Hoyne was the home of my first real apartment in Chicago, a converted storefront we called the Bodega. The floors were so warped, my significant other at the time would laugh herself to tears rolling a baseball down it and watching it return to her. The wiring was so dangerous the old Lithuanian electrician the management company finally sent after three weeks of prodding started yelling “Is stupid! Is stupid!” when he got behind the outlet to see how it had been set up.

I was 23 and it was heaven. I found out a few months later that my great-grandparents were living a few blocks south when my grandmother was born. On Hoyne.

So it seemed especially fitting when I discovered that my street of stupid joy was named after a man involved in a story that now brings me stupid joy. I now bring you the story of Thomas Hoyne, who for 28 days claimed to be the mayor of Chicago.

…

That last sentence didn’t give Hoyne enough credit, but it sure got some folks to click past the jump. Hoyne was a powerful man from a powerful family.

Moving to Chicago at the age of 20 in 1837, Hoyne made his way as a schoolteacher and his fortune as a lawyer. He was Chicago’s first city clerk, organized the public library and served as the first president of its board of directors, was a justice of the peace, a U.S. attorney, a U.S. marshal and so on. He was the major donor who created Northwestern’s law school and the University of Chicago’s astronomy chair. His brother Philip (called “Uncle Phil”) was the region’s U.S. commissioner, a powerful position at the time.

Another accomplishment of Hoyne’s was nabbing more than 33,000 votes in his race for mayor in 1876. Every other candidate combined got 819 votes.

OK, it wasn’t at an election, but at a mass rally of his supporters.

OK, neither major party ran a candidate.

OK, it might not have been a legal election.

The year before, Chicago had signed onto the Illinois Cities and Villages Act, which moved mayoral elections from November to April and extended mayoral terms from one year to two. Mayor Harvey Colvin claimed this gave him another year in office. Others interpreted the act as starting two-year terms with the next guy.

Colvin’s duties required he call for an election in April. But he didn’t, instead holding onto the power he claimed the new rule gave him. Hoyne’s “election” of April 16, 1876, can be seen as more of a protest than some loony tunes 1800s shenanigans. The mayor wouldn’t allow a legal election, so Hoyne and his supporters held an illegal one.

Hoyne waited for Colvin outside old City Hall at the Rookery (same site as today’s Rookery, different structure) to demand he step down. He wouldn’t, and city council supported him by not certifying the election results.

But the city council election had gone ahead as planned, and the incoming council supported Hoyne, at its first meeting canvassing the vote (the technical term for what they had to do to make the election official) and declaring Hoyne mayor. Most of the city departments supported Hoyne as well, either agreeing with the Hoyne cause or because Hoyne appointed new department heads.

The comptroller and police supported Colvin. One side had the political support, the other had the money and guns. A police barricade around City Hall both kept riots at bay and entrenched Colvin in the office.

On June 5, the Cook County courts declared Hoyne’s election illegal, but ordering the city to hold a special election. The council called for the election to be held July 12.

Here’s where it gets special. Here’s where it gets lovely.

“Mr. Hoyne was besought to again become a candidate,” a later history of Chicago would write, “but he refused, saying he considered that he had already performed his duty to the public.”

Hoyne wasn’t a power grabber, or a wackadoodle claiming office he had no right to. He didn’t want the office. He didn’t want Colvin to claim it unjustly.

Monroe Heath was elected the city’s 28th mayor, replacing Colvin, the 27th. Thomas Hoyne, the namesake of my street of joy, either doesn’t make official lists or is put down with a footnote as “mayor-elect.”

But there is a bit to be said for Hoyne, a man who served the people not by taking power, but by keeping power from those who claimed it wrongly.

In August 1876, the city attorney retroactively declared Hoyne had in fact been mayor for those 28 days — not de jure but de facto.  It wasn’t in recognition of his claim, but so the city department heads he appointed could get paid.

More weird mayoral history

One of my favorite early stories on this site happened near Hoyne

- Royce, issue #1, Transmetropolitan

…

If you put a gun to my head and asked me where I see myself working, it would be the Kane County Chronicle.

