I Use The Words "China" And "Mexican" A Bunch In This One, But Don't Worry, It's Not About Trump.

“Frank hungry! Chinatown with Steve McNamee and Don Angelo later.”

-My friend Frank, on Facebook, 3/23/2010

I’m guessing we followed through and went to Chinatown that day. Sounds about right. Throughout my early twenties in Chicago, Chinatown was a playground for an underemployed extrovert to kill an afternoon. 

We probably grabbed dim sum at Triple Crown, our go-to, or maybe we went with MingHin in that weird outdoor mall near the Red Line stop. We likely then emerged into the fresh spring air, dizzy from overeating, and wandered the streets, popping into the shops that all sold the same trinkets, or those that only sold boldly designed home decor, the price tags blowing our young minds, but us vowing to furnish our homes with this stuff once we all grew up and got rich.

One time in Chinatown, my friend Gerry and I were buying cigars in a garden-unit tobacco shop, where a shabbily-dressed man was devouring complimentary pizza, and telling the shopkeeper about his various recent business ventures, which had the accumulated result of his losing a sum that was, by our crude tally, over $100,000. He kept saying that this or that partner screwed him out of x “grand” or y “grand.” He said the word “grand” like a dozen times, rapid-fire. It made us wonder if he thought “grand” meant “dollars”.

Then there was the time my now-wife, Ali, and I spent a rainy day hopping from shop to shop in search of a specific ginseng chewing gum from China that Ali recalled from her childhood. We finally found the gum in a bodega where they only sold it in bulk. So we bought a huge thing of it. (This is the exact plot of my favorite Seinfeld episode, so this was the best day of my life.) I think we still have some sitting around somewhere. That was six years ago.

So, anyway, the Chinese-American population of Chicago is doing all sorts of fascinating things, only a sliver of which I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying, and so I would never reduce this community to a people whose only contribution is their food. Illinois State Rep. Monique Davis, on the other hand, did just that, the same week of my aforementioned visit to Chinatown.

Sun-Times reporter Steve Contorno reported on 3/25/2010 that Rep. Davis, arguing against a bill that would require professional hair-braiders to be licensed, said this:

"You do not license a Chinese person to sell Chinese food. You do not license a Latino to sell tacos. You do not license an African-American woman to hair-braid."

That story popped up in the news not necessarily because of any protest by the city’s Chinese community, but because two fellow State Representatives, Edward Acevedo and Susana Mendoza, weren’t in love with the “Latino=tacos” portion of the quote.

Davis apologized, and Acevedo and Mendoza publicly accepted her apology, but her strange argument proved unconvincing, as the hair-braiding bill passed anyway.

Ok. 

Firstly, you need a license to sell food in Chicago. So, Rep. Davis concocted a flat-out wrong statement, and then needlessly injected it with racial insensitivity.

Secondly, some hair professionals that I consulted (one of which I may be married to) are all proudly licensed to practice their craft, and cite concerns regarding safety training (like when using very hot substances) and sanitary measures (which we should all now suddenly understand the importance of) when they defend mandatory licensing policies.

“But Steve,” you may ask, “Why are you arguing vehemently against a now-retired state legislator over a bill that passed a decade ago?” 

Well, Representative Monique Davis and I have a bit of a history.

In April 2008 during an Illinois House Committee hearing in Springfield, Ms. Davis interrupted the testimony of an atheist activist, saying “It's dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists. Get out of that seat! You have no right to be here!” She also said some shit about how the state of Illinois is “based on” a belief in God, and that the activist must “have something against” God, which demonstrated that Davis literally could not comprehend the idea of not believing in God. 

At that time, I was in Champaign, IL, occasionally attending class, but frequently attending campus events organized by atheists and/or libertarians, so you’d better believe that skinny-little-college-boy Steve wrote Rep. Davis a strongly worded email. 

And oh, wow, readers, do I wish I could share that email with you. Believe me, I tried to track it down. I attempted, to no avail, to resurrect my college email account and retrieve it. I guess it’s lost to the great remote server in the sky. So you’ll have to just trust my fallible recollection when I tell you that, while I’m still an atheist who cares about the separation of church and state, my email to this veteran lawmaker was delectably pompous. It oozed arrogance. Oh my. It was literally sophomoric, as I was a college sophomore, and it betrayed no trace of self-awareness. It should be framed and hung in a dormitory hallway and labeled “Don’t write letters like this.” 

