<<shudder>>

The anxiety of the last few years is ratcheting up like crazy now. These days leading up to Election Day feel almost unbearable. Though I’ve been very aware of how the anxiety has affected me—changes in my temperament, sleep, work habits, concentration, the effect of stress on my body, etc.—I think I’ve been fairly good at calming my mind from time to time, at finding a bit of equanimity, at least intermittently. Pushing through.

But something happened this week that has me truly shaken. Someone I know, not a close friend, but someone I’ve worked with pretty closely, went full-bore glassy-eyed MAGA cult. Like true believer “I’ve seen the light and let me tell you the good news!”

For the most part, my take on MAGA, even with all the insanity since 2016, has been that they’re a version of the same fearful, small-minded faction of Republicans and religious fanatics we’ve been fighting off my whole life; they’re feeling their power, and they’ve gotten a lot louder, but they’re nothing new. But this person’s conversion seems to signal something novel and uniquely sinister. This is not someone who lives in the exurbs of Ohio and is afraid of drag queens, this person is someone squarely in MY world. I’m having trouble letting it go and moving on.

Things I Think About While Reading the Paper on Saturday Morning.

This brings up so many thoughts.

When Y’all moved to Nashville in 1998, we got a lot of attention and got to work and play with some astoundingly great musicians, but there was no festival hosted by John Waters. I think Y’all may have gotten lost if there was, we would’ve been maybe too on the nose. But it’s hard to compare Y’all to an artist like Orville Peck, who is also drawing heavily from traditional country but is, in the end, a singer singing songs. Y’all’s music was, in its sort of homemade way, legit, but we were always more, and less, than a queer country act. Still, we would’ve killed at this festival.

It’s a pretty regular occurrence, the feeling an article like this arouses.

It’s the feeling I get when LIZZIE is (regularly) compared to—and often positioned (ahistorically) as influenced by—shows that it prefigured: Rent, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Spring Awakening, Six … and on and on, it’s a very long list, and of course now musicals set in a historical era with a rock score are commonplace. I’m proud to be on that list with some great musicals. I’m also proud of LIZZIE’s roots in downtown experimental theater, and thrilled that our show has bubbled up into the mainstream. That’s what experimental art does, and is kind of for, if you’re lucky. (I also acknowledge how LIZZIE has changed over the many years, how it exists now in a kind of dialogue with those later shows, and has been influenced by them.)

Y’all, too, grew out of the 80s/90s downtown New York theater scene that spawned LIZZIE. Y’all got a lot of love when Jay and I moved to Nashville in the late 90s because Nashville is tradition-minded when it comes to music and Jay and I were doing something, at heart, very traditional. Our act was a kind of cheeky reclamation of a tradition we loved, and very much a tribute.

The bands and home recording I was a part of in the 1980s were maybe arguably a little more situated in their time. It was one part emulating artists we liked and one part “what’ll it sound like if we do this?” making stuff up as we went along, but you can see how the type of experiments we were doing evolved into bands and movements that got a lot more attention than we ever did.  

I’m not claiming I was some genius always ahead of my time. I just never wanted to do what other people were doing, I wanted to do what I wanted to do, I didn’t care if I didn’t know how, and in fact I saw that as a bulwark against inauthenticity. And trying to define or locate a “cutting edge” is a slippery undertaking. Just because you’re working outside the mainstream doesn’t mean you’re not following in others’ footsteps, they’re just different footsteps, combined in different, possibly new ways. LIZZIE stands on the shoulders of the Wooster Group and Lita Ford. The Woods stood on the shoulders of Jackie DeShannon and Eno and Steeleye Span and the Raincoats. With Y’all it was Minnie Pearl and Ellen DeGeneres and the Louvin Brothers and John Denver. But standing on shoulders is probably the wrong metaphor here. It sounds too, I don’t know, heroic. The process is more like picking up threads or dipping into a stream.

These are just musings on a Saturday morning. I reserve the right to retract or contradict any or all of it!

Who?

Facebook memories had me thinking this morning about my various name changes and nicknames over the years (Jack Cheslik, S.J. Cheslik, Steven Cheslik, SteChe, Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, etc.), there have been a LOT, but I’d completely forgotten about one of them.

In 1994, when HERE revived LIZZIE (née Lizzie Borden: An American Musical) and we lengthened it with a handful of new songs, I was deep in the thick of Y’all. I was touring a lot then, so I wasn't in the LIZZIE rehearsal room much, if at all. I wrote the songs wherever I was, recorded them on cassette, bare-bones, just me and a guitar with a fuzz pedal and I think maybe a little Casio keyboard, and I sent them to Tim and the band. There was no written music or M.D., everything was much more DIY indie then than now.

