The March, Chapter One: Meet Brooke Dotry

“Ow.  Quit it”

-Bart Simpson

Brooke Dotry, tired from an afternoon spent downtown collecting signatures for Green Peace, entered the living room of the Wrigleyville apartment she shared with her sister Celia. Celia was sitting on the floor painting her toenails, while their neighbor, Gio, lounged behind her on the couch.  They were watching cartoons and laughing.  Something called The Animaniacs.  Brooke rolled her eyes. 

Waited.             

She rolled her eyes again, this time accompanying it with a loud sigh.

“Brooke,” said Celia.  “Why don’t you just watch it with us instead of being such an asshole about it.  It’s funny.  God.”

“I might be an asshole,” said Brooke.  “But at least I’m a grown-up asshole.”

Celia flipped her the bird with the hand she held the polish wand in.

Gio, in the meantime, had leapt guiltily off the couch and now stood awkwardly, wishing he’d just sat up straighter.  He ran his hands through his hair and grinned at Brooke, which irritated her.  It bugged her that Celia’s little meathead boyfriend was always hanging around.  And it bugged her that Celia kept insisting that Gio had his meathead crush on Brooke.  As though Brooke would ever be interested in a meathead like Gio.

Poor Gio didn’t deserve this malignant opinion.  Sure, he was good looking in a perpetually tan, slicked-back hair, leaning towards beefy way that is the common cultural representation of the American meathead.  He also had a very unfortunate predilection for Zubazz pants.  But he was a bright guy and a nice guy.  He worked hard for not much money at a local tavern while pursuing an MBA at DePaul. And he was one smitten kitten when it came to Brooke.

Gio had crushed on Brooke ever since the day the sisters had moved in across the hall.  He’d helped them with their boxes, instantly enamored by the pretty girl with her message tees and extravagant long, dark hair.  Later, they shared a pizza while Brooke held forth about saving the whales and the evil that Bush (the first one) was doing in Central America.  She was smart and passionate… and, God, that hair!  He’d been picturing it splayed carelessly post-coital across his chest since the day he met her.

Celia found the whole thing both be- and a-musing.

She slapped him on the leg and said, “Gio, tell Brooke what you told me.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Gio.  “My boss is desperate for waitresses.  I told him about you and he said to come on in.  I bet he’ll hire you on the spot.  You can wait tables a few days a week to make some money and spend the rest of your time on your environment stuff.”

“Fantastic,” said Brooke dryly.  “I can wipe spills up off the table with my college diploma.  Dad will be so proud.”

“I doubt will Dad will notice,” said Celia. “And I doubt even more that he’ll mind when you don’t ask him for rent money.”

“Jesus,” said Brooke.  “There’s a huge hole in the ozone layer and you’re worried about rent.  Who’s paying rent for the planet, Celia?  Huh?”

Brooke’s commitment to the environment was noble and all-consuming. It was also, to be fair, pretty new.  Through her first three and a half years at Loyola. Brooke had devoted herself whole-heartedly to a series of causes: anti-Apartheid, PETA, ACT UP.  She’d written letters to Lech Walesa and Gloria Steinem.  She’d bounced from worthy cause to worthier cause with boundless energy and single-minded determination.  But nothing stuck until the second semester of her senior year when she’d taken a class on environmental ethics for elective credit.  Fifteen minutes into the first lecture of the first class, she found her world both endangered and rocked.

            

Thus was the great passion of her life (so far) born.

She worked tirelessly at all the action items suggested by the professor, putting so much effort into Chicago’s big 20^th anniversary Earth Day Event that she barely passed her other classes.  But she pulled it off in the end and graduated on time ready to take our poor poisoned planet by storm.  Brooke was convinced that all the environmental movement lacked was talent, doggedness and an extreme level of commitment.

She and her extreme level of commitment had been active her first post-university summer, waving placards at sparsely populated rallies, petitioning for Greenpeace, writing passionate letters to the editor.  By August, Brooke had grown used to feeling like a Cassandra and secretly (not so secretly) enjoyed being so much more prescient and virtuous than her fellow man.

Of course, all the prescience and virtue in the world won’t pay the rent.  And lately things had gotten a little tight. 

Back in May, at her graduation dinner, her father had given her a check for $1,000 and some jewelry that belonged to her late mother. He then, as was his wont, left quickly, eager to return to his new life, his new wife, his new children.  Brooke didn’t mind.  She was used to it.  And the $1,000 would certainly be adequate to finance her until something better came along.

But nothing better had come along.

