Fakebook tucked under my arm, I leave my room at the Drake and walk south. My uniform of choice—a long-sleeved white dress shirt and black flat-front pants, shiny German shoes—keeps me as invisible as a good waiter.
The morning light banks off the lake. Sidewalks are already heating up, shoppers laden. I know my way around the city. I was born and raised in Chicago, headquarters of Moore’s Frozen Foods, Chief’s employer as he led our family on its socioeconomic shakedown cruise from Glenview to Lake Forest. And I studied at the University of Chicago (major in economics, minor in nightclubs) for a couple of years before being distracted by better opportunities, as Malcolm would call them.
Along the retail lucreway of Michigan Avenue, I try not to appear too interested in the Cartier window display. In a few blocks I leave the steely heart of downtown and pass a deli, a shoeshine place, a couple of ancient taverns.
When I was a boy wandering through downtown, I saw every subtle shift of the sky, noticed every store, and remembered all the details. A deli in Old Town where all the waiters wore short ties to keep them out of the pastrami fat. The fast fingers of the dealers at the Marshall Field’s stamp counter. The pieces of ancient buildings embedded in the base of the Tribune Tower.
I turn, searching for the right neighborhood. A few streets later, I stop opposite a low apartment building, yellow stucco with a brown entryway. A young mother hauling her infant daughter in an Indian-print sling walks out of the building and catches the bus. A few minutes later, an ancient woman shuffles out behind an aluminum walker, smokes a cigarette, then flicks the filter into the gutter before she walks back in.
The entryway turns quiet after a few minutes and I glide across the street. I walk like Miles Davis, cool but coiled, ready to unleash a hard knot of furious notes. This would be early Miles, before he turned his back on his audience and started hitting a clam every eight bars or so and calling it art. I know the perils of imitation, but Miles lets me move invisibly through neighborhoods by day, bedrooms by night.
The narrow vestibule smells of burnt onions. Flyers for take-out pizza and debt reduction litter the floor. The battered mailboxes of the Lakeview, forty-two in all, bear peeling tape and a United Nations roster of names. From the back of my fakebook I take out a thick stack of $100 bills and divvy them up. I’ve become adept at division. Everyone gets two, the occasional box with more names gets three.
The familiar euphoria washes over me like the Spirit descending or opiates crossing the blood-brain barrier. I’ve lingered in hundreds of entryways like this—eggy air, piss whiff, bare bulb shining, floor tiles cracked like a dried-out riverbed. Today everyone will find cash along with their bills. The stack dwindles and I push Ben Franklin into his final mailbox. The thrill is gone, replaced by an urgent need to get away quickly before the building super spots me.
Back at the Drake, I take the elevator downstairs to the Cape Cod Room, where I’ll be playing a three-night stretch. In the glass case outside the club waits the press glossy of me in a dark suit, sitting at the keyboard of a gleaming Steinway. I’m staring off into the distance, hair black and shining, eyes inviting. Chief’s family was English, Eileen’s Czech, making me a standard Chicago-style mutt. My semi-mysterious look is calculated. After all, all musicians need to get over with an audience. We invent someone more exotic than we are and eventually that someone becomes us.
THREE NIGHTS ONLY. FROM NEW YORK. JAZZ SENSATION ROSS CLIFTON. I am not from New York, though Malcolm insists that we all say we are since it classes us up. I am not entirely sure what a jazz sensation is, but I know that I’m not one. And Malcolm decided long ago that Ross Wolfshead, my real name, was too scary and hard to say.
A new poster hangs next to mine. Another of Malcolm’s travelers is playing here the week after me—Marianne London, a singer in a tight blue dress. Marianne has long reddish hair and a good smile. She’s standing in the crook of a grand piano, unaccompanied, I notice. She seems too young and dewy to be on Malcolm’s circuit and I decide to ask him about this Marianne London sometime, find out what the real story is behind the patently fake name and the innocent smile.
