… even when there’s a polar vortex going around. You remember that polar vortex, where it dropped for a week to 10 below zero, and that’s not counting the wind chill factor coming off of Lake Michigan, even? Brutal.
Okay, as I understand it, there were these Loyola University kids from out of the audio-visual department who were roaming around Rogers Park with all their video gear, looking to shoot something with the old human interest angle for one of their class projects, about the polar vortex, you see. But so far, the only thing they could find was some guy who threw his hot coffee into the air for them to show it exploding into an ice cloud, it’s that cold. Other than that, nothing much else going on: everything around them shut tighter than a meat locker.
But, Gary, we’re talking Jesuit-trained kids here. These kids, they’re not letting some polar vortex situation stop them from meeting their mission, not them. They keep march, march, marching along through this clear, crystal blue day with a sun that looks frozen stiff in the sky and a fierce Chicago hawk slapping its wings upside their heads.
Eventually, they end up on a part of Clark Street where the two lanes are split wide into four lanes by a grassy wooded concrete island. All they find there is some dive sports bar, car repair and auto parts and muffler repair garages, and a chain-linked, fenced-in parking lot full of empty taxis next to one of Chicago’s very own 24/7 doughnut and coffee joints.
Everything looks closed. And when they see that includes one of Chicago’s very own 24/7 doughnut and coffee joints that have been known to stay open even over Christmas and New Year’s, well then, time to forsake the Jesuit mission and come out from this most unholiest of the unholy cold snaps ever recorded, they’re thinking.
But you know what, Gary? These kids, they’re walking across Clark to turn back to the comforts of their dorm rooms … till all of a sudden, they see it: the open sign for which they have been waiting: someone has put out the light behind a window with a logo for what was then a used bookstore—as opposed to what is currently a used-up bookstore … but like I say, we’ll get to that later.
This place, it’s got the name: LOOMING SEE BOOKS. The logo I’m talking about, it’s what I would call an Ultra-Venus with flowing long hair walking on the water of Lake Michigan etched in glass in the front window … but oh hell, Gary, she could be walking on the Sea of Galilee for all I know, just that, it is on my mind that this Ultra-Venus is on Chicago’s very own lakefront … which I have a very good reason for thinking, as I promise again to relate to you later on, my friend.
Okay, so this Ultra-Venus, she’s holding out the palms of her hands on the sides of her hips like Our Lord showing off where they pounded the nails in, only, instead of bloody holy wounds, she’s got two books on there: the one to the left, it’s something called The Waves, and the one to the right, everybody knows, The Old Man and the Sea. Way strange, huh?
Now, on the sidewalk in front of the bookstore, there’s a chalkboard sign that says BOOKS FOR SALE TODAY and two big industry-sized plastic storage bins. One has piles piled on piles of what looks like lonely books without a home and a $1 handwritten sign taped above them. Other one, it has all these DVDs and VHS tapes of mostly anything everybody has already seen at least a hundred times before.
Gary, you can imagine what these kids must be thinking? Not only is there a bookstore here open for business on what has to be the coldest day of the year, they have some sidewalk sale going on for nobody on the streets. Who’s in charge here, anyway?
So wanting to find out, they go on inside, lugging in all their video gear. And there she is, Crystine herself, sitting all alone at her cash register desk. This desk of hers, it has books on it here, there, everywhere around her. Also one of those hippy trippy lava lamps, stuffed kids toys of Winnie the Pooh and the Piglet, a mason jar crammed full of book page markers, and, of most importance to my story here, this Ernest Hemingway bobble head. Big white beard shaking the scowling Papa head.
Now, from what the Loyola Phoenix student newspaper reported after she was gone for good, the kids said that, when Crystine saw them come in, she stood up from the desk with one of her friends-for-life smiles, told them they looked way too cold, and went to the rear of the place to bring out coffee and a bag of Doughnettes, you know, those store-bought chocolate mini-doughnuts that would survive a nuclear blast without going stale.
That must have cinched it, those Doughnettes. They had to shoot her.
As for the video they ended up with, let me say that, as a music fan, I think they picked a damn good song to go along with Crystine talking up her bookstore: classical piano keys, tinkling faraway notes that some French guy composed about a dancing princess. Which is funny, because Crystine had something of the Princess Diana in her, you know? She’d laugh out loud and totally deny it if you told her, but damn if she wasn’t like Princess Di herself in that bookstore, always listening hard to people’s worries and problems, smiling on them, hugging them up, making them feel like they were the ones who were the royals, know what I mean?
Gary, you should hear her in this video of hers. With her sitting there, not dressed at all for some polar vortex, but in something she might have worn down South in Florida, where Crystine was born 33 years ago. Sort of a lite-lace top with thin straps she keeps fingering back up after they start slipping down her arm while she’s telling the the camera how LOOMING SEE BOOKS is open now for all those Chicagoans suffering from cabin fever, who want to “traverse”, as she puts it, outside during a Chicago winter for a warm place to “convene”, as she puts it, to pick up a physical book for a very “tactile”, as she puts it, and special moment flipping through the pages, is how Crystine puts it in her smoky, yet wistfully lilting voice.
