It has for years, decades. That smell permeates the building and spreads out onto the North Branch of the river. When the wind is right it scents the whole downtown with a short, tangy reminder of cocoa and jobs. On summer days, it’s what Chicago smells like to me.

Inside the factory door of the blankface warehouse, there’s a glass booth decorated with hygiene requirements for any visiting subcontractors. A few workers pile out the door, their shift done. They laugh wearily and joke, like kids at the end of a school day.

The hefty man behind the glass sees me and nods me in what’s clearly the right direction. I enter the shop. 

It’s not much of a shop. Little by way of decoration, just a small, industrial room with racks of candy and one lonely worker waiting by a scale. There’s an exit to the rear with a Sharpie sign marking the route to the employee-only wholesale section.

The woman by the scale smiles and understands when I ask for something wholly made here. The racks of candies in tidy red packages had been sent out to other places for finishing. She points me to the back wall, where there are Ziploc bags hand-stuffed with cracked bits straight off the factory floor. They look like bags of loose stone.

I choose two Ziplocs — a Meadowlands Milk because I figure it looks good and a Saratoga Dark because it intrigues me. It looks raw and unbrushed. There are bits of sandy tan on the inside. It hasn’t been tempered to a smooth sheen yet, and never would be. But it was made right here, and that’s all I wanted, while I can get it.

Blommer Chocolate Factory, one of the last holdouts of industry in the West Loop, a blankface warehouse on a burgeoning, Rahm-ening corridor of condos and fancy restaurants, a strip of factories and machine shops one by one being picked off by the 21st century economy, could go away.

I ask the woman about the article, the one that said the family that owns it was thinking of selling. No more chocolate shop. No more smell wafting through the city.

“We found out the way everyone else did,” she said, and after that I don’t feel comfortable sharing more of our conversation.

I left. I wandered.

Sacks of stone-like chocolate shards in hand, I walked by the old Tribune printing plant that’s going to be a gleaming mixed-use development of, based on the online renderings, Borg-like glass condos and interracial unity. I walked by factory workers on smoke breaks and miniskirted hostesses arriving early to guide well-coiffed diners to their seats at upscale restaurants. I walked by cyclists on Treks that ran into the four digits and I walked by two old Italian men, hair swept vertical with pomade, who set up chairs to smoke cigarettes and shoot bull outside a bar painted like an Italian flag.

I perched for a bus by Western and Grand. Bikes rushed past the shops of HVAC repairmen and a boxy glass condominium building smashed like a game-ending Tetris piece into a space it doesn’t fit.

A space it doesn’t fit yet. The sci-fi box with the built-in coffee shops will be the norm, the last-standing old warehouse the kitchy anomaly.

A cabbie blocked the rushing bike lane to let out a passenger, and I hated him and loved all bikes. A biker spat on the cabbie’s window, and I loved the cabbie and hated all bikes. A white man spat on a Middle Eastern man, but he thinks it woke because he rides.

In a town that’s knows it’s post-industrial but doesn’t know what it’s pre- of yet, things I loved battle against things I loved. The environment fights against jobs. Upscale coffee joints eye the real estate of longtime dive bars. I’ve never spat on an immigrant, but I’ve been the biker racing up the corridor. I’ve dined at some of those high-end restaurants, and I’ve drank at the Italian-flag bar and its equally-belligerent-in-Irishness twin on the corner. I like gourmet coffee, fancy food, bikes and dive bars, but to see these things I love individually mashed together and fighting for existence made me realize how unsustainable and mutually exclusive my love really is.

The world’s being remade in my image, and I don’t like how it looks.

I have so many questions for this neighborhood where you can buy a Ziploc of chocolate shards or a $60+ updo with special rates for bridal parties. Are we ever again going to be a place that makes things, or just one that enjoys what others produced? Are we a building a city for tourists, where posh, drunken whites spend posh, drunken 20s and then skitter to suburbia? Or can we create a place for people to lift, haul and manufacture better lives?

Can we have both?

