[A re-exploration of a large portion of my thirties spent mostly between cocktail bars and record stores.]

Post-Valentines Day 2014 the red Cherry Coke machine of my heavy relationship was knocked over. I garnered all my emotion. These breakups always took more than one push. After being rocked back and forth a few times it finally fell over. The solemn conclusion set in mutual intention was saccharin sweetness in liquid form gushing over sad linoleum.

I pulled in the gravity of the commitment I’d laid out. In the following weeks kinetic energy was refocused. If I wasn’t to brand my life to another person in the deepsouth burbs, then I was going to move all my chips back to the North.

Though dejected, the idea a move back to the adult playground of Chicago raised hopes once again. I slowly began to hover in elation.

I was able to write a letter and get out of a lease I had in an apartment in a town I won’t speak of. The Adventurebook was opened yet again, and the light glowed forth in radiant wonder. I got to decide which of the official seventy-seven Chicago neighborhoods I wanted to reside in.

I started by knowing where I didn’t want to live. As I began to whittle down, I targeted a land directly on the ambiguous border straddling Ukrainian Village and Humboldt Park. A main purpose I chose this area was because my childhood friend Joey lived there, between Archie’s and Star Lounge.

At the time my rent expense needed to be relatively low, what with school loans cuffed to my ankle like a grim shadow as well as financially attempting to recover from a divorce, a few years prior. Reasonable rent combined with a stark contrast of having a place that was not roach infested is a highly improbable intersection. A poor person, city home-hunter’s Venn diagram. I did a scrap-grasping Craigslist search on anything in the area roughly within my range.

The first place I looked at was some version of a disaster near Rockwell & Augusta, where the main selling point seemed to be: “look… if you crane your neck at this angle and peer out this tiny bathroom window, you can see the Sears Tower!”

The second (and final) Craigslist unit in my queue, located on North Maplewood, included no pictures in the online listing so I was incredibly unmotivated. Even when I texted the owner for a picture, not filling me with much hope, he shot back a blurry photo of the floor, definitely taken from an antiquated flip phone.

I literally almost didn’t bother to go see it, but it was only $850 per month, and I had another place I planned to see that was actually in Joey’s building one block away. I parked out front on Maplewood and witnessed an astonishing twelve-unit six-flat Greystone. Still keeping hopes low, I rang the buzzer and met the elderly landlord, Jim.

I followed Jim up the engraved wooden staircase etched with old Latin King iconography. Inverted pitchforks and broken six pointed stars. Upon entrance to the unit, I became stunned. The shockingly wonderful atmosphere of the Maplewood place, with hardwood flooring, high ceilings, and fresh paint immediately felt like home to me. It had a back deck, in-unit central heat and AC.

 

A tree was lovingly stenciled on the wall by a former tenant, next to a full mirror embedded in dark oak. There were windows overlooking the front and the back, which is a rare find on its own.

A combination of things began to shift, unlocking a real-time epiphany:

A) The reason there were no pictures of this apartment uploaded to the Craigslist ad was because Jim, the old saint, simply didn’t know how to upload them.

B) The reason this apartment was still on the market was because people saw a place in Ukrainian Village on Craigslist at that price point, with no pictures attached, and they automatically assumed it was a steaming trash heap. They didn’t bother to visit.

I mean, I almost didn’t myself.

C) The reason Jim didn’t know how to use Craigslist was because he never had to learn. He had owned the giant building since 1974 and anyone who moved out typically handed the Glengarry leads off to someone they knew and trusted. I would witness this myself multiple times in the four years I’d reside there.

 

No credit checks, no background checks. Some tenants had been renting from Jim for fifteen years with no raises in their rent. Others had been living there since the neighborhood was swarming with late 70’s Chicago street gangs.

D) I knew I was in the magical midst of a remarkable arbitrage event that was far too good to pass up. It was WELL under market for the area. I came to find that people in neighboring buildings were paying upward toward $1000 more for the same sized units.

