Children of privilege

Not our house

     When my older son was 16 or so, he would go to parties. I would usually drive him—kids nowadays don't seem to be as keen to get their licenses as my generation was.
     After following complex directions, down streets I'd never heard of, through winding subdivision I'd never been to, I'd finally edge the car onto a block far nicer than ours, a vista of sprawling new brick structures, big homes with elaborate stonework and landscaping, homes that didn't have crazy lawns mottled with crab grass and creeping charlie. The circular driveway, clotted with cars—none of them from 1991—wasn't black asphalt, dotted with potholes and crumbling to rubble around the edges, like ours. I would stop 4o feet from the tangle of arrival and he would hop out and race happily toward the festivities. 
     "Have fun!" I'd call wanly after him.
     Occasionally, picking him up, I would tiptoe into some marble foyer with a big brass chandelier, and catch glimpses of lacquer dining room tables and expensive newness. A clatter of music and voices would be heard, muted, from deep within the house. Eventually a mother or sister or some person associated with the house would take notice of me, cowering there beside a sea of shoes—the carpets!—and my boy would be summoned and we'd flee.
     After a while, I realized that while he was always going over to other places, he never had his friends to our house—our 1905 hand-made farm-house with straw insulation. Not a McMansion, true, but not without charm, of a sort. A certain down-at-the-heels beauty, if you ignore that the aluminum siding is not all of the same color and the floors are not exactly level. It has a spire—I consider the spire very fancy. Hand made by some farmer out of iron strips, as I could tell when it blew down in a storm. Kids would love partying at a place like this. It has a back deck and a yard and everything. 
     After my hints were ignored, I eventually came out and asked directly: Why did he not have his friends over our place? Why not host a party yourself? Fun!
     There was a silence. He looked at me with sorrow. Did I really not know? Must he actually explain?
     "Father," he began—he calls me "father," I believe, in an attempt to add some kind of classiness and dignity to our woefully hectic, scattered and down-market lives—"our house is not a nurturing environment."
      Ouch.
      "Not a nurturing environment?" I repeated, wounded. "In what way? In what way is this not a nurturing environment."
     "We don't have a pool table," he replied. 
     That helped. I smiled, relieved. Oh, well, yes, no argument there. Can't expect the gang to gather around the old chess table—Italian, drop walnut leaves, bought back when we had money. Not quite the same effect I suppose. Had I realized that a pool table was necessary to nurture children, I of course would have set my sights on one. But I hadn't and now it was too late. Too late for a lot of things. To take up ophthalmology, for instance, and make sure there was that pool table in the basement instead of just boxes and seepage. Thank God every other home in Northbrook already has a pool table, so my son can be a free rider. So at least they're available. He is like the barefoot child, cadging scraps from the back kitchen steps of chums. Maybe I could buy him a package of those blue cubes, used to chalk pool cues. He could bring one in a little box to his parties, his contribution to the cause. The Steinbergs, they may be down and out, but they have their pride...
     I mention all this to establish the mindset I brought to a conversation Saturday. Driving into the city for lunch—more on that later in the week—we were discussing the op-ed piece in that day's Sun-Times, about the phrase, "Check your privilege."
      My wife explained that this was merely an ad hominen attack, a way to silence another person by attacking who they are without considering the merit of what they have to say. Just because someone was well-off didn't mean they don't have a valuable perspective, she said. They should remember that when they met privileged people...
      The boys objected, both of them, immediately: we are privileged, they said. We come from a privileged family. We are of the elite.
     This struck me as ludicrous.
      "No!" I cried. "Nonsense! We are not privileged! We're frantically clutching to the last greasy rung of the middle class, a paycheck or two away from slipping off and tumbling into the abyss." I considered dragging George Orwell into it—what was his description of his family?  "Lower-upper-middle class." That sounds about right. Not "privileged." People of privilege have leisure. They take their summer vacations in Peru. They don't work every goddamn day of their lives like madmen bailing out a swamped and sinking industry as it settles into the water. People of privilege own lots of nice stuff. The drive German SUVs. They do not, as I did recently, get excited over buying a pair of Rockport boat shoes, so much so that they kiss the shoes. They yawn as the truckloads of goodies arrive. They live in big stone mansions with Doric columns and framed Bulls jerseys and wet bars and slate pool tables with red felt in their finished basements. Our basement is a dripping, dank, moldy, muddy horror show; like something out of a Stephen King story. I began to protest more, but was cut off. 
      "Educationally privileged," one of the boys elaborated, and the other agreed.
      "Oh," I said, stopped in my tracks. Dumbstruck. Educationally privileged. Well, umm, yes, that is correct. No argument here. We are educationally privileged. The Northbrook schools are beyond compare. In elementary school the teachers would send home poetry about how wonderful it was to teach our kids. They would bind their work into little books. My older boy's class took a trip over the summer. To China. Glenbrook South has a gross pathology class, taught at the hospital. My sons have not only never been in a fight in their entire academic careers, but I have never heard of a fight occurring. I suppose I could find fault, but it would take some hard thinking, and time, and I'm not sure what I would come up with. I suppose there has been a bad teacher or two over the past dozen years. So the schools are not perfect. But privileged? Absolutely. That would be the word. 
       I told the boys, well, yeah, in an educational sense, yes, definitely privileged. Conversation shifted to other subjects.
       I don't know why I was happy to hear them say that, but I was. At least they recognize it. And I guess I do too, now. Maybe I was just happy to be privileged in any sense at all. Privileged to have to work hard enough for stuff, to plan and wait and delay that, so when I do occasionally get something I want, I tend to really appreciate it. Maybe I was reminded of an essential truth. You can spend so much time looking up that you forget to look around. 

