In the depths of it she could barely breathe, and even her shallow respiration sounded ominous, as if a small elderly man had fallen asleep in her chest and was snoring. In the depths of it she was all dark, and she was in the depths of it mostly always. Her appendages would morph, her arms heavy hammers a’swinging, her fingers fragile glass tubes. Her eyes were burning embers, her hair a swaying anemone, tentacles black and greasy with the ink of the sea.

In the depths of it she was unapproachable at the times when she needed affection most, and even as the pressure enveloped her with its own estimation of care, she realized it was a poor substitute for a human touch. Yet, as she contemplated the possibility of reaching out, and of someone reaching in, she invariably felt her arms too short to reach the surface, and others’ empathy to shallow to retrieve her. She waited in this purgatory for the end, but though her will was already gone, she was not, and would not be. She feared that this was all she knew now, and because of this, she would know nothing else in death. She sank deeper and deeper, sleepwalking through her days and nights, praying for the fatigue, and the fog, and all the water to clear, for a night terror, or a slap in the face, that would wake her and send her chasing after the sun.

–Danny Grosso 

Merry Memories.

–Danny Grosso

Instagram @artispolitics

A nighttime explosion for kids who had no war, the flash of the black light strobe in a vacuum of darkness, started the heart and seared the nearest image into the cortex. No one ever dancing, or even just moving in such an environment will ever forget it.

The sentiment was difficult to comfortably convey to the older guys, who had been to Viet Nam or even Korea, who had seen actual bombs bursting, filling the night with horrible light, but it was all they had, these club kids of the 80’s, to stir the spirit, with Cold War as it was, stagnated into intransigence. Besides, reveling in the momentarily controlled chaos of an out of control dance floor was infinitely better than charging the enemy’s lines. That was something everyone agreed upon.

The staccato animation of dancers within a space that is filled with darkness and music, and every other second, light would prove to be, over that short period, an enticement and a unifying dynamic. It would be only a short time before all of this was gone; and, broken apart as if in a strobe, the movement lost its continuity.

-Danny Grosso

He dreamed of a summer’s day, in Spain, near a tumultuous sea, over which the sun fought and won a battle to color the spirits below. There was a party that travelled on and off the cobbled streets to beach and glen and back again, colored banners marking the route of revelry.

They were already beautiful, but they were rendered more so, luminous even, by the sun, and as they twisted their bodies around they glistened, golden and brown, bronze statues blessed with the breath of life.

There was music playing, a combo, several songs at once somehow rising in harmony to meet a crescendo near the blazing disc in the sky. They would twirl with their hands in the air, and tilting their heads back, steal a second’s glimpse at the brightest star.

It all seemed to fill them with euphoric energy, and that party lasted into the next day and night, and as he’d joined in somewhere along the way, he wondered if the dream would ever end, or it it was even a dream at all.

-Danny Grosso

Continuing the expeditions of Jeff MacNelly, James Kilpatrick, and Eugene McCarthy, with apologies.

The Chickenhawk

This pitiful, featherless bird disguises its timid nature in seasons of conflict, when it emerges from its coop and dons false plumage with martial aplomb. Wrapping itself in armor, or flag pins, or a flag, the Chickenhawk belies its lack of courage with thespian craft, acting out scenes of bravado to audiences hungry for that sort of overacting. Most often, the runs of this farce are short, and the creature must recede to its dwelling and await another casting. However, in the unfortunate (for audiences) present era of endless war, the Chickenhawk seems to be permanently plying its unpalatable craft on multiple media platforms, there, by itself, lessening the intelligence of entertainment consumers who might hold their noses long enough to survive a soliloquy.

–Danny Grosso

It’s so American, really, to be built up on hype, to impossible heights, just to make the fall so much more devastating. He engineered and fed the world with his prodigious activism, before he was co-opted into laissez faire governments so they could share his shiny veneer – before completely undermining his approach. The smartest, brightest boy, who went west, like the country, from Iowa to Oregon and California, a sunny optimist about to run into the darkest depression in American history. Perhaps he became too much like those around him, after he was surrounded by power, in marble halls far from the prairie of his birth. Perhaps, this is all of our destiny, to become what others’ success demands, if we are all really powerless against the drumbeat of progress, or, alternatively, for those with plenty in hand, the status quo. 

It is hard to see photos of him as an elderly, diminished man, with the ghosts of Hoovervilles surrounding him like a grimy aura. Later presidents tried to humanize him, inviting him to public events, even soliciting his counsel. They, like those before him, were still taken by the sheer talent of that once golden boy. He acquiesced as they beckoned, for he knew what great things he knew, but he had already soured past potability. In ‘32 they practically ran him out on a rail, and 25 years later they wanted him to join up again. He must have still felt the sting of one of history’s great rebukes.

He may have managed the immense task, for him, in that late era, of smiling, of forcing his face to forget what was lost in that great fall from grace, but those pictures, just like his kind, are rarities. 

–Danny Grosso

Johnson’s mother left behind a sewing machine when they took her away shrieking. Grown mad over the loss of a young daughter to an outbreak of influenza, the woman spent the remainder of her short life in the company of the kind but helpless doctors at the State Hospital. They were unable to ease her rattled mind.

The machine was the only useful item, to Johnson’s mind, that the woman owned. Gifted to her by an old dying rich matron, for whom Johnson’s mother had provided maid service and sometime companionship, the item had become a source of entertainment for the boy, his mother, and his itinerant father, Josiah. When it became obvious that the baby girl was coming, Johnson’s mother began to make clothes with the machine while the boy sat beside her. It was how he learned to sew, and what he knew of his mother, and of himself, he learned while seated beside the machine. Still, it was a short period of learning, one followed by longer periods of solitude. It was a pattern struck and repeated, like a sewing exercise, whereby Johnson would stitch together the rest of his life. A brief epiphany, maybe begetting a short respite of commonweal, followed by isolation’s return. After his mother’s illness took her away, his father left on horseback, and to Johnson’s knowledge, never returned to the small farm on which they had lived.

-Danny Grosso

Excerpt from the short story. 

All of these people have been changed. All of the places remain until we change them.

Now I see the city’s sameness, its connection to the past, and the hush that you’ve provided has stayed with me, so that I can conjure it up when I wish…

From Chicago Gothic (2007), Available at Amazon Books. Artwork and text copyright Danny Grosso.

The Traveler first appeared in The Loyola Phoenix in 1982 under the title D.C.. Many of the original strips were damaged in the layout and printing process, so the author reworked them in 1990-91.

 

–Danny Grosso