So It Goes

Part 3

With the chutzpah of youth, I dashed off three columns about absolutely nothing. It was one of those rare, unseasonably warm days that sometimes occur in January--days that trick you into thinking winter is over, after which the cold and snow clamp down harder than ever. I got on my bike and rode through steaming slush to the newspaper offices. There behind the Arby's Roast Beef and across the street from the 1,000th McDonald's Restaurant was the Suburban Times. I picked the Times because the editor, Bob Burns, had his own weekly column, one with a terrific name: While Burns Roams. And because the paper was green. Green was my favorite color.

I left my bike by the door--but not too close to the door. I didn't want anyone to see that I didn't have a car, or at least, a car that actually ran. You didn't have to lock your bike then; the fact that nothing happened in Des Plaines meant that no one stole bikes off the street.

When I opened the door I left the world where doors were closed and nothing happened. Inside this anonymous Pepto-Bismol-colored building there was a hive of activity as reporters, printers, and other functionaries scurried around openng doors and finding out everything they could about the Land of Grim Faces. Perhaps, I thought, something did happen in this town; I just didn't know about it.

The receptionist wore clear tear-shaped glasses with sparkles at the corners. "Please have a seat," she said when I handed her my sample columns. "I'll take these to Mr. Burns."

To my surprise and consternation, the receptionist came back to say he was in the office, and he would see me shortly. I had expected to hand the columns over and slink off on my bike, unseen. I waited, watching reporters hurry out in rumpled shirts and ties loosened at the neck. Others, probably advertising people, came in with suits, belching after their big business lunches. It all seemed terribly exciting.

There wasn't a splinter of wood in that building. All was hard, and modern, and cutting-edge for the 1970s. The chairs in the waiting area were hard metal, the floor linoleum cracked and with dirt triangles at the corners. The walls were green cinder block, the desks brown steel, the cubicles metal covered with cloth. it seemed I sat in the reception area for an hour or more. I memorized the dirt streaks left on the flesh-colored linoleum, which was cracking in some of the corners. The cinder block walls were colored green, the same as the newspaper itself.

The receptionist's phone rang. "Mr. Burns will see you now."

Burns did not get up, but motioned me to take a seat. To my consternation, he proceeded to read my work right in front of me. I sat, pulling my fingers, twiddling my thumbs. Good editors, I know now, are like that: they read quickly so they can move on to other things. They also an't resist checking out copy that seems even remotely interesting. I looked around a the bodies scurrying to and fro in the office, answering phones, standing, talking about news, laughing cynically. Those in the front were in shirts and ties or dresses and pantsuits. In the back, where the presses loomed like great green monsters, burly men climbed up on machines wearing dirty coveralls. an acidic smell gave a tang to the air. The clacking of typewriter keys, the ringing of very loud desk telephones, the whirr of hot wax machines, all took my mind off the fact that someone was reading my words right in front of me. Newspapers in those days were noisy, violent places, places where ink was smashed onto paper, paper was physically glued onto other paper, paper was photographed and etched with acid and burned onto metal plates, and the plates were squeezed under enormous pressure and webs of newsprint were rolled between them. Then the rolls were sliced and folded and bound into bundles. It was a brutal landscape, a sort of blacksmith's forge where words and pages were pounded, baked, and forced into shape. I never wanted to leave it.

Burns let out his breath quickly all at once and I snapped to attention. I couldn't tell if he was sighing from amusement or disgust. Then he picked up a pen and started marking up my writing, like one of my college professors. The pen danced, slashed, and then stabbed the paper, which he was still holding suspended between the desk and his face. I dared not speak.

Finally he handed the sheets back to me. "Pretty good," he said in a surprisingly soft and boyish voice. "Fix them up and bring 'em back, and we'll get them in there some time when we have room." There was no talk about money. I think I shook his hand. I don't remember leaving, getting on my bike, or riding home. I do remember that the stores, the streets, the cars, and the few pedestrians no longer seemed so foreign to me. Now that I had a role to play, a job to fulfill, I was one of them.

One of the first So It Goes columns I submitted:

In the end, there was nothing to say

By Greg Holden

I usually go to work hoping that the day will pass peacefully, without problems, and that I can simply go home and not have to think about it until the next day. But that seldom happens. Just when things seem to be quiet—too quiet—and you begin to relax, then trouble sneaks up behind you and jumps on your back.

