My grandma

     My mother and I talk on the telephone several times a week. A few days back, she mentioned that Friday, April 11, is the 30th anniversary of her mother's death.
    Which got me thinking: "I should write something about Grandma Sarah." That was the first thought, anyway. The second thought, arriving hard on its heels, panting, as if worried it would be too late to stop something embarrassing from happening, was this: Don't do it. Writing about grandmas is a fraught endeavor, best left to amateurs. What subject is more prone to schmaltz than one's grandmother? How many buckets of ink, how many pixels, have been slathered on the subject by writers less mediocre than I? Has anyone, in fact, in the wide swoop of literature ever written anything good about their grandmother? She loved us. There's nothing more to say.
     Back away slowly from grandma and nobody gets hurt.
     Which I was about to do. When a third thought, so far sitting in the audience, arms crossed, scowling, shot up its hand, waited then, when called upon, identified itself: "Too timid to write about his own grandmother."
     Fuck no. Never. Better to be bayoneted on the field than expire of fear cowering behind the battlement. That's not our way.
     Sarah Bramson was a tiny, birdlike woman. She was trim, put together. I never saw her sloppy or disheveled or anything other than ready to go. She was a professional woman. She worked in the May Company department store in Cleveland, a salesclerk—we were all proud of that. It was a sign of respectability. Plus there was the 20 percent employee discount, proof that we were not only an industrious family, but insiders, connected. We all benefited. I remember being, oh, 21, tucked into the back of my grandmother's blue Chevy Citation, with her and my mother, on an outing to the department store to purchase a Calvin Klein bomber jacket for me, the discount taking off a bit of the sting. I loved that jacket.
     She sang, with the Jewish Singing Society, the played poker and mahjong. She had cronies who would try to fix me up with their granddaughters. When I was small, she would stack the deck on our excited greetings by keeping Hershey's bars in her purse. Our grandma AND chocolate! What's not to love?
     She was the center of her world. My mother has written a lot of poetry, but the one sentence she wrote that really nailed her subject was the opening line of a poem about her mother: "She achieved the fame we all seek." Yes, exactly.  She was the sun in our solar system.
     Yet she was part of a matched bookend set with my Grandpa Irv, who was quiet and Polish and smoked and drank Old Grand Dad and popped Luden's for his ravaged throat. If there was an edge of vague menace to him — he would give my mother "a licking" when she was young — there was the story of him chasing her down the street, belt in hand. There was the implication I could get one too, if I didn't watch myself. I watched myself.
     They lived together on the East Side of Cleveland, in Cleveland Heights, where my mother grew up. I was 22 before I ate a Thanksgiving dinner that she hadn't made.  She baked — "garbage cake" is what I recall, a pastry roll with whatever was around the kitchen tucked inside (hence the "garbage") -- jam and raisins and walnuts and cinnamon and apples. I'd happily pay $100 to eat a slice now. There's no recipe. My mother has tried to make the dough, many times. Couldn't do it.
    My grandfather died in 1981. He was ailing, but robust, and it took us by surprise. He took ill having lunch with my mother, and was gone in a couple hours. My grandmother wanted to climb into the grave. Then she did something that shocked us. She recovered, fast, and was living, doing things. She had a gentleman friend, Dave. She was Blanche DuBois, only Jewish and in her 70s and in Cleveland.
     Then she died too. Also in a day.  Good for her, bad for us. Her death was worse, 30 years ago Friday, because we didn't have her to worry about. We didn't have anyone to worry about. Only us, and what were we now? It was over. My mother's extended family never gathered together in the same room after her funeral. My wedding, maybe, but then that was it. What would be the point? Half of us didn't even like each other. She had been the glue. The house was shut down, her possessions scattered. I took a photo of my grandfather as a young man, and a compact she bought on her honeymoon, at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago.
     I only remember one thing my Grandma Sarah ever said to me — and grandparents, this might be a hint to choose your words carefully. There had been an episode of "The Price is Right" — she and my grandpa loved to watch "The Price is Right." A woman had said, during the little pre-game interview they do, that she had worked as a dresser in Hollywood in the 1930s, and the host asked her if she had any regrets from the experience and she said, according to my grandmother, why yes, that Clark Gable had asked her to sleep with him but she had refused.
    "Of course she should regret it; the woman's a fool," my grandmother snapped, her eyes hard. But then a soft look came over her. "I would have said, 'Just let me get my clothes off."
     To which I, maybe 19, replied, "Grandma!" But I always cherished that, it was who she was, a romantic, a dame. She had aspired for better things for herself — she cried, my mother always said, to see the house on Rossmoor. It was so small. A person such as herself deserved a better house. But she lived in it for 35 years. She was smart though, and followed things — she subscribed to The Reader's Digest, so the best of news and writing would be delivered monthly to her door. I'd be embarrassed to touch it in any other setting, but a visit to her house entitled me to a happy half hour lapping up its bowl of predigested pabulum.
     There is another memory, oddly tied to my post Thursday mentioning the Eurythmics. A high school buddy of mine, Jimmy Armstrong, had a band, The Pony Boys, and were playing at the Agora in Cleveland in 1984. The Agora was a sort of music hall bar in Cleveland. He asked me to come see them and, being a supportive kind of guy, I agreed. But the Agora is on the East Side and I figured, if I'm there late, rather than schlep the hour back to Berea, I'd just crash at my grandmother's house. She was delighted to have me. I had never done it before.
     His band I've completely forgotten. But Annie Lennox — turned out the Pony Boys were opening for the Eurythmics — had short, carrot-colored hair and played the flute. During "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These)" she stuck the microphone into the audience, right into my face, and not only did I sing a verse, but slowly, and very gingerly, I reached out, with two fingers, and touched her hand which, at 23 years old, was something.
     Thus, the next morning I woke up in my grandmother's house. At breakfast, the strongest memory I have of my grandmother, a happy woman in a pink dressing down setting a plate heaped with scrambled eggs in front of me, so happy her grandson is right here, telling her about his big night.
     The next time I was in the house and she was dead and I was looking at everything with flat sorrow, for the last time. On the mantle, by the bookshelves lined with volumes of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, there was a newspaper clipping and a desiccated bunch of flowers. The clipping was a photo of myself and Edie—she never met my future wife, but she saw her, because the Tribune took our picture, backstage at the ballet, identifying us, incorrectly (The Tribune regrets the error) as "balletomanes," lovers of ballet, when what we were in fact were young people who had scored free tickets. No matter. Years later I was glad she had at least seen Edie's picture. Next to the clipping, the dried flowers, and I went to read the card, still attached. They were the flowers I had sent, months before, to thank her for putting me up for the night I went to the Agora. She had kept them there, in their cheap white porcelain FTD vase, even though they had drooped, died, then shriveled up. She hadn't been able to throw them away. Heartbreaking. I was both relieved I had sent them and sorry that over the years I hadn't sent more.

