Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories Read online

  CARLO ROTELLA is the author of Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt; October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature; and Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, the last also published by the University of Chicago Press. He writes regularly for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, and Boston Globe, and he is a commentator for WGBH FM in Boston.

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 2012 by Carlo Rotella

  All rights reserved. Published 2012.

  Printed in the United States of America

  21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 12345

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72909-1 (cloth)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72911-4 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-72909-5 (cloth)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-72911-7 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rotella, Carlo, 1964–

  Playing in time : essays, profiles, and other true stories / Carlo Rotella.

  pages ; cm

  Miscellaneous essays.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72909-1 (cloth : alkaline paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-72909-5 (cloth : alkaline paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72911-4 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-72911-7 (e-book)

  I. Title.

  AC8.R644 2012

  814′.6—dc23

  2011050360

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

  (Permanence of Paper).

  Playing in Time

  Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

  CARLO ROTELLA

  The University of Chicago Press * Chicago and London

  Contents

  Introduction: The Lefty Dizz Version

  CRAFT

  The Genre Artist

  The Year of the Blues

  The Professor of Micropopularity

  The Saberist

  A Man of Deep Conviction

  A History of Violence

  FIGHTS

  Boxing Stories

  Mirror, Mirror

  The Prospect

  The Biggest Entertainer in Entertainment

  Shannon vs. the Russians

  After the Gloves Came Off

  The Greatest

  Champion at Twilight

  Bedtime Story

  CITIES

  Ghosts

  The Elements of Providence

  Someone Else’s Chicago

  The Dogs of South Shore

  Into South Shore

  LESSONS

  Un Clown Biologique

  The Two Jameses

  Three Landscapes, with Gamblers

  The Mouse Sled

  A Game

  Playing in Time

  Acknowledgments

  FOR MY BROTHERS, Sebastian and Sal

  Introduction: The Lefty Dizz Version

  ON THE WALL BY my desk I have mounted a photograph of a confrontation on the sidewalk outside the Checkerboard Lounge, at 43rd and Vincennes on the South Side of Chicago, in 1982. In the picture, the great bluesman Buddy Guy, who owned the Checkerboard back then, faces off against a young man in a hat who has his back to the camera. The young man, ejected from the club after some kind of beef, had stormed off to his car and returned wearing a jacket, with one hand jammed menacingly into one of its pockets. Guy and a crew of his supporters are lined up shoulder to shoulder to bar the way to the door, each privately calculating the odds that the young man really has a gun and would use it. Backing up the boss, from left to right, are Anthony, Guy’s aide-de-camp and security man; L. C. Thurman, who managed the club; and Aretta, who tended bar and waited tables. Standing with them, although he seems more observer or bystander than participant, is Lefty Dizz, a bluesman from Osceola, Arkansas, who hung out at the Checkerboard and hosted its Blue Monday jam for years.

  Unlike the others, who strike appropriately forbidding poses—Anthony with drink in hand, Thurman with cigarette balefully pasted in mug, Aretta with hands on hips in iconic disapproval, Guy front and center with his whole being concentrated in the hands-down, shoulder-forward, head-cocked ready position that indicates a willingness to go all the way—Dizz seems bemused, even distracted. He’s the only one not fixing the troublemaker with a grim stare, and he’s holding something soft and bulky in front of him with both hands, probably a balled-up towel, presenting it with palms inward, like an offering or talisman. The others’ body English says, “Mess with me and you’ll regret it.” Dizz’s says, “Life is complex and filled with contingency; this would be a good time to step within for a taste of Old Grand-Dad.”

  I like to look at this picture, to which attaches a fugitive whiff of the South Side tavern bouquet of my youth: menthol cigarettes, Old Style beer, and hair treatments made by the Johnson Products Company. And there’s the pleasure of seeing familiar faces, people with whom I exchanged friendly words on big nights out in my teens, which means it’s going on 30 years since I used to see them all a couple of times a week. But I also keep the picture around as a reminder to take second and third looks, to revisit scenes and characters and stories that I thought I knew well.