It was a small suburban daily, and a lousy one, where I had what my meager career can call a start.

It was the best experience of my life.

I learned from Brenda Schory, Tom Schlueter, Chris Nelson, Greg Rivara, learned alongside Dan Campana, Kelley Casino, Nick Swedberg, Paul Johnson, Kartikay Mehrotra, Kate Thayer and other names you don’t know but if the world were good, you would.

When I left, among the gifts I got was a trade paperback collection of the first few issues of a comic book called Transmetropolitan. I still know who was behind it (thanks, Laura) but it remains the perfect gift.

It’s the comic book tale of a hard-ass gonzo journalist called Spider Jerusalem in the future. It’s Hunter Thompson among aliens, ray guns and a political landscape that seemed satirical in the 1990s.

Spider was supposed to write the column alluded to in the quote above, but he’s fictional.

In an earlier version of this story, I wrote the words. All eight thousand f-bombs over and over again, interspersed with the vignettes below.

I woke up this morning and realized that was tacky, crass, all the things I didn’t want to be but that the world seems to reward. I apologize to anyone who read the earlier version.

We can do better. The only question is if we will.

…

I never thought much of the guys downstairs.

They were too white bread, too bro-ey, too handsome and bound for success to meet my approval.

“My girlfriend is a Pakistani Muslim immigrant,” he said, pulling a drag off a thick, full smoke.

It was well after midnight. I was coming in. He was wearing a The John Marshall Law School sweater designed to look like ugly Christmas gear.

He didn’t know what would happen. He didn’t know what she could do. He didn’t know if any promises on visas or colleges would matter.

He hadn’t smoked in months, he said.

…

I love a woman more than air.

I haven’t written about her much because since this blog started, I wrote about another woman a bit and, well, that didn’t end well.

I wanted this relationship to be clean, pure, untainted by my desire for online recognition.

She’s the one, y’know? Always and forever.

“It’s OK,” she said as I walked her to her car from the watch party that didn’t turn out as light-hearted and fun as promised. “I’m Jewish. I’m used to being rounded up.”

…

“What kind of a world did we bring you into?” my mother texted.

…

A friend and I had a falling out a few months back. We both knew it was stupid at the time, or at least I can vouch I did. But we’re both proud men so we let it linger.

Last night we hugged and said we loved each other.

It wasn’t a win, or even prompted by this. We made up as much as proud men can a monthish ago.

It was just a recognition that we were united in loss, and that as two hetero cis white men, no loss we experience to this will be a fraction of others’.

…

I called out to a guy on the street “Are you ready for the Apocalypse?”

He was black. He smiled and nodded, already knowing what I was talking about.

…

Spider Jerusalem and his bleak-for-the-1990s vision of the future are fiction.

There are no ray guns, aliens or populace who will turn on a candidate once lies are revealed. The next four, maybe eight and definitely 20, 30, 40 depending on his Supreme Court picks years are a reality no teleporter or space station can fix.

We’re left. And we fight.

I call for hope because I have no other choice. I can’t not hope. It’s not in my makeup.

I tried to comfort my mother. She said I was sweet, dear. I called my sister to comfort but fear I made things worse. I joked with my friends and right now as I sit with a laptop and a pot of herbal tea at a quarter to four a.m. I want to tell the woman I love more than air that it will be OK but it won’t. It isn’t.

My future brother-in-law is disabled. My friends are gay, trans, of color, women or cis white men, only the latter of which will be just fine.

I’ll be just fine because of the color of my skin and the content of my package.

Transmetropolitan never accounted for that.

We’re left. And we fight.

Every move, we question. Every oppression of non-popular religions, we fight back on. We protest, we rally, we scream and cry and, yeah, probably nothing will change.

But we comfort ourselves that progress is a tide and our president-elect (god it sickens me to write that) is a backwash eddy.

In the press, we get as hard-ass as Spider or Hunter. We don’t surrender. We don’t give ground because the truth is a thing, despite indicators otherwise.

It’s late or early, depending on how you reckon. I’ve got to go to work in a bit.

I had planned for a slice of life on gay bars’ reactions to a Hillary win.

