Flashback 2007: Suburban swine

     A stack of photographs tumbled out from a drawer. Pigs in a garden. Hadn't seen them in years, but I instantly thought of this column. The wonder is I haven't reprinted it long ago. The first item is oddly topical, with the internet allowing us to complain about everything all the time. This ran was back when my column filled a page and had a joke at the end, and I have kept the original subheads and the parting stab at humor.

OPENING SHOT . . .

     My wife and I honeymooned at a lovely spot—the Keeper's House, on Isle au Haut, in Maine's Acadia National Park. I still remember making the reservation, almost 20 years ago. The woman said that they had just one room available, but cautioned me that the room looked out over a dock, and at the end of the dock was a blue light, and the blue light sometimes bothered guests in that room, who complained that the light shone into their window, causing them dismay.
    I said OK, we'd just have to cope with the blue light, as the room was the last available, and we really wanted to stay at the place, a rustic inn made from an old lighthouse keeper's house, with no phone and no electricity, accessed only by the daily mail boat.
     So now we're stowing our luggage in the quaint room, with its mantle and candles and thick down comforter. Evening falls, and we look out the window, and begin to laugh, because the light is this little tiny cobalt blue light, way at the end of a dock, the size of a blue marble at this distance. The thought of someone being bothered by it, never mind complaining, was ludicrous.

     Though people do complain. They get bothered, and struggle like wolverines to make it right, forgetting that, more often than not, they'd be a lot better off if they took a breath and rather than try to sand off the rough edges of the world, instead adjusted their high expectations and repaired their lofty estimation of themselves and the perfection they consider their birthright.
     It was a dim blue light far away at the end of a dock, lovely in its own way.

SUBURBAN SWINE
     
     And now the story can be told. I've been champing at the bit to tell it, for well over a month now. But my next-door neighbors had not yet moved away—they left last week. And I didn't want to get them into trouble with the pig police.
     Which is an alien attitude, nowadays, in some parts of the Chicago area. Up in Lake Forest, for instance, where Robert and Kathleen Murphy sued their neighbor, Estelle Gonzales Walgreen, because she kept three pigs on her 2.3-acre property.
     The Murphys said the pigs were loud, dirty and threatened their safety.
     Which struck me as a joke. Because, as fate would have it, my next-door neighbor also had a couple of pigs—or so I was told, since I had never actually seen them myself. Never heard them. And never smelled them. Not once.
     And I tried, craning my neck over the nice cedar fence my neighbor built to contain them. I considered asking, "Show me your pigs." But that seemed nosy.
     Then one day last spring, around breakfast time, I blundered out the back door and, gasping, stopped dead in my tracks—there, in my neighbor's garden, which runs along the side of his house alongside my driveway, were pigs. Two big pigs, one pink, one black, nuzzling the greenery. I don't gasp often, but I gasped then because, really, one doesn't expect swine in the suburbs—well, not that kind of swine anyway.
     The first thing I did, of course, was call the boys, who hadn't seen the pigs either. Then I grabbed a camera. Then I knocked on the neighbor's door, but nobody was home. The garage door was ajar, however, and my first concern was that somebody had broken into the garage, releasing the pigs.
     I suppose I should have been thinking about filing my lawsuit ("discovery of said livestock caused an elevated heart rate and other as-yet-to-be-determined physiological conditions...") But really, my central concern was to get the pigs back into the garage before one of the 15 police cars that constantly patrol the streets of Northbrook slid by and my neighbor's pigs got busted.
     Having never shepherded pigs, I assumed it would be a simple matter of tapping them on the butt—with a stick perhaps—and they would trot in the intended direction. Wrong. It was like trying to herd a pair of fire hydrants. The pigs were happy where they were.
     By now, other neighbors were wandering over. One reached the wife on her cell phone, and she instructed us to dig into a tub of popcorn in the garage and use it to tempt the swine back into the garage. We did so, dropping a kernel a few inches in front of each pig. It would notice the kernel, eventually, lumber forward, snuffle up the morsel, and the process would repeat itself.
     It took about 20 minutes—one of the pigs balked—but eventually we got the beasts back inside the garage. It was about the most excitement the street had seen in a long time, probably since a few of us men removed an enormous wasp nest the summer before.
     The Murphys lost their case in Lake County court, and—all together now—are appealing the case to the Illinois Appellate Court.
     "No one wants to live next door to pigs," Robert Murphy told the Tribune. But that is not true—I wanted the pigs to live next door, had no complaint about them except for their reclusiveness, and am willing to testify in a court of law that I was glad that they were there, am glad I met them in their thrilling bid for freedom, and will miss them, and their owners, now that they are gone.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     I looked in vain for a pig joke that could be printed in a family newspaper.
     Failing at that, I noticed this coyote joke by Billy Crystal, which, given the packs roaming the city, is also apt:
     In L.A. we got coyotes in our garbage cans. Coyotes are just like my relatives -- they go out in pairs, they whine at night, and they go anywhere there's food.
             —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 29, 2007

