Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [36]
These men and women are, for him, what the city is all about: people getting by, people with nothing to hide. He admires their straightforwardness, their directness. In the monograph of his work, he recalls some of his encounters, including the time he approached a prostitute named Anita at a bar and offered to pay her hourly fee of twenty dollars if she’d let him sketch her. She agreed, and the two retired to a by-the-hour room at the Victor Hotel.
“Now, I want you to behave as if I were a date,” Guinan told her. “Do whatever you do and I will stop you at some point and ask you to pose. Do you take off your clothes?”
“Take off my clothes! On a date? I usually wear pants, you know, slacks. And just take out one leg. You don’t want to do me with no clothes on anyway, I got terrible stretch marks.”
Guinan guessed her age at twenty, but Anita told him she was in fact thirty-two and had three children. Guinan had her pose lying on the hotel bed, in red panties and bra, her hands behind her head. She has a distant look about her, as if she’d rather be somewhere else, which is probably how she looks when she’s performing her job.
“It would be a lot easier to fuck, wouldn’t it?” Anita suggested.
“I got to do this work.”
“Takes all kinds.”
Guinan needed to return the next week to finish the drawing, and he asked Anita if they could get the same room. She simply told the clerk that she had a date who couldn’t “make it” unless he was in the same room, a request that didn’t seem to fluster the man behind the desk.
It’s a story which seems meant to let us know that Guinan recognizes that, in the end, he’s completely dependent on the goodwill of his subjects. He often worries that he has taken advantage of people who are down on their luck. One time, he went on a rant about white suburbanites slumming at South Side blues clubs: “There’s something about it I don’t like. Young white rock musicians from the suburbs will go down to some dark South Side neighborhood and have themselves photographed against some bleak urban setting to make it look as if they live there, as if they suffered the hard knocks. They’ve taken someone else’s misfortune to use as a background for their own mediocrity.” “But couldn’t people say that about you?” I asked. “Exactly. Exactly. ’Cause I feel like in the back of my mind I’m doing something similar . . . I mean I pay them, but in a way I get that nagging feeling that maybe I’m exploiting these people.” “Is that why you stopped doing it?” “No, I stopped doing it ’cause my stomach was killing me. It got to the point two years ago that I couldn’t stand looking at another beer.”
But Guinan has another problem. His subjects are moving targets. Gentrification has pushed the poor and the marginalized this way, then that. It’s like being rocked on a ship. First Maxwell Street closed. Then Clark Street was cleaned up, and then the artists and young financiers moved into Wicker Park, and gone were the taverns, the King Palace, the J.N.L., and Sam’s. Rite Liquors is one of the last of his hangouts still standing. “The image of Chicago is becoming self-conscious,” he says. “Suddenly the mayor wants to clean it up, make it look like Anywhere, USA, with a lot of wrought-iron fences and flowers. Flowers in all the parking lots. There seems to be this need to homogenize the place. It was a city of neighborhoods but more and more it’s becoming . . .” He doesn