The neighbor upstairs paced. Next door, an oddly eclectic mix of songs pulsed through the walls. Exuberantly testing out some new speakers they told me. The small clicks and taps of my beloved’s mouse and keyboard bounced inside our little space. She sighed.
My hands brushed outward across the pages of a book, flattening it to copy a quote:
“Obscurity matters.”
A short time later a small skirmish eventuated over the use of headphones during video editing, during which I was rebuffed and forced to bivouac in the library for my afternoon exercises.
To my great luck, a local youth group's ‘Afternoon with the Easter Bunny’ was being celebrated in and out of the branch’s activity room. With children flying hugger-mugger and pell-mell amidst the stacks and tables, it was a decided challenge to execute work of any quality, but I endeavored to carry it off.
After adjudging myself a day’s success at 77 good, solid words, I took a stroll up and down Halsted, stopping into the shops to bother the owners with half-hearted browsing, twisting my vacant smile like a dull blade on my way out each and every time.
What a monster I was becoming.
It was then I thought “You need a small touch-a-the-stuff before finding yourself back at home.” And so I found myself gracefully sat on a stool at Daina’s, thinking about some of my best words.
“Say there young man, do you happen to have a light?”
I heard the question before seeing who it belonged to and prepared myself to say no with a finality that would close off any further conversation. But lo! It was such a creature I saw next to me at the bar that I changed my answer’s tone to a gentle “No, I’m sorry. I don’t smoke.”
I almost added “Monsieur” for some reason. What can I say? I was moved by the old man’s look of kindly vagrancy.
“That’s to your benefit,” the old man responded. “But, I see that you do partake of my one other vice of drink. Would you happen to have enough to lend me a Żywiec?”
“Sure,” I said, handing him some crumpled bills from my pocket, as Daina’s son came from the backroom, fully swaddled in his coat and studiously avoiding us.
“Name’s Zodinis,” he said with a nod, and went about shaking down Daina’s squirrely son for a smoke.
It was late before I knew it, and the old man had been going nonstop the whole time. He discoursed at length on topics such as his former lives, his many loves, old world gardening, the proper method of APA citation, balloon framing, the evils of chemtrails and coffee, and naturally, the old Daina’s tap—when she was still alive.
He did take brief trips to smoke or to the bathroom, but during those respites, I failed to make my exit swiftly enough, before being offered another beer or advice on how to escape the old man’s clutches.
This advice came from anyone who happened to get near me, even Daina’s taciturn son.
“Don’t let him get going about Daina,” a neighbor of mine who works at the packinghouse, told me. “You’ll be here until Easter.”
Boris said it was a great pity, how old Zodinis couldn’t take a hint. He’d seen many a young person be cornered by his interminable tales.
Old Z was coming back in from a cigarette he had bummed from a group of modish youngsters. They had been waiting for a table at the Ramen place next door and now, they’re spot had come through.
A chill invaded the tavern as Zodinis leaned elegantly against the door. I saw the chagrin rise up across Daina’s son’s face as he watched Z cry after his erstwhile comrades from the open doorway.
“Be very careful of your throats, my friends! Slurping such hot soup in the night air!”
At that moment the jukebox jolted to life with Annie Lennox’s smooth voice. The ever youngening crowd was starting to put their stamp on the evening. They mostly kept their vital conferences to themselves, but a few of the middle and advanced ages made attempts across the generational lines.
Gabe’s wife Annette was one of the most successful, having a playful disposition and a wry sense of humor. She joked easily with some of the young femmes fatale who now seemed to rule the central conduit between the bar and the jukebox.
Gabe, who later that night would find his volubility, demanding to be called ‘Gabriel’, watched his wife, but did not join the conversation. He seemed to be admiring the look of her as she stood under the dusty beerlight, the multicolored neon illuminating her salt and pepper hair.
On that gradient of conviviality, of Annette and her youth, and Gabe watching Annette, and me watching Gabe, sat DuPont who was mumbling to himself something that I could only pick up the edges of.
“...and I saw her drying it a few days before…she was…the same attitude….turned towards me…and… saw that there was… cheeks…eyes…shining. “
Ages ago, Lafcadio Hearn wrote about the special mania of New Orleans being “the mania of talking to one’s self”. In his column he expounded on the “widely recognized” New Orleanian’s propensity to “perambulate their native streets conversing only with themselves.”
Surely Chicagoans of all times have been known to be autoconversationalists themselves and, perhaps in older days, even great perambulists. But I think of our city’s madness as one more of captive conversation, a hostage-taking type of soliloquy that demands two parties, but only one moving its mouth.
It is true that we incline towards a bloviating kind of insanity, whether it be the bluster of political speech or the inveterate boosterism from our big business bosses— only the goddess knows! But we do talk at one another with fantastic regularity.
“You know, my young friend, it's starting to snow out there,” Zodinis’ said, sinking down a register as he sat next to me.
"I love the look of snow," his voice now in full wallow. And with an internalized eyeroll, I beckoned to Daina’s son for another round.