Now that my atheism is less like a rabid dog and more like a goldfish that you barely need to feed, and my libertarianism has been completely discarded in favor of basic decency (some people call it progressivism),  Rep. Davis’ attempt to suppress an atheist’s First Amendment rights just does not hit a nerve with me. And I don’t know exactly what to say about her words about Chinese food and tacos, except that it activates the little voice in my liberal head that says, “I don’t think she should be saying that.”

Anyway, I think reading about Rep. Davis’ comments were making me hungry while I researched this piece, because I found myself involuntarily clicking on another headline that had the word “taco” in it. James Scalzitti of the Sun-Times reported on 3/24/2010 that “two men with ties to the University of Chicago claim plainclothes city police officers beat them outside a North Side taco restaurant last month, according to a lawsuit.”

That kernel of a story ballooned into a years-along legal saga that made national news; it was a thread in the patchwork of police brutality and institutionalized coverup culture that dominated the zeitgeist in that half decade. The best account of it for my money is this Vice article written by the two victims.

You know that feeling when you read something in the news and you think, “I know that place!” Well, the location of the aforementioned assault was Arturo’s Tacos, which was repeatedly described by reporters and the victims as a Logan Square restaurant. But it’s in Bucktown. It’s on the East side of Western. I may have moved away four and a half years ago, but I still get heated when my personal convictions about the boundaries of Chicago neighborhoods are challenged. 

Anyway, the place where those cops senselessly beat those two men was, for me, a place where I’d kill time with my longtime musical collaborator, Michele, under the pretense that we were getting important musical work done. We’d pretend to strategize our next moves within the Chicago music industry as an excuse to dig into some tacos and margaritas. 

In my experience, in Chicago, one walks into a Mexican restaurant because it’s there on the corner and you want to eat and drink somewhere, whereas in New Orleans it’s a deliberate choice of cuisine. This is probably because you can walk into just about any neighborhood Mexican joint in Chicago and get some great stuff, and, well, that’s not the case down here.

My neighborhood was more hip than Michele’s (that’s a dig) so when we were working out of my apartment, instead of the no-frills family-owned Arturo’s, we would trot down the alley to Big Star, which is less “mariachi and free salsa” and more “ironic biker rock and small-batch bourbon.” But their tacos are tasty and their cocktails are lovingly crafted.

I took Ali there on our first date. We sat down, I asked her what she wanted to drink, she said margarita, I said me too, and she said, “Well, we should just a get a pitcher, then, right?” 

I thought to myself, I believe I shall marry this woman some day.

Ok I’m just gonna keep talking about tacos.

Roughly nine years ago, a few pals and I went on a “taco crawl” through Pilsen, a neighborhood historically associated with Chicago’s Mexican community. 

(Pro Tip: If you’re thinking of embarking upon your own taco crawl, limit yourself to one taco at each stop. Pay cash, tip well, and politely decline the complimentary add-ons. Otherwise you’ll be done before you even started.)

We hit a bunch of spots on 18th Street, and ended up in a cozy seafood joint on a quiet avenue. Our waitress, who was also our chef, loudly offered us this greeting: “No tacos! No burritos! We don’t have!”

We thought she was informing us that they were out of those items, but as we perused the menu, we realized that this place never served those things, and that she had just assumed that we white fellas would be uninterested in the seafood dishes she did offer. We politely ordered an array of plates to share, and our host seemed genuinely delighted when we polished off every morsel and slapped the tabletop with unabashed satisfaction.

As we departed, we exchanged many a “muchas gracias” with our kind and gracious host, but my impression that I had been pegged as someone who didn’t belong there lingered for a few days, so I went ahead and signed a lease for a place like a block away from the restaurant, and I lived there for fifteen months.

When you live in an epicenter of Mexican-American culture, with evocative street art lining many buildings, families forever congregating on the streets to laugh and unwind, and enticing dining and live music options as far as the eye can see, friends will visit you at your home. So there were many Pilsen mornings that I’d emerge from my bedroom to see familiar faces and bodies scattered about my apartment, some awake and some still sleeping. I’d put on a pot of coffee and a Simpsons DVD. Once everybody’s eyes were fully open, one of us would finally toss out, “Should we go somewhere?” The correct answer was so obvious, it hardly needed to be said aloud:

“Chinatown.”

