The Cabin Page 9

  We put up some fresh targets and went back to the firing line, and shot some of the other rifles, but I was all over the target and couldn’t get any of them to group.

  I told the men I had to catch a 4 P.M. train back to Chicago. They asked me to stay on and shoot more, but I said I had to go.

  We drove back through the farm country, into the town, and to the auction house. The owner showed me around his operation—how the good pieces were separated from the lesser ones, how they were all cleaned and logged and photographed. I walked through the aisles and looked at the various items in the bins.

  It was about time to leave for the station. We were back in his office, drinking coffee and making our farewells. I admired a good-looking pistol in a box on a shelf.

  “That one’s mine,” the owner said. “Picked up for a song. I stole it for two hundred fifty dollars.”

  I picked up the pistol to admire it, and saw it was the one I’d sent him to be sold.

  Wabash Avenue

  Wabash Avenue ran under the El.

  The significant part was eight blocks long. It ran from Randolph Street on the north to Van Buren on the south.

  Wabash was the backside of Michigan Avenue.

  Michigan was show. Fronted on the park, it looked out on statuary, the Art Institute, and the lake. It was a grand white-stone European vision. Michigan Avenue was old Chicago money patting itself on the back.

  Wabash, running parallel, was, to me, a truer Chicago. The street was always dark. It ran underneath the El; the sun never hit Wabash Avenue. It was always noisy. It was a masculine street. It was a business street. As a kid I’d hang out on the fourth floor of Marshall Field’s store for men on Wabash and Washington. That was a store for a young kid to be in.

  The fourth floor had a Kodiak bear to greet you as you got off the elevator. The bear had been shot by one of the customers and donated to the store; and I always wondered what kind of man would shoot such a bear and then keep it anywhere other than in his living room. I still wonder.

  In any case, it was on its hind legs and looming over you as you got off. Ten, twelve feet in the air. There were other animals and heads and fish displayed throughout the floor, but the bear was it in my book.

  Over on the right was the gun section. You had to pass through the fishing rods to get to them, but it was a short walk.

  Over on the left they kept the clothing. I don’t remember much about the clothing on the fourth floor. I remember the hats on two.

  My usual rounds took me from the fourth floor down the stairs to two. They had the most magnificent assortment of hats I have ever seen in my life.

  Every summer I would try on countless straw boaters before deciding that neither the times nor my personality would support my sporting one. One summer I actually bought one, but I don’t remember wearing it.

  I also remember buying a beret or two over the years from the second floor. Very romantic. Not the $150 extra-select Panamas—a true fortune in the early sixties; not the sable or marten trappers’ hats, so beautiful I didn’t even feel fit to ask to try them on; no, I bought a beret once or twice over the years, and wore it out of the store, feeling myself the creditable and up-to-the-minute rendition of a serious young man with artistic aspirations.

  The ground floor of the store was haberdashery. I have looked that word up many times over the years, as every time I see it I am puzzled by its derivation. I am going to look it up once again. I see my dictionary tells me it comes from the Middle English, haberdassherie, and it becomes clear to me I need a new or auxiliary dictionary.

  In any case, I always felt the word was silly. Further, it was associated in my mind, of course, with Harry Truman, a man whom I did not associate with relaxed elegance. Neither endowment, however, lessened my affection for the first floor, which was the Hermès and Charvet’s of Chicago. Man, they had a fine line of goods in there—their like may still exist, but I haven’t seen it.

  I remember the most beautiful shirts and socks and underwear and belts and suspenders and leather goods. Truman Capote had said it of Tiffany’s; “Nothing very bad could happen to you there.”

  The store was always deliciously cool in the summertime, and warm in the winter, on those very cold and very dark nights, when you would have to go out of that haven and fight your way through the people on Wabash who were trying to fight their way through you and get home just like you. And the lucky ones were going on the El, where at least they had a bit of shelter, and you were usually going on the bus, and had to stand on Washington Street, exposed to that cold, which is worse than any I’ve ever felt anywhere else.

  And what is there about the El? I don’t know. I notice that in almost every thriller made in Chicago in the last few years, there is a chase sequence involving the El, and someone riding on top of the El. Well, the El is, of course, romantic, but why would anyone want to ride on top? I always loved it, as it took you out of the cold. I never lived near the El, and always wished that I did.

  I remember the El outside the practice studios at Lyon and Healy’s. I used to while away many hours at the rate, if memory serves, of one dollar per, in the small piano rooms there. I always requested one on the Wabash side, facing the El. That was my Tin Pan Alley—just me and a pack of cigarettes, playing the piano in the closet-sized room … the El thundering by outside the fourth-floor window.

  They were great people at Lyon and Healy’s. In fact, as I think about it, I don’t remember any salespeople on Wabash who were other than great to me. I spent untold hours in the shops, fingering the stuff, questioning the clerks, making only the most minimal purchases, and those rarely. They let me play all the guitars at Lyon and Healy’s, and across the street at Prager and Ritter’s.

