Night Moves Read online

  Night Moves

  Jessica Hopper

  UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

  AUSTIN

  “Night Moves” words and music by Bob Seger. Copyright © 1976 Gear Publishing Co. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  Copyright © 2018 by Jessica Hopper

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2018

  Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

  Permissions

  University of Texas Press

  P.O. Box 7819

  Austin, TX 78713-7819

  utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

  Names: Hopper, Jessica, author.

  Title: Night moves / Jessica Hopper.

  Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018008601 | ISBN 978-1-4773-1788-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1794-5 (library e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1795-2 (nonlibrary e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Hopper, Jessica. | Music critics—United States—Biography. | Music journalists—United States—Anecdotes.

  Classification: LCC ML423.H756 A3 2018 | DDC 818/.603 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008601

  doi:10.7560/317884

  To Jr, for teaching me about Chicago and being down for whatever

  Ain’t it funny how the night moves

  When you just don’t seem to have as much to lose

  BOB SEGER, “NIGHT MOVES”

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  friends, bikes, the long night

  bands, shows, water with ice

  Chicago

  Acknowledgments

  1 Old Loft*

  2 Kinko’s

  3 Edmar Polish Grocery*

  4 Myopic Books

  5 Reckless Records*

  6 Buddy/heaven lofts*

  7 Neighboring punk houses where I lived*

  8 Guy peeing on roof

  9 Frankie Beverly Car Wash

  10 Liquor store

  11 Place I thought I’d die

  12 Empty school lot next door

  13 Ukrainian grind bar

  14 Orthodox church

  15 Earwax*

  16 Where Al left the house naked*

  17 Old man Polish bar

  18 Empty Bottle

  19 Chicago Ave. library

  20 Picante

  21 Redevelopment condos

  22 Rainbo

  23 Dollar store

  24 Car crash

  25 1st Chi. apt.

  26 Mecca Fashions*

  27 Yuppie jizz disco

  28 Quimby’s

  29 Former home of Nelson Algren

  30 Underdog*

  I have tried to recreate events, locales, and conversations from my memories of them. In order to maintain their anonymity, in some instances I have changed the names of individuals and places, and I may have changed some identifying characteristics and details about physical properties, occupations, and places of residence. The quantities and locations of people doing drugs are entirely accurate down to the gram, though. Wicker Park’s level of disgusting has ratcheted skyward since this was first written, so use your imagination.

  JESSICA HOPPER

  INTRODUCTION

  I came back to the Midwest from LA because the penetrability of Southern California light had gotten to me. It was February 1997; I was twenty-one. The days documented in this book begin in spring 2004, a few years into what has since become a two-decade run in Chicago. This book is a testimony, of sorts, to my obsession with the city.

  In the early aughts, living in a series of extremely cheap and decrepit apartments on the edge of an industrial corridor, I was an unwitting participant in a wave of gentrification that has since subsumed the area. All the empty lots mentioned here are now condos; the moused-up punk houses were razed for redevelopment and now exist only in collective memory. I was not yet a professional writer but mapped that dream often.

  I was hardly ever without my friends. This is as much about their lives in that particular time and space as it is my own.

  friends, bikes, the long night

  THE NIGHT

  We met up on bikes while the sun was going down. We were early for the bad movie, so we slurped shakes in the BK parking lot across the street ’til it was time. The movie was terrible—great, lobotomizing fun. Back on the bike. The boys went home, I went to Kinko’s and saw my bandmate Al, who had sweated through his shirt with coffee-fueled anxiety, as usual. I went over to Jr’s for a lemonade, stole two cigarettes, borrowed a Gil Scott-Heron record, we left. Back on the bike.

  I held Jr’s bike while he went into the liquor store. Kids who really were just kids, rolling en masse (a Denali, a Celica, a tricked-out Cutlass) hung in the parking lot and greeted one another with a fluid and immaculate shake—butterfly hands that surrendered into a chest pound below the chains. A gentrified local exited the store and wiped out flat on his back in a puddle, soiling his pleat-fronts and splintering his twelve-pack of Lite. Everyone laughed, including me.

  Back on the bike. Out in the city, everyone was on a date, and all the dates were going to parties on bikes, on polished toes peeking from sandal heels. All the girls with bare shoulders. It must be a great thing to love those girls.

  July 17, 2004

  STICK HUNT

  I had an art project on my mind and needed to go find a particular little branch for it. Jr came with. We went up to the train/land bridge, despite it being frosty out. Someone had dragged a living room set up here and arranged it across from a makeshift tent house that had blown down long ago. The bottom five windows of the building behind it is my old loft. I knew it had been rehabbed, but I was galled when I noticed the windows. My former spot was 4,400 square feet and only had two windows that opened. The rest were Plexiglas or plywood, nailed shut. I felt resentful. Jr noted, “It looks like a hotel now.”

  Jr is a good friend; I explained to him my very long dream from last night that involved doing a Japanese tour as the extra guitarist in a reunited Babes in Toyland. He helped me try to divine a meaning. He did not laugh too hard at me when we arrived back home and I crossed “find stick” off my to-do list.

