Remembering Paranoia After All These Years

It’s been one of those weeks and perhaps, I’ll be saying months soon enough, but for now, I’ll say weeks. As we pull into martial law or perhaps more appropriately, lockdown, in America, week one, I’ve already felt the brunt of it and even in the simplicity of writing an email to my Uncle Mickey, as simple as writing something in the subject line, in which I wrote something to ponder-a friend sent this to me tonight.

I guess even the strangeness of the message within the subject line set off alarm bells for the 109 elves working behind the scenes at Google during the day, enough so that Uncle Mickey told me that my email was marked dangerous and had subjugated the situation in his subject line, You’ve been hacked!

Of course I wasn’t. I was only expressing my feelings, as only I can. And it reminded me of a memory from long ago, from my first career as a newspaper reporter in the suburbs of Chicago. I was a late bloomer when it came to any career I had.

Slow learner in high school, perhaps but I did pick up speed once I hit college or undergrad and yet it took me 10 years to graduate. Tough times. It was pretty much looking for the right fit for college, work and lifestyle and not always in that order either. Five colleges in 10 years. Not bad, a couple of crash and burns, but finally I had gone to where I was supposed to have gone and made it and graduated.

My goal was to be first and foremost a journalist of some kind, be in print or radio, no money in either I was always told. And I’d been a journalist at the end of high school and a radio news director and print journalist along the way. My specialties were entertainment writing, features, investigative reporting and interviews. There wasn’t ever anyone I couldn’t make talk, while understanding, that I knew all the tricks of the trade.

By the time I had arrived at the Des Plaines Urinal (sic), in the fall of 1992, I had already made a south suburban village treasurer resign over a hidden felony record and later missing finances, yet also covered the first ever drive-by shooting, but had a ton of work behind me. That landed me in Des Plaines. My relationship with managing editor Toad Weasel wasn’t always friendly either. He was a hard-skulled character who I frequently disagreed with, never gave me bylines for good stories I had written, because his philosophy was that I had to earn them or more than likely I had to kiss his ass in order to receive my just desserts. Essentially the guy was a true asshole that didn’t give a damn about his writers.

To him, it was a family-owned mom and pop business, in which his father was publisher, his mother travel editor, his brother, in charge of advertising and him as managing editor. Everyone else was hired out as lackeys or lack-thereof. He always hired the best or the worst of reporters and had the shittiest of equipment, including the two by four pieces of lumber for a desk top, barely covering the four drawers consisting of our desks and the basic upon basic of Mac computers, and if it was broken because your screen froze and he didn’t know how to fix it, well, you sometimes had to wait up to four hours to type your story. Typewriters were considered obsolete to him, even in 1992, even though he had a Royal typewriter in his private office.

Weasel and I never saw eye-to-eye, that is for sure and one thing that made me particularly upset with him was his tendency to snoop around our personal lives and our personal files on our computers, which in his mind more than likely at the time he felt that since we worked for him, that all of our notes for stories, all of our scraps of paper we wrote on, the notebooks we paid for out of our pocket, belonged to him. This habit, which I am sorry to say, didn’t get him in trouble at that time, though should have, because in many ways, that was a violation of privacy, no matter how it was viewed or sliced. Take your pick, either or. Didn’t matter to him.

It was one of those early morning search junkets that Weasel conducted, as he always did before his newspaper staff came in for the day, nearly got me hung because of something I didn’t do. As I previously stated, he would go through our files and also at times, though our computer trash bins to see what were working on or doing, possibly stealing company time at least in his mind.

I always made it a point to make copies of my work, harbor it on a floppy disk and throw out what I didn’t need, so he couldn’t find any excess on my computer. He often offered the excuse that he did that as a way to save space on our computers, as computers back then only had 8 megs of ram.

One particular morning, I think it was a Wednesday. Weasel was digging through my computer files and he finds one titled “note to self.” In the morning when I arrive for work, I noticed that Weasel, the managing editor is just staring at me for over an hour until his assistant Tad Soyler arrives and settles in. Tad’s a big burly man and probably would have made a great wrestler or lumberjack. Tad walks over to my desk and says to me in a very low but concerned voice, “We need to talk.”