I knock on the door and a young pale man with a broom lets me in.
“Hey.” Sweeper nods and identifies me as the entertainment rather than the guy delivering beer. Fleeting recognition is about as good as it gets.
“It’s over there.” He points into the main room, rustic and dimly lit with small tables covered with white tablecloths. The kitchen staff clatters away, getting ready for the lunch crowd. The air smells of chowder and bread. Near the bar waits an ebony Yamaha grand, its top down. I open it up, check to make sure the locks are on the wheels. Rolling the piano into people while they eat dinner is regarded as very unprofessional.
First I run up and down the whole keyboard in B major, almost all black notes, an out-of-kilter scale with tricky fingering in the left hand. I play a little sequence of chords that has been stuck in my head. I pound a quick, hard bass figure to check the lower register, find it’s not bad, though a bit boomy. Then I add a few bars from an Ornette Coleman solo.
In all, I run the piano through its paces for about fifteen minutes. My work is done for now. But I keep playing. Nascent melodies cycle from my mind and out my fingertips—three notes from a cab horn this morning, the pattern of a conversation I heard through the hotel room wall last night, a song my mother used to sing when I was a kid, one about rolling a silver dollar across a dancehall floor. These hours of freedom at the piano are my reward for days spent in rental cars and hotel rooms.
On the road, I’m alone—no one to talk to, to call, to miss. But at the piano, I’m joined by Monk, Bill Evans, James P. Johnson, Delmar Robbins, and dozens of other companions from a genial guild of the fleet-fingered and dead. With stride bass and blistering runs, I hammer out the tedium of driving all day with public radio as my only companion. I forget the glacial lunches in small town cafés and the painful absence of anyone else who might share any beauty or insights gleaned from the road.
When I walk out of the Cape Cod Room hours later, my shirt is sweat-soaked, fingertips raw, mind purified by thousands of notes.
I spend the rest of the afternoon looking for a good health food store, finally finding one in Andersonville. Back at the Drake, I do some Tibetan exercises, eat hummus on whole-wheat pita bread, read the Tribune. Then I wash some clothes in the sink and shine my shoes. So much for the high life.
I customize my hotel room to my specifications. I remove all printed material—the triangular paper tents listing the movies, menus, guest guides, “Best of” city magazines—and stack it all neatly in the top desk drawer. I shove all of the furniture to the edges of the room, turn the television around and push it against the wall. I take the pillows off the bed and empty the minibar, replacing its miniatures of vodka and gin with carrot juice, organic apples, smoked tofu, pickled Japanese plums—the kind of food that Chief’s beloved employer never got around to freezing. I unroll a small rug on the floor next to the window in a slanting rectangle of sunlight.
These changes exorcize the room of the anxious spirits of business travelers and subvert the hotel management’s desire that I should spend every night watching overpriced pornography, drinking dinky trumpets of trouble, and making expensive phone calls. But more: now every hotel room I stay in seems like home, even if it’s not.
Several years ago, I found that the road of excess did not lead to the palace of wisdom, as Blake promised. It led to the over-priced loft, a $75,000 Bösendorfer grand I couldn’t play, an indigo blue BMW 7 Series sedan, and a temperature-controlled cellar full of wine I never drank. It led to a complicated girlfriend with whom I shared transactions instead of transcendence. It led to ulcers and migraines, self-induced misery at home and boredom at the keyboard.
It led to a new life and an economy of one.
I could spend all my nightwork earnings on psychoanalysis or meds, but why bother? As long as I’m stealing and giving money away, I’m happy enough. Call it therapy. Call it thievery. It works for me.
The sun passes high over the lake, the traffic coursing along Lake Shore Drive like shimmering blood cells along a crescent of vein. Chicago must have looked so modern to Chief and Eileen as they spun north in their Fairlane, driving straight from dusty Coffeyville with a screaming Ray in Eileen’s lap, the na-scent clot that would be me lodged in her uterine wall.