The next few thousand words, before I took them out, weren’t mine. They were alluded to in a throwaway joke about Spider Jerusalem.

But for the next few years, I can’t tell the difference between those words and mine.

“He is,” I yelled back.

“Hi,” she said, shuffling a few steps toward my friend.

Saturday was a moving day for two good friends of mine, and in the traditions of my people, I traded my weekend and my ability to walk without going “Ouch ouch ouch” for payment pizza and maybe a beer.

That’s what brought two tired, sweaty men to a tree-lined city block where the houses fly yellow and blue Ukrainian flags.

As idyllic as the greenery and scampering children made the place seem, this was still Chicago. The streets were packed end-to-end with cars. Downtown skyscrapers loomed to the east. A few of the louder horns and sirens could be heard from the rush of Western Avenue two blocks away.

The onion-shaped spires of an Orthodox church jutted over the brick two-flats that made up the homes.

My friend and I were unloading his car when the little old lady called to us. Her name was Maria. She had a long, shapeless dress that extended to the ground. She was 80 if a day and she used a cane as she slowly walked down the sidewalk. Her smile was gripping, vibrant. My friend went up to talk to her.

There are neighborhoods in Chicago that exist nowhere except on maps. These are places that have names and histories from when there was a community. Now there’s a series of houses.

But other places are still neighborhoods, with kids running from porch to porch and little old ladies who make it their business to get to know all newcomers.

The street where I live is busy and loud. It’s convenient to transit, to a Subway that gives good coupons for sandwiches and to a coffee shop with terrible service but that will let me use their WiFi for hours.

I don’t know any of my neighbors. I don’t even know all the names of the three or four fratty white guys living downstairs, aside from one’s named Jack and another is something ridiculous like “Chase.” I talked with the next door guy once, a Hispanic fellow whose name now escapes me.

But here on this street of yellow and blue flags, people say hi. Kids run from friend’s stoop to friend’s stoop. Families sit on the front porch or sun themselves in backyards.

Old ladies want to get to know who’s moving in.

Although a chance to pick the brain of a charismatic Chicagoan would seem to be my bread and butter, I waited by the car and let the two of them talk.

It wasn’t a conversation for me. It was a conversation for the two new neighbors.

When their talk waned, my friend walked back to me and the car.

“You’ll see me a ton,” she called after, although there’s a chance she said “shit-ton” and my brain could not process the little old lady using that word. Sources are looking into it. “We’re always on the front porch.”

Learn the history of the two-flat

Meet an old lady less happy about new neighbors

Support 1,001 Chicago Afternoons on Patreon

“The Witching Hour” by Anne Rice. “Bethlehem Road Murder” by Batya Gur. Paperbacks by Ursula Hegl, I.J. Parker, Margaret Erskine, Lawrence Durrell — all on a little sea-colored folding table propped knee-height in the snow and dark and cutting cold.

Things get left in the cold and dark. Things get abandoned to the cold. As the evening urges toward night and the world convinces itself 5:30 is an acceptable time for the sky to be black, things get left behind.

Stray bits. Some forgotten. Some abandoned on purpose, urban jetsam as people scurried to warmth.

Two votive candles sat by a tree.

Long, thin glass tubes advertising saints of dubious historicity sat stuck in ice and flakes by a tree pooching through a fence. The little metal-wrapped candle bits usually tossed in colored glass at romantic restaurants scattered around, like spent shell casings in the cold and white.

Cigarette butts. Dog turds. The odd perfect oak leaf crystallized since fall.

Christmas lights strung around the curb separating St. Helen’s short green space from the sidewalk. A string of bulbs barely skirting the ground. The light snow burying some to create soft glowing patches in the white.

Footprints in the snow — person, dog, rabbit. Bird tracks left in once-wet concrete, what? Months? Years ago?

People are left too.

Bikers. Smokers. Dog walkers and bag-laden pedestrians who trudge trudge trudge through the crunching winter to get wherever it is they’re headed.

A street away is Western. Bars and street lamps and the long, glistening reflection of headlights on wet concrete. The Doppler wail of cars whooshing by. Distant sirens.