So, he brings me into the lobby and screams, “Toad was going through your files and he found this!” And he holds up the printed file that reads note to self and on the inside of the file, was a note written, “smile, the end is near.” And Tad, the assistant says in an alarmingly paranoid voice, “Do you know anything about this? Weasel thinks you’re going crazy!”

 I paused briefly and I tried to think about who would do this to me. Then it hits me. I seem to recall that my now-late friend, Mulligan Moose was always a practical joker. I met him in journalism school, during the last half of my undergrad college career. He was a year in back of me. We always hung out together. Went drinking. Horseback riding. Dinners. Roadtrips. Crazy driving that nearly got us thrown from his mom’s clunky station wagon one night. He would end up retiring by age 38, as a millionaire but would never enjoy it, as he died just months after retirement, in May 2003 as a result of a massive heart attack, just after taking a swim at a local YMCA.

He would come in often, as he knew one of the other overnight press technicians, talk to him and leave, just moments before Weasel would arrive that day. But for the sake of Tad, I told him that I didn’t know anything about it. Tad has also since passed away. God bless that man, Tad.

What made me think of that particular incident in my past life was that Weasel was always paranoid of things that never came true. But in his mind they were and that’s probably what mattered most. And seeing how far we’ve come with paranoia and fear, including 911 and now this fucking Covid-19 scare.

Paranoia is working overtime thanks in part to the local and federal governments, social media, mainstream media, alternate presses and websites and it has certainly impacted friendships of mine. I’m not used to watching my friends crack up so fast or as quick. It’s really terrible, but this is the new reality of the matter.

And I have a great feeling that after Covid-19 passes over our universe, paranoia and fear, will truly be the new norm.

Botox Frankenstein Poetry Series>Scars (For Jessie)

Editor's Note-It's been a very long time since I have published poetry on this blog, Just as I have started posting essays, so I shall begin posting poems. And this poem, Scars, is the best way to start.
As always, enjoy.

Hidden away from the world, she confides in me her desire to love and be loved

How long it’s been since she’s kissed a boy for feeling like a broken toy on the ground scattered 

Strewn in pieces 

She is shy in my mind’s eye so submissive in suspicion 

I want to take her and cradle her and soothe her and kiss her and tell her the monsters are gone forever but I can’t 

For she is a space I cannot begin to understand or breathe, just imagining the horror of war

The bloodied faces, severed souls in two

And the care she applies to make them come alive, back when life was just happy and true

This need for oil, this need for lust, turns into rust and it’s so damn difficult to support the thinking of paranoia behind the brains of the old who send the young who do the damage and destroy their souls in the process

Power verses passion 

Money verses misunderstandings 

It’s going to hurt them all in the end 

Their future not hard to predict at all

I want to reach out and grab her and hold her in my arms and soothe her tell her to come home but I know I can’t do that 

I will only pray for her safety and her passion holds strong and the day that we meet I can sing her a song and that she'll laugh, live and love and leave behind the anger she once felt for a past she held hard like my hands, in our cradle of love

(Written March 7, 2020)

The Little Death

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A death of a loved one is not an easy dilemma to deal with. It comes in many forms however, not just human.

Having said that, I’d met Jim Gautier nearly 25 years ago in Chicago at No Exit, on a Wednesday night, during an open mic session. I’d been going to these sessions since 1988 either by myself or with friends, to read my poetry and/or just listen to other words. I had a habit in those days or bringing my tape recorder along with me to a session.

Being a reporter since the late 1970s for my high school newspaper and subsequently my college newspapers and radio stations and as a freelancer at that point in my career, I discovered that this was an easy tool to carry with me. And I had plenty of blank tapes in which to record with. Sometimes I would record other poets, make collections of their poems and give them a cassette.

