ART SHAY NELSON ALGREN

Faded Dreams On Division Street

 

FADED DREAMS OF DIVISION STREET
By Wayne Allen Sallee
    “A writer does well if in his whole lifetime he can tell the story of one street.” Nelson Algren lived those words hard and unflinchingly, delineating Division Street with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. The avenue was Polish Broadway in postwar Chicago. Algren revealed to us the rules of the con games, had us examine the failure in the faces passing beneath billboards unattainably high–higher than the El tracks in the days before those viaducts were barricades protecting the gentry from the housing projects, days when a shot and a beer only set you back fifteen cents.
    Division Street has changed over the last sixty years, surviving a Jeykll/Hyde transformation (like the old Sinatra hangout that became a Mexican Laundromat) to reemerge as a gentrified hangout for a new breed of clubbers. The Monarch beer signs are long faded, and no one urges you to open a bottle and draw off a glass of Drewery’s. These nights it’s a Leinie–Leinenkugel–on tap, or Rolling Rock, and the bartenders bring their own CDs to play during their shifts. Screw the juke, give the boys and girls a photo booth to drop their jingle in.
    The Leinies are two-fifty for an eight-ouncer, and you won’t find factory workers down this sad street anymore. What you will find are wannabe hipsters and perpetual grad students, skinheads, all-nighters and more than a few greying Svengalis nursing house bourbon with toothless mouths.
    The old men are the only ones who wince when the flash in the photo booth goes off. They know, better than any of us, that frozen moments are the worst of memories.
    In Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm, first published in 1949, Frankie Machine dealt illegal card games in the hushed back room of Schwiefka’s, with his pal and partner, Solly Saltskin steering the marks through the door: monotone poker faces in a seven-to-three world, the elevated train reminding them when it was time to move on. Sinatra played the starched-collared, morphine-addicted Francis Macjinek in Otto Preminger’s film, and his words”It’s all in the wrist with a deck or a cue” were a litany for the next minute being better than the last. Or, at least, no worse.
    The elevated train itself has moved on. Where Algren’s iron thunder once moved level with the second floor flats down Paulina, there is now only the occasional gunshot from one of the seven gangs that populate the neighborhood streets. The O’Hare-Douglas line–The Blue Line–is now a subway. The face of the North Side changed twenty-five years ago with the creation of Interstate 94, the Kennedy Expressway.
    Where Schweifka’s used to be, on the corner of Damen and Division, is a bar these days called The Rainbo Club. The steerer is gone, replaced by a bouncer, a black man with veins in his biceps as big as a nun’s reproaching finger, and the neon in the window clots his face. At seven in the evening you can still hear your own breath in the place. Eleven o’clock and it’s a hive of opinions.       
    Most of the crowd consists of students from the Art Institute downtown. The cheap housing and cheaper regentrification–you won’t see health bars or luxury condos crafted in incomprehensible shapes and colors–have kept the neighborhood from going to hell as more of the old-country people die off. And they do die off, because nobody along Division Street ever retires to a different city.
    A television series about people trapped on an island has ended, a show about advertising set in the 1960s is running a marathon so new viewers can play catch-up: a corner table of students discuss the good and the bad of both, a method of bonding that in Algren’s day involved the cheapest portable radio on wrestling nights perched behind the guy pouring the cheapest swill off the stick.
    Sarah is working on her Master’s in journalism at Northwestern and thinks the former show referred to the American Dream. Joe found the former to be an audience participation thing, noting that similar shows in the nineties didn’t rely on computer and marketing tie-ins. Yong Koo, an Art Institute expatriate who both smiles and sneers in a zippered leather jacket befitting the best of the Elvis impersonators, would rather talk about Japanese monster movies.
    R. E. M. starts in “Electrolite,” Michael Stipe singing about a girl whose eyes are burning holes into some guy, he’s gasoline, he’s burning green, dig? There’s a painting of a group of people with bowling-ball shaped faces that shines when the flash in the photo booth goes off. The bouncer bouncing as he sees fit.
    File in, fill up and fall out.
    Where the poker table at Schweifka’s would have been, a Road Kings pinball machine now sits, with one of those Hamm’s waterfall signs off-center to the right. The music mix runs from the smooth piano of Duke Ellington, new waves bands that were famous when most of the clientele were in diapers, then back the Stan Getz on the sax, followed by John Coltrane, the essential sixties hard bop blower himself. Then back to Echo and The Bunnymen. Flashbacks and deja vu by the bottle.
    And you have to shout to be heard, so you know who smokes because they have nicotine breath. Or the kids just old enough to tentatively try Schnapps. No apple martinis in this joint.
