Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

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?

No one in this city, no matter where they live or how they live, is free from the fairness of my administration. We’ll find you and be fair to you wherever you are.

— HAROLD WASHINGTON, 51ST MAYOR OF CHICAGO

Of Harold Washington, people used to say that as long as he had political combat on his hands he’d never be lonely, and that was all well and good while he was alive, but it caused problems for the mayor in paradise. After a few years of paying his dues in heaven’s trenches, he challenged Gabriel for archangel and nearly pulled it off with 47.6 percent of the vote. Disgruntled and jealous cherubs supported him in droves. Finally, God’s chief of staff, just to get rid of him for a while, let Harold Washington come home for a small, unannounced visit.

It was Martha who spotted him by the baggage claim, long after the last flight had come and gone. She was sweeping up, the last hour of her shift. She said his face had the haggard look of someone who has been crying for years, one way or another.

“Do you know what I mean?” she asked her friend Lucy, the only person she told this to, the only person who would believe her. The two of them were having lunch in the employee cafeteria. Lucy said she knew what she meant. She understood that a man’s dry face could have the look of weeping. She mentioned her uncle Jomo. “He had the look, too. Uncle Jomo’s wife died while he was still in his thirties. He put his grief on with his clothes every morning. When did you see the mayor?”

“Last Thursday,” Martha said.

“Did he say anything?”

“Not at first. I went up and told him that the Orlando flight came in an hour ago. There’s no more bags, sir. You can contact the luggage office in the morning. Everybody from Delta’s gone home. Then he turned to me with a finger on his lips and I knew.”

“How’d he look?” Lucy asked.

“Thinner.”

“No! When that man was done eating chicken, he’d start in on the table legs.”

“All of it gone. And his shoulders were stooped — bony, really,” Martha said. “His trench coat looked like it was hanging off two doorknobs.”

Lucy watched her friend. She had that good way of listening — with her elbows on the table and her hands propping up her face like two bookends. Neither of them was eating anymore.

“Our burdens,” Lucy said.

“Yes,” Martha said.

“My God, remember,” Lucy said. “They wouldn’t let the man do a thing. The mayor would want to take a leak and Eddy Vrdolyak would vote against it.”

“I remember, I remember,” Martha said. “How could anybody not remember?”

“You forget how people forget.”

“Mmmmm.”

“What about his eyes?”

“Still beautiful.”

“So what’d he say?”

“He said Midway looks like a real airport now. Richie Daley, I said, and he looked at me with those eyes. I said, I hate to break it to you, Mr. Mayor, but Richie is king now, and he shouted, Richie Daley, that unworthy dauphin? The father was one thing, a cretin but a man with innate political talent, even brains, a man who somehow — somehow — kept his own nostrils clean while the putrescence of corruption oozed around him. No, the father was one thing. But if Richie Daley is the second coming, I’m Annette Funicello.”

Martha gasping, laughing. “The Mouseketeer?”

“That’s what he said. Even made those ears behind his head with his fingers.”

“And he laughed? He laughed?”

“Half laughed, half didn’t.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Then he cleared his throat, all mayoral , and asked if the pay was any better now that this is a real airport. I said, ‘Sir, there haven’t been any other miracles besides you.’ And then he did laugh, Luce. He laughed until what was left of his poor body wasn’t there anymore.”

E.J. dead now too, still talking. Telling me about his yellow-and-purple-daisied ’69 VW bus, about piling in fourteen friends, acquaintances, and a few folks he never laid eyes on before and driving from Sheboygan to New York to see Joan Baez at the Fillmore East. Motherfucking Manhattan, I’m telling you . From our little cow-shit college in Wisconsin it was like landing on a ring of Saturn. We didn’t know our mothers’ names. I don’t remember a thing about the ride except the fog. Outside the van and inside the van. E.J. nudging me. Nirvana highway, brother, Heh, heh . And that Carrington drove through Ohio with his feet. Tried it in Pennsylvania with his dick till he drove us off the road. Carrington with a name like some Earl of Edinburgh, though his parents were Christian Scientists from Rhinelander. Carrington, Carrington, Carrington. Whose idea it was to buy the refrigerator for Chuck and Kathy D.? I told you about the refrigerator? About Chuck and Kathy D.? How they got married sophomore year and were so poor they couldn’t afford to rent a place with a fridge, so to keep food from spoiling, Chuck would leave sausages and cheese and eggs outside on the porch all night and then run out there at dawn, naked, grab the stuff, and throw it in a pan on the hot plate for breakfast, then nosedive back into their single little-boy bed and make fast and furious morning love to Kathy D. Oh, Kathy D.! One day Carrington and I were shoplifting in Sears and we saw this Frigidaire on sale for sixty-five dollars, and Carrington goes up to it and starts licking it, saying, My dearest, my dearest, till the salesman came over and said, What in holy name? And so we borrowed ten bucks from the salesman, who only wanted us lost, another seven from a woman in the sewing machine department, a five spot from the stock boy, another couple from a little old lady clutching her handbag in Housewares. We made the down payment. This was in ’74 and we were Sheboygan’s hippies. So unique in town we were almost a source of pride. Oh, Sheboygan: city of cheese curd and churches. The rest we got on credit. That fridge is still unpaid for, wherever it is, rusting away in oblivion. Our accounts will never balance. Of course, the problem with Carrington was he never stopped. The best hustlers can’t. It was always something else. He started eight different folk bands our senior year, founded a commune on his cousin’s farm in Oshkosh, asked for handouts, saying it’s not a cult, it’s about love, brothers and sisters, love. By then he was using heavier than the rest of us. The year of Our Lord, the Bicentennial. Jimmy Carter’s buckteeth and Alfred Joseph Carrington the Third on a float in the Fourth of July parade. God knows how he got up there, but there was Carrington, strung out in General Washington’s boat crossing the Delaware, Cub Scouts dressed like elves straddling his legs and whacking him with paper muskets like he was some favorite drunken uncle.