WHERE MY STORY IDEAS AND LOCATIONS COME FROM: CANAL STREET SELF-STORAGE

Abandoned Industry in Bedford Park

Many of you know that I have about 2000 photos on Google Earth via Panoramio. Here's a few of the most recent run-down business I could find. About two miles NE of my house.

A NEW RIGHT-HANDED COMMENT SKETCH

been awhile I know.

THE STORY I WROTE TO GET PAST 9/11

  I CANNOT PROTECT HER EVER AGAIN
            By Wayne Allen Sallee


    Nine weeks now, the man has felt anger and anxiety and fear for all the right as well as all the wrong reasons.  The past was a constant, everything that occurred with horrifying quickness on that achingly blue late summer morning framed in video and glossy magazine print, yet for the man, who turned 42 just two days before the terrorist hijackings, the present comes in fragments.  One day he is right with his reasonings, that same evening it is as if his very existence is a terrible mistake.
    The man had left downtown Chicago in a rush that Tuesday, heading south and west to suburban Burbank.  The train line ended at Midway Airport and he saw hundreds of unfamiliar faces.  The FAA had landed all aircraft; these unknown bodies were finding Chicago a way station, shambling about towards taxis and hotels.  The man still did not know the severity of the terrorist events.  He did not know of the fourth hijacked flight, where the passengers fought their captors and all died in a Pennsylvania field.
    He just wanted to get home and see his nine year old niece and godchild, who would be home from school on lunch.  He walked briskly past workmen on 87th Street digging a new sewer and wondered if they had heard any news at all that morning.  He cut across the parking lot of the Jordan Baptist church and was up the steps and in the door, flipping on the living room television before even extracting the keys from the lock.
      When the man saw the film of the planes crashing, the towers falling, all he could think of was that this was the world we were leaving to the next generation.  And then, walking into the small, suburban kitchen, with a suncatcher over the sink and a refrigerator with school drawings and pizza coupons held in place by magnets of dogs in police and firefighter uniforms , and seeing his godchild eating grilled cheese sandwiches and reading a Dear America chapter book, his heart dropped.  Not long before, he had realized that he had attained middle age, and saw himself as being less and less a protective source towards the young and the innocent, his godchild’s peer group.  What good would it be to follow her back to class, dodging behind trees to remain unnoticed, if some religious lunatic decided the whole place should be bombed to dust?
    And he had, for the first time this century, his first dark feelings towards ending his life.  That is, he wanted to write a story in which the main character ends his life, not through suicide, but through heroism or some other form of self-sacrifice.  He had gotten away from killing his narrators off over the years, as his godchild and now his sister’s twins, now going on three, were aware that their uncle wrote books and stories.   In the twins case, they knew their uncle had his picture on some book covers, just like Mickey Mouse or The Cat In The Hat did.  And so his stories carried a happier tone.
    He had stopped writing stories for shock value, attempting to create reaction regardless of it was good or bad.  In a collection of stories published in 1996, he dedicated the book to his godchild, saying that when he was gone, she could read the stories and see how he tried to make sense of his days.
    In the weeks that followed, the aftermath burrowed into his brain.  At first, the man was angry, feeling in that detached it-didn’t-happen-to-me way the betrayal and violation a rape or mugging victim might share.  What could he have done?
    The terror of the hijacked passengers.  A glass and steel and concrete tomb, collapsing, girders and jumping bodies from a hundred stories up looking like confetti.  Mass murderers who use another language to speak to another God before gunning the motors towards the Promised Land.
    The man had faith because he had been born crippled.  Faith told him God made him this way for a reason, to learn, to teach, to write.   That played a good part in why so many of his main characters weren’t around for subsequent stories; why they died, or succumbed to madness.  This attempt at playing with his future kept him sane when he needed to be lucid the most.  One of his fantasies of years past was of making a planned disappearance; of course, this was before his sister had a family.  People end up missing in the big, bad city every day.  He thought of getting on a Greyhound and doing a Richard Kimble to Portland.  Or maybe Denver.  Take his new name from the TV Guide movie listings.  William Hurt played seedy lawyer Ned Racine in Body Heat.  Mitchum portrayed Jonny Algiers in the sequel to Thunder Road.  Instead of accelerating his future by dying in his stories, a new name and job in a city of strangers would be like changing the present, of having it run parallel to the “old” present.  But now (if he ever really could) the man couldn’t even do a painless thing like vanishing, knowing that in time even family would forget, if only in a small, diminished way.
    And it was all because of the nine year old washing her lunch plate in the sink, telling him how the second grade teachers had everyone looking up words in dictionaries,  while in the other room, on a big screen television, two towers collapsed like white sand.  The man had to stay sane for her.
    And staying sane meant writing stories.  Telling tales of other peoples’ psyches.  And so he wrote.  The man’s godchild spent several weekends at the house, eager to use the man’s computer and access various websites involving pop singing stars and cartoons on cable.  But the news would always come on, or a news break; most times, there was news right there when America Online popped up on the screen.  The girl knew Bush and bin Laden, and knew of some other things in generalized form.  She said that the Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld looked like her friend down the block’s grandfather.  She knew about Afghanistan, and in talking with other nine year olds on the playground, decided that the reason everyone talked about New York City and not the Washington was because the two tall buildings had fallen, whereas the Pentagon was just broken up a little.