    In the men’s room, once you look past the lolling skinheads, faintly visible in pencil on a pocked grey wall, you read “All in the wrist with a deck or a cue.” Someone hadn’t forgotten. The Svengali, perhaps? Below it, a cartoon caveman tells the casual reader that his two-dimensional dick is as hard as bedrock.
*****
    Division Street by day. Attain street level on the northwest corner of Milwaukee and Ashland and get assaulted by the smells of Mexican fajitas and chicken fried a la Kentucky. The neon stretches in the direction of the setting sun. Milwaukee used to be nicknamed Lunchpail avenue because of the large numbers of factory workers who walked to their places of employment, lunch boxes in their lunch hooks.
    These days, these years, there are plenty of listless bodies with ten-yard stares. Nobody back from Iraq or Afghanistan with the war jitters, just men who’ve had pet monkeys on their backs since Reaganomics. Your best bet is to just start walking west.
    Any Wood Street beat copper will tell you the only people who pay attention to their surroundings are cops and crazies. Writers might be added to that short list. Nelson Algren, in Chicago: City on the Make:
    “...it’s still a godforsaken spastic, a cerebral palsy natural among cities, clutching at the unbalanced air. Top-heavy, bleeding and blind. Under a toadstool-colored sky.
    “Maybe we all went to work too young.”
    But on a Friday night it’s time to put the week behind. Walk down the concrete under a sky of blue-green (maybe it was a bad day when Nelson wrote his prose poem), and see the horizon severed by three flats zigzagging down on either side. On an abandoned building just this side of Hermitage, flyers for new clubs further north are plastered over graffiti that most likely reads Long Live The FALN!, a throwback to the Puerto Rican terrorist movement of the 70s.
    And, for some inexplicable reason, the Cobras and the Latin Kings spray their gang symbols on garage doors along side streets.
    Bottles from a nearby liquor store litter the dead grass alongside each stoop where you can still hear the echoes of pitched pennies. Brown and white labels for the winos’ breakfasts, Night Train Express and Richard’s Wild Irish Rose. Nothing but the best, you can go find your damn malt liquor somewhere else, dad.   
    At the corner on Mary Court, there’s an apteka–a Polish drugstore–a vertical sign painted in the 1950s, there is no doubt, with a  nurse taking a man’s blood pressure. The man was had his hat and jacket slung over a vacant chair. A busy piece of art, no doubt. And we all know JFK killed the hat by not wearing one at his inauguration. Does anyone know why nurses stopped wearing those vaguely Puritanical white wedges on their lovely coiffed heads?
    Then there’s a Baptist church, its architecture made it look as if it was built by hand with whatever materials were handy. An empty lot. A taco joint with an overwhelming smell of jalapeños that is overwhelmed by the chlorine seeping from the Turkish-Russian bath house. Finally, the big time. A holdover from the last generation, and the one before that. No televisions, no air conditioning, and no more wars. For just a little while.
    Enough time for the baby boomer generation, and eye blinks that flip images like dated photos from a Polaroid Land camera, its 2011, and those post-war kids are half-century men who scratch their balding heads and wonder why this young hipster crowd feels the need to change everything.
    It’s the Polish Triangle, is what it is. This from a rumdum propped on a stoop littered with pennies and matchbooks from Sophie’s Busy Bee. Bright yellow, dull copper. No sun to make the colors wink. Milwaukee to Damen, then down Division, right back to Milwaukee. Remember RB’s, that big clothing store? Two stories, it was.
    It’s a gee-dee sports bar now is what it is, and you realize there was no bum, not even a stoop. Just a penny staring at you. Pick it up and toss it into the street, maybe it will fall in the gutter. Just cross the damn street already. Cross over to Hermitage.
    Phyllis’s Musical Inn, 1800 West Division, established 1954.
    The current owner, Clemont Jaskot, was born on the second floor two years after the grand opening. Sit down on a red-topped stool and tap the cigarette-scarred bar vas though you have caffeine nerves. A Wood Street squad rolls by outside. Clem draws an Old Style from the stick and tells his tale.
    He says how for most of the people in this neighborhood it’s a second home. Dressed in jeans with suspenders and a faded Cubs t-shirt, Jaskot, moving in on middle age, gesticulates alternately with hands and eyebrows as he mops up an errant spill from one of the kegs at the edge of the bar. As he turns, you can see Sandburg’s name on the jersey. Ryan Sandburg, another Chicago ghost.
    Algren would grin that lop-sided grin. He wasn’t Bukowski, he wasn’t Burroughs. Hell, he wasn’t even Philip K. Dick. He wrote a handful of novels, a couple dozen short stories, all self-contained within a mile radius. Henry Chinanski made the rounds, he’s still alive unlike Bukowski. Algren died in 1981 and left his ghosts in every doorway. Molly-O might just be freshening up in the ladies’ room at Phyllis’s. There’s a mermaid on the door.   