I don’t know what the future holds, and I can’t see a way past this war of money. I just hope that the combination of glass box and blankface warehouse we’ll soon call Chicago finds a way to smell of chocolate.

Read more about that smell

Read more about chocolate and wealth

Read about a South Side candy haven

I’m not here to talk about bullying in media, or about liberals who use people of color as proof of purchase for ideology.

I’m not here to join the chorus of thinkpieces saying the Chicago Reader’s cover using a lawn jockey to symbolize black voters is really about this and that is really about that. This is really about what Adeshina Emmanuel said it was about — racism both overt and covert, a decision-making process that put a bully in command and the media’s desire for black men’s voices so long as the black men say what they’re expected. I have no words to add to that.

My sole purpose in this non-thinkpiece thinkpiece is to remind Chicago writers how to use a metaphor.

Metaphors and satire are tricky beasts, but an easy fix for stuck writers. How better to get people to care about your issue than by drawing comparison to things people already care about? Half your work is done.

When the Reader’s recently and rightly ousted executive editor Mark Konkol wanted his package on J.B. Pritzker to have more emotional impact, he stole the emotional impact of a racist symbol. The Chicago Tribune’s Kristen McQueary did the same thing a few years ago, stealing the emotional impact of the thousands of deaths Hurricane Katrina wrought to sparkle up an otherwise lackluster observation that corruption is bad.

The math is that if A = B and B sort of equals C in a way that’s enough for a quick-hit op ed in the local news, A = C.

It can be handled beautifully. “Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real,” Nelson Algren wrote about the city of Chicago. “Therefore I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, ’till he hath at least some glympse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice,” Jonathan Swift wrote in a surprisingly touching essay about eating babies.

But it can be screaming contests of who can elevate what to which, who can raise the stakes the highest the fastest with a ding ding ding You Won the Prize!!! bell for the person to scream “IT’S LIKE HITLER” first.

A metaphor should clarify. It should illustrate a nuance or thought that would be lost in a mere repetition of fact. It can be silly or cruel, ugly or ridiculous. But if it doesn’t add insight, it’s a needless word. As the good book says, omit it.

Be clear about what you’re saying in a metaphor, particularly one based on real events with real human suffering attached. There was no particular woman who had her face cracked, no actual babies Swift was ready to salt and fricassee. But people did die in Katrina and the Holocaust. Jockey statues depicting black men as subhuman servants still dot lawns today.

Writers of Chicago, if you do feel a need to poach others’ suffering to prop up a lackluster thinkpiece, at least get the messaging right. In the artist’s own words describing Konkol’s vision, “As a Democrat, Pritzker indeed needs the black vote, and he puts all his weight on it in a most disrespectful manner.” In the illustration, what Pritzker is putting his weight on is a cartoon lawn jockey. He’s not leaning particularly disrespectfully. He’s leaning on a thing that’s not worthy of respect.

If the intent was to reveal racism, it did. But when an editor brainstorming a symbol for black voters arrives at imagery of servitude, degradation and stereotype, the racism revealed wasn’t J.B. Pritzker’s.

McQueary’s tepid response to poaching the emotional weight of Katrina deaths carried similar problems.

“And I am horrified and sickened at how that column was read to mean I would be gunning for actual death and destruction,” she wrote.

No one thought you were calling for the skies to darken, McQueary. They were horrified and sickened that you would use human death to score points toward your pet issue.

A metaphor can intensify, but its sole purpose cannot be to intensify. That’s just swearing with imagery. Konkol’s editor’s note about the conversation on race he wanted the Pritzker package to spur said “Hell, it should hurt, like a punch in the gut.” That’s the very reason it should have been avoided.

If you punch someone, the human response isn’t to consider whether your argument is logically compelling. Convincing people your argument is logically compelling is the exact point of an article.

People who are punched double over, then they fight back.

Adeshina Emmanuel did fight back. He fought back with logic and reason, compelling arguments and, yes, metaphor.

“When I look at that cover it feels like I’m that red-lipped lawn jockey and Konkol is the powerful white man on my back,” he wrote, tossing off in 24 painful, beautiful words the nuance and power a editor lost his job for trying to mimic.

