The Cabin Read online

  Now, however, I find it is my ox that is being gored; and though I fear that the quiddity of my objection opens me to ridicule, I am going to state it.

  I am offended and upset by the universality of recorded music played in situations where the listener is powerless to escape.

  I do not find it necessary that restaurateurs, business-people, and captains of transportation should elect to fill the arguably nonmusical moments in my day with their notion of the correct theme.

  I would prefer street sounds, general quiet, or the lovely rhythm of human conversation to music played in a restaurant. Why should the tastes of some restaurant “consultant” predominate over my own predilection for silence?

  I prefer the sounds of the gymnasium to the wretched throbbing of disco music, or whatever that phenomenon is called today. I do not like the time I spend weighing the rights of the restaurant against the rights of myself, the customer, each time I try to decide whether to ask that the music be turned off or lowered, or whether I should just leave. I spend a lot of my life in restaurants, on planes. I read in them, I write in them. Both activities are seriously curtailed by the presence of recorded music.

  One might argue that said music is simply background, but it is not so for me.

  I love music, I play music, I write music, and when it is being played I am unable to tune it out. I am listening to it against my will, distracted from my thoughts, my book, my work, and hating the choice, the fact, and the arrangement, of the music, and the arrogance of those who have subjected me to it. Can it be that those of a certain class cannot imbibe their alcohol or chew their food without hearing Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday, that travelers would feel cheated if they did not hear the Brandenburg Concerto when the plane touched down, that others could not enjoy their shopping mall without “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”?

  I suggest that no one enjoys that music. That it is there because it is there, and that most people either do not notice it or have come to accept it as the correct background noise for the above activities.

  I can do neither, and, though I know this confession brands me as an old maid, I feel I have a just beef, and you have just heard it.

  I would not be so quixotic as to suggest that the courts are the proper venue for the settlement of that which even I, the offended, can barely envision as a dispute; but I suspect that there are others of a disposition similar to mine, and that perhaps somewhere we might have some redress.

  Those of such mind might be thought of as neurasthenic individuals, but we might also be thought of as consumers—and, in that guise, perhaps we might gain consideration of an entrepreneur or two. If I saw a restaurant advertising “good food, quiet surroundings,” I’d surely give it a try.

  The Hotel Lincoln

  I took down an old acting book the other day.

  It was Richard Boleslavsky’s Acting: The First Six Lessons, and, when I was a young acting student, it was beloved by me. The book was a fairly constant companion in the late sixties and seventies. It is an anecdotal and accessible rendering of Boleslavsky’s understanding of that philosophy which, for want of better terminology, should probably be called the Stanislavsky System.

  Here is why I took the book down: I was passing in front of my television, which, to my shame, was turned on. The television was advertising an upcoming showing of the film Lives of a Bengal Lancer. Well, I thought, I don’t know the film, but I love the book. And I strove to prove to the television that my literacy predated the electronic. I scanned the bookcase for the Lives, and did not find it. I did, however, come across another book in the, I would think, limited sub-arcana of lancer memoirs, and this book was Lances Up!

  Now, Lances Up! is by Richard Boleslavsky, and describes his career in the Polish Lancers at the beginning of the Great War. I had bought the book during the period when I frequented drama bookstores and because its author had been a member of the Moscow Art Theater—my youthful Camelot—and had written the excellent Six Lessons.

  So, twenty years later, and involved in a rather pointless dialogue with a television set, my thoughts guided my hand to an old favorite book of mine, and I took it down from the shelf, and a rent receipt fell out of it.

  It was a receipt for $170 for one month’s rent at the Hotel Lincoln, which stood and stands at the southern end of Lincoln Avenue in Chicago.

  I lived at the Lincoln off and on for various years of my youth, and I found it a paradise.

  Let me tell you: when I first began staying there the rent was $135 a month, which included daily maid service, an answering service, a television set, and both the best view and the best location in Chicago.

  The rooms looked out over Lincoln Park and the lake, and I thought the view much nicer than that afforded by Lake Shore Drive.

  I had nothing but Clark Street between me and the park, while Lake Shore Drive had the vast concrete Outer Drive and constant noise and traffic. My room got the most beautiful of sunrises, and it was always clean when I came back at night. I believe I pitied the deluded gentry who paid fortunes for their apartments, and who did not realize that one required nothing more than shelter and solitude. Not only did my hotel room possess those, but it had charm in the bargain. Elaine, the ancient telephone operator, somehow got into the habit of calling me up at eleven or twelve at night and asking if I needed a cup of tea or anything. There was a reported crap game down in the men’s room, which I never found; and there was the sound of the animals at night.

  The animals lived in the Lincoln Park Zoo, which was pretty much right across the street, and many times at night I’d hear the lions or the seals.

  The report of the crap game came from friends at Second City.

  As a kid in high school I hung around Second City quite a bit. I was friendly with the owners and their family, and was permitted to frequent the joint. Later I worked there as a busboy, and occasionally I played piano for the kids’ shows on the weekend.