The cold and dark couple to cast the illusion of loneliness on a world no more scarce and distant now than in bright spring. There would be a smatter more pedestrians. No fewer cars. The dog turds would be as plentiful and the books on the sea-colored table only slightly more picked over.

It’s easy to feel alone in the snow, but it’s not true for me at least. A block from friends. A street corner away from pleasant memories. A turn around the bend from that place where it’s like, “Hey, two-for-one tacos!”

A street person babbled at me at Einstein Bros that afternoon. The bagel shop let him sit and babble in the corner. When I sat within 20 feet, he smiled and galumphed up to me and offered me candy.

I wondered where the snow left him, as I wandered through Ukrainian Village.

My disillusion was momentary and wrong. I had places to go and warmth to receive. I was a tourist in this wind and white and icy grip.

Some things get left in the snow. I had to remind myself I was not one of them.

Comment on this story

Another tale of winter (with rabbit)

I don’t even know if “crates” is the right word. Trays of pigeons? Pallets of pigeons? Port-o-coops?

Whatever the contraptions were called, the men piled out of the mid-sized car carrying two of them just packed to the brim with pigeons.

There were three of them, older, with mustaches. They were Latino and two of them carried mesh-topped plywood containers covering about the floor space of a regulation Clue board. A Clue board port-o-coop just packed to the brim with pigeons is apparently lighter than it would appear, as the men were able to carry them by a lunchbox-style handle on top.

One of the men nodded at my friend and I gaping. He gave a little proud smile, aware of the oddness he was creating by walking from car to small apartment on a sunny afternoon with a crate of pigeons.

The pigeons looked confused.

…

She was young, which means younger than me. She was still probably an adult who could own property, rent a car and run for some, if not all, American political offices.

A little boy ran out of the taco stand, yelling something back at her about, of all things, negotiations. She followed, sacks of Mexican food in hand, smiling and waving bye at the boy.

She had long blonde hair and a big smile. It was dark and I was sitting on a bus bench waiting to go north.

I must have yawned.

“No yawning!” she commanded, giving my shoulder a little squeeze as she passed by the bus bench. “It’s too early.”

She smiled back at me for a moment, then kept walking south. I sat, staring at the retreating figure of a stranger who had touched me.

…

“Let it roll, baby, roll!” the boy sang loudly as he rolled past on his bike.

The bus had come and now I was north, waiting to cross the street to my grocery story. The boy, a bit chubby and maybe about 9 or 10, rode by with an older brother riding on the back, perched on those rods that sometimes stick out of the back wheels of bikes.

As the younger one continued his yodeled “Roadhouse Blues,” the older one jumped off. Momentarily unbalanced by the lack of rider, the younger one wobbled slightly, bumping up against the side of a building.

“Let it roll, baby, roll!” he continued.

We crossed the street, walking up Ashland a bit until we got to the joint Jewel/Kmart parking lot.

“We’re going to race to the Jewel!” the boy called to his parents.

His father called something to him in Spanish that I can only assume from context meant something along the lines of, “Don’t.”

“We’re going to race to the Jewel!” the boy called back, either not hearing them or pretending he didn’t. “He’s going to go as fast as he can and so am I!”

With that, the boys took off, one running and the one who sang Doors lyrics to the world pursuing on bike.

…

Three men had pigeons. A woman squeezed a stranger’s shoulder. A little boy sang.

They won’t be friends. They won’t be enemies. They’re less than strangers. The five never came across each other, just all on one Saturday in September encountered the same sixth.

Just blocks away, but unaware the others exist. Five people living in the same world.

Comment on this story

Read about a stranger distributing dreams

There were muscles under the jean jacket, but muscles that seemed used, not just swollen from too many reps of bad-for-your-back exercises to puff the glamor muscles. The man glided like a snake.

The woman with him was just as visually stunning. A calm, trained model’s face centered by a large metal ring piercing the center of her nose like a bull. She had bright red lips and spiky, close-cropped platinum hair. She had calm collect, an arrogant detachment.

They were gorgeous. Punk Adonises, every gesture oozing sex, danger and the taste of a stranger’s salty kiss.

