he had a quarter a night or a dollar a week. And a lot of people in Chicago didn't.
Didn't have a quarter, and didn't know who the hell Jimmy Beame was, either. That would seem to sum up the hundreds of unshaven, shabbily dressed men I showed that picture to.
I spent a day trying the flops along South Clark. South State, and West Madison- stopped in at the Dawes Hotel for Men. the skid-row charity hotel the General had founded in memory of his dead son. And got nowhere.
Back to North Clark Street. Between Clark and Dearborn streets, in Washington Square, in front of the Newberry Library, was Bughouse Square. If my father were alive, and down-and-out. he'd be here: at night, crowds of men would stand along its curbstones, listening to the oratory of whoever was atop the several soapboxes, propounding upon the favorite topics: the evils of capitalism, and the nonexistence of God. The more intellectual of the drifters and down-and-outers would tend to find their way here, this focal point for reds and I.W.W. sympathizers, intellectuals and agitators. My father would have been at home here.
During the daytime, the soapboxes stood vacant, mostly, and the benches and curbs were taken up by the same sort of unshaven faces I'd been looking at all day for days now (not to mention in my sleep). The major difference was a number of these shabbily dressed citizens were reading newspapers, not wearing them.
A young man on the down-and-out, disillusioned by his rejection from the great newspapers he so idolized, might well end up in Bughouse Square.
I asked several men and got a negative response; then a pale, younger one with wire-frames and longish brown hair seemed to know the face.
'Yes.' he said. 'I know who this is.'
'Are you sure?'
'Yes. It's Mary Ann Beame. She lives in a studio in Tower Town. She's an actress.'
Great
'Yeah. Well thanks, kid.'
'Isn't that worth something?'
'Not really.'
'I'm not begging or anything. I just think since I identified the picture…'
'It's the boy I'm trying to find.'
'Oh. Him I don't know. Why don't you look up Mary Ann? Maybe she knows him.'
Til try that.'
'I could use fifty cents. Or a quarter. I could use some lunch.'
'Sorry.'
'I'm not a hobo, you understand. I'm an inventor.'
'Oh really.' I started to move away.
He got up from the bench; he wasn't tall; his eyes were brighter than a puppy's- in terms of shine, anyway.
'I invented a lens,' he said, and reached in a corduroy jacket pocket and withdrew a round thick polished piece of glass double the size of a silver dollar.
'That's nice.'
'It enables a person to see things a billion times bigger than they really are.' He held it up for the sun to bounce off it: the sun was under a cloud.
'No kidding.'
'I ground it myself, with emery cloth.' He was walking beside me. now; he leaned in and spoke in a hushed tone, touching my arm. 'I've been offered a thousand dollars for it. I'm holding out for five thousand.'
I removed his hand from my arm. carefully, with a polite smile; I even made some conversation: 'How'd you find out that lens was so strong?'
He smiled. Smug. Proud. 'I experimented on a bedbug. I put a live bedbug under this glass, and I could see every muscle in its body. I could see its joints and how it worked them. I could see its face; no expression in its eyes, though. Bugs don't have much native intelligence, you know.'
'Yeah, I heard that. So long.'
He was behind me now. but calling out to me. 'You couldn't do that with an ordinary lens!'
No. you couldn't.
I drank too much rum that night, and decided I had to get rid of this fucking case before it turned me into a lush.
In a little over a week I'd be going to Florida; tomorrow. I had to see Mary Ann Beame and tell her I couldn't find her brother.
So the next afternoon I drove north on Michigan Avenue, past the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower and the Medinah Athletic Club and the Allerton Hotel, toward the landmark those skyscrapers now dwarfed: the old water tower, a Gothic churchlike building with its tower thrust in the air like a gray stone finger- perhaps a middle finger, considering the talk circulating of late that the North Side's sole survivor of the Great Fire was to be torn down to speed the flow of Michigan Avenue traffic.
The water tower, at Michigan and Chicago avenues, gave its name to Tower Town. Chicago's Greenwich