    The man listened to her tell him this, he loved their one on one talks, and he thought back to 1968.  What the hell could the topic of conversation have been in the brick gangway of Charles Gates Dawes grade school?  Certainly not Vietnam or the Apollo space program.   How does a nine year old process what goes on in the world of today?  The world we are leaving them?
    Yes, he could experience the end of his days through his fictional characters.                     
        And he could think of ways to alter or adapt to the present, by starting fresh, even though he never would, short of being in a Witness Relocation program.  But there was no changing the past.  The seasons had changed, leaves of red and orange fallen, window decorations of ghouls and spider webbed hedges madly juxtaposed with flying flags hanging from poles near driveways and smaller flags on suction cups in windows next to the goblins and toothy witches.  September 11th had happened.  It wasn’t a story.  And it might never be simply a thing of the past.  Let go and let God.  Maybe he would, come the snows of December or January.  For now it was more difficult.
    The man was putting up a front for the people around him; his family, co-workers, his godchild.  Mostly his godchild, because of how he felt on that beautiful sky blue day when he realized he could no longer expect to protect her with absolute certainty.  He had written horror stories for fifteen years, but the hijackers made him feel little and inconsequential.  For that is what terrorists do so well.  Mohammed Atta did what Hannibal Lecter never could.  And the man understood why.
      He was no longer sleeping well.  He would type his stories to the point of exhaustion, masking the spasms with pain-relieving gel, laying down long past midnight, only to waken at three-fifteen to the sound and image of a passenger jet crashing into the Sears Tower in a sky the brightest blue.  He would lay there unblinking in the darkness, his nostrils burning from the pain gel pressed into his shoulders and neck muscles  only now, the smell was that of jet fuel.
    Awake then until the false dawn that Chicago’s Octobers bring, he sees himself jumping from a hundred stories up because the very air around him is on fire, of the crunch of body parts beneath his feet, the crunch of the last hijacker’s nose as he, the greatest hero ever, wrestles control of the cockpit and then that final hijacked plane goes into a nose dive but destroys no other building.
    He imagined screams and then the dreams were of explosions in Union Station or of several swarthy men leaping forward on an elevated train, praising their God, before blowing everybody up.  The man used to remember when serial killers were the worst thing to conceive.  His godchild knew all about Stranger Danger, but the Christopher Wilders, Andrew Cunanen and the BTK Stranglers operated almost by chaos theory. 
    But how do you live with terrorists who will just as easily die with you?   Certainly, the man knew enough people of European extract who would say this terrorism is nothing new if you have ever been anywhere else in the world.  His doctor emigrated from Croatia in 1984 and often spoke of mass graves.  Even rotund Henry, who sold lottery tickets in the lobby of a downtown building, said that a plane crash and mass death meant next to nothing in Pakistani life.  Just another day in paradise. 
    He explained this in simple terms to his godchild, how in other lands, you could not own a television or radio, women could not laugh in public and had to hide their faces.
    The man finished up a story he would be reading that next week at a bookstore near the University of Chicago.  He lay back in his chair and dreamt one last time.  In his dream, he is on the rooftop of a building several blocks from the Sears Tower.  It is overcast, rainy.  He turns to stare at me, a distance away.
    “Remember the plane hitting Tower Two?”,  he asked.  It came up in a graceful arc on the television while everybody was watching smoke coming from the north tower.  A commercial plane, the newscasters were saying. “ Then, boom, the fireball.” I jerked away.
    I looked over LaSalle Street, the elevated tracks like Lego blocks far, far below.  But the air around me was not on fire, nor would it ever be.  A gull arced past, not a bit of sky in its path, flying gracefully past building after building.  Like the second hijacked jetliner.
    The man wanted me to look at him, as if I was seeing into a mirror.  He took a gun from his jacket pocket, waved it in an arc.  Though the sky was grey, the weapon glinted and it could have been a less-benign bird.  Aside from gulls and pigeons, Chicago also has peregrine falcons that roost like gargoyles on upper ledges.
    “Look how it curves upward, purposefully, with a mission.”  He stares at me, unblinking.  He has an almost beatific smile.  “Tell her I can’t take the dreams or the reality anymore, will you?”  I don’t move.
    Then he arced the gun away from him, off to the right, like a gunslinger in a bad film.  He pulled the trigger then, after pointing the gun at me, and the last thing I could think was what was faster, the jet hitting Tower Two, or the bullet coring into my left eye socket?
    I awaken on the couch with a start.  It is an early Sunday afternoon and my godchild is typing away at my computer’s keyboard.  I shut my eyes.  A passenger jet hits the Bank One building and the keyboard clacking becomes severed bodies slapping into the plaza’s water fountain.  I shake the image away and then I see a pair of hands in plastic handcuffs, a woman’s wedding ring on one bloody finger.  The hands are twisted in a weird type of desperate prayer, and the tendons and muscle are severed past the wrists.  A man’s torn, clenched fist opens to reveal a child’s equally torn and tiny hand. 
    I do not know when I will stop living like this.  The man who shot me in his dream nods his head in solemn agreement.
    The gray behind my eyelids is a field of containment.