    Jaskot wipes his hands off, the guy grins like he could talk anybody into anything at all. He tells of the type of clientele, construction workers, painters. The nine-to-fivers from downtown. (Not the Loop, that phrase is unknown here, because nobody on Division Street goes further than Ashland Avenue.) The hipsters show up on the weekends, for the bands. Their kind slowly bleeds into the side streets.
    Few have the confidence of fictional Frankie Machine.
    Jaskot said they worked hard to keep the place, he’s talking about mom and dad, keep the place going after the riots. He was a kid back in 1968, but the near north side was a war zone all the way to Humboldt Park and those FALN bastards. Soon after, Martin Luther King’s death made the city burn. Everything cooled down, the world revolving like an empty barstool after last call.
    Jaskot goes back to work, the crowd builds and fades. Outside, a new glass high-rise royally screws with the horizon, and just next door, a man looks down at his waist and he could easily have been checking for a gunshot would as to see if his fly was open.
    Division Street: Irregulars welcome.
    The man checking his fly intended to become drunker than a hoot owl. Standing beneath an Old Style sign that read Zimne Piwo, he had hard muscular arms with liver spots on his hands that seemed out of place.
    Francis Majcinek, our ghost guide, used to lament in the pages of Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm that every other doorway led into a tavern and you had as much on the other guy as he had on you. You find a place, you make it your territory. Liver Spots reminisced on the Orange Lantern, a place from back in the day when taverns put something behind their names. No gee-dee sports or theme bars. Dice girls, cigarette girls, cats that sleep atop a framed picture of Pope John Paul II , and a light behind the bar that went from green to yellow to red. Open to last call to get the hell out, all of you bums.
    He goes back in the way he came, into the Gold Star, an SRO motel above it, the weight crushing down on the painted logo. There’s a lipless wonder that everyone calls Cocobolo, making advances down the bar as if each stool inhabited by a female is a slot machine. Accordion music pumps out of an old jukebox and Cocobolo I shooed out like a fly ball 1moving past the Toyota sign out onto Sheffield.
    Time slows and backs up, the last stop being The Bop Shop, at 1807 West Division. Home to live jazz bands, in present day it is a failed sushi bar, the insides gutted to flecks of grey. What did they expect?
    Ten years back, huge booths with pea-green upholstery, a painting of Charlie “Bird” Parker wailing away, not far from Charlie Minus, John Coltrane, Bessie Smith, and Lester Young. All observing the stage from their individual places above those pea-green booths. The guy running the bar smoked Wantons, talk was small, 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. In a few minutes Ron Dewar on tenor sax will play with The Holly Cole Trio. Until then, a generic cop show flashes silently on a television angled below a Hamm’s sign. The beer refreshing.
    There’s a cat named Boogie, he used to come in during the summer, same as it is now, whenever the music was playing. The cat’s owner moved, the jazz cat of Division Street stayed. Word was he somehow helped a cop named Rizzi arrest a felon in the Norbe Laundromat, but that is open to conjecture.
    Before the Bop Shop, the joint had been the Lucky Stop, and it was Stanley Wozieniek that had installed those pea-green booths that were turned to rubble by fools a half century later. After he died, the place was run by his widow Mania, until her death in 198. Remember: no one retires to the suburbs from Division Street.)
    The Szostaks and the Mamachs who lived out their downtime away from the factories are slowly being replaced by any number of ethnic names. Mexican, Hindi, Jamaican, throw a pin on a wall map. You find them all, some of them students, others professionals, at Leo’s Luncheonette, next to...
    The Bop Shop is gone. Phyllis’s has evening hours now, the construction workers are building townhouses in Wicker Park now. It’s early summer 2011. A redhead named Kara serves eggs sunny-side up, hash browns and steaming coffee. Nix on the decaf.  The counter is a backwards L, taking quick glances at Kara’s green eyes is like looking at the moon before it fades behind the nighttime clouds. Leo’s is another holdout in a city that is perpetually changing.
    Algren’s Frankie Machine was a card dealer strung out on morphine who ended up swinging, in the worst sense, in a flophouse on Maypole Street back in 1948. Forget the spoon-fed crap Preminger put into the film with Sinatra and Novak. Forget celluloid, look for the word.
    Read about the real Machine, strung out on hope and trouble, on bad dreams and trouble. That was Division Street, then. The neighborhood changes, ever so slowly. Most trendy clubs look the same from the outside but for the Bud Lite neon signs shoved into the windows.
    The horizon of buildings is the same, the broken grin of a prizefighter. Sonny Liston. Gorgeous George. More ghosts. Why the hell would you want to leave anyway, baby? Where else can you haunt in peace.
    Sure, that tenor sax from a decade ago, moving up and down can still be hypnotic, but it doesn’t produce troubled dreams anymore. Division Street is on its way back up. Most of us never knew it was gone.
                                Wayne Allen Sallee
                                Burbank, Illinois
                                27 Mar 11