Jim said he was going to paint over the tree stencil art, but I asked him to leave it. I loved every inch of the place, and I really felt like I had blindly stumbled on to something great. I signed a lease that evening.

The best part, as I came to find, was that there was no catch.

Jim took me down to the basement laundry area that had a small community bookshelf. In one isolated room down there, an artist named Jason Brammer, whose murals exist now literally all over the city, including every single Dark Matter location, got his start. He now paints all of Jimmy Chamberlin’s drum kits for every new Smashing Pumpkins tour.

Jim let Brammer crash down there during his starving artist years, on a free cot – any night he needed. A muralist honing his craft on the cellar walls. Air brushed bubbles and leviathans still intact on the neon coated brick. When I visited in early-2015, the cot was still laid out for him if he needed it.

…

In the initial weeks of my residency, I took heed of the door buzzer and noted on the playlist of occupants the name “Bob Nanna”.

With this random guy having a matching name to one of my favorite songwriters of all time, I snapped a photo of the buzzer and quickly fired off texts to my friends. I uploaded the picture to Instagram fully unassuming and completely ignorant in the fact that the name of this coincidental guy actually did belong to the very same man I consider a musical hero.

A chevalier in the Legion of Honor. The progenitor of late 90s emo. A man with an album in the top five emo records of all time in Rolling Stone Magazine.

As I sit here, I remember walking right by him, passing each other on the back stairwell while I was moving into the apartment. His then-wife Lauren commenting silently on my regulation sized disco ball that I hung from the back patio. I didn’t even notice Bob Nanna. Who would ever think they’d be randomly sharing a building with one of their idols? I had been following his music since I was eighteen years old, and I literally own all of his records on both CD and vinyl.

I passed right by him on the stairs and my brain wasn’t able to computationally register it. I couldn’t even match the familiarity to the name on the door buzzer since the idea was so insanely surreal to me. Perhaps somewhere floating in my mind was the vague idea that if this man, as deity, lived in my building, they would have used an alternate name on the on the door buzzer, or someone would have somehow notified me by then.

…

Dark Matter, located a few mere footsteps away, used to throw its Fourth of July party on my street directly in front of my apartment on the block between Iowa and Chicago Ave. It was called MaplewoodStock. Music and free beer from all types of local brewers.

I didn’t know what MaplewoodStock was until early in the morning the day of, but the event created a buzz in me as a 34-year-old introverted wide-eyed optimist could never shake. I saw a guy setting up his beer-serving table in front of a giant Penrose Brewing banner. I noticed him walking in and back out of my building. I went out to talk to him and found out he lived in my building.

I can’t recall the Penrose guy’s position, but he had worked for them from its inception. He was really surprised I had even heard of Penrose at the time, let alone the fact that I had been out to the brewery taproom in Geneva on multiple occasions. I was and still am a huge fan of their beer, so I was incredibly stoked to have him in my building as well.

One night I randomly met the Penrose guy’s wife in the laundry room; a lusterless chamber in which you had no idea what to expect. I kept my bike chained to the wall down there like Sloth from The Goonies. There was a dusty weight bench next to the bookshelf if you decided you wanted to hang out for the laundering duration.

If you were not alone down there, then either awkward encounters with vague strangers who clearly cared not to converse took place, or you formed temporal friendships while waiting the final ninety seconds for your laundry to finish drying. While I was folding my socks, the Penrose guy’s wife told me they were planning to move out of the building soon and head to Denver. That bummed me out. But when they moved I found at my back door, a box full of Penrose beer, stickers, and glassware. A true beeracle in my book. 

The Penrose guy eventually went on to found Supermoon Beer Company in Milwaukee.

I met another new face in the laundry room a few weeks later. He was a hulking man who worked for Oskar Blues Brewery in some sort of corporate capacity in Chicago. The Oskar Blues man had been recommended to Jim by the Penrose guy to move into his unit. As I was waiting for him to get his giant man shirts out of the washing machine we quickly bonded over the idea that our landlord Jim was, indeed, a saint.

