More Unmarked Helicopters

If anything, these photos show you how schizophrenic our weather is, because the photos were taken on two consecutive days two weeks back.The bottom two are from a vantage point at the bus kiosk as I waited for the Cicero bus northbound. Two hours later, after having driven me home and we jawed in the driveway, Andrew Kudelka saw one of the helicopters coming back towards its mothership stuck in a hanger at Midway. The sky actually looks this blue as it gets colder, which kind of pisses me off. But I guess its like having your cake and eating it, too. I'd rather having hot weather and sky the color of horseradish. The two that show the grim cloud cover are just 14 hours later, where the clouds came, who the hell knows. Its Chicago. But there's the helicopter flying over my backyard as I was typing here, and a few minutes later, I heard one again. Its over by the trees, near Leamington Avenue. If I had been outside picking up dog crap, there's a good chance these would have been cooler photos. This way, though, it looks like I'm hiding. Or senile.

Nick and Vito's

Yes, yes, it say's Vito & Nick's right there in the window. But in my old neighborhood, 9 out of 10 people simply said Nick & Vito's when asked what kind of pizza they wanted. Mind you, this place is still around, I mean with the interior looking exactly as it did in the 60s, linoleum floor and all. Pulaski Road has not been kind to businesses the further south one goes. This has nothing to do with the gangs and such, for now even Tuzio the Tailor has closed up shop and scrammed back to Italy. Bulow's Drive-In was torn down for the first strip mall--tiny as it was--in our area. Appliance stores became a video rental place run by Chicago cops, then it became a series of cell phone stores before being boarded up, as maybe 30% of the old neighborhood is. Taverns became real estate agencies and then went back to being taverns, the only difference being that the first time the place was a tavern, shots were called hookers, and old white guys snuck away from their wives at 7 in the morning. 79th & Pulaski was a hub, of sorts, because of William J. Bogan High School (dubbed the Great White Hope while I attended classes because it was the last 100% white school in the city, the year my sister started, there was one black girl and, inexplicably, two Chinese boys). Across the street is a White Castle, and that place will be there after the the cockroaches run the planet. We nicknamed Pulaski "Pizza Row" in the 70s because between 81st and just past my block, maybe 85th Place, there was Pizza Hut, Pizza Pete, Pudgy's (now a huge chain called Waldo Cooney's), an Conte's, which stood toe-to-toe with Nick & Vito's even though there was only two benches in a driveway to hang out. Their last name is Barraco, and there are plenty of Barraco's scattered throughout the area, one is just down 87th past where I live now. Its only a stand up place, you can stand by the window and eat pizza slices. Nick & Vito's was the place, though. We had alleys in the old neighborhood, so I'd enjoy walking through my auntie's back yard, down her alley and then the intersecting one that led to the parking lot. For any of those reading who have ever been there, you'll agree with me when I say that these pizzas seem so thin compared to all the Chicago-style places, but the look is deceiving. And it is probably the greasiest pizza in existence. Which is a good thing. After a few slices, your fingers had a sheen like you'd been juggling a glazed ham. The Barraco's franchises are a different type of pizza, the triangular slice deal. The original place cut their pies up like chessboards. I liked to fold one piece on top of the other. I can imagine a planet somewhere out there that has a grocery store where the equivalent of Saltine crackers is a box of Nick & Vito's pizza squares. And, yea, I'm one of the 9 out of 10 who call it by the wrong name. And now I'm hungry.

Can't Find the 8th Street Man

Yesterday I posted a shot of 11th Street, the only actual street sign I'm aware of. Here's a shot of the 7th Street Motel (AKA the Carter Motel), which was quite rundown in the 80s. A nice restaurant, the South Loop Club, on the ground floor helped it along. The el tracks from the last photo also run past the building. I still have a very vivid image from maybe a dozen years back, the train was stopped momentarily so the car I was in faced the back of the motel and a young and totally black woman in capris stood on the fire escape smoking a cigarette. Of course, I had no camera. But every time I pass that building I think of her, the way she held the cigarette, her face in the direct sunlight.

Anyhow. There is no 8th Street, its called Balbo, and 9th is Polk, 10th Harrison, and 12th if Roosevelt. So why there is an 11th is a mystery. Unless it has to do with the Four Sticks. There is a huge building of condos at 2 East 8th, which is bullshit because the street sign right effing there says Balbo, but the asshats living there wanted a better sounding address. Asshats, I say. I have a character called the American Dream, you see. And he jumbles up things because of his meds and has an invisible sidekick named Blind Justice. Long ago, AD heard Simon & Garfunkel sing "The Sounds of Silence," and misheard "the shadows of an Eighth Street lamp," as "beneath the shadow of the 8th Street Man." As if his nemesis held sway over a portion of downtown, back in the day. So that's the story. Next time, I'm back south and talking pizza.

11th Street

The Second of Oldest Haunts

Humboldt Park, of course, being first. I lived off of 85th and Springfield from 1965 until 1999. Those damnable railroad tracks are situated at a crazy intersection designed by lunatics, one of those three streets that don't quite meet but so the fuck what, we're Teamsters. 87th, Pulaski, and Columbus Avenue (or Southwest Highway, depending on how old you are). The light could conceivably be red, then red again, then a train could go by, then two more red lights. I timed it once. The No. 52 bus was in sight for 12 minutes, just sitting there. I also took some photos of the Lang penguin. All of our ice in Chicago, evidently, is provided by Lang, who sounds like a private eye, you ask me. I like the one with all the signs cluttered about, the top one rusted away. And then there's 85th Street itself, plus 84th, because the colors seemed better. 85th is the one with the hedge. We watched Ashley every day until she was nine, and in the spring and summer she and my border collie Barbie (she named it) would walk with me to the hedges that at the time separated the Crawford and Burns houses, respectively. I'd watch them walk back to our house five doors back, then catch my bus to my evil job in the Loop. The neighborhood changed drastically by 1998, there was a crack house and a guy brandishing a gun to thugs who beat on his Jeep with a baseball bat. It was time to go. Even though I knew only one person on 84th Street, I happened to take the photo as I walked towards Nick & Vito's. But that's for the next post. The one that will make you all everybody hungry.

PSAs, Minstrils, and Idiots

These two pages were taken by from from a blog named Comics Make No Sense, run by Adam Barnett. His userpic is a drawing of Ulysses Solomon Archer, AKA US 1. See, Marvel did a comic about trucks, and US 1 had a metal plate in his head and could pick up Citizens Band transmissions by touching different fillings in his teeth. One of the faults of the book was that it hit the stands about seven years after CBs and Smokey & The Bandit 3 had come and gone. Anyhow, back to the PSA, from an early 1950s issue of World's Finest, which teamed Superman and Batman together in each issue. There we have it, let the black kid join whitey in a game of baseball. Then celebrate by going to a party in rubber masks that insult just about everybody but dwarfs. Ah, comics from the olden times.

Too Cold For Anything But Juvenile Humor