Happy Birthday to Me

Happy Birthday to Me

There's an old cliche that I hear more and more as I grow older. Supposedly it started with the American actress Bette Davis, but I'm pretty sure the cliche was around long before that. People are always telling me that "Growing old ain't for sissies."

Like with most cliches, there's definitely some truth to it.

I remember the first time I became aware of what it must be like being old. I was twelve years old. My parents had invited a friend of theirs over for dinner. My mom and dad had known this guy ever since we came to America as DPs after the war. He was our neighbor, a Polish American who emigrated here just before the First World War. The night I remember when I first became aware of old age, he was in his late 60s, and after dinner he and my parents were sitting in the living room talking about old times. At some point, he excused himself and tried to stand up to go to the bathroom, but he couldn't stand up. His knees for some reason had given out, and he needed a hand from my dad and me to help him out of his chair.

I couldn't believe it. I had known this guy for years, and he always struck me as a bull of a man, large and strong and tough. In fact in his early twenties he had been a boxer, a fighter. He loved to talk about the fights he fought, the punishment to his body he overcame over and over. And suddenly, there he was, sitting in an easy chair in our living room and struggling to lift himself up.

I remember afterwards asking my dad why his friend couldn't stand up, and I remember my dad saying in Polish, "That's what happens when you get old."

I've just turned 72, and I'm beginning at last to understand what my dad meant.

My left knee is busted. My hearing aids hear more than I do. My blurry eyes can't focus. My feet are floppy. My heart is ruined. My sex drive only runs in reverse. My sense of balance is unbalanced. My sleep is broken up every night by 3 or 4 toilet trips. My voice goes in and out. My memory doesn't remember yesterday. My face is my father's. Finally, I'm an old man!

But there are things at 72 that I can still do. I can still sing the songs I love. I can still read. I can still swim and argue and joke. I can still hug and kiss the people I truly love, my wife, my daughter, and my granddaughter. And I can still do the things I love: I can eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, look at the clouds, and dream about tomorrow.

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy.

Protests and Riots

Growing up in Chicago in the late 1960s, I felt that the world was always on the edge of protests and riots.  

This feeling started in 1966 when I was 18 years old and living just east of Humboldt Park.  One day early in June, Mayor Richard J. Daley announced there was going to be a week-long celebration of Puerto Rican culture and people.  It turned into a riot on Division Street that lasted 3 days.  I remember squad cars and sirens everywhere and cops threatening to beat us if we didn’t stay in our homes.  

Less than two years later, Martin Luther King’s assasination sparked a series of riots on the Southside that resulted in 11 deaths, 500 injuries, and more than 2,100 arrests in two days of rioting.  Five months later, there were the Democratic Convention riots, and two years after that the Kent State killings where the National Guard’s killing of four students fueled riots on college campuses all over the city.  These, of course, weren’t the only protests and riots in Chicago.  These were just the big ones.

I was involved with some of these protests.  Starting in 1966, I actively protested against the Vietnam War.  I marched and picketed, and once I even rioted.  

Most of the time, these protests were peaceful.  We would gather at Grant Park and listen to speakers telling us how wrong the war was, or we would march up State Street with signs that said no more war.  But sometimes the protests became violent.  

Why did they become violent?  Sometimes, they became violent as a response to cops being violent.  One time, we were picketing the University of Illinois’ ROTC building at the corner of Halsted and Roosevelt, and the cops there started breaking windows on the first floor of the building with their billy clubs. Some of the protesters ran to safety, others started throwing rocks and bricks at the cops, breaking even more windows.  

I'm not saying the cops are always to blame.  I also saw protesters become rioters without any kind of provocation, breaking windows, throwing rocks, starting fires.  Why did they become rioters?  I think they were people who wanted violence.  I knew some of these rioters.  The protest was just an excuse to be violent for them.  

After the 1968 Martin Luther King riots, the City of Chicago set up a committee to look into the riots.  One of the things they determined was that one of the causes of the riots was “a spontaneous overflow of pent-up aggressions.”

That statement comes close to summing up what I learned from my years of protesting.  I learned the majority of the protesters and a majority of the police officers understood why they were there.  The protestors wanted you to know that something in our society is not right, and the police officers wanted the protesters to know that protesting is okay up to a certain point.  I learned also that there’s a minority of protesters and police officers who wanted to express their “pent-up aggression.”  They wanted to throw bricks and burn things and bust heads and shoot tear gas because it made them feel alive.

These are the people we need to watch out for.

Little Altar Boy Reviewed in the WSJ!

First Major Review of Little Altar Boy!

The Wall Street Journal loved it!

Here’s what they said:

John Guzlowski’s powerful “Little Altar Boy” (Kasva Press, 323 pages, $14.95) centers on the fatal stabbing of a Chicago nun. Set in 1967, Mr. Guzlowski’s latest takes place a decade after events in his equally memorable “Suitcase Charlie,” which also featured Windy City detective Hank Purcell and his partner Marvin Bondarowicz.

The victim was beloved—saintly, some say. She had made a recent secret visit to Purcell’s home to alert him to the pedophiliac conduct of a parish priest. Did that confidential revelation prompt her murder? The priest in question seems to have a solid alibi, as does everyone else in the nun’s circumscribed world.

As he sorts out the nun’s killing, Hank is beyond distracted by the recent disappearance of his 19-year-old daughter, who had fallen into bad company. All this takes place right after Christmas, as snowfall covers Chicago with a sort of spiritual malaise. “He needed a miracle—maybe a few of them at once,” Hank thinks. What he gets instead is another dead body.

As Hank and his partner Marvin drive from one neighborhood to another, seeking information in rectories and blues clubs and drug dealers’ pads, Hank admits to himself: “He felt like a failure and a fool, like a man drowning in his own weakness and inadequacy.” But it’s also Hank’s habit to see a mission through to its end, however dire the consequences, cold the comfort, and irrevocable the harm to his family life and psychic health.

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Here’s a link to the book’s amazon page:

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Altar-Boy-John-Guzlowski/dp/1948403153/

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