By 1994, Jay and I were starting to tour with Y’all a lot and build a non-New York fan base, most of whom seemed to believe our fictional stage identities were real, or they wanted them to be real. (The psychology of the Y'all fandom is still a mystery to me.) So we decided, a la Pee Wee Herman, that we would let them believe it and never admit otherwise. All our press materials had the fake bios, and, even with the most surreal elements of Y'all, we never let a crack show. (I used to get very confused about how old I was because Y’all Steven was much younger.)

So, when LIZZIE returned, I didn’t want to blow the whole thing up by having it credited to Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, so I made up a pseudonym, and the 1994 version of LIZZIE -- which contained the new songs, House of Borden, Sweet Little Sister, Will You Stay?, Why Are All These Heads Off?, Mercury Rising, and Watchmen for the Morning -- was credited to Stephen Streuber. That seems insane to me now, but at the time I thought it was absolutely necessary.

Thirty years ago we weren’t very good about documenting and archiving, and I’ve never been able to find anything online showing that name, but I know it happened!

Covid, Day 4.

Day 4 of Covid. I don’t know why it comes up so much more now than ever before, maybe because I have friends who have kids?, but this notion of concern for the well-being of people in the world when I am no longer in it is, to be honest, a concern I don’t find as urgent or important or even real as most people seem to. Like, why?

I don’t generally share these thoughts because I think people think they’re monstrous, but I just don’t get as worked up as I guess I should about things like population rate decline and climate change. I practice thrift and the “three R’s” but that’s because I believe we all share the world and its resources and it’s immoral to waste stuff. But all the railing at oil companies—the oil companies have sins to account for, absolutely, but producing oil is not the worst of them. Our world requires massive amounts of energy to function, and you can’t just radically change that overnight without causing more harm than climate change is causing. The population anxiety is genuinely puzzling to me: why, if people are so worried about the planet are they not thrilled to see the population decline? At any rate, it doesn’t feel like a good use of my limited sanity to be in a constant panic about climate change. Implementing global measures big enough to reverse it—a project that requires the buy-in of some 8 billion people—doesn’t seem realistic.

Maybe it’s partly my on and off Buddhist training (“Abandon any hope of fruition” or, as a dear friend of mine, who, like me, tends to worry, says, “Is it happening now?”) but that’s not all. I think I’m just temperamentally disinclined to take the far future all that seriously. (When I was much younger, late teens and twenties, I seriously believed I would die young. It wasn’t like a fear, it was just something I knew. Obviously, that didn’t happen.) 

But the last few days, feeling very sick and very angry to be sick, I have been thinking about it. The status quo now, apparently, is that we have to get regular Covid vaccines in order to hold the virus at bay just enough so that we don’t die, but, fairly regularly, we get very sick. I’ve had every vaccine available as soon as it was available, and I’ve had Covid twice. Two years ago, my case was much worse than this one (I could barely move for a couple days), but this one is pretty fucking bad.

Don’t construe this to mean I’m a vaccine denier or anything like that. I will get vaccinated because I don’t want to die yet, and I certainly don’t want to die with a tube down my throat. But it’s depressing to imagine this situation projecting into the future. I only have 20-25 years left if I’m lucky so I can put up with it, but kids now who have many decades of their lives in which this pattern of alternating vaccines and illness is just what you have to do? And how many more similar viruses will take the same shape? Maybe it’s just the sore throat talking (seriously, there is no sore throat more painful than a Covid sore throat) but that’s just bleak. So I guess Covid has unearthed something in me I didn’t believe was there.

I see the contradictions in my attitude here. Just the fact that I worry a lot betrays a concern for the future, but that kind of fretting about possibly bad outcomes doesn’t project out very far, no more than a few months, usually a day or two. But much more telling: I’ve just placed the Y’all archives, and plan to place my own personal and professional archives eventually, in a research library because I want future scholars to have access to them. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.

P.S. While I’m feeling justified in my crankiness: what is the deal with everyone raving about Japanese egg sandwiches? Who hurt you? Did your mother never make you an egg salad sandwich for lunch and cut the crust off? Just because you call it “Japanese” doesn’t make it new. Jesus, people.

Dad, Beethoven, etc.

My Dad for the most part expresses very little emotion. He can be extremely hard to get a fix on. But I was thinking this morning that his favorite music, the classical pieces he loved and that I grew up hearing in the house, was the most frankly emotional stuff in the canon: Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Rachmaninoff No. 2, Chopin, lots of Beethoven. It’s like my father’s emotional life has always been in plain sight, but invisible to me. More and more as I get older, I see that so many things I thought he was withholding from me—expressions of love being the big one—he was actually broadcasting loud and clear, but I was oblivious. Sometimes I think wisdom is wasted on the old. This bit of insight would have been more useful to me at, say, 12.


1 2 1234!!

Because I was telling in 90 minutes a story that unfolded over years, I had to skip a lot of stuff in Life in a Box, whole episodes that someday maybe someone will excavate in the Y’all archives (which will be available to researchers soon! I’ll let you know). The film goes straight from our decision to break up into a wistful and sad ending sequence. In reality it was about 6 fairly traumatic months of unraveling, with the Edinburgh festival near the end of it.