Retain Thy Indignant Eye and Stand With The Accused

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.

Breath As Hard As Kerosene

I skipped over blog entry titles from "The Weight" because, frankly, I really don't even understand what the damn song is about, and now I have Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard singing about Pancho & Lefty (nicknames for my testicles, a little known fact). It rained most of the day and my old roommate from the 80s, Gary Krejca, picked me up and we zoomed over to the open mike for Twilight Tales. As I was waiting for him, I took care of a few things. Cleared out my spam folder. Subj: Security Threat From The World. Hmnnn, curious, an email from Solaris perhaps? Pass. Subj: "Goodbye To Yellow Teeth!? Sounds like a movie starring Jack Palance. Pass. Then it was on the road, and I might have gotten a few good pics of choppy Lake Michigan for a future entry on the song "Lake Shore Drive." Open mikes are always fun because there's a huge mix of short pieces, works in progress are my favorites. One of the younger women hugged me for my birthday and then promptly read a story about a woman who evidently has sex about a dozen times a night but keeps putting her Supergirl underoos back on because she likes getting them pulled off again. I drank an entire carafe of water and I don't even know how to pronounce carafe most of the time. When it was my turn to read, I had to explain about an incident--never mind why--involving my working at the comic shop in the mid 90s, changing from slacks to jeans in the back room, my leg getting caught and me falling back hard enough to have the neck of a Mountain Dew bottle at least kind of, partly, I dunno, maybe the bottle was just curious, ram itself into my @$$. I still tell people if I go to prison one day, just bring it on, Aryan Nation, Nubian Nation or Kree-Skrull Warriors, I don't care. It got a good laugh as I intended because I still have a hard time reading, there is no mike stand and I also blame myself for not printing out pages that I could flip over with some semblance of ease. I'm actually thinking of duct-taping the mike upside down on my face next time around. I read a story, "Never Come Lopez," a riff on Algren's NEVER COME MORNING (the book I was reading when I was demolished by the car in 1989, a Pakistani clothing store owner found it later and returned it to the nurses' station at Holy Cross, several miles away. He couldn't read my name, but he asked where the ambulance took me from someone, after closing his store, returned the book.) Another of the Things I'll Always Remember events. The story ran in PALACE CORBIE, a fine book/magazine published by Wayne Edwards throughout the 1990s. I love the photo of the Mystic Celt here as it is very sharp, the way buildings and shadows look in the late fall and early winter. The werewolves will be at my door soon enough.

Maypole Street & Ashland Avenue

Awhile back I went down the Lake Street el to Ashland, then walked up a block to Maypole, one of the city's ghetto streets in between more kept up streets nearby. More like a wide alley than a street. I went there because I knew that new condos would soon be filling the blight, and that street is where the final scenes happen in Nelson Algren's THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, to me the best book ever written. Frankie Macjinek--Frankie Machine--is on the run after spending most of the novel in the vicinity of Division & Hermitage, the Humboldt Park my parents knew. The book is set throughout 1947 and Frankie finds himself running to Molly Novotny's apartment on Maypole, even then a street where the very poor lived, and then ends up in a fleabag hotel. I may very well have photos of both the apartment building as well as said chicken wire ceiling SRO right here. No one around to tell me on Maypole Street. But I have the photos, within a year these buildings will be into the erff, brothers and sisters.

