CALL ME Jack Kerouac. I’m sitting in the Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago writing stream of consciousness-style while memories of my past pretensions flow back to me. The Billy Goat is under Michigan Avenue between the Chicago Tribune building and the Sun-Times building. It became famous when John Belushi did the “Cheeseboiger, cheeseboiger. No fries. Chips” skits for Saturday Night Live. Since then it has somehow become a tourist trap without losing its authenticity. There are still real life Chicago reporters and pressmen getting beers at the bar, middle-aged drunks noodling at the tables, as well as all the health-conscious folks from modern America looking around. The secret of the place is the cheeseburgers, which are fantastic, though nobody can figure out why, since the frozen patties are standard issue and the grill offers nothing special except seven decades of grime. I think it’s the pickles, though reasonable men differ. I went to college in Chicago and afterwards worked as a columnist for a local weekly and as a police reporter for a legendary outfit called the City News Bureau. It was then my ambition, and a fine one, to be a three-day-a-week blue-collar columnist for one of the Chicago dailies, and I didn’t let the fact that I was neither a proletarian nor a Chicagoan get in the way of my dream. Chicago was then a great newspaper town, with great columnists, of whom Mike Royko was only the exemplar. Mayor Harold Washington was fighting the council wars against the white machine led by Fast Eddie Vrdolyak. I admired Vrdolyak because he was transparently crooked, got a degree from the University of Chicago Law School, wore gold pinkie rings and neck chains, coached in a children’s basketball league which I believe he fixed because his teams were perpetually 17-0, was surrounded by rumors of homicide, and tied up Chicago government in ways that would have made Boss Tweed gape and applaud. I admired Mayor Washington because he was a good mayor and he hated Jesse Jackson. During their showdowns, Chicago seemed like the center of the universe. One survey found that over half of all city council members were packing heat in the chamber. I remember later Dan Rostenkowski had a choice between becoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and running for mayor of Chicago. He chose Ways and Means. We were all flabbergasted. Why would anybody choose some meaningless committee in Washington when he could be mayor of the entire known universe? At least I learned about journalism. My first day I was asked to figure out why a teenager had committed suicide by calling all his neighbors to see if he acted nuts. Then I had to call the widow of a guy who’d died in a car crash that morning and get a comment out of her. Since that day, I’ve never been able to take the phrase “journalistic ethics” seriously. My pretensions were not limited to Royko-wannabeism. Just north of here at Water Tower Place I bought my only pack of Gitanes, though I don’t think I’m to blame since it was my professors at college who assigned French poets in the first place. I once wrote a noteworthy article, which was rejected by every publication in Chicago, on the subject of hotel lobbies. To get out of my grim college neighborhood I used to come to the Loop and do my reading. If I was reading an American novel, like Dreiser, I’d go to the Palmer House, which had a 19th-century American lobby. If it was Tolstoy or Flaubert, I’d go to the Drake, where they had a harpist and you could buy scones. I walked by the Drake last winter and the doorman stopped me and said, “I liked the way you used Bourdieu in Bobos in Paradise.” In other words, a hotel doorman (a) recognized me, (b) knew me as the author of a book published a couple of years before, and (c) knew about Pierre Bourdieu, the impenetrable French sociologist. I gently asked him what he was doing as a doorman. He said what he really enjoyed was reading, and being a doorman was a nice relaxing job that didn’t distract his mind from the books he consumed after hours. Somehow that struck me as very Chicago. The last time I was here at the Billy Goat they had two Hispanic guys working at the grill, but they still chanted out the “Cheeseboiger, cheeseboiger . . .” orders in Greek accents, just to keep up the mood of the place. Tonight the guy behind the bar is a seventy-something white man whose skin probably last experienced sunlight during the first Daley administration. He’s glaring at me now because I’m sitting here with a laptop open, which is very un-Billy Goat. I’ve moved on to another set of pretensions, apparently. The Cubs are losing on TV, by the way. –David Brooks