My family, leavened by promise and dreams, drove north to the second-largest American city. They were moving toward Chief’s first real job and something else they could only vaguely articulate—toward more. They would buy a starter home, send their kids to college, take vacations in Florida. Their appliances would work. The food would be convenient. The sepia lives of their parents back in Kansas seemed desperate and sweaty. Their hard work would pay off someday.
Little did they know.
Though I get plenty of polite applause during my three nights playing the Cape Cod Room, I get no takers for my nightwork. Instead, I leave the Drake and take a walk past bars and empty parking lots, glowing hotel lobbies guarded by bellhops in absurd uniforms. I’m sure there are some great clubs along the quiet backstreets, but I have other plans.
I find a parking lot lit only by a dim streetlight. Parked in a reserved space far from the rabble of ordinary Toyotas and VWs waits a silver BMW 735i with a vanity plate that brags—OVER-QUOTA. It’s not that different from the car I used to drive during my own failed period of conspicuous consumption. The own er wants to keep it safe from key scratches, drunken kicks. That’s the problem with status symbols—other people secretly hate them.
I open my fakebook and pull on a pair of plastic gloves. The small blue and white plastic oval—the BMW Dealer Master Key, or DMK, as they’re known in the trade—fits snugly in my palm. I take a quick look around, then walk to the BMW and press the silver button. I turn the DMK’s small black dial slowly until the locks click and the alarm disables. The right frequency opens any door. Every BMW dealership has a DMK, which makes it easy for their top salesmen to work the lot, unlocking and starting new cars without fumbling for the right keys. When one shows up for sale Malcolm is quick to snap it up.
Inside, I put in the DMK and start the engine, then pull out slowly from the club parking lot. The BMW gives off the familiar hum of precision engineering.
The DMK brings a new elegance to car theft, which usually involves crowbars, broken glass, hot-wiring, and shrieking alarms. I hardly think of it as stealing; the cars are simply being reallocated.
I drive to the address on South Broadway that Malcolm e-mailed. He knows a BMW processor in every city. I check the rearview mirror; the road is almost empty.
At a light, a limousine pulls up next to me, a black Town Car, sleek and elegant. The driver glances at me then stares straight ahead, a small earpiece in his ear. In the back, through the gently tinted glass, I see a beautiful woman in a blue dress sitting next to an older man with gray hair. She smiles at something he says and I’m pretty sure I recognize Marianne London from her poster.
She looks my way and our eyes connect through the layers of glass, her skin lit by streetlights. But the light turns green and the limousine pulls out ahead of me, bound for downtown, leaving me in my stolen BMW, heading toward the southside.
The processor is located in a parking garage that looks closed for the night. I honk twice and the door opens. I pull in and the door closes. Three men in gray jumpsuits stride toward me as if I’m dropping the car off for an oil change.
“Nice one.”
“Guess so.” I shut off the engine and pop the hood.
They look at the engine, check the mileage. “Clean machine,” one says. “You’re in bonus territory.”
“Sounds good.”
One of the jumpsuits checks a list on a clipboard, looks up. “We’re paying eight large for these today.”
“Seems fair.” I smile. It sounds like I’ve brought in a load of watermelons or cattle. I wonder for a moment what BMWs go for by the pound.
He hands me an envelope and I tuck it inside my fakebook without even checking. The processors are pros. Within hours, they’ll have a buyer in Peking—a newly minted entrepreneur in need of automotive status—and make a hefty markup. I’ve been paid eight grand for ten minutes work. Tomorrow, this BMW sedan will be in pieces, packed up for its journey to China via container ship, joining the hidden global flow of illicit goods. In this transaction, only the BMW own er loses out, and my sympathy for him is minimal. His imposing silver sedan is definitely insured. And anyway, loss is part of the human experience.
The door buzzes and I’m on the street again.
I walk back toward the Drake. I pass another BMW parked on the street—a 3-Series this time—and press the DMK again, rotating the dial slowly just to hear the locks pop open. Then I lock the doors again. No need to push my luck.