“Wow,” the man said. “Nuts are on sale.”

“Ooh, we should get some,” the woman replied, pushing the cart up a little more.

No one’s cool in a grocery store, I thought as the man rifled through the shelf of various flavors of mixed nuts, picking out the varieties he knew his wife/girlfriend would like.

Well, the actual thought process went no one’s cool in a grocery store ooh almonds.

In one of the new Mariano’s, a grocery chain halfway in price and pretension between a Whole Foods and the Dominick’s they replaced, people milled on Sunday night.

They milled with wide eyes and full carts. They milled as they do in neighborhoods that have grocery stores, in places that can bring in massive lots of food and beverage and make it an attractive business proposition.

Maybe only public transit has a better representation of Chicagoans in their natural habitats, but even there there’s some sampling bias. People are in buses to go somewhere, so they present for that. Business people dress for business, club kids for clubs, et cetera. You can’t observe Chicagoans in the wild when they’re dressed for their destination.

No one gives a shit how they look in a grocery store.

Here’s a young woman, fresh off the scene. Her curves and hair tell me she’s a hot commodity out on the town. Her dumpy yoga pants and old T-shirt tells me she does not consider this the town.

Here’s a staid professional, the bearing of a man who wears a suit and gives the orders. He’s wandering the aisles, nervously looking for the exact type of tomato he was told to get.

Older couples slowly treading the aisles. A little boy being pushed in a cart while telling his mom a story of his own devising, one that involves shaking his head and making motorboat noises a lot. A woman wearing suspenders and a tuxedo shirt — there’s a story there, you can tell.

We’ve all got to eat, so we forget the pretense when we shop. No one to impress when you’re picking up a tub of peanut butter, someone else’s tampons and a multi-pack of Imodium.

Or in my case, yogurt, ravioli and a shit-ton of almonds.

I looked back at the gorgeous punk couple, the gods of sex and despair wandering the aisles looking how anger feels.

“We need potatoes,” the woman said as the gods pushed the shopping cart off.

Comment on this story

So, I won an award for this on Friday

And I’ll be doing this on Saturday

And unless that was a very mean prank email, I’ll be appearing on this next Monday

I watched a sexy C3PO grind on a leisure suit Chewbacca.

And I got “the highest of fives” from one of the faux Medieval warriors from that throne-game show I’ve never seen.

Because it was the Chiditarod and these sorts of thing happens there.

The Chicago Urban Shopping Cart Race took to the streets for the ninth year this past weekend. Costumed teams hauling carts from bar to bar in the West Town region of hipster oddities raised more than $32,000 and thousands of pounds of canned food for the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

It’s a bar crawl with shopping carts. It’s a charity event that gets a town fucked up. It’s the goddamned Chiditarod, where hot mess teams of drunken bros dressed as Ben Stiller characters stumble trash-filled shopping carts up next to teams who spend weeks or months carving and reshaping carts into 1950s garages, working Pac-Man games shaped like Pac-Man or ICBMs that blast shots of Russian vodka into little cups.

I first heard of the race in 2008, when I helped cover it for the now-defunct WindyCitizen.com, following a random Mr. Rogers-themed team from starting line to final bar.

In 2009, I gathered a few friends to form a truly awful 1980s-music-themed team that splintered to bits once the race started. Devo had to leave early, Sting got pissed off and left, taking his then-girlfriend The Bangles with him, leaving me dressed as Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon to get drunk in the rain with George Michael.

In 2011, I decided running through the slush is for suckers and started volunteering instead. I joined Mr. Rogers’ team from year one (his name’s Andy) and have since helped out at bars along the route, getting booze and bribes from increasingly sloshed costumed people who raised incredible amounts of food and money to fight hunger.

Since then, I’ve dressed as a cowboy, Canadian and Walmart (Wal-CART) greeter. I’ve gotten bribed with royal jelly shots from bees and Jelly of the Month Club memberships from Cousin Eddie. I’ve gotten coffee to sober a criminally drunk bunny rabbit and watched Andy chase down a Conan the Barbarian for trying to pee on a wall.