On this particular October evening in 1995, I was with my band mate Lew Brickhate. We were part of the mix that night, playing under the band name, Joey The Tush Kangaroo. Oddly enough, that would be the night that I would meet four men, two of those men I would be roommates with two years later, but of those four men, two of those men would go onto influencing and shaping my career as a performer, by being a teacher, and a performance partner. Jim was one of those guys. Noam Paco Gaster was the other guy, who I would become lifelong friends with.

I don’t remember what Lew and I performed that night. It is on tape, most likely, and like all things, will be another story for another time, but Jim that night was on fire. He did a poem that left a burning desire within me, I can’t exactly recall the title at present, but I know it had a dizzying effect of a coked out mouse stuck in a maze.

Before Jim left Chicago, he along with Gaster and Mark Cohen, would appear at my venue I hosted at the Skokie Public Library in Skokie, Illinois. That was a hell of a night. Fire surrounded the library, so it was nearly impossible to get to the venue itself, plus it was bitter cold. Despite delays, we all had a great time.

Jim had such an intensity about him, beyond belief. That wasn’t lost on me. A few years later, I would visit him and perform/collaborate with him twice, first in Austin, Texas at the 6^th Annual Austin International Poetry Festival in the spring and then later that year, I would visit him in Los Angeles for a week. It was my first time there and being on a bit of a budget and also wanting to see the “stars” I did exactly what most tourists do the first time visiting a big flamboyant city as Los Angeles; I became a tourist.

I remember taking some kind of Hollywood-like tour, probably by transit bus, walking around and later by car to see homes. Jim seemed to be all against that. I seemed to remember that when I was with him, he would scream out stars names as we’d pass their former or current homes, like, “Jack Benny, arghhhhhhh” “Mary Livingston, arghhhhhhh.” He wasn’t a fan of doing such stuff. 

I do remember, however, driving past James Woods in Beverly Hills, though. And walking up through the Hollywood Hills area and stopping to listen to some fat cat scream at the top of his lungs about the need to have better maid service for his 10 million dollar home. And being interviewed by Jay Leno on Melrose Avenue about my proofreading job at a bingo factory in Bellwood, Illinois.

Seeing Shannen Doherty walking down a public street, watching a television taping of Everybody Loves Raymond and winning a contest in between the taping, but never receiving a prize (I recorded that on audio tape too-ask me sometime to play it for you). And walking through Beverly Hills and past Whiskey A-Go-Go, where The Doors once held court nightly, The Rainbo Room and so many other iconic landmarks and places at the time. And reuniting with Lizzie. What a mistake that turned out to be! And going hungry and feet hurting night after night from so much walking. And going to so many jam sessions and poetry readings (all recorded on audio) with Jim and the many friends I met of his.

Jim lived in a modest apartment. Adobe-style flesh-colored with lemon and orange trees in the backyard. And that’s about all I remember of his living quarters. I want to say I arrived by train I think that first time, as I remember taking a lot of photos at Union Station. It was that rental car that saved us the last four days of my trip. It was a good goofy weird trip.

Even though I tried to keep in touch with Jim over time, it seemed nearly impossible. Lack of maybes or impossibilities in between the rust-coated physical and mental trails of dead ends stretched out over decades had most likely done us in.

But then one day, while perusing the internet during a research project, I decided to so a quick chance search I happened to have found him and saw how well I thought he was doing and also saw that he had a radio show called Jimmy's Potpourri on an internet radio station, KILL Radio, a community radio station in Los Angeles no doubt. I had some previous experience both as a programmer and as an assistant producer on community radio, having just finished a 13-month stint (2013-2014) on Q4 Radio in Chicago.

Arrangements were made and then lo and behold; I appeared on his radio show via telephone in December, 2015. He played a lot of my work on in between my appearance, which included a mix of Sid Yiddish And His Candy Henchmen, solo poetry work and Danish music I had subsequently recorded over a period of five years at that point. We played Chicago-based trivia games-we tied on technicalities and also in a dead heat. It was a good time. I had a blast and to be honest, at that point in my life, I had done a lot of radio, but nothing quite like Jim’s show, literally an extension of his personality. It was and still a quality I admire about Jim.