Out on Lake Michigan, distant ships send out constellations of light. From my quiet hotel room, long past midnight, I watch the lake and wonder who’s out on the water, where they’re going. I can stare for hours: the shifting street reflections on the ceiling, afternoon sunlight raking down a wall, office windows at night, other evidence of everyday beauty.
I remember the limousine, wonder if Marianne London was riding in it. That two of Malcolm’s players might find ourselves at the same stoplight at exactly the same time seems unlikely, but not impossible.
Malcolm is a legendary connector—collectors to paintings, dubious capital to suspect ventures, musicians to gigs. Elegant, cultured as a fin de siècle Viennese, painfully wry, Malcolm refers to himself as an omniwhore, willing to corrupt any market. Once he ran an uptown art gallery, then a restaurant. Both closed under murky circumstances, Malcolm’s favorite.
Now he unites the deft and daring to lucrative shadow careers, if they want them. Most musicians do. It’s better than grinding along, broke and miserable. Malcolm helps us find something we can steal and convert to cash. Minus a 15 percent commission, of course. A saxophone player might specialize in check kiting. A drummer might take a second career removing art from museum walls or electronics from warehouses. Malcolm encourages us to be creative in our side projects. From what I know, I’m the only one on the circuit doing diamonds and BMWs. I wonder what Marianne London is up to.
The phone rings at four in the morning. I raise the receiver slowly.
“It’s me.” Ray never says more. My brother is convinced every phone is being monitored by Them. And with good reason.
“Up late or early?”
“Late. Been really busy. Jackson’s getting a makeover.”
“Again?”
“Always.”
In the silence, I hear Ray’s fast breathing. He walks into Montpelier to make calls—cell phones are too risky—and the trip winds him. He was never a fan of exercise of any sort except the fine-motor variety, our shared skill.
“It’s April fifteenth. You still paying taxes?”
“Of course.” Malcolm always keeps us on the level. A veneer of respectability can help you get away with a lot.
“Sucker.”
“You make your choices, I’ll make mine.” Ray brings out a testy side of me that I don’t like. Though he would be loath to admit it, Ray has adopted some of Chief’s bullying ways.
“Still tickling the ivories?”
I roll my eyes. “Yes.” Ray knows nothing of my hidden work, though he introduced me to Malcolm years ago, setting my whole shadow career in motion. I don’t trust Ray to keep a secret, though he’s the most secretive person I know. His barn outside Montpelier houses a state-of-the-art computing infrastructure and a massive Heidelberg press. He’s difficult, divorced with one son, and committed only to his work. But beyond that, he’s like a stranger who happens to be my brother.
“I’m thinking of getting completely off the grid,” he says softly.
“You’ve been saying that for a long time now.” I haven’t seen Ray in years, but I picture him bearded and keg-shaped, because I know he eats anything put in front of him.
He grumbles. “This time I mean it. I’m putting together a solar-powered generator.”
I laugh.
“Shut the fuck up!” he shouts.
“I’m not laughing at you.”
Silence. More rasping.
“Listen, bro. I need a favor.”
“Not a loan, I’m guessing.”
Even Ray has to laugh at that. “No, I need to send the kid to you for a couple of weeks. I really have to focus.”
I shake my head. “No. Way.” The kid is my nephew, Cray.
“I don’t care what the fuck you say, I’m sending him.”
“Isn’t he supposed to be in school?”
“He’s homeschooled.”
“I bet.” I think of the Artful Dodger schooling Oliver Twist.
“He needs to get around a little. It’s been a long fucking winter.”
“No. And I mean it this time.” Two years ago, Cray traveled around with me for a disastrous week.
“He’s changed. He’s grown up now. Got his license. I know! He can drive you around.”
“The last thing I need is a chauffeur.”
“Then he can carry your bags or something.”
“No.” Cray put a serious crimp in my nightwork and I wasn’t in the mood to babysit him again.