I've just taken my hardcover copy that is completely falling apart but its a hardcover copy from 1950, not some new release, from my shelf between a 1942 hardback of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce and Who's Who In Chicago 1926, because its a nice summer's night and it seems right to type in the epitaph of the book:

It's all in the wrist,with a deck or a cue,
and Frankie Machine had the touch.
He had the touch and a golden arm--
"Hold up, Arm," he would plead,
Kissing his rosary once for help
With the faders sweating it out and--
Zing!--there it was--Little Joe or Eighter from Decatur,
Double trey the hard way, dice be nice,
When you get a hunch bet a bunch,
It don't mean a thing if it don't cross that string,
Make me five to keep me alive,
Tell 'em where you got it 'n how easy it was--
We remember Frankie Machine
And the arm that always held up.

We remember in the morning light
When the cards are boxed and the long cues racked
Straight up and down like the all-night hours
With the hot rush hours past.

For it's all in the wrist with a deck or a cue
And if he crapped out when we thought he was due
It must have been that the dice were rolled,
For he had the touch, and his arm was gold:
Rack up his cue, leave the steerer his hat,
The arm that held up has failed at last.

Yet why does the light down the dealer's slot
Sift soft as light in a troubled dream?
(A dream, they say, of a golden arm
That belonged to the dealer we called Machine.)

Maybe I'm the guy with the arm that will one day fail, maybe Algren's prose is better than his poetry (the lines are jarring to me at first, but they grow on you. Its like the pot calling the kettle bald, as I have 1100 poems in print). But I'll say one thing, this kind of writing is how people used to talk in Chicago. Some of us still do, as if in the misty mother fog of another dead poet's troubled dreams.

The Dillinger Shots

An hour into my day, I watched a guy on methadone arguing with a heroin addict over a crate to beg from in front of the Old Navy downtown. There's a lot more after that, and I might just write a story to read next Monday at the Mystic Celt, the new place for the Twilight Tales readings. Photos on the next roll, the ones just developed are from the Dillinger shoot. I only took a few photos; spent more time talking cop with a guy whose dad, also a cop, was an extra in the BLUES BROTHERS film way back in August of 1979. The scene is underneath the Red Line, crossing Clark Street towards Addison. At times, I'll sit at that el stop, watching part of the Cubs game, seeing only a sliver of right and center field, but I don't care because the background noise helps me write in my commonplace book. That shot underneath the el has some cool stores just out of site. There's BOOKWORKS, and no more need be said. Years back, I bought a pb of Nelson Algren's NEVER COME MORNING. Past that is STRANGE CARGO, where you can buy Doc Marten boots, Starsky & Hutch t-shirts, and postcards of Abe Vigoda, bobble heads of everything iconic, packs of trading cards with stale bubble gum of HAPPY DAYS, T.J. HOOKER, PEEWEE'S PLAYHOUSE, and even SAVED BY THE BELL. And past that, sigh, is Wrigley Field and all the sports bars (not taverns, never call them taverns), and people walking the streets that I really don't give a damn about. Anyhow, here's 1932 Chicago. If Dillinger wasn't doomed here, I doubt anyone outside of Kansas City or Crown Point, Indiana would know of him. Like James Dean's grave. And the rumour of Jonny D.'s penis in formaldehyde...Wayne

A Decade Of World Wide Wayne

I thought it was cool when Rick Therrio's painting of me was hung on the wall of the Bop Shop on Division Street, just a few doors down from one of the bars in Nelson Algren's MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM. I also thought it was clever to be with my friend Dan in a rented car and we drove from Las Vegas to the California border but I only leaned against the Welcome sign and took a huge whiz so I can still, nearly a Half Century Man, say that the only part of me that has been in California is my urine. Its been ten years, give or take a week, that I have had an email address, and I used to have to send out mass emails to send these odd photos to you all, but now I can simply post them on my blog. Is this a good thing? Also, when I typed my first email, I was terrified that I would be the one (ME!) that would activate SkyNet and then the Terminators would come looking for anybody named Sarah Connor...Wayne

