The Ho Tavern

7318 N. Rogers

Chicago, IL 60626

R.I.P

19?? - October 11th, 2010

Thanks for the memories, old girl. You'll be missed.

Not In Arizona

A late summer evening and some of my Mexican neighbors over on the next block, on Damen Avenue, are having a party.

They live in a red brick 4-flat with a two-car garage attached. The garage door is thrown up and a soft yellow light glows from within. Blue and white balloons dangle from the ceiling; blue and white banners hang from the walls. Two long folding tables, each covered with a white paper tablecloth, stand beneath the balloons, surrounded by folding chairs. Children huddle in the chairs, shoveling hunks of pastel de tres leches into their tiny mouths with plastic forks. Adult women move among them. The men are gathered outside, either seated on more folding chairs or leaning against the sides of pickup trucks.

Behind the long tables, near the back wall, stand three musicians. They wear white ruffled shirts and formal black vests. Two strum guitars. Another pumps an accordian. They play rancheras, nortenas, patriotic songs honoring fallen heroes of the Mexican revolution. Their music begins before sundown and continues after dark. Mexcian songs from the garage drift through the neighborhood, and are audible many blocks away. Everyone at the party, everyone passing by on the street, everyone save the musicians, is strangely silent. Listening.

It suddenly occurs to me how fortunate they might be--how fortunate we all might be--that this particular garage stands in Chicago, Illinois and not in Arizona.

Bird Lady

Today on the L, I sat behind a couple of teenage girls who were gossiping about an old lady they saw from time to time, a strange old lady who liked to feed the birds.

This strange old lady hobbled to the park each morning all by herself, a loaf of Wonder Bread stuffed into her purse. She spent all day sitting on a bench, tearing off crumbs and throwing them to the pigeons, who gathered all around her.

"I don't know what her problem is," one of the girls told her friend. "I wanna go, like, 'lady, the pigeons don't need you to feed them.'"

They were still to young to understand it was the old lady who
needed to feed the pigeons, not the other way around.

Life is Only Temporary

Fourteen years old and I am straddling my Huffy, sailing down a sidewalk left slick by a sudden summer rainstorm. My hair is drenched. Wind rushes across my scalp and cools my ears. My white t-shirt sticks to my chest and stomach like a second skin. Hands gripping the handlebars. Feet locked onto the peddles. My strong, young thighs pump up and down like a pair of leathery pistons.

I don't see the trench at the end of the block until my front tire nearly meets its lip. Construction work. Curb gouged out. Not a single warning flag or sign in sight. Fuck you, you lazy, thoughtless bastards.

My brakes are nearly shot. My tires are balled, and slippery from slicing through the newly formed puddles. Too late to stop. Too late to turn. I am gonna roll right over this trench whether I like it or not. I clench my teeth, tighten my gut. I brace myself for what I fear will be a nasty, painful jolt in the crotch.

But the jolt never comes. Instead, my front tire drops right into the trench and a I am airborne. I fly over the handlebars and spend an eternal, exquisite moment in contact with nothing, nothing but air. I even have time to blink. To swing my head right, then left. But before my eyes can focus on anything, it's over.

My right shoulder smashes onto the blacktop with an sharp, audible "crack!" The rest of my body crumples down around it. The impact blasts the air right out of my lungs. For the first time in my life, I have the experience of drawing breath with all my might and coming up empty. I literally cannot breath. I try again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. Somewhere nearby, a car horn is blaring.

Sheer animal panic sets in. I roll onto my back, gaze up at the sky. Please, God, let me breathe. Let me breathe, God.

The sky is bright, blue. Empty.

I try to draw breath again. Nothing. Mushroom clouds are bursting in front of my eyes, billowing patches of black on black. Something wet and sticky and hot is filling them up, blinding me.

Then suddenly, the air rushes back into my chest in a torrent, a glorious cloudburst blessing a parched and dying land with sweet, cool rain. I breath in, breath out. Breath in, breath out. Then I cough. Then wretch. Then start to cry.

I can hear footfalls and people's voices nearby ("What happened?" "Is that kid okay?"). A youngish black lady in lavender scrubs kneels down next to me, face hovering over mine. Her hair is short and sweeps away from her face in a series slick, delicately sculpted waves. Huge gold hoops dangle from both her ears. Her cheekbones are high, sharp. Her eyes are soft, like an angel's.

"Baby, you all right?"

She doesn't wait for an answer. Instead, she pulls a clean white hankerchief from somewhere and presses it, hard, against my forehead just above my right eye. Her hands smell clean, like cedar...




I must have gone into shock after that, because I don't remember much of what happened next. I surived with a concussion and a broken collar bone. The latter still aches some days, when it rains. But that was the first day I felt in gut, as well as understood in my brain, that I was mortal.

