"Where I Come From" by Andrew B. Hurvitz

Some of the housing in Skokie, originally uploaded by YoChicago2.

What would I tell him? That I was still unemployed after three years? That damn bastard. He was flying in from Denver to L.A. and had to call me up. The same drippy ass, lethargic, nasal Midwestern voice, “Hey Mike, it’s me Larry. I’m going to be in LA next week.”

Larry Kramer had a rich dad. They did something with printing. They had a factory on Fullerton on the NW side of Chicago. Then the father bought a lot of buildings, in depressed areas like Wicker Park. Then this dad died and the real estate became expensive and the rents went up and Larry was swimming in dough.

Larry was a slob. Even in the fourth grade he had a 36-inch waist. He had asthma and a “weak heart” so he was excused from gym class in our Highland Park grade school.

Larry’s mom, Joannie Kushner Kramer, was a beautiful woman. She had red hair, piled high and sprayed solid. She wore Guerlain and pleated, pressed gabardine trousers and smoked Camels.

They lived in a custom-house, built in the late 1950s with a double height living room and a two story deep basement. At the very bottom of the basement they had a freezer stocked with Mounds and Almond Joy bars, and a ping-pong and pool table.

You had to take off your shoes when you went inside the house. The windows, the “Pella” windows, were never opened, but the house was cool inside in the heat of the summer and toasty in the Chicago winter. Rich people live in air-conditioned houses if they can afford it. They never bother with natural weather conditions.

Marv Kramer was a gruff, bow-legged, cigar smoking, Eldorado driving 60-year old. He had fought in the big war and then he fought his new war at the printing plant. They had the contract for every synagogue newsletter in Chicago. It was some kind of tradition going back to Russia. The congregants prayed on “Kramer-print” and when you drove on the Dan-Ryan past Fullerton, you would see a 30 foot high neon sign with a printing press and the words, “K-R-A-M-E-R”.

Mild

I guess if I had one word to describe my own life it would be mild. I was not terribly angry. I was not very ambitious. I laughed easily and drove slowly. I didn’t get upset. I just thought things would come along and eventually I would get married and get a job and have kids and die.

In grade school I regularly earned B- or C+. I sucked at mathematics, but managed to get a C+.
My grades and demeanor and popularity were mildly successful.

My dad died when I was very young and my mother raised me. She worked in the Jewel as a cashier.
We got discounts on ground chuck, milk and produce and even though she earned around $4.50 an hour, we managed to live in a fairly clean and well-kept ranch house near Lake Avenue.

My mom kept a little collection of cameras on a shelf in the dining room. This was a little hobby of hers. There was a Zeiss-Ikon Contaflex, a little Nazi lens from Germany. There was also a Nikon F Mount, a Leica, and an Agfa Automatic 66.

She had once had aspirations to become a photographer, and during her young years in Grand Rapids, Michigan had worked in the Photographer’s Club. Then she met my handsome father, a thin Italian with a pencil thin mustache and a thin waist. They were married ten years, he made her give up photography. They fought a lot. Divorce followed. We moved to Chicago. He stayed back in Michigan.

She brought the cameras along. Put them on a glass shelf. Dusted them weekly. She never shot with them. They just were there as reminders of what she had never been.



Practical Advice

I found, living in the Midwest, that the most mundane people are the most self-assured.

Marv Kramer was like that. He knew just how to get a handle on life. And let you know it.

“If ya want to make money, sell something.”

“I never believed in education. Work is where it’s at.”

“Just pick something and pick at it.” (advice on work)

He pontificated when he walked into his house, after he laid his hat on the hall table, and went into the bathroom to wash his hands.

He was not bothered “by the road less taken”. He was on the crowded highway, the one that most ambitious men took, speeding along in the left lane, passing most of them.

I used to look at him, and think I never want to grow up into someone like that.

Mr. Kramer, as I called him, might ask some questions of me, but they were never probing, and perhaps they weren’t even sincere?

“Whom do you like, the Cubs or the White Sox?”

“Whom do you think is tougher, you or Larry?”