And while this is going on, the camera will switch here and there from Crystine’s strawberry blonde face and rosy high cheekbones with the little ring in her nose and the dots of piercings inside her ears doing all the talking, to her walking around her bookstore in her worn bluejeans and those sandals she was always wearing – yeah, even when it’s polar vortex outside – showing the camera all these books she’s taken in on their shelves and floating around her arms with their rings of bracelets and a tattoo copy of the LOOMING SEE BOOKS logo real slow like she’s conducting those classical piano keys tinkling faraway notes even before they were put on the soundtrack of her video.
And where she sighs out that she walks into the bookstore every morning believing, yeah, maybe I go to a place called home to sleep and take a bath, but this is really home, you’re thinking, she’s turned her not exactly clean, not exactly well-lighted, closed-in space with a basement in the shadows of the traffic always on the move on Clark Street outside her only window into her very own Disney Magic Dancing Princess Kingdom World, with subjects forever bound to her.
With books, her walls.
I say this because, many of those books she has in the video, who’s going to end up actually buying them? Like, Omar the Tent Maker? The Silver Mines of Father Tim? The Wicked Little Boy Blue? Like, sets of old school encyclopedias way past their shelf life. Really? Word Perfect for Idiots? Come on now. I mean, you ever hear of anyone who’s using Word Perfect these days? Those there, they were just paper bricks for the magic walls, is all I’m saying.
But don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Crystine didn’t have books people wanted under your usual History, Arts, Self-Help Psychology, Religion, Man to Man to Woman to Woman Love categories, sure, those sold … not as many as she would have liked, but that’s another question.
And she had some choice, rare ones too. I myself found, now get this, in hardback, the three hardcore classic Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer novels in one totally annotated collection with commentary. That’s right: I, the Jury; Kiss Me, Deadly; and Vengeance Is Mine. Where else could you find details about the nightclub and bar scene, maps pointing to locations where the action went down, the make of the guns Mike Hammer shot, and what men who dressed like women wore in 1950s New York … yeah, I know what you’re thinking, what’s that last one doing in a Mike Hammer novel? But that’s why you need the annotated edition with commentary, my friend. And strange thing is, I only found it at LOOMING SEE BOOKS, too, nowhere else: not on the computer, not in any other bookstore, not even in the library, just at Crystine’s. Like it had been waiting for me, all along. Way sweet.
Anyway, back to this video I’ve been telling you about. Not only are you getting some idea of what books and magazines and CDs and DVDs and music and video tapes Crystine had gathered in there, you’re also seeing all the baubles, bangles, and beads decorating everything. Right, these beads: you got webs of plastic beads hanging from hooks in the brick walls and junk rosary beads on a coat rack with funny old lady hats with their stiff veils and hard feathers. Then, you got your statue of a two-headed Chinese dragon sticking out its tongues on a shelf, and, under that, this clock that has an Audrey Hepburn face, like, telling you it’s time to put on the sixties chic shades and plug the long cigarette holder between your lips for your breakfast at Tiffany’s or wherever. And also, you see these two grinning Mexican Day of the Dead skulls that she’s using for bookends to keep some horror novels in line on top of a bookcase.
You know what I’m saying, stuff like that.
Crystine was also big on backing local artists in that bookstore of hers. Neighborhood Chicago Picasso types, with their crazy and wild paintings, always hanging around the walls. I guess because we’re talking polar vortex here, the paintings in the video have that winter look, like, there’s this same black stick tree without a leaf showing up in a couple of them. My favorite in the video has two of those trees in it, a bare circle of a full moon, and this big-eyed, sci-fi alien kid looking at the sky, like it’s wondering, how the hell did I end up on this freezing cold planet anyhow?
Another one of the paintings has all these people jamming themselves into one of those glass phone booths you used to see on the street corners while gobs of paint are dripping down on them. Makes you wonder: who’s ever going to answer a call coming out of that hot mess? But that’s modern art for you, right? Lots of questions, not much for answers.
So that’s that for that video, with Crystine talking about the beauty of books in her life, with a key to the place on a string around her neck so she won’t lose it and maybe get locked out, I’m thinking. Next, I’m going to tell you about her last videos forever … but first, you want to know something about doughnuts?
When the Loyola kids shooting the video got back to the campus, they found out that the Loyola men’s basketball team was the only game in town that night, everybody else had cancelled because of the polar vortex. And you know what? They were giving out free doughnuts and coffee to anyone who came out in the cold to watch them play.
Now, there’s this 88-year-old nun fan over there who is famous for attending every game and she later told sports radio that they held the game to help fulfill their Jesuit mission. Not to kid, she really said that.
Can’t you just see those doughnuts and coffee multiplying like fish and loaves? For free? Lots of laughs.
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