Maybe I came to Chicago—after everything in 2001, when I was 18—to meet Lidia. But I never met her, not once.
I purchased staff picks on a shelf titled “Lidia.” I bought up her shelf. It replenished itself on Tuesday. I bought Tuesdays of Lidia, the presumption being she was a staff member of this used bookstore on Milwaukee Avenue. But I only ever saw men working at that place from 2001-2005, the window of time that I lived in Chicago.
Sometimes in a bookstore a name on a staff picks shelf persists after that person has gone—dead or moved, to graduate school, or in 2001 maybe on to Portland… It is sometimes not obvious to scrape a label off of wood, even when that person isn’t part of your bookstore system any longer. Sometimes, in a bookstore, a ghost is recommending you your books, think of that, which makes sense considering them, and the mass majority of the writers are gone and some are like Lorca, or such as Isaac Babel, were executed.
Through Lidia, ghost or no (and I wanted to know!), I was reading now: Duras and Leduc, who else? Oh, Soul on Ice, Ponge. Better than going to college, which I didn’t go to in Chicago, not to UChicago, and going to Café Earwax where I was ingesting the moving syllabus of ULidia and wrote out my discontiguous final paper for her—(mon professoire)—in the margins of my new used purchases, but I wanted, at the time, to meet her, sure. I was so very in love with her.
She had me reading Pierre Guyotat’s Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers and Fanon and Flaubert. Baldwin and Bouvard and Pécuchet—In Duras, the fog the marshes, the Saigonicity of her one story read ok with Kindred—colonial landscapes foggier than I ever imagined in the morning. Unica Zürn und Housekeeping—I looked up from a book. My coffee was coming towards me at Café Earwax, like the scene at the beginning of the great film So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993) where a cappuccino in a big cup is coming up for Mike Myers, before he goes on.
WOMAN, he performs at an open mic in SF.
WHOA, MAN.
I looked up from a book into all of Earwax—orange, red, yellow, wood. But my own coffee was coming up for me in only a stout diner mug, everything in Chicago just like that. Trying to be the bone. No foam. Or very tight bonish foam.
WOMAN, I thought.
WHOA, MAN, and I was glad not to be in a room—a café is not a room—on a day like this
in this time when The Bends plays on something that isn’t Spotify, and Mike Myers says “Look at the size of this thing. It’s like Campbell’s Cup-O-Ccino” before he was ever Austin Powers, that motherfucker, and the artistic communities of San Francisco are before they were computers, and FLYING OFF YOUR MOTORCYCLE is inside of this wrist that twitches a little (happily, greedily) on top of the page I’m reading, in Chicago where I read and thought for Lidia. It was a purpose. She was a god. God was so female in a hermeneutics of new erotics—I was in love with a name on a shelf, and its bearing. It was like the film Before Sunrise (1995). Chicago, Vienna, me & Julie. It was like looking for someone without the internet, without a clue.
Sometimes I read out loud from her books right in public. Have you been 18? Have you been 17, 18, and then, were you then 19? I read Villette all the time. Anybody I saw coming by with a big disgusting bean burger with burnt portobellos as the bun, I wondered, are you her? Are you swimming out to me in this ocean of earwax?
I couldn’t leave Café Earwax just then, before my night shift at the stationary store by the river, in the little rented space right in the bend of it where it would begin, on Kinzie St., to reek of chocolate. I stayed to finish Dhalgren or Villette.
Paper at night, only me.
Cutting up cardstock (pug-themed) with one enormous knife machine. $400 dollars a month, an etc/misc hit off Craigslist. The married couple drew pugs on thank you cards, were in need of a night cutter so they could get some sleep. And I also cared for their pugs, their inspo, two of them and walking these into their preordained it seemed divots. This was 2001. Bang. Dumpsters were fresh with the pastries and flesh that was fresh enough. At the time I hated to read dialogue, I could barely read a book that contained that kind of pacing. I was almost allergic. Guyotat, if only for his prose blocks, appealed to me a lot a lot. I did not have a dialectical feeling! I did not feel like things were conversations. Eden Eden Eden is the most “violet”-activated book in the world. It’s very sexual and it’s violent. Men were always telling me I looked lost at this time, a lot of them did say that. Coming up to me. “You look like you’re lost.” It was dangerous. Was it true? I was looking for Lidia, that’s true, and maybe looking looks like losing.
I asked Darius, “Would you tell me please when Lidia works?” I said, “She is staff here, correct? Is she here? Does she work in the back?”
“There is no back,” Darius scoffed.
“There isn’t any backstock?” I wanted to know. That was strange. I asked, “Where is your coat?”
He pulled it out from under the high counter and let me feel. It was standard for that time, a green military jacket with orange lining. Very old, I could feel the spines of the old feathers in there. There was not any fluff left, a clatter of spines. I asked, “Is this warm?”
“I don’t want to be comfortable!” he said approximating André Gregory in the film My Dinner with André (1981), in which Gregory famously eschews the comfort of an electric blanket like an idiot.