Saturday fun activity—Where IS this?

     It looks like an Apollo space capsule.
     But it isn't.
     It's displayed as if it were in a museum.
     But it's not.
     To see it you have to pay.
     But you're not paying to see it.
     It's in a very famous place.
     But it's not where it's supposed to be.
     What IS this thing?
     And where is it?
     Post your answers below.  The first correct answer will receive one of my dwindling stock of two-color, super-collectible blog posters. Good luck.

Jane Byrne turns 80

     Dear Mayor Byrne:

     Happy birthday! Early, I know — you don’t turn 80* until Saturday. But I want to deliver my best wishes ahead of the pack. 

     Since we live in a cynical age, I must swear, off the bat, I’m sincere. This is no Brutus-is-an-honorable-man take-down disguised as praise. Everybody deserves nice words on her birthday, and you more than most. You’ve already taken your blows. You came from the outside, defeated a sitting mayor who had fired you for criticizing his administration. Yes, there was that timely blizzard, which made your victory seem divinely ordained. But it was also your spunk. Or as you so eloquently put it, at the time, you “beat the whole goddamn machine single-handedly.” 

     That you did, that you did. After winning the Democratic primary in February, 1979 — the first time since 1927 that the slated machine candidate did not become mayor of Chicago — you crushed your Republican opponent, Wallace Johnson, winning 82 percent of the vote. I haven’t checked all history, but if there is a more lopsided victory here, I’m not aware of it.

     Winning the only electoral office you ever held escorted you into a spinning buzz saw. If Rahm feels cocky for surviving one major strike — the teachers — you endured three, one after another, in your first three months in office. You inherited a city awash in debt — jeez, does nothing change? — and so tried to cut back on cost-of-living increases, sparking the ire of city employees, who struck three consecutive months, boom boom boom. The CTA union in December, 1979, the firemen in January, 1980 and, in February, the teachers. 

     Madam Mayor — I can’t call you “Jane,” it feels too familiar and perhaps insulting, and I think you’ve been insulted enough. “Calamity Jane” and “Attila the Hen” and worse in a sexist era, slurs I’d be reluctant to reprint now, but your enemies did not hesitate to say then.

