Misty Mother Fog of A Dead Poet's Dream

I wrote that phrase back in college and I still think of it whenever the fog hits Chicago. More often than not these days. If the photo shows up above, it’s the Trump Tower that dissolves into the greyness. That was last Thursday. But if I hadn’t been crossing the street and seen the building, I likely would have continued on to the subway stairs humming Hallowe’en songs. Instead of my dumb line from an okay poem I wrote almost thirty years ago. The Ramones’ “Pet Semetary.” Elvis’s most haunting song ever, “Long Black Limousine”, from the Memphis sessions in 1968. Henry Mancini’s “Experiment in Terror,” which was the theme for our long-departed Saturday night CREATURE FEATURES, which ran only the Universal Monster films. About the only one I catch myself actually SINGING is Jan & Dean’s “Surfing Hearse.” She might be cherry, but she could be worse, my surfin’ hearse. Fun fact: they also rhyme spooky with kooky. Oh, those wacky surf musicians.

I missed out on the entire month of October these last three years. Last year I was involved in a writing project not my own, typing maybe twelve hours a day, and the previous two years I was at the infamous printing plant, back then it was standing on my feet twelve hours a day. And I love October, not just for Hallowe’en. This entire month I’ve been putting monster-related content on my blog, including scanning most of a fumetti of HORROR OF PARTY BEACH just because it was time someone saw that thing online. I never had the time the last three years to do something every night, and before then my blog was barely had legs. I’ve had the chance to reminisce about childhood toys like the old Vac-U-Form that made Creeple People and an old vinyl record my older cousin had with audio clips of Lugosi and Karloff.

October is also a month of death. It seems that I know an abundance of people with September birthdays. Thankfully, the deaths are far between. Important deaths, just the same. Karl Edward Wagner, back in 1994. Harry Fassl last year. A neighbor girl with epilepsy, so long ago I can’t remember the year, the first non-familial wake I attended. Fog and crappy piles of muddy leaves and I wonder how it must be in Houston or LA, what orange and black decorations look like in sweltering heat.

There will be another death this week, my oldest cousin on my daddy’s side, down in Shelbyville. Off the respirator since Friday, now with a lung infection, she has a DNR. I was joking with Dave in an email earlier about how I had started this essay and was interrupted by updates from different aunts in Kentucky, then while I was in the middle of our email the phone rang yet again. My dad’s hard of hearing and so I’m the mouthpiece. He’s also the only one up here, staying after Korea to join the police academy. I’ll likely be on Greyhound to Louisville on Friday. We never traveled as I grew up, but for Father’s Day in Shelbyville when my granddaddy drove down from Dry Ridge. My first time anywhere besides Streator, Illinois and the I-65 corridor through Indiana was when I attended the World Fantasy Convention in Providence, in 1986. People come home to die in Kentucky. Quite the different world than Chicago.

I sometimes wonder what I’d be writing if I grew on a farm thirty miles from the big city instead of this place. Well, the farm is gone, and so are the road marks on Flat Rock Road, the “colored” cemetery (as I was brought up with that word on both sides of the family) on one side of a gravel road and another cemetery across the way, one with rusted spoons melded to thin pieces of metal that read BABY. Flat Rock Road is a subdivision now, the homes in an oval around an egg-shaped manmade lake. Maybe it would be like course correction, my dad a Statie, or working for the Simpsonville police. And yet, the second most vile story I’ve ever written, “The Shank of The Night,” is based on events not in Chicago, but from a small town just over the Ohio River from Louisville. So I might have ended up writing what I do. All in the past now, I haven’t had grandparents in fifteen years. If I go to Kentucky, I go it alone, on Greyhound. The bus pulls in at Sixth Street and Muhammed Ali Road a block or two from the river. I’ll wait for my cousin to pick me up and sit in the food court while he makes the half-hour drive, in the early morning hours. There’s a Chevron across Sixth, and I drink coffee and watch shadows become people lumbering to their early shift like zombies, walking through that misty mother fog.

And on that note, I wrote a quickie ghost story for a contest in the Chicago Tribune. I actually hit the 700 word max almost on the mark without trying. I you have a few more minutes, take a look.

MIDNIGHT MISTS OFF BUBBLY CREEK
C 2009 by Wayne Allen Sallee

It wasn’t that far gone that I wrote an essay about places those of us might haunt in the afterlife. Not in a bad way, more along the lines of revisiting, well, old haunts. Maybe a tavern at the corner of Rockwell and Lithuanian Plaza, present day. Or outside the Orange Lantern at Division and Wolcott back in 1954, with the servicemen returned from Korea and flirting with the dice girls in the autumn glow. 1954, because that was the best year for you. Laughter and discreet smooches beneath the ZIMNE PIWO sign.

Myself, I plan to haunt Bubbly Creek. Specifically the bridge near Archer Avenue, that black monolith now covered with pastel graffiti loops and jagged territorial warnings. I’ve always been fascinated by the artery that is Archer, and of all my memories of Nite Owl bus rides long before the Orange Line. The old Chinatown, signage for Ray-O-Vac batteries, Chinese Maid and Ping’s Iron Works already ghosting into the brick walls of factories in the early 1980s. Taverns of times past, the Quinn Street Inn and The Doghouse, the street squeezed tight before widening just before Ashland.

Bubbly Creek ran beneath Ashland, beneath the Stevenson Expressway, the wayward south branch of the Chicago River. Methane bubbles from rendered cattle back when everyone in the neighborhood worked at the Stockyards. This was the place where I found my solitude. Where I’d write and observe.

Where I’d carry my long thoughts.

I’d get off the bus on a Saturday afternoon in the dead of winter, climb up the gravel and stand on the bridge, staring at the vanishing point towards the lake, the Sears Tower a smudge in my left eye. Sometimes I’d feel the thrum of an as-yet unseen Amtrak train, most often it was just the wind and I, Chicago’s wretched, howling hawk.

A swirl of mist when I exhaled through my mouth. And when the delivery trucks and cars streaked with grey and white had passed, I could yell for the simple sake of yelling. I’d hear my echo from the walls of a nearby factory, its’ windows like broken teeth. One time, I climbed down the other side, this time in the spring, and was surprised to find a Frigidaire with a missing door in a tangle of downed branches. On a lower shelf, copies of LOOK magazine, mid-60s from the articles listed on the covers. Pages sagging from rain or worse.

The creek was my muse, each season of every year I would get on the next bus, and then go to the Huck Finn’s on Kedzie and write my brains out. And I would drink coffee like a fiend.

Sometimes I wondered if people thought I might be a ghost myself, parishioners from St. Bridget’s or denizens of the Archer apartments seeing me as a recurring wraith.

When the Orange Line elevated line began operation in 1993, things changed. The Ashland station came on the scene with bright lights and commuters at all hours. New town houses were built to allow owners an easy ride to their jobs in the Loop.

My haunt was gone.

But I could still write about its’ past, though it wasn’t the same as living it.

Back in May, I was returning home from the northside, taking the Western Avenue express bus to the El. I was heat beat and antsy at an unfamiliar train station, and of course I took the wrong train. We passed 35th, I realized my mistake, and found myself at a deserted Ashland station. Bubbly Creek visible in slivers below me, lit by the moon.

A rush of relief as I saw a Midway-bound train at the vanishing point. Turned to surprise as I heard my name, spoken next to my ear as if in secret. I whirled and saw nothing but sharp shadows. A fading mist at water level, wrong for the season.

Echoes became the wheels of the approaching train. I hurried through the open door, knowing someone had found the intimacies of Bubbly Creek before me.