  Marc PoKempner, a longtime photographer of the Chicago blues scene, happened to pull up at the curb outside the Checkerboard on his motorcycle on that summer night in 1982 just in time to shoot a sequence of pictures of the confrontation. I used a different shot from his sequence in a book called Good with Their Hands, published a decade ago. That one was taken from an angle farther around behind the young troublemaker, so that he almost entirely obscures Dizz. Guy has stepped more prominently forward in that one, Aretta’s not in it, and Thurman (who later wrested control of the Checkerboard from Guy) looks off to the side, all of which has the effect of making Guy seem isolated as he attends to yet another problem that an egregio virtuoso should be able to leave to his underlings. I put it in the book to evocatively illustrate Guy’s account of how difficult it was to run a club on the South Side in the 1970s and 1980s.

  The Lefty Dizz version may not be a better picture in the conventional sense—yes, the poses are more dramatic, but the troublemaker’s free hand is blurred, and Dizz, too, is not quite perfectly in focus—but it has an added valence that matters. Guy was the marquee name, the guitar hero whose ownership of the Checkerboard gave it a reputation as the capital of Chicago blues and attracted fellow greats like Muddy Waters and Otis Rush, insiders’ favorites like Fenton Robinson and Magic Slim, and rock stars like the Rolling Stones and Stevie Ray Vaughan, who dropped by the Checkerboard after playing sold-out arena gigs. Dizz, the only person I’ve ever known who bore a close resemblance to the Cat in the Hat, was by comparison a minor figure, a local character known for a couple of novelty songs—“I’m sitting here drinking my eggnog, but there’s nobody to drink with me / It’s the 25th of December, and I’m sad as a man can be”—and for his gift for orchestrating a good time. He had a serviceable voice and a droll showbiz manner, and he was a distinctive, if limited, guitar player. He did a great deal of one-handed playing, part of a large repertoire of onstage gimmickry, but he wasn’t all tricks; he had learned a thing or two about propulsive grooves from the blues-party juggernaut Hound Dog Taylor. Thanks to the quality of local talent and in great part to Dizz, an ideal emcee, the Checkerboard’s Monday night blues jam was a cut above all others. It usually started out in desultory fashion but built in intensity as musicians, patrons, smoke, inebriation, and sound accrued in the narrow, low-ceilinged room until some magical fission point was attained. On Tuesdays, still lost in t
he previous night’s music, I’d go around in a daze at school—more of a daze than usual, that is.

  Dizz, whose given name was Walter Williams, was the most approachable of the Checkerboard’s notables. A generous fellow and a natural-born enthusiast, he showed a particular affection for the kids from my high school who hung out there. Dizz, who had studied economics at Southern Illinois University, enjoyed playing the down-home blues sage as much as we enjoyed playing at being barflies and connoisseurs. Each indulged the other. I liked to ask technical questions: “How do you make a song yours when other players already made it famous?” He liked to drop aphoristic advice on whippersnappers: “Take your time and listen. Don’t be all in a rush to play fast and blow everybody away. Take your time, and you’ll hear that note in that song that nobody else has heard.” He played an annual gig at my school, staying up all night with his band, the Shock Treatment, to make the early-morning assembly in the gym, where, bleary-eyed in his third-best suit, he played a short set of his old reliables: “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” “The Things I Used to Do,” “Never Make My Move Too Soon,” “Bad Avenue,” “Somebody Stole My Christmas.”