I saw Jim again in September 2017, when I briefly toured Los Angeles with a Chicago rock band for two dates and some grueling nonstop documentary work without a break. He came out to Molly Malone’s in West Hollywood. It was good to see him. I left the tour when an opportunity too good to pass up arose back in Chicago, so I flew home.

Sid Yiddish, KILL Radio, Los Angeles, California, Winter 2019

I appeared twice more on his program in 2018 and 2019 in person, while looking for other opportunities and visiting friends in Los Angeles. Both of those appearances would be with Eileen Weiner, a transplant from Virginia, (by way of Texas and Hawaii) but has lived in Los Angeles for some years. She’s a funny comedienne, singer-songwriter, poetess and writer. I had listened to a previous appearance of hers on KILL Radio and decided to friend her through Facebook. That was indeed a good move. Eileen is pretty personable and a sweetheart  in her own right. While I was there in 2018, Eileen would take me to the biggest Jewish graveyard in all of Los Angeles, namely Hillside Cemetery, near the 405 Freeway, where Al Jolson and many, many other Jewish entertainers are buried. We had a good time scoping out the graves and feeling the vibes within the crypts.

 2018 was a indeed a glorious year after visiting Los Angeles, which included a wild Danish/European tour that summer, appearances on TMZ, recording a future Sid Yiddish And His Candy Store Henchmen album and a performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art was the capper. 2019 wasn’t so terrible either. The trip-entailed game shows, talk shows, recording with my old friend Westley Heine for a future album and of course, reading short stories on KILL Radio with Eileen. Sure I had my ups and downs, but with the shit and shivers, came the grins and the shiver-me-timbers. It was a good feeling over all those past two years. I learned a lot.

And then most recently in 2020, I learned that Jim’s show would be coming to an end, pulling the plug as they say in radio, but not because of his show, but rather because of the station losing its lease. I listened to the March 1^st show, the second-to-last program and it was beautifully done, well thought out and greatly produced. I will be appearing on March 8^th program.

I have to say that I will miss Jim’s program greatly, because whether radio realizes it or not, they need voices like Jim to give community radio its rightful place in the world. When a radio station is unplugged, one million radio waves can be felt like a tremendous earthquake, with aftershocks to be felt for years to come.

Jim said on his program last week that one of the chief reasons he came to radio was to share his vast collection of music. Of that there is no doubt. Jim has a great knowledge of it and knows how to mix it up each and every time he broadcasts. I am hoping for the best for Jim and his news crew of one, John Glazer, that they will land somewhere relatively soon.

Back in 1999, I met Ornette Coleman backstage at Symphony Center in downtown Chicago. I told him how much I admired him and his work and he spoke up and said, "It's not about me, it's the about the music, man!" I however, believe it's a bit of both, so in that sense, Coleman would be half right and half incorrect, because Jim fits Coleman's words just fine.

See you soon, James Gautier. 

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Death Comes In Threes-Part 1: Making Reservations

It’s been a rough week.

I have embraced and enveloped death at least three times. Death of a budding relationship, death of a close friend’s mother and death of a community radio station. I don’t always like starting my week out like that, but so it goes, so goes my nation. Each death symbolizes a small part of life that has been ultimately snuffed out.

In this segment, I’ll tell you about part one. Two and three will come later this week.

Budding new relationship. How I adored Kristine. Wrote 24 poems about her directly or indirectly related to her. From the start, she was running the show-in other words, she laid down the ground rules-boundaries, temporary state of flux, feeling each other out, quite literary too. It felt more like a FWB (friends with benefits) and there were catches. Major catches.  She was converting to another religion. And in order to date her, I had to convert too. She was long distance, so I had to be flexible and patient. And I was. Despite the long distance, five hours driving for her. She was in the middle of a divorce and fighting for full custody of two children. Kristine even asked me for attorney advice. She was very much in control. And maybe desperate.