  I like the train bridge because it’s so Chicago: 1/4 nature, 1/4 trash, 1/4 industrial, 1/4 gleaming rehab condos everywhere you look. You can’t beat that view of downtown. Chicago is so Chicago—it’s like getting mashed in the face with a volume of Sandburg poems.

  One day, a few summers ago, a friend and I stood in the same spot whipping rocks, trying to knock out the remaining glass in the panes of an old abandoned meatpacking warehouse. We said we wouldn’t leave until we knocked out some of the white panes. After about thirty minutes we realized they were plastic, not painted glass, and couldn’t be broken no matter what we threw at them.

  January 09, 2007

  WANNA SEE SOME MEATY-A-ROIDS?!

  The brightest meteor shower in our lifetimes brought us up the North Shore to a park in Glencoe, the darkest place I could ever remember being outdoors. We scanned the sky and lay on a picnic table and cursed the trees that blocked our view and then headed down to the beach. There was a 100,000-watt light shining on the boat slips that was light-polluting our good time, but we waded through the surf to a dark spot behind the parks building, just up the sand a bit. We soon found we were not the only ones with this good idea: a trio of teenage boys with a pocket bong had also claimed this spot.

  They could not see we were women double their age.

  “So, do you guys go to school or do you work?”

  Actually, we’re grown-ups.

  “Well, I live like a grown-up . . . I’m a ge
mologist. A graduated gemologist. You know much about diamonds?”

  He may have said more, but we were seizing with laughter. They were not fazed; they also bragged to us about both the impressive size and girth of their at-home bongs.

  We lay there until very very late, and could only see maybe fifteen asteroids dissolving in the atmosphere, not at all like the “up to twelve a minute” that the Internet had claimed. That lying planetarium! It was worth it, so very worth it.

  August 13, 2007

  JOY OF (WO)MAN’S DESIRING

  Jr and I were talking social as if we had not already hung out for hours the previous day and caught up on all existing topics. He was at work at the bookstore and took a smoke break; I breaked with him and did the smoking for him. Outside it was eighty and almost 10 p.m. and everyone young was skateboarding and biking and tube-topping and staring each other out, a loose mob up and down the sidewalks to the bike-in movies and bars and nouveau emo discos: all that Wicker Park proffers. We were talking about exercise, to be exact, when a girl lurched forward and excitedly announced it was her birthday. “Thirtyyy-twooo,” came out of her mouth in a drunken slurp. “I am going to come in soon and buy all the books I want.” She named some authors I didn’t know. Her boyf, maybe twenty-four and anemic-looking, poofed in from the ether. As she wreathed her arms around him, he added, “And P. G. Wodehouse, too!” Who’da thunk it, the pale kid with the crustache is a Jeeves enthusiast.

  Also tonight was the poetry slam of the at-risk youth, mostly teen moms whose writing was about being sad but sturdy under the weight of motherhood. They read with babies on jutted hips or toddlers bing-bonging teeny heads into the back of their legs. After that there was a DJ, and for a quick fifteen minutes before everyone had to bus back, the girls danced and the toddlers waddled. And then as the sub-bass intro for “It’s Going Down” went bum . . . bum bum, on the three, I saw a girl back it up and drop while front-strapped with a babe in her BabyBjörn. She moved smooth like she was floating, with one hand supporting her baby’s head as she dipped towards the floor. It was reverent and defiant at once; it was a beautiful thing to see.

  May 10, 2007

  THE PLAGUE OF WHY?

  Before Jr and I went on our walk today, we were standing in the kitchen talking to Matt, and Jr says, “What’s that guy doing on the roof?” We turned around and looked at the roof that is directly parallel to our kitchen window and there was a guy down on one knee, with the other leg outstretched, his back to us, his hands in front of him, situated around this pipe opening, like a duct, coming up from the roof. Matt supposed he was fixing the vent and Jr and I insisted, “NO HE IS NOT! HE IS PEEING! HE IS PEEING INTO THAT HOUSE!” And we were right! The urinator saw us, looked ashamed, kept pissing, then shook, zipped up, and stood. Then he walked towards the other end of the roof like he was inspecting it or something, all, “La la la just making the rounds . . .” and then went back down the ladder.

  I thought of the Robert Capa quote I read last night, about how every picture should ask a question. If there had been a picture of that man tinkling into the duct, it would ask many questions. For example:

  1. Why is he peeing into the duct?

  2. Is that his house?

  3. Does he know where that duct goes?

  4. Is it some weird fetish he has?

  5. Does his ex-wife live there with her new boyfriend?

  6. Is he a handyman who hates his job?

  7. Is our duct next?

  I spent the beginning of our walk wondering all this out loud and then Matt and I wondered about it again later. Do I post a missed connection on Craigslist, warning my neighbors that there is a mustachioed mystery urinator roaming our rooftops? It is a grade-A baffler.

  January 03, 2007

  BORN (AGAIN) IN THE USA

  We were walking down Western for a long few blocks, and right before we passed the saint candle memorial in a box, with its xeroxed color RIPs and a thin plywood cross where a man was killed (where Jr saw the man die), we began talking of rebirth. Of personal rebirth and of spirit renewed, of life, but how to live it?

