“There is something too permanent about ‘I,’ something shrunken and stifling.” Annie Ernaux, The Years, translated by Alison L. Strayer
D dropped out of Rogers Park’s Sullivan High School before his senior year, the 1969-70 term. As a freshman, sophomore and junior, D was eccentric, studious and unfashionable, a persona that was socially isolating and unsustainable. During the long hot summer of 1969, his sensibilities radically shifted. He tore away the ‘uncool’ sartorial remnants that had been foisted upon him by his Eastern European immigrant parents, as if pulling a deep scab. Newly costumed in the fashion of the day, in bell-bottoms, flowing shirts with wide lapels, double-breasted jackets, wire-rimmed glasses and long sideburns, he drew double takes from Chicago’s Morse Beach to Rush Street: “Man, are you Ray Manzarek, from The Doors?” Or, even more thrilling were the times they exclaimed: “You could be John Lennon’s double!” These spontaneous affirmations allowed an escape. When he first sported those wire-rimmed glasses, popularized by Lennon, his stepfather violently condemned them as “n**r glasses.” His mother tag teamed with an unrelenting, sixteen hour campaign of nagging. He did not budge. After all, for them he was the bajkeverő, “the bastard,” “the troublemaker,” and suddenly, under their roof, the feared image of the counterculture.
By mid-August, Sullivan was a stage he was compelled to exit. Students, teachers, and administrators had three years to observe and interact with what he had been. It was better to move on. Just sixteen years old, he enrolled as a freshman at Roosevelt University’s South Loop campus, for the Fall 1969 term.
The Fall of 1969: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” Roosevelt occupies Louis Sullivan’s 1889 Auditorium Building on South Michigan Avenue. Back then, its revolving door opened onto a mosaic tile entrance, and from there an imposing staircase climbed to a second floor that functioned like a train station between classes. The police riots of the 1968 Democratic National Convention were still in the air, like the smell of smoke months after a California wildfire. That Fall brought the murder of Fred Hampton while the Vietnam War kept on. As befitted the times, he was not the sole desperate and hastily reinvented soul on campus. The cafeteria was where D’s improbable circle gathered: an Italian hipster, an ex-nun, an English lit teacher who began every class with meditation and the chanting of AUM. The second floor was where he met Aaron Mendelson.
Mendelson spoke volubly with a faux British accent, his broad face framed by thick black hair and equally thick eyebrows. Intense deep brown eyes burned behind black horn-rimmed acetate eyeglasses. He wore three-piece suits around the South Michigan Avenue campus, which accentuated his thick hands and legs, a pronounced waddle on flat feet, while sporting an ebony cane with a white onyx tip.
In January 1970, D invited Mendelson to an evening party at an Uptown apartment, hosted by D and two roommates. While the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour played in the expansive 1920s living room suffused with incense, Mendelson wandered to the enclosed back porch and covertly appropriated cans of black, pink, red and white paint. He smuggled these into his former cohort’s bedroom and painted a mural on one wall: The wall adjacent to his host’s bed was painted black. In the center was a white outline of a grave, with some Latin phrase. There was a white skeleton on the wall and a cross, over a grave, with a ghost-like figure hovering above, suggestive of The Devil. When Mendelson finished his hastily composed masterpiece, he casually walked out of the room, telling no one. When D brought an “older” nineteen-year-old woman into his room for perfunctory sex, it was only then that Mendelson’s grisly “gift” was discovered.
He saw Mendelson one last time, a month later. When he visited Mendelson’s 1950s basement apartment in West Ridge, their conversation had just begun when Mendelson dropped to the floor, writhing; an epileptic fit. The drooling, the uncontrolled agitation, the flapping tongue, the manic eye rolls, and Mendelson’s sheer helplessness. It was over in a few minutes. Then slowly, carefully, D crouched down to where Mendelson lay sprawled and gently helped him up. Unmasked, the English affectation was gone, along with all other pretense. Weeping, he confessed that he was not born and raised “across the pond.” He was from Oklahoma City.
D stayed with Mendelson for a half an hour, offering what reassurance he could, obliquely sensing a future unmasking of his own. Then he left. They never saw or heard from each other again.
Dion Dennis is a retired Associate Professor whose post-academic creative nonfiction and memoir appear in The Write Launch, Across the Margin, The Drift & Dribble Miscellany, The Thieving Magpie, and Bull (forthcoming); critical work appears in minor literature[s].
Accompaniment: “Pale Blue Eyes” — Velvet Underground
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