Honor U.S. dead by not making more of them

Pete Stockslager, former Commander of American Legion Post 791, participates in a Memorial Day ceremony. A Vietnam War vet, Stockslager was an Air Force pilot stationed in Da Nang. He served two tours, flew 336 missions, and left the Air Force after six years with the rank of captain and 80 percent hearing loss from the roar of the jet engines.

     Monday is Memorial Day, and I know what you're thinking: boo hoo, no Memorial Day sales, no picnics, no parades...
     Well, dry your eyes. That isn't quite true. Some stores are open—my wife and I bought a washer at Abt a few weeks ago. Yes, the shopping experience is not the unbridled joy it once was. The employees are wearing masks now, more or less. As are we. No jars of Hershey's miniatures to fuel the deliberative process. We ran in, tapped an Electrolux, paid and ran out.    

     And picnics...of course you can still go outside. Outside is right there, where it's always been. True, you can't go to the lakefront. That's rough. And you can't gather your family or friends in groups, at least you're not supposed to. When I think of barbecues at Memorial Day, I think of that joyous moment when the charred hot dogs and Polish sausage are heaped on the big oval platter, the poppyseed buns stacked high in their big circular basket, the superfluous burgers glistening, just in case someone wants a burger, the pickles slivered, the potato salad mounded, the relish, mustards and —judge me harshly if you like but really, give it up because it's tiresome—ketchup set out and ready. People crowd around the kitchen island, elbow to elbow, nose to nape, grins big and goofy, hands shooting out in all direction—plates! forks!—spearing franks, splitting buns, scooping big dense spoonfuls of potato salad and chattering away how delicious everything looks. There's always enough.
     Not this year. Parades are out too. I suppose some could try a social distancing parade, but the just Northbrook Junior High Marching Band, spread out, would cover a mile and take 20 minutes to pass by, "The Stars and Stripes Forever" a thin, disjointed ditty wafting along the scattered spectators, as the horns at Cedar Street try to follow the drums three blocks back at Western.
     So sales ... barbecues ... parades —we've dispatched Memorial Day, have we not? Having covered the holiday's various elements, and can now look forward to 4th of July without fireworks. That will be. ..
     Oh wait. I've forgotten something, haven't I? Memorializing fallen soldiers...