“Where do you want to go to school, Harvard or Yale?”

They were questions not to make you think, but to make sure you thought just like he did.

Regret

One day, when we were walking home from our last day of class in 9th Grade, I told Larry something I regret to this very day.

“I hate your fucking father ,” I said.

He suddenly was injured, sick, cheeks desaturated. His face seemed to nearly collapse. “Why would you say a fucking thing like that?” he asked.

“He’s a fucking ass hole. I just think he sucks,” I said.

“I ought to pound your face in,” he said. But he still couldn’t understand why I said it.

“He makes a ton of money, and you live like princes, and your mom doesn’t have to work, and you keep your fucking air-conditioning on all summer and you vacation in Florida or Arizona every year,” I rattled it all off, the damning evidence of decadence.

“So! I can’t help it. What do you want me to do about it?” he said.

“Just take what I said and think about it. My mom works as a cashier to support me and I don’t take any of it for granted,” I said. Somehow my moral superiority excused me from gross insensitivity.

“You know what! We aren’t friends anymore! You aren’t coming over anymore. You aren’t my friend,” he said. He pushed me and then ran away.

I was lying on the grass. I had just ruined a friendship and I was just thinking of how I kind of liked ruining good things for no good reason.

Retirement

Mom worked at the Jewel on Touhy in Skokie. Then she was transferred to the Jewel in Edgebrook where she stayed for a year. Then they put her up in Glenview, closer to our home in Highland Park.

She had worked as a cashier for so long that she trained the new cashiers on the automated scanning machines. The lasers: a miracle device that were supposed to make it easier to ring up customers.

But they caused the older customers discomfort. It went too fast for the old biddies who couldn’t see how much they were charged for each item.

Then the automated SKUs sometimes didn’t compute and the cashier had to enter each number on a product by hand. The lines grew longer, the impatience of both the workers and shoppers increased.

Mom was older and she earned $20 an hour, plus benefits. She was part of a union. She wore a special brass pin that said, “Genevieve/1970” the year she started at Jewel.

If she retired, in 1995, she would collect a pretty good pension for the rest of her life. But if she could stand on her feet until 2000, she would greatly increase her retirement income. The choice was easy.

She rang up groceries until the millennium.

Grades

I hated to study.

I had this recurring dream: that I was in a classroom and the teacher was passing out a math test that I had never studied for.

Only it wasn’t a dream. This was exactly how I went to school.

I wasn’t doing drugs. I wasn’t studying. I wasn’t playing sports. I’m not sure what I was doing.

When I think of high school, it is a blur of hallways with lockers. Bullies and bitches and running to the next class.

And the holidays! So many of them in America: Columbus Day and Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, Martin Luther King, Abe Lincoln, George Washington, Passover, Easter, Spring Break, Summer Vacation. God and heroes, harvests and resurrection. The beach….


The Mirror

People told me I was good-looking. It was a blessing, so I was told, to have clear skin, lots of thick hair, a wide forehead, a lean body, broad shoulders.

But when you are born like this, you don’t have any other image of yourself to contrast it to. You aren’t old yet, so your youth is just what it is. You eat badly, you don’t exercise, you don’t have to try hard, and still…..

“Wow, you are really handsome.”

It’s a good thing. You don’t have to try. It just pours in like a dividend or an inheritance.


Before Graduation

In my Senior year, almost as a throwaway, I decided to run cross-country. There I was, running everyday after school, with a bunch of other guys who ran much faster than me. The coach, Harold Serban, was an earnest blue-eyed Lutheran from Arlington Heights, with a close-cropped hair-cut and aqua eyes. He stood along the track eyeing us all like the rotten fuck-offs we could be. When his gaze locked onto you, you were in his sights, marked for assassination.

“I don’t like the way you run,” he said to me after one particularly breathless and exhausting spin around the track.

“I’m sorry?”

“No. This isn’t about an apology. It’s about your attitude. You have to stop skipping. You are relaxing in the end, instead of giving it your all,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Damn it!” he said as he pulled me by my sweatshirt hood into his face space. “Don’t apologize. Take action and show me what you can do! I don’t want anybody on this team who isn’t trying their hardest!”

