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41 Cold, Cold World O ur first frigid days in Chi-town were spent numbly watching Mayor Daley’s funeral on TV. Scott had a brick house in Evergreen Park, a well-appointed suburb north of the city. Once a hardcore hippie, lately Scott had traded in his Harley for a three-piece suit, and a job with his father at the stock exchange downtown. Dep and I slept in his attic, clinging to each other, wondering how the hell we were going to make it. We had forty bucks to our names. For Christmas-slash-Chanukah, we agreed to spend one dollar on a gift for each other. In a used bookstore Depty found a thick worn volume of Shakespeare ’s Collected Works. Inscribed To Little Sybil from Big Depty 12/25/76 With love & everything D. Dawg—it was his gift to me in a year that had taken us from Georgia to Texas to Illinois. With my buck, I bought him a secondhand woolen cap and a pair of heavy gloves. He was going to need them. We celebrated Christmas Day at Scott’s parents’ swank apartment on Chicago ’s Gold Coast. High above Lake Michigan, the wind blustered in rattling squalls against a tall bank of windows overlooking the gray water. House rules required the men to wear jackets for dinner, so Scott had provided Depty with a green sports coat. “I feel like the doorman,” he whispered, seated beside me at the elegant table. We clinked glasses of champagne. Depty kissed my cheek. “Merry Christmas , little darlin’. We done made it.” New Year’s Eve came and went quietly. We spent the evening lolling around in Scott’s attic. On the second day of ’77, Dep donned his new hat and gloves, and we ventured into the frozen city to look for an apartment and check out the theater and music scenes. Scott had told us about Kiley’s, a bar on the North Side known to book country rock bands, and Dep knew of another 157 158 | Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley venue on Lincoln Avenue, Somebody Else’s Troubles, where folk legends Phil Ochs and Steve Goodman, not to mention John Prine, were often on the bill. On our way home I picked up a neighborhood gazette in a grocery store one block west of pricey Lakeshore Drive. Back at Evergreen Park, I answered every ad, looking for work. There were five or six requests for dog sitters and pedicurists; only one looked really promising: “Housekeeper/nanny wanted. Good hours, good pay.” Dialing the number, I spoke to a woman with a familiar Brooklyn accent. She was funny and warm, not at all the chilly upper-crustacean I expected her to be. I made an appointment to be interviewed at her Lakeshore Drive apartment in a few days’ time. Meanwhile, we found a cheap tenement apartment on the city’s North Side. The chipped plaster walls stank of mildew and neither of its two dreary rooms was a bath. We’d have to share the facilities in the hall with the other tenants on our floor, and the homeless men who slept in the vestibule. Its charm was its rent, which was weekly. The night of my housekeeper interview coincided with our move to the slums. We agreed that I’d go to Lakeshore Drive first, and meet Dep afterwards at the new flat. The doorman announced my arrival. I rode the ornate elevator to the twelfth floor. Duct-taped suitcase in one hand, I lifted the other to knock at the apartment door when suddenly it opened a crack. There stood a tiny Jewish faun, a boy of four-and-a-half with dark hair in close ringlets. Taking in my mended bag and ragged bellbottoms, he closed the door in my face. I knocked again: this did not bode well. The woman on the phone came to let me in. I knew her immediately as the faun’s mother. At thirty-four, she was small and fairy-like, with pale inquisitive eyes and amber curls. She was bemused. “That was James, by the way. He thinks you’re already moving in.” She led me through the spacious living room. A black marble fireplace graced one wall, while a mahogany baby-grand piano filled an entire corner. A long row of bay windows looked out on the lake which, in January, was an expanse of colorless ice...

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