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The Cave Dwellers

Joseph Mitchell

     Greatness guides.  Or can, if we let it.
      Several times in my career when, facing a dilemma, I pondered what my idols would do in a similar situation. When writing my first book, about college pranks, I wondered whether I could get away with writing the chapter on Caltech's Ditch Day by consulting the many articles already written about the annual event. Or did I really need to try to pry the secret date out of class officials, then spend a chunk of my advance buying airplane tickets to Pasadena and back, plus booking a hotel room, then actually fly to California and attend the event itself?
     I solved this dilemma by asking, "What would John McPhee do?" The great New Yorker writer was always there, up that tree with that logger, or in the canoe cutting through some stream "as cold as a wine bucket" in Alaska. That gave me my answer, John McPhee wasn't phoning it in. He'd go.  So I went to California, and the chapter is far, far better for those select few who have ever read it.
     Or on a more regular basis, if I find myself contemplating revealing something awkward or uncomfortable that I had rather not write about, I remind myself: "If Dan Savage can write candidly  about being fucked up the ass, I can write about ... whatever. Owning eight Big Toe Uglydolls." (Savage is known for being a sex columnist, but he writes wonderful memoirs—"The Commitment," about getting married, "The Kid," about adopting a son. They're honest, funny, and delightful to read). People who win admiration are bold. Be bold. The enemy isn't embarrassment, but indifference.
     Greatness also comforts. I never attempt anything so ambitious that I can actually be guided by the example set by the Washington Post's two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Gene Weingarten. That's would be like modeling your paper airplane after the B1 bomber. But we are both still in the same profession, or what's left of it, and that has to count for something. It's like admiring the stars at night: I didn't make 'em and I'll never get there. But I can look at them.
     So naturally Friday, right after dinner, I stepped out onto our front porch with Joseph Mitchell's "McSorely's Wonderful Saloon," a collection of New Yorker stories, and soothed myself. It worked like a charm.
     Mitchell was so famous for the unproductive last decades of his life, where he would go to his office at the New Yorker and, well, nobody knew what he did, that's it's possible to overlook just how good he was. He was excellent.
     I knew the story I was looking for, though I hadn't read it in many years: "The Cave Dwellers," a reminiscence about when he was a reporter for a New York tabloid in the early 1930s.
     "The winter of 1933 was a painful one," the tale begins, with Mitchell's trademark simplicity. Friday was certainly painful to me, and I'm not even sure why. At every step, I did exactly what I was supposed to do. Yet by day's end I was feeling so ... crappy. Maybe I was just tired.
     A couple had lived at O'Hare airport for nearly a month. The tip had come in from the wife of the couple, in an email Wednesday morning. My editor passed it on to me because, well, I'm kind of the Keeper of Lost Toys. I phoned the woman, like I was supposed to. She made sense. I drove to O'Hare to talk with her and her husband. They seemed what they said they were. We spent, oh, 90 minutes chatting. I had no question in my mind that everything she told me was true. She knew the streets of the old Taylor Street area where she said she grew up intimately. She knew who Oscar D'Angelo was. Nothing was suspect. She didn't seem to be trying to scam me or deceive me. She wasn't looking for anything.
     I wrote the piece Thursday morning, as expected. The part I was most proud of was the end, a sentence pointing out that those getting antsy being at home should be happy they have homes to be at.
    Friday morning the story was played across the entire front page. Credit Ashlee Rezin Garcia's moving photographs for that. The treatment wasn't expected, but appreciated. Every day on the front page is a good day.
    Except this one.
    Then emails started in. Lots and lots and lots. I'm used to emails. But this was ridiculous.
    In "The Cave Dwellers," Mitchell is covering the "human suffering" beat. Murders and Salvation Army bell ringers, breadlines and relief bureaus and evictions.
    "The attitude of the people I talked with was disheartening," he wrote. "They were without indignation. They were utterly spiritless."
     Maybe there was some of that. You don't become homeless because you're so dynamic. That echoed a phrase I wrote several times Friday, trying to explain the couple's situation: "learned helplessness." Some readers wanted to know why these people were homeless. I didn't know what to tell them. Others—most—wanted to help. But how? Where should their money go?
     I suppose I could have just ignored them, just skipped over their emails. Sorry, not my table. I just report the fires, I don't put them out.
    That didn't feel right. That would make me the faulty transmission, the void between the roaring engine of Chicago generosity and the mired wheel of this homeless couple. I didn't want to be that. My first thought was to set up a bank account for them. But I just work at the paper. I don't run it. We have policies. I consulted with my bosses, who reminded me: we don't do that sort of thing, I was told. And that makes sense. Because if we did, we'd slide into becoming social service, all our time would be taken up helping homeless individuals, and no stories would get written. I agreed, and was off the hook.
     And yet....
    "I began to feel I was preying on the unfortunate," Mitchell wrote.
    I was relieved when somebody set up a GoFundMe page. Problem solved. I began referring people to the page. For less than an hour. With each email referred, however, it dawned on me, clearer and clearer—I didn't know who this guy was. It could be a scam. Worse. A scam I was endorsing, just by making the referral. Thousands of dollars had already been pledged. I phoned up the person who organized the page. Our conversation did not settle my concerns. It was almost normal. But something was ... off. He was not a legit person, in my estimation, but someone acting like a legit person. A fine but important distinction. The emails kept pouring in. Maybe he was honest. Maybe he wasn't. I couldn't be sure. I got permission from the homeless woman to give out her email to those who wanted to help, so people could contact her directly. We stopped recommending the GoFundMe page. The couple moved from Terminal One of O'Hare to a Quality Inn, courtesy of a benefactor. The ace investigators at the paper looked into the GoFundMe page. There were worrisome questions, reservations. I won't go into details. We made sure not to recommend or link to the page. I ended up wordlessly forwarding the letters offering support to the wife's email, and to write the readers back, thanking them for their generous inclinations. It took the whole day. Nothing else got done.
     The cave dwellers of the story's title are a couple who lived in a cave in Central Park for a year but are living in an apartment by the time Mitchell meets them, down to their last seven cents, apparently. This is at the height of the Great Depression, another crisis moment in American history. The story Mitchell writes about the pair also goes on the front page. He also is overwhelmed by the reaction. "My box was stuffed with letters and telegrams from people who had read the story about Mr. and Mrs. Holliman, and attached to many of the letters were bills or checks to be turned over to them," Mitchell writes.
     At least I didn't have to deal with that.
     He revisits the couple, trying to give them the donations the readers had sent. The couple is in mid-spree, with liquor bottles scattered about, cigars, gift baskets wrapped in cellophane. I'm not suggesting that my O'Hare couple would respond to support in the same way. Rather, it is the sense of let-down I related to. No kindness goes unpunished. The couple is indignant over a slight error. The husband starts in.