Ray pauses. “Look, he’s sixteen now. And he’s trying to figure out where he’s going with his life. I thought it might do him some good to get out on the road. Don’t you think?”
I say nothing.
“You’re playing in Dallas next month, right? He’ll meet you.”
I pause. “How do you know where I’m staying?”
“You always stay at the same hotel. You’re really predictable, bro. I know everything there is to know about you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.” Our boyhood echoes across the years.
“All I’m saying, Ray, is don’t send him out to see me. Repeat. I do not have the patience to deal with Cray.”
Ray pretends not to hear. “Be looking for him. He’s taller now and he’s got his hair dyed kind of a deep yellow . . . you’ll see.”
“Thanks for the update on my nephew. Don’t send him.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
The phone clicks and my brother is gone.
Ray and I became playground grifters when I was in sixth grade and he was in eighth. Our classmates did little but play desk hockey with sticks they made from pencils, wire, and masking tape. Outsiders already, we were rarely invited to play and when we were, we were soundly beaten, since our opponents spent every idle minute at school slapping wads of tape across their desks.
Wandering around the playground one afternoon, I found a half-empty tube of congealed tar left behind by workmen who had repaired the school’s flat roof. The day was cold and raw and when I kicked the end of the tube, the tar cracked into shards on the ground.
“Black opals,” Ray whispered from behind me, then set out his plan. “Give me a handful and throw the rest into that Dump-ster next to the gym. Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone about it.”
I nodded.
“In two weeks, we’ll have a couple hundred dollars. Guaranteed.”
“No way.”
Ray smiled. “Yes way. But you have to help me.”
I nodded, locked into the role of younger brother.
“Got any cash?”
I shook my head. Ray scowled. He ran a thriving candy and cigarette concession from his locker and always had money. He took out his wallet and handed me some dollars. “Put these in your pocket.”
Back among the table-hockey players, Ray pretended to admire his black opal. I took a careful look at it and we improvised a bit of dialogue, shouted, pushed each other—all free advertising. Once we had a crowd, Ray went into his pitch. He was already a pro and soon the asking price for this rare black opal dug from the Chicago dirt was up to ten dollars. I chimed in with twelve dollars and waved my cash at Ray when he gave me the signal. Another slack-jaw shoved a twenty at Ray and he shook his head.
“Not for sale,” he said. “I like it too much.” He was building demand, customer awareness, market pressure.
For days, the entire school searched for black opals, which Ray claimed came from a deep vein of semiprecious stones somewhere beyond the basketball court. Kids scraped sticks along the hard ground during recess. They rushed back to the schoolyard after dinner and dug with shovels, using flashlights when darkness fell. None of the preteen prospectors came up with a black opal. We had the market cornered. Ray took on the confident, peaceful look of someone with an enviable and insurmountable competitive advantage.
A week later, Ray announced he would sell his black opal to the highest bidder after school on Friday. By the time our frenzied auction ended, he had two hundred and seventy-five damp, wrinkled one-dollar bills in his backpack. A group of fourth-graders had pooled their allowances and yardwork earnings to buy Ray’s chunk of worthless tar.
Ray had plans for that cash. He wanted to buy a 1950-D Jefferson nickel, the rare one that would complete his collection. But the principal came for a visit that night. Chief uncovered our loot in Ray’s backpack, and assumed that—as the fourth-graders claimed—we had stolen their hard-earned allowances. We were expelled. We spent that night huddled in our room, awaiting our punishment with a mix of fear and pride.
The devious work of the Wolfshead Boys had just begun.
Too rattled to sleep now, I sit in front of the hotel room window, watching the lights of the city. Somewhere along the horizon waits the Glenview bungalow where Chief started his way up the ladder at Moore’s, where Eileen nurtured her greenhouse of grudges, where Ray and I began to lie, cheat, and steal.
I’m ready to leave the city of Chicago, so freighted with commodities, memories.