North Shore Notes: Fallen angel

Stevenson Memorial by Abbott Handerson Thayer (Smithsonian)

      When actress Anne Heche was declared dead Aug. 11, nearly a week after crashing her car into a house in a fiery wreck, my reaction was to note her age, 53, note mine, 62, and mutter a silence prayer for the nine years, and counting, that sobriety gave to me. Because if I didn't give up drinking at 45, that could have easily been me. Not a particularly profound thought, nor one I'd ever share here. I try not to ring that bell too often. Which is why I'm glad that North Shore Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey rings it loud and clear in her report today. 

By Caren Jeskey

“I wasn’t born with it either. I had to learn to be crazy.”
         —Anne Heche

     If you’ve seen Anne Heche on stage or screen, chances are you were transfixed — a wan, elfish creature with talent and wit. Like Kathryn Hahn and Parker Posey, Heche had an alluring, mercurial quality that made it hard to look away.
     Somehow I’d missed the melee between Heche’s angels and demons, until now.
     Her life was an uphill battle starting with abuse by her father in a household where the truth was not allowed to be spoken. She was an extreme nail biter, and in her memoir — that’s now selling for upwards of $500 — she wonders “why people didn’t look beyond the spotted bloody clumps” of her fingers “to think there was something hidden there, perhaps family secrets, perhaps pain.” Maybe they did, but they did not know what to say.
     It’s terrifying to think of how such pain, unhealed, can turn into fire and brimstone right here on earth, in sunny southern California. 

     In a guest appearance on the Adam Carolla Show in October of last year it was clear that Anne was in trouble. She was skin and bones, jittery and slurring. She poured disorganized words forth with pressured, impassioned speech that was hard to follow.
     In May of this year as a guest on a show called Women of Impact, she was just barely holding it together. Host Lisa Bilyeu lavished praise on Heche. “You sit here an Emmy winner with your own podcast looking like you love life.” 

     “I do,” Anne unconvincingly replied with a smile and vacant eyes. She went on to charm her host with a Hollywood mask. She offered words of false or maybe hopeful wisdom, as though her waking nightmares were a thing of the past.

     Over the years Heche spoke of her alter ego, “the half sister of Jesus Christ. I created another entity that was from Heaven. Celestia is the reason I believe I survived. She was the consistent love that allowed me to know that I could get to the other side of my abuse.” Probably disassociation. We now know that Celestia’s powers only went so far. They may have comforted Heche, but they did not provide her with the real help she needed.
     On Daily Blast Live, the hosts said what a lot of people were thinking. I cringed as I watched it, knowing that more stigma is the last thing we need. Host Al Jackson casually mentioned “I stopped drinking. I am doing yoga,” just before he addressed their expert guest, Dr. Drew Pinsky. Jackson insinuated a problem of his own with alcohol, then moved right on to analyzing another’s life.
     This is what we do. True self awareness — really sitting with and being completely honest about who we are — is a lot harder to bear than focusing on others’ deficits and failings. This is the root of stigma. Not seeing that we are all human and we all need help in one way or another. It’s not us and them. It’s just us.
     Jackson continues: “I am glad you are bringing up mental illness. It’s a buzz word in our society now. Anne Heche said since 2001 she’s been dealing with mental health issues. We are all sympathetic to mental health issues until it affects you. Until somebody with mental health issues comes plowing into your front yard or my front yard.” Then it’s “I don’t care about your mental health issues. My kids are playing in my yard. How do we as a society show empathy for this but also not forgive it?”
     This is a timely place to say that I have driven drunk. I know “good” people who have, and who still do. I see it all the time. “I’m fine,” they say. I said. It takes a lot less then one realizes to be an unsafe driver.
     If we are going to make society safer from people who are living in addiction and mental illness, we need to see and care about people, not see others as illnesses to be avoided. Or we can try to hide, but it’s getting harder. “They” might be us, and if not, they are just one or two degrees removed.
     Per Zeinab Hijazi, the senior mental health technical advisor at UNICEF: “One in seven kids under 19 years old experiences some kind of mental health disorder around the world. Mental health [issues] remain stigmatized and underfunded in almost every country, rich or poor. Even before the pandemic, far too many children were burdened under the weight of unaddressed mental health issues, including that one in four children live with a parent who has a mental health condition, and that really half of all mental health conditions start by age 14 and three‑quarters by age 25. But most cases, while treatable, go undetected and untreated.”
     Just assume that you know nothing about mental illness. Even as a psychotherapist with decades of experience I have more to learn than will be even remotely possible in this lifetime. Did you know, for example, that “a growing number of psychiatrists maintain that, as a presumed disease entity, as an identifiable state, schizophrenia simply does not ‘exist?'"
     Did you know that there are support groups for people who hear voices? Where they are allowed to be themselves and are not shunned or locked up? It’s okay to say “I don’t know” and to be curious rather than assume we know what others are going through. We are not the judge and jury when it comes to Anne Heche, or anyone else. We cannot know what it was like to walk in her shoes. It is not lost on me that she traumatized a woman, nearly killed her and her pets, destroyed a home, and nearly harmed others on that fateful day. Her actions were horrible. The extreme problem with her brain, booze and drugs was peppered all over the internet. Why were we not more equipped to notice? And to get in there and help before it was too late? 

