Casual

...I walked by the Drake last winter and the doorman stopped me and said, "I liked the way you used Bourdieu in Bobos in Paradise...

...At least I learned about journalism...

...It became famous when John Belushi did the "Cheeseboiger, cheeseboiger...

...I admired Vrdolyak because he was transparently crooked, got a degree from the University of Chicago Law School, wore gold pinkie rings and neck chains, coached in a children's basketball league which I believe he fixed because his teams were perpetually 17-0, was surrounded by rumors of homicide, and tied up Chicago government in ways that would have made Boss Tweed gape and applaud...

...Mayor Harold Washington was fighting the council wars against the white machine led by Fast Eddie Vrdolyak...

...He's glaring at me now because I'm sitting here with a laptop open, which is very un-Billy Goat...

...The last time I was here at the Billy Goat they had two Hispanic guys working at the grill, but they still chanted out the "Cheeseboiger, cheeseboiger . . ." orders in Greek accents, just to keep up the mood of the place...

...I remember later Dan Rostenkowski had a choice between becoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and running for mayor of Chicago...

...I went to college in Chicago and afterwards worked as a columnist for a local weekly and as a police reporter for a legendary outfit called the City News Bureau...

...No fries...

...Chips" skits for Saturday Night Live...

...DAVID BROOKS...

...He said what he really enjoyed was reading, and being a doorman was a nice relaxing job that didn't distract his mind from the books he consumed after hours...

...I gently asked him what he was doing as a doorman...

...If I was reading an American novel, like Dreiser, I'd go to the Palmer House, which had a 19th-century American lobby...

...It was then my ambition, and a fine one, to be a three-day-a-week blue-collar columnist for one of the Chicago dailies, and I didn't let the fact that I was neither a proletarian nor a Chicagoan get in the way of my dream...

...Why would anybody choose some meaningless committee in Washington when he could be mayor of the entire known universe...

...The Billy Goat is under Michigan Avenue between the Chicago Tribune building and the Sun-Times building...

...Then I had to call the widow of a guy who'd died in a car crash that morning and get a comment out of her...

...To get out of my grim college neighborhood I used to come to the Loop and do my reading...

...Somehow that struck me as very Chicago...

...The Cubs are losing on TV, by the way...

...Just north of here at Water Tower Place I bought my only pack of Gitanes, though I don't think I'm to blame since it was my professors at college who assigned French poets in the first place...

...During their showdowns, Chicago seemed like the center of the universe...

...We were all flabbergasted...

...He chose Ways and Means...

...I've moved on to another set of pretensions, apparently...

...The secret of the place is the cheeseburgers, which are fantastic, though nobody can figure out why, since the frozen patties are standard issue and the grill offers nothing special except seven decades of grime...

...Chicago was then a great newspaper town, with great columnists, of whom Mike Royko was only the exemplar...

...In other words, a hotel doorman (a) recognized me, (b) knew me as the author of a book published a couple of years before, and (c) knew about Pierre Bourdieu, the impenetrable French sociologist...

...Since then it has somehow become a tourist trap without losing its authenticity...

...Tonight the guy behind the bar is a seventy-something white man whose skin probably last experienced sunlight during the first Daley administration...

...If it was Tolstoy or Flaubert, I'd go to the Drake, where they had a harpist and you could buy scones...

...There are still real life Chicago reporters and pressmen getting beers at the bar, middle-aged drunks noodling at the tables, as well as all the health-conscious folks from modern America looking around...

...One survey found that over half of all city council members were packing heat in the chamber...

...I admired Mayor Washington because he was a good mayor and he hated Jesse Jackson...

...My pretensions were not limited to Royko-wannabeism...

...I think it's the pickles, though reasonable men differ...

...I once wrote a noteworthy article, which was rejected by every publication in Chicago, on the subject of hotel lobbies...

...My first day I was asked to figure out why a teenager had committed suicide by calling all his neighbors to see if he acted nuts...

...Since that day, I've never been able to take the phrase "journalistic ethics" seriously...