My friend Dan, who, at the time lived in Nobel Square was thinking of moving out of his place. We went to Half Acre on Lincoln for a few beers and a burrito and conversed about how great it would be for him to somehow move into my building. The conversation with the girl who was waiting our table started out general but ended up pivotal, altering the course of things to come.

She mentioned she lived in Humboldt Park. I responded with, “Oh, so do I. Which intersection?”

She said she lived at Chicago and Western. “Oh, so do I. Which actual intersection?”

She told us she lived at Maplewood and Iowa. “Oh, so do I. I’m at 843 North Maplewood. What’s your address?”

This person working on the other side of the city, not only lived in the same building that I did, but she was married to the burley Oskar Blues man who I had met in the laundry room that precise morning. On top of that, she said they were already moving away, also to Colorado. With an inside baseball commentary like this, it was written in the stars. With Dan as my witness, we exploited that golf tip and he would soon become my neighbor in the Maplewood Commune.

The day they moved out, I found at my back door, yet again and stacked to the sky, cans of Oskar Blues beer. Though, I will say that husky fellow must’ve left those cans setting on his heat register for a really long time. I drank a Death by Coconuts and ended up vomiting syrup of midnight black coconut death in to my kitchen sink. I checked the dates on the cans and using judgment, gave half of them away, pitching the rest. I wouldn’t touch an Oskar Blues beer for years after that.

 

The day I helped Dan move into the Commune was the very day we used the same U-Haul to pick up a fifty-five gallon oak barrel from Revolution Brewing on Kedzie. End-over-end we rolled it up the back stairwell like Donkey Kong. The crafted cooperage of staves and rings adorned my living room. Once used for Woodford Reserve bourbon, then utilized to age 2015 Deth’s Tar for a year, it’s next purpose would be to bring cheer and warmth to all upon entering my home.

Dan eventually got our friend Jeff moved into the building as well. Including a fifty-something-year old psychopath named Ken Keirnan who lived directly above me, who I would regularly hear screaming bloody murder at his cat (and whom I’m also not convinced wasn’t having a non-consensual sex affair with a male ghost), and this other dude Chris Gangi who lead a well-known Chicago-based jam band called Cornbread, the Maplewood apartment was shaping up in to an all-around Sad Men’s Commune in the very best way possible. This is not even to mention the bastion and principal of the emo genre who resided with us, unironically and unintentionally spinning this capstone into the actual building as an emo haven.

…

I had a few run-ins with the aforementioned Ken Keirnan. When I first moved in, I was so happy that I would listen to my records on my turntable and – Just. Fucking. Relax. I had dodged so many bullets in my life; two previously cancelled engagements to women, and a four-year marriage that was on the fritz since the very day of the wedding.

Those early weeks of living in the Maplewood Commune were therapeutic beyond belief for me. Being back in Chicago and existing in the best neighborhood, along with the absolute miracle of the apartment I found. It’s a chalice of sovereignty I can’t very well put into words.

While playing my Passion Pit record at a very reasonable volume at a very reasonable time of day, I heard a loud series of bangs on my door.

I sheepishly opened it to find the madman Ken Keirnen standing there, mid-scream: “Can you turn that down?! This isn’t a fucking dorm!”

My reaction was to immediately apologize for the synthesized pop being too loud, and explain that the volume of the music really doesn’t sound extreme from inside my place. But he hobbled away like an old hermit on speed, up the stairs, still gawking at me from between the bannisters like an enraged rat, startled at its own vehemence.

A few weeks later, after knowing to keep the volume extremely low, I was listening to my Kool G Rap 12-inch from the Soul Assassins II compilation. This motherfucker came back down and banged on my door once again with the same level of rage and the same verbal assault.

The identical scenario took place. This time I saw it in his lifeless dolls’ eyes that it was his final warning in this bleak pattern. I felt the coldness and the idea of him taking a knife to my throat seemed like the next logical move. I was positive by the sheer rabid rampage, coupled with the fact that I wasn’t doing anything offensive, that he’d killed multiple people before.

I knew that if this happened a third time, I wouldn’t be alive for a fourth.