You? You can pay tax. But LaSalle Street? Against the law...

     Two utterly true, impossible-to-argue generalizations about people: a) they like to insist they are right about everything; b) they often are wrong.
     Notice a conflict? There is nothing you can do about b); try not to be mistaken, but it still happens. But a) can be worked with, and I find if you readily accept errors as they occur, you’re way ahead of the game.
     Thus when Tom Donovan called Wednesday to say, in essence, that my column on the idea of a financial transaction tax overlooked a key point, I was not irked. I was not shamed. I was glad; I had tried to figure out pensions, absorbing a range of opinions from the mayor’s office to the Chicago Teachers Union. But I am not the Jedi Council and certainly was interested in what the former president of the Chicago Board of Trade had to say. Donovan started by comforting me: I am not alone.
     “What people either don’t know or tend to forget is: Everybody talks about a transaction tax — aldermen keep raising this — but I passed a law prohibiting a transaction tax from ever being enacted,” he said.
     Donovan happened to have a copy of the 1980 law before him and read it to me:
     “Sec. 1: No unit of local government shall levy any tax on stock commodity or options transactions. Sec. 2: No home rule unit, as defined in Article VII of the Illinois Constitution, shall have the power to change, alter or amend in any way the provision . . . ”
     OK then. Why did you pass the law?
     “The reason I did it was was to protect the exchanges from the city ever taxing them, naturally," he replied. "We were in a competitive environment, we were building buildings and I wanted our members to feel safe and secure, not subject to taxes by the city of Chicago. So I pushed through this piece of legislation."
So such a tax is impossible?
     "As much as [CTU's] Karen Lewis talks about it, you'd have to go to Springfield and change the law, which they won't be able to do."
     I've known Donovan for years and like and respect him, and felt flattered by his candor — "which they won't be able to do" has a whiff of the iron scent wafting off Michael Madigan's "Nothing-happens-that-we-don't-foreordain" way that Illinois government is run, and has been run, for years. Money always wins. Still, with a representative of the usually faceless world of Big Finance on the line, I had to ask, in my piping plebeian voice: why not? Why shouldn't brokers and bankers toss a penny in the till when they make a transaction? I pay tax when I buy a stick of gum.
     "You may pay tax on a stick of gum, but you don't pay tax on your job," Donovan said. "Markets are very competitive and price is a factor. We were always able to make that argument. I won that argument in Washington for 20 years. I was able to get that passed, my first year as president of the Board of Trade, that gave us the comfort and security to invest in the city of Chicago."
     One of those who kept trying to create a tax, Former Ald. Virgil Jones, called. "I put that into the council back in 1995, and it was tabled," he said.
     Well, points for trying, alderman.
     Odd. Religion inspires people to rant and be mean when crossed. But money replies with a murmur. From a lawyer at a big firm:
     "You, like many others, do not understand the mobility of money," he wrote. "If Chicago imposed a financial transactions tax, many of the transactions that take place here would likely go to other places that do not have a transactions tax. The CME itself might move. That would be expensive but is not hard to do. In my case, I have a national practice with no specific ties to Chicago. . . .
     "My firm has an office in Dallas and I have been considering moving there lately [no personal income tax]. If the State increases the income tax, I will move and it will take many people making a lot less money to replace the lost revenue. I was speaking with another of my partners who spends part of the year in Wyoming (also no personal income tax). He is likely to move there if taxes increase. Chicago, and Illinois, are nice places to live but they are not what they once were. Raising taxes further, rather than raising more revenue, will move Chicago and Illinois one step closer to Detroit."
     Ah, Detroit. Can't let that happen. You could argue that the history of Chicago is the history of rich folk fleeing, starting in the Prairie District and heading for Wyoming by way of Kenilworth.
     There is also a counterhistory of common folk trying to get a better deal than the one the powerful force upon them and call fair. When does that dynamic come into play?