     One way to de-stigmatize so-called mental illness is to learn more. Learn as much as you can and start with yourself, your family, your friends, and your community.

“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.”
                  ― Clarissa Pinkola Estés

 

Tom Coffey, who helped Washington win, wield power, dies at 77

     There's a first time for everything. I knew Tom Coffey, slightly, from Steve Neal's epic Friday afternoon luncheons at Gene & Georgetti, back in the day. He was among a cast of Chicago stalwarts that included Wayne Whalen, Jay Doherty and Michael Cooke. After Tom fell ill in July, he made overtures, wondering whether I might write his obituary. It did not seem a request that could be decently refused, particularly considering his role in city history.

     When too many white Chicagoans were turning against Harold Washington because of the color of his skin, Tom Coffey became a key supporter, working to elect Chicago’s first Black mayor because of the content of his character.
     Mr. Coffey eventually quit as a partner at Kirkland & Ellis and moved to the city to become Washington’s chief of intergovernmental affairs and one of the inner troika of trusted advisers running the mayor’s first administration. 

Tom Coffey

     He died Wednesday at his home in Hinsdale, surrounded by family. He was 77.
     “Tom, from his youngest days growing up, had a sense of social justice, a sense of commitment shown by his service in the Marine Corps,” said high school friend and Cook County Commissioner Larry Suffredin. “When you combine the tenacity of a Marine and the moral leadership of a social activist, you end up with a committed person like Tom Coffey. He was focused on getting to what was right.”
     Mr. Coffey went on to found Haymarket Public Strategies, a political consulting and government lobbying firm whose clients ranged from future U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun to future President Joe Biden.
     “It is easy to see why Mayor Washington has so much confidence in you,” Biden wrote to him in 1986.

     Thomas Patrick Coffey was born Sept. 11, 1944, the first child of John and Billie Coffey. His father was an official in the city’s economic development commission. Growing up in St. Thomas More Parish, 85th and Western, he graduated from Archbishop Quigley Preparatory Seminary.
     In 1966, he earned an English degree from Loras College, a Catholic, liberal arts school in Dubuque, Iowa. At Loras, he met Mary Alice Butler of Oak Park. They married in 1968.
     Mr. Coffey studied law at DePaul University, getting his law degree in 1968, a year many Americans were concentrating on avoiding the draft. Instead, he enlisted in the Marines, serving as a JAG lawyer stationed in Okinawa.

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"Das Boot"

     I can't speak of how young people view new movies when they come out on streaming video.
     Maybe it's a huge honking deal. You'd have to ask them.
And I'm not one of those who mistake their youth for some kind of golden age.
     But scarcity and value are related in direct proportion.

     Before cable you could catch movies in the theater, and there was an excitement to the moment. Otherwise, you'd have to wait until they came to television, chopped up and larded with commercials, years later. 