Every August, coverage of the festival brings it all back. I remember how beautiful Edinburgh was, how much I loved every trip to Scotland with Y’all, and how exciting it was to see so much cool theater day after day. It’s pretty thrilling. I think I’d love to go again, but as a theater-lover, without the pressure. But I wonder if it would bring back too many painful memories for me to enjoy it in the moment, all these years later.

I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but by August Jay and I and Roger weren’t talking much to each other. It wasn’t angry silence. We spent a lot of time apart, but also together. There was love, but it was also just so very very sad, and we were trying to get through the days in whatever way we could. And then doing our show every day, which was all about our love and our big dreams, knowing that in our real lives we’d given up our dreams, that it was all winding down. (The theater itself was a large high-ceilinged classroom in an old school, completely shrouded in black and dark blue velvet curtains that sucked the sound and light and life itself out of the room—even with house lights it was so dim you had to squint to find your way in and out. You can’t imagine a more cheerless space.)

Early on, we were invited to perform in a sort of late night variety show in a bar, where people would do a bit of their act to try to create buzz and get audiences. The competition for attention at the festival is fierce. As I remember, we sang Fancy Pants, a fast, funny song that our audiences loved, but Jay was so wound up he took it like twice as fast as usual. I couldn’t keep up with him, and for whole stretches of the song, his downbeat was my upbeat. It was the most intense, surreal, terrifying 2 minutes I’ve ever spent on a stage. And it didn’t work. Our show ran all month, I think 5 or 6 shows a week, and we never had more than 6 or 8 people in the audience and that was a good house. Usually it was more like 1 or 2. I’m not exaggerating. It was brutal.

Our plan was to stay together for the rest of the year—we had gigs booked well into the fall—but in Edinburgh we decided to make our New York show in September a farewell show, and to do our last performance on a live radio program in Ithaca which was in September I think, maybe early October, and cancel everything on the calendar after that.

The Mind's Eye is not an actual eye.

In my first week at Parsons, in a class I don’t remember the name or purpose of—in addition to the studio classes (painting, sculpture), there were a couple required classes that were more focused on ideas, on learning how to think about art; in fact my main criticism of art school, and it’s the reason I only lasted a year, is that there’s not nearly as much attention given to learning how to make art as there is to learning how to talk about art, so that your experience is nearly completely determined by the sensibility of whatever teachers you end up with, which obviously can be good or bad*—the teacher was leading a discussion having something to do with idealized forms, which she described, using “apple’ as an example, as what you picture when you close your eyes and someone says, “picture an apple.”

I said something to the effect of, saying that you’re “picturing” something is a figure of speech; you’re not really picturing it, you’re imagining it, you’re contemplating its attributes or qualities, but you’re not looking at a picture I thought I was making a trenchant point about how idealized forms are ideas, not depictions. But the teacher, who I guess just thought I was a smartass, said something like, “Well maybe you need to do some contemplating on what exactly it is you see if it’s not a picture.” That teacher, I can’t say if it was because of that early interaction, but she disliked me the whole semester. She would literally roll her eyes when I raised my hand. For what it’s worth, I thought she was kind of dim.

Anyway, I thought of that teacher when I ran across this article on “aphantasia,” which is described as the state of not having “a mind’s eye.” I’m skeptical. Am I supposed to believe that some people, when they close their eyes and think of an apple, actually see an apple? I know that the mind contributes to seeing, but vision begins with a mechanical process, a lens interacting with light, etc. If people can close their eyes and imagine a thing and see it, as they claim, in full color, as clearly as if it is right in front of them and they’re looking at it with their eyes, completely conjured with the mind, then why do they need to shut their eyes? Why can’t they just think it and see it in front of them, replacing their view of the world actually in front of them with a mentally conjured view that is indistinguishable from it?

I’ve done my share of drugs, so I know it’s possible to see something vivid and whole and absolutely real-looking, but which is not actually “there.” That experience of hallucination sounds like what these scientists are saying most, or many, people have, like all the time.

* I had three main teachers at Parsons. No one has had a bigger influence on my life and career than my painting teacher. I frequently refer back to her teaching in class, and conversation outside of class, when I think about what art is and means, and what the activity of art-making entails and requires. My drawing teacher was entertaining but taught me nothing. My sculpture teacher was a complete zero. I don’t remember, in fact I don’t think I had, a single moment of engagement with him.

Math.

I’m on the train from Saratoga Springs headed home after a month at Yaddo where I was working on my book.