And she was broke.


Click here for Chapter Two.

A Note on Aging

So a note on aging. Outside of the bullshit physical stuff which everyone deals with once you start getting older. And, to which there is really only way comment: "Fuck! Really?"

But there are the mental aspects as well. Now, in my family we have a decided lack of old men, which sucks a lot. I wish we had some more old men because that would mean that the men in the previous generation would not be, you know, dead. So, when I make this grand sweeping statement about old men, accept that my experience is limited and so I could be wrong. But, here's something I think is a hallmark of old man-dom: an old man may only have the loosest understanding of what it is but they KNOW they don't like it. And don't want to know about it anymore. And you're an idiot because you do like it.

It used to be that kind of philosophy was mostly about music and TV and other forms of pop culture. But nowadays we're living in this era where technological leaps happen every 10 minutes or so, which I think is causing the old man thing to proliferate across all ages and most emerging means of communication.

I was at a kid's party over the weekend where I made the crack "You'd know that already if you would just give it up and get on Facebook!" To which the response was "I don't want to reconnect with my friends from 25 years ago. If I still wanted to know them, I would." And then there was high-fiving.

Laney was tugging on my arm, so there was no time to respond, but I really wanted to! This misunderstands broadly (and I would argue purposefully) the point of social networking. For example, the people I communicate the most with on Facebook from my past are often people I wasn't particularly close to at that time I knew them in the real world. At it's best, it's like going to a party where you hear what people are talking about and find people who you want to talk to. At it's worst, you find out that that fellow you know tangentially thinks racist pictures of the president are hilarious. But unlike being at a party where you'd have to extricate yourself delicately, you can just unfriend and move on.

I'm at the point now where email seems like an obsolete, clunky way to communicate. With social networking, it's like you put something out there for people to pick up if they want to. When you email me pictures of your kid or that hilarious link, it gets all mixed in with the 800 emails I get a day from various political groups and I feel like I have to look at it right then or else I'll lose it in my inbox. I'd be thrilled to relegate email to professional communication only. But, I have people with whom email remains my sole method of communication, because they refuse to join the rest of the world in social networking. Get off my lawn.

The telephone, by the way, is only to tell me that someone is dead. I'm not really sure why I still have one. I can texted for mortal alerts.

To be fair, I do see one legitimate reason for eschewing social networking: you're old school when it comes to privacy. Which I understand even if I think it's kind of quaint.

But to the rest of you old men out there, it's kind of fun to have people on your lawn.

That sounded a lot dirtier than I meant.

Also, up to Chapter 10 on Brooke, if you're interested (pw is brooke!123 )

Attn. All My Chicago Peeps

So, I have a question, Chicago People, does the following ring true to you at all?

Chicago is known as the Windy City. And Chicago can be pretty windy. Picture: it's January and you're walking amongst the skyscrapers downtown. Those tall, elegantly substantial buildings protect you from the bitter, biting wind if you hug close to them. But one building will give way to the next and and as you make your way across the corridors between them, a wind tunnel can strike. Wind tunnels focus the wind so that as you cross them, the wind might blow off your hat, knock you off your feet. But, if you are a Chicagoan, as you brave that wind tunnel with frozen snot on the inside of your scarf and sensation in your feet a distant memory, you'll grab your hat before it flies away, chuckle and think "It's only a certain kind of person tough enough for this. In Chicago, we filter out the weak. Chicago is so awesome."

This brings me to the real reason why Chicago is called the Windy City; because despite those January days, Chicago isn't really all that windy. Cleveland, I'm told, is way windier. And while there are various theories as to how the moniker came into being, there's one I believe because it sounds so much like Chicago. It was coined by the editor of the New York Sun in the late 19th century to refer to the Chicago habit of rabid boosterism. To his point: even the truly terrible Chicago weather serves as a point of pride for a Chicagoan.

Only denizens of the wider Philadelphia area are more vociferously proud of their hometown. And whence this proud spirit of noisy boosterism? Much of it stems from a genuine recognition of all the things that are wonderful about Chicago, the amazing architecture and theater, the sports teams, the brusque affability of its people, the sparkling lakefront. Yet there is one shameful, unspoken reason Chicagoans boast so much: it's often just so much whistling in the dark to cover up the younger sibling inferiority complex we have with New York.

