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

It never ended. It will never end. He will keep agitating. They will keep repressing. 1977, in England, meant something, even in the new world, and means something still, to him, and the other few that kept the aesthetic. The scowling presence, the jackboot jaunt, but the stuff wears thin on a second decade. Most left for sell-out status, few stayed. At the brokerage houses the powder was free, but that proposition  was unattractive to the real partisans if they had to become yuppies in the bargain. No, he won’t do it. No condos and babysitter budgets, no working wives and money markets. He knows Joe Strummer would never cave. Even the pressure of stardom and the cascade of money couldn’t make Joe a Tory. Here, on the other side of the pond, he himself could think of nothing to make him a Republican. Even music of the 50’s was too progressive for those people; Christ, they were still listening to Benny Goodman. Meanwhile, the modern soundtrack slashes through his mind and he navigates the street scene back then; of homeless wanderers and sick refugees, turned-out factory workers and people cut off the dole. It’s morning in America but the sun don’t come up here. The passing of years erased the obvious evidence but left the collateral damage. It was a trick they pulled, letting it get so bad that people would become grateful for the slightest improvement, then watching the grateful spend the rest of their lives toiling just to keep the status quo, while access to real capital swirled invisibly, unknowingly just out of their reach, to the powerful few. It never ended. It will never end. He will put on his leather and yell at the world.

-Danny Grosso 

Memory can latch onto odd things. Sometimes the endeavor of a moment’s glance can burn a lasting impression.

He remembered her face for awhile, but that image faded over time, overpowered by the starkness of her get-up, all that boxy contrast, a somehow delicate squareness. Against the hazy sky, she looked like she was placed in a light box for viewing. Her clothes moved herky jerky smooth, like a long-form modern dance, alone on stage, out there on the street. The world was changing; cold war to glasnost, malaise to ambition, downers to amphetamines.  It was beginning to look different as well.

Walls come down, trends evolve from muddled to clean, people open their eyes anew.  Freedom can mean everything, and sometimes, it can be just the littlest thing. The loose proportions of a new design that is worn on the body, an intimate artistic display, can mean freedom in a small but not unimportant way. The breeze between the garment and the body, the freedom of movement at the joints, the respectful limitation of palette, all of this can elevate the feeling, embody a new era, and by hyperbolic extrapolation, generate hopefulness.

He had no idea if she knew anything about the heaving sociopolitical changes that gave him vertigo, or if she cared that there was still apartheid in South Africa, troubles in Ireland, and a plague of homelessness, disease, and unemployment here at home. What he saw in her was the seed of hope. She looked different, so times may be different, and things might somehow be getting better.

-Danny Grosso

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

The Oppo

The shaded Oppo is, or may be, for as much as we know we know, which is not nearly enough, the essential creature of the new political age. Stealth in its movements but bombastic in its pronouncements, the Oppo is a master of the dark arts of political intrigue. Its senses are naturally drawn to controversy, a reverse of the common ‘flight from danger’ instinct. Its skills are highly evolved and continually evolving,  to match the digital, instant gratification ecosystem of an incessant news cycle. Shamelessly results-oriented, the Oppo produces its legacy of scandal without any second thoughts, and continuously moves on in search of more progeny. In this way it operates as a dangerous predator, striking indiscriminately alike on the deserving and undeserving. The vanquishing of consensus, its only real threat in the bestiary, has left the Oppo with unlimited vistas through which to pursue its charge. Also, the modern entrenchments of political factions mean that there is always a market for the Oppo’s work. Look for this creature to continue to rise in prominence, or rather, look for its work. Its secret agent skills make this creature hard to hold.

-Danny Grosso

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

It was the dress he’d always wanted to make; the one that answered the question posed by his mentor. “What would you want to wear if you were a woman?” he’d ask when one of his acolytes devised a very conceptual and very very uncomfortable piece at the atelier. “Imagine yourself having to do anything but stand still in that…” the great teacher would continue, before hitting them with the clincher: “Uncomfortable is unattractive.”

The spring breeze was, for him, the former student, and now fledgling designer, meant to be interpreted, transformed, manifested into a garment. He’d first had the inkling as a teenager, while wearing his father’s too-wide pants, and feeling the simple freedom that comes with ease of movement and wind at the ankles. Later, after a splurge purchase at Saks, he experienced the cool of the May breeze at an outdoor art fair, through a shirt of fine linen, loosely proportioned at the shoulders so as to gather the air like a sail. He’d been taken by the feeling, so much so that his inspiration wall was filled with loose fitting but well tailored models draped in supple fabrics and photographed against the product of a slow fan and in light meant to evoke a spring sunrise.

He purchased a roll of the softest, cleanest linen and cotton blend, a luminescent white, another splurge, but one that limited creasing and repelled stains, making it easier to work with and to wear. He hung  three yards of it on a wall, and sat in his big leather chair, staring at it. He was thinking of his mentor when the design of the dress just came to him, he didn’t need to drape the form, or model the pieces in muslin, though he would, to assist in detailing construction, before he sent the handmade sample, instructions, and drawings to the pattern maker for multiple production.

He’d been taken lately by the curiosity of similarities, and in this instance began to design a tribal pattern that passed for art deco as an adornment. The applique tightened the dress at the waist and neck, which in turn loosened the look at the sleeves and skirt, allowing for the swing below the hips that would evoke movement, ease, and of course, the cool breeze of springtime.

It was a beautiful May afternoon. He would loosen his cravat, and walk home across the courtyard, barefoot, listening to the soft rustling of the new foliage. In his pocket would be a swatch of the fabric he’d been working with, and a sketch of the dress. Later, he would add them to the memorial binder he’d created to his mentor, while sitting on the balcony with the potted lilies, his baggy silk pajamas succumbing to the breeze.

–Danny Grosso

“Long ago, long ago” he said, or rather muttered, to himself over and over, all day.  To see him now was a sad vignette, a tragedy within a tragedy, a moment within a life.

Once he was tall and straight, with a Clark Gable mustache and an eye to the future, but now…

Living in the past is not really what it is, more like living in moment, past and future unimaginable,  in a room with a window but no door.

Sometimes he went outside, on his bicycle, to scrounge around for things you can find when your head is down. The averted gazes of others left a wider space for him to operate, though operating often just meant looking for discarded butts. He knew that he knew many of these people, and that he was not entirely unrecognizable under the beard. He also knew they wouldn’t confront him. He’d burned enough emotional bridges to insure his relative isolation, and the hat and beard did the rest.

Long ago he didn’t have to hide. He wore loud clothes in the club, he dropped names, he chased pretty girls. The quiet confidence of that age is gone, another tragedy within a tragedy.

-Danny Grosso

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

The Leaker

The Leaker just can’t help it, so it seems. Bequeathed with a mind full of valuable, extraneous information, set upon by a ravenous pack of info hounds, the Leaker does what it must: it leaks. Sponge-like and cheese-holed, its life cycle is the rhythmic taking on of information and subsequent discharge of same, all to a fetishized following of pilot-fishing scribblers whose living depends on this arrangement. Bigger beasts attempting to interrupt the Leaker’s cycle have been vexed through the ages – the leaker is of a perfect, if to some, somewhat nefarious design. Regardless of sanction, reassignment, book advance, or exclusive interview with pre-approved lines of inquiry, it does what it is designed to do, and the drip, drip of info feeds the greater ecosphere around it. In this way the Leaker may be one of the most generous and essential creatures in the bestiary. It gives out as much as it takes in, often to the accrual of beneficiaries far-flung and unaware.

-Danny Grosso