Sid Yiddish And His Yeshiva Boys Two

But projection and conjecture on her part was bad. Not so good. She wasn’t totally to blame. I was too. I believed her and didn’t like being put on a short leash. I talked too much. Told her way too much too early. Trusted her easily. Bad move, because advantageously I was taken. And when she gave back, she gave back hard and good and soft and vengeful.  My phone blew up in her trunk one early morning while on the way to shul and I had to have it replace it entirely. I don’t think she cared.

I made a lot of the arrangements for us to have Shabbat dinners, visit Orthodox and Chabad halls. I remember one dinner in particular we went to. I tried to fit in and I thought I did. I was asked a lot of questions, as was she. And I answered them all. To her, that was talking too much.

As an observer I almost had to be a Jewish Quaker, in other words, be the dummy, Charlie McCarthy for all those over 70, on Edgar Bergen’s lap, who talked when Bergen threw his voice or moved the dummy, Charlie McCarthy. I wasn’t quite ready to be a dummy.

But I suspected that old stereotype Jewish joke fit me just fine. In case you don’t know it, it goes a little like this: “What’s the best job for a JAP (Jewish American Prince, usually it’s princess)? Making reservations.”

We met in the weirdest of ways, through social media, Facebook to be exact. During the latter half of December 2019, I have a habit of posting photos a lot. Similarly, like an art curator, who changes exhibits every few months. With photos it was the same principle. A lot of people don’t change their photos. Can’t imagine why. Oh well.

I had just posted a photo of myself with tefillin in a selfie with a couple of local Chicago Yeshiva boys. I’d been tefillined before by one of them and in fact, this past Friday during my week of death was tefillined by a familiar Yeshiva boy again. I can’t hide if I tried from them. Not that I want to of course, but anyway. Tefillin in layman’s terms is just this: a black leather strap with a small black box attached to it, containing a parchment with a prayer inside the box. Usually, when I see them is Friday afternoons-I see at least 10 of them, a minyan in fact. How ironic. Or maybe it’s in God’s plan of helping me get it all together.

 Whenever they corral me, I choose to be tefillined. And with them, I say a simple prayer in Hebrew that they repeat with me. I almost know it by heart in as many weeks that I’ve performed it. In early December, I had seen them first at a local Dunkin Donuts in East Rogers Park. I was with my friend Davina, we were playing Crazy 8s, I think and I saw one Yeshiva boy come in and as he was leaving, all I said to him was, “Have a good Shabbat.”

That’s all it took to get him to respond.

And then of course, the eternal question popped out; are you Jewish? I said yes and that lead to another Yeshiva boy who wanted to tefillin me. Davina had never seen this performed before and I had to reassure her a few times that these guys wouldn’t hurt me. I stepped outside, as she watched in bewilderment as they performed their mitzvah. Selfies followed and poof! They were gone. Onto the next Jew. 

A few weeks followed before I would see two familiar faces on the Morse el platform. The Yeshiva boys. I was heading south this time and they asked me if I wanted to be tefillined. This time I had said no, because I really wanted time to myself, which was the South Loop. They insisted and so I gave in. The great advantage I had going for me this time, was that I had an empty el car all to myself.

And so I was teflillined. And after that, they went on their way, as I did too. It was this particular experience however, when I believe I received one of the better selfies I had taken with these two guys. And so, when I posted the photo on my cover page in the early morning of December 15, exactly one week before my 58^th birthday, I had no idea what was about to take place.  It didn’t take long for any kind of reaction to begin popping.

What turned out to be a catastrophe in the beginning ended as a blessing in disguise. A film guy I had been friends for a few years, based on a sketch he had made of me nearly 30 years ago, in a subway tunnel in downtown Chicago, after searching for and finding him on Facebook and asking him about it, we became fast friends. He saw my photo with two Yeshiva boys and it made him react caustically, a psychotic episode at best. Overreaction at its worse. Anyone who came to my defense that day on that particular day and over the course of the next few days, would be verbally attacked and threatened with the wrath of God. I’ve had previous experience with that situation before, so it wasn’t exactly new to me.