Coupla Things

So, I have this long commute to work and sometimes Laney and I chat (these days mostly about what things AREN'T FAIR). Other times we play various alphabet-related games. And sometimes we sit silently seething over the soul-crushing waste of time that a 45 minute commute is (it could be that only one of us if silently seething). But under any circumstance, whenever I see this car:




I feel like I've been transported to some third world banana republic and the recently deposed dictator of the military junta is sitting in the backseat wearing fatigues and wraparound aviators. Is that just me?

Also, two more chapters of Brooke, if you're interested (pw is brooke!123 )

Brooke - Chapter 5

If you're interested, you can get it here.

PW- brooke!123

About Brooke...

I noticed that there were a couple of people reading Brooke. But I'm told that if I publish this on the intertoobz, I might run into trouble if I really try to publish it. Not that I am hopeful in that arena, but there's no reason to completely rule it out, right?

So, this is problematic for a few reasons. The most important was that publishing it was keeping me disciplined. So, what I think I'll do is make it available via drop.io or something and alert my Facebook friends when it's updated. There a compromise has been reached. What's that? I should be writing on it? Yes. You're right. I was going to tell you all about Rosie in this chapter (who is not nearly as trampy as that awful Teddy makes her out to be) and you were going to meet the villainous bar owner too.

I'm going to get cracking right now...

Brooke: Chapter One

On a hot August Tuesday, 1991, Brooke stood on a bustling corner in the heart of downtown Chicago as the 78th averted eye and 39th irritated sigh brushed past her, her clipboard and her thinly veiled air of superiority. She rolled her eyes and consoled herself thusly: “There is still nothing more satisfying than having met one’s moral responsibility.”

I know. She sounds like an asshole. Youth and untried ideals can make assholes out of the nicest people. But we hope, and are often rewarded in our hope, that the rich complexity of everyday life will exorcise tendencies toward smugness and self-righteousness right out of a girl. It usually does. But, for the time being, Brooke is as committed to her assholery as she is to the environment. And Brooke is very committed to the environment.

Bear in mind, this was some time ago! Al Gore was too busy campaigning for Vice President to be telling us inconvenient truths. None of us turned the water off when we brushed our teeth. Thanks to the lachrymose Indian, most of us had stopped throwing pop cans out car windows for close to 20 years now. But we weren’t recycling them.

Brooke was. And she was loudly, obnoxiously, and frequently demanding that everyone around her do the same.

Surprisingly, given her passion for the environmental cause, she’d come lately to it. Through her first three and a half years at Loyola, Brooke had devoted herself wholeheartedly to a series of causes: anti-apartheid, PETA, ACT UP. She wrote letters to Lech Walesa and Gloria Steinem. She floated from worthy cause to worthier cause, with boundless energy and single-minded determination. But nothing stuck until the second semester of her senior year when, for elective credit, she signed up for an environmental ethics class. Fifteen minutes into the first lecture of the first class, she found her world both endangered and rocked. Thus was the great passion of her life (so far) born.

She worked tirelessly at all the action items suggested by her professor, putting so much effort into Chicago’s big 20th anniversary Earth Day Event that she almost flunked a history class. But she pulled it out at the last minute and graduated on time, ready to take our poor poisoned planet by storm, convinced that all the environmental movement lacked was talent, doggedness, and an extreme level of commitment.

Brooke and her extreme level of commitment spent their first post-University summer unemployed, waving placards at sparsely populated rallies, petitioning for Greenpeace, and writing passionate letters to the editor. By August, she’d grown used to feeling like a Cassandra, and secretly (not so secretly) felt pleased to be so much more prescient and virtuous than her fellow man.

This particular August afternoon, her moral obligation vis a vis petition signing having been met, Brooke returned to the Uptown apartment she shared with her sister, Celia. She found Celia sitting on the floor painting her toenails, while their neighbor, George lounged behind her on the couch. They were watching cartoons. Animaniacs. Brooke rolled her eyes. Waited. And then sighed loudly.

“Brooke,” said Celia, “Why don’t you just watch it with us instead of sighing like that. God. You can be such an asshole sometimes!”

“I might be an asshole,” said Brooke, “But at least I am an ADULT.”

Celia flipped her a bird with the hand she held the polish wand in.

George, meanwhile, jumped up off the couch like it was on fire. He ran his hands through his hair and grinned winningly at Brooke. Well, I say it was winning, and you’d probably think the same, but Brooke found it grating. It bugged her that Celia’s boyfriend was always hanging around. It bugged her even more that Celia wouldn’t admit George was her boyfriend. It especially bugged her that Celia insisted that George had a crush on Brooke, as though Brooke would be interested in a frat boy like that.