      And you made an A-list of bitter enemies.  Richie Daley was just the start.
     "An erratic and stormy person, she kept the city quaking during her first administration," wrote Nobelist Saul Bellow. "Appointees hired and fired without rhyme or reason whirled in and out of the revolving doors."
     That might have been true, but still, anybody Saul Bellow disliked is OK in my book.
     What do Chicagoans recall? You began the festival that got Taste of Chicago going. Millions have happy memories of standing in the middle of the street, licking barbecue sauce off our fingers, because of you. That's something. You started the revival of Navy Pier.
     You moved into the Cabrini-Green public housing project. It was a stunt, sure, but not a stunt we'd ever see today. Cabrini-Green is gone, and the poor people who used to live there . . . they sort of vanished, haven't they? I mean, they must exist, scattered in other places, but as soon as those high-rise projects came down, the city forgot their occupants. You, on the other hand, saw this intractable problem and tried to do something about it. You made it your problem. That took courage.
     That it couldn't be fixed, well, to me that is part of the Jane Byrne Lesson — the point of the story. We love outsiders. We root for David, not Goliath. So outsiders can and do win. But once they get their hands on the levers of power, well, somehow the darn things just don't work for them — you didn't invent that. Another outsider who took office a couple years before you did, Jimmy Carter, learned the same lesson, one taught over and over.
     I have your phone number and really wanted to call. But you haven't been in the press at all, for years, and I was reluctant to bother you. I last saw you, three years ago, at Rahm Emanuel's inauguration, slowly crossing the stage. I did phone your daughter to see if you'd welcome intrusion. She never got back. I get it.
     So even though you may have washed your hands of us — and who could blame you? — that didn't strike me as a reason we should ignore you. You were a pioneer — the first woman elected mayor in Chicago and even now, no larger city in America has elected another. You fought hard and had a quality I admire: you kept fighting. "I will be conquered," Samuel Johnson said. "I will not capitulate."
     You may think that you've been forgotten, erased from history. I know you were unhappy when Mayor Daley tore out your fountain. Maybe he did it to spite you — he's the type — or maybe a big fountain didn't belong in the middle of Wacker Drive. But it was there for a while, and Chicagoans still remember it.
     I sure do. The night I proposed to my future wife, we were crossing Wacker and stopped at the fountain — dedicated to children, remember? — and did a little impromptu ritual, anointing each other in the water, a kind of baptism of expectant parenting. It worked; the boys are 16 and 18 now. Thanks.
     Happy Birthday. Chicago has not forgotten.

* If any reader wonders how she turned 80 in May 2014 and died at 81 in November, the answer is she lied about her age, shaving a year off, and covered it up for years, according to my colleague Mike Sneed, who says she confirmed it with her daughter Kathy. 

"The law's delay..."

    Legal woes are always distressing, even when you've done nothing wrong and are certain—well, as certain as you can be in the crapshoot of our legal system—of exoneration. So when I heard that a colleague at the Sun-Times was being sued by the subject of a story who—I have absolutely no doubt—was merely unhappy to see his words in print, I went over to commiserate, and later sent him this column from 2000 about the vicissitudes of the legal process. After I read it, for the first time in 14 years, I thought it might be helpful to others who find themselves in court. The only thing I left out was a bit of key advice my wife gave me for appearing before a judge: "If you find yourself in a situation where you can either speak or stay silent, always choose to stay silent." Very wise advice.