Konkol is gone, by the way, fired in the wake of his first and only issue. His legacy will be that cover. He’ll be back in Chicago media someday, I’m sure.

When he does pop up at some digital-only, subscription-based community aggregator model with a GoFundMe no one drops by, I just hope he’ll have learned the final, main and to an extent only lesson on metaphor:

You can’t punch hard enough to make a bad idea good.

Her foe in the faux mustache and all-too-real chest hair laughed at her, pointed and made a Trumpian chuckle-smirk to the audience. He turned to the crowd to flex again, the audience hurling boos at him as his theme song – “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” – piped through the gymnasium.

Then the wrestling began, wedged between the dancing.

On Thursday, I went to Lucha VaVOOM, an L.A.-based promotion that pairs Lucha Libre Mexican wrestling with nouveau burlesque. Between sets of masked good guys and unmasked baddies tossing each other around the boxing ring of the Soho House club in the West Loop, burlesque performers from Michelle L’amour’s troupe displayed their own feats of physical prowess, albeit in a slinkier, twirlier fashion.

We hooted and hollered in the audience, acted the clowns. It was a blast, as artificial and colorful as a swig of cherry cola.

I felt weird after.

I think there are few things my generation wants more than authenticity. The trendometer has currently slipped to that setting at least. We guzzle faux-vintage cocktails in trendset bars designers got paid a lot of money to age and weather. We watch shimmying dancers in styles our granddads knew about, but would never admit they did, but it’s OK these days because the dancers are into it and really that’s just feminism now, right?

And we watch pro wrestling, but it’s OK and cool because it’s like authentic and cultural and stuff. Rudos. Technicos. Masks and stagecraft.

It was black and white and Asian wrestlers pretending to live a Mexican cultural trope. It was women who don’t remember the first few Reagan years pretending to live in a form of stripping popular in the 1950s.

I’m writing a blog that pretends to be a 1920s newspaper column. I know from adopted culture.

I had a blast, but felt a bit bad that I was watching fake fake wrestling. I felt I should be supporting more traditional Lucha Libre, go to some arena where I have no idea what people are saying, give my minutes and money to performers doing it as more than a lark.

Maybe I will. But that will be a different story.

I don’t feel as bad as I should about the wrestling’s cultural appropriation. I have that ability to write off their performance as a corny homage since it’s not my culture being taken. I know no one in that room made a choice that night between their dollars going to Soho House or to a West Side arena where the announcer blasts Norteña music. It’s not a noble thought, but it’s true.

So this, my friends, is a true story about falsity. This is a tale of the purest, most bona fide inauthenticity available. They dressed in tights and colors forged in a different time and culture, they shimmied and grappled in ways handed down from the past, and we hooted and hollered and jested along.

They danced as fakers, but managed to touch something tawdry, rude, shameful but truly, truly true.

I see the Van Buren Street bridge too, and the bottom of the salmon-colored skyscraper that’s topped with the light bulb castle that blares like a beacon at night. Tour boats and Lower Wacker drivers coast by silently at eye level. Pontoons and rec boats cruise a little lower.

It smells like burnt carbon underground.

That ugly office building they prettied up by drawing a map on the side is visible too, at least the low bits. That’s OK. I know where we’re going.

Away.

I’m scribbling these lines in a college rule notebook surrounded by concrete — above, below, to the right and most of the way to the left. The left is where Union Station ends and my view of river, bridge, buildings, Enwave and the ugly office building prettied up with a map begins.

I’m on a train, and I’m heading out of here.

I wrote about this impending trip last week, teased myself en blog for “my desire to travel in the most hat-and-suit-old-timey fashion possible,” but now it’s on me. I’m in an Amtrak car waiting for a three-day jaunt west to Seattle, the land of coffee and a lingering affection for the 1990s.

The roomette is nice, but I’m clearly not so much in for nights of intrigue with a Hitchcock blonde as 5 p.m. dinners with doughy gray-haired couples with southern accents and college football hoodies griping about the pasta.

