I’m staring at a severed head.

It’s an old head, so that makes it better, maybe? It’s from Egypt’s Ptolemaic-Roman period of 332 BCE to 395 CE, the plaque on the glass case tells me. They think ancient grave robbers threw it away after tearing apart the body to get at jewelry, amulets, medallions and other valuables to pawn. The head is completely wrapped but for a section under the nose where the muslin fell off centuries ago. I see a dried, blackened philtrum leather-stretched back over small, flat teeth.

And this seems natural. It seems natural that giggling kids are being hushed among bodies, that this leather-stretched upper lip that once formed words and smiled is now laid on a table for my edification, education, titillation in a way I would find disgusting if the corpse were younger.

“A body that is 200 years old, what makes that any less palatable than a mummy that’s 2,000 years old? Boy,” Egyptologist Emily Teeter of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago said, taking a moment to think. “Boy, I really don’t know.”

The Field Museum of Natural History is tourist attraction, research institution and final resting place for more than 4,000 human beings, ranging from individual toe bones from Native American mass graves, to ceremonial trumpets carved from Tibetan femurs, to the current “Mummies” exhibit running through April 2019. And it’s just one of the Chicago museums and art galleries — from the Museum of Science and Industry’s body slices and plasticized human bits to the International Museum of Surgical Science’s trephined Peruvian skulls — where corpses are the exhibit.

But there are other collections that aren’t on display, relics of days when spectacle trumped education and it was hard to tell sideshow from research institution. Mummies torn to shreds in early 20th century “unwrapping parties.” Native American skulls plucked from graves as souvenir. Or medical oddities from black Chicagoans unfortunate enough to die poor with unusual bodies in the 1800s.

These are the stories of the bodies that don’t go on the museum floor, of the program frozen by the Trump administration that guides Native bodies’ return and of how Chicago institutions handle those people who, through no fault of their own, have a museum for a grave.

Skulls and the Star-Spangled

The guiding American law for bodies and museums — the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act or NAGPRA — relates only to bodies from the indigenous from U.S. soil, but the moral issues don’t stop where the law does, said Field Museum Repatriation Director Helen Robbins.

“Museums and other state institutions have a lot of other human remains too, and they have the human remains of the mentally ill that became medical specimens — or prisoners or criminals. People who don’t have power in the world, that’s what happens. It is a Native American, indigenous issue because of the history of what happened in this country and also in other colonized places, but there are human remains of African-Americans in museums, in universities, in surgical colleges,” Robbins said. “It’s a much broader reality than just Native Americans.”

The Field has repatriated more than 200 people’s remains domestically through NAGPRA and 200 internationally to indigenous groups including the Maori in Tasmania, the Inuit in Labrador and the Haida in British Columbia.

The mummies are staying put, Robbins said, as the Egyptian government is not considered the descendant of the pharaohs. Under Field policy, remains must be given only to descendant communities for proper interment — whatever that means in that culture.

“They could put them in caves, they could put them traditionally in trees or scaffold burials like they did in parts of the Plains. Burial, cremation, out to sea — whatever ‘repose’ would mean to that cultural group,” Robbins said. “But not sitting in a museum.”

Any institution that receives federal funds, even passthrough funds, has an obligation to report potentially Native American bodies to NAGPRA. Pending or recent NAGPRA cases includes museums of course, but also art galleries, universities, state historical societies, the U.S. departments of Defense, Energy and Agriculture and even the office of the San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner after a man brought in a box of hundred-year-old Native American skulls and bones he found while cleaning out the house of a recently deceased relative.

NAGPRA Program Manager Melanie O’Brien said when NAGPRA passed in 1990, remains of more than 200,000 Native American people were identified in American museums. Now that number is down to 180,000.

“It’s a human rights law,” O’Brien said by phone from her DC office. “It’s about equating the rights of Native American dead to the rights that everybody else enjoys in this country. There’s a common-law understanding of what happens to your relatives that die, and that common law was not extended to Native Americans.”