Talking music with the kids

     The newspaper has a Starbucks machine on the 10th floor, plus a big red soda machine, and cereal, candy and ice cream bars, not to mention fruit and juice and varieties of almond milk in a cooler. After I get the column going, I like to pop up there for coffee, fuel for the rest of the morning. 
    I've dubbed the area "Pleasure Island," not just for the candy, but for the arcade games next door. It's intended to demonstrate that we are not a stodgy analog newspaper filled with old coots like me, but a glam high tech digital business buzzing with bright young people, and we are all supposed to mingle as we caffeinate and sugar up (and beer up, during the weekly social hours, or so I hear). Most grab a bowl of Raisin Bran or a banana and run. But sometimes they do linger and talk, and I certainly don't mind joining in for a bit of a chat with my coworkers.
    Or trying to. 
    As I pumped my coffee, two guys in their early 20s and a woman about the same age were talking.
     "...it was one of three bands that are important to me," the young lady was saying solemnly as I ferried my cup of black regular over to press its lid on. "I still can't believe they're going to accept my ticket and let me in."
    They were talking about music. I like music.
     "That's a phrase I haven't heard in a long time," I mused brightly, taking a step toward them. Three heads swiveled in my direction, their faces slightly surprised, as if a chair had spoken. "The phrase, 'bands that are important to me,' that is," I elaborated.  
     I smiled, slipped a protective brown sleeve around the cup and tapped the cup top in place. "Then again, I think of the the Eurthymics as a new group," I continued. Self-deprecation—always useful in conversation. Shows I'm an easygoing sort.
     Still nothing from the trio. Maybe because the name "Eurythmics"—very big in the 1980s—meant nothing to them. Maybe it did evoke a spark of recognition, but in a bad way. Maybe my name-checking a 30-year-old group is the moral equivalent of Larry Weintraub—50ish, goatee, tattoo of an inkwell on his bicep, wrote a column where he dressed as a circus clown and dipped himself in pudding and such, dead for a decade— had burst in on a conversation me and my pals were having in 1988 about R.E.M. and U2 and Jane's Addiction  and said, "Of course, nothing can top The Dave Clark Five."
     The three young folk gamely tried to continue their conversation.
     "Where are they playing?" one guy said.
     "Lincoln Hall," she said. The concert was last night, so don't get your hopes up.
    "I saw them in a bar in Cleveland," I added, not quite willing to let my great musical moment with the Eurythmics go, impressing no one.
     Another pause. The trio sighed. Apparently this old person was still talking to them.
    "So what group is it?" I asked, so that someone would be saying something.
     "Julie Ruin" she said.
      The name meant nothing to me. All groups do nowadays. She could have said "Peg Board" or "Meg Odon." Turns out to be a group, not a person. Like Jethro Tull. We all looked at one another.
      "What kind of music?" I continued, still doing the talking thing.
     "Feminist punk."
     "Like Ani DiFranco?" I ventured, tossing out the one name of a female singer I knew who had a slight edge and became popular after Ronald Reagan left office ... Sort of like Larry suggesting Brenda Lee when the conversation shifted to 1980s female singers.
      "With a harder edge," she said.
      "Sort of a female Big Black?" I continued, grabbing at an edgy group, forgetting it was another band that's 30 years old. Actually even older.
      "Yeah," she said, fleeing, before I could deploy the sentence forming in my head, "And the only reason I know who Big Black were is because I went to college with Steve Albini." She didn't quite break into a trot, not in actuality, but she might as well have.
      I took my coffee and shambled toward the escalator, a little more stooped than when I had shuffled in. Julie Ruin is a Brooklyn band. I would define it as the type of music that appeals to people who haven't listened to much music, but what do I know? You can decide for yourself. I'm going to have to stop this talking to young people business. It frightens them and saddens me.

Trying to defuse the pension time bomb

      It hurts to have your pension cut. Trust me on that; I know of what I speak.

     In 2009, when Jim Tyree bought the paper, the deal he offered was: the union loses its right to seniority and takes a pay cut, and the company stops funding our pensions.

     What made the union vote to swallow that bitter pill was the alternative: If we didn’t accept it, Tyree promised, he wouldn’t buy the paper and it would go out of business. The only question was, was he serious?

     After exploring the subject from all angles, the honest answer seemed to be yes. So we took the deal.

     In the past five years, I have had no cause to regret that decision. I’m glad there is a Sun-Times and glad that I work here, and while I am not glad that my pension was frozen five years ago, it’s better than nothing. Should I someday actually get a pension check for any amount, I’ll be glad for that too, not to mention surprised.

     The situation facing city workers is neither so dire nor so clear cut. They don’t risk losing their jobs, not immediately anyway. They aren’t even facing pension cuts — their pensions can’t be cut, by law. The bill passed Tuesday in the Illinois House only scales back future increases in the labor and municipal funds, two of four pension plans the city funds. No matter. From the union perspective, promises were made.

     In an ideal world.

     In the real world, what happened is that Rich Daley gave away the ranch. The parking meter fiasco is small change compared to the pension disaster where, if the city keeps its obligations, Chicago will be hollowed out. The $600 million the city legally must contribute next year looms. Something has to happen, because if it doesn’t, Chicago becomes, in essence, an elaborate pension plan that also puts out fires.