                            Wayne Allen Sallee
                            Burbank, Illinois:23 October 2001
   

THE END OF ZERO YEAR WITHOUT MY DAD

It has been easy to come up with reasons as to why I have not been more productive this year. Part of it, certainly, has included all the outdoor chores and the aches that follow. Not all from my CP, many are frm old age now. I turn 56 on the 9th, but I really don't want to celebrate anymore, because last year I received my father's urn on my birthday. More shots of my father, and then onward to new posts of new things.

BAD GRAMMAR THEATER: 21 AUG 15

I received a ton of copies of AGONY IN BLACK, a comic I was in that Joe Monks published in 2000. Recently, he contacted me about finding some boxes in his garage and would I want any? I said, sure, give me ten. He sent me forty. So I read one of my Every Mother's Son stories, "Because He Can". Big crowd, too. The usual band of misfits read, as well. Harold Holt, Brendan Detzner (the host, Maggie Wagner, Christine Fugate, Michael Penkas, and Reina Hardy, who I could not photograph as the battery on my camera went dead.

THE AMERICAN DREAM VS. THE COUCH POTATO

Mike Penkas has been kind enough to take stories I had typed on my old Smith-Corona Galaxie Twelve and get them computerized for me. For those of you unfamiliar with my character The American Dream from the 80s and 90s, check out the photo above and it will help you make sense of the story below.