Darius was a man under twenty-five in 2001. He had to say his things but I had to say mine, too.
“Could I leave Lidia, do you think, a little note?”
He agreed so I tried to write her one. DEAR LIDIA
“Let’s go,” Darius said, “outside.”
He read the whole note (it was a letter a letter) at the bar, in a red vinyl U at Club Rainbo.
“Tell me, Darius, are you her? Are the staff picks under a pseudonym?”
I would adjust. I would still learn.
Do you want a description of Darius? What do I say, the height, a color? A white?
There are eyes, hair, and skin. There are repetitions and motions constantly coming out of him. There’s posture and size and clothes. I have already donated to your sick charity that he always wore a military jacket. Is character a distinction? But distinctions too are programs. I could say he was drunk.
At Club Rainbo we took double shots of whiskey and then again. But I stopped, really, and I only sipped out of my second shot glass while he kept throwing them into him. He clearly had a problem with this. He began telling me that he had a drinking problem, and why. He was abused as a child. “But about Lidia…” I wanted to protest (somehow to her, in an aside):
“DEAR LIDIA, the craft of characterization is fascism. I should not fill Darius up (or flesh him out, gross) with his reasons for drinking, as how can that matter, what a person says for himself, or what I say for someone else? What’s left to say? Isn’t there a lot a lot?”
Darius was a very looong person.
The effect of his character: he abused a drink. The effect: he went to the bathroom for a long time.
“Tell me if you are Lidia,” I implored before he excused himself yet again and disappeared.
“I don’t mind if it’s you!”
He shook his head like nu-uh she’s real.
Before he disappeared to the bathroom for another unreasonable amount of time—I think it might have been two hours—he had taken a poem out of his pocket and read it to me, quite a few pages.
As he read it I took time to dwell, and to be alone. I watched him perform his poem as I thought about that day’s reading from Leduc’s second memoir, Mad in Pursuit.
I wrote, in my mind, a final paper for Lidia about Violette Leduc titled “Leduc and the Object.”
I want to think solely about Leduc’s rabbit fur coat. Her superhero cape. She likes it over and against her friend Maurice Sachs, who dies, shot to all exeunt and it’s this rabbit fur coat she lines with meats to sell on the black market pumping up the dead coat with mismatched flesh bricks and patches, like a fur and meat mix-up and an exterior and interior mash-up unless she sold rabbit meat but doubtful. She would though. What a book!
Darius thought I was listening to his poetry reading. The effect: he asked me what I thought.
I said, “Lidia doesn’t ever recommend much poetry on her shelf, I’ve noticed.”
“Lidia,” he said, “is a dead person.” This is when he excused himself for an almost unforgivably long time.
I was left in the booth to contemplate this alone. I was left to disbelieve him, drunks are known liars, but also to wonder. I drank up my shot. And to contemplate that his poem was not wonderful. Not outstanding. No. It was a poem about taking a walk and observing, relating to, some pigeons. Amateur hour. I wanted to open everything, take everything, I wanted to find the chest of violet mesh in the pigeons. I was sick of breadcrumbs when it comes to pigeons in poems. While he was in the bathroom (for such a long, long, drunk time) I rewrote his poem.
Bored, using the phone…
Darius, later, joined Jerome and I in the booth. I had been reading to Jerome the revision, and Jerome was listening intently, very touchy, very touching me. He touched my knee, shoulder, and where my ribcage began becoming my breast. He set an outrageous tone. He squeezed and touched and bothered vowels with his accent. He supplied us all with lemon drop martinis, there were six on the table. He didn’t want to go back and order more when we’d get done with the first round.
“This is Jerome,” I explained to Darius.
“Hi Susan. Hi Jerome.”
Darius said that Lidia was dead. He said she was so believe it. Her sisters came for her clothes and computer and car. Everyone thought he, her husband, would want her books.
“I have not read many of them,” he quickly explained to us. “And it shames me, not to tune my brain, to set it off on the same course as hers. I have wanted to but I can’t read. I can’t concentrate any longer. I only read comics. When I have to. So I’ve been setting all of her books up on a staff picks shelf, I figured they would scatter. I did not account for someone like you, Susan, who comes in every Tuesday like a raccoon. I envisioned, more, a slo-mo scattering.”
“How close are we?”
“We’re almost done. It’s nearly over. You almost have her entire library. Happy?”
“And how about Lidia? What happened to her?” Jerome demanded. He always wanted this. Not answers—to make demands. He loved barking and buying everything up. He gave me money for books. He gave me money for food. $400 dollars was nothing in Chicago in 2001. Please. He was housing me. He was pleased to be paying me.
“Susan, who is this guy? He’s so old.”
I noticed, the first time over, Darius had pasted a portrait of Virginia Woolf above his sink where a mirror should be and where he shaved his head like an anti-nazi skinhead, a straight-edged look (ironic), but he had, too, a tint of UChicago or something on him, some ivy under the tongue he was still somewhat sucking like a lozenge of funds. It came out. When he did not return pants that did not fit. When all of his clothes, I noticed, were not used. When his own shelf was very Franzen, even those first ones, and unnecessarily heavy on the Fish, Stanley Fish.