George was good looking in that blonde Midwestern, rosy cheeked, leaning towards beefy kind of way. He was also bright and convivial and far from the arrogant, entitled, frat boy Brooke had pegged him as. He worked hard for low wages as a doorman at a local tavern while studying business at DePaul. He was cheerful and sweet. But Brooke never could see the cute tree past the threatened rainforest.

George was smitten with Brooke. He had been ever since she and Celia moved into the apartment next door. Here was this skinny girl in a message tee shirt with all this pretty, long dark hair. She held forth with such ardor about saving the whales and the evil that Bush was doing in Central America. She was smart and passionate…and that hair! He’d pictured that hair countless times splayed carelessly post-coital across his chest.

Celia threw a pillow at George. “Tell Brooke what you told me.”

“Oh, yeah! The March is hiring,” said George. “I can get you a job waitressing there. You can do that a few days a week to make rent and spend the rest of the time on your environment stuff.”

“Fantastic,” said Brooke dryly, “I can wipe down the bar with my college degree. Dad will be so proud.”

“Yeah, it’ll just kill him to have to stop paying your rent,” said Celia, taking Brooke’s dryly and raising her a solid acre of Sahara.

Celia was a little more than a year younger than Brooke. She was embarking on her senior year at Loyola while working retail at Marshall Fields. She lived a very different life than Brooke, with her head firmly in this world and her feet both stylishly shod and on the ground. Secretly, though, she admired Brooke for eschewing worldly things like work and rent and what other people thought. At the same time, she resented Brooke for recusing herself from the real world and being a burden on their sad, widowed father.

“Hmmm, you may be right,” said Brooke, who'd recently donated a good chunk of her rent money to an Indian hurricane relief fund. “I guess a job like that won’t be too taxing timewise, and I will be able to spend my days on important things. George, tell them I’ll come by in the morning to fill out an application or whatever it is I’m supposed to do.”

“Will do,” said George, imagining crazily romantic scenarios: in the soft dawn light, he’d walk her home and then, at the door, she’d let her hair down and smile up at him…

You know where this is going. You know better than George. George is a sweet guy, but kind of a sap when it comes to romance (and by that I mean prone to confusing being horny with being in love). He’s also not right for Brooke at all. Celia, on the other hand… well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

George took off to go to work and Celia turned to Brooke: “Look,” she said tentatively, “Do you want to finally split up Mom’s jewelry or what?”

Their mother, dead several years now, had passed down a moderately nice collection of jewelry which she’d intended for her daughters to split upon college graduation. Their father took this to mean upon Brooke’s college graduation, and had given his daughters the box in June immediately after the ceremony.

“Oh, Celia,” said Brooke wearily, “Can’t you just keep it? You’re more into that kind of thing than I am.”

Celia said softly. “Don’t you want something that was Mom’s?”

Chagrined, Brooke nodded.

Celia rushed into the other room and returned with the box. She opened it up and pulled out a simple silver chain with a ruby pendant. “Here,” she said to Brooke, “This will look so pretty on you with your coloring.”

Brooke held up both hands as if to push something distasteful away, “Oh no! Who knows who was exploited to get that stone. We should send all that stuff straight back to Africa.”

Celia frowned and stared into the ruby. “Mom wore this whenever she got dressed up. Do you remember? She’d put on her little black dress and the ruby would pop out all red against the black. She looked so pretty. When she came home she’d come into the bedroom and kiss us good night. Do you remember? She’d come in on tiptoes, smelling of cigarettes and perfume and she’d lean over and kiss us. When she stood up after kissing me, I remember the closet light catching in the ruby and thinking how much I loved that smell and how pretty Mommy was and wanting to grow up and be her. Remember?”

They were silent for a few minutes and then Brooke said quietly, “I do. You keep that necklace, Celia. You look more like Mom than I do anyway. Next time you get dressed up, you can put on a little black dress, and wear your blonde hair up like Mom did. Put that ruby on and smoke a cigarette and all the little girls who see you will be desperate to grow up too. I’ll take these silver earrings. Do you remember these? Dad vacuumed them up one day and Mom dumped the bag out in the back yard. I wanted to help and ended up covered in dust. Mom hosed me off outside. I can wear them whenever I want to play in the hose.”

Celia smiled fondly. “Take more,” she urged. “There’s more here. What about this ring? Or these other earrings?”

“No” said Brooke firmly. “Just these. You take the rest.”

And then Brooke left her sister sitting on the couch to sort her jewelry and emotions, and went to work on a letter to the editor about the deforestation of the Ecuadorian rainforest.