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Blogs

No one must know my terrible secret...

House of Noh!

Monday, March 28, 2005

The tiny, elderly woman who seems to be the owner and sole employee of the Noon Hour Grill under the Brown Line tracks at Irving runs the whole show, so just four or five customers at her little breakfast / lunch counter gets her bustling. While she’s bustling she says things like “oh my!” and “goodness gracious!” very quietly under her breath with her high-pitched gentle old lady voice in a manner that is endlessly endearing.

But don’t feel sorry for her when she gets lots of customers all at once demanding (courteously, everybody there is always very courteous to her) her attention. She likes to keep busy. “I don’t want to be old!” she’ll explain if anybody expresses their regret for her bustle. However, this not wanting to be old thing may just be what she says to be polite. I don’t know. If you sit at the counter and listen long enough you’ll eventually hear her express some bitter regret to her most familiar regulars over not taking the opportunity to sell her lunch counter at a totally sweet buy-out price a few years ago.

But if she feels like she’s frittering away her golden years cooking for a bunch of assholes, you wouldn’t know it. Here’s the best part about the Noon Hour Grill – which, standard rice cooker on top of an old television, spider plant baby growing roots in fresh water in a coffee cup on the formica counter, free issues of Chicago Shimpo magazine aside; the best part of the Noon Hour is really the old lady who runs it. If you eat everything you ordered she’ll reward you when she comes to take your empty plate away. “Oh! You finish! That SO NICE!” Where else will merely finishing what you ordered at a restaurant earn you such praise?

Oh, and the door to the Noon Hour Grill doesn’t shut all the way on its own, and the trains running over top of the little storefront are really noisy. So if you’re the one sitting closest to the door you’ve got to get up and push the door closed the last few inches after each new customer comes in. That’s your job.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Further evidence of my archetypically tragic character: (And keep in mind that this occurred after capsizing in the Chicago River with cell phone, wallet and binoculars in my pocket, getting that filthy water all up in my peehole, and being tumbled downstream like I was in a rock polisher.) Okay, I was standing under my old rusty shower head, all goose-pimpled from the dribbling cold water. That’s when I realized I was all out of soap. I did have a few scraps stuck in the drain, I realized. This was lucky. I squatted down and picked them out of the hairy drain-mess.

You know how the diamond necessary for operating the only laser strong enough to shoot up a meteor that is hurtling directly toward Earth somehow always gets busted? And you know how then Superman or whoever shows up and squeezes the diamond shards in his (or her) hands, creating such heat and pressure to re-form the diamond into one piece?

These soap fragments - I should be able to squeeze them together into a serviceable mass. But when I opened my fists I found not the reformed diamond soap bar that I had envisioned, but instead just more, smaller soap fragments that washed out of my hands. This time they washed down the drain.

Oh, and also: Assholes always trying to give me their business cards. Shit.

Friday, March 18, 2005

I guess there’s some sort of new Wonderbra out now. I don’t usually follow these kinds of things, but I inadvertently caught the new Wonderbra product roll-out parade a few weeks ago in the lobby of the Hilton downtown.

And, BTW, it’s crazy what sort of swanky places even a doofus reeking of that military surplus mildewy smell and dressed in a ratty sweater, chain-lube-stained jeans, and ill-fitting self-knitted cap can just walk into around the downtown area. There’s that architectural center by millennium park, which is really cool and last time I went was exhibiting paintings by these awesome Chinese painting brothers named Tomax and Zamot who I guess throw crazy wild parties at their secret painting loft lair. And you can even check out the Monets and shit in the art museum downtown if you can withstand the withering glare of the admissions person as you take a downward departure from the “suggested donation” admission price of $20 and slide your penny across the counter – index finger on top if it, like you’re moving the slide switch on one of those music mixing boards. Oh, and also, it’s extremely important that you announce your $.01 donation as “one peppercorn!” I’m not sure this is technically correct, but any nerd who’s been to lawschool (and that’s like everybody) will think it’s HILARIOUS and forgive you your snide un-support of the arts. I mean, a penny! You can find a penny on the sidewalk if you just walk around looking for one.