  When I showed up at the Checkerboard with my friends, he’d purse his lips and give us a mock-serious nod from the stage, and between sets he’d stop by to shoot the breeze. (The drinking age was eighteen, but a thirteen-year-old with cash in hand had no trouble getting into the Checkerboard and ordering drinks.) In good weather, we held our between-set colloquies outside the club on the sidewalk, standing around with drinks in hand in the desolation of 43rd Street, a once-thriving business strip that had fallen upon hard times. A mile to the west, the dark towers of the Robert Taylor Homes marched off along the expressway. They’re gone now, taken down by Daley the Second (who will, I think, edge out his mighty father in the all-time rankings of Chicago’s political bosses), but back then the massed high-rise projects seemed like an immemorial feature of the landscape. I suppose the glaciers seemed equally permanent, back when the Laurentide ice sheet covered the upper Midwest.

  Dizz is gone, too; he died of cancer in 1993. When I look up from whatever I’m writing and gaze for a while at the picture on my wall, he comes back to me.

  I think of this book of selected pieces—some new, but most published over the past fifteen years in a variety of magazines, quarterlies, and other publications—as a kind of Lefty Dizz version, a second look from a different angle that allows what was obscured and implicit to emerge into view and change a scene’s texture of meaning. When I come back to these pieces and read them together (and together with the new ones), removed from the immediate context of assignments and deadlines and editorial demands in which they were written and published, the altered setting brings out new resonances. Putting them together here also returns the pieces to their most original context; that is, they’re all about things I’m interested in, and in many cases they’re about things I’ve been interested in for a long time. Seeing them lined up shoulder to shoulder like this gives me new insight into the sustained interests that brought me to these various particular topics and to the ways in which I wrote about them.

  In the pieces that follow, blues, boxing, pulp fiction, movies, my old neighborhood, and other people’s old neighborhoods recur frequently among a broader range of topics that includes jazz fantasy camp, gambling, ghosts, dogs, what it’s like to run a movie studio or mega-church, and fear of clowns. I do go all over the place, which is one of the joys of writing nonfiction; people are up to all kinds of things, and the writer and his readers get to tag along. But I also see some unifying throughlines in this book.

  First, most of these pieces are about city life in one way or another. There’s a certain kind of child of the middle class who finds himself attracted to both the street and the library, and who fashions a life out of exploring the relationships between them. Such people form a tribe, and among its members are some of the writers whose work has made the deepest impression on me—Émile Zola, A. J. Liebling, and Jack Vance, to name only three. I already knew I was a member of the tribe, but rereading this selection of pieces reminds me just how forcefully this identity has shaped what calls to me and how I explore it.

  Second, if I have a meta-subject, it’s how creative people give form to inchoate inspirations by pouring them into the vessels available in a particular time and place: genres and styles like Chicago blues or space opera or the stick-and-move technique of the master defensive fighter; institutions like the Checkerboard Lounge or a publishing house or a boxing gym or a government agency. And along with the possibilities for giving form to a creative impulse come the limitations on creative possibility that often supercharge art, sport, and other endeavors with meaning. There’s a story in this book about a fight between Larry Holmes, a 52-year-old former champion still looking to pad his all-timer’s résumé and make one more payday, and a barnstorming strongman known as Butterbean, who yearned for the legitimacy and subsequent purses he could earn by making a fine showing against Holmes. That fight’s meaning was almost entirely a product of the strictly limited circumstances under which an old man and a fat man—both inspired, both gifted in ways that most observers did not credit—practiced the fistic arts. That’s one of the lessons I think I’ve learned about creativity: it begins to have human import, to take recognizable signifying form, to the extent that it’s constrained by the conditions in which it’s made.

  Third, looking back over these pieces reminds me just how powerfully my own inspirations and interests have been shaped by having been poured into the vessels available to me: magazines and quarterlies, the academy and the commercial writing trades, the profile and the essay, assignments, deadlines, travel budgets, house styles, word counts and per-word pay rates. In my early twenties I tried repeatedly to just sit down and write, on my own, in a vacuum, and nothing came out. After a while I figured out that I needed less freedom and more useful constraint: craft training, clearly defined jobs of work to do, editors. Much of what I know about writing I’ve reverse-engineered from what editors did to my drafts, and editors have paid me for my words and sent me to Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Rochester, to WrestleMania in Orlando and a fencing academy in suburban Atlanta and the Harvard-Yale football game, to polka joints and casinos and a nighttime water-and-fire ritual on the river in downtown Providence, and to many of the other places that turn up in the pages that follow.