  In any case, in the early sixties, well before the time of the rent receipt, I was exposed to la vie bohème as rendered by the actors at Second City. The club was, at that time, half a block from the Hotel Lincoln restaurant (which was not, I believe, called the Laff-In at that juncture); and it was related to me that various illuminati of the North Side lived in the Hotel Lincoln and ate and wrote and schemed in the hotel restaurant, and shot craps in the men’s room, and, having been told these things, I remembered them. And when it became time for me to go out into the world, I applied to the hotel, and was rented a room.

  I bought my first typewriter (an Olympia, for which I remember paying two hundred dollars; it seemed like a lot of money for a manual typewriter, but I’ve still got it, twenty-some years later, and it still works fine) and paid a month in advance and lived at the Hotel Lincoln. I went downstairs several times a day to the restaurant, now called the Laff-In, and sat in the same booths that had once sheltered Burns and Shreiber, Fred Willard, and the great Severn Darden. I received messages at the switchboard, and had beautiful young women back up to my room. I went down to the Laff-In in the middle of the night and had chicken soup with the owner, Jeff, and talked about the world. I never went into the hotel’s bar, but did have a drink now and then with the proprietors of the drugstore, behind the prescription counter.

  I worked during those years at a day (or “straight”) job, and, in one capacity or other, in the theater.

  I sold land over the telephone for a while. The real estate office was way up north in Lincolnwood, and so I rode the length of Lincoln Avenue twice each day on the CTA bus, and it seemed significant to me that the long bus route began on the very corner where I lived. (And coming home at night, I could see the red-orange sign of the hotel from as far north, if memory serves, which it probably does not, as Addison Street.)

  I worked as a waiter at a club just up Clark Street; and, during that period, I worked as a busboy in the final days of the London House.

  I wrote plays in my notebook, sitting in the Laff-I
n; and wrote sitting on various benches in the park across the street.

  I had just a few clothes and several theater books. Looking back, I think that I can say that I not only set out to but managed to emulate a model of the Life of a Chicago Writer.

  I had guests at my house in Boston on the evening that I took down the Boleslavsky. One of the guests was a young actor. I started reminiscing with him and his friends about my early days in the theater, and told him, as, it seems, we middle-aged fogeys may do, how romantic and how cheap things had been in my day. I told him about the perfect life of charm and comfort lived for $170 a month, and brought out the book and receipt as if the fact of their existence would mitigate my garrulousness. He admired the book, and I made him a present of it, and inscribed it with his name and the wish that it would bring him much enjoyment and luck.

  He asked if I meant him to have the receipt too. I hesitated a moment. The receipt had just become precious to me. It was an absolute relic of an earlier day of my life. I wanted the receipt. But what did the receipt signify? That I had, in fact, lived through those times in which I had lived? Who would doubt it, and, equally, to whom could it be important? It could be important only to me, and I knew the truth of it already. So I told the actor that, of course, I meant him to have the receipt, too; because I wanted to be part of the succession through Boleslavsky to Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theater, and I was flattered that the young man wanted to make the tradition continue to himself through me.

  The Shooting Auction

  I took the train out of Union Station in Chicago, and went south. I was going to meet a man I had known only over the phone. He ran an auction house for firearms. I’d bought several pieces from him, and sold a piece or two as well.

  The last auction had in it a .45-caliber Colt pistol of mine. I’d had the gun extensively reworked and tuned for shooting competition. But business had taken me away from practice, so I decided to clean out my gun cabinet and sent it down to the auction house.

  The pistol and the modifications had run me well over a thousand dollars, but the auction was a place to find a bargain; I would be lucky to get eight hundred for the gun.

  After the auction the proprietor phoned and told me that he was extremely sorry, but that my gun had only fetched $275. He was surprised and apologetic, and offered to waive his commission, but I told him, no, that I’d profited as a buyer at the auction, and that I knew the rules of the game, and that the pistol had fetched what the market thought it was worth, that he should deduct his commission and send me a check.

  He then invited me down to his place in southern Illinois to see the operation, pick up the check, and do a little shooting at his range.

  I was flattered by the invitation, which was, I knew, offered partly by way of apology for what he considered my disappointment at the auction price. I am not a gregarious person, and, further, wouldn’t have wanted the man to feel beholden to me; but my experience of the shooting sports was of an exceedingly friendly and hospitable fraternity. My acquaintance with the owner of the auction had grown over the time of our business dealings. He seemed a friendly man, and his invitation to come down south and do a little shooting was very much in the fairly universally, in my experience, friendly style of the shooting world. His offer caught me in between projects, and a trip and some shooting sounded like a very good idea, so I got on the train and rode south.

  He and his friend met me at the station, and we went to his friend’s house. The man had a large collection of American shotguns. There were perhaps eighty of them displayed horizontally on every wall of his gun room. On a table in the center of the room was a scale-model steamboat he had made. The damn thing was about two feet end to end and fashioned completely out of brass. I was told that it was detail-correct down to the smallest fittings and gauges and that it operated perfectly.

