He warns us that what’s inside might not be appropriate for children and other sensitive viewers. Al Capone’s lost vault. They’re tearing down the Lexington Hotel, once the Big Tuna’s headquarters, and have discovered a vault that’s been sealed for decades. Who knew he lost one? Who even cared? But now that Chicago knows it, the city is awash in hysterical anticipation. And Geraldo’s got the exclusive. Live. I’m alone in front of the TV with a joint and a hunk of cheese. There’s a team of hard-hatted workmen with jackhammers and high explosives. There are wafts of dust and lots of noise, and Geraldo whisper-shouts into the microphone. We’re making history here. It goes on for more than an hour and a half, with frequent commercial breaks.
At one point Geraldo says, “I feel like Jeremiah walking among the ruins.”
Look, Geraldo, just open the thing already.
Finally, they blast the door off. Geraldo coughs, gasps, says something inaudible—there’s an enormous crash. The camera jumbles and the screen goes blank. Cut to another commercial. Geraldo’s dead and they’re selling antacid. And Oldsmobiles and Mountain Dew. And then he’s back, undaunted. Geraldo Rivera knows no daunted. Wait. He’s holding something. A bottle. Ladies and gentlemen, citizens of Chicago, interested parties around the world, we’ve made a discovery. Pause. Swallow. Alphonsus Capone—alias Scarface alias Big Tuna alias Jolly Fellow alias Snorky—may have once drunk from this very bottle before carrying out yet another despicable act, the likes of which have made this city infamous around the globe. Go to the deepest Amazon, as I have, Geraldo says, and there you might meet, as I did, a little native boy, naked, nothing but a loincloth hardly covering his burgeoning private parts, and tell him, as I did, that you are from Chicago, and he’ll say, Chicago! Chicago! Capone! Pow! Pow! Kill! Kill! Kill! Yes, the lips of such a man may have once touched the phallic spout of this very bottle…
The camera zooms in on the bottle’s label. Ernest and Julio Gallo, 1981. Pans back to Geraldo’s stricken face. Maybe someone back at the station was thinking, Now at last we’ll get rid of this chucklehead. Geraldo looks as if he wants to eat the microphone’s afro. Not much can leave this man wordless. But I keep watching, we all keep watching. The wonder of live television—even after nothing’s happened, it keeps happening. Plus, there is always the chance that Geraldo might spontaneously combust. Soldier on, Geraldo, we’re still with you.
“Friends,” his voice rising to a squeal. “Friends, how on earth did this bottle, this vessel of Dionysus, find its way through the impregnable walls of a sealed vault? Only in a city as diseased as this one, where vice still flows like milk down an sinless child’s throat, like blood in the veins, like sewage in the drainage canal, could one of the greatest robbers in the history of the known world be himself robbed, the thief thieved, the boodler boodled. Oh, my friends, mystery begets mystery begets mystery—it’s the very fornication of existence in this modern Gomorrah we call Chicago.”
What were we expecting? That the vault would be our King Tut’s tomb? Pompeii in the Loop? Maybe we were just heartened that, even here, something could survive, something remain. In a city where all is knocked down and all is replaced, maybe we just want to know something has been here all along. A solitary man holds a bottle and a microphone amid plumes of old dust. Nobody gives a damn what’s in the vault, Geraldo. Times like these all you want is to hear a voice, any voice. In the afternoons, I bag groceries at the Dominick’s on Skokie Highway. I’m seventeen. When I get fired, which will be soon, the manager will say, Listen, putz, you’ll never work at a Dominick’s again, anywhere in the Chicagoland area and northern Indiana—you got it? You’re not competent, you lack basic competences. Mostly, though, I’m just lonely, a new kind of lonely. I’d think about all the eyes that would never look my way, all the eyes that were always turning away. Do you remember? When all you had was your own sweaty needs, your own endless furious needs?