EVEN THE NAME “CHICAGO” seemed cool to me as a child—it was itself, it was idiosyncratic, hatched in its own place, not a colonial name like New York or New Orleans, or a paean to a particular religion’s heroes like San Francisco or San Antonio, but a name grown from the land and water of that place; although it was while I lived there that I discovered from Mr Mahoney that the word Chicago was an abbreviation of the Potawatomi name for the place where the river entered the lake, roughly chicagouate, referring to a species of garlic that grew particularly well there.
“So it is,” said Mr Mahoney in his wry tone, “that every day many thousands of people around the world use a word meaning ‘garlic’ for the city in which we live; we might as well call ourselves Garlic City, or Garlicville, or Garlicton, or Garlicsburg, any of which would be not only historically accurate but redolent, in a manner of speaking. A visionary man such as yourself might see to it that a proposition for a name change make it onto the Cook County ballot. I would do it myself but at the moment I am seriously discommoded by His Eminence the Cardinal, who is threatening to have me excommunicated from Mother Church. I have replied with evidence that his financial wheeling and dealing has lost some five million dollars from the coffers of the archdiocese—coffers filled by donations from most of the two million Catholics here, many of whom are poor as mice. An honest man, a man who adheres to his vows as a priest, would admit chicanery, apologize, ask for forgiveness, and amend his ways. That is not the way of the Cardinal Archbishop. Some observers of all this find it entertaining, in the same way they found the heavy-handed blundering exploits of our former mayor Richard Daley amusing. Neither man is amusing. Both use their offices as gathering points for money and power, and both ignore and demean and insult the very citizens they are sworn to represent. There is nothing entertaining about criminal activity, despite the evidence of popular culture, which insists on celebrating thieves and assassins. For us to be famous as the city of Al Capone and John Dillinger, for civic corruption and strong-arm politics, is a shameful thing. It is especially shameful when the man sworn to lead two million of his companions in an effort with the most blunt and direct mission statement of all time—feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, succor those in despair—instead leverages personal profit from business transactions, lies and dissembles, stashes money in slush funds and shady real estate investments, lives as floridly as an ancient emperor, flaunts his power with supercilious glee, and attacks those who would call him to account for the breaking of his vows and the shattering of trust among his fellow congregants.”
Thus Mr Mahoney, in the full flower of his considerable oratorical skills. His suggestion about the ballot measure appealed to me, though, and for a week or so I pursued the possibility, until I discovered that there was no such provision in Illinois law for a general plebiscite of that sort; there was only the possibility of “initiatives,” which were so complex and difficult to file that essentially it was impossible. Edward was of the opinion that Abraham Lincoln would have eventually suggested an amendment to state law, allowing voters more direct influence occasionally than merely through their elected representatives, but he himself was suddenly elected president in 1860, and had to generally abandon what had been close attention to the peculiarities of Illinois legislation prior to that time.
* * *
I have not said enough about Edward’s friends, I think. He had an inordinate number of friends, of many species, but let me concentrate on the dogs for a moment. There was Basher, a young boxer dog, and Wendell, who was some amalgam of wolfhound and husky, and so tremendously powerful but graced with the most gentle temperament. There was Maximus, who had been a racing greyhound before being adopted by the cantor at the temple, and there was Beatrix, of indeterminate species, and the blue-tick brothers, two hunting hounds with voices like faraway church bells. There were several black Scottish terriers I could never tell apart (although Mr Pawlowsky said he could tell them apart easily by their idiosyncratic gaits), and a Newfoundland named Grahame who reportedly had lost her left ear in a battle at sea. There were free-range dogs, many of them of mixed ancestry, who ranged as they chose along the lake, and there was one small lean gray dog that looked awfully like a slumming coyote to me, although Edward had made it clear that I was not to mention coyotes in this dog’s hearing, for reasons that were not explained. Mr Pawlowsky told me once that one of the many things he had learned from Edward was that most dogs were exquisitely sensitive about parentage and heritage, and that a lot of scuffles and disagreements started with scurrilous remarks and muttered caustic comments that were ostensibly offered as jokes but were neither meant nor received as such. “Not unlike human culture,” as Mr Pawlowsky observed, “where a great deal of what passes as social discourse is more verbal jockeying and snide commentary; you have to admire canine culture at least for the fact that you can respond to what clearly is a sneering dig by biting the speaker in the ass. We don’t get to do that so much, and maybe we would be a better society if we did.”