     And then we become Detroit.
     So Mayor Rahm Emanuel is probing, looking for revenue, hoping to pry more money from real estate taxes, the standard mechanism to pay for city pensions.
     As he does, something keeps echoing in my brain — not the most economically savvy brain, I should point out — that Karen Lewis, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, suggested to me in November. We were talking about schools, but it might as well have been about funding pensions.
     “So raise taxes on the rich guys,” she said. “Do the financial transaction tax. Do something. Why is New York not in the kind of mess, financially? Why is that? You think about it, New York has Wall Street, those guys actually do pay their fair share.”
     The mayor’s financial brain trust points out that while New York does have a financial transactions tax, so many investors fled that now it reimburses them 100 percent.
     While there isn’t any exodus of Chicago companies — the mayor regularly shows off new corporate headquarters — the population is shrinking: 150,000 people lost over the past decade. Does not real estate tax affect that trend, in a bad way? Again, Lewis:
     “We have the CME. We have the Board of Trade. These guys are getting away with highway robbery. Those are the people [Rahm] respects and cares about. Because when you say we have to make hard choices, hard choices are not closing down schools in poor black neighborhoods. That’s not a hard choice. That’s an easy choice. A hard choice is going to the CME and saying you guys are going to have to put in a financial transaction tax. The city needs the money. That’s a very hard discussion. That’s a hard choice, and if you were really a good mayor, that’s where you would go. You would say, ‘Look guys, I know you like every single penny and more and blah blah blah. But guess what? You can’t even spend it all, you can’t spend this money. Let’s do the right thing, make the schools good, c’mon, 10 cents a trade, whatever. You guys aren’t really going to notice that. Let’s do that.’ ”
     I don’t want to go all Occupy Chicago on you, but that made sense to me. If this is a citywide problem, it should have a citywide solution. We won’t solve it on the back of business — nobody is suggesting that. But doesn’t business benefit from cops? From firefighters? From having roads and a nice city, run and maintained by hardworking city employees? Spread the pain around. At least appear to spread the pain around.
     Because there is a lot of pain to spread: $32 billion in unfunded pension obligations. The city’s entire operating budget for eight years.
     If it were an atomic bomb sitting in the middle of Daley Plaza, with one of those big red LED readouts ticking down the seconds, we’d figure something out. Quickly.

Be as happy about spring as you were sick of winter

     A shame that we don't greet the spring with the same zeal that we apply to loathing the winter. Maybe because we don't have to shovel the warm breeze. The flowers that poke up —like these purple crocuses in the trees beside our house Monday — can be left where they are. 
     Over the weekend, I got in a little yard work -- mainly scraping up the leaves that eluded me last fall. We went crazy with bulbs last year, and it is good to see them coming back in numbers. Can't plant tomatoes yet, of course —Mother's Day — but I'm tidying the garden, plotting my crop. More butter lettuce, less arugula.
     As I went about my tasks, I for some reason thought of bucket lists, all those romantic quests people assign themselves, claiming they must do before they die, climbing Manchu Picchu and going on an African safari, bungee jumping off a bridge over some gorge in New Zealand. These things, they seem to suggest, will give their lives texture and completeness and meaning.
     Maybe so. I can't answer for other people's lives. Nobody can. You can only explain your own. Me, I honestly don't want to do any of those. Maybe this means I'm getting old, but what I really want to do before I go is more of this. Puttering around this yard. Seeing to these bulbs and trees and bushes. The things that highlight my life aren't things found on any brochure. I'm really glad I had kids, got a dog. Contentment gets a bad name, but not among those experiencing it. Certainly nothing to be embarrassed about. I don't want a bigger house or a better car. I've seen Paris and Venice and London and Rome and Tokyo and and Tapei and Jerusalem and Casablanca... Not that I've seen the world or anywhere close and now have no where else to go.  Hawaii would be nice. Edie and I are going to go there, we've decided, next year, for our 25th anniversary. I imagine they've got really nice flowers.
    But I'm in no rush, and if we never make it there, I won't be calling out "Kealakekua Bay!" on my deathbed in regret. It's spring right now, right here. The winter was a beast, as Chicago readers know. Too much cold and too much snow for too long. But it's done now. And we should be at least half as happy about spring being here as we were mad at being mired in endless winter. We're not of course. Human nature. We have a certain genius for unhappiness. We're Mozarts of complaint.
     Speaking of which. Don't get me wrong; it's work, the yard. Sometimes I abandon it to practice lying on the sofa, reading a book. Another top item on my personal bucket list of small, quotidian tasks. And none of my garden turns out perfect, none of those fancy Versailles-like flower beds that some people manage. We have a really big yard, and it's old and overgrown and there's just me, but I do the best I can, and parts look okay sometimes. Well Edie, too, God bless her, pitches in. The bulbs were her baby.
     The cat marker, by the way, is for Hercules, a lovely, lithe tabby who died young. He was a fan of apple sausages, and I would feed him bits at breakfast—I hope that wasn't what did him in, although, if it was, he died happy, which is what I hope somebody says about me if they find me pitched over in the garden someday.  Better there than on the train. 

Don't be afraid: it's just poetry

     The great Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post's two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, called me out over this column in a Twitter exchange (from Aussie hookers to the best columnist working—I piss off 'em all). Actually, he wasn't mad, just questioned whether something could be poetry if it doesn't rhyme. I answered an emphatic "YES!" but he held his ground. There is no accounting for taste, and I'm trying to forget that he finds "Death of the Hired Man" by Robert Frost to be tripe. To me this is all a quibble over semantics: poems are what people call poems.

     Friday was cold and windy. Getting dressed for the Cubs home opener, I thought: better put on my Under Armour. Which is usually reserved for skiing or when it’s 15 below zero. But I worried that high-tech long johns were overkill, so I fired off an email to a Cub fan buddy, who would be at the game. Is wearing long underwear to the ballpark in April, I asked, a “prudent precaution” or a “shameful stratagem?”

     You’ll notice the alliteration in that question. Not an accident. “Prudent precaution” came naturally, then I paused, searching for the right “s” word to put after “shameful.”

     Not poetic, of course, but a reminder that we can all use language to decorate and enhance the most ordinary moments of our lives, like checking with a pal to see if wearing long underwear to Wrigley Field will mark a guy as a weakling. (“I will be wearing mine,” he answered, a reply I was grateful for when the wind picked up and the temperature dropped after the sixth).

