OTHER springs have come on strong before. That one where David walked, I’ve heard, was something quite new in the field. It turned the fields a greener green and flecked the figs of old Gilboa with gold. Yet here in Chicago in the big green middle of a brand-new all-American beginning to everything, I think no spring before was geared this high.
At the Sunday morning newsstand the papers hadn’t been tossed in yet by the news truck. The newsy hadn’t showed up yet. My mind was filled with that Russian dog that had two heads.
That was the reason I was up so early. I knew the Tribune could explain everything. I walked on.
Into a spring strutting like Marilyn Monroe defying traffic lights. That seemed to stand for a moment to one side as if listening to someone like June Christy singing about how it’s really spring that hangs her up the most, and you think: that must be as fine as any girl can sound. Till spring herself comes on with lyrics of her own, making the lyrics up as she goes along. A spring that tops the very best, then tops herself and, breaking off, announces to all young men from everywhere, that there is a garden where smorgasbord grows from ryebread trees, the Garden Where All Things Are Possible. And all young men are invited to help themselves and all is free: Allt är möjlig i gården hänger smörgåsbord från ri bröd träden.
A spring, that is to say, telling all young men all things are possible. That if you are a young man from Stockholm with a right hand too fast to follow, and the reason you do not use it against sparring partners is that it has such awful power it will take a man’s head off five inches below his shoulders and snap it like a twig and all of that, then somewhere in the room is a reporter who, for one fleeting moment thinks—allt är möjlig—all is possible—and you’ve sown a seed in the climate of belief. All that then remains to be done is to write a round-robin letter to sports editors and sign yourself: The Unacknowledged Champion of Everything. Leave the rest to spring.
“All right, but what about the dog?” I thought I heard someone call, but when I looked around there was nothing but a used-car lot with this year’s models already awake and last year’s still drowsing about. A cherry-colored pennon above them waved me a cherry-colored good morning.
A morning to bring poets running to see which one can sound the most like Mr. Thomas used to sound.
Between the sidewalk and the street a narrow streak of city grass grew so green one breath would breathe it into fire. Would Joseph Rostenkowski, Ward Committeeman, approve a spring that left things growing in the street? I wondered. Yet it really wasn’t so much a Ward Committeeman’s spring as it was a State’s Attorney’s, an Ed Hanrahan spring, and that’s the dandiest kind because it knows where spring is legally entitled to grow and where it is not.
“It is my proud privilege and special pleasure to announce that the State’s Attorney’s Office has arranged for spring to arrive four days early to both sides of West Division Street. Eastbound traffic will be rerouted past students crossing at St. John’s High School. So will westbound traffic as students must not be run down from either direction. Courtesy fees in payment of violation of traffic regulations are not payable on the street; but officers will carry even change just in case. It’s the proud privilege and special pleasure of this office to announce that tickets to Riverview Park are now available on a bipartisan basis to well-behaved children under twelve at Wieboldt’s well-behaved department store.”
Sometimes I think a streak of common grass burning between sidewalk and street is as hard a thing to understand as a dog with another dog’s head growing out of its neck.
Once a candidate for local office offered a hundred dollars as first prize for a poem about Chicago. A hundred dollars was a lot of money then as now, so I sent in a poem about Chicago being freight-handler and hog-butcher to the world and how freight-cars roll in here on little cat feet. And signed it “Edward St. Vincent Millay” in order to make a strong impression.
I should have signed it “Edward St. Vincent Hanrahan” because I didn’t win. The poem that took the hundred began
Chicago is a stallion wild
Windstretched and untame
I know that doesn’t seem real great on paper, but just you try saying it out loud in a whiskey-tavern. You’ll find, as we of the Poetry Trade like to put it, that it “gains momentum.”
We of the Poetry Trade know how to say a thing to keep the layman in his place. You have to keep the layman in place in any line. “Give a layman a hand,” we say, “and he’ll take a whole knuckle.”
“It’s true as Proust” is still another—but this one has to be sort of dropped with an indifferent air. I dropped it like that in front of a bartender once—“this Schlitz is true as Proust”—just like that—and before I knew it he had drawn me two Pabsts.
I tried the bit about Chicago being a stallion wild on him; but he didn’t even draw a Pabst. He just stood there. So I pressed him about did he think Chicago really was a stallion wild? But all he did was keep standing. So I said, “It’s big as Whitman.” Then he started that just standing there again. He was all layman.