I love this city, but it’s a love that tires. It’s exhausting loving a place that seems so determined to break your heart. Another dive prettified. Another hot scam by a person of power. Another dead body of a person who never could be. Rich over poor, wealth over reason and a chum bucket of scumbags slopped into the water ready to take advantage of it all.

Feh. Who needs it? I want a week in Seattle, where they never have to deal with problems like an overtly pro-gentrification administration, a looming real estate crash due to overbuilding, a police department dealing with a legacy of corruption and racial bias, skyrocketing housing prices and… I’m going to stop talking now.

Similarities yes or no, I just want a break from the home that breaks my heart.

In my concrete womb or coffin, there’s a quiet lull, as if people know. Then slowly, slowly, the train pulls out.

It goes through the endless concrete, CHUD-ian tunnels, the hidden corridors of passages and infrastructure that makes our downtown life possible. It bursts back into sunlight by the horsehair condo building and Continental Tire.

Two pro photographers document an Amtrak construction worker leaning against a girder watching the results of his labor rumble by.

He looks miserable, a reluctant model for Americana.

After the concrete maze, onto the concrete streets, Chicago beckons. But not the pretty Chicago, the one that tries to lure passersby and motorists to stop, share, spend. The real Chicago that knows the train couldn’t stop if it wanted to, so doesn’t put on airs beyond functionality.

Some graffiti belongs in museums. Some makes me shake my head and mumble, “C’mon, man, get it together.” The people we pass fall in the same tribes too.

It’s slower than I thought, the train inching its way past decaying factory lofts and other urban detritus. Chicago Mailing Tube Company. Pack Life doggie day care. Eastern Kitchen & Bath. Half-yellow trees, a Union Pacific cherry picker truck given replacement wheels to run on train treads. Metra stops and muck. A tire pile. Blue Streets & San trucks.

It’s so ugly. So beautifully, beautifully ugly.

A happy man named Alan comes by to give me the lay of the land, how to make dinner reservations and where the observation car was, but I don’t care. Who cares what’s coming? I am exactly where I want to be, as the train pulls me away.

Enjoy dirty politics and dirty martinis with me at “How to Steal an Election,” a night I’m running with Atlas Obscura and the Room 13 speakeasy a week before the election. Swill craft cocktails while I take you through decades of COMPLETELY LEGAL voter manipulation in Chicago and elsewhere. Fun, civics, jazz and the craftiest of craft cocktails. Tickets are going fast.

I thought I was meant to joke and taunt, bouncing unbruised from one fiasco to another, enthusiasm unflagged. I would joke away the Bushes, the Cruz, the neverending Romneys pop pop popping up like four-year perennials.

I would win one of these days, I thought, because I was smarter, younger, more vicious, more willing to laugh and joke the crowds away. I would win because how could I not? How could I not laugh the murderers and fools out of sight by being so very damn clever?

I can’t laugh right now. I can’t laugh at what happened Monday.

He, the goblin he was trounced and outmaneuvered and outflanked at every gulping sneer he pulled, and it will not matter.

He was foolish and fooled, deluded and deluding, a sin against reason and truth and basic human assurances.

And it will not matter.

Those who love his hate will continue to love him. Those who hate his hate will continue to hate him.

But the core, unavoidable term there is hate. He never has to live in a world of climate change. Pure, unbridled hatred is his renewable resource.

Laughter used to be mine.

Even should he lose, which I pray my godless prayers he does, I will not be able to laugh this away. I can’t laugh away how close he came.

I see my father, swept with a crowd into rocking the car of George Wallace, chewed out later by the order for appearing at a protest in full Roman collar.

I see my grandfather, tired from the factory, saying in the quiet, assured way I miss so much that no Republican ever did a thing for the working man.

I see generations back, spitting and sprawling back to a dozen European countries. I see Irish boggers, hillrods from Bavaria, Jews chased out from a dozen lands, long-snooted farmboys from that bit of Holstein that couldn’t decide if it was Denmark or Germany but was Denmark when we left.