    That said, seeing movies in a theater wasn't always very difficult. When "The Sting" came out in 1973, it played in the movie house in Berea for a year.
     One of the big movie events of my college years was "Das Boot," the German submarine movie that came out in the United States 1982, directed by Wolfgang Petersen, who died this week.
     Two things stand out — and you know a movie is good when anything stands out, never mind 40 years later. 

     First, because I saw both the original in German, with English subtitles, and also the dubbed English version, I was struck by how much more dramatic German is. "Jungs! Lasst uns in die U-Boot jetzt gehen!" just sounds a lot more dramatic than the English translation: "Hey guy, let's go into the submarine now."
     Second was a scene I've repeatedly referred to over the years, when trying to illustrate the old adage "Necessity is the mother of invention." The U-boat is sitting on the ocean floor, unable to surface because the pumps that would blow the water out of their ballast tanks were damaged by depth charge blasts. A sailor is under the floorboards, working on the pumps. His face appears at a hatch opening in the walkway. "We need some No. 6 wire!" he says, or words to that effect. There is no No. 6 wire, he is told. "If there's no No. 6 wire, then we're all dead," he replies. What follows is a panicked scene where the crew fans out over the ship, searching, ending with someone busting open a radio receiver and uncoiling the necessary wire from inside. 

     Sometimes you need to be inspired to bust the radio open. Or as Dr. Johnson once quipped, the knowledge that a man is to be hanged in a fortnight concentrates the mind wonderfully. 

Gacy and Trump: the surprise connection

"The Farce is Over," by Honore Daumier (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

     John Wayne Gacy sued Des Plaines and its police department. For harassment. For illegally searching his home in unincorporated Norwood Park. For insisting on following him around, prying into his affairs, undermining his reputation as a pillar of the community with their relentless questions, implying some kind of link between him and missing young men.
     His lawyer filed the suit on Dec. 19, 1978, seeking $750,000. Two days later, bodies were discovered in a crawlspace in Gacy’s home.
     Consider the chutzpah of the criminal. Their minds are skewed, warped. They have already deceived themselves into believing they have the right to do evil, to rob, to kill, to rape, to satisfy themselves while hurting others. They also are skilled at fooling their victims, tricking them, luring them into ruin. And so certain criminals believe, not without reason, they can deceive you, too. Because they are so much smarter, in their own minds.
     Part of the contempt that allows a person to do evil is an unshakable sense of superiority. Gacy claimed self-defense. As the bodies piled up, he confessed. Later, he insisted he didn’t do it. This shape-shifting dynamic — squinting, evaluating any current situation and then trying to squirm out of it — is the grease sociopaths skid through life on. Or try to. The baldness is shocking.
     When the FBI executed a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Aug. 8, the range of excuses immediately offered by the former president and his army of enablers almost exhausts the range of human imagination. These are just mementos. No, the papers were overlooked briefings, brought home by our hardworking chief executive. No, the classified documents weren’t classified, because he said so. No, it was all a plot. No, the papers were planted. And on and on.
     The brio is breathtaking.

     I know we’re not supposed to be surprised at this point. But any decent person almost has to be surprised. There is a baseline assumption of truth, rationality, that holds back law-abiding citizens, causing us to lag many steps beyond those who leap ahead, unhindered by any pang of conscience or shred of humanity.
     That’s why we still remember Gacy after nearly half a century. We know killers exist. We know Gacy was a killer. But the specifics of his crimes are still shocking. He raped and tortured and killed 33 young men and boys. We don’t want to live in a world where that’s ordinary, accepted, forgettable.

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A new stain on my reputation

     No one has ever asked me what I plan to do in retirement. But if anybody ever does, I have a ready answer: work on the house. A 115-year-old farm house that wasn't constructed all that well in the first place is constantly in need of repair, and as the years go by, I try to do some of the work myself. 

     It's very satisfying. And cheaper. And often better 

     For instance. The house has an unusually large deck in back — originally there was a free-standing 16-foot pool in back, that the deck connected to, and my wife insisted the pool be removed, lest the boys drown themselves.  We had a handyman square it off. You could land a helicopter on it.     

