S.O.B., R.I.P.
Casual S.O.B., R.I.P. Of the many reminiscences that have poured out since the death of Mike Royko last Tuesday, my favorite came from one of his fellow columnists, Rheta Grimsley Johnson of the...
...Even when he wasn't writing about those neighborhoods they lurked in his columns some-where—he wrote from them, I mean, even when he didn't write about them...
...I would have tipped my hat, bowed from the waist, and pinched you in the ass...
...Now he was hunched over my friend, whispering...
...1978...
...When he saw me he gave me that look again...
...He was sitting alone in a hotel coffee shop...
...He championed the little guy to the end...
...He brought news from a world that was only dimly imaginable from the outer suburbs of the city—the now much-mourned world of ethnic neighborhoods and two-flats and corner taverns, where everybody smoked and worked with his hands and didn't take no guff...
...When Rheta Johnson's column about Royko came out, he read it and wrote her a note...
...But he was the greatest journalist of his time, and being an S.O.B had something to do with it...
...Great column today...
...But there was profound revulsion in it, I can tell you that...
...It wasn't a sneer...
...This was too good to be true—my friend was going to get a taste of the real city...
...I had never seen him in person before...
...I grew up reading him in the Chicago Daily News (d...
...He hunched over his paper again...
...One hand held a Pall Mall, the other a plastic cup of (I think) Old Style...
...One night I brought in a friend visiting from California, a very pretty woman...
...When I came out a few minutes later, Royko was sitting on my barstool...
...But before I go on with Johnson's story, I would like to interject one of my own...
...Even now, 15 years later, I can't think of the look he gave me without feeling slightly sick...
...We could breathe in the fumes of ethnic-neighborhood Chicago without venturing out to an actual ethnic neighborhood, which might have been yucky...
...America cannot afford to lose many more such men as this...
...When I was in my twenties and had moved to the city, I started hanging out at the Billy Goat Tavern below Michigan Avenue, fabled already in the early '80s as the quintessential "shot-and-beer" joint...
...He said you were a dork," she said...
...He was probably an S.O.B...
...My voice was very high...
...Royko was my hero, too...
...I ordered a glass of white wine for her and, though I shudder to think of it now, a shot and a beer for myself...
...ANDREW FERGUSON...
...At the corner of the bar sat Royko, alone, hunched over the paper...
...Unlike his colleagues, though, he almost never struck a false note...
...I don't know whether that world ever existed in the romantic version recollected these days by its survivors, but Royko made it vividly real, and very funny, and sometimes, but not too often, poignant...
...She couldn't quite bring herself to walk up and speak to the great man, and she wrote a column about it...
...In his last years he refused to bend to the pressures that closed in on him—the pressures of political correctness, in current shorthand—the same pressures that have crippled journalism elsewhere...
...I screwed up my courage...
...I didn't say anything, nor did my friend, but at last, after several interminable minutes, she giggled...
...But—alas-—the fakery is what makes it, in 1997, the "real Chicago...
...It dazzled me as a boy, and never stopped dazzling me...
...Hi, Mr...
...Of the many reminiscences that have poured out since the death of Mike Royko last Tuesday, my favorite came from one of his fellow columnists, Rheta Grimsley Johnson of the Atlanta Journal Constitution...
...Like all newspaper columnists with too much space to fill, he could summon various emotions at will for the purposes of that day's column: high dudgeon on Monday, weepy sentimentality on Tuesday, ironic detachment for the middle of the week, and so on...
...He was right to say that he hadn't changed, the world had...
...The gift of his invention seemed bottomless...
...It wasn't condescension...
...Wizened Chicagoans say the Billy Goat is no longer the "real Chicago": It's too self-conscious, its grime and gruff-ness almost self-parodic...
...But nowadays the little guy is just as likely to be a white middle-aged small-businessman harassed by OSHA or the EEOC, or otherwise bedeviled by do-gooders and busybodies...
...Slowly, very slowly, he stood up, winked at her, and climbed the stairs out of the bar...
...Johnson's story is better than mine, and one thing you learned reading Royko was to save your best stuff for the kicker...
...You should have spoken," he said...
...Royko," I finally said...
...Royko was a hero to Johnson, as he was to many people who grind out copy for a living, and she finally laid eyes on him during a Democratic National Convention a few years ago...
...We probably ruined the bar as a result...
...Liberals always loved him for championing the "little guy...
...Yuppies liked the Billy Goat...
...So had the city...
...After a half-hour or so, I got up to go to the bathroom...
Vol. 2 • May 1997 • No. 34
