[A Business Casual Work-Life Essay]

[Saga No. 8c]

Towering stacks of discouraging oil paintings and multiple binders thick with distressing sketches. Landscapes that morphed in to faces when stared at long enough. Paranoia in pointillism. Scary looking, disturbing mixed media that could never be fashioned by people who didn’t struggle with voices of apparitions, haunting the internal monologue of their being. Art pieces that could only be crafted by a tortured soul locked in a ghoulish metaphysical chamber.

My friend Tim and his brother Ben opened a gourmet popcorn shop near Lincoln Avenue and Diversey in early 2014. They named the shop in dedication to their father’s ongoing and obsessive collecting of artwork created by the criminally insane. Outsider art.

The more gruesome and unsettling creations would be hung at the shop and tagged for sale. It would be an outlier in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of mostly moms and strollers and toy dogs and yoga classes. Nannies perhaps looking for Chicago Mix caramel corn, but definitely not searching for schizophrenic master works in pastel, cobbled together by the drooling and the demon possessed.

The intrigue of frightful dread and revulsion meshed with sugary delights and cloying confections. The Church of Abraxas.

The Popcorn Asylum.

Who can take tomorrow, dip it in a dream?
Separate the sorrow and collect up all the cream?
The Candy Man can ’cause he mixes it with love,
And makes the world taste good.

Halloween Season 2013 we gathered under buzzing fluorescence in the sterile laboratory for a soft opening. Alex, Jason, Tim and I. Stainless steel mixing silos for the kernels to pop – cauldrons of mischief and wonder. Neutral white paint and newly placed subway tile – the tone of a padded room.

Darkness was cracked to sip and christen. A stout so fiendish yet candied it could be the only bottle to baptize the Asylum. No one thought to have glassware, so we drank from Pyrex labware and beakers like twisted technicians. I still hold the drained Surly vessel to this day. A mummy preserved.

I would help manage Popcorn Asylum a few days a month on weekends and off-days. Reduction, and savory poblano chilies. Dehydrated strawberries run through a meat grinder. Crimson guts and scarlet gummy worms. Frankenstein constructions of peanut butter and jelly popcorn conglomerate. Unconventional snacks in vacuum sealed packaging.

I once stood there next to Tim watching this employee Peter Bread attempt to fit a garbage bag that was too small for the can into the trash bin for five straight minutes. It was a striking moment. The suffering was painful but not as sad as the fact that there was absolutely nothing we could do for him. A zombie too far gone.

Deisel would often blast 2 Chains loudly on the stereo in the kitchen on production days, when the shop itself was closed. ⁽¹⁾ Dancing and rapping combined with lots of unprompted sharing of war stories from his time in Iraq. Jovial in his chamber as he sipped Mountain Dew and 16-ounce cans of Budweiser Chelada Clamato. As a pitch-black twist on a theme, he seemed to get a lot out of his tour in Iraq.

In working side by side with Deisel, heating full cans of coconut oil and dispersing the scent of luxurious cannibal angels, it would be the first time I’d ever hear of molly. It was MDMA, but molly I think was a concentrated version of ecstasy. Deisel expressed quite a bit to me, his passion and adoration for cocaine.

A few mornings at 6 AM, when I’d come into the shop, Deisel would be lying on the hardwood floor in the dark with a tall boy of Lime Straw-Beer-Ita. To offset the morning alcohol, he would sip an energy drink before rising from his crypt. I never asked if he was at the shop all night, or if he just got there early and decided to nap.

Either way my assumption is that he never stopped drinking. But what better way to stave off a hangover than to simply imbibe all day every day?

With the power of elves, he stepped out of his coffin. A chalice of blood-red Monster drink in hand and pupils dilated like a shapeshifter after nocturnal rambles. Dawn would soon break. He would vomit and be sent home.

Ben, the unholy puppet master of the operation utilized a porter from Temperance Brewing for a reduction in use of a beer themed caramel corn. Mushroom pop strain, melted butter, and brown sugar. Mastery in an amulet of horror and candy corn. ⁽²⁾ In a scheme of guerilla marketing, we made up hundreds of small sample bags of the caramel corn created with a Russian Imperial Stout homebrewed by Alex, and we distributed them for free at Dark Lord Day 2014.

…

To prove a bleak theme of the Asylum there was often radio silence during shop hours. No music in front of house. Innocent yuppie fathers fortuitously perusing the troubling prison art to a soundtrack of absolute hush. Manifestations of distant howls creating a tableau of Deisel and Peter Bread bouncing around in strait jackets in the kitchen. Sprites performing merry deviltry.

Witchcraft and Watercolor.

They call me Sweetness, ‘cause I like to dance.

I was able to help get Popcorn Asylum on the WGN television program “Chicago’s Best” since my friend Jordan shot and edited the entire show. It was a perfect match because the shop was new, and Jordan and Waltor Payton’s daughter were always seeking current, interesting food-related pieces for their broadcast. One caveat was that Jordan asked me to play the character of a random customer being interviewed while browsing the shop.

I have no talent in ad lib. As the perplexed, casual shopper, I made some sort of off-the-cuff remark about the smores caramel corn, stating on television that it was the “greatest thing I’ve ever had in my mouth”. Walter Payton’s daughter in this simulation stopped making eye contact.

It was dark. An improvised, debauched and unhealthy link through a sexualized eating disorder all wrapped in the outright deception that I was a local patron. I became an accidental but true representative of the Asylum themes.

Jordan, who I’ve always known to be someone who can brilliantly take unintended sexual innuendos and prominently exploit them, showcasing them between emphasized nat pops and overdubs, spotlighted my ill-intentioned pun front and center. I appreciated it on some level. The amount of text messages I got the night after it aired was notable. As a new star of the Silver Screen I got notes from a lot of people I haven’t heard from in years.

…

The house of magical formulae would last a few years, and I recall Ben saying most of his business was eventually yielded in wholesale product for catered events or sold online. They closed up shop and both brothers moved out of town.

I got word a couple of years later that Deisel passed away. He died in his sleep due to a cocktail of drugs. Accidental overdose.

His passing was not shocking yet it was a solemn bit of news to receive. Deisel drinks now Budweiser tall boys in the Halls of Valhalla.

Fresh boar slaughtered daily. 2 Chains on repeat in a soundtrack to a fallen combatant. 

Come and see,
The Confectionary;
Very merry,
The Confectionary.

You stir all the sweetened pots and watch the clocks –
The time has come to close the shop that time forgot.

…

1) Deisel would try to tell me that 2 Chains’ name used to be Tity Boi and he was formerly a member of St Lunatics. I knew that wasn’t right, but I couldn’t quite recall which group Tity Boi was in. I knew it wasn’t St Lunatics, though.

At the time I was actively going to church in Naperville and I was even involved with music there. The worship leader was named Darrin and I had his phone number stored. Deisel’s name was also Darrin.

When I remembered the 2 Chains origin story, I pulled out my phone and texted Deisel – “hey man! Tity Boy was in Disturbin’ Tha Peace, not St Lunatics!” Deisel didn’t reply and I didn’t know why. He was so impassioned about his stance I started to wonder the reason for zero response. *Sigh*

Obviously, I had sent the Tity Boi text to the stoic church worship leader, who probably didn’t understand the meaning of one word of what I was writing, other than “tity”.

2) Temperence Brewing sold the beer caramel corn bags made from their Porter at their taproom in Evanston. I also got Northdown Taproom & Café to sell Popcorn Asylum stuff behind the bar. Rest in Peace to Northdown. Kind of another insane place that didn’t quite fit the Lincoln Park motif.