  (Editors are important, and I’ve been lucky to work with several superb ones, but they’re not always right. I have revised some of the published pieces that follow. I didn’t attempt to bring them up to date, change verb tenses, or otherwise uproot them from the historical moment in which they were written, but I did touch them up here and there to sharpen the focus of my Lefty Dizz version. I have also occasionally restored a line or a quote that got cut the first time around, undoing editorial decisions that were guided by considerations that I no longer have to take into account.)

  I see one more principal sub rosa unity in many of the pieces that follow. They give you a pretty fair notion of what I liked when I was thirteen, or at least of enthusiasms that have lasted: not just for the music of Lefty Dizz and Buddy Guy but also for the writing of Vance and other masters of genre fiction; for the fights and other embodied sorts of knowing; for crime stories, cityscapes, the virtues and mechanics of working at a craft, and the traffic between school and subcultural scenes. As I point out in my profile of the 92-year-old Vance, who was bowled over in early adolescence by the pulp magazine Weird Tales and whose own writing similarly bowled me over at that age, you may never again lose yourself so entirely in a work of art as you can when you’re thirteen. I think of thirteen as the intellectual age of consent, the moment when the hot wax of a formative sensibility takes perhaps the deepest permanent impressions. It was at that age that I began to recognize in myself the twinned attractions to library and street, and to search—vaguely, at first, but with greater purpose as the years went by—for vessels in which to pour that i
nterest and give it lasting form that could also serve as craft and calling.

  It was at that age, too, that I began to realize how libraries and schools were like gyms and music clubs, all of them institutions where specialized knowledge is ordered and passed along, where one can begin to see how people get good at things. Every library is a local incarnation of the Master Library of All Time and Space. Every school, from kindergarten to research university, is a branch office of that world-spanning enterprise, Big School. Every bar, whether it offers live music or not, is a touchingly imperfect copy of the One True Universal Bar. The Mystical Body of Boxing Gyms can manifest itself in a strip-mall storefront with a duct-taped heavy bag hanging in the corner or in a converted industrial loft just big enough for a sparring ring. In my early teens I began to see such permutatively recurring places as my natural habitat, structural elements of the world I wanted to live in, and to realize that the lessons to be learned in them were the lessons I wanted to know more about.

  I tend to be most comfortable at ringside, on the close margin, inside the scene but ceding center stage to headliners like Buddy Guy and the troublemaker in the hat with his back to the camera. But I do recognize that there’s a kind of self-portrait between the lines of this book, and that returning to these scenes and stories and reading them together brings that self-portrait into clearer view. And I have to admit that the character somewhere between observer and participant who emerges into view in this Lefty Dizz version, the figure whose presence is always implicit even when obscured in the pieces that follow, is me.

  Craft

  The Genre Artist

  JACK VANCE, DESCRIBED BY his peers as “a major genius” and “the greatest living writer of science fiction and fantasy,” has been hidden in plain sight for as long as he has been publishing—six decades and counting. Yes, he has won Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards and has been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and he received an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, but such honors only help to camouflage him as just another accomplished genre writer. So do the covers of his books, which feature the usual spacecraft, monsters, and euphonious place names: Lyonesse, Alastor, Durdane. If you had never read Vance and were browsing a bookstore’s shelf, you might have no particular reason to choose one of his books instead of one next to it by A. E. van Vogt, say, or John Varley. And if you chose one of these alternatives, you would go on your way to the usual thrills with no idea that you had just missed out on encountering one of American literature’s most distinctive and undervalued voices.