I had set an arbitrary goal for myself — to end the month with a draft. I say arbitrary because I’ve never known how long this book would take to write. I’ve never written a book before, and the scope and structure of it keeps changing as I go. I started it in earnest four years ago at the beginning of the pandemic, but I don’t know how to measure how much time or energy I’ve spent on it because that formulation changes day to day depending on whatever else demands my attention: family, cooking and cleaning, LIZZIE, therapy, the gym when I do that, a million other tiny things that need done when they need done.

I didn’t end the month with a draft per se as much as a picture coming into focus, but I fulfilled the real underlying goal which was to work as hard as I could, to keep my head in it every waking minute (and some of the sleeping ones), and I got more done in the previous month than I did the whole year before it.

I’ve never experienced anything like Yaddo. I won’t even try to describe it. I’m only a hour away and it feels like a dream. People talk about the magic, the spell, of Yaddo. The magic is real, though I think the largest portion of Yaddo’s effect is maybe not magic at all, but just the answer to a material question at the heart of what it means to live an artist’s life: The work has its demands, and they are the same whether I am at Yaddo or at home. And home has its demands, and they are the same whether I am at Yaddo or at home. Both home and work are all-consuming, and I fail at either if I don’t devote my whole self to it. When I am at Yaddo, I can ignore the demands of home and just do the work and I am an artist. When I am at home, if I ignore the demands of home and just do the work, I am a psychopath.

The various indie creative communities, non-profit institutions that produce, present, develop, support artists’ work—visual art, music, theater, etc.—have been focused the last several years on creating models where they can pay artists a living wage. (Historically artists who made work in those institutions worked for little or nothing because they wanted to do the work and would take whatever they could get.) But I always feel at odds with this “artist as employee” conversation. Yes, artists need a living wage but that is the wrong frame. Artists need the material circumstances within which they can work, and that includes a living, but they also need the space their work requires, they need their beds made and towels and sheets laundered, their meals prepared, morning walks and evening conversation, to share their work with other artists working in the same and other media who love and revere the process, and still seemingly endless hours for daydreaming and scribbling, hard thinking, and typing into the late hours, in a community of people who know hard it all is and what silence means. Artists need the circumstances that make art-making possible. This project I’ve been at for the last 4 years, or the last 15 years depending on where I mark the beginning, has required reflecting on a lifetime of correspondence and journals and notes, reminding me that I’ve contemplated and fretted about this tension, this dilemma over and over and over since I was 20 years old, and 40 years later I’m pretty certain that these circumstances are incompatible with life. That — not depression — is the cause of my lifelong sadness and anxiety. Depression is irrational, whereas this insight is as reasonable as a mathematical fact.

Rumors of the demise of gay culture have been greatly exaggerated.

I’ve been noting and saving thoughts and images with a vague idea of how they connect, wanting to write a longer piece, but I have too much to do right now and want to save what writer brain I have left and available for the bigger project. I noticed this morning that it’s the 6th anniversary of the Masterpiece Cake ruling by the Supreme Court, the decision that made it clear to anyone who wasn’t listening that religious fanatics still hold huge cultural sway—so I figured instead of waiting I’d just share all this stuff and let you construct your own argument about what it all means.

So here. The first image is the last paragraph in an essay about Charles Ludlum and also about the state of American theater in the 1980s, in a quietly and cumulatively stunning book of essays from 1986 by Andrew Holleran called Ground Zero. It’s out of print.

The second one is a letter my mother received around that same time from a neighbor in response to her short letter to the editor taped at the bottom.

Next is an article in Playbill about Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola, and camp. My impulse to write something came after seeing Titanique soon after Oh, Mary! and feeling exhilarated and optimistic that gay culture has survived after all. (I kind of wish I’d seen the unsexy, unqueer, anti-camp production of Cabaret on Broadway before the other two, which may have soothed the irritation.)

And finally, the video is one I post pretty often around Pride season. In one of my mom’s letters I read this week, where she’s explaining to some Indiana bigot the importance of coming out, she quotes the lyrics at length. We have enemies afoot; they’re closing in around us. They’ve beaten us before; they’ve many ways to confound us.

And My Brilliant Father.

And because Father's Day is coming up and Dad’s recent move into an independent living community is why we're rifling through Mom's old files, I’ll brag on my father now.

We never did quite know what my father did at work. Something to do with electronics, then later computers. He’d say he worked with machines, and I seem to remember that once he or Mom referred to him as a “design engineer.” What we did know is that if you needed to accomplish a task but couldn’t figure out how to do it, he’d crack the code, he’d make a device or contraption, he’d find a way. That’s how his mind worked, which as you can imagine makes this time of his life when he’s losing his visual and manual and mental acuity extremely frustrating for him. (I am like him in many ways, but not this one.)

He invented this machine. I have no clue what it does, but it must be something important because they patented it.


Happy Pride Month.