The American Dream Meets The Couch Potato
by Wayne Allen Sallee
The following dialogue will be later photocopied and distributed throughout the City. It is important that the Children understand where I am coming from. It is Sunday the Twelfth of June in 2988 this is an old typewriter and there is no one key only an ell key. It is actually then the year 1988. I am sitting on a street corner at let me see Sangamon and Liberty which is part of the Maxwell Street Flea Market that everybody in their right mind has heard about.
I am sitting by a man who tells me that his name that he goes by is Fabian Migillicuddy though his pals laugh at this like I am being “dissed.” I know what “dissed” means because I am of the Street. Fabian sells all kinds of typewriters and clowns and even has a Cuddly Duddly from the old Ray Rayner Show if you are old enough to remember this. Remember diver Dan and Miss Minerva? How cool. I do. I have been around the Maxwell Street area (The Police Station, 7th District you see every night at the beginning of Hell Street Blues and also in the movie the Blues Brothers they eat in Nick’s). I have patrolled here because the dreaded Eighth Street Man was seen eating in the Silver Grill on Depot Street just two blocks south of here. But I realized suddenly that I had to recount my incident involving the Couch Potato before the Haldol makes me forget.
So Fabian let me sit here and type on this smith-corona Corsair Deluxe with no One Key.
Perhaps he will let me have this as an exchange for patrolling what was known as Bronzetown in the days of Capone and his ilk. I will be visiting relatives in Kentucky soon and could put this instrument to good use on the Greyhound bus rolling down Interstate Sixty-Five. The passengers would not mind because all citizens understand The American Dream.
The incident I am to relate happened to happen just days ago. I was patrolling further north than usual particularly because of sightings of the Eighth Street Man. Andrew who I see at the Lawson YMCA sometimes he said that he might be up around Sheridan in the Rizzy area known to the city as Buena Park. Also lots of drugs are dealt there now and I can only pray and wonder what it will be like when the hapless Cubbies start playing night Games in the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. I will be stopping drunkards and carousers from urinating on people’s lawns the whole week.
On the particular night in question I was patrolling Hazel Street and came across several children making a big production number out of running up and peeking in the front window of a house specifically right at the corner of Junior Terrace there by the Monterey Apartments. In the heart of the City yet you’d be surprised that many on the street speak only Polish and that far north by the Lake is strange. So I knew that these kids were fooling with a hardworking person of Polish descent and I don’t have to tell you that I too am of Polish descent though I cannot reveal my name other than The American Dream. I am becoming quite well known.
I watched what they were doing for several of my minutes and then came forward without still letting them see me. Everyday kids mind you. Not crackheads and their diseases, like so many youngsters today. And I am so glad that young blind Justice did not live to see all of this that the City has become.
The children like you and me once were would take turns running up to the door of the two-flat and ring the bell, sometimes a child feistier than the others would look in the window. To the left of the door. Something about this set-up made me check it out and I tell you now I am glad I did.
There was a man sitting in a chair directly opposite the picture window. He was sitting in a big green chair the kind like you see Art Linkletter or the Medicaid people sell on TV. When they aren’t showing commercials for singles clubs and parties and Hot Love. Behind him on the wall was a framed picture of Pope John Paul II as he is from Poland you know as well as I do. The TV was on and it must have been under the window area because you could not see it. I know it was on though because, when it got dark after the kids were called back home and still respected their parents enough to go straight home after being called the second time, then you could see blue light coming from under the window and hitting the man’s face. He was dead you know.
As well as I do. The children had been making a game of who would get closest and maybe thought that ringing the doorbell would wake the elderly man up from his nap. There was mail in the mailbox did I say? A copy of the Enquirer and Star, the elderly man who was dead was named Jablonski. Stashu Jablonski. Mr. Other mail was for voting and social security. No one watched as I went through his mail because I was hoping for a purpose.
Then it all came to me. A way to teach the children respect. Sure maybe they didn’t know that the man Jablonski was dead, I mean he never moved but still, I just felt they needed to be put in Their Places.
I waited until it was very dark and some punk from the Monterey Apartments was playing a Don Rickles album really loud. Didn’t he or she know that it was summer and other people had their windows wide open too? Then I broke the window under cover of the noise, the back one by the door. The elderly man was stinking a bit but my ski mask covered up the smell. Also, it was a long day for me and I wasn’t the nicest of smellers too.
I guess he died during the day because no other lights were on even in the kitchen. I hoped that he did not have a dog like my beloved dead so long Scoopy because the dog would certainly be eating the elderly man’s feet.
He wasn’t eaten at all. Just dead, maybe from angie or some other heart thing. You see this all the time. This was last Friday so I knew the children would be back for their innocent harassment of this dead man.
I was ready but knew I would be hungry before it was all over. But it would be worth it because the children would understand.
I will skip ahead as the only thing on Insomniac Theater was The Saint in New York. Boy I laughed over that I tell you. So I will skip ahead now.
At about ten o’clock they came again. Was there nothing else to do on Hazel Street? What did I do you ask. I took all of my Strength but I was able to prop myself up behind the elderly dead man and when I knew that the children were at the window. I. Shoved.
Okay maybe. Maybe I shoved too hard because Mr. Stashu hit the TV set with his waist and fell into the window where it broke. He had kind of a big nose like my psychiatrist don’t tell him I said it though and it smashed against the glass. If that little scamp Blind Justice my sidekick had not died searching for the King of Rock and Roll last summer at Navy Pier 9 (for his resurrection of course, we thought then), he would have rushed around front to see if the man’s nosehairs were pressed against the glass as well.
All the children backed off and ran away screaming or something except for one. Could he be brave enough to be my new sidekick I was thinking then to be honest.
I chose that moment to open the door. Go Home and Learn To Respect the Dead, I told him. If he gave me the answer I was looking for then maybe he’d be fit.
He pointed at the old man with an artist’s hand. Do you mean him? he asked and I nodded. He’s a couch potato is all. who are you? He asked and I told him that crippled and insane, I am The American Dream.
You know what I think, he said then, I think that you’re dead too. He gave me the finger just as the picture of the Pope fell off the wall.
He ran off then. Here then is the message for the children at large.
Don’t mess around with dead people because it will always get back to you.
I called the police and told them that the boy who gave me the finger killed the old man by scaring him quite badly. I described both of them completely.
Something should come of it you know as well as I do.