     A few years after, I hired a neighbor who had a house painting company to stain it. He charged a lot and his crew splashed stain on the siding. A decade and a half went by. Whatever protective qualities the stain might have ever had broke down. The deck grew grimy, dark, mildewed, almost slimey. For the past three or four years, I'd greet the summer with, "I should treat that deck before it rots." This summer I resolved to actually do it, and — this is key — borrowed a power washer from a friend (Thank you Sandi!)

     Power-washing the deck was an epiphany. Layers of mold and black grime blasted away with a sweep of the gun, returning the wood to a near pristine state. I can say without hesitation that nothing I wrote this summer was half as satisfying as powerwashing that deck. And nobody complained.

     Then I sanded it. A sane man would have bought a large circular sander, or even rented a floor sander. But I already had a six-inch reciprocating hand sander, and the deck does have all sorts of posts and rails and steps and such. So I crawled over the deck, sanding it with this ridiculously small tool. Which allowed me to sand it really well, and pound in the nails that were up, and find zen-like escape from the various nightmarish situations percolating on a national and personal level. It took days.
     "And to think I almost paid somebody to do this," I thought, astounded that I got to do it for free.      

Good stuff.

     Finding the right color stain was the most difficult part. We started out thinking blue, for some reason, probably insanity, but went through three or four shades, which didn't seem right, then three or four browns, until I was guided to Ready Seal pecan, with help from Rick at J.C. Licht, who probably just wanted my wife and me to stop coming by for more samples and get on with it. It went on easily, without streaking. Rich and slightly red. 
      I rolled it on, doing details with a brush. At first I thought I'd need three gallons; I ended up using eight. Toward the end of the third week —in my spare time, on nice days—the job neared completion. The other day, I bought new hardware and replaced the rusty hinges and latches on the gate. The thing is like new.
     That's it. No flight of poetry, no message beyond DYI: do it yourself. If I can, anybody can. I plan to take a short break, then start in on painting the trim in the entrance hall. God knows the hall needs it.

It looks best after a rain.

‘We draw you in with beauty’

     Humanity’s first home was a garden. And while biblical Eden is no longer available to stroll through, alas, the Chicago Botanic Garden is very much with us.
     I’ve visited hundreds of times — the place kept my wife and me sane during COVID. While encouraging people to visit isn’t in our selfish interest — crowds — going at least once certainly is in yours.

     Particularly now. This summer the garden is celebrating its 50th anniversary, showing off 10 large commissioned outdoor artworks, and the second half of August might be an ideal time to explore a place I often describe as “heaven-like.” (“Edenic” just doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.)
     Half the size of New York’s Central Park — 385 acres — the Chicago Botanic Garden isn’t actually in Chicago, but Glencoe, immediately east of the Edens Expressway between Lake Cook and Dundee Roads. 

Chicago Daily News
Jan. 27, 1965.

     

     Visitors are led through the wide range of natural habitats, from formal English walled garden to wildflower-bedecked prairie, from a carefully-cultivated Japanese island garden, complete with teahouse, to a woodland walk under towering oaks where only the blazed trail lets you know you’re not in virgin forest.
     There are vegetable gardens and groves of birches, water lilies and desert cacti. I’ve seen deer, otters and, on one memorable occasion, a hooded merganser duck. One of the joys is shifting in scale and perspective, lifting your gaze from close-up examination of a gorgeous lily to peer across the lagoon at a bridge in the distance, flanked by weeping willows.
     The place is so big, we recently spent an hour there walking and never went inside, merely circled the perimeter.
     One of the more astounding aspects of the Botanic Garden is, no matter how often times we visit, and we often go three times a week, it’s always fresh, new, interesting, because of the changing light at different times of day, the seasons of the year, plants waxing and waning, annual shows — orchids, jack-o-lanterns, a light show at Christmas. My wife and I visit in February when it’s 20 degrees, as the garden is beautiful in snow.

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"Be secret and exalt"

     "Now all the truth is out," William Butler Yeats writes. "Be secret and take defeat/From any brazen throat."
      The beginning of an odd little 1916 poem with a breathtaking title: "To a Friend Whose Work has Come to Nothing." 