I brought a stack of my mother’s personal files home from Indiana last month, including one with clippings and copies of her letters to the editors of various papers over the years. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, on a wide range of local and national topics, from neighborhood land use and development, local ordinances, a rails-to-trails bike trail (her pet project—Mom and Dad were avid bicyclers), endorsements of town council candidates, abortion and birth control, separation of church and state, racial justice to school funding (her only stance with which I disagreed), and lots of letters regarding gay issues. It think every time anybody said anything negative about gay people, my mom wrote a letter. She took it very personally. I knew she did this, she would often send me clippings, but seeing evidence of the extent of it, over so many years, was moving.

The one below, though it’s a personal letter she sent to a columnist, not a letter to the editor, is my favorite—a personal letter allowed her space to share more of her thoughts and feelings. I love her portrait of my brother and me as boys. She was a very clear, concrete thinker. Her sense of justice was never abstract. I always knew how much my mom loved me, how she got me, how she felt especially protective of me, but reading her thoughts here, expressed so open-heartedly to a near stranger, is a special gift now that she’s gone and I’m old.

In the file, there’s also a copy of the columnist’s thoughtful reply, accepting Mom’s invitation. I sure wish I’d been witness to that coffee date.

On My Mother's Side.

Sorting through more old family stuff. This letter doesn't have anything to do with what I'm writing, but I was stopped in my tracks by its liminality, by how it sits so precariously at a moment of great change, in my family and in American history.

These are two pages from a letter my grandmother, Elsie DeMeyer wrote to my mom in 1972, a little over a year after my grandfather, Emil DeMeyer had died. Less than a year later, my mother and Elsie (her mother) had a falling out that was never repaired. Since I was ten years old, I’ve thought of these events and told this story as if it was one quick sequence, and narratively it is, more or less, but this letter sits between the two events, after the death and before everything fell apart.

Not only was my mother’s family about to explode, but the quiet rural community of small family farms where she grew up was about to be gobbled up by a wave of development that started when Six Flags Great America came to town and started buying land to build an amusement park. Not a local phenomenon—though it certainly felt local to the folks in Gurnee, Illinois—but a seismic transformation of the American landscape and the end of a way of life for families, many (most?) of whom were descended from Northern Europeans who’d immigrated in the 19th century.

When I happened on this letter, I assumed it was written by my mother. the handwriting is eerily similar. I have letters in my grandfather Emil’s hand as well, and his cursive also looks almost the same. (Pages 1 and 2 of this letter are missing.)

Relax!

This smells off to me.

I feel like young people now find any r/t sexual overture or suggestion or proposition or invitation suspect, like they’re terrified of intimacy, exposure, vulnerability. It makes me sad to think what they're missing, the experiences they're closing off. Yes letting someone actually touch you in real life is fraught with all kinds of danger. Do it anyway. In my experience, pretty much everything good in life comes out of that intimate physical connection: love, comfort, joy, art.

But then the original Puritanism sprang from fear too, fear of God's wrath. God’s wrath was huge, terrifying, and total. What could be that scary? What are these young people now afraid is going to happen if they let go?

(It bears mentioning that, contrary to the stereotype, those original Puritans were not necessarily afraid of sexual desire and its place in a godly life. The parameters were strictly policed, of course. but they were not shy about it.)

This Is What We're Doing Now.

We tout longer life expectancy as a marker of human improvement, along with decreasing poverty rates, increased literacy, less infant death, etc., because we consider a longer life, the longer the better, an objective good. It’s hard to argue with that. 100 years ago, at my age I’d probably only have a few years left if I hadn’t already died of a heart attack—but now I have a pretty good chance at 20-25 more years. Which is very nice. I’m not ready to go.

But here’s the thing I’m learning about longer life expectancy. It means a population at an advanced age where they need a great deal of attention and care and help (the science of living longer is further along than the science of preventing physical aging), just when the people they’re most dependent on for their care, probably their children, are starting to deteriorate quickly, with bad knees, bad backs, arthritis, lowering energy levels, decreasing power of memory and concentration.

And in my case, a late career abundance of work, and the sense that I am a better artist—certainly a busier artist—than I have ever been, alongside a stark awareness that my powers are slipping and time is limited—so, an urgent call to work now and fast.

Of course as soon as I write this, I can think of a hundred factors that make the situation vastly more complicated than my easy formulation, which is more than anything just an expression of how I feel this morning. And to contradict my whole theory: My sister, who is only a few years younger than I but much more fit, doesn’t drink or smoke, eats well, and has always loved to exercise, has experienced no apparent lessening of strength or energy and her back and knees seem to be fine. Do with that information what you will.

Mother Play.

We saw Mother Play last night. I just joined a Facebook group called Gay New York 1970s and 80s, people sharing memories and photos of places and people. It’s very joyful and moving, wistful, fun. That span of time, the 70s explosion of culture and community in the wake of Stonewall, and then in the 80s that culture and community responding to the plague and the stark realization that we had to save ourselves because they had every intention of letting us die.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say the play includes a gay character in the 1970s and 80s who dies of AIDS. It made me think how we (American people, culture, government) didn’t reckon with that carnage but just moved on to marriage and love is love, and now AIDS and its terrifying signs (Kaposi’s lesions, pneumonia, wasting) are just tropes, emotional triggers, in a story about something else.

