You Will Go Where You're Meant To Be

A weekend in Chicago 20 years after I forgot to get famous

I’m pretty sure I saw Neil Fallon from Clutch at the Pelican show last night in Chicago. I’m 25 years past the age or blood-alcohol level to go up and fanboy out on someone just trying to watch a band, so I didn’t find out for sure. And what did I have to talk to him about? My old group opened for him in the time of velociraptors and Limewire, a topic I bet anyone would simply love to have hollered into their ear while Coalesce was opening a show at 110 decibels.

Pelican enlisted Shiner vocalist Allan Epley to sing “The Cliff,” the only non-instrumental in their set, and I remembered that Epley slept on my floor once after a Shiner gig at Whit’s End in Toledo in 1995 or 1996. The show was a bust, my apartment was gross, and I’m not sure if I’d rather find out he didn’t remember that stayover, or that he did.

I’m old enough now to see bands that went for it, went back home, fell apart, moved on with life, stumbled back into the game, and are now selling tickets and touring and putting out new releases with a second wind that belies their years and receding hairlines. I crossed paths with a few of them, for good and for ill, and most of those interactions are just about erased from history.

Hell, I did standup longer, more seriously, and more recently, and the footprints I left in that scene might as well be impressions in desert sand. A few people might remember seeing me open for someone they’ve heard of, and I’m not even technically “out of print” – my two released albums get streams from a couple hundred listeners a month, mostly as part of random comedy playlists. But it’s a safe bet that if I wandered into a mic in town tonight, 90% of the room wouldn’t know me.

This isn’t a poor-me post about the fickle whims of showbiz and fame, two things that hit me with a glancing blow at best. I do get occasional bouts of the what-ifs – I think it’d be weird if I didn’t. But these days they’re very much of a wispy and wistful variety – I can wonder what it’d be like to have an act worth resurrecting and putting on the road, while gratefully appreciating every night I haven’t loaded a drum kit in or out of a place, and every hour I didn’t have to spend appeasing the algorithm gods with desperately-edited crowd work comedy clips.

Just like when you graduate from school or leave a job, a few connections survive the entropy of years and distance. I have friends in Chicago from the band days, and from the time we shared on an internet music forum that pre-dated social media as we know it. I went to the show with one of them, spent the afternoon drinking beer and watching Happy Gilmore 2 with her husband, and stayed at their house after the show.

Another sweet friend from those days, who had originally planned to put me up, called them with instructions to take me to Kabobi, a place I’ve raved about here before. I got to have the saffron butter chicken with dill rice again, a meal that is probably my favorite food on earth now, and in true Kabobi style, there was enough left over for a cold breakfast today before I left Mike and Carol’s.

I headed across town to see Ed, who’d gotten roped into watching his new nephew for the weekend, and I got to make funny noises at a baby, one of my all-time favorite activities. Ed and his wife Margaret were exhausted and nearly ready to hand the little poop explosion factory back to his parents, but I got an hour or so of hang time before I had to move on.

Thanks to the vagaries of Amtrak, I wasn’t leaving town till 9:30, so I killed some time at a coffee shop and then made my way to Damen for the Wicker Park Festival. (This required the use of a new CTA train, and a transfer to the Blue Line I already know, the second-most Chicago activity in this dispatch.) Calling this a street fair does it a disservice – this was eight or ten blocks of a major city thoroughfare blocked off with stages at each end, artists and vendors of every stripe, and enough heart-attack fair food and local beer to put half the city into an early grave.

I was looking for my friend Jen, a comedy pal from Kalamazoo who moved to Chicago a few years ago. We hadn’t hung out since well before the pandemic, and after a pass or two through the throngs of partygoers, I was starting to think we weren’t gonna today, either. But she finally texted me that she and her friend had dipped out of the heat to a favorite local pizza place on the next block.

Between more beers and bites of little loaded redskin potatoes (is it a potato skin if it’s pretty much the whole potato?), we caught up and commiserated about the state of the world, jumping back into the chat like we’d seen each other six days ago, not six years.

We ended the get-together at just the right time, with the most Chicago of farewells, a Malort shot (if you’ve never indulged, imagine a liquor made by soaking rotten tenement floorboards in algae-choked pond water, and then picture an entire Midwestern city drinking it on purpose to prove they’re tough enough to deal with bad traffic and shitty winters).

After sweaty goodbye hugs on the sidewalk, I got back on the Blue Line, downtown to Union Station, and into the boarding line for the Northeast Limited just as it was making its way to the platform. It’s important to remember the differences in stations, because in Toledo I was able to park within 50 feet of the door, saunter in twelve minutes before departure time, and make my way to my seat. In Chicago, it’s more like actual transportation, and you gotta come correct.

When I woke up at 5:30am in Toledo the day before, I had a tired and grouchy moment where I wondered if I could cut my losses, write off the concert tickets, and go back to bed. I wasn’t 100% sure I was gonna make it to all my destinations, or if the show was gonna rock, or if I had the gumption to make eight hours on Amtrak and 36 hours in Chicago worth it.

One of the artists at the festival sold this print on a block of wood, and it spoke to me, the way a thing you never should have crossed paths with often will. Not to get all manifest-y, but I decided on the spot that when I make my next move, be it opening a shop or expanding into a warehouse and fulfillment center, this will be the first thing I hang up there.

I don’t believe in predetermination or destiny. Shit’s just too capricious. I wasn’t meant to see this art, or hang with Mike and Carol and Ed and Margaret and Jen and baby Brooks, or rock out with Pelican, or soak up the weird midafternoon vibes of a Starbucks on Armitage until I gleaned a new short story idea from it. The universe didn’t intentionally swerve the clown car of fate to put me in front of a plate of butter chicken.

But I did my level best to align those moments, and I gambled that most of them would work out like they were supposed to, and then I embraced the hell out of each one as it came along, and that seems just as spiritual (and a helluva lot more practical and believable).

It’s easier to give yourself grace for the paths you never navigated earlier in life, when the meandering walkabout you did end up on takes you into the orbit of so many fantastic people and new environments. If I did believe in manifesting, and I wanted to nitpick the universe a little, I’d ask for a train that left Chicago a smidge earlier – but then again, getting home at 3am is a small price to pay for a weekend so rich and full, Malort be damned.