Aside from a few bad apples (sometimes peeing apples), the people are lovely. They’re here to fight hunger and dress as Sharknado. They want to erase inequality as Spy vs. Spy.

It’s a bizarre Chicago event that’s becoming a bizarre Chicago tradition. It’s booze and fun and charity and costumes. It’s a date on my personal calendar of the year, a holiday full of people I only see then. Standing outside a bar on Chicago Ave., waving a massive flag while dressed as a Walmart greeter, I feel part of something just a little bit bigger than myself.

And I get “the highest of fives” from a Lannister while doing it. I call that a win.

Comment on this story

Watch video of the disaster of my 2009 ’80s pop music team, part one

The disaster continues with part two

Has the agony ended? NO! It’s Chiditarod Diaries Part Three

Race Day 2009: The Saddest Le Bon

“It’s the same thing. The conductor is like in charge,” he said, choosing each word with care. “But it’s the same thing.”

On the Metra each morning and night, men with hats come and take money from strangers. Some are known to the regular commuters – the riders gab and gossip and ask about families. Others slip unnoticed, just another service worker treated as an annoyance not to address or look directly in the eyes.

But the men in hats – and they’re always men – continue to take the money and punch the 10-rides. They’re old, they’re young, they’re chipper, they’re tired, they’re black, they’re white, they’re Hispanic. But, I’ve noticed in my few months as a Metra rider, these men in hats fall in two camps.

Some hats say TRAINMAN and some say CONDUCTOR. And on Monday, I finally asked one of the men why.

“So the conductor is like the boss?” I asked.

This trainman was tall and, as mentioned, Hispanic. He had a cocky smile under a thick mane of hair (that itself was under a TRAINMAN hat).

His hands zipped and snapped, gesturing as he talked.

“Sort of, but it’s like you’re in charge of that train.”

“Oh, so the conductor’s like the boss of that shift,” I said.

“Like I have the hat with the emblem CONDUCTOR on it,” he continued, running his thumb and forefinger across where his current topper said TRAINMAN. “I’m just not wearing it right now.”

We chatted a bit more as the train rumbled south and his hands zipped and snapped. The train kept rumbling south as, in all the other cars, men in hats that said TRAINMAN and their shift bosses called CONDUCTOR took the money and punched the 10-rides.

“It’s the same thing,” the trainman finally said, flashing a cocky smile. “He’s just doing less work than me right now.”

Comment on this story

“They build new atoms out of bombarding electrons onto the nucleus. They’re building new elements, I think, faster than I can write music,” the computer programmer said.

“I wrote a piece called ‘Tungsten’ for the first concert that we did. Tungsten is in the filament of light bulbs so the image in my head was like these like old-school light bulbs and movie marquees kind of like flashing on and off,” he said.

The Jan. 9 Chicago Composers Orchestra concert in the Garfield Park Conservatory had pulled up stakes and headed north for an after party of booze and burgers at High Dive in Ukie Village. As the classically trained volunteer musicians drank and gabbed and the jukebox blasted punk, orchestra co-founders West, 32, and Brian Baxter, 27, talked modern symphonic composition.

Baxter had to half yell over The Descendents’ “Suburban Home” to say how he wrote the piece performed that night in the conservatory’s Fern Room based off a piece that inspired the Fern Room.

“I think it would be appropriate to extrapolate some material from the Mendelssohn that the architect was inspired by and sort of orchestrate out just one part of that within and around the space,” Baxter said between bites of Buffalo wing. “So that’s how I came up with that.”

Chicago is “an orchestra town,” Baxter said, but the other orchestras lean staid and old-timey, sticking for the most part to classic crowd-pleasers like Bach and Beethoven. History, he said, is to blame.

“Post World War II, composers started writing crazy-ass shit that everyone hated,” Baxter said. “I happen to like a lot of that music, but it didn’t have necessarily broad appeal.”

Faced with classic pieces that could draw a crowd or experimental soundscapes of crazy-ass shit, orchestras headed old. New music became niche.

“Orchestras became museums, for better or worse,” Baxter said. “I think in general, worse.”

The CCO is different. Only modern. Only works by living composers.