It had been one of those quiet days until I came back from a delivery. The cashier hurried up to me, wringing her hands. "I just caught a boy shoplifting," she said. "Frank's really been yelling at him."

Before I could think or speak, there was my boss Frank pulling a limp tousle-haired boy by an elbow. "Drive this boy back to his home," he commanded. "Tell his parents he was caught shoplifting and I don't want to see him in here again." That was all. He pushed the boy at me and stalked off.

The boy stood there sniffling and wiping his nose. He was so thin his clothes seemed about to fall off. "Where do you live?" I asked. He did not answer. He stared at the floor, a picture of humiliation. I had received some of Frank's tongue whippings myself and knew how he felt. I led him gently out the door.

When he sat next to me in the car I saw that he was Spanish and that there was a ring of dirt around his neck. "Tell me where you live now, and I'll take you home." He mumbled an address and I hurried off, anxious to be rid of him. He was making me nervous.

The drive over was agonizingly silent. I longed to speak to him, to cheer him up, but could not find the words. Suddenly he looked up at me with perfectly round eyes. "Are you going to tell my Mom and Dad?" All at once I wanted to let him go and avoid a scene with his parents. Nobody would be the wiser. But I kept driving.

We pulled up before a large, rickety frame house, with peeling paint, scraggly vines, and bicycles and naked dolls scattered on the lawn. The boy ran ahead and I followed him to the backyard. A fat woman holding a dishrag leaned out of an upper window, yelling to the boy in Spanish and gesturing with her arms. Then the father came out and walked toward me, looking angry.

I told him the story and his anger faded. "I apologize for my son," he said. He turned and began yelling at the boy. Then he began hitting him behind the ear. He picked him up by the neck and dragged him over to me. "You take us to the store. We apologize."

All the way over he hit the boy and screamed at him in Spanish. The boy wailed "No, no." I tried to tell him to stop. But I didn't know what to do. Was I on the side of the store or the boy?

In the end there was nothing to say. There are times when you feel outraged, but there's nothing yo can do. I didn't talk to anyone for the rest of the day. When it was time to go I hurried home and tried to forget about the boy or of what kind of future lay in store for him. I'm still trying.

So It Goes

part 2

It was 1978, the winter of my sophomore year in college. I was a twenty year old virgin. As I dusted the shelves at the Rexall Drugs on Oakton Street, gently removing the Doan's Pills and positioning them in neat rows, I knew with certainty that every customer was staring at me in my blue stock clerk jacket and thinking, "That's right, he hasn't done it yet; it's so obvious. Look how neat and restrained he is." The boxes of Ipana toothpaste mocked me. The old woman on the bottle of Lydia Pinkham's elixir grinned knowingly. The bus driver, letting people off at the White Street stop just outside our front door, chuckled as he told the debarking passengers, "Go say hi to the twenty-year-old virgin for me."

I won't go into the many reasons why I was in this state. But suffice it to say, as I wiped my hands and stared out the front door at all the happy non-virgins driving by the store, I wanted to mark my territory in the world in some way. There by the door were all the daily newspapers; at the time we carried six or seven. In those days, the newspapers were full of columnists. It was obvious none was a virgin. They all spouted forth confidently, spewing out their opinions and making their mark on society. Jack Mabley and Richard Christensen wrote for the Daily News. Bob Greene wrote for the Tribune. My own hometown papers, the Suburban Times and the Journal, played out the competition between the local giants on a smaller scale.

The king of all the columnists was Mike Royko. I read his column religiously--first in the Daily News, and then (when that paper folded) in the Sun-Times. He was known for skewering Chicago's longtime mayor, the Boss, Richard J. Daley. He invented a fictional character named Slats Grobnik who commented on the political intrigues that were always at play in the big city.

My town, Des Plaines, had not a bit of intrigue. We had no boss. We had no downtown; it was split in half by the commuter train tracks, and then much of it was erased by an obnoxious parking garage. Half of our residents could not name our mayor at any given time. Having no experience myself and having done nothing of significance, I was just the person to write about a town where nothing happened.

So It Goes

Part 1

As I approached my twenty-first birthday I became convinced that unseen forces were conspiring to make my home town neat, orderly, and utterly devoid of life.