I wrote him a letter. I apologized and expressed confusion at the idea that my music volume was actually very low. I will reiterate that this was always around 6 or 7 PM. It’s not like this was in the middle of the night.

He wrote me his own letter and taped that letter to my door like Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five these to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg. He accepted my apology – sort of. He finally made clear that it was the bass not the volume. On his pedestal he expressed that he is always reading or writing upstairs. As if I needed a reason. Aside from my fear of being murdered, I also simply would never want to irritate a neighbor, psychopathic or otherwise.

 

This information about the bass could have been valuable in maintaining a respectful neighbor-to-neighbor relationship in the first place. That is, if only he would have stopped like a normal person and talked to me after the first incident.

Alas I looked at my bass knob on my vintage tube amp, and it was in fact turned up to the maximum level. I set the bass at zero and that’s the number of issues we had after that.

…

Tabbs-Nevada/Nevada-Tabbs liquor store (I never did know the proper name) was just one alley-walk away. They saved me on countless nights of not having any beer or toilet paper in my established bachelor pad.

I had a secret smoke nook nearby at the opposite end of the same alley, where I would sit on an abandoned stairwell and smoke my cigars, hidden away from rain. Hidden away from people who like to do that dramatic, pretend coughing thing as they find offense to my habit, err… hobby.

During my tenure at the Maplewood Commune, I got to become one of the first patrons of both EZ Inn and Split Rail, both of which I would frequent regularly.

 

Haywood Tavern, California Clipper, The Beetle, Café Marie Jeanne, Rootstock, CC Ferns, Bullhead Cantina, Blind Robin, Empty Bottle, Lockdown, Bite Café, Archie’s. All of these became regular haunts of mine, merely due to sheer geography.

I’d frequent Star Lounge basically literally every single morning. Some of my most cherished memories are walking over there to get a coffee and a trail mix scone before driving east on Chicago Ave to my office on Kingsbury at the time.

The job I had at the time was a joke. For one solid year I inspected ADA ramps with a smart level, all over the city. I’d say from age thirty-five to thirty-six I went out most nights of the week. Some nights I’d be out til 2 AM. I remember some weeks being drunk every night and going to work every single morning hungover.

I’d come back home at about 3 PM and take a nap. I was able to function because the work was so easy, and it provided me just enough funding to go back out as soon as my nap was over. I knew this wasn’t sustainable, but I also knew it was temporal. Even with the hangovers, I enjoyed every minute of it.

Dan and I once drank a full bottle of Chartreuse on his back deck in one multiple hours-long sitting. Discussing life, weaving scenarios of the future. A memorable accomplishment by two French Monks of the Sad Men’s Commune that would never be replicated by anyone else in history. 

…

The one place that I called my bar was Sportsmans Club.

If I wanted to meet Joey at Sportsmans Club by 7 PM, I left my house at 6:56 PM. I’d remember for the one-hundredth time that I forgot to bring cash, so I’d have to use the ATM before ordering an Old Fashion.

Sportsmans Club, a neighborhood tavern that has been there for sixty years would showcase classically inspired cocktails. They have an amaro machine to disperse shots of Fernet Branca on the original art deco bar.

 

Sportsmans Club will forever grip real estate in my heart. Many conversations with many strangers, under the reel-to-reel tape machine and the taxidermized animals. Nights ending in hugs. I learned good lessons and gained a lot of new perspective in that sojourn of truth; lessons I’m actually embarrassed to type about now, because I was thirty-five when I learned them – way too old to be gaining the particular insight I became privy to.

Nonetheless Sportmans Club was an amulet to connect me to unknown patrons I’d never see again, starcrossed and interwoven for relative moments of enlightenment.

I met a girl there whose father was one of the founders of Second City. She came home with me that night.

One night I met Adrian Younge there. I noticed a guy who looked to be my age, but he had a walking cane. I knew this was no mortal man. Sure enough, I got to enjoy Baller Manhattans and conversation with an artist whose work spreads over Ghostface Killah’s Twelve Reasons to Die, and Kendrick Lamar’s Untitled, Unmastered.