     Cut to the next day, around Sheffield and Fullerton, I noticed the sleek Pegasus logo of the Poetry Foundation on a placard atop a taxi cab. Oh right. April is National Poetry Month, and while the commencement of baseball is marked in Chicago with pomp, solemnity and mass ritual, events like Poetry Month are shrugged off by the vast majority, which is just plain wrong. 

     First, poetry is important. Yes, as with long underwear, there is a whiff of effeminacy to it that many guys find off-putting. A cultural slur you’d think we would have abandoned long ago. Soldiers write poetry, not only a century ago, such as  Wilfred Owen’s classic “Dulce et Decorum Est,” about a World War I gas attack (Go online and read it right now, “As under a green sea, I saw him drowning/In all my dreams, before my helpless sight/He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.”) 

     But also soldiers fighting today. Brian Turner, in his collection “Here, Bullet” sees a sergeant shoot a crane in Iraq. "It pauses, as if amazed death has found it/here, at 7 a.m. on such a beautiful morning, before pitching over the side and falling/in a slow unraveling of feathers and wings."
     Second, poetry is useful. It's a tool, like a screwdriver or a hammer. Though I suppose that depends on who you are. If you are Mr. Equanimity, smiling at the clouds as you stroll happily along, your neighbors setting their watches as you pass by, well, maybe the stuff has not much use for you.
     Even then, there are always lighter poets, like Billy Collins, who runs up to the reader waving his poem like a 6-year-old showing off a new toy. "To take a poem/and hold it up to the light/like a color slide/or press an ear against its hive./I say drop a mouse into a poem/and watch him probe his way out."
     Me, being a dark sort, I've been revelling in the poems of Louise Glück, such as "Stars." She inventories her scant world. "I have a bed, a vase/of flowers beside it,/ and a nightlight, a book." Life itself questions her: "Do you dare/send me away as though/you were waiting for something better?/There is no better/Only (for a short space)/the night sky . . ." To which she hisses back: " I was brave, I resisted,/I set myself on fire."
     And third, Chicago is a poetry town. Do you think Wrigley Field, built in 1914, is old? Poetry Magazine was founded here in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, and has fielded better players and enjoyed a better past century.
     Chicago is a city not only with statues to poets such as Goethe, but with an apartment building and a parking garage named for poets. There is the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill on Sundays, now in its 27th year, and why that isn't a standard Chicago tourist stop along with Wrigley and the Art Institute is an utter mystery. There is the Poetry Foundation itself, which put up its airy and attractive building on West Superior to help sop up the Lilly $100 million fortune that drenched it, a dubious boon they've coped with better than expected.
     There is nothing superfluous about good poetry. It guides and instructs. I picked up "Leaves of Grass" a 150-year-old poem, and read one sentence that resonates today.
     "And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy," Walt Whitman writes, "walks to his own funeral, dressed in his shroud."
     That's it, I thought. That's what our political problem is right now. Not enough sympathy —for other people, that is. We overflow with sympathy for ourselves and puzzle that others don't share it, when we are so stingy doling it out. Maybe we should take our cue from Whitman and pause from marching graveward to cast off our blinding burial cloth, force ourselves to feel compassion for the other guy, even if we don't like him. Here poetry helps, or could help, if only we let it.

Shutting up is an art form

   "Honey," my wife called from downstairs. "The Bulls game is on."