    "You said in that writeup we only had seven cents left, you liar."
    "Well, that's what your wife told me."
    "I did not," said Mrs. Holliman, indignantly. She got up and waver her tumbler, spilling gin and ginger ale all over the bed. "I told you we had seventy cents left." 

     They refuse the money Mitchell has collected, chase him out of the room, throwing a gin bottle at his head as he flees down the stairs. Back at his office, he has to send each donations back to each individual reader. The couple are swept up by a millionaire in a limousine who. takes them to live with him at his farm in New Jersey. But when Mitchell checks on them a few months later, they are gone.
    "I think they left me because they just got tired of living in a house," the millionaire tells Mitchell.
     Life is too complicated to whittle down into a news story, yet we try anyway. Most people are good, most people want to help. I certainly consider myself to be a good person who wants to help. But helping can be difficult and fraught with complications. You can do everything right and at the end of the day it still feels wrong, and you aren't even sure why.




   

Texas Notes: Badass Women

     The latest report from EGD's Austin bureau chief, Caren Jeskey.

     We all know Jane Addams (1860-1935), a progressive social reformer and the mother of social work who said “old-fashioned ways which no longer apply to changed conditions are a snare in which the feet of women have always become readily entangled.”       You’ve probably heard of Emma Goldman (1869-1940) who was an anarchist social justice advocate who said “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things.” 

      You may even know Sissy Farenthold (born 1926, 93 years old today), a human rights activist who was nominated to be Vice President of the United States in 1972 and finished second at the Democratic Convention that year. She said “I am working for the time when unqualified blacks, browns and women join the unqualified men in running our government.” 