But, Mother Play: Jessica Lange’s screen performances have always been riveting, but seeing her on stage is something else, no matter the material, she casts a sustained spell. There are several sequences I could point to, but one in particular, a scene several minutes long in which her character is alone on stage, just being alone, I don’t think I took a breath until it was over. Of course it’s a high level of skill and experience—and this role, vulnerable, tense, extremely exposed, always at least half drunk, couldn’t sit more squarely in her wheelhouse—but there’s something ineffable, too … anyway go see it to see her.

No Outlet.

I decided, or I should say it became clear, early on that, because the “idea” of this book was not rational—well, it makes perfect sense to me but it’s not the kind of sense I could describe in simple sentences or an outline or some such thing, it’s more of an intuition that it all hangs together—that, even though the project would obviously require a lot of research, I would let the process of discovery determine the eventual shape of the book. Because one of the ideas motivating the writing of this book is that what’s erased or hidden or destroyed shapes lives and “life” as much as what is recorded, shared, archived, I knew going in that there would be some knowledge of the subjects of the book, some history, that I would be able to find and other knowledge I would not. And that I would be okay with setting out to find things and coming up blank. That very circumstance is the story.

But there’s something about a mystery. The longer and harder you look for something, the more difficult it gets to stop. In research there are no dead ends—there’s always another trail to follow, no matter that none of them looks promising; they always look unpromising until they’re not.

There’s a story I want, it was reported in local papers at the time, referred to in articles and books, mentioned on podcasts, but never from the point of view of the person at the center of the story. His story, in his words, exists, or did exist, in his testimony in a 1986 trial. I’ve seen references to the testimony several times. I was certain I could get the transcript in Chicago. I did not, but I was hot on the trail (and learning a ton about legal research in the process). I went from office to office downtown, was sent here, then there, then back to here, finally found someone who, though she didn’t have access to the transcript, told me exactly whom to call and what to ask for. When I got home, I called the court reporter’s office and they told me they didn’t have it, that something that old would have been “warehoused” at the county clerk’s office. I’d been to the county clerk already, but I called anyway, and they told me they didn’t have it, that the court reporter definitely should have it. So I called the court reporter again, spoke to a different person, and she said yes it should be there but she looked and it isn’t. (I should say that every one of these people in all these offices, in person and on the phone, took my request seriously, treated me with patience and kindness, and truly tried to help me find this transcript.)

The last evidence of this trial transcript is a record that it was requested by the post-conviction attorney, prepared, and picked up by her office in 1993. She didn’t return it and it was never seen again. (In 1986 there were no digital copies. There was often just one copy, typed up from the court reporter’s notes and passed around.) That attorney is still practicing—in fact, she’s kind of famous—so I emailed her office to ask if she still has it. I haven’t heard back.

This slipperiness of history is exactly what my book is about. The story I was chasing is about an incident that occurred in public in a small town, lots of people know the people involved, saw it unfold, most certainly everybody in town was talking about it, there are accounts of it in the local papers, in books, in articles, all of which contain obvious distortions, speculation, and omissions that were repeated from account to account, and most certainly a bunch more inaccuracies that aren’t so obvious, so I don’t trust any of it. History is like memory: the more times a story is told the further it gets from the “truth.” Even if I were to get hold of the trial testimony containing the protagonist’s own account of the thing, it would be shaped by whatever concerns he would have brought to the telling: pride, embarrassment, fear, ego. Court testimony doesn’t have any special claim to the truth.

All of which is to say that I did exactly what I told myself I wouldn’t do: I got attached to telling the story in a certain way that depended on knowledge I didn’t have but thought I could obtain.

Winona.

Most of the drive up to Winona, MN, my father’s and grandparents’ hometown, from northern Illinois is through Wisconsin, but then you cross the Mississippi near the end and drive the last 20 minutes along the river with those famous bluffs on your left and the river, which is very wide there, on the right. It’s beautiful, and I always wonder why my parents—who both loved that area and talked about it a lot, especially comparing it to Indiana which they hated but spent most of their adults lives in—never moved back there. I know people don’t always think of their lives as so easily mobile, but why would people spend their whole lives in a place they disliked so strongly?

Winona is a small but not tiny town on an isthmus between the river and a long skinny lake. Both shores are public park. I’ve had these wedding photos of my grandparents since Lenore died and I took her scrapbooks. They were taken in the park on the lake, along which is a road lined with mansions. My dad says it was a popular place to take photos, with the fancy houses as backdrop. I thought there was a good chance the house in the photos was still there, and my cousin Debra and I found it easily. I tried lamely to replicate grandfather Ed’s pose. I don’t have anything close to his charisma and style.