To the flip side of Sportmans Club, mostly directly afterward, many regretful decisions occurred at either Village Pizza or Bacci’s Pizza. Planted directly across Chicago Ave from one another, the two competing pizza joints had some sort of perpetual mystery feud.

It went deeper than mere pizza competition. They absolutely despised each other. I skewed toward Bacci’s – more of a clean-cut option that came in a nice box. Village was just as tasty, but grease saturated, and served on the type of paper plate that could be seen in the vehicles of people who lived in their cars.

 

Countless mornings I would wake up in utter disgust after noticing the pizza bag from Village in my garbage can, or a cardboard Bacci’s box in my recycling bin, completely forgetting that I had even gone to either place the previous night.

I remember walking into Village with Joey who already had his giant triangle slice of Bacci’s pizza in hand, chomping away.

“Hey! Is that Bacci’s!?”

They booted him right the fuck out the door with that shit. Done. Outta here.

 

…

A lot of weekends, I’d wake up, get a coffee from Dark Matter, light up a Partagas Black Label, and walk up California to Revolution Brewing on Milwaukee by 11 AM. I’d order a burger and zone out with a few Anti-heros or barrel aged stouts. I’d walk to Reckless Records and spend hours flipping through electronic records used rock records, and looking for 45s and 12” singles of 90s hip hop and R&B.

I’d meet up with Dan somewhere after that and spend hours day drinking at Metropolitan or Dovetail, then walking to Donnerman or Beer Temple. Just a complete free for all of zero accountability and next to no responsibility in life. No pets and nothing on the horizon even resembling the idea of having a kid let alone a solid relationship. A lot of nights capping off the evening at EZ Inn before they closed at 2 AM, and stumbling a mere couple blocks away back to my bed.

Charles Manson Revisited.

On a few random weeknights at the Devil’s hour, I would see out my back window, the aforementioned madman, Ken Keirnan, pull a baseball bat on vehicles that were idling in the alley, honking their horns.

I witnessed this auteur of back-alley violence do his thing on multiple vengeful occasions. In fairness, I never understood why the drivers of these cars would sit out back and honk. Cell phones exist. Did they not realize people were sleeping? Honestly the honking for the obvious drug deals was mind-numbingly irritating.

Every time I heard the sinister hymns play in the alley at 3 AM, I’d hear Ken Kiernan begin to stir from his slumber above. I’d listen to him rifling around in the dark for his bat. Knocks of pine on the hardwood above. I knew like robotic clockwork that I would surely hear him barrel down the back steps an instant later.

Brandishing his Louisville Slugger with no questions asked, just swinging for the fences like a roided-up Conseco, a lone bash-brother, smashing these cars until the owners drove away terrified. During these short rage episodes, I felt a bit of relief. Admittedly, for those few moments in that vile window of time, that twisted crusader was my MVP.

One night, well… one night he pulled his bat on the wrong fucking vehicle.

This particular car honking in the foggy dusk contained at least four full grown men who were no doubt in the midst of a black-market sales arrangement. Maybe even five guys. But at least four. I heard the predictable overture of rustling and muffled swearing, and the ceremonious fishing out of the bat. Rumbling feet down the wooden back stairwell, gate flying open with a whirlwind of expletives bum-rushing the alley between the dumpsters.

He wound up and straight Kirby Pucketed that car, shattering the headlight. The back-alley dwellers, flummoxed for a second, jumped out of the car. That feeble, sad old man realized the crescendo of his legendary vigilantism was now behind him. Basically, just to say, “I tried”, he took a final, useless whiff with his bat directly at the most meat-headed looking goon of the lot.

 

He may as well have been a four-year-old blindly wagging a reed at a piñata. He was instantly pummeled to the pavement. One street tough really rained down some brutal blows and seriously repackaged my neighbor’s ass before handing it right back to him. It was painful to watch, and as I phoned the police, I assumed that was it for old Ken Keirnan. He lay there lifeless as the car peeled off beneath the streetlights.

