2
“Read Your Lease. Goodbye.”
The near North Side of Chicago is a Greenwich Village, a slum, and a night life strip bordered by the commerce of Michigan Boulevard and the Gold Coast homes and apartments of the wealthy.
Into a narrow trough between the down-and-out losers of Clark Street and the luxurious livers of Lake Shore Drive flows a stream of life that has no direction, organization, or established pattern. Here are attracted the inner-directed ones struggling with their own visions, along with the hangers-on, the disenchanted and emotionally bankrupt. It is a haven for the broken soul as well as the earnest and rebellious. The drug addict, the petty thief, the sex deviant and the alcoholic are generously mixed in among the sincere and aspiring. There are the dislocated wealthy, the connivers and parasites, abortionists and pimps. There are call girls and crowds of visiting firemen, second hand clothing stores and smart shops, pawn brokers and art supply stores.
Gertrude Stein once wrote about Picasso’s reply to a young man who was seeking advice on the best location for opening a Parisian bookstore: “I would just find a place and start selling books.” Well, I found a place, uniquely unfavored as a crossroads of commerce (during the day, virtually no one was on the street), but teeming with the malcontents, the broken, the battered—the flotsam and jetsam of urban life, along with inspired or aspiring prophets, musicians, artists, and writers. What more could one ask?
The original dimensions of the Seven Stairs were fifteen feet by nine feet. A single bay window looked onto Rush Street. At the other end of the room stood a small sink. The bathroom was on the second floor and seldom worked. Three ashcans on the sidewalk by my window served the building for garbage disposal. Occasionally the city emptied them.
Across the hall was a hat shop—a blind for a call girl establishment. The woman who ran it was actually a hat maker and made hats for her girls. She was a heavy woman with enormous breasts, who wore immense earrings, always dressed in black silk, and changed her hair dye regularly: red, jet black, once silver-grey. She had a small, bow-shaped mouth, garishly painted, and in the four years I knew her an improper word never passed her lips. She was filled with commiseration for cats, at least a dozen of which wandered in and out of the hall daily. Once in a while, she would buy a book, always with a fifty dollar bill, and then was very apologetic for the inconvenience when I had to run to the drug store for change.
Behind my shop was another studio occupied by a charming hypochondriacal ballet dancer and a boy friend who was the tallest, ugliest man I had ever encountered. Above were two more studios, occupied[occupied] by a painter and a girl who wrote poetry. There were also two studios on the third floor, but to this day I have no idea who was there. A bricklayer lived in the basement with his odd and rather pretty daughter, who had bad teeth, a nervous tic, and huge, burning black eyes.
Over this assortment of humanity ruled an evil king who in my reasoned opinion was in fact Mephistopheles in the guise of a landlord. His life had its meaning in seeing that the innocent were punished, that neighbors were aroused to hate and distrust one another, and that needless disaster always threatened his subjects and often befell them.
It was amazing how he could achieve his devilish ends by the simple incantation, “Read your lease. Goodbye.” This was his message, whether in the inevitable phone call when you were a day late with the rent, or in answer to your call for help when the fuses in the basement blew or when on a bitter February night the sink broke and the shop began floating away.
The sink affair occurred at a point when my business had developed to the extent of a few regular accounts and come to a quiet stalemate. Once these faithful customers had come in, I was through for the month. I could scarcely stand the empty hours waiting for someone to talk with. It was bitter February, cold enough to keep any sensible soul off the streets. I sat before the fire, filled with self-pity, my doomed life stretching hopelessly before me. Finally I bestirred myself—and this was my undoing.