“Everybody thinks he’s tough. Then you grow up and find out the truth.”
“Uncle Mike says you were.”
“He’s got too much time on his hands. Nobody my size is tough.” He thought for a moment and smiled, and I knew he’d found a way to make light of the subject. “Well, there’s exceptions, of course: Mickey Walker was real tough. He gave away forty pounds when he fought Schmeling. Beau Jack was tough. Ike Williams. Barney Ross. Henry Armstrong, of course, but he’s before my time.” He got up from the couch and made his way toward the kitchen.
As he was walking away I tossed out with, “Did you get shot in Korea?”
He stopped and turned, fixed me with a look that said I’d stepped onto dangerous ground and then relaxed. “Do I look like I got shot?”
“No. I just heard…that you got hurt there.”
“Only my feelings. Now knock it off about Korea. I don’t want to talk about that.” A look of clear annoyance crossed his face, and then he remembered his audience. “I didn’t like Korea. None of the girls would go out with me.” He went to the kitchen, shaking his head, leaving me alone and uncomfortable in the living room.
But, my verbal assaults on his private thoughts notwithstanding, most Wednesdays we were inseparable: he took me downtown, to the movies and out for a hamburger and a malt, he took me to the beach and the zoo, to museums to learn about the world. He seemed to know every interesting place in a city overrun with them, some of them little-known: we visited the train yards, watched boats, wandered in neighborhoods where we were the only white people, ate in restaurants serving food I’d never heard of. I believe he knew the location of every hot-dog stand within the city limits and had eaten at all of them.
He was in love with movie theaters, with the smell of fresh popcorn and the sight of a glittering lobby filled with overwrought pseudo-Grecian sculpture and dominated by a candy counter the size of a small ship. Chicago in 1954 was a city of movie houses, great and small, they fed off one another, cross-pollinated and gave birth to new ones, it was impossible to go four blocks without coming across one.
My uncle knew every one of them and took me to them all: to the grand palaces downtown like the Oriental and the Roosevelt and the Chicago and the Loop, and all over the North Side, the Century and the Belmont, the North Center and the Crest, the DeLuxe and the Covent and the Will Rogers and half a dozen others so small and shabby that they weren’t listed in the papers—I still find the ruins of these little shows, their empty husks and boxy skeletons on used-up streets. He introduced me to the Bugg Theater at Damen and Irving, where old movies came to live out their last days as part of a double feature that changed three times a week. He taught me that there were no movies like the old ones, and that there was never a good reason to watch a movie without a box of buttered popcorn and some candy. His combination of choice was popcorn and a Mounds bar, and I adopted this vice without hesitation.
This was truly the Age of the Western, and in the period between 1954 and 1956 I’m certain we saw every oater made in the English speaking world, and knew the complete canon of each small-time star who put on a stetson: Rory Calhoun, George Montgomery, Joel McCrea, Audie Murphy, Sterling Hayden, MacDonald Carey and John Ireland, Lloyd Bridges and Randolph Scott, Frank Lovejoy and Guy Madison and John Payne. He was fond of historical films as well, and at the Bugg Theater he introduced me to the collected works of “Cousin” Errol Flynn, including The Charge of the Light Brigade and They Died with Their Boots On.
This was also the period when Hollywood fed off the common man’s paranoia and fear of science, and buffeted the moviegoer with the perils of space travel, the dangers of science, and the evil intentions of our celestial neighbors: I saw the earth attacked by robots and flying saucers with death rays, by giant crabs and grasshoppers that came to town and behaved badly, by beasts living in the bowels of the earth and mutant sea creatures, including a memorable octopus that tried to eat San Francisco.
One day as we headed home after a movie in which malevolent beings from Mars attempted to take over the earth, I commented, probably with a note of hope in my voice, that it was good that such things weren’t real.
He said, “Yeah, that’s for sure.” A moment later he laughed and looked down at me. “No, you know what? I don’t think so. The people in this movie, they have their attention focused on one problem. They don’t have time to worry about anything else. They got no time to worry about money or their wife or their job or school; they have to worry about the Big Problem. You see? You’re out there fighting a giant octopus, it don’t make a lot of difference if your boss is mad at you.” A moment later he said, “The world’s full of problems, kid, that’s what life is made of. Give me the giant octopus anytime.”
I laughed, and not till years later did I fully understand what he meant, and what is more important, that he was right.
High Art and Baseball
We visited the museums, all of them, and my uncle stunned me with the things he knew: I decided he was brilliant. With the hindsight of forty years I understand that he just wanted me to learn what other kids were probably learning, and that he didn’t want me to think he was stupid. He had a fair knowledge of animals and geography and astronomy—at least to the point of knowing the basic constellations. I knew no other adult who could point out Mars or Venus on a clear night, and took this to be a manifestation of a singular mind.
Most of all, I enjoyed the Art Institute, and I’ve told a thousand people over the years that the day he first took me there was the day that changed my life forever. It’s not true, of course: the day he took me under his wing was more likely the day that actually changed my life, but the other way still makes for a good story.