Frankly I was surprised he stood back up ever again. He hobbled back in, leaving behind his cherished weaponry and nursing his bloody headwounds as he staggered. It was harsh, but you know, witnessing this was just one facet of the many-sided di that constituted living in the Maplewood Men’s Commune.

…

My friend Popcorn learned how to tattoo during his seven-year stint in various maximum security prisons. Using a makeshift tattoo gun fashioned together from an electric razor and a straightened out ballpoint click pen spring as a needle, he would barter his talent for money, cigarettes and protection in the clink.

Since Joey, my friend Michael, and I all grew up with Popcorn, we paid his way out to Chicago from Omaha. He didn’t have a driver’s license, but he drove some car our from Nebraska with no license plate on it. We all got tattoos from him in my living room. True to life emblems in an oath to never dime.

Many bottle shares took place in my apartment, and many a party was manifested. I liked to invite everyone I knew from every circle of my life to my birthday gatherings. Forcing all my worlds to collide as a social experiment, I liked to put everyone, twenty-five or thirty people, in the same room to see what happened.

There were a couple fights, make no mistake. But mainly friendships were facilitated and traditionally, amazing beers were always opened.

I became friends with Bob Nanna during my stint there. He came to some of my parties. Once he brought a guy from Saves the Day over to my place for a bottle share. One time I awkwardly pulled out my Age of Octeen and Frame & Canvas records from my collection in front of him.

The first year I was there, I got invited up to his fortieth birthday party celebration. It was kind of unbelievable for me, and it always will be. A golden ticket I’d randomly receive. I went on a very nice date with one of his friends a few years later – a woman who I initially met at that very party.

I liked to text Nanna his own song lyrics randomly if the situational fit was good. One time we locked eyes when I saw him drive past me while I was leaving the Smoke Nook in the back alley.

“That Car Came Out of Nowhere”

 

I got to bond a bit with him at EZ Inn over beers and at Sportsmans Club over pristine cocktails. It was interesting to me to dive way past the records and songs, just into the general struggles of… life. Although I did appreciate being able to ask directly from the source, where certain song samples came from and what various song phrases meant. I got to reminisce with him about shows I saw him play as far back as 1998.

…

As the years moved by, scales and measures shifted clockwise, naturally toward priority. It was finally time to document the Commune as a monumental segment of my life, and slip the keys to a fresh, new, starry-eyed member.

I had a final burger at Lockdown before it closed its doors permanently at the exact time I decided the transition out of the Sad Men’s Commune. It was imminent. I had to take Lockdown’s literal closure as a stoic and solemn sign that it was officially time to move on. The final week of my residing at Maplewood, it was warm enough for me to do one last run in my West Town sanctuary of industrial strips, homeless man under-bridge dwellings, and a brewery-roastery-bakery gauntlet.

As I ran, the familiar aromas of Metric, Passion House, Goose Island, Finch and Rhine Hall – all hit me at their respective blocks, taunting me and reminded me of countless days trying to get in to shape back there in that abandoned, shameless land of no vehicles. The true judgment-free zone.

During my run, I saw Dan walking home from the Metra train near Smith Park. We slapped high-five.

Dodging foliage and leaping over a prostrate transient I jogged through that vacant maze for an hour in my swim trunks that I had owned for what was approaching twenty years.

Nearing the end, as I ran westward with the sunset splashing my eyes and washing out everything in my view, the final symphonic seconds of the Frengers record by Mew blazing in my ears. Not quite friends, not quite strangers – a commonality established in my laundry room. I sensed the countdown for the life-altering time I spent at Maplewood winding out just like the last minute of that endorphinic final hour-long run.

As the smoke cleared from the Intelligentsia roastery, I took an alleyway where I saw my upstairs psycho neighbor Ken Keirnan aimlessly walking around. I’d recognize his terror-inspiring calf tattoo anywhere. Spotting him in some sort of deranged game of Where’s Waldo for a final instant, this culmination tied up the final bow on the gift that was the magical Maplewood Sad Man Commune life.