The cracks in the ceiling resembled a map of Eastern Europe. My brother snored on the other side of our shared bedroom; his two pet rats scuffled in the galvanized tin washbasin they called home. Hormones were percolating all over the place.

I blinked at the alarm clock--5 a.m.--and burst from the covers like a prisoner freed from shackles. I crept downstairs, stepping gingerly over the creaky fifth stair. I practically flung myself through the front door, expecting to see a troupe of gnomes at work, cleaning, making everything look the same, and sprinkling the sleeping inhabitants with fairy dust designed to make them compliant and terminally satisfied.

Out of the corner of my eye, it seemed I did see subtle shapes scurrying into the bushes. One bush shivered, either from the wind or an unseen farm. Then all was still. An air conditioner rumbled. Dry leaves rattled along the pavement. A lone sparrow cheeped weakly and returned to sleep.

I got in the habit of waking before the sun rose and hurrying downstairs. I sneaked out through the back door and crept around the corner of the house. Once, I definitely saw a shape disappear into the neighbor’s hedge. I hurried after it in my pajamas and bare feet. By the time I reached the front edge of the hedge, which was only a couple of seconds, the shape was at the end of the next set of hedges. I only saw a dark form and some shivering in the leaves. The dark shapes seemed to be moving with superhuman speed.

All at once there was a final rustling in the bushes. The night was still again.

In the daylight, the suburban streets seemed to hold traces of the Unhappy Dust that infected the docile inhabitants. Like a herd of gloomy sheep, each man gave each wife an identical dry-as-paper peck on the cheek. They shuffled to their old, rusting muscle cars, aging GTOs, Dodge Challengers. These were blue collar men, the mechanics and boiler repair crews of the Chicago metropolitan area. Starters clicked, flywheel teeth ground, engines rumbled to life. Exhaust hung in the dead August air as each man hurried off alone to spend the day wrestling with machines.

Children burst from slapping wooden screen doors. They jumped cowboy-style on their Big Wheel tricycles. They rode up and down the sidewalks, plastic wheels clattering on the cracks, like miniature versions of their fathers--except that their faces bore identical mindless grins. Women talked, smoked, frowned, inspecting one another's footwear. Students labored toward bus stops under the weight of backpacks. Only the children smiled. Everyone over the age of, say, seven showed the same grim, expressionless face to the world. Why weren't the children affected by the fairy dust? What thoughts preoccupied the residents and prevented them from smiling? Was anything going on behind the downcast eyes, the furrowed brows, the hurried steps? Why was nobody happy in this town? What kept all these people in their cold, isolated orbits?

A jet rumbled in for a landing at nearby O'Hare Airport. I stared intensely at the flies that were already buzzing in the humid air. I stepped hurriedly--eyes downcast, brow furrowed--realizing I must look exactly like everyone else as I followed the bushes in the direction of the dark shapes I had seen the night before.

I longed to know what, if anything, was going on behind the closed doors, the half open windows. There must be some sort of life unfolding in the little brick houses, because I saw little sign of it in front, in the still and sooty air. The hedges lined the houses, one after another, in almost continuous rows, each property well defined, each resident's territory separated from those on either side with a sort of green skin. They ended at the area of squat factories, offices, and warehouses that had recently been built up just south of the neighborhood--our "industrial park." In this park no trees grew. Only a network of streets and driveways and boxlike buildings stood atop the fields and hills where my friends and I had played as children. Here, we had chased grasshoppers, opened milkweed pods, and made forts. Now the fields and trees and hills had been flattened and buried beneath stone and concrete—except for one small plot in a corner, next to the highway, where weeds grew and a single cottonwood tree stood, crooked and gnarled and with several of its limbs cut back by landscapers.

The crickets stopped as I walked toward this last remaining patch of prairie. I stood at the edge, on the curb and looked down. The earth dipped down and disappeared into darkness, obscured by weeds, tall grass, and flowers. The foliage shivered, and then I shivered. I knew this was where the gnomes had disappeared. I walked back home past rows of identical brick houses lined up like so many pieces on a Monopoly board, all the same dull brick color, with 4 windows and two doors and one or two cars in the driveway. Here in the bright sunlight the town seemed utterly uninspiring. I had to do homework for my college classes, and my column for the local newspaper was due by the end of the day.

Dead Plaines

Dead Plaines, part 2