Synopsis/blurb……
These 17 stories
which first appeared in the Chicago Reader, cover everything from art to
taxicabs. In between you'll find stories about pauper burials, the newspaper
business, a high school cheating scandal, accidents and saloons. One element
the stories have in common is the city of Chicago.
From the Back Cover
The center of attention is a young man with at least twenty stab wounds
in his chest. He looks scared all right, but even more than that he looks poor.
Dressed in the clothes they died in, they all look poor . . . After they are
wheeled into the hallway and their clothes cut off it's easier to look at them.
Then they are just dead bodies and it's possible to imagine them as once being
alive. Thrown together in the freezer they could never be anything but what
they are: a group portrait of death on the city's streets.---from The
Cook County Death Trip
"The only question the police asked me was: 'Are you the
cabdriver?' I said: 'Yes,' and that was the one word I spoke. The next thing, I
was frisked, put in the police car and wasn't told what I was charged with or
nothing. Every time I opened my mouth, I was told to shut up. They didn't tell
me a doggoned thing except 'Hey, that's Dan Rather. You're in big trouble.' So
they printed me, mugged me and put me in a cell." ---from Hack
Writing
This is such a typical Chicago scene they should use it on the city
Christmas cards: a snowplow sitting near a doughnut shop or a convenience store
waiting for snow that seldom comes. The drivers must get bored. The city should
find something useful for them to do to pass the time. Maybe they could knit
mittens for the meter maids, or answer nonemergency phone calls, or wash and
wax Resident Only parking signs. --- from The Bus Stops Everywhere
But sometimes late on a quiet night, in the lull between the songs, you
can almost feel the past trying to speak. Maybe that's the mysterious allure of
the place. The ghosts of all those drinkers--some for a single shot, some for
20 years--fusing with the booze and the music, the talk and laughter, old stories
and new, until finally those larger-than-life figures come down from the wall.
Some nights you can almost see them at the bar in that misty amber light.
---from Obituary for a Saloon
The race angle in the city's long-running feud with the taxi industry
is just a smoke screen. The mayor can pretend to be on the side of the poor and
look like he's fighting discrimination, but behind the scenes the skids are
greased for developers and real estate speculators, who've been getting rich
pushing the poor and lower middle class from one neighborhood to another for
decades. The real tragedy of Humboldt Park is not its current lack of taxis.
It's the glut of cabs that will soon arrive as the trendy lakefront expands
farther west, pushing the poor and the lower middle class out of yet another
neighborhood. ---from Newspaper Boxes, Taxicab Myths
Once a month, a Social Security check is dropped in my mailbox. I add
it to a stack on the bookcase. There are 30 checks to date . . . made out to my
friend Sam Sarac. His picture is on a photocopy of an immigration document that
I keep on the same shelf. The document is from 1964. I assume the photo is from
that same year, when Sam was granted permanent resident status after entering
the U.S. in 1961... Every check is like another nail in Sam's coffin, and I've
got $11,000 worth of checks so far. He must be dead, I keep telling myself.
It's undoubtedly the most money he's ever had to his name.--- from Lost
Cities
A great collection of reminiscences about Chicago and the
changes the city has undergone in the past 40-plus years, as seen through the
eyes of a native and cab-driver, Jack Clark.
Taxi driving, traffic, barbers and haircuts, pauper burials,
furniture moving, city politics, high school cheating, bars, family pets and
cranky relatives, friendships, re-gentrification, old girlfriends, beat cops,
race relations, Martin Luther King assassination, an ex-wife, journalism ……
Interesting, enjoyable, thoughtful, philosophical and a bit
regretful probably at how his home city has evolved during the last half a
century, not all the changes being positive.
He made me feel nostalgic for a city I have never been to and in all
probability never will. In some respects I guess that city doesn't exist anymore.
If he can entertain me talking about newspaper boxes and
traffic signals, I’m looking forward to his fiction.
5 from 5
Jack Clark’s website is
here.
Bought on Amazon a year or two ago.
Josephine’s ringer is lying in the dirt and she is one step
closer to putting a stop to the bloodshed. 