They came here where others were carted by slave ship, or had their lands stripped from them, gifted with baubles and smallpox blankets and marched to the wilderness to die. My people sought this nation others were forced into and I can no longer laugh.

Half the nation wants to put him in charge.

“We’re going to raise babies in this,” she whispered to me during the booze-fueled watching party.

“I know,” I whispered back, putting my arm around her.

No, I cannot laugh.

But I’m a writer, a talker born. If I can’t crack jokes and laugh it all away, what can I say? What can I say now that I’m stuck with this unrelenting, imprisoning sincerity?

Here’s all I can think to say, a laugher turned terminally sincere.

I say here’s to America, that beautiful catastrophe. That land of heroes and monsters and the uncomfortable backthought that what’s one of yours is the other of mine.

Here’s to the land that tells the black and brown they’re valuable as long as they vote for the donkey and then shut up, that tells young white men to do as they’re told or else they’ll look foolish. Here’s to the land that tells the young, rich and lily they’re a protected class, as endangered and ennobled as an exotic butterfly.

Here’s to the land that values the will of a 3K-old desert tome more than the future of a pregnant teen who cannot have this baby.

Here’s to the dead we killed.

Here’s to the dead we will kill.

Here’s to the land that promises hope, that has acted as a beacon since the early immigrants came to these shores seeking greater religious persecution than was available in England at the time.

(And apologies to Garrison Keillor for stealing his gag.)

And here’s to the land that dreams, that lives, that breathes, the land whose sacred contract is one of evolution. Here’s to the greatest clause in the greatest document this nation knows. Not pledges for guns or free speech or our god-given right not to quarter soldiers or even the amendment flipping the other amendment that said we couldn’t have cold frosty ones.

Here’s to Article V of the United States Constitution.

“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.”

I want to cry just reading it. Those beautiful lines, those beautiful lines let us make amendments. They let us know the greatest thing a nation can do is change.

We can live without our sins. We can grow beyond slavery, beyond rights denied because of a fable of apples and snakes. We can ban cold frosty ones and then flip it back because our government’s covenant is that we can do better.

We will do better.

Unless we stop.

Unless we give these powers to a monster.

I can’t laugh at him anymore. He is not a clown or a misguided child. He is a savvy and calculating master of outrage who has taken our laughter and our superior kidding and turned it to a shot at power beyond any of our imagining.

If he wins, we will get a minimum of two Supreme Court picks.

He will get nuclear weapons.

I cannot laugh.

We are this beautiful catastrophe of a nation, of a land born in blood and oppression whose motto is “Let’s figure this out.” We are America, America is us.

We can figure this out. We must figure this out. We must become better than the better angels of our nature and, no, we no longer have the right to laugh.

I believe in nothing, but god bless the land of the terminally sincere.

A few more thoughts on America

How I find hope

It will be

I hadn’t thought about the little girl with Down syndrome in years. What a smile she had. How proud she was of her swimming.

Oh god, the circus story. That damn elephant.

It was good to go through my life in paper.

I’m getting rid of my storage space. I got it in 2014 to store a then-extra couch and wingback chair, but took advantage of it to not deal with aspects of my mess.

The pile of tax paperwork from 2011? Throw it in the space. My DVDs from when DVDs were a thing? Chuck ‘em next to the cassettes, bowling ball and Shabbos candles.

Now the couch and chair are in my living room and I’m starting the tedious process of spending nights alone in a storage space sorting through box after box, tossing what I don’t need.

For an ex-reporter, this includes a massive crate of old newspapers and notepads.

For a good heap of my 20s, I was a newspaper reporter. It was my job and my identity. I hated it and loved it and hated it and was it. Buzzing around suburban dailies, hoping and praying for a foothold that would get me to the Trib, the job was my life for years.

That means this old printer box of increasingly ratty newsprint and those pocket-thin reporters notebooks was my life. It was me.