    "Just a minute...," I replied, from my office, "I'm arguing with prostitutes in Australia."
    Strange world, this.
    Watching the Bulls play on television with the family is a joy. In the mornings we ask each other, "Are the Bulls playing tonight?" Someone checks the schedule hanging in the kitchen, and, if there's a game, we all sigh in happy expectation. Regular readers know that I'm not much of a sports fan, and generally that's true —I went to the Cubs home opener Friday, reluctantly, invited by a reader, but could not name a single player on the team, before or after. It was nice to sit there and eat peanuts and trade baseball trivia. But the Cubs didn't do anything memorable. One of them hit a home run. That's it.
     The Bulls are different: tremendous athletes, passionate competitors, each an individual, all trying to make the best of a tough situation: Derrick Rose being out for another season with another injury. It's still fun to watch them play. I never thought that passing the ball could be a thing of beauty, but when Joakim Noah does it, it is, sometimes. Often.
     Yet I lingered upstairs Friday. Because there is a strange mix of intimacy and invasion to the Internet, particularly Twitter, which has replaced Facebook and email as the dynamic communications form of the moment (and don't write in informing me that no, it's now Spotify, or LeadPipe, or something even newer. I'm 53 years old. I'm by definition behind the times. I catch up when required).
     What happened is this: Wednesday night I got a call from Attorney General Lisa Madigan's office, telling me that Amnesty International, which generally has a sterling reputation somewhere between Doctors Without Borders and Miss Bianca of "The Rescuers," would be debating, in Chicago, on Friday,  whether to endorse the decriminalization of commercial sex: basically saying that prostitutes, madams, pimps, brothels, should all be legal. Their argument is that selling your body, or someone else's, is a civil right, like voting.
     Madigan passionately believes that is wrong, that all commercial sex is coerced, either now or in the past, the result of child sex abuse. "The reality is, no young girl dreams of becoming a prostitute," she told me, Thursday morning, when I was writing the story. Her view made sense to me.
    I felt confident the column laid out the situation in a balanced way. "The issue pivots on that notion of consent,"I wrote. "Is Madigan right, that prostitution is invariably the result of sex abuse and coercion? Or can it be a choice, a business transaction among consenting adults?"
    Now I admit, I didn't line up testimony to back up that second premise, never thought: "I better find some hookers to talk about how wonderful their lives are." My belief, from 30 years of reporting, is that prostitutes are invariably damaged in some way, typically drug addicts feeding a habit, and fall or are lured into that way of life, trapped without recourse. 
     While no doubt some are working the bar at Gibson's and having a grand time, at the moment, that is rare enough to be insignificant, compared to the general awfulness of the trade experienced by most women. Heroin addiction doesn't become a good life choice merely because Keith Richards pulled it off. That said, I did not do a thorough and comprehensive review of world prostitution. And in posting my story here, I gave, as I try to do on the blog, a little extra background that didn't fit in the paper, a look at the bias I brought to the story:  years ago, I went out with the Cook County Sheriff's Police as they swept streetwalkers off Cicero Avenue. It was a scene from hell; I was amazed that men would pay these women for sex, because I was uncomfortable standing on the same block, breathing the same air.
     That wasn't offered as a sweeping indictment of all sex workers everywhere, but rather a description of what I felt, honestly and sincerely, standing there. 
      The column hit the world of Twitter Friday afternoon, re-tweeted more than 100 times. And a furious opposition sprang up that caught me completely off-guard.
    "Pure hate..."
    "Polemics and damaging stereotypes..."
    "You are afraid of your own sexuality, so you condemn others for theirs. It's fairly textbook..."
     The reaction was not from Chicagoans, but Australian sex workers -- as far as I could tell -- plus various sympathetic sorts: London party boys, Irish good time gals. Dozens of them.
    "So horrendous. Not even slightly professional."
     "Comparing SW to drug dealers rises to a whole new level of cluelessness."
     "Neil Steinberg is a pustulent, rotting WANKCHARIOT."
     The thing to do would be to ignore it all. I had my say, now they have theirs. A columnist should have a thick skin.
     But to me, a thick skin leads to a thick head. What I do requires being sensitive to nuance. It's not a choice, really. Constitutionally, I'm not the shrug-things-off sort. I'm an explain-myself sort. That's how I'm able to do this job. So I waded in, trying to answer all these people, tweeting in batches of five and 10, trying to make them understand my perspective, to tamp down their outrage. But the more I tried, the angrier they seemed to get, and the more personal. My comment about hookers on Cicero Avenue, about not wanting to breathe the same air, really rattled them, and each tweet exaggerated it a bit more, until it was no longer about a certain group of prostitutes on Cicero Avenue, but about all sex workers, then about all women everywhere. 
     I tried arguing back. No, not all sex workers. Actually,  I was thinking about one specific, real person -- Pam Bolton, I remember her name. I talked with her. The cops said she had AIDS. She was scary. Two weeks later she was murdered. I never forgot her. 
     The next thing I know, I'm arguing with a dominatrix in Seattle and Dan Savage, the sex columnist -- and my friend, someone I have had lunch with, talked to, read all his books, and deeply respect—is trying to moderate between us.
      "I know you both," he writes. "If you got together, you guys would get on like a house on fire. 1st round - or 3 - on me?"
     I almost wrote back, "You know I don't drink, Dan," but then too much of my personal life was already being dragged into it, dug up by Down Under doxies racing online, grabbing what sharp details they could find in 30 seconds and rushing back to scratch at me with them. Personal and mean, behaving very much like right wing religious zealots do when challenged, a rare point of commonality between the two groups.
     Dan's becoming involved gave me clarity, because I thought of his recent book of essays, American Savage, and how it frustrated me when, in places, he detours into various pissing matches and inside-baseball parsing with angry people from various sexual subgroups, who do not see Dan as he really is, big picture — an important writer, a man of integrity and courage and humor who spotlights important issues that most people never even thought about, never mind sympathized with — but instead measure him on some partisan standard insisted upon by their particular clique, find him lacking in that one regard, then condemn him broadly for some lone sentence or passing thought plucked out of his decades of writing.
     Which is what I was getting now, from people who didn't know me, but were waving a phrase they didn't like—"breathe the same air"— and trying to smear me across the floor, demanding automatic sympathy for themselves while extending none to me. I was the Bad Man they had uncovered. The classic slasher movie dynamic -- identify someone as evil, quickly establish his guilt and then punish him with all the cruelty that supposedly left you aghast in the first place. You're free to be as vile as you like if you have the right victim.
     I wanted to say, "You know, I was attending secret transvestite dances in Chicago while you were learning the alphabet, honey, so cut me some slack..."  I kept trying to disengage from it, yet kept being drawn back, to face this howl of disapproval. I finally leapt up, fled downstairs, and caught most of the first half of the Bulls game. The Bulls dominated, of course.
     At halftime I was back at my computer. The more I looked at the fireworks on Twitter, the more I recognized the pattern. This is what you get from insular groups—motorcycle riders, gun fanatics, sex workers—who are so used to trading pieties among each other, they forget how to deal with outsiders. They see themselves as besieged. Everybody outside the wall is either a friend or an enemy, a zero or a one. Thus, if I make a statement that seems just a dry, factual rendition of reality—riding motorcycles without a helmet is dangerous; so is carrying a loaded pistol on your hip; prostitutes are mostly degraded victims—expressing that thought flips the switch in their heads, their targeting systems boot up and lock on you, and they automatically blast away. Piling on, flooding the zone, rushing with a snarl down the hillside, clubs raised over their heads, is their mob-mentality response to anything perceived as an insult.  
     Eventually I was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers and their corrosive bile. I started just blocking everybody who commented on Twitter—the examples I gave are actually the mild ones, the ones I didn't block, because the worst ones are gone. When that was too much had the presence of mind to ignore the thing and head downstairs for the fourth quarter—I missed the third trading quips with harlots—where my wife had prepared some peppermint tea. 
     That helped. Peppermint tea always helps.
     The Bulls crushed the Bucks. I came back upstairs, refreshed and determined to extract myself. Consider the source. I looked at the bios of the people writing in. You need a glossary. "Sex-pos Feminist, Bi, Ply, Libsoc, Agorist..."etc. from Wellington, New Zealand. ("Libsoc" is libertarian social philosophy, Agorism is a kind of utopianism where society is based on voluntary exchanges). "Genderfluid Feminist Dominatrix EXTREME MISANDRIST" (hater of men. Well knock me over with a feather.  I had a hunch, but still looked it up, to be sure). 
    You have to marvel at that. "EXTREME MISANDRIST." In all caps. Because a plain old lower case misandrist who merely hates men moderately doesn't do the trick. That took an edge off the criticisms. To be honest, there is something so heartbreaking, it's almost sweet, advertising your own bigotry in your bio and then caterwauling that people aren't treating you fairly. It's like the guy who complained that a supermarket bakery was discriminating against him because it wouldn't put his son's name, "Adolf Hitler," on his birthday cake. Well boo-hoo pal, maybe you should have thought of that before you got into the hating business. 
     It would seem too obvious an irony in fiction, which is why I so love journalism. You can't make this stuff up. A reminder that even marginalized groups can be haters—especially marginalized groups; sometimes, it's all they've got.
     You can't be hurt by that, I kept telling myself. You can't. At least you shouldn't. Because this isn't about you, this fire hose of on-line antipathy. They may have your name, and a few dusty facts they grabbed off Google. But they don't know you, don't know what they're talking about. They're just taking the common dodge of using what they consider their victim status to be bullies. And yet — almost touchingly — they somehow expect respect for it in return. How's that workin' for you guys, as a life strategy? Make many friends that way? 
     Enough. There's no winning, just stopping. The tragic part is, they have a point somewhere. I see that through the haze. I'm not the Welcome Wagon for banning sex work. When not channeling the attorney general, I'm pretty open to any stab at fixing intractable social problems like prostitution. If the goal is to reduce the harm, as with drugs ("Foxxie! He's comparing us to drug dealers again!"), then the solution seems a kind of quasi-legalization that kills the secondary market. If Scandinavia can cut heroin use by giving the drug away for free, under controlled settings, maybe making prostitution legal, for the prostitutes, while keeping being a pimp or a madam illegal, would help. It seems to work in Sweden. Maybe instead of banning brothels, the government should run them. 
    Or maybe not. Given how terrorized and abused prostitutes often are, how they'll testify that the man who beats them and takes all their money is in fact merely their boyfriend, not their pimp, this is an area where glib solutions should be viewed skeptically. 
     Enough. Shutting up is an art form, one that requires practice. I'm bad at it, but I'm trying to be better. I don't understand people who live online, endlessly sparring with others who disagree. Not my idea of fun. Which is why I'm glad I call the shots, and can move on from their world, at a quickstep, while they're stuck there. Though to be candid, I'm glad for this episode, because it taught me, not only what agorism is, and how to crank up the filter on my Twitter Interactions feed, but also the heretofore unimagined notion that some women will claim that being a prostitute is the fulfillment of their childhood dreams (pride is the last possession of those with nothing, and the more abject a person's situation, the more they insist on elevating themselves. I try to remember that when some debased soul is glorying themselves over me). It also reminded me of the importance of walking away and waiting for the storm to pass. 
     None of the women who claimed that prostitution was their childhood ambition took me up on my request that they write in at length, explaining that journey. "Someday mum, I'm going to blow strange men in cars, just like you..." I kept asking my Twitter correspondents, if you have a point to make, why not write to me directly and make it fully instead of getting me in their crosshairs and squeezing off 140-character bursts? Only one, Dan Savage's dominatrix pal, who wrote a column for Seattle's The Stranger for many years, actually did.  This post is already too long, and this letter makes it longer—you might want to take a break and have some peppermint tea; it's revivifying—then return. But I asked for it, so I'm presenting her letter uncut and without comment, and you can judge for yourself. I think she makes some good points:

Dear Mister Steinberg,

Mistress Matisse

You said in your tweets on this subject that you were open to more information, so I’m taking you at your word.  This letter may look long, but the situation is complex, so I hope you take the time to acquaint yourself more fully with the issue of sex worker rights. 

First, some basic terminology. People who exchange sex - or sexy activity, if not actual penetrative sex - are sex workers. That’s a catch-all term that includes everyone. Categories break down from there: an escort, a massage worker, a street worker, a dominatrix, et cetera. Some people write it as one word: sexworkers, and as the Chicago Manual of Style hasn’t yet made a rule for this, either way is acceptable.

Those are all neutral terms. The word “hooker” is a slur, and so is “whore”. Prostitution is a crime, and calling someone a prostitute is making a statement about their legal status, so unless one is talking about a legal situation, it’s better to avoid that word. Those are the terms I’ll be using in talking to you, and that’s how sex worker activists will speak of us in any further reading you may do. 

Background: There is a worldwide sex worker rights movement underway. It’s been going since the ‘80’s really, but it’s been moving in higher gear for about the last decade. In the US, what we want is: any nonviolent and non-coercive exchange of sex/sexy activity for money to not be a criminal offense. Basically, if a sexual act would not be illegal if no money changed hands, then simply adding money to the situation should not transform it into a crime. We have a long way to go in achieving that goal here - America is the last Westernized nation that arrests a LOT of people for nothing more than offering to have sex for money. Not pimps, not traffickers, the actual sex workers themselves. Most of them are women, most of them are poor, and a lot of them are people of color. Some of them go to prison for it, and all of them are seriously harmed by the experience of being harassed by police and arrested. Laws against sex work are unjust and unfair, and we want that to change.  

