And I couldn’t stop laughing.

Down some water. Laugh. Dip among traffic. Laugh. Cram an energy bar and stop by the tampon boxes, fast food wrappers and museum-pimping statuary that pool along the spot the Roosevelt Road bridge overlooks both river and the vacant Rezkoville and I laugh laugh laugh.

July. Bike ride. Entire length of the city just for funsies and to end the site on a high note. I’ve been posting about it for a week and a half in stories I wrote between August and early October. You’re all caught up.

This is story #1,000. This site will end on Friday. I will miss it greatly. But I’m not ending, nor is Chicago.

I found crime here. I found death and sex and sin and kiddos playing piggy on summer days in the park. I wept and shook here and I laughed and shook here. I got drunk and kissed girls and took boat rides and played croquet. I wore spiked leather bracelets in one life and neckties in another. This town rattled and made me.

North through the skyscrapers, north through the trendy bars, north through gay neighborhoods and wealthy ones and ones where the poverty bleeds and bubbles from the soil itself. North.

The stories, by god the stories. The people I met! The people I didn’t meet! I’ve talked to dancers and magicians, politicians and thugs and drunks. I hit this city with all I had and at the end I told so, so few of its tales. This city threw itself at me and I gave it a pittance, my thousand stories trickle and tinkle against the ocean this Chicago throws back each moment.

In June 1921, Chicago Daily News reporter Ben Hecht debuted “1001 Afternoons in Chicago,” a daily column slicing life in the first quarter of the 20th century. In the preface to the book version, editor Henry Justin Smith recalled the “haggard but very happy” Hecht turning in the first few columns.

“It was clear that he had sat up nights with those stories. He thumbed them over as though he hated to let them go. They were the first fruits of his Big Idea — the idea that just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often flatly and unimaginatively told, lay life; that in this urban life there dwelt the stuff of literature, not hidden in remote places, either, but walking the downtown streets, peering from the windows of sky scrapers, sunning itself in parks and boulevards. He was going to be its interpreter. His was to be the lens throwing city life into new colors, his the microscope revealing its contortions in life and death. It was no newspaper dream at all, in fact. It was an artist’s dream. And it had begun to come true. Here were the stories. … Hoped I’d like ‘em.”

By 1925, Hecht was sick of it. He had written a deliberately smutty novel called “Fantazius Mallare” as a test case on American obscenity law, and American obscenity law won.

He was fired from the Daily News in 1923 but had with a group of friends from the Dil Pickle Club arthouse scene started the Chicago Literary Times, an inspiring, brilliant drain on time and funding. Writer pals were calling about easy money and literary fortune in New York, and Hecht was ready to submit.

These are the final lines of the last 1001 Afternoons in Chicago story, “My Last Park Bench,” in which an older, weary Hecht stumbles across the younger version of himself.

“I catch a glimpse of him following me with his eyes, excited, damn him, over the mystery and romance which lurk in every corner of the city, even on a cinder-covered bench in Grant Park. Let him sit till doom’s day on this bench; he will never see me again. I have more important things to do than to collect cinders under my collar.”

I didn’t know when I started that Hecht was a liar and fabricator, a newsman conman of the era for whom Truth and Fact formed a Venn diagram, and none of it mattered so long as the words sang. He ended up in Hollywood, his gift for witty lies finding a more appropriate setting than a newspaper page.

I just knew I wanted to try what he claimed he was doing.

Since April 2012, I never missed a scheduled post day and, aside from some clearly satirical stories about mascots, Santa Claus and the brainstorming session for “tronc,” I never made up a word. What you read from me over these last six years is Chicago in the 20-tens as seen through my lens and microscope.

Hope you liked ‘em.

I was laughing when I hit the graveyard.

I made it. I made it through my self-assigned task. I made it through Chicago and I made it through, Chicago. My throat was dry and my legs burned white like charcoal ready for meat. But I was laughing.

My side trips and roundabouts added almost 20 miles to the route. Had I stuck to the path, I could have gotten there at 30. Instead the app tolds me I took 49.86 miles to get from Burnham to Evanston, plowing through that town between.

I’m not done yet. Not with my 1,001 stories, not with my half-century ride. Just a touch more to go.

I turned the bike around and headed back into the city, aiming my aching bones, burning legs and slightly chafed uppity bits toward the Howard Red Line stop. Nothing left in me, I slouched toward Bethlehem to be born.

A CTA worker came out of her glass cage to greet me.

“No bikes on the train,” she said.