     Easy for Yeats to say, who straddled the world in his own lifetime, and would linger longer than most. Whose lines are used as movie titles: "That is no country for old men..."
      In the poem, he seems to brace his unnamed friend, "Bred to a harder thing than triumph," presenting his own success as somehow unfair. 

Being honor bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbor's eyes?

     It might seem odd that Yeats might cast himself as a liar, but it's a theme he would return to, such as in an even shorter 1916 poem, "The Coming of Wisdom with Time." This is the whole poem:

I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

For how can you compete 

Though leave are many, the root is one;

Through all the lying days of my youth.

      It's unclear whether it's himself or the days of youth that are lying; my bet is both. Either way, withering into the truth sounds painful. Though not without advantages. The life work of most people either comes to nothing or very close, on the grand scale, and whatever impact anybody manages merely holds back obscurity for the briefest time. 

     This is a long way of saying, I had mixed feelings when my colleague Eric Zorn returned to the John Kass well for a definitive drink, "The truth about John Kass’ dispute with the Tribune and the Tribune Guild." He begins well, promising he will "summarize the controversy," though I don't believe any piece of writing nearing 5,000 words can be considered a summary unless it's addressing the history of the world. 

      While I'm confident that Eric has certainly stylishly and thoroughly retired the topic, I hope, if not buried it in a lead-lined coffin, I was still tempted to pick up the theme he began, like one jazz musician riffing on another's melody, and expand upon it, as we did to so much fun and effect earlier last month. 

     That post got 20 times the average readership, so obviously people, for whatever reasons, are primed to laugh at John Kass. Unlike Yeats's friend, splashing around in the kiddie pool of untruth does not shame Kass in his own eyes, apparently, though it does him in a negative light with certain others.

     But my heart isn't in it. Nobody is entirely bad. I have a colleague who tells a story about Kass. She was in the City Hall Press Room when some disturbed person, upset over something she wrote, burst in, shouting, and made to attack her. But Kass leapt across a desk and tackled the man. He saved her.  

"To a friend..." first appeared in the
May, 1914 issue of Poetry Magazine.

    Does a moment's physical courage counterbalance years of caustic fuckery?  Hard to say. Remember, the people he writes for are already debased, soul-dead Trumpies, lost, looking for their daily fix of fear and self-victimization. If Kass didn't sell it to them, someone else would. It isn't as if, were he unavailable, they'd start reading David Hume instead.

     Bigotry is the collision of ignorance and fear. As much as the hostility and damage caused by haters tempts the clear-eyed to simply hate them back, we have to consider the keyhole view of life they limit themselves to, all they miss, the essential tragedy of their condition. They can't listen and they can't learn and so they wander, dazed survivors after an accident, in the sunlit center of a glorious world, eyes squinched shut, lashing blindly out at their imagined enemies. They're hurt and hopeless and you can't scorn them, for long. Or shouldn't, anyway.

     So as much as I enjoy heartily ridicule, I tend to eventually come out the other side, shaking contempt off like a dog after a bath. I grew to genuinely pity Jay Mariotti, and wish I had been nicer to him, wondering whether he might not be genuinely ... well, he's a litigious cuss, so I'd better not say. Afflicted with problems more severe than just being an asshole. 

     Even Bob Greene. I don't regret a bit of BobWatch. Fun, and well-deserved, at the time. But should he pitch forward today into the sand at Sunset Bay, metal detector pinging plaintively beside him, unheard, I don't think I'd use the opportunity to revisit his shameful exit or the deeply weird nostalgic rathole he plunged down.  He did hang with Michael Jordan — I certainly didn't hang with Michael Jordan — and had a column in Esquire, and a regular gig on "Nightline," and rang the journalism bell far more loudly than I ever will. That he could vanish so completely is a reminder of just how completely we all vanish, good bad and indifferent. That's the lesson. The warning.

     "Be secret and exult" Yeats ends his poem. "Because of all things known/That is most difficult."

     Or so imagines Yeats, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. As so often happens with those simply guessing at life, based on themselves, he's quite wrong. It's not difficult at all. In fact, it's easy. Almost mandatory. What other choice is there? "Soul clap its hands and sing," as Yeats himself instructs in "Sailing to Byzantium." Now there's a plan.