     But I betcha don’t know Elisabet Ney. Grab your pipe and a cup of tea, have a seat in your cozy overstuffed armchair and let’s fix that right now.

     Elisabet Ney was a stone sculptor from Prussia who moved to the US and built a modest castle for herself in 1892 in Austin where she could sculpt and showcase her art. It also became a salon where progressive folks sat to share ideas and debate the state of the world. Elisabet shocked her 19th century community by daring to wear bloomers. That’s right. A woman in pants, scandalous! Though kind of makes sense for person who rides horses, don’t you think? Anyway. She also used her — can I even say it? — maiden name. That’s right. The maiden had an opinion and deemed herself worthy enough to express it, including living her life on her own terms. As shocking as it is, there are some brilliant and talented women in the world who have their very own ideas and make their own choices about how they will live their lives. Some even become bad ass sculptors or — if you want to be dramatic — sculptresses, while they are at it.
     Elisabet named her castle Formosa from the Latin formosus meaning beautifully formed. Formosa is now a museum closed due to COVID-19 that can at least be visited on a YouTube channel today. When I first saw this stone castle in the middle of the city during a COVID walkabout I thought “oh, Austin, there you go again.” This is a city of hidden gems. I returned to this magical place in the city time and time again before I realized how much meaning I’d find behind the walls, which I still have not had the delight of entering. On my first visit I ogled the structure with its grand balconies where I could picture Elisabet sitting and watching the sunset after a day of strenuous building. I stood in front of the columns and exquisitely detailed stonework and felt this woman’s power. I sat on the front stoop and enjoyed the view of the carefully tended gardens.
     On my next visit I gravitated along the gravel path weaving through what reminds me of a prairie restoration project one would see along the lakefront at Montrose Beach or around the Peggy Notebart Nature Museum in Chicago, but with Texas live oaks boldly claiming their space in the landscape. I weaved around to the back of the castle and noticed modern sculptures in the backyard, including bright blue felted birds’ nests appearing real on the limbs of a tree. The windows in the back of the castle were too high for me to see into, but I was entranced to find just the head of a larger than life graceful stone woman looking longingly into the distance in one of the rooms, and in the room next to her a solitary man doing the same. I wanted to climb the wall and go into those rooms, but I am sure there were cameras and a good security system so resisted this strong urge.
     On one of my visits two police officers — and I thanked them for their service — approached me and asked me if I worked there, since they were responding to the alarm going off. I said no and we chatted until the true proprietors arrived. The irony of the fact that one of these officers mansplained incorrect information about Elisabet Ney to me was not lost on me. “Her husband never lived here in Texas with her. She sculpted the Goddess of Liberty on the top of the Capitol building.” Wrong, and wrong. I tried to tell him, but he was sure he was right so I let it go. After all, he was the one with the gun, the badge, and let’s face it, the anatomical right to silence me. I’m used to it.
     The plaque in front of the museum mentions that Elisabet had strong opinions, thus was considered eccentric. I guffawed. A woman with opinions? In the South! Well, she must be eccentric. That odd bird. When I read more about her online after this visit I fell even more deeply in love. She viewed the institution of marriage as a state of bondage for women — not to say I think it always is — and is quoted to have said “women are fools to be bothered with housework. Look at me; I sleep in a hammock which requires no making up. I break an egg and sip it raw. I make lemonade in a glass, and then rinse it, and my housework is done for the day.” She went on a hunger strike for weeks when her parents opposed her being a sculptor and not only did she get her way and followed her dreams, but her works are showcased in the Texas State Capitol building today (no not the one on the top, Officer).
     She was an early leader of the Texas Women’s Movement and a civil rights, education and arts advocate. I noticed that diminutively she’s described as “one of a kind” somewhere online. Oh that funny, odd, pants-wearing chick! Haha! She may have studied with the top sculptors of her time, excelled in her art, moved thousands of miles to a new land, learned a new language, built an impressive home for herself and her creations, and her work stands next to the more highly lauded male sculptors of her time, yet she’s called odd and eccentric and it almost seems as though folks found her cute. She’s not cute.  She’s a force of nature.
     I wonder how many men would feel comfortable changing their last names to theirs wives names, wearing skirts even when pants made more sense, being forced to study things that they were not interested in to conform to societal norms, and to be condescendingly called “one of a kind” for expressing their true selves? There are hundreds, thousands, probably millions of us who would walk in Elisabet Ney’s footsteps if we could, and we try. We will continue to try. Maybe one day this world will be equally led by women of strong heart and mind, unafraid to forge unique and powerful paths and will not be considered unusual.

