Cyclone Charlie
March's "somber Chicago" and a sneak peek at our upcoming work of autofiction....
“I am American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and I go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s fate is his character, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”
~ From The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
Joel Bowman, drawing inspiration from the other side of the world…
My first visit to the Second City came a few years ago. Soaring in from Mexico’s capital, where I was then living, I beheld the iconic skyline as the plane banked hard west over Lake Michigan, our heavy metal machine draped in the fading afternoon light. What a spectacle! What a triumph! What a beacon of grit and human ingenuity, right beneath us!
There, outstretched beyond my window, was the city of Benny Goodman and Theodore Dreiser, of Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow, of “Scarface” Capone, “Bugs” Moran and John Dillinger, too.
I journeyed to Chi-town to conduct some research for a then-nascent book idea, a seed, really... one I dreamed of one day writing... and one to which I’ve lately returned. That... and to see a rock ‘n’ roll reunion show with a childhood friend, who had likewise flown in for the occasion. So we pitched up at The Drake, the second hotel in town to serve a martini after the end of prohibition, and set about reliving the glory days of our misspent youth.
Against March’s “somber city,” we bar-hopped, eyes wide open for three days, up and down the Magnificent Mile, from grillroom to taphouse, bistro to dive bar, jazz hall to concert room... enough to fill a thousand pages of reflections and ruminations.
The following excerpt picks up the action with the novel’s principal characters, Charlie and Amis, at a historic rooftop bar overlooking Millennium Park. Please enjoy this exercise in what French novelist, Serge Doubrovsky, called “autofiction,” tentatively titled, Cyclone Charlie...
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From Chapter II of Cyclone Charlie
Perched atop the Athletic Association’s trendy beanery, a crowd of casually coolish Chicagoans mingled with out-of-towners and internationalists alike in the arching, crepuscular glow. Amis surveyed the scene as Charlie parted the humming crowd en route to the bar, the ocean corridor closing behind him in a splash of plaid jackets and clinking highballs and gesticulating, bangle-clad forearms. They came from all walks, thought Amis, coagulating in this thick, sui generis soup. They were in from the prairies and up from the bayous, each come to make good in the Windy City. New and Old Worlds, arm-in-arm, at home and from abroad. Come Germans! Come Irish! Come Swedes and Norwegians! They were steelworkers and meatpackers and cloth cutters and odd jobbers, joiners and stevedores and factory hands too. Pinned to the disassembly line, specialized, bargained down, broken up. Hog butchers of the world, so Sandburg observed, the weight of a young nation lodged square on their big, broad shoulders. Come blacks! Come Asians! Come Latinos too! Great Migrations and the New Negros and a Black Renaissance, Harlem’s rowdy midwest brother. The city aswirl in movement and melody, Polka hop, Steppin’ and Cha-Cha-Slide. Amis sauntered toward the glass railing and peered out over the thousand-year monuments. He saw heaving doric columns and Peanut Park and Frank Gehry’s shiny metallic ribbons, strewn across the grounds, so many forgotten playthings of the gods (little-g). Behind him the DJ’s warm tunes - soulsy, bluesy, housey and more - comingled with the after office chatter, while the winds over the Great Lakes whipped across the skyline shards.
Amis snapped-to when his lanky friend sidled up, a pair of Chicago Fires in fist.
“Extinguishers next,” said he, presenting the potent libations. “But first, to poor ol’ Mother Leary and her clumsy heifer. There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!”
Strange thing to sing to children at bedtime, mused Amis as the 100-proof flames licked at the back of his throat. “Like Ring Around the Rosie,” he shook his foggy head.
“What’s that?”
“The pocketful of posies. Supposedly some old wives’ nostrum against plagues; bubonic, pneumonic, what-have-you.” Amis noticed the blank tide filling Charlie’s blood-orange eyes. On he pressed, “‘A-tishoo, a-tishoo,’ that’s the sneezing and wheezing. Falling down represents death, you see?”
“I see. And the roses?”
“Pretty euphemism for ashes, which is used anyway in some other versions. ‘Ashes, ashes we all fall down...’”
“Well, well. Aren’t you a bag of uppers tonight, eh?” Cyclone Charlie let forth a bellowing laugh and landed an open hand in the middle of Amis’ back. “A real gas, eh? What’s next, tales from the cancer ward?”
Solzhenitsyn, Shamalov, Wiesel... Amis repressed the biting urge to summon history’s key witnesses and, instead, landed on, “Well, it was you who brought up the great conflag, was it not?”