All American grave repatriations stopped in May 2017, when President Donald Trump’s new Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke temporarily suspended all Department of Interior advisory committees, including the NAGPRA Review Committee. While existing committees received individual reviews to see if the administration considers them wastes of money, Zinke added new committees such the Hunting and Shooting Sports Conservation Council, the “Made in America” Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee and the Royalty Policy Committee, which consists of mostly oil, gas and mining industry executives.

Tribes and museums that had already come to terms on transferring ancestral remains had to simply pause, waiting for Zinke to review NAGPRA, O’Brien said. The committee passed muster and will meet for the first time since then on Oct. 17-19.

Meteorites, Nazis and Slippery Slopes

NAGPRA scared researchers at first, Robbins said. Many were concerned it would open a floodgate of returning valuable scientifics specimens, and not just bodies. NAGPRA also covers the return of sacred objects — like pipes, headdresses and kochina masks — and “objects of cultural patrimony.” Those are objects so central to a tribe’s identity, it’s considered owned by all members; O’Brien uses the original Star-Spangled Banner that inspired the national anthem as her example.

Many scientists feared the slope would slip and NAGPRA could mean turning over insects, fossils, botanicals — and the valuable intellectual property from any medicines derived from such plants.

It wasn’t an unreasonable concern. The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon tried to use NAGPRA to reclaim the Willamette Meteorite — which the Clackamas people called Tomanowos — from New York’s American Museum of Natural History in 1999, as Tomanowos was the traditional site of religious ceremonies. (They came to a deal — the museum kept the meteorite, but tribal members can schedule private ceremonial visits.)

As Field showstopper SUE the T-rex was found on Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation land held in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, those initial concerns of a specimen floodgate hit close. They also largely haven’t come true.

“I’m not worried that we’re going to have a huge request for botanical specimens or insects or certain kinds of things,” Robbins said. “But the world is changing and shifting and people are asserting ownership over items that 100 years ago nobody would have considered to be claimable or anybody’s cultural property or intellectual property.”

Robbins’ job puts her between researchers and indigenous people, sometimes uncomfortably. While the Field offers bodies back to the tribe — there are 300 people’s partial remains waiting to be picked up and another 1,000 offered to NAGPRA with no tribe claiming them — getting back a sacred object or item of cultural patrimony “isn’t a slam dunk,” Robbins said.

“You have to have a certain tolerance for having people yell at you or be upset, whether its from other institutions or from descendant communities,” Robbins said.

No matter how respectable and above board the museum was in its acquisition of a sacred piece, if they got it from a person who got it from a person who got it from a person who acquired it illegally, it’s not the museum’s.

“The closest that you can come to this kind of process or legal process would be the work that’s done around looted Nazi art,” O’Brien said. “Museums have priceless collections of artwork that, through provenance research, can actually be shown was looted in World War II by the Nazis, was bought by the museum and the museum actually doesn’t have good title to that.”

And some of the pieces were most certainly not acquired with consent, whether sacred relics or human bodies.

“Some of the early collectors, they just walked around picking up human remains,” she said about the museum’s collection of Native American dead. “Late 1800s, early 1900s. ‘Aw, I’m living in Arizona, just walk around picking up human remains.’ They weren’t scientists. They just thought it was cool or interesting.”

Pickled Punks

Repatriating bodies is a global issue. British academics are working to find a suitable resting place in India for the skull of 1850s rebel Havildar “Alum Bheg,” executed by the British in 1857 and found in the back room of The Lord Clyde pub in Kent in 1963. Irish activists including the mayor of Derry have petitioned the Royal College of Surgeons in London to release the body of Charles Byrne, the 7 foot, 7 inch “Irish Giant,” who died in 1783. Anatomist John Hunter acquired the body somehow — the most popular account is that he paid off the undertaker and had his agent fill the coffin with paving stones to dupe Byrne’s friends.