And I laughed.

…

Read a few of my favorites:

The Rabbi’s Machine is Missing — Whatever happened to Chicago’s last typewriter repairman?

The Human Addict — A begging addict talks about being treated like a person.

Old Joe of Canaryville — Joe sits in his shop waiting for customers, as he’s done for 68 years.

Nuns in a Cash Register Store — Another bit of Chicago is lost.

The Nut Hut — Over soup, a woman recalls her role as a professional tease in a prostitution scam.

Party at Uncle Fun — Customers, staff and Uncle Fun himself say goodbye to the well-loved Belmont gag shop.

The Murderess Down the Block — I find out a 1920s lady gunner lived a few houses over from me.

The Most Sarcastic Child in Chicago Watches a Clown Show — Clowns from Theater Oobleck and El Circo Nacional de Puerto Rico win over a very sarcastic child.

The Steelworker’s Mermaid — How four sculptors hid a seven-foot mermaid for 14 years.

Mama Olaf — An immigrant tale of love and tripe soup.

Miss Sweetfeet Breaks — A breakdancer talks about the need for more B-Girls.

Light and the Rocket — A child I knew just killed a man.

The 16th Artist — One man’s arts center aims to revive Englewood.

The Rabbi, Harry Potter and Too Many Corpses — A rabbi has to tell a little boy some bad news.

Whatever Happened to the High Priestess of the Flappers? — In 2016, I wrote about the head of a 1920s clique of teen glamour girls. In 2018, her granddaughter reached out.

Since I don’t want to miss a moment of this, I loaded up the site before we left with Le Tour de Chicago, four bike routes through famous sites in the city’s history. I’m not posting these as thought exercises — get out there and explore this city.

We rode through Chicago’s newspaper history on Friday, and later this week will learn about lakefront encroachment and something I’m just calling “A Warhellride to the Goddess.”

Today’s bike tour is going to go through some of the spots connected to Chicago’s gay and lesbian community

See other LGBTQ landmarks not on this bike route

If someone yells “One day,” you can hear if it’s “One day” (I’ll dump your sorry ass), if it’s “One day” (you’ll realize what we had) or if it’s (I just wanted) “One day” (without having to deal with your shit).

That’s how I knew the way the woman in the black Honda Accord said “Bob” was a bad one. It was burning and resentful, should be underlined, italicized and maybe written in that drippy red blood font from horror movies.

It was “Bob” (you jackass), not “Bob” (the sweetiekins light of my life).

I was riding my bike north on Halsted, past the bars, bistros, boutiques, drag theaters and S&M shops of Boystown, Chicago’s awesomely named gay neighborhood.

The voice from the Accord belonged to an older woman, one far-fallen into the delusion that perms and dyeing could make white hair a convincing blond. She sat next to the “Bob” of blood font mention, an older man with a head of gray hair, some sunglasses and a horizontally striped polo shirt that screamed to the world “This man knows his golf handicap!”

The car pulled away. I kept pedaling past rainbow-colored signs and the occasional couple chattering happily about both having penises as they walked down the street.

I caught up to the Accord at a light.

“You don’t know” (what the person we are discussing has been through!), the woman shouted at Bob.

Green green green. Please. Green.

The next several blocks were an unintentional game of tag between red bike and black Honda Accord.

Despite my best efforts, I would catch up with the black Accord at lights and signs and occasionally just on open stretches, just enough to hear the fight continue before they sped off.

“You’ve been holding him back!” the man shouted at one point, trying to karate chop the steering wheel for emphasis like a shoeless Khrushchev.

They peeled off, soon catching another red.

“One day,” he muttershouted loud enough for me to hear, three feet and a car door away. “Just one fucking day” (without having to deal with your shit).

I got blocked behind one of the many, many Chicago drivers still confused by the marked-off lane with a picture of a bike on it (“Wuzzat for? Trees? Dogs? Parking if I feels like it?”). As I got past, I looked ahead and saw a black Honda Accord turn right at a stop sign.

Free.

I guess I should feel bad making comedic hay out of a couple in pain, but if stories of young lovers all kisses and grabass are fair game for the poet, writer or street photographer, I don’t see why their alternate shouldn’t be. The fruit of a ripened love should be as considered as the young shoots of its first bloom.

Even if the resulting fruit is a weird argument speeding through a rainbow neighborhood in a black Accord.

In a poetic way, a love that fights and recovers is more beautiful than one that’s perfect until it shatters. But I was glad they were gone, headed down that side street into that all-important zone known as “not by me.”

