from Marquette Park to Western, not that far at all. One side is a huge church and a credit union next to Holy Cross Hospital, that Deli is/was directly across the street. I took photos between California and Rockwell, and since it was about 10:30 on a Tuesday morning, it was hard to tell if a few of the taverns were still doing business. Seemed that way, though I'm no longer certain of the clientele. I got the stare from more than one black guy in basketball shorts and dago tee. But my story is about the Plaza Pub.
I was with Critical Mass Chris and Citizen Nick and Chris was taking notes for a pal on some south side bars. I remember it was cold, but then probably 8 out of 10 of my adventures occur when it is cold. I need to get out of this town. It's dark in the place, empty for a Saturday afternoon in January, maybe five years back, but the place slowly filled up and I was hit by cold air every few gulps from my drink. The TV above the window (the one on the right in the third photo) had some show on The History Channel about Hitler and some malady he might have had. Film was examined. We all watched because that's what you do in a neighborhood tavern. Somehow several of us got on the subject of words that started with 'hemo.' I'm sure that in the comments tomorrow, Scott (AKA C.N.) will have the conversation verbatim. It was centered around hemotoma and hemophilia. The woman who tended bar, and likely owned the tavern, had that ageless look women have when they are past middle age, kept themselves in shape, and had a glow about them because they carried gigantic half-filled snifters of cognac. I was thinking how she looked like Lili St. Cyr if she had been alive. You just knew she'd been sexy, and was probably still sexy. She could have been 45, she could have been 60.
The lady felt the need to get the answer to what hemophilia was in her own manner, and she went to the other side of the bar and grabbed the BIGGEST hardback dictionary I had ever seen in my life. It had been a chore to lift it up, but she had the arm muscles to work it. One of those volumes where the cover is fuzzy and looks like felt with leather edges.. A guy who sat next to me got in on the discussion. His name was Stan. The only time I have ever met a guy named Stan in my life is inside of a tavern. So there she is, talking through her cigarette at us, her perfume exquisite, with all the other regulars, who easily had twenty years on, well, Chris and Scott, were staring at the bartender's ass. Black slacks and a coral sweater, I can still remember, though Scott has the conversation down, I know that much. Not much more to the story than that, we stood there looking at the black and white images of Nazis on the television and were clear on the definitions, then we finished our drinks and went back into the cold twilight. All the regulars maybe thought it was odd that we had been there, and we were really the only ones surprised at the size of that thousand page dictionary. But it was something talking to the woman, wondering if she and the others talked about us after we left.
Then we went to a bar named Clowns Alley, by the old Colony Theater on 59th and Troy.
Tonight there is a reunion of the cops who were part of the Dem Convention in 1968, 41 years ago this weekend. There are people outside protesting their peaceful dinner. Judging the cops from then with the cops from now. My father got a double hernia and then a blood clot in his right leg thanks to one of the 1968 protesters, and regardless of how that scene went down as a whole, what you had was a bunch of hippies high on angel dust and weed pissed off at cop and throwing bricks through windows because they maybe had a collective dream where Jim Morrison's giant talking penis tells them to inflict anarchy. It wasn't Kent State, nor was it Rodney King. It was two large groups of people, each equally filled with unease on a hot summer night.
And nowww...we have cops like Anthony Abbate, who deserves his own meme so that we could all put Anthony Abbate Is A Cock-Knocking Piece of Human Shit. Its these cops of today that further cloud the memories of those who want to think the cops of 1968 were truly evil. On March 11th, 2009, this giant dick of a man beat Karolina Obrycka repeatedly after she refused to serve him more beer. Well, in true Chicago fashion, Anthony Abbate, the fucking asswipe that he is, received two years probation. The judge based her decision on the fact that the bartender, who is 5'6", touched Abbatte first and therefore the big cowardly fuck thought that beating on her for 117 seconds was self-defense. This city is as corrupt as fictional Gotham, the Abbate verdict the last real nail in our coffin. I loved the idea of Joker as anarchist in The Dark Knight, because I'd really like to take my dad's old nightstick from 1968 and break every bone is his ugly face. Then shove his balls up his ass. Forget mock tea parties, we need vigilantism.
It's my 600th post, not counting the 121 posts from my first blog, Meanwhile...At Stately Wayne Manor. My buddy Chris, now in Anchorage, sent me an email yesterday, which, in part, read: "...the Chicago of my youth is asleep. Maybe it will rot out like Detroit did and become Nelson's Algren's sandbox again. Perhaps." The blog entry's name is one of my favorite lines of Algren's. Another one comes to mind, but I'm putting it down here, in light of how Abatte beat the Polish girl a foot shorter than him, it's from CHICAGO: A CITY ON THE MAKE. "Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose." No truer words have ever been written.
Fifty years now. I've blogged about this event, I've written about it, and I've fictionalized the Our Lady of Angels fire as the prologue to THE HOLY TERROR. So many things went wrong that day, in the neighborhood bordering the one I grew up in. The fire house was a few blocks from the three-flat I grew up in, the school further west by a mile. A book called TO SLEEP WITH THE ANGELS, by David Cowen and John Kuenster, is an extensive history on the fire, and was published in 1996. It might have been arson, as the kid eventually confessing to the crime had been involved with setting other small fires in Cicero into the mid 60s. But he swears that on that day, he tossed a lit cigarette into a garbage can to avoid another reprimand from a nun. A waist high can made of cardboard, with aluminum at the bottom and top in a thin rind. Yet they kept those waste cans well into whenever the hell I was in fourth grade. The fire spread quick, because everything was wood, and the fire engines first went to the wrong corner (the church, not the school), then found their own ladders wouldn't reach second story windows. Grocers and cab drivers stood on the playground, catching kids as they jumped. Three rooms on the second floor had the most casualties, in one room, a survivor said the nun told the kids to sit there and pray, and they were mostly found at their desks. Many children were too small to pull their chairs to the window or climb to the sill on their own. They were 4th graders. Kids burst into flames in front of the firemen, as the fire came down from the cock loft as well as through the doors. One boy died from his burns nine months later, so the death toll was 95 kids and three nuns. This is truly an event rooted in the 1950s, in an area where every family knew another whose child or children had died. Kids from families of factory workers and house cleaners. The fireman in the photo was again interviewed after the Oklahoma City bombing, because of the photo everyone saw of Baylee Almon being handed to the paramedic. The man lives in Oak Lawn, just south of me, and he has had a very difficult life. Not just from the experience at OLA, no, he took a detour that one would more likely see in one of my fictionalized tales. I've gone to several of the anniversary masses with my friend Chris Turek, who now lives in Anchorage. Sobering is not the word, not anywhere near a description. 98 lit candles near the entrance, the regular Sunday mass now spoken in Spanish. We would be encouraged to take the candles home, I would always take that of Wayne Wisz. The last name alphabetically and the youngest of the victims, he was eleven years old when he died. Times Past.