He chopped up Byrne’s body, boiled his flesh off and, while The Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum is closed until 2021 for renovation, has displayed the skeleton ever since. Because Byrne was tall.

Some long-sought repatriations have come to pass.

The Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia returned the skull of World War I soldier Thomas Hurdis to the Australian government last year. Donated by an army doctor, Hurdis spent 98 years as part of the museum’s “dry specimen” collection of skulls and bones. Its “wet specimen” collection is body parts and fetuses — many of conjoined twins, including the shared liver of Chang and Eng Bunker the original “Siamese twins” — preserved in formaldehyde or other fluid.

“Pickled punks,” as preserved fetuses in jars were called, were a staple of 1800s sideshows.

Many medical specimens in museums, colleges and other private or public collections have questionable pasts, Robbins said, referring to the collection of mostly African-American medical oddities Rush Hospital gave the Field in 1900.

“Poorhouses, prisons, mental institutions, almshouses. If you don’t have money and you die, today even, what do you do?” she said.

But the issue, like the world, is complicated.

“It’s really important to understand too that human remains in institutional collections have huge scientific importance. Not only for abstract knowledge like anthropology and archaeology and the peopling of the world and all these kinds of more abstract intellectual things. How do you think people developed artificial knees or hips?” she said. “They did it from using, looking at and working with skeletal collections. But a lot of these skeletal collections are from problematic backgrounds.”

Representatives of the International Museum of Surgical Science on Lake Shore Drive declined to be interviewed for this story.

The Field is working on improving the standard of care for the thousands of human remains, even individual bone fragments, not on display. That includes separating co-mingled bodies from mass graves and, when applicable, storing them in a manner fitting that culture’s funeral customs.

They’re starting with the North American remains, then hope to apply that standard to all the people who rest in peace in the museum’s back rooms.

“It’s our responsibility to care for these individuals no matter how they got to the Field Museum,” Robbins said. “It doesn’t matter whether it was legal, scientific excavation or somebody wandering around in Montana picking up a skull.”

Wrapping Up

One of the mummies in the collection of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute is “just a bare body that was in a case,” Teeter said. It was a woman who was acquired, like much of the museum’s collection, by Dr. Henry Breasted, many when he and his wife went mummy-shopping during their 1894 honeymoon. She was stripped of all wrappings sometime between 1910 and 1930.

“We have no idea why,” Teeter said.

Teeter thinks the woman might have been used in an “unwrapping party,” a late 1800s, early 1900s entertainment that is exactly what it sounds like.

“This poor mummy, it’s being basically pulled apart for people to just look at it,” Teeter said. “You’d end up with this poor, naked body on a table and then party’s over.”

It wasn’t the most grotesque fate given to the pharaohs’ heirs.

“Certainly in the 1900s and the 1800s, mummies were dealt with in a much more cavalier way. You hear about them literally being ground up for medicine,” she said. “Every small museum needed to have a mummy, so people were going on the Grand Tour and just buying mummies helter skelter without any concern for their context.”

The unwrapped woman is in Oriental Institute storage, as are other unwrapped mummies and mummy parts. Three of the four regularly displayed mummies — 2,800-year-old singer-priestess Meresamun, 2,400-year-old priest Petosiris and 2,150-year-old “Young Boy” — are in full wrappings and, when available, coffin.

Teeter doesn’t expect the unwrapped woman will ever be displayed. A strip of fabric determined which mummies are showpieces, which storage.

“We exhibit mummies to show something about the culture, and showing just a body is not something about the culture,” Teeter said.

But there have been some unwrapped at the Institute.

One of the people — Teeter’s careful never to call them “specimens” or “things” — on regular display is completely without wrapping as part of a predynastic pit burial, when they weren’t wrapped. Similarly, an unwrapped head was temporarily on display as part of the recent “Book of the Dead” exhibit, which ended in March.