Wheels of justice turn v-e-r-y  s-l-o-w-l-y
        
    There are 73,728 small squares on the ceiling of Courtroom 1501 in the Daley Center.
    Not that I counted every square, waiting to stand before the bar of justice. I did the math. But I probably could have counted. I had the time.
     I had never been sued before, and found the experience not only hour-devouring and distressing but, in an odd way, uplifting. Looking back over this year of Sturm und Drang (that's German for "moving to the suburbs"), the lawsuit stands out as a lingering piece of unfinished business I should confront before 2000 can be dumped, with a grateful sigh, into the dustbin to make way for a shiny, new 2001.
    Being sued sucks. It is days in a windowless, airless room, somehow both too big and claustrophobic, waiting for your case to be called, staring dully at tiles on the ceiling, hearing the headachy murmur of legalisms just out of earshot, noting the starched exhaustion of lawyers, the unease of regular folk.
    There are motions and counter-motions. Many times I recalled that Hamlet, listing reasons to kill himself in his famous "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy, puts "the law's delay" up high, right after the pangs of despriz'd love.
    Sure, I could have hired a lawyer to handle it all. But first, I'm too cheap. Second, I can't roll over in bed without hitting a lawyer. Third, I wanted to experience the thing, firsthand, to feel its essence. I won't go into the particulars of what sparked the suit. Like most of what winds up in court, it was ridiculous and peevish. Suffice it to say it emerged from what happened between myself and a young man in line at a drugstore. Words were exchanged.
    The guy pulled a knife and ended up hauled off in handcuffs by the cops.
    As he was taken away, an officer said, "Be sure to show up in court or he'll sue you." But I didn't. He hadn't hurt me. I figured, in the scope of atrocities committed daily in the city, this little incident wasn't worth pursuing. I didn't want to waste my time or add to his woes.
    There is no hell in Judaism, no divine punishment for sins. So I saw being sued as a minor form of punishment—a purgatory—for not listening to the police officer (always, always dear readers, listen to the police officer. He knows).
    The process was made almost worth it by the judge (and I'm not polishing apples since the case is—I think—over). The guy suing me didn't have a lawyer either, and didn't seem to grasp the fine points of the legal system, such as the need to show up. Despite my passionate desire to get this over with, I had to admire how the judge—whose eyes conveyed a seen-it-all-twice weariness—tried to cut this guy every break, so that the avenues of justice would not be denied a person just because he happened to be in jail the day his motion was dismissed.
    The lawsuit ground on between August and early December. Quick for law. The odd thing was, as it progressed, I began to like the guy suing me. He had an Energizer Bunny doggedness I appreciated. Despite losing at each step, he pressed on, filing new motions, a Terminator of the Municipal Court.
    After our last—one hopes, in law you never can tell—court appearance, we rode down in the elevator together. "Well," I said. "If I don't see you before Christmas—though if history is any judge, I will—have a merry one." He replied that he reads me in the newspaper.
    I don't want to say that I'll miss court, because I won't. But I will cling to the lessons I've learned: Be unfailingly polite. Listen to the police. And forgive the people you cross swords with. So belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, Mr. Guy-Who-Sued-Me. Among my usual lightly-held New Year's resolutions is the iron vow to keep myself out of court, if humanly possible. You might consider doing the same.
                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times Dec. 28, 2000
 

Lucas museum might seem like a good idea, now...

     Have you been to the Flash Gordon Museum yet? Right next to the Adler Planetarium? Lots of fun. There’s a mock-up of Ming the Merciless’ throne room on the planet Mongo, and you can reach out and touch the fearsome Sea Beast ...

     OK, OK, there is no Flash Gordon Museum next to the Adler, and a good thing too.

     If you are unfamiliar with Flash, he was very big in the 1930s, first as

George Lucas

a newspaper cartoon, then as a movie, then a movie serial, which kids in the 1950s and 1960s saw endlessly rerun on television.

     I bring up Flash as a reminder that fame fades, even huge fame, even “Star Wars”-level fame. It bathes its creator George Lucas in a golden glow now but will not last forever. Watching the city bend over backward to put his proposed museum on the Chicago lakefront, I hate to be a spoilsport, but I have to ask: Do we want this museum?