At the Art Institute I fell in love with the paintings and the cheery lighting immediately, but it wasn’t so much the art that made it special for me, it was what happened between my uncle and me. At all the other museums, the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry, the Aquarium and the Planetarium and the tiny, almost unknown Academy of Sciences, he knew things, many things, and I spent a good deal of my time listening to him, trying to learn. At the Art Institute he was a little lost, off-balance, we were equals, a pair of lost explorers in a foreign place.
“This one I don’t know much about, Dan,” I can remember him saying as we stood just inside the big front doors. “I never studied much about art in school.” He spoke quietly, I can still see him looking self-consciously around us at the people entering the museum. If it made him uncomfortable, I was sure I wouldn’t much like it.
“Do you like it here?” I asked him.
“Do I like it? Oh, sure. It’s great. Art is great. C’mon, let’s make your acquaintance with these painters.”
I can’t think about those long elegant halls without seeing him, standing there with his hands on his hips, wearing a blue silk jacket with a map of Korea on it—thousands of servicemen returning from the Korean War came back with those gaudy jackets.
In my mind’s eye, Tom is squinting at Monet’s waterlilies or his haystacks, at Manet’s picnickers, at Seurat’s park strollers, at portraits and crowded scenes from the Dutch and German masters, at the harsh, powerful Americans, and he’s talking, constantly talking of what he sees.
“Wow, look at that! See, Dan? See how they make it look like snow? Look up close, it’s just white paint, globs of it with blue paint for the shadows. Up close it’s just globs of paint, now step back and you see? See what he did here? How ’bout that, huh?”
He liked to peer close-up at a painting to see the brushstrokes and then back away to watch the transformation of the artist’s daubings into an image.
I wanted to like what he liked but I wasn’t impressed: I stared at an entire wall of Monet’s haystacks in a field and wanted to know why Monet couldn’t think of anything else to paint; I looked at the little dots that formed Seurat’s lovely scene and asked
why he couldn’t cover all the canvas like a real painter; I looked at the Renaissance portraits and thought we had once been a race of fat people. It seemed that Manet had blurred vision and van Gogh painted only boring things: flowers, empty rooms, his own face. And confronted with abstract art, with distorted faces and bodies from the Riverview funhouse, two-headed humans and flat squares of one or two colors, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was pulling my leg.
“What’s that one supposed to be?” I asked of an abstract filled with geometric shapes and accented near its middle with a single eye.
“Beats me, kid. I knew a guy in the service that drew like that, but he was nuts.”
“Uncle Mike says all artists are nuts.”
He snorted and said, “He would. Your Uncle Mike, he’s got his heart set on making it in the world the way people usually try to, in business, wearing a suit and driving a nice car. You tell me, kid: a guy wants to make nice pictures all day in a sunny room—if his luck is running, maybe he actually makes a living making these nice pictures. Is that nuts?”
“It sounds okay.”
“Of course it’s okay. If I could draw…” And I remember him looking down at me in an odd way. “You can draw. You could be one of these guys if you wanted. You could be anything you wanted.”
I told him I wanted to be an FBI agent or a jet pilot and he just shook his head absently.
“Nah, you’ll find something better than that. You want to do something that’s…enjoyable. That’s what you want.”
I don’t remember saying anything to him, but he had shown me a new possibility in life—though painting still seemed a pallid option compared to the FBI or the Texas Rangers or jet planes.
We quickly developed favorites: Tom liked El Greco, whose people seemed to have stretched limbs or blue skin—“This guy was wild, huh? They look like giants in a B movie.” He liked Ivan Albright, whom I found rather frightening, and was fond of Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper.
“See, I actually think I understand this one,” he said the first time. “I know all the people in it.” When I asked him who they were, he just said, “The kinda people we know. Maybe that’s me someday.”
I hated the painting: there was something frightening about the idea of these people whiling away the night in this sterile place, and for a moment I felt terribly sad that he thought this might be what was in store for him.
He saw that he’d given me a shock. “Nah, Grandma won’t let me stay out that late,” he said, and led me away. The day was not lost, however: he took me to a room I fell in love with, a long gallery of gore and bloody wounds, the work of German Renaissance artists ostensibly bent on visual reverence for the early Christian martyrs but in actuality obsessed with violence and blood, perhaps letting off the steam of a repressed age, or of emerging modern man in love with his own bellicosity: there were gory scenes of early saints pincushioned with arrows, people broken on the wheel, people mauled by savage beasts or roasted alive. It sold me on the high-art concept.
But of all those artists, living and dead, one stood out in a small boy’s opinion, a painter whom I have long remembered as the Nameless Impressionist: she was a middle-aged woman we found bent over her easel in the same corner each time we visited the Art Institute, scratching and daubing away at a painstaking recreation of one of Monet’s landscapes. The first time, I watched her do one of Monet’s small flower studies and announced to my uncle that she was doing a better job than the master had. I thought I was whispering, but several people laughed and I was embarrassed until Tom said that he thought so too. The woman gave us a distracted look, blew hair out of her eyes, and went on with her incipient Monetism.