The purpose was educational both times, Teeter said. The unwrapped predynastic pit burial “was an important part of the story of mummification.” The decision to temporarily display the unwrapped head came after a more difficult conversation.

“We also want [museumgoers] to understand the full meaning of what they’re looking at, that it’s a beautiful box but the reason the box is there is that there is a mummy inside it,” Teeter said. “This is a person who chose to be, or his family chose to have him, prepared in this very particular way.”

It is “quite subjective,” Teeter said. She had to fight to get the child’s mummy displayed, but she fought against a guest curator who a few years ago wanted to display one of the collection’s wrapped heads.

“I said no. No. No, no, no, no. To show parts of a body, to me that was disrespectful and just plain ghoulish. There’s nothing to be really learned from that display other than [being] kind of creepy,” she said. “It’s a head torn off a body. It’s somebody’s head in a box. It’s like, ick.”

As sensitivities have changed over the years, different museums have reacted differently. Body Worlds, a traveling exhibit that visited the Museum of Science and Industry in 2005, 2007 and 2011 — and whose creators provided the plastinated specimens for the MSI’s ongoing “You! The Experience” exhibit that kept the Jewish boy from seeing Harry Potter in the story from Oct. 3 — trusses corpses up like art pieces.

On the other extreme, the Manchester Museum in England covered all its mummies in cotton shrouds in 2008 out of respect. That lasted two years, when they caved to public demand and re-uncovered the mummies. Other museums display trigger warnings that bodies are present, or put the humans in the collection in side rooms where no one could stumble upon them unaware.

Beyond the Native remains guarded by NAGPRA, there’s little guidance for how human remains can be displayed, said Teeter, Robbins, O’Brien and a few other museum folks who didn’t make it into this article, for reasons you’ll discover Thursday.

Instead, the reasons a pharaoh is science and a pickled punk sideshow is cultural, they said, part of a general shift in terms of what people expect of our museums.

“There should be a purpose,” Robbins said. “It shouldn’t just be ‘Hey, here’s the Irish Giant! Look! Isn’t that weird?’”

Happy Birthday. I hope you have a good one. It’s nice you won’t have to work.

I hope you enjoy the book and remember your sister while your reading it. I love you. Enjoy your birthday.

Love your sis,

Cheryl

I put the spray-painted copper copy of “Clear and Present Danger” back on the shelf in the fake child’s room. It slid easily between similarly coppered copies of “A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960” and a Tom Clancy’s “Without Remorse” that, based on a stamp on the title page, once belonged to a dentist from Santa Rosa, California.

I was in a furniture store so fancy it had valet parking. It’s a Restoration Hardware too posh even for that posh chain. Taking up five floors of displays, fake rooms and a real wine bar in the former Three Art Club of Chicago building in the Gold Coast, the store goes by RH.

In a way, this story is about fake rooms. The store is set up like the most poorly laid-out home in American history. One floor is room after room of bedrooms for children and teenagers. Another floor is just modern interiors. The rooftop terrace is lined with patios encircling and enshrining the historic arts club.

So they’re fake rooms, laid out and designed for fake people. But that’s not the story.

The story is the books.

The display books in the fake room for fake twins who share a fake bunk bed were all spray-painted copper, a fitting aesthetic for a world where all the books come in the same color. Other rooms had old law books painted black, Jim Belushi autobiographies painted an off-white the color of a palomino’s tail.

Dick Francis mysteries shared space and color with antiquated textbooks. Celebrity tell-alls were, as far as the fake people who lived in these nonsensical non-rooms cared, interchangeable with financial reports and gimmicky humor wares.

One display by a staircase had six identical copies of a Henry James biography, all with new white covers pasted in cloth over the real text.

No one will ever read these books. No one will ever enjoy, hate or tire of these pages. The sister’s note, vanished to the city. The dentist’s stamp, gone from the world.