I pulled up to the next intersection.

“I was there twice!” I heard a man’s voice yell from a Honda Accord, which I’ve since learned is the seventh best-selling car of all time and was America’s top pick by individual consumers for all of 2013 and the first quarter of 2014.

Black’s a very popular color, too.

“Twice!” Bob yelled to his wife before their particular Accord sped down the road, red bicycle pedaling behind.

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A look at young love

I’ve loaded up the site with stories to run while I’m gone (social media and newsletter handled by the amazing Benji Feldheim), but there were still a few gaps, gaps I’m filling with revamped and refurbished stories from Getting Strange, a blog I wrote from 2008-10 for the now-defunct Windy Citizen.

So, from Aug. 5, 2008, here’s a tale of friendship, Speedos and the dreamy eyes of Colin Firth, a piece originally entitled “And now, the gays.”

…

I have recently acquired the one thing every 20-something white liberal craves and longs after but never quite thinks he’ll get – a gay, minority friend.

Envy me, all you people who go to Critical Mass on your Treks. Yearn to be me, fellow people who threatened to move to Canada in November 2000 and November 2004. Worship me, Utne Reader readers.

I could be the King of Wicker Park. Co-king with my gay, gay friend.

I do have to clarify that he’s not my friend because he’s gay. He’s my friend because he does a really hilarious impression of Heath Ledger as The Joker.

Marriages have been formed on less.

But on Saturday, this friendship offered me a glimpse into the subculture of subcultures, the Holy Grail of alt living. And, that night, I had my in to a whole new and tastefully decorated world.

Now, I’ve been to gay bars before. With ex-girlfriends. Who I had heterosexual sex with. Often. And never while thinking of Colin Firth.

But I have never been to so many gay bars before in my life.

Strangely, I had planned to stay in on Saturday.

I was doing some Windy Citizen stuff when “Jeff” (pseudonym at his request) Gchatted me to see what I was up to. I said that I was up to nothing and we went back and forth about whether there were any good karaoke bars in town. We decided to meet up with our friend “Lindsay” (Another minority! I am soooooo liberal!) and hit up one in Boystown.

Now, I am liberal and tolerant. But I’m also shallow and needy. So I decided to dress … a little gay. Getting hit on is getting hit on and I wanted some massive ego uppers.

I put on the nice jeans, a white T-shirt and an unbuttoned button-up short-sleeved shirt over it. Button-up shirt for no reason? Pure stylish affectation!

I show up at Jeff’s apartment. He looks at me and shakes his head.

“That’s not gay,” he said.

Damn. It wasn’t a good start. Once again, I had confused gay and Jimmy Buffett.

Now during the very expensive night, there were two cab rides and four gay bars. I’ll break down the gay bars accordingly.

Gay bar number one: The gay sports bar.

Turns out the karaoke wasn’t going on that night. I don’t know what to say here other than that I’m a really dangerous darts player.

No, I mean I’m really bad. One shot bounced into the other room.

Also, I lost at Cutthroat three times. But I came in ahead of Lindsay each time. I can’t beat gay Filipinos, but tiny Japanese women … heh heh heh. Feel my pool-playing wrath.

Gay bar number two: The gay bar with the dancing guy.

Now, I don’t know the straight equivalent here. There really isn’t one. It wasn’t quite a strip club because the guy wasn’t stripping. He came onstage in a Speedo, left in a Speedo and danced a lot in the meantime.

Also, there was only one of him. One guy. One stage. No Tiffani at stage number two, all right, let’s give it up for Tiffaniiiiiiiiiii!!! Coming up next on stage number three, Aaaaaaaaaamber!

But I really liked the place for one reason. I always like when the person serving me food and/or beverages calls me “honey.”

I like it at Waffle Houses, I like it when I’m back in Rockford for a family dinner and I even like it when an old gay man wearing suspenders over a T-shirt gives me two Long Islands and a Corona.

What can I say? I’m a sucker for affection.

Gay bar number three: The really nice gay bar with the atrium feel.

Nothing really to say here. It was a really nice bar.

This was the point in the night, though, where I realized I was more tolerant of bars knowing they were gay.

I wouldn’t have touched this place with the dancer from the last bar’s ten-foot pole if it were a straight bar. I would have said “fern bar,” “meathead bar,” “Get me back to the pool-playing bar where everyone just happens to be gay.”

But since they were gay, I was cool with it.