In warm weather we went to ballgames and a strange calm seemed to come over him that brought with it long silences. At times I would look up at him and see him surveying the park or the crowd with a dreamy look on his face, and I wondered why he wasn’t paying attention to whatever was happening on the field. These were dark days in Chicago baseball: the White Sox were good but never good enough to get past the Yankees or Indians, and the Cubs were awful in ways only they could devise. “Beautiful Wrigley Field” was frequently empty: the upwardly mobile middle class hadn’t discovered the attractions of ivy and day baseball yet.
But what was mordant for baseball business was wonderful for a kid and his uncle who just wanted to hang out at the ballpark. We’d find our seats and stretch out, and two or three innings later we might move and try out some other seats. Toward the late innings we’d hit the upper deck, and one breezy day when the Milwaukee Braves were shelling the bleachers we moved to the very top row of the ballpark. It seemed that I could see the ends of the earth: at the very least, I could see Riverview, and what I thought were the twin steeples of St. Bonaventure Church.
Then Tom showed me his knowledge of the wind currents. From a vending machine we had bought a pack of cheap black-and-white baseball cards featuring the current Cub crop, including both the phenomenal black rookie named Ernie Banks—for it was true that, years after Jackie Robinson and twentieth-century reality came to baseball, the Cubs discovered black people: now they had Banks and Gene Baker. I held up a card showing the pitcher whose offerings were at that moment being deposited in center field by the Milwaukee hitters. Uncle Tom took the card, bent it, leaned back in his seat so that his head and arm were actually outside the upper deck and then flicked the card up into the jetstream. The card disappeared over the upper deck roof and Tom slid back into his seat, his eyes quickly scanning the area for the acne-struck teenager who was our Andy Frain usher.
“Watch the field,” he said, looking straight ahead. “Pretend you’re watching the game.”
I feigned interest as the next Brave batter fouled off a pitch, and then I saw the card. It was floating to earth like a tired bird, making a long, slow descent, and it landed mere inches from the shoes of the Cub second baseman. The fielder looked at it, stared up at the stands with what could have been a frown, and then picked up the card and tried tossing it away. The card flew seven or eight feet and settled a little closer to the pitching mound.
It was a simpler time: today if a kid—or his uncle—tossed a piece of paper onto the field, it would be retrieved by the groundskeepers, who would wash over the field like the locusts that ate Brigham Young’s crops, forty of them retrieving the offending card while a crew of security people with headphones swept through the stands looking for Alger Hiss.
But that first time nothing happened, and so we repeated the process with the remaining five cards, and when we were finished, all six, including Ernie Banks, were littering the infield grass. My uncle was particularly proud that he’d sent the last card, a photo of the Cub first baseman Dee Fondy, within a foot of the real Dee Fondy. His effort also earned us a visit from the dreaded Andy Frain usher: this one was perhaps sixteen years old and might have weighed 110, and he informed us that we could not throw things on the field and that if we persisted in our degenerate behavior, he’d have to ask us to leave.
My uncle who had been shot with guns on frozen Korean hillsides and brawled with grown men looked the kid up and down with a “so what?” in his brown eyes, and just when the usher started to look nervous, decided to be a good guy about it. He looked down at me and said, “Cut that stuff out. You want to confuse our infield?”
“No, sir,” I said, delighted to have a speaking role in the performance.
“He won’t do that no more, sir,” my uncle told the kid in the blue uniform, and the guard went away, his body language proclaiming to the crowd that he’d behaved honorably.
My uncle looked at me. “He’s just doing his job. He probably don’t even like it, his ma probably talked him into making a couple dollars for the summer. All over the country there’s people just doing their jobs, and most of ’em don’t like their jobs. Worst thing about the country.”
“Do you like yours?” I asked him.
“No,” he said and watched the meeting in progress on the mound, during which the Cub manager presumably told his pitcher to let Eddie Mathews hit the ball four hundred feet if possible, because that is what happened next. After the home run he looked down at me, and he was laughing. “Hard to believe the Pirates got a worse team, isn’t it? Listen: most guys try to find a job that pays the rent and a little more, and they’re happy when they get that because they know there’s people that don’t have even that. That’s how I am: I got a decent job and I make a fair buck, but there’s a difference between making money and having a good job.”
“What would be a good job?”
“The one you don’t mind getting up for every day. The one that makes you happy. That’s the one you want, Butch, the one that makes you feel good about how you spend every day. They can pay you a lot of money, but if you’re on your feet in a factory every day and you know it’s never gonna change, it’s not much of a job. Not a real great life.”
“What would be a good job for you?”
He looked out over the field and pointed with his chin. “What they do, I’d do that if I was any good. Greatest job on earth, playing ball and having people cheer you and pay you money—only most of these guys don’t know it. And it don’t last long for them. And there’s guys that write about baseball for the papers, now that would be a good job but that’s a college man’s job.”
“Writing about baseball is a job?” This made as little sense as anything I’d heard.
“You bet it is. And when the season’s over they write about the Bears or they cover the fights. They get in for nothing and then they tell people what they saw and how much they liked it.”
He raised his eyebrows at the significance of this, and it did seem like a fine thing.
“Maybe I’ll work at a dairy,” I told him.
“Nah, you don’t want to work at a dairy. Buy your milk from a dairy but don’t work for one.”
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 9