The passersby who stroll the store with an eye for design and a flute of champagne will never know if these books are good or bad, if they were given as loving presents or picked up at airports to kill the hours.

It was heartbreaking in its realism, a parody of a satire of a reminder that this is how books are used. Even if these particular texts that someone took the time to fill with verbs ended up sold to Books By The Foot or some other company that stocks the restaurants, showrooms and other fake libraries meant to connote intellect, seeing books consigned to decoration made me unaccountably sad.

An unread book is an unnerving thing, and a jarring reminder for someone who wants to write.

Even success doesn’t mean your words will ever be known.

It’s not the most visible part, the tall condo buildings from that misguided period of American architecture known as the 1970s, when the point of a building was to crane above the others, out out out into a view you could brag about to your ground-dwelling coworkers.

Before the deluxe apartment in the sky was the ultimate in movin’ on up, luxury was low, squat and gorgeous.

Stone mansions still named for the 19th century robber barons who lived there. Skinny Greystone two-flats the size of an old-time Chicago lot but with ornate heraldry and curlicues carved into the Indiana limestone.

Queen Anne, Romanesque, Tudor, Threedor. Peeks inside the large windows show libraries, crystal, security systems — one dead body and a Professor Plum away from a child’s board game.

The neighborhood is grim and glorious.

And here’s where the rat scampered by.

I say scampered because it was a bit too slow for a scurry or skitter. It was fast by human standards, a brisk ratty trot. But for a creature with hypercharged rodent metabolism, it was practically an amble.

This rat was, in rat terms, wandering across the street.

The fact the street was the high-wealth Astor Street of stone mansions slammed with National Register of Historic Places plaques made no difference.

This was the neighborhood where the rat nests.

While it is nice to realize the self-vaunted millionaires live down in the muck and mire with the rest of us, the point of this story isn’t “Ha ha, the richies have rats.”

Well, I mean it isn’t just “Ha ha, the richies have rats.”

No one can hide themselves from life. People try, oh glory be they try. They put up mansions of thick limestone or crawl to the sky, up up over the rest of us common sinners.

But no casemate is thick enough, no movin’ on up tower high enough to keep out life.

And that’s what I like.

Although I make no case for romanticizing vermin, there’s a certain joy in life creeping in places it wasn’t wanted. The blades of grass busting through a pavement crack, the herons making nests in a public park.

I know a city rat is one of the more disgusting examples of nature’s glory, but you take what you can get. There aren’t many prancing fawns in the 606.

When life does burst through, grass or bird or even city rat, it means there’s hope for all of us who feel unwanted sometimes. It hints and teases that we’ll be able to crack through whatever barrier we’re facing, make a home where we weren’t intended to be.

And “all of us who feel unwanted sometimes” means all of us.

I hope the little rat ambling through its neighborhood makes its way down some ratty corridor, some tunnel combination of alley and gutter and burrow and basement. I hope it peeks and squeaks into some little den or warren.

Some disgusting, urine-smelling, horrible den or warren — again, I do realize city rats are nasty.

But I hope the scampering rat finds its way into a place that, to it, is as much a Gold Coast home as the high-rises and robber baron Greystones.

Read about a stretch of the Gold Coast infested with a bagpiper

A store owner in Little India finds her wares unwanted

I’m sorry about the “threedor” pun. This story starts with a much better one.

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It’s been poking out of a cardboard box on the back stairway for months, a box full of other games I didn’t get to. A baseball bat and glove. Balls soft and base. A bubble wand. Various juggling apparati and old pump-up water rockets that phwish into the sky.

I didn’t get to any of them this summer, but only the Frisbee annoys.

It’s a small white one, a dinged and scratched little beast offered as a free promotional for a newspaper where I used to work.

“Kane County Chronicle • 7 Days a Week • Starting August 3”

I haven’t played with it in years. Nor the baseball bat. Nor the glove. I got to the bubble wand and pump-up water rocket in 2014.

