Big Money

Karl was one of the last full-time drivers working in my father’s office when I arrived. A large, middle-aged recent immigrant from Poland with fine blond hair and a thick accent, Karl was responsible for coining the phrase ‘big money’ and as a result claimed a certain pride in ownership over the words. He employed them almost hourly, sometimes on multiple occasions over the course of a single sentence. He told me often, especially during my first few days in the office, before my father was admitted into the hospital, that, ‘This is not big money. This is big money.’ He had only been in America for a handful of years, just long enough to take a critical, if not contemptuous, view of most things concerning the business and to be convinced that regardless of the circumstances, he could surely do better.

In the days before my father’s surgery, when he was still checking into the office daily, the two would often have rambling arguments over the lack of work coming in or which routes were best for getting to a particular suburb during rush hour. Each was righteous in his own particular way. Karl, in a near rage which could just as easily be disassembled or assembled, would complain about the lack of big money coming into his pockets. My father would try and assure him that big money was coming, if not now, then soon. On at least one occasion I remember that their argument was interrupted by a phone call from one of their clients requesting an immediate pickup of a number of heavy boxes that needed to be transported twenty miles away to an office outpost in the suburbs. I remember my father hung up the phone, stood up and with a big smile repeated the order directly to Karl: ‘Twenty boxes. Pickup from Lower Wacker to Winnetka. Rush.’

There was no need to say anything else. The significance of twenty boxes going from downtown Chicago to the far northern suburbs as a rush-order delivery was so self-evident that they could just as easily have continued to stand there grinning at one another, but it seemed as if the moment wouldn’t have been complete unless they fully acknowledged it. Perhaps Karl said it first, although in this case it would have more likely been my father, who had an instinctive sense of how to appease his drivers. ‘Big money,’ he said, to which Karl responded back, even more enthusiastically, ‘Big money.’ Whatever argument they were having was temporarily suspended, if not forgotten. Karl rushed out the door and my father sat back down to better enjoy his reprieve.

From the beginning I imagined Karl and me becoming if not friends, then at least solid drinking partners. Once my father was in the hospital I pictured myself saying to Karl at the end of the day, ‘Let’s go have a beer. I’m buying.’ When Karl was busy handling a major, big-money run, I took care of the small deliveries around the city, which in the beginning took me twice as long as they should have. Occasionally if Karl was still in the office when I left to make a run he would tell me the fastest way to get to the intersection of Dearborn and Jackson, where to park the van so as to avoid a traffic ticket while making a delivery, or how to find a particular loading dock on Lower Wacker. Our shared vocabulary consisted initially almost entirely of logistics.

Eventually we made several large deliveries together, experiences that bonded us close enough for Karl to share with me occasional fragments of his life in Poland before he came to America. He was unabashed in his nostalgia for home and like my father spoke often about the things he loved and missed and was certain to never find here, things that ranged from family, to love to decency, integrity and honesty. There was none of that in Chicago and in America, as far as he could tell. What there was here, though, was work, work that could lead to big money, which Karl was committed to.

After only a few days at the office with Karl I began to think of my life in Chicago as the temporary manager of a small business as more real than anything I had done before. The hours spent delivering packages, answering the phone or talking with Karl seemed to have an inherently greater substance than the life I’d been living in New York, which in comparison now seemed like all smoke and mirrors; child’s play that had been extended into a second decade of life and would perhaps some day be extended a third. Chicago was a realer city – more down to earth and normal, a place where men worked hard and drank beer, a ritual of which I was now part. I was shuttling daily between the hospital, my father’s office and whatever small deliveries fell to me to complete. I had never anticipated it, but I began to pass the hours spent in traffic wondering how I could help improve the business. I tried to think of business contacts I could drum up from college; new technology I could investigate and advertisements I could write in search of new drivers. It would take months, if not years, to do all that and as far as I could see at the time, that was just fine. I was finding my way around the city again. I was having dinner with old friends in neighbourhoods I had rarely visited before. It was fall and the city, weather and evening light were glorious, and as if that weren’t enough, the Chicago Cubs, historically the worst team in baseball since the second half of the twentieth century, were in first place and seemed like serious contenders for the World Series.

Either by luck or by serious efforts of the imagination, sometimes seemingly disparate events converge, through which we try and find a pattern. That fall I took the Cubs’ unexpected winning season and drained it for all possible meaning. It had been ninety-five years since the Cubs had won the World Series and almost sixty since they had made it to the finals, and yet in the fall of 2003 they were one of the best teams in the country. The significance behind this was obvious to me. The Cubs were on the rise and as their good fortune extended, so would my family’s. It was a simple one-to-three ratio: the Cubs would win the World Series, my father would emerge cancer-free, business would thrive and I would later be able to say that I was there to have witnessed it all.

The fact that I had never really cared about baseball hardly mattered. As a child I went to three or four Cubs games a year. I cheered them passionately while they were in plain view and mostly forgot about them shortly afterwards. Starting that September, I became a devoted fan. I read, watched or listened to every game, sometimes rushing between deliveries to my new favourite bar in the Ukrainian Village to watch a couple of innings before heading back to work. I had become fully invested in the myth and lore of baseball’s most heartbreaking team, with its sad-luck string of losers and occasional heroes. I found myself able to slip easily into conversations about baseball and the Cubs’ chances of winning the division and making it into the World Series with strangers at a bar. I said things like, The new pitching staff is remarkable, perhaps the best in baseball. Kerry Woods is the best young pitcher in the league. Sammy Sosa is inconsistent in the play-offs: a great but greedy player who likes to only hit home runs. Dusty Baker is the best manager in baseball, and the Cubs should be thanking the gods daily for giving him to them.

I often had these conversations in the same bar I now frequented, where in keeping with the spirit of the time I drank cheap bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, the official beer of the Chicago Cubs, known for its flat, watery consistency and popularity, instead of the rail Scotch that had sustained me in New York. It was part of a rapid transformation that I imagined I was making from New York literary life to that of the now mythical blue-collared American worker. I found pleasure in rushing to finish a beer and cigarette while watching a game in order to fill a last-minute delivery for one of the law firms we regularly worked for. This was real life and real work, and, with the exception of my drive-by bar stops, how my father and his drivers spent most of their days.