Thoughts on The Mission (film)

I am not a religious person. Nor am I spiritual. I agree with Marx's assertion that religion is the opium of the masses, and as far as I am concerned, so-called "spirituality" is just religion for lazy people.

So it was with some surprise that, while watching the 1986 film The Mission for the umpteenth time, I suddenly found myself thinking, "this has got to be the most spiritually profound scene in cinematic history."

I am speaking of the scene where Mendoza breaks down and cries. Let me put this in context, in case anyone hasn't seen the film.

Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert DiNero) is a slave-trader who kills his brother in a jealous rage. Afterwards, he is filled with remorse. As a penance, he follows a group of jesuits into the Amazon jungle, dragging an entire suit of armor behind him. He climbs mountains, crosses rivers, scales waterfalls. All the while, the suit of armor remains lashed to his back. Finally, the party encounters indians, the people Mendoza had enslaved for years. But instead of killing Mendoza, the indians cut his burden loose. They slice through the ropes fastening the armor to his body, and heave the whole load into the river. Mendoza breaks down. He begins to cry.

In that moment, Mendoza understood that the killing of one man--his brother--was not his greatest sin. His greatest sin was the killing and enslaving of hundreds of indians. Yet, the indians spared his life. They forgave him. Mendoza realizes he has been given a second chance, that he can change, that he can make amends for his past crimes. In that moment, he is reborn.

The important thing to realize is that Mendoza receives this new understanding as a flash of revelation. Given the kind of man he was, he could never have reasoned his way to this new understanding. That's what makes his experience spiritual. I realize now that if spirituality means anything, it means this: the ability to gain insight by nonrational means.

"For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face...And now abide faith, hope, love, these three, but the greatest of these is love."--Corinthians 13: 12-13

The Myth of Bureaucracy

During a period of prolonged unemployment, the only resource one enjoys in abundance is time.

I lost my job in 2007. I worked for the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (IDFPR), a state agency charged with regulating insurance companies, currency exchanges, state-chartered banks, real-estate brokers, and host of professionals ranging from physicians to security guards. It was a dull job. Dull, but reasonably well-compensated. It also gave me a privileged vantage point into the inner workings of state government. Because I find myself with time on my hands, I've decided to take this opportunity to debunk a few widely-held myths about state government.

Myth: The state is inefficient because it is overly centralized.

Fact: The state is inefficient because it is not centralized enough.

Many people reading this statement are probably scratching their heads right now, so let me explain.

State agencies come into being as a result of laws being passed by the state legislature. There is no point in passing a law unless an agency exists to enforce it. So, a new act is passed in Springfield and--presto!--a new agency needs to be organized.

The state grows agencies the way people in South Texas build houses. In South Texas, when a new child is born to a family, or when an aged abuelita moves into the home, father and sons build a new room onto an existing house. Rooms are added as the need arises, instead of conforming to some overall plan. Over time, houses built this way come to look awkward and ungainly. They may still serve their basic function; however, they appear unsightly from the street, and their interiors become difficult for strangers to navigate successfully.

The state has the same problem. The term, "State of Illinois" is in fact a fiction, an umbrella term used to refer to a scattering of totally disconnected agencies. Each agencies has its own policies and procedures, its own traditions and internal culture. No one from any one agency has any idea what any other agency is doing. No one is ever told who regulates what. There is no integration of any kind. It is this lack of centralized integration that makes navigating the state such a headache for its citizens.

Myth: The state is overstaffed with unneeded patronage workers.

Fact: This is not so much a myth as a gross exaggeration. There is a certain amount of bloat in the system, but it exists overwhelmingly at the top of the hierarchy, not at the bottom. At ground level, where state employees interact directly with the public, there is a massive, chronic staffing shortage.

For example, say you have an auto accident and your insurance company refuses to pay. IDFPR has exactly four people whose job it is to take your complaint. That is, four people in the entire state. Think about how many people live in Illinois, then think about how common disputes with insurance companies are. You get the picture.

Myth: State employees are lazy, surly, and rude because their union makes it impossible to fire them.

Fact: State employees can be, and sometimes are, fired. To say otherwise is pure hyperbole. Being covered by a union contract simply means state workers have to be fired for cause, rather than at the whim of a supervisor. Union employees can be fired, but only at the end of a clearly defined grievance process. In many countries, this is the norm. The United States is unusual in that the overwhelming majority of workers here are employed "at-will."