It’s getting too cold to Fris.

Summer is gone, I have to concede that. I wandered the Gold Coast tonight after getting let out of work early for weather purposes (damn outdoor job).

Sweaters. Jackets. Hats. Hustling to destinations rather than letting the night air be their goal. People tugging on the chains of their over-bred fluff monsters to get Snookums to pee a little faster so they can get back in to TV and sedentary lives.

I love fall, I do. But the transition to early-dark nights that are just going to get earlier and darker when the world gets hiked back an hour is always a jarring one. It reminds me of all the things I didn’t do rather than did, all the missed days of beach and Frisbee.

I played a lot this summer, I did. Bikes and picnics, reading in parks and hours-long walks where the only purpose was feeling the heat trickling down the back of my neck before I bought ice cream from a man pushing a little cart. I have nothing to gripe about other than that damn tilted axis and the transition to a hunker-down winter.

No adult can play as much as I want to, seven days a week like my Frisbee taunts. I don’t know if I should even try. I live a feckless enough life as is without water rockets and softball.

We can’t play every day. We can’t always schedule moments of childish joy amid the commutes, bills and laundry detergent that defines our oh-so-serious adult lives.

But I would be a liar if I said I didn’t want to try.

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Read a tale of winter

And the bagpiper on the condo roof.

Peace to the newsman, chasing stories for cartoons.

Peace to the lady who jammed in Tunisia.

And peace to the one who makes really sexy ladies’ underthings.

The year is ending. Another revolution around the sun. Another slow arc of the top that never seems to unwind. Another winter night of wine and friends and winter morning of headaches and shame about how tubby Christmas made you.

It’s a time to say goodbye to the people and places of the past three-six-five. For me that means a fare thee well to those I wrote about here in  these …

These, what?

These pages? Don’t make me laugh. A short at a server somewhere in the world and these lines never happened. No library for one to stumble across a dusty old book they come to love. No song that gets caught in their ear or crumbling monument they sit upon on a picnic day.

My Chicago, vanished. My legacy the momentary darkening of some pixels on your screen and the lightening of others.

So I say goodbye to the people I met, the places I wandered, the things I saw. The drum circle at 63rd. The dancers on a South Shore roof. A woman handing out dreams on the #66 bus.

I say peace and farewell to the makers of one final canoe, to the hobbled pigeons, trainee barbers and shot girls dancing in inappropriate places.

Peace to the scientists in rooms of insects. Peace to the cackling homeless man on the bridge, the screaming one on the train and to the peaceful, loving one I don’t see in my neighborhood anymore, which is starting to make me worried.

Peace to family, friends and unicycle salesmen.

I wish peace to the seasons, to the homeless man pushed through an ugly spring rain.

To the smoke and sweat of a summer-clogged night.

To the little girl laughing as the bubbles float to the street in an endless warm fall.

And peace to the communists holding court in the snow.

Peace to you, 2013. To the men and women and inanimate objects I fell in love with just enough to write about on a site one power surge from oblivion.

Peace and goodbye.

And to you, 2014, and to all the people, places, objects and hilarious shitheads I will meet in the next three-six-five, I say hello.

Peace and hello.

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“Nope,” the doorman said, narrowing his eyes and looking away from me. “Haven’t had any complaints about a bagpipe.”

The condo doorman was about 45 and awkward, so awkward. His elbows jutted out like a marionette as he had wandered from the back room. His sports jacked emblazoned with the name of the condo building hung limply over weedy shoulders. He had a thin, happy smile that looked more like pulling his lips back to bare long, sickly-toned teeth.

But the smile was genuine, as was the awkwardness. I liked him a lot.

“Oh, I’m not complaining,” I said. “I was just walking by and I heard a bagpipe. I was trying to figure out where it was coming from.”

That’s true, that part. I had been walking down a ritzy side street off the Gold Coast shopping district when I heard soft music coming from above. It was a crisp November evening and the strains of a poorly played bagpipe cut through the chill and dark.

