Nerves of Steel: who among you?

Dare to join the T2H crew at Quimby’s Thursday for the relaunch of the newest bit player on the crowded Chicago reading series scene, our own “So You Think You Have Nerves of Steel?” which I blogged about when expecting it to launch back last November. Delays, delays, I know. This time round, rumor and innuendo have been less at the front of plans and in their place, well, think monstrous love and well-being and fortitude and general comeuppance, perhaps, all qualities I might well like to better associate with the alloy that gave the city of the series’ birth the fair (or fairly grim) architectural bombast that it holds today.

Couldn’t have picked a better bookstore for it, that’s for sure. THE2NDHAND’s first-ever bookstore-sited reading took place encased in those walls April Fool’s Day, 2001. I can guarantee your memory, such as it may be, of that Sunday will be blown well out of your pants by Thursday’s event, if that makes sense.

Come out, ye readers. Details here:

SO YOU THINK YOU HAVE NERVES OF STEEL?
WHERE: QUIMBY’S BOOKS, 1854 W.North Ave., Wicker Park, Chicago
WHEN: Thursday, Jan. 14, 7 PM,

FEATURING:
*Host Harold Ray (aka ACM fiction editor and THE2NDHAND coeditor Jacob Knabb)
*Chicago playwright and past THE2NDHAND contributor Chris Bower
*THE2NDHAND repeat performer and writer Jill Summers
*& Literary stalker extraordinaire Amanda Marbais

There’s more at THE2NDHAND site: www.the2ndhand.com/events/events.html; the Facebook page for the event via THE2NDHAND’s group there is here. You can grab a copy of the new broadsheet, featuring Kate Duva, there too. Speaking of Duva, she’s on the program for the next series event at Whistler on Feb. 8.

And now for a new addition to this blog, a fragment of some work in progress, for kicks. Thoughts appreciated. Here goes. . .

Food enough to last several days, in the end, I thought, cigarettes too. Tobacco was but of course miraculously cheap in Alabama, after Chicago’s $6-$8 a pack, and the canned vegetables and meats were dirt cheap themselves; For his absence, the Suited Man couldn’t have led me a more well economically suited place.

I made my way back to Ingalls through the Five Points central business district – with the exception of Charlotte, every Southern city looking to be considered someplace important has to have a Five Points central business district, modeled on the example perhaps of Atlanta, granddaddy of them all. It’s where the urban freaks and weirdos meet with the town’s shuffling, decaying old guard, a clash made manifest for me today as I descended the large hill into the district from the grocery in the presence of both Iraq War-protesting peaceniks (from middle-age-looking soccer mom types to your more typical punks and anarchists) on one side of the circle where met 20th Street, Magnolia and 11th Avenue, and directly across from them a slightly larger coterie of anti-abortion activists. Among them was a decidedly demonic-looking cross between Abraham Lincoln and Ghandi (with the latter’s trademark spectacles) preaching from atop a milk crate clad in what I could only assume was Amish garb, tophat a’flourish. He was flanked mostly by women bearing signs that read gorily and variously, some including pictures of the bloody mess of aborted fetuses and such.

I watched them warily, grimly the latter crew as I strode by on the other side of the street.

WHAT DO WE WANT? /
Peace! /
WHEN DO WE WANT IT? /
now!

“Peace my brother!” Lincoln/Ghandi, of the anti-abortion party, attempted to boom, though the peaceniks were surely louder. I was close enough to make out his message. “Peace indeed for the unborn souls of the world’s wicked, who blaspheme the teaching and the omnipotence of God; only God gives life, and only he taketh away, in the name of the Lord!” There was a guy in a Harley-Davidson shirt next to the street preacher holding a piece of poster board printed with a variously red, black and brown-colored blob of an image of what would have been indeterminate content if it weren’t for the “GOT A SMOKE?” tag at it’s top, “Tobacco is a the devil’s killer of choice” in smaller lettering below the picture. I pulled hard on my cigarette. The guy holding the sign then did the same, incongruously, with his own, looked me square in the eye, then to his poster, his cigarette and back to me again. He shrugged, puffed, and smiled.

I felt my head expand. I conspicuous, after all, one of the single bystanders not rolling through in a car. The man in his Harley shirt then shrugged, extinguishing his cigarette in the gutter, breaking away in short order from the preacher to confide to me that he got paid for what he was doing. “If you’re out of work,” said the man, “there’s money in this poster.” The anti-arbotion types tended to limit their appearances here, thus every time they showed up the television newscasters followed, ever to make references to the 1990s Eric Rudolph clinic bombing of a still-extant just a couple blocks from Five Points, I learned.

Who exactly paid him? I asked.

“It’s cash, man, how do I know?” he said. “Does it matter? They want us to help swell the ranks, make a good show.”

I pointed to the peaceniks across the square. “They do the same?” I said.

“No way,” he said. “They’ve got real balls and blood behind them. They’re out here every freaking day – new crew every time. No money in it, as you could say about most so-called liberal endeavors. Got a cigarette?”

Lincoln/Ghandi took final notice of us talking and turned his bile in our direction. “…and we were talking about sin, yes, and even among our own here today are vile prognosticators, fornicators and partakers of the vile weed that is the tobacco plant and worse, most surely,” he said. “Take the example here, of Winston Grubbs, 50-year-old homeless black cancer victim who continues spreading the message of the destructiveness of his habit while continue to engage it, proselytize it to the youth community as only a Promissory member can.” I took it he made reference to me as a member of the “youth community.”

“I’m nearly 30,” I said, loud enough that he could hear, and lit another smoke for myself, passing a fresh one to my companion, whose eyes lit up as if prepared to offer a profuse Southern message of thanks and, perhaps, an apology. “Don’t sweat it,” I cut him off, and schlepped my groceries on down the street. Lincoln/Gandhi never skipped a beat.

Back in the Suited Man’s lair I combed the environs for clues, messages from Rinckoff or signs of my father. I came up empty. Whomever it was I was chasing was long gone, though clearly the bed had been laid for my existence here. I took it as a matter of course for a Shining Man, I guess, and laid the groundwork for some time in Birmingham, enjoying the beers and a hot meal of sliced bread, one can spinach warmed on the, thankfully, fully functional hotplate. A background of smooth jazz served musings on a Southern networked cabal of radical-right mercenaries known as the Promissory well before it took me off to dreams upright at the computer.

Then I woke, having slept sitting for several hours, and the radio was off. . .