Stuck at home? Try living at O’Hare — since April

Manuel and Linda Benavides at O'Hare airport (Photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin Garcia)

     Linda Benavides and her husband, Manuel, slept at O’Hare International Airport Wednesday night. In Terminal 1, near baggage claim. At least they tried to sleep, until 2:30 a.m., when the police kicked them out, again. They went to sleep on the Blue Line.
     Or tried to.
     “There was a party on the train,” she said. “The Blue Line is bad. Drug addicts.”
     Most likely they will be back at O’Hare tonight, sleeping there again, or trying to, leaning against each other, using their jackets as blankets. 

     They’ve slept at O’Hare most nights for the past month. A good place to sleep, Linda said, because the bathrooms are right there. But not exactly pleasant.
     “It’s hard,” said Linda, 65. She said it several times. ”It’s hard.”   
     Why is it hard? Well, the lights are always on, for starters. And the constant looped announcements. “Cover coughs and sneezes and clean and disinfect hard surfaces...”
     Plus it’s cold. 
     “Like a refrigerator,” she said.
     The couple is used to the warmth of Central America. They lived in El Salvador for more than 10 years, trying to stretch her tiny pension from the Chicago Board of Education.
     “The only family he had was in El Salvador,” said Linda, while Manuel, 64, looked on. “He lets me do all of the talking because he can’t express himself that well.”
     They lived in San Salvador from 2009 until April 16.
     “We were helping his mom,” she said. Then his mother died. And the trouble began.

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Photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin Garcia

Flashback 1991: Room 174—a dead end

     An upcoming column required a call to the Cook County Medical Examiner Wednesday. I had a lovely conversation with someone from the county, and told her, in my chatty, effusive fashion, that nearly 30 years ago I spent the day with Dr. Robert Stein, the county's first medical examiner—before that, the post had been "coroner," a political office that rewarded connection over skill, and was filled more by men in derby hats than pathologists with medical degrees. I wanted to show her the article—a flaw of mine, I know, showing off my stuff, but too late to fix that now. I remember being proud about two aspects of this story: first, that I remarked upon the beauty of the young bodies in front of me. That didn't seem a place most reporters would go. And second, that I pointed out that most of them were African-American. At the time, it was considered impolite to do that. But to me, it was required. A problem can't be fixed if it can't be mentioned.
   