The sounds of “Amazing Grace,” “Scotland the Brave” and, in one weird interval, “The Hokey Pokey” (because that is, after all, what it’s all about) trickled down on the shoppers and dog walkers striding through the cold, clear darkness.

Echolocation and happening across a man in a valet jacket who yelled “He’s on the roof, man!” took me to a condo highrise where I could just make out a dark figure swaying on the top balcony.

“Sorry, I don’t know anything about a bagpipe,” the sports-jacket uniformed doorman of the building said, looking outside, up, down and otherwise away from me.

“Huh. It sounded like it was coming from here,” I said, suddenly very conscious that I might be outing a piper for breaking his condo tenants code.

“Weeeeeeeeeeeeell,” the man said. “I was outside hailing a cab and I thought I heard something. I looked around and thought, ‘Where’s that coming from?’”

“Yeah,” I said. “And it sounded like it was coming from here.”

“Was it good?” the man with his blocky haircut, Crispin Glover build and limp-hanging sportscoat suddenly asked.

I considered.

“I liked that he was playing. It was like, ‘Hey, free music.’ But he wasn’t very good. He kept hitting sour notes.”

“I don’t think it’s very good,” the doorman said, trailing off and looking down.

“That he’s playing, or …”

“What’s your first name?” he asked.

“Paul,” I said.

He gave me his first name, inhaled slightly, then reached out his hand. He looked me square in the eye as we shook.

“He lives on the 24th floor,” the doorman said.

“Ha!” I said.

The bagpiper, I would learn, wasn’t very good but would play a lot. He doesn’t have loud parties or scream and shout. He just spends some nights on the balcony playing the bagpipe to the Chicago air.

The doorman and his ridiculously Irish first and last name grew up loving the bagpipes but “never had the guts to try it.” But the love of the pipes means he covers for the man, playing dumb when he has to.

The neighboring businesses love it, the condo tenants hate it, but the piper manages to keep it just below the statutory decibel count for a noise complaint.

“A cop once came in and asked ‘How many units you got?’ I said 48 and he said, ‘We got a complaint about a goddamn piper, a bagpiper.’ And I played like I didn’t know anything, like I did with you.

“I asked if he was going to do anything. He said, ‘Do you think I’m going to go through 48 units?’ and he turned around and walked out. That was before we had the cameras though,” the doorman said, gesturing to a black, glassy spot on the otherwise eggshell wall.

As he spoke, the awkward, timid man got more animated, miming playing the pipes one moment and jumping back and forth to play both himself and the cop the next.

“I mean, I like it,” he concluded. “I love the bagpipe.”

“I love the bagpipe too,” I said.

He smiled a huge one.

“Go Irish!” he called, cocking his arm back for what would turn out to be an angular, violent high five.

“Go Irish!” I replied as our hands slapped.

“And go Bears!” he added, as this is Chicago.

I smiled warmly for what would turn into a conversation about the odds against Detroit.

“Go Bears,” I said softly as, I’m sure, the bagpipe strains of the Hokey Pokey played outside.

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According to the ad on the hotel wall, at least.

Real Chicago is a $15 order of Salt Cod Croquettes.

According to the Small Bites menu at the Coq d’Or restaurant downstairs.

Real Chicago apparently has luxury jewelry stores, bars over the windows of the ground level kitchen storage spaces on the building’s north side and views into the magnificently chandeliered ballroom above. Real Chicago has $42 parking and thank you notes from Princess Di and Woody Allen.

“Thank you for all the wonderful suits,” Woody Allen wrote.

Pat Morita wrote “Arigato” after his stay in Real Chicago.

“Real Chicago” is the slogan of The Drake Hotel, a Gold Coast (really Near North Side, shhhh!) wonderland of ritz and opulence that has served tourists and the glamorous since 1920.