March Is Always Weird But This Time It's Especially Weird

In March 2009 I was sleeping off a hangover on the back bench of an Irish Greyhound-type bus en route from Galway to Cork when my friends shook/shouted me awake. 

“They cancelled the South Side Irish Parade,” they told me.

I processed this for a moment and finally said, “I’m miserable already. You woke me up to tell me that?” I rolled over and fell back asleep.

People of Irish descent living on the South Side (especially the far Southwest Side) of Chicago have been throwing their own St. Patrick’s Day parade for four decades. We like to think that it is wildly distinct from the Saturday parade downtown. It feels intimate (though it drew an estimated 300,000 the year before it was first cancelled.) 

As a kid at the parade, you take in the bagpipes and Irish dance routines and catch candy from green-clad participants with smiling Irish eyes, and maybe some years you’re even invited to march if your family is connected to some union or charitable organization. 

As a high-schooler, you congregate in terrifyingly large teenage hordes along the route and sip Coors Light which you’ve cleverly disguised within an extra-large Mr. Sub fountain cup. 

As a young adult, your friends’ parents finally stop “looking the other way” at your debauchery, and you realize they’ve always been as drunk as you were on this day, and you all sing “Courtin’ In The Kitchen” by the Clancy Brothers together over a folding table of corned beef and Jameson. 

These specific examples apply to everybody, I presume. 

As of that bus trip in Ireland, when I heard about the cancellation, I had not missed a South Side Irish parade my entire life.

That was eleven years ago. Now, I understand that this is the first entry in series that promises to be about what was going on precisely ten years ago, but, (a) back off, and (b) bear with me.

So that was the first time the South Side Irish Parade was cancelled. The next time would be the following year, which, at the time of this writing, was ten years ago. See? I got to it.

In a 3/15/2010 Chicago Sun-Times article, Mark Konkol explained that the parade was cancelled for a second year in a row due to “rowdy and drunken behavior by some revelers.” He quoted Chicago Police Commander Michael Kuemeth, who really tossed some extra spicy giardiniera onto his description of that justification, citing “the lawless behavior that ruined the parade.”

Welp, the parade has been ruined one again, but not by the antics of those (we?) drunken Southside micks. It was ruined by the Coronavirus. 

This unequivocally horrifying global pandemic has ruined lots of things: my income, everybody’s social life, sports, my wife’s income… the list goes on.

Let’s jump back ten years, because I think that’s the whole thing I’m doing here. (Look, it’ll be a while before I get the hang of this.) On March 17, 2010, writing in the Chicago Tribune, Peter Cameron reported that while a vaccination for the H1N1 virus, colloquially referred to as the “swine flu,” had been made widely available to Americans for free, “many health departments are having trouble giving away their remaining stock -- some of which might have to be thrown out.”

That’s right. A decade ago, a vaccine for a virus that ultimately killed over 12,000 Americans was like a flyer for a local improv show: they couldn’t even give it away.

For my part, I was even worse than the churchgoing folks in that article who casually refused the vaccine. 

(Ok. I’m about to tell another story from eleven years ago. Maybe I should just shift the whole focus of this project to eleven years ago. I don’t know. I’m sorry.) 

During my senior year of college, my friends and I hosted a “Swine-Flu-B-Q,” a cookout at which we exclusively served pork products. The idea was that we had encountered misinformation (that’s Olde English for “fake news”) claiming that one could contract the H1N1 virus by eating pig meat, and so the pork industry was needlessly suffering economically, and so we wanted to give them a boost and alter public awareness by purchasing and ingesting a disgusting amount of sausage, bacon, ribs, you name it.

We took that global, news-cycle dominating virus so unseriously that not only did we make jokes about it, we spent money and charcoal and man-hours to turn an entire day into a joke about it. Conversely, I’ve spent the past week glued to cable news, like an old person, hoping to hear anything about a possible Coronavirus vaccine.

Ok, that was eleven years ago. What was I up to this week ten years ago? Serendipitously, I happened to write a blog on 3-17-2010 detailing just that. Here’s an excerpt!

“The scents of peppermint and tobacco now ran through my breath, and this is exactly the combination of scents attributed to the grandfather in the original "Parent Trap". I smelled the way an early 1960's old man smelled. I was happy to smell this way, as I strolled along Lawndale Avenue, the sun sneaking in past the edges of my brown sunglasses, and my dog panting laboriously as she pulled at her leash.”