  This seemed a bit obsessive, and I found myself repressing an impulse to question the infinite completion of the model. “But surely,” I wanted to say, “it can’t have every gauge and fitting of the original …” But I held my tongue, although I found the intricacy of the model aggressive, and I admired his collection of arms.

  One of his prizes was a German drilling, a double shotgun with a rifle barrel underneath. The guns are, I understand, popular in Europe, but I had never seen one. And its oddity was accentuated by various features fitted into the stock that would change the point-of-aim when the shooter changed from shotgun to rifle. The drilling had a comb-and-cheek piece that popped out of the stock when a button was pushed, and it was very well made and very German and I admired it no end.

  The door to the friend’s gun room was taken from a bank vault. Walking in his hallway, one opened a door to what could have been a linen closet, and found, beyond it, the massive steel vault door.

  The two men gathered and advertised their guns each month in an old-fashioned hand-drawn brochure. I collected the brochures and bid on a few of the guns, and I sent some in to be sold, including, as I’ve said, the Colt .45 automatic.

  The two men were to drive me out to their club. We went south through very flat farm country, over the blacktop road. In a while the land became slightly rolling and more wooded. We went off on a side road and then through a stretch of woods to the shooting club.

  The club, I was told, was a rather exclusive affair and drew membership from all over the Midwest. Admittance had been closed for some long time, and new membership opportunities tended to devolve almost exclusively upon the family and friends of the old members.

  Additionally, to apply, one must have spent, I was told, ninety days “under canvas.” I had never heard the expression before, and thought it somewhat overly picturesque, until I reflected that my reluctance to embrace it was probably founded on both envy and ignorance of the situation it described; and to the world that would have need to refer to the phenomenon, the phrase was not only apt, but, to the contrary of my suspicions of its prettiness, direct and businesslike in the extreme.

  As we drove through the club’s long driveway—we have all, I think, had that experience of first exposure to a secluded and exclusive spot, in which the drive from the barred gate to the main buildings seems interminable—I was pointed out the house of the gamekeeper.

  We drove past it, and over the various streams and past the small lake of the shooting-club preserve. I was told the names of the streams and how the ice fishing took place and the ponds were stocked, and how the wives of the sportsmen prepared this or that traditional dinner on its appointed date.

  We drove to a small cabin and parked. The cabin was furnished with a few long tables and a wooden chair or two. Around the walls were lockers and shelving.

  My companions signed into a log book and took some targets from a bin, and we went outside, out beyond the cabin, where there was a hundred-yard rifle range.

  The owner’s friend took the targets and walked the hundred yards down to the butts. The owner and I went back around to the car and opened the trunk and took out several rifles, ear protectors, and a canvas shooting bag.

  We took the lot over to a shooting table back at the firing line, and laid out the rifles, side by side. The man took a sandbag from the shooting gear and pointed to one of the rifles and asked me if I’d go first.

  We saw the other man hoist up the targets, down at the end of the range. I waited, with that schematic shooting courtesy which always has in it just that little bit of “show,” for him to return and move well back of the firing line before I prepared to shoot.

  The rifle was some very quick and flat-shooting thing. A 220 Swift or something. A varmint rifle. I took the sandbag, whacked it down on the table in front of me, and pounded a valley into it with the edge of my hand. I opened the bolt of the rifle and laid the stock in the sandbag groove. The man gave me five rounds of ammunition, and I took them and put them next to the sandbag. I sat down in the metal chair and pulled it up to the shooting table.

  I asked him if it was all right to dry-fi
re the piece and he said it was. I got down behind the rifle and looked through the scope. The eye relief was good for me, and it brought the target right up close. I got myself into a good shooting position, my left arm across my chest and the hand hugging the right shoulder; I closed the bolt and took aim at the target. I took a deep breath. In and slowly out; then in and half out, until the crosshairs rested exactly on the bottom center of the bull’s-eye, and I squeezed the trigger, which broke clean at what felt like around three and a half pounds. I opened the bolt, looked up from the rifle, and loaded the five rounds down into the magazine. “Well, I guess I’m going to shoot here,” I said. The two men nodded and stepped farther back from the firing line.

  I put four shots into the target, and they felt so good that I got a bit nervous and pulled the fifth shot slightly. “Flyer!” I called out after the last shot, and immediately felt foolish, as if anything in the world depended upon the consistency of my shooting.

  I opened the bolt, and one of the men said I had shot very well. But I couldn’t get over my last shot, and compounded my feelings of gaucherie by going on about it. “No,” I said. “Last shot’s way off. Way off.”

  We walked down to the butts and pulled the target down, and it showed four shots in a one-inch group just right of center at the bottom of the bull, and the fifth shot three quarters of an inch below and to the right of the group.

  This was good shooting, even with the flyer, and both honesty—I was shooting rather above my head—and courtesy required that I shut up about it and let the next man shoot. But I just couldn’t seem to keep quiet, and I kept going on about how the rifle “felt,” and what a good rifle it was, and how I had pulled the last shot. I felt like a fool and knew that my chat sounded false to the other men.