  About how when you realize that we are perpetually moving closer to death, that when it looms large as life, you get free from a lot of the in-between and unreasonable musts. Jr saw a man whose body and spirit had just separated, taken in an instant from being of this world to out of it. He said perspective came quick, one night, maybe two. You make peace with death’s swift manners and it raises you up.

  I did not remember until I was home, I had had this same revelation—maybe seven years ago—on the same strip of Western Avenue. My life at the time was just smoke, ash. I was all kinds of frightened, but by accident had started believing in god, and started praying hours a day. The revelations of spirit were constant. I made peace with death just south of the Western/North intersection as I was walking alone from the train after a show late one night. A man had been following me slowly in his car for blocks and I tried picking apart whatever I could to be less scared. I got okay with dying in the span of about one hundred feet, in the middle of a plaintive, panicky dialogue with god. It was not so much through force of will as it was just a sense that came upon me. Respect for death’s omnipresence.

  This weekend we went to Tim’s dad’s memorial service, at his father’s local. The old people at the service, of course, know how to grieve and what to say, how to say it, to hug and not pat the arm awkwardly, and that you bring a hot dish. I watched these older folks, pinochle partners of the past, widower golf buddies, old Mooses with lodge livers; there was nothing unknown in their mourning. It was sure, they knew its form and shape. Our table of kid-friends, we were all moving like nervous atoms because of what we do not know yet.

  January 09, 2006

  CAN’T BE STOPPED

  The best part of the emergency room was my radiologist, who was so earnestly strange that it made me feel like I was in a Lynchian dream sequence. He had a limp, said everything twice like a bad song (“Donot-move./Do. Not. Move.”), wore a lab coat with his name on it, and made jokes I did not understand as jokes. He presided over nine neck X-rays, then disappeared for a while. I lay there, staring into the machine above me, which was like a big Cuisinart with a light on the bottom. He came back and said, “We must do it again. In the processor, three of your X-rays landed on top of one another. All together. Like the Three Little Bears.” He adjusted the light and leaned in to adjust me. “I figured out who the villain is in that story. Little Red Riding Hood. She ate all their porridge.”

  He leaned over me again to adjust the light, and I thought, the only time anyone gets this close to my face, it’s because they are going to kiss me.

  I countered, through my concussed fog, “Little Red Riding Hood is the protagonist, not the villain.” Then I passed out.

  I got in a car accident. A man in a gray Caprice Classic hit me head-on while he was pulling some extreme traffic move on Western. The worst part—really, the worst, worse than my car being totalled—is that when it happened, I was on the phone with my Nana. My eighty-six-year-old Nana, telling her I was coming to visit soon. And then I was screaming and apologizing and had to hang up on her because there was an exploded airbag, and my car was filling with smoke. I hung up on her, stepped outside the car, and passed out on the blacktop, in traffic. A guy who was spare changing came to my aid and got me to the curb.

  Then there were the police and the police made me go in the ambulance. I called Miles and Jr and Matt and told them where the ambulance was going and why. And then I was on the gurney and they put a catheter in the back of my hand and things on my fingers and a thing around my neck that made a Velcro sound and strapped me down. I fell asleep, but I woke up when we were going into the ER, rolling rolling under the lights, and I thought of Bushwick Bill on the cover of the Geto Boys’ We Can’t Be Stopped and I wished I had my camera, to preserve this moment for my eventual solo album.

  Then I woke up and Miles and Jr were standing there leaning over
me saying, “Hi, buddy,” and the look on Jr’s face almost made me cry. I explained that I was all strapped down and given the special collar until I was done with all the X-rays and the CT scan to make sure, but that the doctors think I am fine. Just a concussion and smoke inhalation and whiplash. Matt was ready to fly home from tour if anything was wrong, if they were going to keep me at the hospital. “I am fine,” I said. “I just wanna get home so I can see Spoon on Letterman,” I said. I am tough, but it sure is nice to have such good friends to come pet your hand when you’re hurt.

  Never been in an ambulance before. The CAT scan was like an oscillating donut. Had also never done that before. I was lying there, forever, after the X-rays and scans, and I was watching my vitals on the monitor behind my head. Every time Miles mentioned the unused “urine bag” stationed next to him, my heart rate went up. We played a little game to see how high we could spike my heart rate: 127 on “urine bag” alone.

  September 01, 2005

  I’M IN UR PARALLEL UNIVERZ, RIDIN’ UR ARMORED ICE BEARZ!

  Last weekend, I went to Derek Erdman’s birthday party. There was no cake, and he spent the entire time making grilled cheeses so as not to have to deal with anyone. These two teenage girls showed up and were standing in a huddle in a corner. I decided to befriend them and introduce them to people I knew. When I was sixteen and hitting up the parties of the people I worked with at the record store, grown-ups all, I would wind up standing in a corner with my best friend trying to project Wow I’m having so much fun drinking this beer, while slugging back the Michelob Light we’d pilfered from her parents’ basement fridge. And even though it was totally the lamest lame that ever lamed, we would front to our school friends about the rad party we partied at, and never acknowledge to one another the soul-crushing awkwardness of being the only teenagers at a grown-ups’ party.