What?
Yes. Summer vacation. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve still been working my ass off at the bar, but this summer has been the first time in years that I’ve had summer days to myself. The past two years I’ve busied myself with internships, and the years before those I’ve been stuck in either a windowless auction house, a windowed auction house (perhaps worse to see summer passing you by), or an over air-conditioned downtown office building.
This lack of the summer part of summers came as a shock to me when I entered the square world. My father always used to tell me, “you don’t know what freedom is until it’s taken away from you.” He wasn’t waxing patriotic, he was referring to prison, and that’s what my first summer spent working entirely indoors felt like. “You don’t know what summer is until it’s taken away from you.”
Now, I imagine that most adult-types can count the end of their academic life and the beginning of their work life as the point where they made the transition from outdoor summers to indoor summers, but I had a peculiar string of careers in my early 20s. After dropping out of school after my freshman year, I helped run my family’s mega-jumbo laundrymat in Chicago’s Little Village. I learned nothing about business, picked up not a lick of Spanish and made my own hours, which often meant driving drunk to the place after the bars closed to do the books and then heading out to play roulette in Elgin. Point is, I was untethered, I spent my days working on my punk rock record label / publishing “empire” and generally did whatever I wanted. Summers were for touring with your band, drinking, making out, and having a good time. Actually, at that point in my life, that’s what I did in most seasons.
Anyhow, my next job also leant itself to summer revelry, working as a bartender at the Fireside Bowl. Now I was doing double duty, see? I was working at the laundrymat, and at the bar. Woah. A regular workhorse. Now, in fairness, I shouldn’t put my work ethic down too much, because, honestly, I have always been prone to working like a maniac, but the catch is that I will work furiously on what I want to work on, and that was the case for my next endeavor, a place where I had some of the best summers of my life, Jinx café.
As of next week, ten years will have passed since Jinx opened its doors, but a lot of the fun came in the months before. Those who knew my crazed, grumpy, occasionally hysterical self during that time would likely offer a single syllable in response to hearing me speak fondly of that period, “ha!” My partner, Michelle, and I worked 17 hours a day trying to whip 1926 W. Divison into shape. Sawing, hammering, welding, cursing, crying, and drinking. We kept the front door open for light and air and for the occasional “what’s going on here,” from the neighbors.
We drank cheap beer with friends who came to help and sat outside on the stoop. I spent at least two days getting drunk and going at the exterior with a propane torch and a scraper before deciding, “fuck it, I’m just painting over this shit.” I remember whipping said torch across a rainy, vacant Division Street in a blind rage about something or other. I was so disappointed when it didn’t explode. I believe it had to do with having potentially destroyed my 1964 Oldsmobile’s engine while trying to drive through a flooded viaduct that I would never have been driving through if the Home Depot closest to me wasn’t out of the black Astroturf I had to have – that day, massive flooding or not.
But anyhow, after a summer of, “we’re opening next week… no, next week… no, next week,” we finally opened the first week of September. The place was a hit. We loved our customers, and they loved us. My seeming lack of desire to actually make money made us one of the coolest cafes ever. We didn’t pay our employees well, but we certainly didn’t work them very hard either. We encouraged drinking while on duty, which led to hilarity and the occasional sliced finger.
Fall was romantic there, feeling the weather change after a long, hot, hard summer. Girls in sweaters. Flirtations. Indiscretions. Winter was cozy: people trudging through the snow to get to the place, peeling off their layers when they got inside. It was perpetually steamy inside. The windows were always fogged up.
But then came Chicago’s notoriously short spring followed by, yes, summer. I had taken to riding a 1964 Vespa (what’s with me and that year?). I wore vintage short sleeve button down shirts, polyester slacks, and ugly Red Wing shoes (when you’re on your feet 14 hours a day, you make some sacrifices). I rode my lanky self around on my little red scooter (or “moped,” as Jinx staffer Andy Moran would call it just to annoy me) with a pair of yellow-tinted goggles on my head. I would roll up and park it on the sidewalk outside, and would get excited when other scooter folks would assemble there. Soon, Michelle purchased a 1970s Honda 550 Four, and the whole place was lousy with two-wheeled motorized vehicle enthusiasts.
On Saturdays and Sundays, I would typically show up at 11:15 or 11:30 (we were supposed to open at 11). The front gate would still be locked, and my employees would be sitting outside on the stoop, waiting for me, along with several patient customers. I’d slide back the big, iron gate and the whole lot of us would wander into the dark coffee shop. Someone would be sliding the gates back from the front windows as the regulars staked out their usual places and I got the coffee brewing. Occasionally, we’d find one or more of the previous evening’s employees still there, passed out on the couch by the pinball machine and the jukebox. I’d grab some money from the till and walk down to D&D to buy some champagne so we could sit outside and drink mimosas. Andy invented a brilliant game one night called, “drink until we can’t see our customers” which didn’t involve drinking yourself blind, rather building a wall out of our empty beer cans on the front counter until we, literally, could not see our customers.
Our mostly male staff would ogle the never-ending stream of gorgeous young women who came through our door. The summer heat made for fantastic states of undress, and we relished the opportunity to wait on these girls hand and foot, and make plans to get drinks later, and then maybe to come back to Jinx late at night to play strip international military aircraft identification (the only deck of cards we had).
I remember nights of late night scooter rides with girls pressed up against me. To the Green Mill. To Finkl Steel. To my horrendously messy apartment which was often without electricity because I forgot to pay the bill.
I was a lush and a playboy and it was summer.
So a few years later when I’d gotten out of the café racket, in and out of a venture into the dying world of video rental, and remembered that I had some skill as a graphic designer, I ended up working at an auction house called Wright. I was 27 years old, and it was for all practical purposes, my first “real” job. I started in April and I loved it. I worked around 60-80 hours a week on average. I treated it as I did every other entrepreneurial venture I’d engaged in, with passion. All consuming passion which destroys relationships and leads you to drink too much.
I would stare out the window of the gallery, located in the West Loop, home to a few art galleries and a whole lot of meatpacking, and watch the summer go by. The white-clad meatpackers would take smoke breaks outside and I would contemplate taking up the habit. Friday nights would bring well-dressed men and women to the area, they would stand outside, schmoozing and laughing, and I would watch them with envy as I sat behind a gargantuan LaCie monitor Photoshopping a missing leg onto a sofa (“it’ll be fixed by preview,” my boss would say.)
A couple years later my summer would be spent, again behind a computer, but this time working on Sunday advertising supplements for the likes of Sears and Linens ‘N Things at the downtown advertising firm of Ambrosi. I would wear a cardigan in the chilly offices, take an early lunch and lie in the summer sun in the grassy area across the street from the Sears Tower. I would sit through muti-hour phone conferences about which way some towels should be folded in the upcoming photo shoot and I would stare out the window and wonder what it would be like if we were talking about something interesting. I wondered how people could live like this. Work so gruel-less that they had to invent carpal tunnel syndrome to have something to complain about.
How did our society willingly, collectively, give up summer? We were raised on summer from childhood, they organized our academic lives around it because they knew that brains aren’t meant to work in summer. So who’s brilliant idea was it to have people work indoors, year round upon graduation? And you’re supposed to keep that up until retirement? Don’t give me that vacation bullshit. Two weeks? Fuck you. And don’t act like “casual Fridays” is supposed to substitute for ice cream and mosquito bites.
Give me sunburn and sand in your shoes. Give me hot dogs and Solo® cups. Give me short skirts and sunglasses and it’s too hot to fuck but let’s try anyway. Give me two-stroke smoke and winding roads. Give me petanque. Give me Slurpees®. Give me summer.
