I’m playing piano at a bar. It’s just 7 PM on a summer Tuesday in Chicago, and I’m sort of drunk in my sky-blue tie.
I don’t really know how to play piano, in any sort of academic sense, but I know that if you’re hitting, exclusively, the white keys, and that if you’ve got a sense of rhythm, and that if you’ve got anything like a ‘feel’ that then—then you can’t really go too wrong. This much has gotten me dates with girls I didn’t really like, at this bar in the near-northwest side of Chicago; this much is keeping me company with myself in this bar, with two old men and a blaring TV screen.
I might have ‘sold out’ now, in my sky-blue tie in Chicago and I might be waxing nostalgic, RE: my more struggling, artist-like graduate school days at this bar, right now.
I might be flashing my thick and difficult literary tomes around the Chicago Loop in my sky-blue tie and my new sunglasses, to tell everyone who’s a believer that I’m still one of them too—I’ve just got to make some money right now, all you believers.
But I’ve also got to move into a new apartment, paying twice my old rent, in Chicago, because I signed a lease feeling like no one would ever want to be with me if I couldn’t make this largely better—this whole *being with myself* business. I need to make it so much better.
I’ve moved out of the basement I lived in, for a year, with another ‘struggling artist’. The basement our snarky landlord calls ‘The Man Cave’, but which I have called in my head, ‘The Marxist Cave’.
In my new apartment in its prime location, with my sky-blue tie and my new sunglasses and more forthcoming amenities and glamor and perks—now that I’m supplementing my ‘struggling artist’ existence with full-time work in Big Bad Corporate Law—there’s just no limit to the number of dates I can achieve, with girls I don’t really like, here in Chicago.
John Wilmes is a writer and professor in Chicago, and the author of Jad's Dad Milo, available at Mouse House Books.