There are nicer hotels. And there are older ones. There are fancier ones and richer ones. There are hotels along the waltzing downtown strips of women in furs and men begging for pocket change that are more renowned and schmancy. But none other than The Drake have the balls to call themselves “Real Chicago.”

“Real Chicago” is the slogan, not the motto. The motto, as embroidered into the hotel’s carpeting beneath a crest of an axe-wielding dragon, is “Aquila non capit muscas.”

“An eagle does not catch flies.”

It’s the Drake family coat of arms, so the place comes by it honestly, but it means there’s work that’s beneath a certain type of person.

They’re the eagles. We catch the flies.

This place purports to be Real Chicago? This place dares?

Well, it is.

This fortress of wealth with the windows barred below the ballroom is Real Chicago. The really real, 100-percent City That Works.

It’s the totem of a town of haves and have-nots. It’s a shining symbol of wealth excused by history. That’s the way it was, so it’s still OK. It’s not a gilded turd of profligacy — it’s a holdout from an earlier era.

It was “high-society’s first choice in opulence” as the swells of the ’30s out-drank and out-partied the Depression-era bums outside, according to the hotel’s website.

“The Drake Hotel guests see today provides the grandeur of the past and accommodations fitting for today’s high society,” the site says.

History excuses these things, makes them cute and even natural. Of course there are bars on the windows of the kitchen. Of course Woody Allen gets suits. Of course fly-catching is not the work of eagles. That’s the way it was! History! Class! Culture! Gatsby or some shit!

There’s an Anglican hymn with which I would like to close this rich boy’s meditation on wealth. It’s about a God who put everything just how He wants it, from the color on a bird’s wing to poverty.

God made some rich and some poor because that’s how the malevolent thug likes it.

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly,

And ordered their estate.

God would stay at The Drake. God would stay in Real Chicago.

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Sometimes I remember that night as a trip to North Avenue Beach with my roommates to see a band at that spider-covered bar that looks like a boat. Other times I remember it as a few years earlier, when an old lover and I would sometimes walk along the water before hitting a bar and my place to get savage with liver and genital. The only consistent part of the memory is the heat of the night and the fat woman’s sway.

She was fat – no point heading to the thesaurus for a word that won’t hurt her feelings. She was fat and she smelled bad. Her body took up two seats of the No. 72 night bus; her odor took up the whole back half.

The roommates or the lover and I made chit about everything but smell before the bus pulled up to the little roundabout, letting us pour onto the beach. Stars above. Bag lady reek below.

She heffalumped out of the bus, pulling sack after sack behind her. We headed north for some reason, either for our pre-fuck constitutional or to kill time while waiting for the band to set up at the bar shaped like a boat.

North Avenue Beach at night is one of my favorite places. Cool, at least by comparison to that hot summer day in the year I can’t remember, and as lovely as a stage set. You want to run barefoot along the sand that might have needles and dive in the lake that’s probably not so hot for swimming. I’ve done both.

Eventually, the lover or roommates or maybe it was just me and I was meeting the roommates at the bar, we headed back south. We saw the bag lady off the bar’s starboard. She was peeling off her clothing under the little standing fountain where the daylight beach lets kids knock the sand off their feet. She had come to the beach to shower.

Layer after layer came off until we realized she was merely enormous instead of grotesque. As coat made way for jacket made way for shirts one, two, three, she eventually stood there under the night sky, mahogany belly piling out beneath fat breasts tamped back by a sari or sarong or just a floral bikini top that was all the bra she owned. She took the bus at night to the beach because that was the only place she could clean herself. She knew how she smelled.

The roommates or lover and I didn’t have any big revelation or even talk about the woman that much. We just kept going until we got to or were each others’ entertainment for the night. But I’m thinking about her now, that woman standing under a stream of water and the starry sky. She wanted to peel off the layers of filth and grime, wash them off under the cool night sky and finally, finally feel clean.

Sometimes I know how she feels.

Written in April 2012

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