I like a life that yellows like newsprint, one that shows its age and datedness. Everything I write on this site is as crisp and high-res as the moment I typed it two, three, four years ago. There’s no context, no Bush-era news story next to words I wrote, no “For Better or For Worse” a few pages later in the days before the strip went to perma-rerun.

I like the gray hairs that have been popping up since I was 20. I like a little gravitas.

It’s sad to toss these memories though, even if I keep a copy or two. There will never be another Kane County Chronicle of Nov. 23, 2004. There will never be another Aurora Beacon-News of Sept. 19, 2009.

There will never be another reporter’s notepad where I made that particular doodle, grabbed that particular quote or just wrote “BORED BORED BORED” in that particular handwriting at that particular municipal subcommittee planning meeting.

Years of my existence in stories no one but I have thought about in ages, notes no one but I have ever read. A giant box whittled down to a smaller box of memories to be packed away until my grandkids debate whether to toss them after I’m gone (that’s not an allusion to my death — I plan to be the first centenarian on Mars).

It feels good to be getting rid of the storage space. I bottled up a lot of my life there, kept it to the side to be reintegrated later.

I guess now’s later. I get to have my history back, at least the parts I need.

That’s what was both nice and sad about sorting through my paper past. It was nice to keep only what I wanted, throw away the bits that were unneeded or troublesome. The printer box was big. Heaps and heaps of weight that I realized I no longer needed to carry.

The past heartaches were now old letters. The past stresses were now old notepads. The past burdens and troubles that kept me up nights and made me wail at the world were and always had been light little sheets, easily tossed aside if only I had known then what I know now.

I feel better shedding my papers. I feel light, free and ready to focus on the future I’m planning.

Now, figuring out what to do with four boxes of 1990s Spider-Man comics, that’s going to take a little thinking.

A mysterious woman in a storage locker

A former coworker hunts magic

When layoffs took my former boss

When Michael Ferro laid off the Sun-Times photo staff

When Michael Ferro made the Tribune “tronc”

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Through that white mask, he tried to quiet the room with a glare.

“Take off the sash!” a woman in the crowd yelled for the third or fourth time.

“I told you before,” he said, gesturing to his face. “Ugly.”

The duel was about to begin.

The Ink and Blood Dueling Society is not a thing that exists, so it’s better that you stop asking questions about it.

It’s not a secret society of writers who compete in head-to-head matches to create short fiction in front of a live audience, based on audience suggestions.

It’s not led by the masked military Baron Waldorf Astoria, the masked pirate-suited Capt. Jim Blood and a masked medieval Lord C. Byron Taylor.

And they most certainly didn’t have their two-year anniversary show on Saturday at the flagship location of the literacy nonprofit Open Books at 651 W Lake St.

Masks are encouraged among the audience at Ink and Blood, but only worn by a smattering among the backroom crowd at Open Books. A man in the back wore steampunk goggles perched on his head. Others wore top hats, harlequin masks, a handmade plaster of Paris skull face. One woman wore tights and a tutu.

Others, the bulk by far, just wore clothes. Jeans. Sweatshirts. Baseball caps.

In front of this crowd of harlequinade and Cubbie blue, there was a screen with two Google Docs open. The writer/duelists never appeared before the crowd. They were just words appearing live on the screen.

With Baron Astoria riling the crowd and a guest guitarist and guest juggler filling the dead zones, the crowd (fueled by a generous donation from New Holland Brewing, if’n you get my drift) shouted and screamed at the appearing words. They gave direction, suggestions, pop culture references to see if the hidden writers could find a way to work them in.

The first match, a bout about Beyoncé, resulted in two stories: a pretty funny take on Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s secret werewolf lifestyle and a slightly meandering look at Bey’s murder cult.

Beyo-wolf (not my joke, an audience member’s) won that match as determined by audience vote.

It was pure democracy. Shouting, screaming, voting, yelling. And democracy is great for society, but there’s a reason it’s not used more in the arts, Komar and Melamid aside.

I was quite taken with one of the stories based on the suggestion “rutabaga.” Within 10 minutes the hidden writer had crafted a compelling vignette about a beggar girl stealing produce from a far-flung Eastern market. It had grit, depth, an arc and a stern, shocking ending, all within the time it takes to hard boil an egg.