“The challenging part is that, as far as I know, there aren’t any or very few start-up orchestras even in general but in particular for new music,” West said.

Case in point: Pos Metaphonos by composer Lawrence Axelrod, which the CCO had premiered earlier that night.

“It was written in ’92 and it hadn’t been performed yet,” West said. “He had hoped it would be performed and just with the focus of orchestras not being on contemporary music, it had not. It took 20 years for the opportunity to come up for it to be performed.”

The jukebox blasted punk. The Ukie Village crowd slammed beer. Baxter and West met while studying musical composition at Roosevelt University.

Both decided to write for orchestra for their masters’ theses in spring 2009. They pulled together an orchestra and conductor to put on their works. After graduation, West went back to computer programming and Baxter got an administrative job with a local youth orchestra.

“About a year out from the program we were like, ‘Look, we need to make this a reality. We need to do this for real,’” Baxter said. “‘We’ve got a great list of performers, we’ve already got connections with all these people. I mean, if we’re going to do this, now’s the time.’”

They got the orchestra from their theses back together with a few new faces, created a board of directors, incorporated as a non-profit and hung their musical shingle in the summer of 2010.

For the musicians they knew, it was a chance to perform new, exciting music now rather than waiting for an opening to play Beethoven’s Fifth now until their fingers go. For Baxter and West, it was a chance to see their work and other work they were excited about performed.

“If you’re comparing it to like the rock, pop world where like say you have a band and you’ve got your four guys playing a basement and you go out and you play shows, you’re writing the music that you’re performing,” Baxter said. “The composer’s got to get together with these performers and sell them his or her music. You have to get other people excited about it and then you need advocates for your music.”

The music blasted, I presume, into the night. The after party went on, I’m taking it, long after I shook the hands of Randall West and Brian Baxter and toddled my way home. The violinists, I gather, gabbed with the clarinetists and maybe did a round or two of shots with the woodwinds or maybe the woman I saw earlier in the night who had made her glockenspiel out of hardware store plumbing pipes.

I’ve done three days of stories now on the Chicago Composers Orchestra. I might tag back in with them sooner or later as this site meanders on over the years, but for now I want to leave them like this. I want to leave them as two young guys sitting at a bar, drinking cider and gluten-free beer, snacking on Buffalo wings and, as a party rages on around them, talking about the music that excites them.

Comment on this story

Read the first piece about the Chicago Composers Orchestra

Read the second

Instead, the sub shop hands every order through an actual opening in the thick Plexiglas separating the kitchen from grim dining area. No bulletproof spinner need apply.

Now you can get your subs, chicken burgers, gyro puffs, wings, catfish nuggets, jalapeño poppers, Polish sausage, Italian beef and double gyro cheeseburger with fries and a free pop through an actual opening from an actual person who doesn’t think you’re going to shoot and rob.

The fact I love this place is why I’m not going to live to 100.

Yes, when my ladyfriend’s not cooking us fantastic, healthy meals or when I’m not making myself the bachelor fare that usually involves boiling something from a box, I’ve been known to partake of the divey sub shop on Ashland.

From the outside, it looks like a TV news reporter should be doing a live remote about the gangland shooting that just went down. But on the inside, it’s… worse. Grim benches and tables, some bolted, some not, and walls full of food ads, some handwritten in marker.

But the food’s tasty and the people are really nice.

There’s the little Hispanic lady who smiles so softly, the bigger guy I mentally call “Fat Kartikay” because he looks like a fat version of my friend Kartikay, even that sort of scary dude in the Cubs sweatshirt who told me a story about getting attacked on the L by a drunk guy even though I didn’t ask.

So here’s to the greasy spoons, the holes in the wall, the little spots that make you wonder who would ever eat there up until the moment it’s you. Here’s to the places where they make the fries fresh for you and display the good health inspection results because otherwise you would wonder.

These are the places that make a neighborhood. Not the hot new eatery with the OK from Time Out, but the little corner spot where your brown bag is soaked in fry grease by the time you get home.

There’s as much heart as heartburn here. And that’s saying a lot.

Talk about this story

A lot of their food comes from distributor ILTACO. Now where have we heard of that?