In an at-will employment situation, an employees are entitled to quit their jobs at any time, for any reason, with or without notice. Needless to say, this is not much of a "right" as far as employees are concerned. However, the rules of at-will employment also allow employers to fire employees at any time, for any reason, with or without notice. If an employee feels he or she was fired unjustly, they must prove the firing was unjust in a court of law. Employers carry no such burden; their right to fire is honored automatically while the case is being adjudicated. Since many employees lack the time, money, and legal savvy to take on their employers in court, the "at will" employment relationship gives employers near-dictatorial power over their workforce.

Because unions in the US are so weak, with so few workers covered by union contracts, American employers (and most workers) see the at-will employment relationship as normal and natural. They don't question it. American employers are so accustomed to totally controlling their workforce, they tend to regard any other arrangement as an outrageous infringement on their rights. In fact, however, at-will employment is no more or less "natural" than other other arrangement. It is simply one of many possible models for employer-employee relationships, one that heavily favors the rights of employers.

As far as the accusations of rudeness and laziness go, my co-workers at the state were the same mixed bag of people you'd expect to find in any workplace. Some were surly and lazy; some were energetic and helpful. I think people who find all state workers incompetent or unhelpful have fallen prey prey to a phenomenon psychologists call confirmation bias. Simply stated, confirmation bias is our tendency to interpret new experiences in ways that confirm what we already believe.

For more than a generation, US political culture has been permeated by right-wing, pseudo-populist, anti-government propaganda. This propaganda campaign has been so successful most Americans now accept its key tropes as "common sense." For example, most people accept, axiomatically, the notion that government can't do anything right. Many also accept the corollary to this belief: that everything can be, and should be, run like a business. After marinating for 25+ years in a stew of neoliberal orthodoxy, is it surprising we often regard the boorish man at the DMV as typical, while forgetting all about the pleasant woman at the Social Security administration? When a clerk at Walgreen's treats us rudely, we don't blame it on the fact he or she work for a for-profit company. However, when we get similar treatment at a public agency, the experience immediately activates our stereotype of the sluggish government bureaucrat.

That said, I will concede the point that some government workers could be a lot nicer and more helpful than they are. Why the rude behavior? That leads me to my next, and last, point.

Myth: The state has plenty of money; they just need to tighten their belt more.

Fact: One of the most shocking discoveries I made while working at the state was how utterly impoverished it is. Illinois ranks fifth in the nation in terms of its population size, yet has one of the lowest state income-tax rates (3%). What this means, at ground level, is that most state workers cannot possibly do their jobs effectively. Whatever their level of commitment, they simply lack the resources.

I already cited the example of IDFPR's staffing shortages. I can give others. For example, investigators at the Illinois Human Rights Commission have to pay travel and other expenses out of pocket; reimbursement by the state can take three months to four months. Meanwhile investigators need to travel every week. This means they are always behind financially. Their employer, the state, always owes them money. The state is so poor, it requires its own employees to subsidize its day-to-day operations.

As a result of these and other problems arising from the chronic lack of resources, we have a state system heavy with demoralized, dispirited, disgruntled employees. When one's job seems hopeless, not caring becomes a rational response. Is it any wonder some of them become rude and indifferent?

The Queen of Rogers Park

You won't find the Queen sipping white wine at the Red Line,
or hear her voice float on a note strummed from the stage at the Heartland Café.
She doesn't take her morning coffee at Charmer's, or nibble cheese at Taste.
These places are just her painted face,
Her press-on nails, Her push-up bras, Her cans of spray-on tan.
They are the dress She wears to the ball,
the delicate china She pulls from the cupboard
when delicate company calls.

The real Queen is One Tough Chick with a scar on her lip
who steps out at night with a baggie of weed pressed beneath her breast.
She gots strong hands, stone knuckles. She can make fists when she wants to.
She'll press her belly against yours at the back of some dark bar, pull away,
and punch a tooth clean out your head. Then she'll wipe blood from your lips with her own and fix you with a gaze that says, "Baby, I'm sorry. Forgive me."

She drinks draft at the Ho, where old timers go
to tend friendships and feuds born on schoolyards.
Where the poker still pays and the bands don’t play, and
regulars still smoke

because they’re regulars,
because they’re family,
because they’re home,
and stash their ash in tiny tins
emptied of tiny cough drops.

Her knees settle on fresh rose petals strewn
before votive velas burning in a sidewalk shrine on Rogers,
built by the strong brown hands of Luís, el Jalisqueño, en honor de su apá.
(te extraño, mi apá,
ya no luches más,
que te cuiden los ángeles,
que descanses en paz)
Llegaron juntos, de mojado, quince años atrás.

She roosts in the rafters of St. Henry's Church and
sails down Devon nestled in the back seat of Sanjay Patel’s cab
to the gates of Rosehill, where She stands guard beside the sad-eyed stone angels
who forever keep, but never judge, the grateful and ungrateful dead.