These Days!

Planning this trip, I thought I would journal and blog at the end of every day, I thought I would read the day’s research and write a bit before I went to bed. I have not done that. I have mostly gone back to my hotel room, had a drink, and gone to bed early.

Today was not atypical. I went to bed last night at 9:30 and woke up at 6. I met my cousin Cathy for breakfast at 8:30 and we talked about the last 50 years of our lives, our families, our loves and losses. The last time I saw Cathy (she remembered, I had forgotten) was on a trip to Six Flags Great America with her, her cousin Meg—I guess that would make Meg my cousin, too—and my brother and me when I was 15. Mom was much closer to her Aunt Alice (Cathy’s mother) than to her own mother and when we visited we always stayed with them and not at the DeMeyer farm. After breakfast, I drove out on Washington Street, which used to be Grange Hall Road, to Gurnee to see where the DeMeyer farm was. I knew the farm was no longer there, or any farms, it’s all just dusty random businesses along a wide highway. I couldn’t tell where the farm had been. I haven’t been there since I was ten. I think Great America came first and then lots of development followed. It’s all unrecognizable.

Next was the Waukegan Historical Society. I was very frustrated yesterday not having found Grandma Lenore’s address here and wandering around, nothing ringing a bell. I thought someone there might be able to help me. Their library is closed for a renovation, but the woman running the museum remembered the popcorn store that I remember in the storefront of Grandma’s building. I went to the public library to see if they had old city directories. They did, and there it was: “Cheslik, Lenore 207 N Genesee Apt 305”!

So I walked over to Genesee Street and, plot twist, Grandma Lenore lived over a theater! The Waukegan Theater, now called the Genesee Theater, was a vaudeville house, then a movie theater, and I think about 25 years ago they completely renovated it and now use it for live music. That strip of Genesee was a small theater district in the early 20th century, with three theaters in a handful of blocks. I have no memory from childhood visits of a theater next to the entrance to Grandma’s. She lived there from the early 1960s until the late 1970s, so it’s possible it was closed. Those were rough years for a lot of those old downtown theaters.

Then I drove the few blocks to the house where my family lived when I was born. The house is still there and looks better than it does in photos from the early 1960s. When I got out of the car, I remembered that down the block and across the street my mother had a friend, Henrietta, who told a story about her daughter getting ringworm on her scalp and having to have her head shaved. (That story transmuted into Y’all lore as the story of Cousin Mandy.) At the end of the block, there’s a deep ravine with a creek at the bottom. My brother and I remember the ravine and how Grandma told scary stories about a troll who lived down there (and I also somehow connect the ravine with Helen Keller but I have no idea why now). But I didn’t remember that it was half a block from our house. No wonder Grandma was trying to scare us away from it.

Henrietta lived in one of these houses, I’m not sure which.

Don’t go down there!

It was only about 2 so I decided to drive down to Des Plaines about a half hour south to visit the grave of Danny Bridges, Larry Eyler’s last victim. I’d been feeling a little uncomfortable about the murder tourism aspect of a visit and almost talked myself out of going, but I was compelled. Of Eyler’s victims, Danny Bridges is the one I, and I think a lot of people, are most drawn to. He was the last one, the murder Eyler was convicted for, and he’s unusually young. Young among Eyler’s victims, and young to have been on his own. Everything you read about him makes you think there’s no way he would’ve let that happen to him, he was too smart, so it’s especially puzzling and sad. I cried when I found the grave. I felt silly, I don’t know him. The inscription from his sister was moving. He didn’t have much love in his life.

I was going to have dinner at Louie’s tonight, but I hadn’t had lunch and I was hungry so I stopped on the way back to the hotel, at 4. Louie’s Pizza is mythical, it is the pizza that my parents compared every pizza they ever ate their whole lives to. The best pizza review you would ever hear from my dad was, “It’s pretty good, but it’s not Louie’s.” The reason my mother taught herself to make pizza was to see if she could duplicate it, because they couldn’t get pizza as good as Louie’s in Indiana. I would bet that my dad took Mom to Louie’s on their first date. It was their place. I had never had it, so I can’t comment on whether it’s the same now as it was 65 years ago, but it’s pretty damn good. Tavern-style pizza—very thin cracker crust, cut in squares—is the other Chicago pizza. If you want to try it, there’s a new place in the West Village called Emmett’s on Grove that doesn’t have the regional atmosphere, but they’ve got the pizza down. It’s pretty good, but it’s not Louie’s.

Mecca.

Some research is reading interesting books. Some is archaeology.

The last person Larry Eyler killed was a 15-year-old boy named Danny Bridges. Most of Eyler’s victims were men in their 20s and 30s, but a few were younger. Bridges was quasi-homeless, street smart, charming by all accounts. At that time there was a bustling market in teen boy prostitutes in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, and that’s how he survived. The story is that Eyler picked him up there, but it doesn’t add up because Bridges knew Eyler and knew that he was dangerous, so why would he have gone with him?