Between that film guy, and me I had promising career placement all lined up-a small part in one of his films and two of my Henchmen compositions within the film. I was a shoo-in at last for an indie award. But not to be. Being Jewish was my downfall to him. In the meantime, while all of this was going on, my friend Scott had tried to intervene on my behalf to see if he could get inside this guy’s line of thinking, but alas he was trumped too. Threw up his hands and posted his conversational threads with the film guy. On that particular day, Kristine was watching and waiting and then decided to direct message me. “Are you Jewish?” “Yes,” I responded. She showed up on my doorstep nine days later and so our relationship began.

In between that time, we romanced each other, ate and talked our way about all of our lives happy and sad and everything else in between. Most people think or at least tell me that romance is supposed to go on for a long, long time. Whatever that means and for some reason, I always get involved with the crazy ones, despite how they sell themselves off to me.

The doom to fail part came up quite early, when we had talked the first time she showed up on my doorstep. We had just been walking from my local city center. It was Christmas Day. I had found a $20 bill on the way home that afternoon. It was to the point, our deep conversations began. We talked about anything and everything. And I mean everything.

Being that she was in custody battle for her two children and in all likelihood she assumed somewhere in her mind that she would lose them, because she had told me, that her ex-husband had planned to testify that she was unfit to be a good mother, because of her varied mental illness, which for the sake of this conversation, will not be disclosed, but she did have one leg up on me, that of being hospitalized for inability to cope.

Her chief concern was that. And so she told me outright that she wanted more babies. I didn’t know how ready I was at that moment to hear that, because usually, that kind of talk takes place when you’re in solid and not the second day you meet someone. Also, she confessed she had been “stalking” my page for two to three years.

Stalking. That poses a problem. Or as my friend Grue says, “it’s toxic.” When I saw Grue in Philadelphia in late January, she told me as much as she cares about me and she does a lot, she didn’t want to hurt my feelings but did bluntly tell me, that the relationship I was having with Kristine, was toxic and it would be best to bail.

I saw the beginning of the end of our relationship in early February, while I was in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania discussing weather options with Punxsutawney Phil. Phil came through with his end of the bargain. An early spring. Meantime, Kristine came to Chicago on her own and stayed with the couple that we’d met a few months previously. I felt betrayed. Used. Used as her steppingstone in order for her to get where she needed to go.

When we talked the night I got back from Punxsutawney to Philadelphia, the conversation lasted for 14 minutes. I knew the end was near. The week after, she sounded chipper, but then, last week, we had a decent conversation and then she sprang it on me. Decided to put me in the friend zone and reminded me that it was all temporary. Simply put, she stated that she was had “no interest in “typicalness.”  I laughed quietly to myself and said, “Well, I’m very atypical.” She sneered back and said, “Oh, that’s for sure!” I stopped her in mid-conversation and asked her what she meant by that. She refused to answer. It was like pulling teeth. And then she switched the subject purposely and dug deeper into my personal difficulties.

So I thought about it and responded this way: “Stop projecting your anger onto me just because you are coming out of a bad marriage and leaving a bad husband and projecting all of his flaws on me, doesn’t make me the same person.”

Dead silence on the phone for what seemed like hours, but were indeed seconds. She wished me luck, as I did her and then, boom! Down went her receiver. I cried hot stinging tears for five minutes and then it was over. I was very sad, but knew I had to move forward. “At least you saw some action,” my friend Peter would tell me a few days later. I wanted more than just action with Kristine. I saw a lot  of myself crumble in those five minutes. But five minutes is all it takes to figure out what your next moves will be. And I perked up.

And that’s kind of the easy part. Kind of. Sort of. Not really though, because you damn well better believe if you’re going to switch-hit into another religion completely, that you will still be carrying all of your previous baggage with you.
Grue was right. Kristine was toxic.
She’ll make a fine Jewess to some poor schlub someday.