     What’s going to be inside? The museum’s website — still is clunkily wooing San Francisco, a move rejected by those in charge of the waterfront park where Lucas first wanted to put it — describes it this way:

     “The Lucas Cultural Arts Museum will be a center highlighting populist art from some of the great illustrators of the last 150 years through today’s digital art used to create animated and live-action movies, visual effects, props and sketches,” alongside paintings from Norman Rockwell — Lucas owns 57 — plus other classic illustrators such as Maxfield Parrish and J.C. Leyendecker.

     All good. So it’s not just going to be Mel’s Drive-in from “American Graffiti” and Indiana Jones’ fedora from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Your average tourist in 2024 won’t care much about those.

     I should confess here. I’m the rare moviegoer who liked “THX 1138,” Lucas’ first movie, a jarring sci-fi film with Robert Duvall, far more than “Star Wars.”
     I can remember seeing the first "Star Wars" debut in the summer of 1977, as a 17-year-old, worldly as a kitten. I walked out of the theater, disappointed and puzzled. Here you have a movie that is basically a two-hour running gun battle at close range between minions of the evil Galactic Empire and these four rebels, one of whom is 7 feet tall, and the ooh-scary stormtroopers can't so much as graze the wookiee's ear? Weak.
     It was downhill from there, and by the time the Empire was overthrown by teddy-bear escapees from a toilet paper TV commercial, the charm was lost on me.
     To give Lucas the benefit of the doubt, I assume he's savvy enough that his museum will take its "cultural arts" name seriously and not just be a showcase for his dusty mementos, though I note that "warehouse" is part of its description. Between the gravitas of the Art Institute and the edginess of the Museum of Contemporary Art, there is room for a museum that showcases the more popular aspects of culture: not just movies, but advertising, illustration, fashion.
     Still, someone should ask: Are tourists, for whom "Star Wars" carries the emotional heft of "Buck Rogers" - another big science-fiction movie series of yesteryear - going to line up for a museum dedicated to Arrow shirt ads and magazine covers, and the magic behind movies they've never seen?
     For the record, Lucas museum could be a great idea, something that graces our lakefront and gives the nearly 50 million tourists who visit Chicago another place to go.
     Or maybe not. Private museums can be bland money-making tourist traps, as anyone who has gone to, oh, the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., knows. If all the Lucas museum is going to offer visitors is a chance to pay $24 to see R2-D2 and C-3PO's actual costumes and then be shunted into the biggest gift shop of all time, is that really what the city of Chicago should support? It's not as if Lucas were putting his $300 million behind the DuSable Museum and relocating it to the lakefront. Given the educational and civic roles of the Adler, the Field and the Shedd, we need to look closely and ask what exactly Lucas is offering, who will control it, and do we really want it, not only now, but in the future?
     Museums as entertainment have a way of getting dated, fast. Look at the scrap of Disneyland that Springfield built around Abraham Lincoln. It opened in 2005 at a cost of $170 million, yet already is showing its age, in need of a big face-lift despite infusions of state cash. It's like Six Flags Great America regularly requiring a new high-tech roller coaster to draw a quickly bored public. Time passes, fame fades. We are all happy George Lucas is hanging around Chicago, where the winters are cold but the people are warm. Of course, let's consider his museum. But take a long look at it first. Because once it's there, it'll be there for a long time.

An inch of progress in a hundred-mile crawl

   This was my column in the Sun-Times yesterday—I didn't post it here because I wanted to comment on Jimmy Armstrong on the day of his funeral. But I didn't want this to sink into the mists either. Not a ton of reaction to it, which is a shame. I think the subject might be too grim for people to think about.  

   Linda Brown is not as famous as, say, Rosa Parks. Yet she is a civil rights pioneer too. As a 9-year-old third-grader in Topeka, Kansas, in 1950, Linda wasn’t allowed to attend the Sumner School, a few blocks from her home, along with Mona and Guinevere and her other friends living in their integrated neighborhood.

     Rather, she had to walk half a mile and catch a bus to the all-black Monroe School, two miles away.