October that year stayed warm and clear and crisp all the way through Halloween, and something about the nights being so pleasant and starry sent people out to clubs and cafes in remarkable numbers; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that was the most profitable October ever in Chicago, at least judging by the crowds of people I saw crammed into blues bars, jazz clubs, gyro shops, pizza joints, party boats on the lake, street fairs and festivals, school barbecues and picnics, church carnivals, block parties, and impromptu parades and processions of every conceivable shape and size. I saw a Catholic priest cradling a silver box (called a pyx, I discovered later) reverently in his hands as he walked along Clark Street, followed by perhaps a hundred people, many of them singing a song I did not know. I saw a line of eighteen firemen walking slowly down Roscoe Street, for reasons I never discovered. I saw a dancing line of more than a hundred people in Portage Park, on the west side, all of them dressed in amazing bright colors and dancing with absolute abandon while dozens of men and boys hammered steel drums in a dozen different rhythms at once, a mesmerizing sight and sound.
The epic event for me that October, however, was the Greek Festival at Saint Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church on the west side, just past Lincoln Avenue. This was an epic event for the whole west side of Chicago, a famous street party that people for miles around began talking about and preparing for months, but I will always remember that year’s festival for a single infinitesimal moment—not even a whole moment, but a slight gesture that I realized even then wasn’t slight. Sometimes even now I watch it unfold slowly again in memory, almost lost in hoopla and bustle and tumult, almost obscured by throngs of laughing people and wriggles of smoke and tides of shouts and music and the billowing of tents breathing in and out with the evening breezes; but not lost.
According to Edward it was Miss Elminides who had suggested to Mr Pawlowsky that he and Edward come to the festival; the way Edward remembered this was that there had been a discussion of the best Greek food, and Mr Pawlowsky had opined that the greatest achievement of Greek cuisine was the gyro, the perfect marriage of flavors and edible packaging, and Miss Elminides smiled and said that while the gyro was an excellent version of the sandwich it could not be mentioned in the same reverent tones as many other savories traditional to her ancient culture, savories she had many times marveled over during her lifetime, and Mr Pawlowsky demurred politely, and said something about other Greek foods in his experience being like Greek music in that a little went a long way, and Miss Elminides at that point proposed that Edward and Mr Pawlowsky attend the Saint Demetrios Greek Orthodox Festival, which she knew for an inarguable fact to be a remarkable and thorough and entertaining celebration of Greek food and music.
In Edward’s opinion the next few seconds were some of the most enjoyable seconds he ever spent in this life, because Mr Pawlowsky was so evidently torn by warring impulses, and of two contradictory minds, and wholly flummoxed, and trying to entertain two conflicting ideas in his head at once, that you almost expected his ears to spin, or smoke to issue from his eyeballs, or what hair he had left to twirl itself madly in the manner of a desert dervish. He wanted to instantly accept a direct and alluring invitation from Miss Elminides, but also instantly realized it would entail a serious voyage for him away from the apartment building. Saint Demetrios was easily three miles away—maybe forty blocks!
But to his credit Mr Pawlowsky said yes before you could count to ten, and Miss Elminides said that would be lovely, and she would check the schedule of events and choose the best of the music being performed, and then she took her leave, and Edward noted with high glee that Mr Pawlowsky then went into something of a brown study, from which he was only resurrected by having to fix a leaking faucet in 2A.
So they did all go to the Saint Demetrios Festival, and somehow I was roped into it too, because I was coming back from playing basketball at Northwestern University and would pass right by and might as well pop in if only to make a heroic effort to sample the wide array of gyros being sold, and so I was there at about ten o’clock, eating gyros happily with Edward, when we saw the slight but not slight thing. Miss Elminides had seen the musicians opening their instrument cases, and said something to Mr Pawlowsky, who realized that he ought to go claim two good seats in front of the bandstand. I think now that he didn’t think about what he did next, but just did it out of the love and tumult in his heart. He bowed ever so slightly and held out his right arm for Miss Elminides, and without hesitation she put her left arm into the crook of his elbow, and they walked down the aisle of the little bandshell toward seats in the first few rows.
Edward and I were behind them as they walked toward the stage, so we didn’t see their faces, but the way they held each other’s arms so gently and naturally, as if they had always walked that way, with Mr Pawlowsky leading by a hair so he could gently use his shoulder to part the crowd and Miss Elminides sailing just slightly in his lee, was as eloquent and articulate as any facial expression I ever saw. We make too much of faces, I think, and often miss the supple expressiveness of the rest of the countries of our bodies; and not just human beings, either, but all beings; we all shiver and leap and shuffle and drag and skip and scuff and wriggle and wave and wag and flitter and flag in so many ways that language can’t keep up, and we are always having to invent words for the ways we move to say how we feel.
