Holiday Wishes 1994
Holiday Wishes 1994
Wicker Park Wishes
Friday, November 26, 2021
Wicker Park Wishes
“And let this be the death of treacle,” Annalee Birdcount says, “and a re-awakening of true, genuine, tribute and fuckin’ sentiment.”
It is the day following Thanksgiving and Annalee is in bed, the morning sun slithering across the bedroom floor. Black Friday. Time to log on to Amazon, time to meet up with her old friends and go for a walk downtown. Some college football. Time to convince Mom and Dad that they should put up the Christmas Tree today and not wait a few more weeks. Thanksgiving is over, Christmas time is here.
But the bitter days long, long before this digital world are still with us as well.
Annalee smiles at this thought as she sets down Wicker Park Wishes, the cutting new novel by Margaret Larkin which Annalee has just finished.
Do you long for the old days before cell phones, the Internet, social media, and well, all this BS of the year 2021? Annalee was born in 1994, the year Wicker Park Wishes is set, and, sort of like Annalee, of course, it’s the story of a young woman who is, what?, trying to find herself? Bullshit, Annalee thinks, Claire, the protagonist, can let the world find her.
Claire works hard, is smart, kind, and is not shy about admitting she wants men, or at least some men, at least as much as they want women. Want her.
Page 2, “….but Claire couldn’t help but feel a shockwave between them.”
“Yes, I’ve felt a few shockwaves,” Annalee thinks as she skims back over the book, admiring the cover art work with the girl with no eyes talking on a phone that has a curly cord sticking out of it. “Many a shockwave but not enough. Not lately.”
Claire’s whole world is a shockwave in Wicker Park Wishes. Back when a shockwave had to happen between two living things in the same room, not from behind a mask or over a text message. Back when you likely heard new music by stumbling into a dive bar on your way home, not because some algorithm suggested it as you sat home alone.
Claire is working as a temp in a downtown Chicago office and is trying hard to move up while not letting go of the drinking, the carousing, the un-tethered danger of youth and carnality.
Page 159, “…What was she doing? She couldn’t have him and Trevor, and even if she could, she’d be a slut, and she wasn’t like that. Or was she? She wanted both of them. Plenty of guys did that and thought nothing of it. Why couldn’t she? She could alternate…have one on a Tuesday, the other on a Thursday, then spend the weekend with one and another weekend with the other. Like having custody, but just the dating version. Like having a mini harem.”
She rolls her own cigarettes.
Chicago is cold. Chicago is danger. It’s edgy. There really are drug addicts and weirdoes all over the place in Chicago, 1994. It is a perilous world but not nearly so scary as today. Back then the enemy could be lurking in any dark alley. Now, they are on your phone and in your every thought.
They are in the air, Annalee thinks, as she runs a finger over one of the masks she has used as a bookmark.
The good old days were always supposed to be more dangerous, Annalee knows. But they weren’t. But they are always worth writing about, just like in On The Road, which she read in college and scribbled her own little poems and cartoons in the margins. Was that really an adventure? Annalee wondered, or was it just doing things and then typing?
Wicker Park Wishes, Pages 71-72, “…She picked up a zine from a small table near the couch. She’d seen the zine and others like it at the head shop... She started paging through it and looked at the hand-drawn pictures and the articles that looked like they were typed on a typewriter, then glued on a page. It was like a collage. She picked up another one that was totally sharp, like from a copy machine. Nothing handmade there. Poetry and stories about life in Wicker Park and Ukrainian Village and Bucktown. Someone had taken the time to write it all down.”
Take the time to write it all down. The good times, the hard nights, the hangover mornings. The youth, the smoke, the empty beer cans and that flashing light on the answering machine which, as Margaret Larkin writes, “…can make or break a relationship.”
The waiting. The lovely, pensive waiting. The moments of boredom that could really be more thrilling than anything else because they’re full of everything. An open world of questions not answered.
Annalee holds Wicker Park Wishes to her chest and drifts down a river of deep, discernible, blissful mystery and remembers the times she did not know, and also the people she will always know. Every single person in the book is real. They’re on the page, saying, “write it all down,” without having to say that at all. --TK
Friday, November 26, 2021