It lost to an audience-pleasing psychedelic sex romp that managed to cram in all the pop culture references the crowd shouted out. Ah well.

But without the night, without Capt. Blood, Baron Astoria and the cape-wearing Lord C. Byron Taylor, I wouldn’t have had a chance to see the beggar girl story at all. I got to witness the live birth of a piece of art that I really liked.

I mean, I would have. If the secret Ink and Blood Dueling Society actually existed. Which it doesn’t. So shut up.

Here’s their website.

…

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The big guy walked down this thin corridor without bumping into anyone. It was a suave, practiced feet.

As he walked, he boomed a question that I answered. Thankfully, I had enough patty melt in my mouth that he didn’t hear my response, considering he was talking to the Blackhawks-clad trio just past me.

A middle-aged woman with mall mom hair and a hockey jersey gave a squeal when she saw him, swiveling in her chair and reaching up for a brief hug.

They chatted about hockey. He was surprised she had never been to a Hawks live game before. He gave her tips on when to get there (4:30, when the doors open) and what to do between then and the game (walk around, explore).

He talked about where his seats were compared to hers and they just caught up like old friends do.

Then he turned back around and had another old friends conversation with the next people down the line.

I found out later that the big guy was the owner, George Lemperis. I just thought he was a friendly local, a regular at the old-style diner, until I saw him behind the counter when I got up to go.

I found out later that the place used to be a skid row diner, years before the United Center rebuild, Oprah and the 1996 Democratic National Convention started converting this section of Madison into a western outpost of trendy bars, foodie food joints, condos and cutesy boutiques.

The grill had been sizzling since 1938, a few different owners before Lemperis and his family. Since the big guy took over in the 1970s, it has gone from a place he had to work armed to a spot where Coach Q showed up with the Stanley Cup, according to a WBEZ interview with the big guy.

Around this all, friends and buddies — there is a difference — milled and slapped backs. Smiling staff pushed past each other by the grill as burgers, patty melts, hash browns and long, thin strips of gyros meat hissed over a diner full of laughter, endless sports talk, gurgling French fry oil and the catching up of people who only see each other when hockey’s on.

I didn’t talk to the big guy other than the accidental convo when he was actually addressing Blackhawks-clad trio behind me. At first, I thought he was a regular. Then, I thought he was a cashier.

I didn’t realize I just had a brush with the King of the Palace Grill Sandwich Shop on Madison.

Learn more about the place

A hippie strums banjo and watches the crowds go by

Meet a puppeteer

The Norwood Park Half-Wit

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Long hallways lined with identical corrugated aluminum doors, each locked from the outside. Motion lights clicking on as you walk by doors you think you’ve passed before. They click off one by one as you turn down familiar corners you realize you’ve never seen.

Sometimes down a pastel hallway, you see a light on an section you know you haven’t been.

And a shrill wolf whistle comes from nowhere.

Yeah, pumping in “Raspberry Beret” isn’t going to cut down that shiver up your spine.

I push my cart of boxes and furniture. A shrill wolf whistle comes from nowhere.

“Hello?” I call.

No response.

I like the nothing places in Chicago, the darkened hallways, the blank walls in a converted camera factory. There’s so much place in this town, so much identity that a place that could be anywhere is almost remarkable.

I like the little mystery of a storage space, too. I want to go inside all these locked boxes, see the furniture and old love notes and toys and photos. I want to hop on the beds and poke through the yearbooks and play with all the fishing rods and camping gear.

I want to see what it is so many people want to keep but not have.

A shrill wolf whistle. A light clicks off behind. A shiver up the spine.

I packed my own corrugated aluminum box with my own secrets. Old furniture, boxes of mementos that wouldn’t mean a thing to anyone but me. Locked them away and walked off to the office area downstairs in the former camera factory.

I found the man who had signed me up for a space the day before.

“Hey,” I said. “There was like this shrill whistling upstairs.”