Edward and I looked at each other, but we didn’t say anything, because it wasn’t like any words were necessary, but each of us knew that the other one was delighted at what he had just seen, and we went to try the spanakopita, which was extraordinary. I have looked in vain for spanakopita as good as that spanakopita at the Saint Demetrios Festival for years now, and have not come anywhere close. Perhaps, as a friend of mine says, you have to be actually at a Greek festival, in a city, on a wild Saturday night, just before the band starts, surrounded by people who are laughing and jostling and talking and eating, to savor great spanakopita properly. I’d like to say that he’s wrong about this, because I dearly love spanakopita, but more often than not I suspect he is right, and there are even times I think maybe the very best spanakopita has to be eaten while marveling with pleasure that you just saw a slight thing that isn’t slight at all.
* * *
You would think after my decision was made I would be happy, or anticipatory, or thrilled to contemplate prospective romantic and geographical and occupational adventures, and certainly I felt something of this, but mostly I found that I was melancholic. Indeed, to coin a phrase, I had the blues, and there was and probably still is no better place in America to have the blues than Chicago, all due respect to the Mississippi Delta where the form was invented, but where blues clubs do not have delicious steaks from Kansas and Nebraska and vibrant cheeses from Wisconsin, paradise of cheeses. Also Chicago had been where the acoustic blues of the country became the electric blues of the city, and I was partial to the electric blues, which had verve and snarl and punch in it, like the rock music I loved, while retaining the old dark weird of the blues as it had squirmed to life in the slave lands of the South.
So it was that October that I haunted the blues bars along Lincoln Avenue, mostly Kingston Mines and Wise Fools and John’s, and night after night sat in corners and felt the music more than heard it—does that make sense? Part of this was sitting close to the stage, which was easy to do in those old rattletrap clubs in the years before they became tourist destinations; Kingston Mines was such a hovel that part of the roof fell in one night when Eddy Clearwater’s band was playing, and famously the band never missed a beat, even as water poured down in torrents near the pinball machines. But part of it too was the way with the blues you can safely ignore the lyrics and feel the tidal pull of the music, its thunderous chant and chorus, its moan and shriek, the way its repetitive nature, in good hands, becomes a sort of roaring meditative thing, lit up and sharpened and electrified by the piercing brazen needling ringing guitar.
I found, after many hours in dark corners nursing my whiskey and swimming inside the music, that I didn’t care much about the singer or the song—it was all the same to me whether the singer was male or female, mumbling or shouting, whispering or roaring, charismatic or wooden, and it was all the same to me what song was being played, old standard or gleaming new original, updated classic or obscure nugget unearthed from a scratchy record or handed down from guru to apprentice. It was the music that I liked, and sometimes loved; the way you always knew the form, but were always surprised and sometimes delighted by the delivery and the passion and the skill, and even, occasionally, moved by something—the sharp sneer of a guitar commenting acidly on the tumult of the other instruments, the bar extended twice or three times by a band delighted by its flow that night, the rare haunting saxophone (saxes are uncommon in blues trios and quartets), the way a singer sometimes would stop singing words altogether and just hum or growl what was in his or her heart, beneath the words.
I know it sounds fanciful to speculate how a city’s music might reflect something deep and true and real about the place; and also Chicago, of course, is filled with all sorts of other music, much of it certainly characteristic of some of the city—I mean, there’s a lot of polka music in Chicago, understandably so, with such large Polish and Czech and Slovenian and Latvian and Slovakian populations. But with total respect for jazz and polka and rap and opera and rock and pop, I still think Chicago sounds like the electric blues, and the electric blues sounds like Chicago, and even if you hear a good blues band in Dublin or Dunedin, as I have, you are immediately in Chicago, in a dark corner, nursing a whiskey, hoping that the roof will not fall in, and being amazed by the mastery of the bass player, who is somehow playing chugging lines that sound eerily exactly like a night train through rustling fields of corn.
You might not also hear, in that electric blues, wherever it is being played, poorly or well, the faintest hints and intimations of traffic along the lake, and jackhammers and piledrivers pummeling the Loop early in the afternoon, and the thrum and rattle of elevated trains, and the bellow of tankers and barges far out on the lake, and the grim clang of descending winter, and the jungled sound of millions of people in one particular place in America arguing and laughing and singing; but you might. I do.