(Which gives more weight to Eyler’s already credible assertion that he did not commit all 25 murders alone, but that’s another rabbit hole. If you’re curious about Eyler, the Wikipedia entry is pretty comprehensive as far as what’s known. To my mind, a great deal of really important stuff is not known and a lot of what is surmised is fishy. The source most heavily relied on by other writers is a book called Freed to Kill, by Gera-lind Kolarik, a Chicago journalist who followed the case closely. The book is downright weird, she’s sort of the hero of her story and refers to herself in the third person. She speculates a lot and with confidence. No index, no citations. It baffles me that hers is the only serious book about Eyler. There must be hundreds of books about John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer.)

Anyway, Danny Bridges evidently gave good interview because he’s featured in a multi-part feature on child abuse in the Chicago Tribune and he’s interviewed in an NBC news special on child abuse (which is where he mentions Eyler, just a few weeks before Eyler kills him). Media was obsessed with child abuse in the early 1980s; remember the hysterical panic about daycare centers? I have been able to find neither the Tribune series or the TV documentary, so far.

I thought I’d located the TV piece. Several sources said it was a made-for-TV documentary called “Silent Shame,” produced by NBC in 1984. A friend helping me with research tracked down what is apparently the only available recording, a VHS tape at the Indiana State University library in Terre Haute, Indiana. (The ISU library also has a fascinating connection to the Eyler murders, also having to do with the possibility of an accomplice, but I keep getting sidetracked!) So I added Terre Haute to this trip because it’s kind of on the way, and Eyler’s murders were mostly committed, or at any rate he dumped most of the bodies, along the stretch of IN-41 which runs from Terre Haute to Chicago, and I thought it would be cool to drive that route.

When I walked in the library, there was a long circulation desk with a huge neon sign over it: “ASK.” So I asked the kid sitting there where I might find the video. He sighed and looked up from his book, gave me a “no clue” look. I handed him a piece of paper with the call number, he looked at it for a few seconds, then said, “Second floor?” I asked him where, once I found it, I could view it. He said, “I don’t think you can watch a VHS tape here.” I said, “You don’t think? The tape is ‘library use only’ so if I can’t watch it here and I can’t check it out, why do you have it?” He gave me the no clue look again. I asked him if there was someone who might have a clearer idea of the situation, and he said “no.” HE SAID NO.

So I wandered around a bit. The place was absolutely deserted. A college library at 9:30 a.m. No reference desk that I could locate. Finally I snagged a woman who looked like maybe she worked there, showed her the piece of paper and asked where it would be, and she took me to the regular stacks, found the tape, and handed it to me. I asked where I could watch it. She said, “Hm. I don’t think any of the listening stations have VHS.” But she said, “Let’s ask,” and she headed for the desk with the no clue guy. I said, “He doesn’t know.” Just then another woman walked by and the first women snagged her and asked. There was one VHS player, downstairs all the way in the back corner.

Well, this was a 1984 VHS tape so if you know you know that VHS doesn’t really last that long. The tape was so badly degraded that it ran at about 1/2 speed with the audio completely garbled and mostly indecipherable. It was an hour long and I was just looking for a few minutes’ interview with Danny Bridges. It was a seriously creepy documentary, ostensibly news, but very salacious with lots of images of actual child pornography with no attempt to obscure the identity of the kids. Because it ran so slow I was there for 2 hours waiting for this interview, and then the show was over and no Danny Bridges. He wasn’t in it.

All the true crime nerds and serial killer freaks on Reddit are trying to find this Danny Bridges interview. I scoured a long thread and picked up that nobody has found it yet, but also that there’s some confusion between this NBC documentary “Silent Shame” and a news special called “NBC Reports: Child Abuse.” So the interview must be on the other one. I’ll keep looking. Hopefully it’s not VHS, and hopefully it’s not in Terre Haute.

Well, I sat down to write a short blog entry (I have two hours between things and I’m at a Starbucks) about my afternoon at the Chicago Historical Society library leafing through 5 years of GayLife, a Chicago free gay tabloid with ads and listings and classified and hard news and politics, looking for coverage of Eyler because I wanted to get the community’s take at the time. It’s a weekly, so hundreds of issues, most of them with nothing about Eyler, but I had to look at every page to find out. My fingers were black when I was done. It took forever and even longer because I was so captivated by this media world that was so familiar and that has mostly disappeared, these bar rags full of stories of gay-bashers attacking gay men, police attacking gay men, politicians attacking gay men, then AIDS attacking gay men, and page after page of explicit ads for bathhouses and “best ass” contests and drag queens, all the sex and joy and fun of our community right there alongside the constant danger of violence and hate. And 1980-84 is a pretty packed few years news-wise, otherwise, too.