Funny thing about my Coronavirus self-quarantine: smoking cigars and walking my dogs are my only two outdoor indulgences. Turns out I deal with an unspeakably terrifying worldwide viral outbreak the same way I dealt with being an unemployed college dropout living in my mom’s basement ten years ago: Smoke a cigar, walk a dog, write things on the internet.

A clarification to the “unemployed” descriptor I just gave 21-year-old me: I accepted a sales associate position at Macy’s the very week I wrote that blog post. I had dropped out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign rather abruptly, so I took the first job I could get. I was selling premium (read: overpriced) men’s denim at the Macy’s in Water Tower Place, so the job got me out of the South Side a few days a week, and put enough money in my pocket to eventually get me an apartment about a mile north of Wrigley Field. I had no degree and no plan, but I had a steady paycheck and a reason to get out of the house.

Today, I have a degree. I finally got my diploma last month after a decade of half-heartedly chipping away. And I technically have a job as a bartender. But, because all Louisiana restaurants have been shut down due to the Coronavirus, I have no steady paycheck. Not only do I have no reason to leave the house, I’m strongly discouraged by government officials and society-at-large to do so. So I need the cigars and pooches and blank page (and the wife and Nintendo Wii and red wine) more than ever.

Sunday would have been the day of this year’s South Side Irish Parade. I haven’t been to one since my wife Ali and I moved to New Orleans in 2015, and I normally wake up that day feeling like I’m missing Christmas. This year, as I sang along to a Dubliners live album while sipping Guinness and selecting from my closet a green Milwaukee Irish Fest polo and some brown tweed trousers, I pictured all the South Siders back home who were probably listening to and drinking and wearing stuff similar to mine, but who, despite the parade being cancelled and the growing trend of social distancing, would undoubtedly still be flooding the bars on Western Avenue, clinking pints and shots and embracing as they chugged, or huddling around dining room tables overflowing with trays of corned beef and rye bread, everyone helping themselves with bare hands.

But, as was the case with the apathetic H1N1 risk-takers, my own behavior on Sunday was not without blemish. With a corned beef needing more time in our Crock Pot, and New Orleans Mayor Latoya Cantrell failing to weigh in on whether it was still ok for a healthy young couple to go out for happy hour margaritas, we took the mayor’s silence as a go-ahead. 

Arriving at La Casita, we exchanged pleasantries with our usual bartender, but it was one of those instances where when you tell someone you’re doing “alright,” you look them in the eye, sort of shake your head and shrug, and you maybe say the word “alright” a few times, indicating that you’re only as “alright” as one could be right now. Other than that, the scene was bizarrely normal. We had a few margs and some guac, the waitstaff was upbeat, and a pregnant woman at the table next to us shared nachos with a toddler whose hands could not possibly have been sanitized. 

And, you know what? I’ll leave you there. A shaded patio on a sunny day, ice cubes slowly melting into two margaritas (one with a salted rim, one without), Ali excitedly pointing out every dog that gets walked by, and only a slight inkling in the backs of our minds that this humble indulgence may be but an ephemeral privilege. 

What This Blog Is

 Roughly ten years ago, I was posted up with my friend Don at the bar of Longman & Eagle, a Michelin-Starred Chicago restaurant that we would use as a place to drink whiskey and loudly engage in obscene wordplay. I was explaining that while I try to “be myself” around my family and other members of polite society, I tend to not discuss…

“Your checkered past.”

Don had finished my thought for me, as he often did.

The phrase “Citizen Steve and his Checkered Past” tickled us, so we riffed on it until it had been exhausted. I vowed to make it the name of my solo music project, assemble a backing band (“His Checkered Past”), book a small Midwestern tour, and release an eponymous debut album.

Yeah, I never did any of that.

So I’ve sat on that project name for a decade. And now that albums are obsolete, and my habit of burning bridges has left me with no collaborators to join that backing band, and I’m loath to briefly visit the Midwest let alone book a small tour there, I figure I’ll put the name to use. And I see no better use than to take a look back at myself a decade ago and ponder, “What was I doing?”

I mean that literally. What was I doing this week ten years ago? What was going on in Chicago, where I lived then? What was going on in the country? The world? Wisconsin?

So with the help of Facebook and my friend Pat’s Chicago Public Library login info, I intend to look back precisely one decade, once a week, and take a glimpse into my Checkered Past.