Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [37]
Guinan’s still painting. He’s been sketching jazz and blues musicians at places like the HotHouse and the Velvet Lounge. He can depend on them. They’re predictable. He knows when they’ll be there. He tired of the chase. We met up one night at the Velvet Lounge, a small, dark former speakeasy with floral-print wallpaper from the 1940s. On the wall opposite the bar are photographs of jazz musicians who have played here. On one of them, the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy has scrawled, This place is a temple. The lounge is owned by saxophonist Fred Anderson, who’s now in his seventies and, as the founder of a modern jazz co-op, has performed here and overseas, in Germany, Hungary, France, and Japan. Someday, Guinan wants to paint a portrait of Anderson, whose curved posture resembles a sax. Guinan had taken me here this particular evening to hear Nichole Mitchell, a jazz flutist whom he has painted. He titled one of the portraits “Wheat Grass,” since for a while Mitchell lived on a diet of wheat grass. (A French pharmacist bought that work.) There were six members of the band, and nine of us in the audience, not counting two middle-aged men at the bar watching a Chicago Bulls game. When we returned to the Lounge a few weeks later, this time to hear Edward Wilkerson, Jr., a young, talented sax player who’s been reviewed in The Atlantic Monthly and whose pieces are, as Guinan suggests, like individual short stories, the crowd again was scarce—three people besides ourselves. “That’s why I identify with these guys, ’cause I don’t have an audience either,” he says.
There’s a touch of self-pity in his voice, but I’ve become convinced over time that Guinan wouldn’t have it any other way. To be recognized now in his city would mean he’d have to rewrite his own story. A friend with whom he’s had a falling out says of his outsider status: “I guess I always thought that was just part of his personality. I guess my point is that not being appreciated in Chicago is largely a deliberate thing. Van Gogh was anguished over [not being appreciated in France]. He was terribly unhappy about it. That’s probably why he killed himself. But it’s the way Bob wants it. . . . It’s by design.” Loeb told me, out of Guinan’s earshot, that perhaps Guinan’s obscurity in his native city is necessary: “That’s the way he looks at society, as an outsider.”
For all of Algren’s affection for and reliance on Chicago, he became more and more embittered by the rejection of his hometown. In an afterword he wrote ten years after the initial publication of City on the Make, he wrote: “Love is by remembrance. Unlike the people of Paris or London or New York or San Francisco, who prove their love by recording their times in paintings and plays and books and films and poetry, the lack of love of Chicagoans for Chicago stands self-evident by the fact that we make no living record of it here.”
But of course that’s precisely what Guinan has done. He’s expressed his love by remembrance. For all of Guinan’s identification with Algren, he lacks the author’s bluster and harshness. In a moment of candor, he told me, “I feel so damn lucky I’m appreciated somewhere. And it’s so damn nice to walk down a street in Chicago and nobody knows who I am. The whole thing’s an accident. Somebody from Europe liked my work and that’s why I’m there.”
It still doesn’t explain why Guinan hasn’t found a place in his hometown, why he isn’t more celebrated here. Those I spoke with suggested that it must be the subject matter. Too depressing. Too dark. Too desolate. When we were at Rite Liquors, I asked Guinan what seemed to me the obvious question: “Why not move to Paris, where you’re loved?” But Paris, he told me, is too pretty. “It’d be like living your life in a pastry shop,” says Guinan. “What can you paint in Paris?” He took another swig of his Zywiec.
Inside Out
You are gigantic in your virtues and gigantic in your vices. I don’t know in which you glory the most.
British journalist WILLIAM T. SNEAD,
on visiting Chicago in 1893
Periodically,