     Her father, Oliver Brown, joined a group of 13 black parents suing the school board in February 1951 — the famous case is named after him because he was the sole male plaintiff, so his name was listed first. The case became Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court ruling whose 60th anniversary was Saturday.

     The case ended the “separate but equal” legal fiction used to justify segregation of black students from white.

     “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race,’’ the Court declared, “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

     Prophetic words, particularly since the system of segregation wasn’t undone. Now instead of being enforced by law, it’s maintained by economics and geography.

     What happened? The law changed, but hearts and minds did not, especially white hearts and minds set on keeping old ways. The ruling was met with a formal rebellion known as “massive resistance” in the South — a decade of chaos, as black students tried to enroll in white schools. It could take a platoon of National Guardsmen to do it.

     Up in the broad-minded North, we savored the show, forgetting that segregation here was just as extreme but maintained in a different style. In Chicago, it was the result of brutally enforced residential segregation, whose logic was: A black family couldn’t move into a house in a white area if their potential neighbors burned it down first. If thwarted, white Chicagoans fled rather than mingle with blacks, first to private and parochial schools, then to the suburbs.

     The Brown court case shouldn't be celebrated as a change so much as mourned as a lost opportunity. This is a problem that we should put our full attention to, not nod at on anniversaries. If all people are created equal—and they are—then the relative poverty and dysfunction of poor black areas of the city is an artifact of the past, as is the comfort and success of upscale white areas.
     In 1980, whites comprised half the city but only 18.4 percent of public schools when the Justice Department sued Chicago Public Schools for having a "continuing system-wide effect of segregating students on a racial and ethnic basis."
     The white school population kept shrinking. Now it's below 9 percent. Trying to desegregate CPS, a wag wrote, is like trying to bake an apple pie with a teaspoon of apples.
     White flight guaranteed desegregation never got a chance to work. Nor was the problem relegated to the '50s. In 1990, Carroll Elementary in Ashburn/Wrightwood was 37 percent white. Then a white man was shot and killed during a robbery in 1993, and a realtor and a woman she was showing a house were raped. Suddenly the neighborhood flipped. In 1999, Carroll Elementary's white population was 1.7 percent.
     As important as the issue is, to talk about blacks in the public schools is to miss a key point. Between 1970 and 1990, the white population of CPS fell by 75 percent. But the Hispanic student population climbed by about the same amount. African-Americans aren't even the majority of the city's public schools anymore. CPS is 44 percent Latino, 41 percent black; in 1986 it had been 60 percent black. A reminder that while we're looking back at the unresolved civil rights struggles of the past, a new unresolved struggle—the integration of Hispanics into national civic life—generally is ignored.
     Today, the law isn't the problem. Official brutality isn't the problem. The problem is the inertia of a system built up and maintained by both, continuing on its own accord in this segregated city, a Frankenstein's monster America created over centuries and can't stop now. As bad as the past was, at least then some thought this might be fixed. Who believes that now? Sixty years is a long time. But not long enough to untangle this knot of tragedy and lost opportunity that our grandparents and great-grandparents wove and left for us. Thanks, gramps.
     Oliver Brown, by the way, died of a heart attack in 1961. His daughter Linda still lives in Kansas, where she helped create a foundation to foster educational equality.

Jimmy Armstrong, dead at 55.

   

Jimmy Armstrong

     The great James Thurber once wrote, years after he had settled on the East Coast, that the clocks that struck in his dreams were often the clocks of Columbus.
    That's how it goes, not just for us guys from Ohio, but for everyone.
     When you leave your home town, it stays with you, lodged in your heart like a little snow globe, one that you take out on fewer and fewer occasions as time grinds on and give a gentle shake, trying to see the people inside through the swirling snows of yesteryear. It gets harder and harder to make them out, their figures fading as the years fly past. But they are still there, and occasionally one flickers into view, a faint ghost, to whirl once again for a moment before vanishing altogether.

     In Berea High School in the late 1970s, like all high schools, there were the jocks and the greasers—"racks" we called them, for murky reasons. There were the band geeks and the brains, the popular kids and the outcasts.

