Free Touch and Go by Studs Terkel Page B

Finally, he reluctantly concluded that civilization was doomed. Thus, his name.
    What was remarkable and strangely moving was the show of respect the other guests afforded him. Oh, I imagine a good number had him down as a pistachio; but, nonetheless, they did not threaten to toss him out of the window. It is true there were occasions when Ben and I were urged to give him the heave-ho. Joe, whose real surname was Chch. It does look strange, no vowel, all consonants. All we could say was Joe Chuch. We had to include that one vowel in speech.
    It was as Civilization that he brought forth our local notoriety. The moment that most irritated his fellow guests was when he’d go up to his room, number 35, on the third floor, dead, dead, dead drunk. As Ben or I tossed him onto his bed at, say, 1:00 a.m., the troubles began. As soon as we had descended to the clerk’s desk three floors down, we heard the howl of a banshee. No, it was more of a cry for help. “Owww! Owww! Owww!” I’m sure the whole street resounded with this mayday howl. I expected the police at any moment.
    Ben and I rushed back up those fifty, sixty steps, saw the man sprawled out, moaning. His mouth was wide open. We shut his
mouth, pressing his lips tightly together. Again we descended. On reaching the desk, we heard that same chilling cry again. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Said Ben, “Let’s get a safety pin.” There was no need. Again we shut his mouth, but now we actually wedged his lower and upper teeth together until they interlocked. It worked. Thus, the nighttime passed.
    I was for some time mystified by his baying at the midnight moon, “Owww! Owww!”
    Suddenly it hit me. You needn’t be a philological scholar to understand that Joe Chch, aka Civilization, was crying out for his missing vowel. “Owww! Owww!”
    The one time Civilization did get into trouble involved me and a piece of zinc. We were always reading and hearing of non-physicians who had cures of some sort. I’m not referring to the obvious W.C. Fieldsian frauds and monkey-gland “doctors.” I’m referring to thinkers like Civilization, who had an idea about increasing one’s height. Civilization had experimented with zinc, so he informed me. A sliver of zinc under my heels would in one year increase my height by about two inches. I did as he advised and cut myself up pretty bad. My mother detected my bloody heels. On occasion, she arrived uninvited at the hotel. (We lived in an apartment some distance from the Wells-Grand.) She threatened to throw him out of the window. The man was unfazed. His thick accent added panache to his proclamations. He was advising her of a little known cure for ill-temperedness. Unfortunately, the world was not ready for that cure.
    What really created the glory nights at the lobby were the debates between the retired Wobblies and the good “company men.” “Company man” was the favorite good-behavior phrase for the fink or the three-dollar bill. The most favored of all the synonyms for the strikebreakers was “Scissorbill.” He was the capitalist with a hole in his pocket.
    I had no idea when my actions would turn political. As the favored child, I was an observer; I saw rather than did. I know that by
1933, just as I was finishing my last year at the U of C law school, I witnessed a demonstration. It was at the beginning of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933–34 that I saw Italo Balbo, Mussolini’s minister of aviation, land with a flotilla of two dozen seaplanes from across the Atlantic. He came ashore to tumultuous greetings almost as lyrical as Lindy’s. From then on, at the corner where the Hilton Hotel overwhelms all else, the street was no longer named Seventh. It became and remains Balbo—a small street, yet a vital thoroughfare in leading you to expressways.
    Chicago may be the only large American city with a street named after a fascist. Oh,