Please allow me to set the stage: Here I am stinking up the Hilton lobby with its elaborately painted ceiling and gilded whatnots and fainting couches and stuff, me blemishing countless photograph backgrounds of the pictures tourists are taking of the building and decoration, when the Wonderbra parade comes marching through.

First there was an alpha model dressed in some sort of fancy ball gown. She was clearly the dominant model and she led the lesser models, who were each dressed in swanky ball gowns of their own. Then came some buffed-up guys wearing really tight t-shirts that said “wonderbra” across the front. (I think the t-shirts on the guys had to be really tight so that people could see the guys weren’t wearing bras – just so there wouldn’t be any confusion.) The buffed-up guys each carried some sort of bosom-supporting device before them in gold framed glass boxes.

I watched the parade pass, it was full of confidence and hip-swinging swagger. But when they came back through the hotel lobby again I thought they looked a little shaken for whatever reason. And then a few minutes later they appeared in the lobby again. This time they were visibly disturbed and their formation wasn’t as tight as before - the t-shirt guys weren’t holding their display boxes as high and the models’ shoulders were starting to droop. I think that they were there to show off their new, miracle accentuated bosoms, but something had gone terribly wrong. Maybe the people they were supposed to model for weren’t there yet, maybe it was just poor planning on the part of some model coordinator. They were desperate. Their glances fell upon me, then, appropriately, passed along. But there weren’t many people to choose from. In the lobby there was a cluster of old, white-haired women, a bunch of people rushing around too busy to check out models, and one guy with a mustache and a ball cap on. But the mustache guy was asleep. Clearly, it was a self-esteem lessening experience for the models. With no better options, they sort of straggled back over to me and started doing some half-assed modeling moves or whatever. I wasn’t sure really how to act. I mean, I almost always smell like peanut butter. What’s worse, I am (as I’m constantly reminded of during job interviews) a hick. And besides small shows, like in bars and stuff, the only real concert I’ve ever been to was when Weird Al Yankovich stopped in Kalamazoo, Mi. Further, my hair looks increasingly like Jim Carrie’s villain character in Lemony Snickets, and just last night I was sitting in my filthy kitchen on my sutra desk and picked a slimy booger out of my nose. I rolled it up into a ball between my pickin’ (index) finger and thumb. Then I tried to feed it to my cat. I think the models could sense that about me too, but they had to present their bosoms to somebody! It was very awkward and EVERYBODY was embarrassed. I guess that’s the modeling / bosom-accentuating-undergarmet industry for you.

Thursday, March 17, 2005

The mighty Chicago River was angry yesterday afternoon - a chained bear enduring the poking and prodding of townspeople but nurturing its rage and dreaming of the concrete fetters along its banks slipping away and providing it with an opportunity to lay about itself with a bloody and terrifying wrath. Gatorade bottles and turds tumbled by in the torrent, caught up in the river’s primal lust to spill its contents into the Great Lake Michigan, unaware that the last few hundred yards of its course has been touched by the filthy hands of mankind to flow backwards in an unholy abomination of civil engineering.

I slid my fragile little craft into the icy torrent down the spring-thaw-muddied banks just a little upstream from that waterfall where the river meets that channel dug from Skokie. My destination: more upstream. Where the river got tight around brush snags and rubble and the current increased, I often wasn’t able to climb the rapids on my first try, I’d be just about to crest a wave over an old shopping cart or broken WPA paver or something and the river would overcome me and wash me back downstream.