Dirty double-standard? Obnoxious white liberal pretense of tolerance? Desire to see if Colin Firth happened to be there? I don’t know. But I did have fun.

Gay bar number four: The dance club. With gays.

I like to dance.

Stop number five: The Golden Angel.

Despite the watersports-sounding name (Thank you, Dan Savage, for that term), this was just a diner where three friends ate breakfast food and shot the idiomatic shit.

We talked about grad school and we talked about people we know and we talked about why the hollandaise sauce on my Eggs Benedict was yellow.

Hollandaise sauce isn’t supposed to be yellow.

It was a great night. There was no lesson learned about tolerance and respect. My only lesson was to stop using my friends for blog fodder. We just hung out, no one got plowed and it was honestly one of the most clean, honest, fun nights I’ve had in a long time.

So here’s to Boystown. Long may she reign.

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Two stories of Boystown

In the house of Idah Dally;

There were always throats to sing

Down the river bank with spri-

“Hang on a second guys,” Anderson Lawfer broke in. “So one thing I want to try here. Jaz, could you try it with a little more, just more jazz?”

“OK,” Jaz — James Anthony Zoccoli — said as the 1920s barroom scene broke up.

We were in Nowhere.

Nowhere is the troupe’s nickname for the space above Strawdog Theatre. It was a collection of stage furniture and old lights, high stacks of plywood for future sets, bar stools hanging from coat hooks, thick ventilation tubes, tables marked in tape for what stage prop and what stage makeup goes where.

And on this sunny afternoon last week, it also held the cast of “1001 Afternoons in Chicago,” a radio play of Ben Hecht’s stories put on by Strawdog and Access Contemporary Music.

The show is tomorrow night at Architectural Artifacts in Ravenswood. I’ll put a link for tickets below. You should go.

I’ve been tracking this production for months, since a former profilee on this site let me know it was happening.

I sat down in March with Seth Boustead of ACM, the originator of the project. Boustead and fellow composer Amos Gillespie wrote the jazz-inspired rags and tunes that will bring one story into another as it brings us into the world.

In April, I hung out with Anderson Lawfer and Mike Dailey of Strawdog, the guys in charge of the crew turning Hecht’s 92-year-old vignettes into a cohesive, evocative radio play for 21st-century listeners.

And last week, in May, I sat in on a rehearsal, watching the actors and soundmen turn the words into performance for one of the first times.

I’m going to the show tomorrow, too. It’s at Architectural Artifacts in Ravenswood. I’ll put a link for tickets below. You should go.

Up in Nowhere, the cast gathered around the table to read the script. As Lawfer gave tips and advice — and even switched some of the casting for one scene mid-rehearsal — Ben Hecht’s stories came alive.

Jaz did give more jazz to “Don Quixote and His Last Windmill.” A camera and sound crew ran around to capture the rehearsal.

“I think between the music itself and the musicality of all the sounds that’s going on, that will be a lot of really neat stuff to see with the voices,” said Jaz, who will be narrating the Ben Hecht voice of the scenes.

The voices themselves brought the scripts to life. The narrator of the “Thumbnail Lotharios” segment gave a showman, P.T. Barnum air to a piece I had always read with a grim resignation. The speakeasy of “Don Quixote” came to life with a glass-rattling fervor I hadn’t heard in my head but now can’t hear anything else.

The crying baby of “The Mother” and other sundry sound effects were brought to life by two foley fellows, one of whom was named Starr Hardgrove.

“There was a big lengthy discussion with the baby’s cry so we’ll see if that ends up in the final show,” Hardgrove said. “What makes a baby’s cry? I think human voices are the hardest thing to master. Without having just an actual baby there you have to find a sound effect that would actually work. There’s a lot of different avenues you can go to but any time we can do it live, it’s always a good thing.”

Although I didn’t get enough time to meet with the musicians, I plan to change that tomorrow night at the show (Architectural Artifacts … link for tickets … you should go).

It was beautiful. It was weird. It was odd hearing stories I knew told in radio and, I knew was coming, song.

We were part of a tribe hunting Ben Hecht, me with my notepad and they telling their stories from Nowhere.

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Buy tickets (did I mention this was coming?)

Read the first of this series

Read the second

A giggling pixie of a young woman opened the door and wordlessly flitted upstairs for me to follow. Pausing only to peek back and giggle, she gamboled up the stairs, finally gesturing me to walk through a doorway.

I walked into a plain, white room with a hundred purple roses hanging upside down from the ceiling. Ten slim white men stood in a cluster in the center. Women in the auditorium seats were giving them instructions.