      And then there was Jimmy Armstrong, in a class all by himself. He was a cool cat. He proudly smoked cigarettes and drank black coffee, as well as other things, and philosophized. He played music. I remember pausing between classes, in the doorway of the school auditorium, listening, rapt, while he sat alone on stage in the empty room and noodled on an electric piano, all alone. He was good. 

     Jimmy was handsome, but had a deformed upper lip—it was a little thicker than it was supposed to be. He was sensitive about it—you were never supposed to ask him, and I never did. A substitute teacher once made a passing crack, probably in reaction to his mouthing off, and he stood up and pointed at her then chewed her out in a way I never forgot. I was dumbstruck that a kid could talk like that to a teacher, but that was Jimmy. The rules did not apply. He was Huck Finn.

     I can't remember why we hung out—it's been too long—but I know that once or twice I was at his house, near the fire station, and he was at mine. My guess is that Jimmy was cool, and coolness was something I sorely lacked, while he probably admired my smarts. I remember I used a word, "valkyrie," that he had never heard before. I explained to him what it meant, and he was just delighted. He was, he said, going to write a song about it. He was so happy, it made me happy. I'm not sure if he ever did, but I liked the idea of having an impact on someone who was creative, someone who was a musician, an artist. 

    For a few years after college I'd call Jimmy when  I went home to Berea to visit my folks. In 1984, he was opening for the Eurythmics at the Agora, and I went to see him play—at least I think it was him. There's this video online that gives you a sense of the music.  His brush with fame came in 1986, when he was on the TV show "Star Search" with Ed McMahon. But it was just a brush. I can't tell whether he was good or not, but either way, he never made it out of Berea. As the last line of his obituary put it: "But the ability to make something of his own inherent creativity continued to elude him." You grab, but the thing you're grabbing at dances mockingly away. I can relate to that.

    The last time I spoke with Jimmy was 20 years ago—I was on the Oprah Winfrey Show, talking about a book, and he phoned me in Chicago, so excited. Jimmy could have this little kid quality that cut through all the hipster pretense, an enthusiasm that was more endearing than hauteur could ever be, and I remember hearing him enthuse about seeing me on Oprah and smiling, thinking, "Not so cool now, are we, Jimmy?"
    The past 25 years of his life, I really have no idea. I went back to Berea with Edie, and he rolled by my parents' house with a friend. But the visit didn't go well; Jimmy was abrupt, even rude—I can't quite put my finger on why; perhaps in his view I was now conventional and domestic, playing house with this gal, while he was courting greatness. Maybe I caught him on a bad day. Edie didn't take to Jimmy, naturally, and that was that. Though that is not something to judge a person on. A woman who wrote to me from Berea a few days ago said she and her mom would often see Jimmy at church. "My mom and I always noticed how kind he was to his mother, how much he seemed to enjoy taking her to mass." That says a lot, but I couldn't tell you if he was generally a good or bad person, whether he lived a happy or sad life. Probably some mix of those, like most of us.

    The obituary on the Cool Cleveland web site mentions his "substance abuse demons"—The Plain Dealer specifies it as heroin.  Jimmy was the first person I ever heard mention "AA"—I think we were still in high school. I do remember bumping into him once downtown and us deciding to go to the state store to buy a bottle of wine, which we shared under a bridge in downtown Berea. Something novel for me, but a routine that Jimmy seemed familiar with. That sounds more debased that it really was—Berea was our hometown, as comfortable as an old shoe. Ducking under a bridge was something kids did on a summer's day, then. Some of us did, anyway. When we finished the bottle, I walked away thinking, "That was fun, but not how I want to spend my time." Maybe Jimmy should have left town and tried his luck at the big time. Maybe he did—I really didn't know him well. So maybe he did, though that can just end in another kind of disappointment.

    His funeral is today at St. Mary's Church in Berea, Ohio.  Jimmy Armstrong was 55.