Writing From a Heavy Gravity Planet.
As I detrained far above the Joliet streets, I could tell that the backpack and cane were not ergonomic, that I was close to a back sprain and that my left hip was in distress. Gingerly down the long concrete stairs, I moved so slow that Dan and I missed each other. Returning inside as he returned outside, meeting under the boxy brick arch, we shook hands and he relieved the gimp of the tiny burden wrecking the wan frame with one bear paw of a hand.
Dan no longer lives in Joliet, where he spent his first ten years or so. Nor does he live where the family moved to, but part way between Joliet and Plainfield. He expressed a driven desire to drive me by the place where he grew into a youth, where he had lived a wonder-filled life as a boy: now Statesville Prison. This ominous early 20th century dungeon is surrounded by a rectangular road grid and overlooked by two water towers, with “Statesville” stamped ominously upon them.
We take two circuits around the Statesville State Prison with Dan giving the tour with all of the eye for extant and extinct detail common to the man who introduces a friend to his boyhood haunts, noting what is the same, what has changed, and pointing solidly at those aspects which remain only in memory. His narration is a mix of socio-political deadpan, such as the fact that corrections officials from countries as far off as Sweden toured the prison in its former incarnation as Joliet Federal Penitentiary, as “a model prison” to be replicated around the nation and around the world.
These fascinating details will be reserved for Dan’s recollections had at his dining room table some day later this week, in one of two chapters, earmarked for this, the one on growing up on a federal prison farm or the one about his father’s term as Chief Engineer at that facility. The ancient institution of resident functionaries, whose family also reside on the property is, I think, is now limited to a small number of cemetery caretakers. Even this is almost gone in America. Dan’s experience as a prison farm tyke ended in 1980 perhaps a decade or two ahead of that practice. One supposes that children living upon a federal job site is now clearly against various federal laws, except perhaps on military base housing, or wherever the Puppet-in-chief is stored off stage.
At a crucial point in Dan’s automotive retrospective, he turned his white work truck around at the mouth of the very driveway to his childhood house, a house yet lived in, with one metallic painted minivan in the driveway. A great spreading tree, an oak or a maple—I forgot to check the leaves and can’t identify any other type of leaf other than an aspen—shaded an idyllic grass yard. The center piece of this perfectly flat play space is a well. I asked Dan, “Is that an actual functioning well?”
“Oh, no,” he smiles, “Decorative. Good thing it’s not, because I fell into it and got busted up!”
The spreading smile, overshadowed by sad commemorative eyes, split Dan’s thick bristle beard of crimson-tinted brown as he said, “It was a good place to grow up. I was friends with the sons of the other prison officials—there was a huge house on the other side of this lot. There was a building over there where the horses were stabled on the ground floor and the guards were stationed on the second floor. We would go feed the horses sugar cubes… Most of the farmland has been sold off… those subdivisions over there, was crop land, the prison was entirely self sufficient. The trustees, guys with six months or less left, who hadn’t killed anybody, would come cut the grass. My Mom would find me playing catch with these criminals out in the yard and call me in…”
And Dan reluctantly turned the wheels of his work truck and took us away from his yesterday.
Various byways were taken out of Joliet, even along Route 66, where he pointed to a “Kicks” ice cream shop, with statues of painted blues singers in black suits and hats posed in stop motion above a white painted block building of tiny proportions. Dan pointed right, “We went to that ice cream place when we were kids and still take our kids there.”
Pointing left, “Those houses are all fuckin’ Mexicans now—you have the occasional shooting here. Down to the left is the only boxing gym outside of Chicago. I checked it out. It’s just for Mexican kids. Some African Olympic boxer from some country opened a gym a few years back, I think right before Covid, and it didn’t last a year.”
As we drove towards his home along the broad, easy streets, surrounded by cornfields and subdivisions that used to be farmland, Dan points to a pond with a fountain between the boulevard and a postmodern condo subdivision, “State Natural Resources stocks this with fish. There is a guy in a wheelchair who fishes here. You’re allowed to fish these ponds. I always loved fishing, had some fantastic experiences up in Wisconsin. I just can’t get excited about fishing in a retention pond. Unless you are fishing in Southern Illinois were it is hilly and the glaciers didn’t flatten it out, down by the Shawnee National Forest, you wouldn’t even want to keep any fish you caught in Illinois. The rivers are low and slow and filled with truegreen and chemlawn runoff. There is a cool chain of lakes up by the Wisconsin border, which is a lot more like Wisconsin. But other than that and the south, Illinois is so suburban, even in the agricultural areas, with farmland being sold off for subdivisions, that sports fishing is not a thing.”
We return past many an automotive repair shop or garage, with Dan informing me that I will be meeting the owner of one of these shops on Saturday, at a house party he is holding. Entering the driveway where we so spry-like trained and sparred 14 months ago, before my misstep into bio-mechanical oblivion, Dan again hefted my 30 pound world in his heavy hand and led me through his garage, up into the kitchen, down into the 2nd of the 4 split levels of his nice “lived in” house, to this tiny guest room. This room is often used for his visiting twin granddaughters, who lived here during my 2020 visit. Appointed for girls now about six, I suppose, the princess and fairy bed sheets on the cozy cot, the pink basket on this vanity desk, help the old gimp feel at home. Honored with a window air conditioner, I smile as Dan points out the tiny imitation polar bear rug [with no head, of course] placed over the threshold. Kicking up the throw, Dan points with his toe at a lifting threshold and says, “My granddaughters said they put this here so that Pawpaw’s friend doesn’t trip!”
Squared away beyond the tiny darling threshold, I went above, where Dan sat at his dining room table and enjoyed a good 8 hours of streaming conversation. This convinced me to abandon my three-part chronological outline. Instead, I shall embrace Robert E. Howard’s dictum that a man who has experienced adventures naturally relates events at random and out of chronological order. Dan has no desire to relate his adventures, but to honor six men: Dad, Demetrius and Dave, now dead, Sean, locked away for life, and Scott and Frankie, both of whom Dan has lost all contact with.
From a Heavy Gravity Planet is mostly an ode to these leaders and fellows who accompanied Electric Dan on some portion of his journey to being a thoughtful Man.