Everyone turned to stare at me. I turned to stare at my silent pixie, who looked back with a horrified expression.

“I think you’re in the wrong place,” she said.

Here’s where Ben Hecht’s legacy lives too.

After the confusion was cleared and it was revealed I was not an actor late for rehearsal for Strawdog Theatre’s show “Big Love” (tickets on sale now!), I found myself in the theater’s empty cabaret area at a table with Strawdog’s Anderson Lawfer and Mike Dailey.

“Three white guys who look exactly the same,” Dailey joked as we sat down.

Lawfer and Dailey are creating a radio play version of “1001 Afternoons in Chicago,” the 1920s newspaper column that inspired this site.

The pair were introduced to the idea when Seth Boustead of Access Contemporary Music sent a Facebook message to see if they would be interested in scripting plays to go along with music he and fellow composer Amos Gillespie planned to write about Hecht’s short vignettes of 1920s Chicago life.

(I sat down with Boustead in March and will link to that below. “Hunting Ben Hecht, Part 3″ will be sitting in on a rehearsal; part 4 will cover the play itself.)

Lawfer and Dailey are two of the five Strawdog writers turning Hecht pieces into plays. Framed through “Grass Figures,” Hecht’s meditation on people laying on the grass in Grant Park, the show will weave together stories like “Don Quixote and His Last Windmill” and “Dapper Pete and the Sucker Play.”

“Ben Hecht” will stay in Grant Park watching the people laying on the grass. “The Reporter,” which was how Hecht referred to himself in the column, will walk into the worlds of each story.

“Early on, Andy and kind of agreed we want to pick pieces and cut them out in such a way that the focus is as much as possible on the voices of the the people he is talking to,” Dailey said. “So like ‘Dapper Pete’ is one where it’s almost entirely the character talking. There are quite a few of those. ‘The Man From Yesterday’ was another one — we’re not doing that one — but that was another option. And we also try to get a little variety. ‘The Lotharios’? What is it?

“‘Thumbnail Lotharios,’” Lawfer softly added, fiddling with the electronic cigarette he puffed through our discussion.

“‘Thumbnail Lotharios.’ That’s another one,” Dailey said.

Theatrical screams erupted from the room with the hanging purple roses.

The five writers, two composers, full cast and small orchestra will take Hecht’s suicidal businessmen, conned con artists and seductive manicurists and put them into live-action modern radio plays, a space where Dailey and Lawfer shine.

Thanks to Picklebot.

“We have a Strawdog initiative called The Hit Factory — modestly named ‘The Hit Factory’ — where everyone in the Strawdog ensemble is encouraged to write radio plays,” Lawfer said. “Mike and I, for example have written I think six now together called ‘Picklebot and Lawfer.’ Picklebot is a pickle-joke-telling robot and Lawfer, who’s me, we tour around fighting crimes.”

“And usually save the world,” Dailey said.

“Like three times an episode,” Lawfer said.

The troupe’s “wirelesses,” as they initially called the radio plays, started around 2002. Lawfer and Dailey always stayed with comedy (although Dailey said Picklebot hasn’t told a pickle joke in about a decade).

Other troupe members went darker with their wirelesses, telling the adventures of Doctor Night or writing about George Reeves, the real-life actor who played Superman in the 1950s TV show and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Although the wirelesses died when The Hit Factory started in 2007, Strawdog does about three radio or radio-style pieces a year, Lawfer said. The most recent was “Kill Shakespeare,” where the audience watched images of the comic book that inspired the play. That was the first collaboration with Boustead and the AMC.

They were excited, these two men at a cabaret table on a dark night in north Boystown. They were excited as one sipped Diet Coke and the other puffed an electronic cigarette. They were excited about the possibilities of merging radio and orchestra, about putting their own spin on this cultural artifact.

They were excited about Ben Hecht.

“I went through some addiction issues, some things in my life a few years ago,” Lawfer said, leaning in and pocketing the cigarillo-shaped electronic cigarette. “Once I started cleaning myself up, for some reason this city became part of my well-being. Feeling connected to Chicago and to the community has been a huge part of my recovery, personally.

“There’s something about the humanity in this book compared to any of the others about Chicago where he describes the architecture and the poor people and the rich people and he loves everyone equally, for some reason has been a huge inspiration,” Lawfer said.

“1001 Afternoons in Chicago” debuts May 21.

Read Part 1 of this story, an interview with one of the composers

Buy tickets to the radio play

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