All this has got me thinking, Gary: maybe that OPEN/CLOSED switch up on this polar vortex video was really a sign of things to come for Crystine and her LOOMING SEE BOOKS.
Not good.
Now I’ve been talking to you here about how she kept her bookstore open during the coldest day of the year, okay, well from that, Crystine earned something of a reputation after the video posted to YouTube, not to mention earning more of the green stuff when it went viral – in the old sense of the word – enough to bring in more business. That, and there was a bit more of the cash flow when a coffeehouse moved into the corner space next door where some rundown pharmacy used to fill fake prescriptions. Nothing like strong java to make you want to jump out of your seat and go buy something new to read, am I right?
But it’s one thing to come out of the cold of a polar vortex, and a whole other thing when some way sick virus goes global and comes in your face.
Of course, you know what happened. Everybody knows what happened. A happening thing that wouldn’t stop happening. And you can imagine, with her known as the owner of a bookstore that went face-to-face with the deep freeze, how it must have torched her heart and soul when the great national virus started closing shop …
… sorry, I missed that, Gary. You say the Crash Palace stayed open the whole time? What with people dying to breath in hospitals, masked up faces, restaurants and bars shutting down … except for this place? You tripping on me? How did you manage that, staying open during the Covid? You knew someone the old Chicago way?
Whatever. For everybody else but you guys then, it was welcome to our world, won’t you stay inside.
Which is exactly what Our Lady of the Polar Vortex did. Lock down LOOMING SEE BOOKS, then lock herself down into some private world of a white room with black curtains on the window, where she knit yarn dolls, worked jigsaw puzzles, played that board game Scrabble with herself, and danced around with some cat for everyone to see in video clips on her Facebook page. Now running at full loop into a digital eternity.
This dancing cat, Crystine picked it out of some back alley litter, I’m told. Some skinny, black-and-white mutt cat, which had this cute black spot on its nose like a Charlie Chaplin mustache. She named it Pilar because Ernest Hemingway floated her boat and that was the name of his, the one he went marlin fishing on and hunting for Nazi submarines during the war. I’m guessing also that Crystine knew that Ernie was a major cat person, what with all the strays he had running around his house in Cuba and the photos of him loving them up – and when you see in these photos how he hugs his cats compared to how he hugs one of his many wives, seems to me like he got along better with the pussies.
Okay, back to Crystine’s dancing cat … I mean, the cat she danced with … I mean … you know, Gary, before I go into their act, I think I could use a drink. No, I’m not ready to cash in my 33 AA coins here for an adult beverage just yet. I’ll stick with your Red Bull with Mountain Dew in the mix. But thanks for asking, maybe later, after I finish living my book here. I may need it when everything is done. But for now, I’m just happy to fill a space where the Crash Palace used to be now that the Crash Palace is back here.
Yes, my man, sitting at the bar, talking to my favorite bartender ever, hanging with all my old drinking buddies: saints and angels, angels and saints … like it’s my own personal heaven that they and you and the Our Lady of Guadalupe tattoo wrapped around your leg never left. Ha, just my way of pulling your leg, Gary. I had to bring it up because there’s this one particular tattoo that’s been bothering me lately. No, not on my body, on hers. But we’ll save all that for later on.
Anyway, it’s beginning to feel like I never left the Crash Palace, whether or not I’m drinking. Of course, technically speaking, I am drinking, but you get what I’m saying: drink-drinking-drunk.
Like she ended up doing until she wasted away.
Later, people around her were telling me that Chrystine had all of a sudden come down with a bad case of anorexia—you know, when women don’t eat because something is eating them? Well, here’s what I’m thinking: drink-drinking-drunk. As in, hitting one of those plastic pint bottles of screwtop vodka you see lying empty all the time in Chicago gutters. You know what happens when you start slugging down the TSAR STAR or other some other cheap fake Russian brand. Throws you out the door and into the streets, mumbling and cussing to yourself until you’re standing on some corner, howling damnation to the rotten world that’s trashing your brain lobes. Some nasty poison is the plastic pint bottle of screwtop vodka, let me tell you.
Now I’m thinking drink-drinking-drunk because, Gary, it’s a way different Crystine you’re seeing in these cat dancing videos of hers. A stick figure of her former self. Looks even skinnier than the cat. Like, she used to have a roll of heavy metal bracelets on her arm that would shift around and clatter when she walked through the bookstore or whenever she lifted her hand up to smoke one of her many cigarettes: now, in the videos, her arms and hands are so thin that you could imagine her thumbs just shrinking to the point where the bracelets would slide off her arm to the floor. And her legs, way thin too, looking like the stems of dried up weed flowers, or something. And those sandals I told you she went around wearing? Now too big on her feet.
Not in the best of shape for dancing, I’d say. But still wobbling around to the music, singing to the cat, holding it up to the ceiling to stare at it and call it her “gorgeous animal” … and she’s holding it under its armpits so that it looks like a sleepwalker dreaming of zombies, or something. Then standing its hind legs on the top of a scratching post, like she wants the cat to act like a go-go dancer on a catwalk.
After the cat gets fed up with all this and escapes her to walk around the floor, Crystine starts beckoning for it to come back to her, wanting to gather it up in her cupped hands … but when the cat ignores her, she pouts and starts kicking and pumping her fists into the air.
No, I’m certain it’s all about drink-drinking-drunk. Anorexia just doesn’t make someone act that goofy. And with how people around her were telling it after someone or other found her naked and dead in her bathtub a couple weeks later, alcoholism was only one of the weird diseases she was hosting … but we have a ways to go before we start exploring that hot mess, my friend.
As for now, I need to tell you about the music she was playing during this paw de deux of hers. To my ears, mostly meh. Some post-disco diva screeching about how everyone is born all equal no matter what or who they are or something and I’m thinking, yeah, sure, until you’re fixing the ticket prices for your next concert tour, am I right?
And it seems every cat person out there has to love Cat Stevens, and Crystine was no exception: in one of the videos, it’s him meowing his morning-has-broken song while she’s doing this stumble of a slow waltz with her dancing partner.
But to be fair to her musical tastes, there is one song that isn’t all that bad: about being a slinky freak to that throwdown beat. When that dance ends, Crystine tells the cat “I’m a slinky freak, you’re a slinky freak, we’re freaking the body all night long”. But it’s obvious the cat doesn’t get it, just hanging there by its shoulders over her head, looking dazed and confused for so long it’s not true.
No, there’s only one way to view her dance of death on cat’s paws that I found after watching these videos … what, 50 times? Mute the sound and listen to an album called The Scream by Siouxsie and The Banshees, which, given the atmosphere around the Crash Palace, you probably know:
Jigsaw Feeling
Overground
Carcass
Helter Skelter
Mirage
Metal Postcard
Nicotine Stain
Suburban Relapse
And the closer:
Switch
Only then can you see the real picture.
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