House of Monsters

Bob caught this with only the images, which i sent from home. We had been talking about various shops full of goodies like dinosaurs and old books and vinyl records, and I thought of the House of Monsters, which closed about three years back. It was on the third floor of the Flatiron building at North and Milwaukee, the ground floor of which had several intriguing businesses such as The Quaker Goes Deaf, an oldies record store (sadly flooded during heavy rains in the late 90s) and a few small restaurants and tiny shops. The upper floors, accessible from a massive stairwell or the clown-painted hand crank elevator, were artist lofts. This area of Wicker Park was a haunt to Nelson Algren and has been regentrified to the point that nothing is as recognizable now as it was even ten, well, fifteen years ago. Ah, but House of Monsters. I still have a Universal Monsters tie I bought there, a Godzilla one was badly stained by some nasty coffee. Everything one could want, most I could not afford. I found copies of Fangoria I did reviews for and its sister magazine, Gorezone, which had my stories in it, back in the day. 16mm Japanese films, Frankenstein stamps and mousepads and keychains. Dozens of models and ready-made dolls and articulated scary things. Ceiling high racks of VHS tapes ranging from Murders in the Rue Morgue to Nightmare on Bare Mountain, which takes place at a nudist colony. I was able to locate the original version of Carnival of Souls there, about the creepiest, cheaply made film that I've ever seen and highly recommend. I don't know if HoM is selling online now, but i really don't care, because there is no real experience, and joy, and pleasure, as walking up that Frankenstein's castle stairwell and opening the door on such claustrophobic madness.

Namesakes

My namesake passed away from cancer yesterday. Wayne Henley was my daddy's best friend in grade school and however far along in high school they got. He worked for a trucking company that went bankrupt and so he moved to Madisonville, KY near his wife Bobbi's family and for a decade or so ran a general store. We hardly get to Kentucky much since my Grandaddy Grover died in 96, but we were in Shelbyville in the summer of 03, and with several nudges, I was able to get Wayne, Bobbi, and their oldest son David, to make the two hour drive to my Auntie Dorothy's house to surprise my dad. It was fascinating to hear them talk, about as close as I ever got to being inside the head of one of Nelson Algren's Division Street characters, as they talked about when my dad lived on Willard Court and how they'd each walk a mile from opposite directions to meet at Peabody School and hang out. No one had cars, no one had much money. How they were visiting my mom and her younger sister Ceil and had to jump from a bathroom window when my Uncle Ed showed up home from work early. (Ed and Flo took care of mom and Ceil after their parents died around 1935, though no one really knows how my mom's mom died or where she went, she just left). I like that memory best, I had been aware of some of their misadventures already. We had exchanged letters over the years--Wayne and I--his letters were always in pencil on unlined paper, mine often bemoaning how little news I had to impart. In just the past two weeks, I've been emailing another son, Jeff, and playing catchup. I dedicated FIENDS BY TORCHLIGHT to Wayne, and when he received his copy, he decided to tell me about his cancer, but I was at work and my father spoke with him instead. Jeff gave me more details, mainly that his daddy lived 19 months longer than the doctors expected. I did one good thing, one correct and right thing, just this once. Wayne pestered me that summer four years past to write a western story, as he loved westerns, read them on his front porch every day. I told him that I'd create a character and call him Gun And A Half Henley. As I fought my brain to write the story, I would visit the Gallery Bookstore on Belmont and purchase early Elmore Leonard and Loren Estleman westerns and send them southward. I finally wrote the closest thing to a western I ever would, a kind of small town monster story where everyone flees but the sheriff, which of course had to be called "High Moon." The character is Wayne in an abstract way, because the events and thoughts revolving around why he is called Gun And A Half (one hand is crippled up)have no bearing on his true beliefs. I threw in a bunch of werewolf in-jokes such as naming a nearby town Talbott, things like that. Some of you reading this might not realize that about a dozen of my published stories are set in Shelby County, Kentucky. Well, now you know lots of things. I'm proud to hold Wayne Henley's name.

The Clues Were There

March 18th 1989, the anniversary coming soon enough, I already have the heebie-jeebies, the restlessness of recalling being very close to my Creator. The night before, I had watched DOA, that Saturday morning, a rainy, icy, pitiless day, I left home for my doctor's appointment with page 243 of my novel in my Smith-Corona. I saw the dust on that page 68 days later. Another clue, besides the Edmund O'Brien movie, was that I had been rereading Nelson Algren's NEVER COME MORNING. I left the office and 30 seconds later the nurse at the front desk saw me flip up into the air. My first real memory of that day, I recalled earlier moments later during my recovery, was of the EMT cutting open the sleeve of my new and expensive suede jacket sleeve. I asked him not to and he told me, quite matter-of-factly, that it really didn't matter because both bones in my left forearm were sticking through the other sleeve. Above are the photo of me on Day 2, my hand like a sausage, useless as my right hand because the bones took on lives of their own just below my elbow. The other photo, again forgive my glasses and overall scary face look as my hairline receded, shows the torn jacket. I kept it until the tenth anniversary and then I burnt it.