“Fair play. Fair play...” Charlie drifted off, letting his hazed gaze stray a ways across the tilting terrace. He granted it pause, lillipadding here and there, when a fetching form arrested his fancy. Amis observed his friend’s familiar ways. His jutting chin leading the cranial pivot (up periscope!), clenched jaw grinding teeth like a bike chain, rocking and rollicking from heel-to-toes, rarified airs affected, eyebrows ever atwitch. He wondered if anyone knew Charlie’s ticks and tells better than he did. Maybe Isla? Surely, yes. And yet, Amis could not convince himself it was so. Even in her affected perfection, her glossy sheen and conspicuous attentions, she seemed but a simulacrum of the real self, a kind of super-faux ego. He made to inquire after her and the kids but, once again, his mind touched something sensitive there, or perhaps “thorny” was a better description, and so he filed it away for another time.
Nettlesome... barbed... briery... he was still talking to himself when Charlie broke in some moments later.
“Seven o’clock, sapphire sheath, little off-the-shoulder number. Latina, perhaps,” he nodded along as he spoke, as if he were already in conversation with his winsome sirenita. Amis nodded too, though his periphery did not extend beyond about four-thirty. His own focal point rested somewhere along the handcut horizon.
“Now that’s real beauty, Amis,” Charlie’s ogle lingered now. “God’s honest truth. Beauty...”
And that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know...
The crowd smothered his borrowed musings and Amis turned again to swim in the lake and the open air across the park. This kind of bar scene had never really appealed to him. Whether in Brisbane or Berlin or Buenos Aires, it did not much matter. The after office milieu, jocks jostling, ribbing, pinstriped psychopaths panting and thumping their gym-chisiled chests, conscripting pretty Louis Roederer soldiers haloed with cheap pyrotechnics. The showiness made him cringe. Had “success,” so-called, always hummed at such a deafening, atonal volume? Considering the skyline around him, monuments to commerce and industry, he had to concede, naked ambition was nothing new. Ok, fine. But this was something else entirely. He turned to consider the heaving throng, the thronging heave. No, this had to do with attenuated attention, with digital devices, with followers and platforms and the insidious atomization of the demos. Witness the posing, the checking in, the vicarious living through filtered experiences, the never-ending photo sessions, cameras forever turned inward. The Digital Age had ushered in a distinct phenomenon, discrete and perforated from history, in which man became severed from society, community, heritage, family, the body politic at large. The anachronistic concept of a collective experience, however flawed and imperfectly wrought, served at least to anchor public discourse in a commonly understood set of principles and values. A generally accepted framework. The nation tunes into the nightly news, follows the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Olympic boycott or watches his brother set foot on the moon. He knows he is present, in place and time, shoulder-to-shoulder with his people. He might disagree with his neighbor over some particular matter of taste or aesthetics, on the value of modern music, say, or contemporary literature or current affairs; likewise might he debate the justification for some foreign entanglement, in Syria or Guatemala or East Timor, weighing carefully the merits of his opponent’s position; or question the domestic response to an economic malady of sorts, a shortage of goods or a glut of labor; but he could at least be sure that he and his interlocutor were, for practical purposes, speaking the same language, that they shared more or less the same end goal, even if their means of achieving it so differed. But now?
This was not the first break in the chain, of course, but it might well be the cleanest, the most profound, most decisive. Even the fledgling modernists, cleaved from their traditionalist, Georgian roots and dropped naked and trembling into a vacant world, no eyes in the heavens and His blood (capital-G) on their hands, searching desperately for transcendence from the present moment and struggling to find the language to voice the content of their shiny, new, unconscious minds; even they, the Lostest Generation of all, were bound by a common project, fastened tight in their disillusionment, forged in the crucible of post-war horror and committed to the search for redemption. Amis closed his milky eyes and sighed a dust-filled sigh.
Come Lost! Come Greatest! Come Silent and Few!
Come Boomers! Come Xers! And now, what is true?
We are broken from ourselves, pined Amis, his maudlin reverie set adrift somewhere over Survivor’s Garden. We are consumed by our identities, intersectionalized into the meaningless matrix of victimhood. Daily we are swallowed whole, gawking like big-eyed Narcissus, into the black reflective spring. Riven asunder. Down, down, like Ahab and his whale. The Age of Heroes is cold and dead and, anchored to it, the eternal quest for truth.
When old age shall this generation waste... beauty is truth, truth beauty.
And that’s all for today, dear reader. Look forward to more installments in future issues. In the meantime, feel free to…
Stunning!!! Beautiful to read...
You’re at again, eh? It’s good that my dictionary is digital, otherwise I’d have worn out a couple of Merriam-Webster’s because of you. Let’s see, whose works shall I move on the bookshelf to make room for #3? You’re catching up with Casey-Hunt.