But I was able to make slow progress. At least until I reached a fast, shallow section of rapids just under a bridge at the Northpark Campus. A few of Northpark’s fresh-faced students were standing there on the bridge when I paddled into sight. The chunks of concrete in the river below their bridge made up a sort of dam, and there was only one little chute I could fit the kayak through. But through this chute is where the river poured all its fury. What’s worse, the approach was littered with more concrete chunks, making it difficult to get a good bite at the water with my paddle. I made an exploratory attempt at the chute but was quickly washed back down the river. By now there were half a dozen students gathered at the bridge, talking among themselves and pointing. I took what I thought was the best angle to the chute, and almost made it, but the concrete chunks kept interrupting my paddle stroke. I was rejected and washed down the river again, this time sideways, my head hanging in shame. Frustrated, I tried again, this time using a straight-on berserker approach right at the chute in a tornado of splashing water. I didn’t even make it into the chute.

So, in shame, I had to paddle over to the side of the river and portage. I put in just on the other side of the bridge. The tender young Northparkers stuck their heads out over the bridge railing just above me. “Hey Mister!” one asked, “is that a homemade paddle?”

“Aye, Laddie, it is!” I responded and flourished the crude thing for crowd. “That it is!”

Then I put one foot in the kayak. It drifted out into the river a little and the current caught it, making me do the splits. The kayak drifted into the dangerous part of the river until I was really splayed out. I had no choice, so I lifted my landward foot off its rock, brought it toward me, and plopped in down into the river – knee deep in the chilly water - to steady the kayak. There were like a dozen Northpark students on the bridge by now, watching me closely, and when I put my foot in the water they uttered this collective sigh of disappointment that was so empathetic but at the same time so well-wishing and encouraging that although I was embarrassed I couldn’t help but be heartened a little by it. “Don’t worry,” the kid who asked me about the paddle said, “I bet the river will get easier the farther you get upstream.”

So I paddled onward, until finally I reached a park where a huge tree had fallen all the way across the river. Not eager to portage again, I grabbed hold of a branch and rested by the banks. A very elderly woman wrapped up in a headscarf hobbled up to me on the bank with half a loaf of old stale bread. She tore off little bits and threw them into the water around me. “Eat!” She commanded, “Eat!” At that, I loosed my grip on the branch and let the river do with me what it would.

Thursday, March 03, 2005

I think I’m really good at it. So I’m sort of broken-hearted that nobody ever lets me help put their flyers up. Maybe it’s just me being paranoid, but I’m starting to think people don’t mention their flyer-posting activities when they’re around me because they know I’ll insist on helping.

This is a shame because I’m really good at putting up flyers. And I enjoy it. I have experience too. In college I had an awesome performance center job and one of the responsibilities was walking through the tiny, picturesque downtown next to the college and asking local stores to display flyers advertising upcoming shows at the performance center.

Matt G. was an old pro at it. My first few times out he showed me the ropes. One day we walked the town distributing flyers for a ballet company that was coming to town. We stopped by the old hardware store and put up a flyer in their window, then we stopped by the old tyme barbershop and put a flyer in their window, and then we stopped by the department store and put a flyer up. But when we got to the pet store called Reptile World, Matt G. made as if to pass it by. “Hey, what about Reptile World?” I wanted to know.

Necessary background information about Reptile World: It was in a tiny store front but the store went way back. There were all sorts of aquarium parts and hamster cages and mixed in between them were cages with live animals and tropical fish in stinky, algae-filled buckets and whatnot. The place was filthy and merchandise was stacked haphazardly. If you found your way to the back there was a huge rodent breeding facility pasted with signs that said, “Not for sale!” The proprietor bred his rodents at maximum output, so much so that the air was always a few degrees hotter in that area of the store and the air was humid with urine soaked pine chips. It was like a mammalian compost pile filled with wriggling, eyeless, baby pinky mice. There were very few reptiles in the store.

You might be wondering, why call it Reptile World if there aren’t many reptiles for sale? It turns out that the proprietor operated a grey-market lizard zoo deep in the basement of the store. That’s what he was supporting with all the rodent breeding. For $1.50 per person the proprietor would unfasten a moth-eaten velvet rope behind the counter across the stairs leading to the basement. The stairwell was totally dark, as was the basement, but then he’d flip one of those huge, evil villain knife switches and a bunch of florescents would flicker on below. As soon as the lights went on the snakes came awake and you could hear the rattling of the rattlesnakes, even from the top of the stairs. Some of my friends wouldn’t go down there, even after they paid their $1.50. The reptile guy was always like. “No refunds!”