The next week, I ran my hardest. I really pushed myself. At the Niles North meet, I ran the 800 meters. I came in last.

The week after that, I ran myself ragged. I loaded up on carbs, like spaghetti, and ate chocolate bars and drank Gatorade, milk shakes and cheeseburgers. I gained 3 pounds.

But I didn’t win any races. I dropped off the team. I wasn’t going to let any coach tell me that I wasn’t trying.

About a week before graduation, I drove over to the Jewel on Waukegan Road in Glenview to pick up my mom.

Sitting on a lawn chair near the front entrance was Joannie Kramer. She was smoking a cigarette and seeming to enjoy the spring sun. I walked up to her.

“Hi. I don’t know if you remember me Mrs. Kramer, but I am an old friend of Larry’s,” I said.

She got up and grinned and extended her hand. “Why how are you? I wouldn’t have recognized you. You grew up so much! You boys played together, you were such good friends.”

“Yes. I still see Larry in school but he runs around with a different crowd than me,” I said.

“He got into Yale. Yes, he’s going east in the fall!” she said.

“What brings you all the way up to Glenview?” I asked.

“The club. I just played tennis and I’m waiting for my husband to run inside and grab us some dinner,” she said.

I was here to pick up my mother, the cashier. I didn’t care to tell her that.

Marv Kramer walked out with two paper bags of groceries. He immediately saw me and put them down. He hugged me.

“My boy! We thought you had dropped off the face of the Earth. Larry still talks about you,” he said.

“I heard he’s going to Harvard,” I said.

“Yale. Yale University in Connecticut,” he said.

I had my hands in my pockets. I was smiling at both of them while shoppers went in and went out. We were momentarily united in an awkward moment.

“Please say hi to Larry,” I said.

“Yes, yes. We will,” Mrs. Kramer said.

“Well good-bye,” I said. They waved and walked to their car.

I went inside the store and picked up my mom.

I don’t think that either of the Kramers had remembered my name.


The Flat Streets

Almost every street in Chicago, except for a few, runs in a straight line. I can think of a few, like Lincoln or Milwaukee that are diagonal, but only one curves and it is called Sheridan Road.

Sheridan Road was where I escaped to when I dreamt of leaving Chicago. I would drive up, starting in Evanston, and pass through Wilmette, past the Bahai Temple, and then enter that green, lush, verdant, elegant precinct Kenilworth, past Winnetka, Glencoe and back home to Highland Park.

As an admitted failure, I would see the rows of identical yellow brick homes on our street and think not of how I might avoid living here, but of how I might one day end up in one of these.

There is nothing wrong with living in a clean, sterile ranch house, with crew cut shrubs and polished aluminum storm windows. This is what makes Chicagoland great in its entirety.

But after high school ended, and I graduated 464th out of a class of 530, and knew that I would never be inside the hallowed walls of Princeton, Yale or Madison, I had to plan an escape.

Woodland Hills

I now live in Woodland Hills, California deep inside the San Fernando Valley. On Friday nights, I eat in the Olive Garden, and I buy my books at Barnes and Noble and shop for groceries at Whole Foods, and rarely go west of Calabasas or east of DeSoto.

We had another day of 110 degree heat, our 15th in a row. It’s October 11th and I don’t think the temperature has gone below 99 in four months.

I applied for a job, not long ago, at the new giant Ralphs Market they are building up on VanOwen and I think I’m confident that I might be hired as a cashier there.

Mom died last year and I flew into Chicago and we had a quiet service at the chapel, and then she was buried way out in St. Charles.

I hope I have a job by the time Larry Kramer comes into LA. He told me about a big Brazilian steakhouse where you can get huge portions of food merely by putting a green light in front of your plate and then the waiter will slice another slab for you.

I really like LA. It’s so much better than Chicago. There is just so much more to do out here and I am really confident about where life is taking me. I’m not going to shovel snow, or look at gray skies ever again.


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