The Secret Knowledge

It was so young. When I was born, many were alive whose parents had dealt with the Sauk Indians.³³

And there was the Lindbergh Beacon, the most powerful aircraft signal in the world, its light visible for forty-five miles, atop the Palmolive Building, sweeping the sky once-a-minute to make the night safe for air traffic.

Hefner bought the building in 1965 it was renamed the Playboy Building, and they put their logo up, and I used to work there. And the great entertainers worked for him at his Playboy Club around the corner, staffed by the Bunnies in their abbreviated costumes, ears, and cottontails, who were prohibited from dating the customers, but were not prohibited from dating me.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed an open chess pavilion on the beach at North Avenue, and I wrote my first play (The Duck Variations, 1972), about two old DPs, sitting there, looking at the lake. A DP was a displaced person, and it was my father’s term of opprobrium for an appearance insufficiently put-together. “You look like a DP.” Insufficient for what, you might ask, and the answer was “to get on in the world,” for why else were we in Chicago?

Across the drive from the Chess Pavilion was Lincoln Park, and I used to sit out there and write in my notebook. I dated a wonderful girl who worked for the Mob. She lived in the Belden Stratford Hotel, and in the summer she would sunbathe in the park across from the hotel, by the statue of Shakespeare, and every hour on the hour a bellman would bring her an iced coffee. She drove a Mercedes 280 convertible, and she never locked the car, as, she explained, anyone who wanted to break in would simply slit the roof, so why antagonize them?

The back of her car was ankle deep in parking tickets. She would park on the steps of City Hall. And when the tickets got too deep, she’d collect them in a bag, and give them to somebody who would fix them.

One or two nights a week we would drive to Cicero, and I would watch her doing one of her jobs. She had a ring of keys which let her into the various clubs in which her people were interested. She’d let us in to the deserted clubs, at 4 A.M., and she’d go to the vending machines, open them with the keys on the ring, count and then replace the money, lock the machine again, and we would leave.

Her boyfriend followed us, now and then, in his car. She told me he had vowed to kill me, but I’d seen him, and I didn’t believe the threat. I don’t think this was particularly courageous on my part; he just didn’t look the type.

We conceive the world not through indoctrination, but through osmosis: a culture is the amalgam and the sum of the unwritten laws: “This is how we do things here.” And I believe that, in Chicago, I had a very interesting youth. This is how we did things there: one spiffed the mechanic at the cab garage if one wanted to get a working cab to drive; one paid off the cop who pulled you over, as it was much cheaper than going down to 11th and State and paying the fine; the politicians were corrupt—why else would they be politicians? (the absence of this understanding in the minds of the young baffles me); the Governors, regularly, went to jail, how about that?

And through it all one had to make a living, which meant, and means, learning how to navigate in the wider world—learning to take care of yourself.

For the Government was going to take care of you at best to the extent that you took care of it: if you wanted X you did Y, if you did not do Y, why in the world would any rational entity give you X?

You wanted to work for the Park District, you kicked back your two weeks’ pay; you wanted your kid on the Fire Department, you got out the vote.

The politicians have not changed, but it seems that the electorate cannot locate its ass with a guide dog.

There was, in Chicago, no such thing as Social Justice, there was the Law, and the Law was both made and administered by imperfect human beings, like ourselves; and the operations of the Law itself could be and were corrupted. There was such a thing as “the underdog,” but anyone demanding that status was merely picking up a convenient club to use in the fight. (cf. Saul Alinsky on being a “neighborhood organizer”: “The third rule is, ‘wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.’ Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.” Rules for Radicals, 1971.)

The White Neighborhoods got better snow removal? Of course they did—it was a segregated city and the councilmen were white. And cries for Justice, the blacks knew, would be less effective than getting a dog in the fight, and getting people on the City Council and into City Hall, and letting the Whites gape slack-jawed at the other fellow being unfair.³⁴

Was it a terrible thing to be a Black in Chicago in those days? Probably. My people came over from Poland to escape the Pogroms, which is to say, fleeing murderers. Did we, the Jews, feel bad for the Blacks? Yes. What did we do about it? We joined the NAACP. Was this effective, appropriate, insulting, paternalistic? How would I know?

Did they do it because they felt “guilty”? The suggestion would have been greeted as psychotic. What did my parents’ generation have to feel guilty about? They came here with nothing, sixty years after slavery’s abolition, fleeing their state in Europe as slaves or semislaves, and scant years ahead of Hitler’s assassins. They supported the NAACP out of a sense of tzedakah, which is to say “righteousness.” Was their response insufficient, or misplaced? No doubt. But it was not risible. And the South Shore Country Club, eight blocks from my house, and Restricted, allowing No Jews, was eventually bought by Elijah Muhammad, restricting all whites, and life goes on.

But I believe I benefited from the absence of sanctimony.

10

MILTON FRIEDMAN EXPLAINED

Each party alleges, and its enthusiasts agree, that it has never done anything wrong, and its opponent has never done anything right. Any failures, catastrophes, or absurdities during its tenure are blamed on late-appearing aftereffects of its predecessor’s enormities.

Most officeholders and candidates are both politicians and lawyers, and so labor under the double anecdotal taint of—I will not say, “mendacity,” but “looking on the bright side.” The bright side is, of course, that which favors their particular interests and aspirations. If bread, it may be identified by the presence of butter.

Let us assume that in all close elections each side will endeavor to steal it (a safe assumption, as it is the case); for what unpatriotic soul would not in the service of National Interest wish to lessen the vagaries of chance?

Let us assume, then, that each party partakes equally of the human capacity for good and bad, for corruption, for misguided compassion, and of overweening cupidity; and that each will suffer failures of projects both good- willed and merely monstrously self-serving.