In addition to the rattlesnakes there were huge boas and pythons, alligators, crocodiles, poisonous frogs, coral snakes, one very depressed fanged featherless bird, a motley crew of iguanas rescued from abandoned trailer homes missing various limbs, a small kimono dragon, cobras, spitting cobras, flying cobras, hissing cobras – pretty much any scary kind of reptile. There was sort of a circle route through the reptile cages. The only ones that had plexiglass cage-fronts were the spitting cobras and the plexiglass was all stained with cobra spit. The rest of the snakes and crap were kept in what looked like chickenwire rabbit hutches. There was only about two and a half feet between the cages and when I walked between them the snakes would strike against the chickenwire along both sides of the aisle, rattling the flimsy looking cages and their loose wooden latches. As I toured the reptile zoo escaped crickets would hop out of the way in front of me on the damp, pocked concrete floor.

I don’t know if it was an accident or not, but one time I was down in the reptile zoo alone and the reptile guy turned out the lights. I’ve never experienced such blackness as I did in that damp, humid, poisonous reptile filled basement. I just had to stand there and yell frantically for the reptile guy to turn the lights back on because the snakes were still all worked up and rattling and I knew that if I accidentally brushed up against the chickenwire a snake could bite me through it. I’m afraid it would be an unfair exaggeration if I typed that when the lights finally came back on and I dashed up the stairs I saw that the Reptile World proprietor’s pants were tented with a huge, forked, erection.

But anyway, I was a philosophy major and Reptile World was a valuable resource I used to stay practical as I developed my environmental ethic - “I don’t care if that diamond back has a right to exist or not, if it gets out of its cage and comes after me I’m going to go all ape-shit clubbing it with this giant rawhide dog-chew!”

Okay, so back to flyering. Matt G. didn’t want to ask the guy to hang a flyer in his shop. I took his reticence to be the result of his terror for poisonous reptiles. I was like, “you flyer-poster coward!” In retrospect however I realize that he probably didn’t see a flyer in the window of a grey-market lizard dump as a positive endorsement for a ballet company. But whatever. I grabbed a flyer and our roll of clear tape and ran into the shop.

The lizard proprietor gave me lots of pushback re: displaying our flyer. I wouldn’t take no for an answer. But he wouldn’t listen to reason. Eventually I was like, “Enough talk!” and I started taping the poster up inside the window to face the street. It came out sort of cock-eyed because I had to keep watching the reptile guy over my shoulder just in case he got too menacing while I was taping. Matt G. watched the confrontation through the front window, from the sidewalk. He had a terrified look on his face. I thought there’d be trouble, but after I got a few corners taped down the reptile guy gave up.

Whenever I give my cat a bath, I’m there on my knees beside the tub holding Mr. K in the water and he’s trying to leap out and squirming but eventually he gets all wet and just sort of stands in the tub, puts his cat paws on my chest, and rests his furry little cat chin on my shoulder and meows piteously but quietly in my ear while I give him the old lather, rinse, repeat. The reptile guy was exactly like that, once I had a few corners taped down. All signs of resistance left his face and his shoulders sagged. He was like, “Oh well, I guess you got that flyer taped up there now. I guess I’ll just have to live with it.”

And long after the ballet company had come to town, months after they’d left actually, that poster still hung in his window all crooked and sun-yellowed. I always pointed it out to people when we passed the shop. “You see that flyer? Well, do you?! I’m responsible for that! That was all me! I’m the best flyer-poster ever!”

So anyway, I guess my point is that I take a lot of pride in my flyer-posting ability. If it was a more lionized activity than it is right now, like it deserves to be, I’d ask my friends before we hung out with a woman I wanted to impress to steer the conversation around to flyer hanging. But unfortunately it’s not that lionized, so instead I ask my friends to talk about how good I am at peeing into empty bottles. I haven’t spilled a drop in years!!