  The salespeople at Abercrombie and Fitch told me about all the custom knives in the first-floor cases. The first major sporting purchase of my life was made there. After much deliberation, and after much saving, I bought a Randall #5 bird-and-trout knife out of the case at Abercrombie’s.

  It cost fifty-five dollars. It was, and still is, advertised as the knife that Francis Gary Powers was carrying when his U2 was shot down over Russia. I don’t know why, but that seemed, and still rather seems, a legitimate endorsement. I suppose that was what Wabash Avenue was to me—a very romantic street. It had the weight of seriously romantic endeavors—hunting, music, dress, reading. I got my first credit card from Kroch’s and Brentano’s bookstore. I was, I believe, seventeen years old, and they gave me a credit card.

  I discovered literature in their basement paperback section. I discovered contemporary writing on the first floor. The salespeople would order books for me, then would look the other way while I stood at the rack and read that week’s new book. I felt like a member there.

  What a different world. I remember the salesmen at Iwan Ries tobacco store schooling me in the niceties of tobacco smoking as they sold me my first pipe—delighted to be passing on a tradition. I remember buying English Oval cigarettes there. I loved the box and the shape. Someone told me that you were supposed to squeeze them to recompress them into a round shape, but I never did this, and if it was the right thing to do, I didn’t want to know. They tasted, to me, of powder and the very exotic—much more so than the heavier Balkan Sobranies, which, it must be admitted, came in the best package anything has ever come in—that small, flat white metal tin, which held ten cigarettes; or, later, a couple of bills and a driver’s license, vitamins—it occurs to me that, even at the time, one knew that there were not really a hell of a lot of things that the Sobranie case was perfectly suited to accommodate—but what promise it offered.

  That was Wabash Avenue. They were glad to see you smoke, glad to see you enjoy yourself, glad to help you do it, and delighted that they could earn their living by assisting you. I suppose it was the end of Chicago as the Merchant to the Frontier.

  What am I forgetting? Up at the top, at Wacker, is the statuary group of General Washington, and somebody else, and signific
antly, to me, a Mr. Solomon—if memory serves—who is there inscribed as a merchant supporter of the Continental Cause. Away down the other end of Wabash were the main garages and offices of the Yellow Cab Company, where I had one or two interesting encounters during my days as a cabdriver, but the real Wabash ran just for those eight or nine blocks under the El.

  Various Sports in Sight of the Highlands

  I try to pop over to Scotland for a little golf once every forty-three years.

  As there exists both religious theory and folk belief to the effect that, should one scorn someone or something in this life, in the life to come one will become that thing; so, in my introduction to golf, did I reap what I had sown.

  For I had spent some time—as who could escape it—watching folks devoted to golf in that same way and with that same devotion others give to cats or the First Amendment, or to other sports and articles capable both of use and of receiving devotional fervor.

  I had watched these folks and wondered. As a child, I spent far too much time in a new suburb of Chicago, which suburb’s only claim to fame was that it bordered a golf course of, I believe, national distinction. And one summer, some première-classe golf contest was held there and neighbors of mine made a lot of money renting out space in a cornfield to those who had come to watch the golf.

  And I had, of course, putted through the windmill, and into the mouth of the gorilla at those carny spots named “Putt ‘n’ Grin,” and so on, on too-hot midwestern evenings.

  As to golf itself, however, I was as innocent as the babe unborn is held to be under some of the more lenient of religious persuasions; and I had come to Scotland to learn.

  I approached my first lesson with this attitude: how craven it would be to wish to excel at a sport the clothing of whose participants I had laughed at for so many years. And, as it turned out, I was not in any danger at all of so excelling.

  I was welcomed at a beautiful resort devoted to sport, and put into the care of an excellent teacher, who showed me the position of the feet, of the hands, of the head and knees, and of the shoulders. I was shown how to relax the shoulders through raising the chin; and how the angle of the ball was sure to depend on the position of the club as it came to the ball, and how that was assured of depending on the angle of the backswing.

  My excellent teacher broke it down section by section, and I was sweating with the effort of it all after a few minutes.

  It reminded me hugely of the hook. My boxing coach said, of that other worthy mystery, “Yeah, you try and try, and one day, next week, next month, sometime, one day, ‘Dawn over Marble Head.’ ” Well, in time the hook began to make sense; and I, as I say, see the similarity in the golf swing.

  In both, it seems to me, the hands and arms are along for the ride, and the legs and waist are doing the yeoman work; so the acquisition of both the hook and the golf swing must be a process of breaking it down, and learning the components by rote over lengthy periods during which one has nothing better to do.

  This whole idea was fine with me, but I had been allotted only two half-hour lessons with the instructor, after which I was to play nine rounds with the resort’s golf pro. At the end of my first half hour I had only progressed as far as missing the ball completely whilst concentrating on the movements of my arms and torso; and my second and last bout of tuition boded fair to consist of missing the ball while employing my entire frame.

  Well, I consoled myself, what is golf anyway?

  Nothing, I reflected, short of some bastard amalgam of billiards and hiking.