Another time someone asked Allen Ginsberg what he thought about Chicago and the way Mr. Ginsberg put it was: “Death is a message that was never sent.” A friend of Mr. Ginsberg’s stepped up and said what he thought about Chicago. And that was, simply, “MEOW!” He said this “MEOW!” in such a wonderful lifelike way that everyone understood what he had in mind: He thought he was a cat.
“Do you know what you’d have if you put Mr. Ginsberg’s brains in a cat?” I asked him and he didn’t know. So I told him—“a crazy cat.”
But another friend of Mr. Ginsberg’s knew that he had the real solution:
“Chicago is a rose,” he said before anyone could stop him. The fellow had thrown the whole game away on one bad pitch.
For myself I simply couldn’t stop thinking about that Russian dog. Had the Russians beaten us to it again? How could anyone be absolutely sure that Morris Fishbein might not have relatives in Russia? How, in fact, could anyone be sure of anything? What was there to stop the Russians from teaching the dog to sing, “I Ain’t Got No Body” and thus turn a purely scientific experiment into a grisly prank? To come down to it, I realized I myself didn’t even know which head I was thinking about. I needed a Tribune badly.
The Augusta Bakery was still closed, but it was giving away free smells. You have to go around the alley where they load the morning delivery trucks to get one; but you can have all you want so long as you don’t get in the way of the man carrying bread trays. I picked old-country-rye with seeds to smell first, even though I hadn’t yet had orange juice. This is a very heavy whiff to hit a person’s stomach with no warning, but I was hungry. Next I tried egg-bread plain, but they hadn’t used enough eggs. After that I had a French do-nut, the light kind without frosting. I didn’t hang around for pineapple cheese rolls because something began to get me in my middle like that June Christy coming on about it being spring that hangs her up the most again, and that is exactly what was doing it: spring was coming on again. Like spring. I walked on.
Into a spring of old-time church-chimes, old clocks ticking remembrances of things people used to say and sing they don’t say or sing any more. I remembered a fellow used to come on between strip acts at the old Rialto. He weighed in around ninety pounds and wore a bright orange tie that hung past his knees and his face was so little and so pale behind it that it made the business of being a man something very comical in itself. The song he sang best was Oh Why Did I Pick a Lemon in the Garden of Love Where Only Peaches Grow ? His name was Kenny Brenna and if it wasn’t for me both his name and the song would be lost to posterity.
A big green trolley-bus whose windshield said CHARTERED came racing its empty seats down the middle of the street. Yet in the very last seat a woman’s face, pale as heroin, looked out; the only one who rode. “Zaza Zazaza, ” she told me. So I knew I was the only one, beside herself, who knew she rode.
I thought of a spring whose bright returning would bring, in the semi-windup featuring eighty rounds of boxing at the Marigold Gardens, a welterweight from Gary, Indiana, named Zale in the semi-windup. With EXTRA-ADDED ATTRACTION: Ruffy Silverstein wrestling Hans Schmidt, the Prussian Giant. Some spring that smells of egg-bread, plain; but short two eggs per loaf.
Turning off Ashland onto Cortez I saw one Puerto Rican sitting on top of a Keep-Our-City-Clean box far from Puerto Rico. He wore a red shirt open at the throat, cream-colored trousers fresh from the cleaners, and was combing his hair as if he had just killed somebody on North Clark. When he saw me coming he replaced the comb and began to riffle a deck of cards.
“Come to me here you,” he ordered as I passed, “couple fast hands black-jack, just me and you.” The riffle sounded heavy like a deck with one extra card. My guess was that it was a queen. The Polish boys who used to deal seconds around here never used a queen. The card you had to watch out for with them was the jack. Don’t ask me why. If I knew why Porkies prefer a queen and Polskies a jack, I’d know about two-headed dogs, too. The whole thing was explained in the Trib; but I missed the issue. I simply have no luck no luck at all.
“Let me just talk to you, you,” the dealer asked, but I kept passing for I knew now who he was. Just plain old Bill Saroyan still trying to get up his taxes; nobody else.
I once knew a spring that came on fiercely tootling, red-white-and-blue-whirlabell, a small girl on a Fourth-of-July tricycle with flags tied to the wheels, who left laughter trailing like a confetti-colored pennon down the long block behind her.
I knew another spring that walked in handsewn jeans, and rain-gray shirt and cap pulled low, below the wrack of a prison noon: whose lips inquired without moving, “Will you hold this for me?” and walked on never glancing back to where, the taped blade plunged five inches in, the paid informer lay.
I knew a spring that once dealt stud poker all night long, the first card and the last card closed, fifteen dollars on the last card or an open pair, dealing on and on past midnight and toward noon; in a room that smelled of burning punk and dead cigars and booze. And when the last bluff had been called and the last closed card was opened and the burning punk was fading, someone rapped the door: we all looked up.