     They all end up here. All the clumsy drunks and the cocky felons; the innocent bystanders and the gangbangers who flash the wrong sign. Everyone who dies in the street, dies by the grim forms of violence, dies alone and unknown.
     Whatever the cause, they are brought to the same address: 2121 West Harrison St. They are brought through the same side entrance to the same room: Room 174. They are weighed on the same big stainless steel scale. A mop and an industrial wringer bucket always wait nearby.
     In this year of violence, when Chicago seems sure to top last year's total of 851 killings - the third highest in the city's history - and could very well break the all-time record of 970 murders, it is easy to fixate on numbers.
     But if you spend time in the Cook County Institute of Forensic Medicine and watch the dead come in, one at a time, the numbers recede. They are replaced by a realization of both the skewed racial mathematics of murder and the shocking fragility of the human body.
     Each evening, the next day's list is tallied. It usually contains between a dozen and two dozen names. The list appears on the desk of Dr. Robert J. Stein, Cook County's first and only medical examiner. For 15 years, he has left his home most days before 4 a.m. to arrive at work by 5 a.m. for a 12-hour day.
     He picks the cases he will handle, assigning the rest to the three forensic pathologists who work with him.
     Last year, 8,000 bodies passed through the medical examiner's office, which performed about 4,500 autopsies when cause of death was in doubt.
     On this particular day, there are 16 cases. Six are homicides. On average, eight times as many black people are murdered in Chicago as white; today, five of the six homicide victims are black. The sixth, a stabbing victim, is Hispanic. It is an average day.
     The rest are car accidents, mysterious deaths or possible homicides, requiring autopsies to determine cause of death.
     People mistakenly refer to the entire building as a "morgue," but in truth, the morgue is the big refrigerated storage area at the center of the building. It can be entered through several tall freezer doors.
     Contrary to popular belief, there are no drawers, no slabs. The bodies rest on gunmetal gray shelves. The shelves rise six high to the ceiling, and a forklift is needed to get them down from the top.
     Some bodies are wrapped in plastic shrouds, or white sheets, but the wrapping is haphazard. The only sound is the hum of refrigerator fans.
     The bodies are drenched in liquid soap, in bleach, but still the smell of death seeps through the rubber seals on refrigerator doors and soaks into clothes. Almost unbearable at first, after a minute it disappears, for a while, until it sneaks up again. It is an unforgettable smell.
     One morgue door leads into the autopsy room. The size of an elementary school classroom, the autopsy room has four stations where autopsies are performed simultaneously by Stein, Dr. Robert H. Kirschner, Dr. Mitra Kalelkar and Dr. Edmund R. Donoghue.
     At 8 a.m., there are more than a dozen people in the room. There are the four pathologists, each with an aide who does the bulk of the dirty work; several police officers, and a medical photographer, who takes pictures of the corpses and closeups of their wounds. Visiting interns from the University of Chicago and other schools, as well as doctors from South Africa and Japan, are also in the room.
     At each station is a corpse. The bodies are inclined on stainless steel tables, with fluids draining into large sinks.
     One body is that of a 22-year-old woman, shot by her boyfriend, who then killed himself. He is on a table nearby. On another table is a bicyclist; at the corner of 53rd and Princeton, he was shot seven times.
     The most unsettling thing about the bodies is that in many respects, they are beautiful - resembling sculpture, young and well-muscled, faces handsome and peaceful, beaded with water droplets from the beige hoses aides use to wash the gore into the sink.
     They look like they should be alive, and, of course, they should be. To gaze on those faces, unmarked, and those eyes, open, and then shift attention to the empty, red chest of the corpse is agonizing.
     Stein's case, No. 388, is a 25-year-old Mount Prospect man. He is dressed only in khaki shorts. On one arm is tattooed a dagger; on the other, a devil's face.
     There are no visible wounds. The only sign that he is not alive is his rigid pose; the deep, port-wine stains on his shoulders and the back of his neck, and his lower lip, which is deep blue.
     Mount Prospect Police Officer John Gross says the man was a drug dealer and user, that his roommates said they found him on the floor in his apartment.
     Cutting open a body is quick work. Stein's assistant, Doug Childress, takes a scalpel and, in two easy movements, makes incisions from armpit to armpit and from throat to navel. A few moments more and the man's heart is being weighed and examined.
     "This is the most important blood vessel in the body," says Stein, poking at the aorta. Lungs, liver, spleen follow. They are cut into slices, and samples are sent to a toxicology lab.
     The head is cut open with a small electric saw, its circular blade the size of a half dollar. "Guy's got a thick skull," says Childress. The skull is then opened with a small chrome wedge. The top of the skull makes a terrible sucking sound as it is removed. Stein weighs the brain and sections it.
     After about 45 minutes, Stein has uncovered nothing. All organs seem normal, and they are put into a plastic bag and returned to the chest cavity, which is crudely sewn up with heavy thread. The skull is packed with cotton.
      The next step is to wait for the lab report. Unlike on the television show "Quincy," which the 70-year-old Stein says is wrong on almost every detail, there are no rushes. The lab report will take up to two weeks. Until then, Stein fills out a temporary death certificate.
     The suburban man's body is returned to the morgue, and case No. 391 rolls into the autopsy room. On the new corpse's right big toe is wired a yellow tag that reads: "Unk. male black." He had been shot in the back at West 57th Place the day before.
     Despite the apparent cause of death, Stein still has to examine the body, murmuring details into a micro-recorder.
     The unknown man's clothes are cut away. A pair of black Air Jordans and a black baseball cap are set aside, near a bloody sponge. The corpse is tilted on its side, the body rigid, like a mannequin. The bullet hole is photographed beside a small ruler. The hole is one-third of an inch in diameter.
     The organs are examined. The bullet is found, lodged in a lung, along with a fragment. It looks small for the damage it has done.
     Stein pulls back a lung to display a pool of blood in the chest.
     "See that?" he says. "This man could have been saved if he was gotten to a hospital in time."
     At the next table, Harold Alexander, a technician for 20 years at the medical examiner's office, finishes sewing up one homicide victim. The body is rolled into the morgue and, 60 seconds later, another one is rolled out into the autopsy room.