“Why wasn’t Lidia ever reading any Virginia Woolf, isn’t that strange?” I asked. I had never bought any used Woolf on her memorial shelf.
“She totally disliked her, Susan. Like Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mary Butts. They all thought Virginia was kind of in the 8th grade.”
Darius drank problematically. I used to think it was because his young wife had died, but then I found Lidia’s Al-Anon paraphernalia—her pamphlets and phone lists in a folder—and he said, “Maybe you wanna go, too?”
But I didn’t want to. I didn’t even go to a college, I wasn’t going to go anywhere. Park, café, bar, that was the agenda—leave it. I stopped spying on Sonia though.
I learned that Lidia was never dead. I would have no way of knowing if she’s living up to this moment, right now. Her last name: Green. Try looking up a Lidia Green. And Darius, dead I guess? There is nothing to look up, no one to call. It’s a hundred years later, of course they’re all dead. But I learned she had been alive, at least then, at least at that time, and I learned this when I was at Nina’s in NY, on the phone with Darius. It was one of those last times for saying anything. That kind of kiss-off conversation, but we’d had a few.
“I might get back together with Lidia now that you’ve left.”
“What?”
Nina was getting ready for work. I watched the shine on her fish.
“Now,” he explained, “that you’ve left me in this puddle of cocaine on the bathroom floor, my dear Susan, I might call up my ex, Lidia—she’ll help now. I’ve been talking with her this whole time. She’s been on the backburner, that’s right! She was the one who was willing to go to Al-Anon for me. She was the willing one!”
He was so dramatic. Cocaine can’t puddle. What was he saying? Was Lidia really alive? He said he was going to hang himself. Or up. I couldn’t quite hear. I let the phone fizz off with the shining fish. Plonk. I couldn’t care about if he’d die one more time. That if had been knifing me in the if for four years!
I’d left all of my books, Lidia’s books, with Jerome. Everything but every Brautigan! Jerome had tossed this extra Saab off to me and I easily as olive green left town. He’d bit me hard, on the mouth, and then put money in my bleeding mouth. I can’t even tell you how much.
I did not know Nina, or her fish, too well and it was only incidental that I’d stayed the night with her, but I didn’t know what to do next. If Lidia was alive, at that time, I wanted to find her. God, guide, what was she to me? Star, cherish, hand, hollow, leash. Sexy leash. It seemed I’d have to put up signs, fliers in Wicker Park, up at Earwax. I’d list the books I owned—what if “Lidia” was not even her name? Ok, I would not use “Lidia,” only a list of every title. Does this sound like your library? I was in NY, so instead I used Craigslist. I put this list in a Missed Connections context. You made me, Goddamnit, where are you? The subject line…
I had been a hated child. That’s what I’m trying to explain. Plus my hand was still bloody, the brutal fish had bitten me mercilessly as I worked to take my phone out of its water. It had SO not been worth it. You always think a cliché will count, why else would we suddenly use it? My phone died from the clichéd way I’d fed it plonkishly to the fish, and now my hand was bleeding a spicy red. It would be just like life, just like relationships and abuse, to use some poison ivy as a Band-Aid. So I looked around for some, to be perfect, but Nina only had uncolored ice, antibiotic gel, and we decided it would be better to air out the wound.
“It’s actually better to air out a wound,” Nina said. But she did have to leave for work.
I looked at her books. Art books. Books of nudes. Inspirations for fashion design. I put my wound on her window sill. I resolved never to discuss with her the prospect of putting down her fish. When an animal bites you, though, you kill it. That’s an ancient rule. And I hadn’t killed anything yet.
I’ve only returned to Chicago once, for Jerome’s funeral. I remember standing in line to get a scoop of his burnt bod, his all-grown nephew giving from the urn to anyone who said they’d like a baggie, and he was using these little bags for sandwiches and for a moment I felt like I was at camp or home or school and ash. There was a long line of mostly people, many women, with a grimace, looking to get their own baggie, but I remember about him: free booze, shiny shoes, crossed legs. The sunshine. I remember being a hated child. I looked to see if there was any sign of Jerome in my little bag, some glitter or ecstasy powder, something funny or cash but aren’t ashes the worst, just much much worse, than cinnamon?
I told his nephew, who I remember being a very young baby, whom I held once by accident, “A long while ago, I left some books with Jerome. Would he still have them?” I held my baggie of ashes, easily, softly, like an exhausted stone.
“You’ll have to ask Lidia,” he said, and I was shocked, shocked to hear it, I had not heard that name all the while, never encountered any sort of Lidia—it had really never come up—but this person, whom he pointed to, was a very very young person, would not have been the one, no very green in the dress, who had been living with Jerome, a loved pet, loved, but, who shook her head, like a remiss little librarian letting me know Everything’s been gone.