  It was, I said in my fit of pique, guilty of falling into that category of most despicable of activities, something that would “ruin the drape.” My preferred leisure hours of the last forty years have consisted of playing the piano or playing poker, a signal desideratum consonant to the two that they do not ruin the drape.

  In neither the playing of the piano nor the playing of cards do we find the necessity of carrying around weighty, bulky, or awkward objects that would deform the clean and flowing lines of the nifty clothing elected by nature as appropriate to the pursuit of such endeavors. One cannot say the same of golf.

  Yes, I understand that one is theoretically empowered to subdue the energy of human or mechanical caddies to carry one’s golf clubs, but this seems to me an unattractive alternative for two reasons.

  First, I think that there must be those times when one must carry the clubs some small way—even if that way is as limited as from the baggage carousel to the car—and this would ruin the drape.

  Yes, you might say, but could one not simply point the golf clubs out to a porter and have him or her carry them that offending distance?

  Yes, I reply, one could; but this would put one afoul of that which I feel is the second serious disqualification of the sport: it seems to me that a whole big bunch of time and space has to be put aside to play golf.

  My hero, Thorstein Veblen, wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class that the lawn, as we know it, is nothing more or less than the attempt to re-create a field that has been munched down by sheep—thus conferring upon its owners the status of gentlemen and-women farmers. Well, when I got up to Scotland, his point was driven home. My approach to the resort was through a vale called Glen Devon.

  The car left Edinburgh and climbed higher and higher through green fields and country lanes until the land fell away on the left side and there was one of the most magnificent views it has ever been my pleasure to see.

  I saw a steep mountain valley and, climbing away up the far side, sheep dotted on the hill, untold miles of intersecting stone walls, grass grazed down to look like the finest and most cared-for lawn, which had, on scant reflecting, and with homage to Mr. Veblen, been mowed down to resemble this vale.

  And I looked out at the golf course, on which such obvious and loving care had been expended; and, to my untutored eye, it looked identical to the sheep-shorn little hills beyond it. But it was Coco Chanel, I think, who said that there are two good reasons to buy anything, because it is very cheap or because it is very expensive.

  And I thought that, for myself, an indulgence in golf spoke too much of what Mr. Veblen called “conspicuous consumption,” of both land and energy.

  Now, I am no one to talk, for I am sure that I defy all but the most hardened and deluded golfers to have spent more on their clubs than I have spent flogging an obviously beaten pair of eights. And I am proud to have spent that most precious of commodities, my youth, mured in an area that, human nature being what it is, I have come to identify as the esthetically correct venue for sport: a small and smoky room.

  So, go in peace, you golfers. Go your way and I will go mine. I returned for that lesson which was to unify in sport the higher and lower portions of my body, and, I think, learned a thing or two, and, I must say, looked forward to my meeting with the golf pro and our round of golf.

  But it was raining hard that day, and the pro and I never got to play.

  I spent a most pleasant half hour sitting with him in his office. I asked him about the birds I had seen on the golf course, and if, in his experience, they ever came to grief.

  He told me that over the years he had knocked down a bird or two, and that, in his youth, he had even taken the odd one back home and cooked it.

  He explained that a golf ball can be moving at upward of 120 miles an hour, and that these things happen. He told me that once, in fact, he downed a sheep.

  Well, that was good enough for me. I unbuttoned my coat and relaxed, and we had a real good chat about sport, and hustling, and betting, and what a fine world it was to allow one to make a living doing what one loved.

  I could have spent the day there, but he was a man with work to do, so I excused myself, and thanked him for his time, and moved on.

  The rain continued to come down and the resort liaison asked if I would like to essay one of the other activities in the tuition and the practice of which they are famed.

  I acceded and went in the rain to their shooti
ng school, where, under the tutelage of another excellent instructor, I delighted in breaking several clay pigeons, and returned after a while, wet and cold and glowing, to the shooting lodge, looking for a short drink of Scotch and feeling like a real sporting gent.

  The rain was letting up a wee bit, and the golfers were preparing to play. Not my sport, as I have pointed out, but the people who pursue it certainly are serious, and as I looked at them teeing up in the rain I reflected that any leisure endeavor which can be pursued to the point of monomania is worthy of respect, and I was warmed by both the Scotch and my own generosity.

  My House

  In my younger days in New York everyone I knew lived in a walk-up apartment building, and I didn’t know anyone who lived below the fifth floor.

  At least that is the way my memory has colored it.

  I remember the industrial wire spools that served as coffee tables, and the stolen bricks and boards out of which everyone constructed bookcases. There were red-and-yellow Indian bedspreads on the wall, and everyone had Milton Glaser’s poster of a Medusa-haired Bob Dylan displayed.

  That was how the counterculture looked in Greenwich Village in the sixties. We considered ourselves evolved beyond the need for material comfort, and looked back on a previous generation’s candle-in-the-Chianti bottle as laughable affectation.

  We children of the middle class were playing proletariat, and, in the process, teaching ourselves the rules of that most bourgeois of games: the Decoration of Houses.

  The game, as we learned it, was scored on cost, provenance, integrity of the scheme, and class loyalty.