     "I've been doing this so long," he says. "Every day. You get tired. You take so much–six days on, six days off. Sooner or later it catches up, the stress builds up. I've quit twice and come back twice."

     To summarize the bodies he handles, Alexander says: "Mostly black. Black male. Young male. Gang-related. Drug-related." In fact, 75 percent of the homicide victims in Chicago last year were black—639 black victims arriving at 2121 W. Harrison.
     Downstairs, near Room 174, Joseph Thomas is compiling the list of new arrivals.
     "We're going to hit the 1,000 homicide mark before year's end," says Thomas. "We're getting six or seven homicides a day. That's a lot of cases. It makes you so you don't want to go out for a drink after work."      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 10, 1991

A 5th star on Chicago’s flag: pep talk or curse?

  
     My people have a useful term that doesn’t translate well: kine hora. It’s Yiddish for “not the evil eye,” but means something akin to “knock on wood.” Were I to toss off some giddily optimistic prediction — “In September, when everything is back to normal, I’m looking forward to enjoying a sunny afternoon at Wrigley Field” — my wife might reply, “Don’t give yourself a kine hora.”
     Fate has a way of grinding our faces in misplaced optimism. My ballgame plans, come September, might haunt me as I’m herded into the temporary detention facility set up inside the shattered ruins of Wrigley, snagged in the federal sweep of writers and people who wear eyeglasses after July’s general societal collapse. I’ll look around, dazed, realizing I’m in the exact spot where I had anticipated an afternoon of peanuts and box scores.
     Best to avoid cheery predictions.
     So when Mayor Lori Lightfoot said, twice, she wants the city’s response to COVID-19 to be worthy of a new star on the Chicago flag, I winced, hope dwindling. Maybe this isn’t the beginning of the end. Maybe this is where the Bad Part starts.
     “I want nothing less than for our efforts over the coming months to truly warrant a fifth star on our flag,” Lightfoot said last week. Maybe she was being merely motivational, the way a Little League coach tells his players “I want every one of you to put in your best Hall-of-Fame effort against the Bumblebees.” That doesn’t mean he expects them to end up in Cooperstown.
     I hope so. Because to sincerely suggest a fifth star ... isn’t that jumping the gun? Isn’t plotting new flag stars an Ed Burke move? The defanged Burke argued a posteriori for a fifth star for the 2016 Olympics which, in case you forgot, didn’t work out so well.
     Fortunately, the solution was posed by the mayor herself, exactly one year ago. 

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