And in came Summer in a yellow dress saying “the joint is raided, boys.” And everybody laughed.
And once I saw a spring of lonesome jacks played by a girl in a pool of light at the end of a third-floor hall where no one comes all day. Crosslegged, ball and jacks, she made up a third-floor spring as she went along, just for girls who live behind numbered doors in halls where no one comes. As if she felt that the bright noontime city behind her might stay at noon, and never slowly darken, if she could find a magic saying to say with ball and jacks. Yet the city behind her was already darkening.
Near the corner of Chicago Avenue and Wolcott two walls squeezed out an old blown bum, one who had been squeezed between many old walls—barracks, flophouse, barroom, and cell—that are made to squeeze men in. This one had been squeezed between walls where old bricks sweat and slowly drip in a cold, uncaring sweat. He came toward me now with one sleeve slowly squeezing the other and both elbows squeezing his middle. He had to hold his head bent a bit forward because something unseen kept squeezing his neck. His cheekbones were ground in a heavy vise that only a shot of Old Stillborn could loosen. This was the vised man Time and The Goat had caught between them. When Time and The Goat begin to press there is nothing on earth can help a man but Old Stillborn. He held out a card old brown beggary had begotten. I put it to my eyes and let them squeeze themselves to me:
DONT WORRY
DONT HURRY
BETTER TO
BE LATE TO
THE GOLDEN
GATE THAN
ARRIVE IN
HELL ON TIME
He wanted a nickel for his philosophy, although both the philosophy and the card he offered it on were secondhand. I handed him a coin—then realized too late that it was a quarter! My mistake must have been reflected on my face, because he snapped his card back out of my hand, looked me up and down with real derision and asked impatiently—“What are you waiting for—change?” Then turned, laughing lightly, on his heel. And left me standing without a quarter. And no philosophy whatsoever.
Well, what do you know, he hadn’t been a mere wino after all. I’d been touched by a true Mortimer Adler of the alleys; one who knew how to collect on the philosophy of others, and bank the money for himself. If that fellow had a PhD, I realized, he’d be dangerous.
Passing the used-car lot again, the new year’s models looked brighter than ever, but last year’s were still drowsing. The cherry-colored pennon that had waved to me had itself gone back on the nod, folded over upon itself above a 1956 Chevy. A Tribune truck sped past and I broke into a run, still clutching my card, because I wanted to be the very first to read what they had thought up in the Tribune Tower the night before.
I had begun to doubt whether Chicago was really a stallion wild after all. I was sure it’s no damned rose. I doubt it’s even a rose that says “MEOW!” although that seems to be nearer than thinking of it as a cat that smells like a rose.
What it’s really closer to being is just an endless stretch of crisscrossing streets where men from everywhere have come to see how close they can come to killing one another without losing a customer and still stay out of jail.
A small girl was sitting on the stand in a new print frock with a green balloon tethered to her hand.
“Has someone forgotten you, honey?” I asked her. She studied me thoughtfully.
“Where you been all night?” She wanted to know.
The way she put that made me think for a moment I might be up against a midget—but what would a midget be doing holding a green balloon?
“You might pick up the morning papers,’’ she suggested in that tone so near to scorn. “Or am I asking too much?”
Chicago isn’t the best town in the world to be seen conversing with an unaccompanied child, and there have been so many laws passed against crime in general lately that I might not even have a defense in pleading that my accuser was a fifty-six-year-old midget. There might be something about talking to unaccompanied midgets. I am all for law and order on Sunday morning, so I put the papers beside her without unbinding them, thinking that might be interpreted later as a ruse to gain time.
Am I asking too much? Of any Sunday-morning balloon-man’s spring in Chicago, that it lift the wishes of all young men in landlocked bars a little, waiting for their lifelong lives to start?
Or raise the hopes of Sunday-morning sidestreet solitaries all over town, to let them drift slowly and low above St. John Cantius and high, then higher, over St. Bonifacius and St. Columbkille, toward that wonderful garden where all things are possible? To all those now merely waiting for rain or bread or love or peace with a pinch of the salt of magic in it that will last till the big dark falls.
Allt är möjlig i gården hänger smörgåsbord från ri bröd träden.
The garden where all things are possible. And all is free.
All is free to young men in landlocked bars on landlocked streets.
In a spring inviting every young man with a right hand too fast to follow to be the Unacknowledged Champion of Everything.
If anyone has been killed on North Clark Street recently, it wasn’t me.