“Yeah, that’s the alarm,” he said.

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Another story of fear

A lady living in a storage space

Another short moment

Ivan Albright was an American magic realist artist you know if you’ve seen the 1940s movie version of “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” He’s dark and brutal, brilliant and horrid, and one of my favorite artists.

I stood inches from him as a trumpeter practiced scales that soon turned into Civil War-era military formation calls as I realized I stood in a room that in a moment reeked of more money than I would earn in a life.

I was in the Union League Club.

The Union League Club is an old-school club. For a few hundred a month, you can be a member and stay there, eat there, shag golf balls in the room I would later find above where the elevator stops. It dates to 1879, the website tells. It seems it.

It was dripped in art, I was told before I went there for an awards ceremony where I won nothing. Every corridor, every hallway, every room off to the side absolutely dripped in art from Chicagoans, 1800s to today. I went early to see, taking the stairs up floor by floor to get to my destination.

In a dining room across the way from the gorgeous art hall where I watched an Ivan Albright while an early arrivee from a Union League Brass Ensemble serenaded me, I heard the head waitstaff tell the rest about the specials so they could repeat it to the diners. Something about creme brulee.

A bathroom I ducked into had paper towels monogrammed with the Union League logo, hand sanitizer, a squirt bottle of the original Listerine (the one that tastes horrible), hand sanitizer, soap, Pinaud’s Clubman aftershave and, I noted with a chuckle, urinals that goes down to the floor like in a grade-school restroom.

On four, in a library where nerds go when they die, I sat in an orgasmically comfortable leather chair beneath a painting of a man whose girth and mustache shrieked “1800s steel baron” or “Walrus King.”

It reminded of the Diogenes Club from Sherlock Holmes, Holmes’ brother’s plush club that called for silence. If the Diogenes Club had a collection of all the Federal Writers Project books under glass and a surprising amount of Erma Bombeck.

It also had a collection of first prints of Chicagoana in a locked cabinet. It included Ben Hecht’s “1001 Afternoons in Chicago.” I snapped a photo with my phone, the simulated shutter snap ripping through the silent room.

Five was my destination. One room was getting readied for our cocktail reception. In a room across the way, a couple was recited outrageous wedding prices. I circled a staircase past a portrait that looked like a less-bald Moriarty to go up to six.

Six was my destination too, it seemed. Staff were preparing the banquet, glasses tinking against each other like a symphony for triangle.

The art was modern on six. I didn’t like it.

In the stairway up, I came across a painting I liked a lot. It was a painting of a Chicago street, the line style an 1800s impressionist, the scene of Burger Kings and other spots the only betrayal it was more modern.

A dining room marked as reserved for the Notre Dame Club luncheon took me in. I walked past to a back room where chairs were stacked and art was painted on the walls, right on the walls. The ceiling tiles tattered and crumbled above this storage space.

Art was painted on the walls, right on the walls. An attempt at a trompe l’oeil timetable for the Albany and Buffalo, a fake spot for time cards, a deer head, all painted right on the walls in a storage space. 

Across the room had more painted paintings in painted frames. One looked like an Edward Gorey train conductor. Another was a house. I felt uncomfortable. I moved on.

I went down a hallway on seven. I walked to a door I know I shouldn’t open. I did. It was a plain white stairwell, back-and-forth staircases less ornate and art-laden than the ones below circled me up past various floors marked “N.”

8N, 9N, 10N.

At 14N, I walked through the door and take the damn elevator up to 22N. It’s tastefully decorated. I found another white stairwell to go up up.

It was getting more industrial, less comfortable. I saw a corridor off to the side. I followed it past a window peeking out onto air vents and find a room with a net for people to shag golf balls into. The room was plain and white. I was reminded of public elementary schools. A printed sheet of paper taped to the door said the Golf Room would be closed through April 26 for repairs. It wa May 3.

I went back to circle more winding featureless staircases. Up up up. At the top, nothing. A locked door that said “Danger. High Voltage.”

I went down to see if I won my award.

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That’s the rich. Meet the poor.