There is more to sex worker’s rights than simply not being arrested. But in the US, that’s the biggest hurdle to overcome. What American sex workers specifically want is: Decriminalization. That means that all laws making the offering/purchasing of sex for money a criminal offense are abolished. An example of decriminalized sex work would be the systems used in New Zealand and parts of Australia, where sex workers can work independently or in a brothel, under reasonable business regulations.

Decriminalization is different from Legalization. An example of legalized sex work would be the counties in the state of Nevada where there are a few licensed brothels. The state imposes very strict regulations, not comparable to any other industry, on the daily lives and personal behavior of women who work in the brothels. Women have little control over their surroundings, when they work, and how they meet with clients. They must pay a large part of their earnings, including tips, to the brothel, and they may not work anywhere except the brothel. They must live in the brothel full-time – they cannot work a shift and then go home. If they are not in the brothel, they are not permitted to be anywhere in the county, and are subject to arrest if they are. Sex worker activists do not favor legalization. 

I have been a sex worker for over fifteen years. I am an activist for the rights of sex workers. As part of that, I would like to see a world where no one is forced to do sex work. That does happen sometimes, and it's bad. But forced sex work is not the huge and scary problem some people would like you think it is. It is not okay that it happens at all, but it simply does not happen NEARLY as often as anti-sex workers say it does. The pivotal fact: When lawmakers and anti-sex work activists say “sex trafficking” they mean ANY exchange of sex for money, even if it is between two adults and completely voluntary. Let me say that again, because I think it bears repeating. To an anti-trafficking activist, an adult person, fully in possession of her rational faculties and completely independent of anyone else’s influence, who chooses to exchange a sexual act for money equals: a sex trafficking victim.

I think this is deeply insulting to people who really are victimized. I think one should only use the work trafficked to mean a person who is truly being forced or coerced, or controlled by another person in a way that's harmful or exploitative. I also think it's unjust to invalidate the agency of an adult person. I own my body, and if I, as a consenting adult, choose to have sex with another consenting adult, the state should not have the right to say, "No, we don't approve of your reason for having sex, so we are declaring your act to be a crime and arresting you both." It does not matter if I decided to have sex because someone bought me dinner, or because they offered me a diamond ring, or if they offered me a hundred dollars. Further, no one should declare that I am a "victim" of anything without my consent. It is for the person who has had the experience to identify whether she/he was a victim of something or not. It’s wrong to impose a label on someone they did not choose for themselves. 

Since about 2008, the state rhetoric about any act of sex for money has changed, and the state now defines all of it as "trafficking". That's happened for a variety of reasons, most of them to with the allocation of grant money and the erosion of civil liberties. There is a War On Sex Workers, much like there has been a War On Drugs. There is a system of restrictive ideas about what kind of behavior is socially acceptable, which have been woven into government policy and law, and there are a lot of people whose jobs and money and sense of power are all dependent on keeping that system in place. If there is no social panic about shadowy international crime rings and millions of women and children being abused in sensational ways, those people will lose power. That's why when you read scary headlines about “X Bazillion People Are Being Sex Trafficked", it does not necessarily mean the person is underage, or has been taken from one place to another, or is an undocumented immigrant, or is being forced or coerced into doing sex work against his/her wishes. (It also doesn't mean that anyone can actually see/find those supposed victims, since they are often pure invention.)

People can be abused in systems of sex work - just as they can be abused in non-sex work forms of labor, and in all other social systems. But criminalization and stigmatization of all sex work is not the right answer. People are abused in the social institution of marriage, too. But we do not outlaw marriage and arrest anyone who says, "I do." People are raped, but we do not respond to that fact by outlawing all consensual sex. On a moral level, we do not want anyone to be harmed. But when it comes to allocating public resources to combat that, the current system does not work.  Some of the systems that are ostensibly used to "help" people are not what those people themselves want, and may actually cause even more harm. It is not useful to treat a very wide spectrum of people around the world as if they were all the same one-dimensional “victim”, and neither is it wise to try to condense this multifaceted issue into a few bits of bumper-sticker wisdom. 

To that end, this is the reading that I recommend to get a fuller understanding of the challenges of helping those who need help, without criminalizing, stigmatizing and generally imposing a very binary victim/criminal worldview onto a large and diverse set of people.

A good place to start: "The War On Sex Workers", by Melissa Gira Grant: http://reason.com/archives/2013/01/21/the-war-on-sex-workers

And this, also by Melissa Gira Grant: "What the New York Times (and France) Got Wrong About Prostitution" http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/12/sex_work_laws_the_new_york_times_praises_france_s_new_legislation_and_gets.html

An excellent piece by Maggie McNeil debunking false statistics on sex work and trafficking: "Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics" http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/27/lies-damned-lies-and-sex-work-statistics/

If you just read those three pieces, you’ll have some idea of where we are coming from and what we are fighting against. I can recommend LOTS of further reading if you want it, from big-picture pieces to really granular stuff. There is a lot of good work happening, and good things being said. Ask me for any sort of information about sex worker rights, and I’ll happily direct you to it.

But the best way I can sum it all up is: listen to the sex workers themselves. Not the state, not rescue organizations – the people who do sex work and who suffer under unjust laws. We have voices and we know what we want. We say “Nothing ABOUT us WITHOUT us”, and that’s what we are fighting for. 

Sincerely,

Matisse