"600 words by Esther J. Cepeda"

Hatless "Drunkard" doesn't give up his ship

"600 Words" by Esther J. Cepeda

For those who followed columnist Neil Steinberg's public meltdown in September 2005, when he was arrested on charges of domestic battery, the money shot of his new book "Drunkard: A Hard Drinking Life" comes early:

"We are arguing just outside [Kent's] door. I'm yelling, she has the phone… she's dialing…she has the phone up against her head and I suddenly swing, an arcing, open-handed slap, knocking the phone hard against the side of her head."

There, on page 22, Steinberg pulls back the curtain on an episode that made headlines from the pages of his own paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, to the front page of rival Chicago Tribune and even his old haunt the New York Daily News, making a spectacle of the sometimes wicked, sometimes sweet curmudgeon from Berea, Ohio who climbed the ivory tower of journalism into a four-times-a-week column at a major American newspaper.

The slap that changed everything.

The slap that changed readers' image of Steinberg, 48, from doting dad to two young boys and devoted – if oft-times bumbling – husband to a beautiful lawyer, into a stereotypical sauced newspaper man and, worse, wife-beater.

That slap confined him not only to jail – if only for a night – but many nights to a cold guest bedroom, and sometimes even to chillingly welcoming bars where fellow journalists revel in the tradition of downing drinks once deadline is met.

And the slap wasn't even the worst part! There was the indignity, sure, but there was also the parade of disappointed friends and family, clueless counselors, way-too-Jesus-y AA devotees and, of course, glorious, ever-beckoning alcohol which, if you don't drink much, you might not notice is almost literally everywhere.

So why – why?! – would anyone who'd gone through that miserable trial relive it nearly three years later, again so publicly, as he steels himself to embark on press engagements in support of his sixth book "Drunkard: A Hard Drinking Life", published by Dutton.

"People ask me if I'm embarrassed about it," Steinberg told a crowd of family, friends and award-winning journalists at an intimate book party in downtown Chicago Wednesday night, "but I tell them: 'I wasn't embarrassed to down every drink in sight, why would I be embarrassed to talk about how I got myself out of it?'"

A few days before, he'd answered my first question – why!?! – in his inimitable Steinbergian tone: "If you don’t write about something, then it's lost and I thought it was valuable to remember this," he said as Sun-Times news men and women flitted in and out of his office. "I really did it because I really wanted to redeem this experience. As Dante said, if you've got to go to hell you've got to take notes."

Some notes!

Harrowing, painfully lonely notes. Notes no one wants to fess up to when the hangover hits. Notes you wouldn't wish on an enemy. And yet, notes that at the most unexpected moments ring brightly, reverberating with hopeful – and really funny – timbres.

"I was writing it as it was happening, so I like to think they're fresh," he said. "The editing was excruciating – that was as difficult, if not more difficult, than the writing. At the time [of recovery] the book was the one thing I could control. I couldn’t control the drinking, the law, or the case but I could control the book. During the editing I had to really battle to keep control if it."

And was it worth it?

"If I wrote ‘Ulysses’ it was," he says, reasonably tired of pondering it. "Given the pain, ‘The Sun Also Rises’ would not have been worth it to me, I would have much rather avoided the whole thing."

"That said, I feel I did the best I could with a bad situation. I at least rose to the occasion and didn’t move to a Red Roof Inn and continue drinking. At least not yet."

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com

Chicago columnists unite!

"Pregunta del Dia" by Esther J. Cepeda

"Pregunta del Dia" translates from Spanish into "Question of the Day" and today’s comes from K.C. (not of the Sunshine Band), a Lemont, IL reader who asks:

Q. I looked at your "events" page and so what’re you doing June 18?

A. Oh, K.C., bless your heart! Now I don’t have to contrive some way to plug this performance (and great timing, by the way).

Next Wednesday I’ll be moderating a pre-performance panel featuring my Sun-Times pal Neil Steinberg, the Tribune’s incredible Rick Kogan, Accessible Contemporary Music’s Executive Director Seth Boustead and The Moving Architects’ choreographer Erin Carlisle Norton.

You see, ACM and TMA are putting on two performances of "1,001 Afternoons in Chicago," a live, newly-composed music and modern dance piece interpreting a few of the stories of legendary Chicago newspaperman Ben Hecht.

Who?

Yeah, I didn’t know either, but Hecht was – during the 1920's – a writer at the Chicago Daily News who challenged himself to write a short story each day and publish it in the paper. Despite how ridiculously unlikely it would be that any editor today would allow such a thing – apparently back then newspapers actually printed more than five "column inches" on any given topic – Hecht’s stuff was wildly successful, spawning the "1,001 Afternoons in Chicago" column.

Was he "the Royko of his time?" Perhaps even better. Hecht was such a rock star in Chi-town he left for New York City, then to Hollywood to screenwrite movies (Scarface, A Farewell to Arms, A Star is Born) before being tarred, black-listed and…well you’ll just have to come to the panel Wednesday June 18 at 7:30 pm at the Music Institute of Chicago, 1490 Chicago Ave., Evanston to hear much more, but suffice it to say, the guy who once wrote this:

"Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock."

was fascinating.

But never mind all that, the real star of the evening will be the collaboration of Accessible Contemporary Music’s sounds paired with The Moving Architects’ corporeal expressions mixed in with video, all telling a selection of Ben Hecht’s stories.

New music sometimes scares people but I find if I can listen to it a bit before I experience it onstage, which you can do at http://www.acmusic.org/concert_1001.html (read some BH stories, too), I can really get into it live.

If I could even begin to describe the music along with the movement, it would take me 1,001 words and I still wouldn’t do it justice. I could try to convey Seth and Erin’s enthusiasm but I might overload you with breathless quotes like: "This project celebrates the golden era of journalism, when the newspaper was part of everyone’s daily routine!" Oh, if only there were millions more Seths around to save printed newspapers from certain extinction.

Don’t fret if you can’t make it next Wednesday – or if you don’t need the geeky newspaper-lovin’ pre-performance fawning – just don’t miss this Saturday June 14 ‘s show. It’s at 2 pm in Curtiss Hall of the Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan Ave. on the 10 floor. It’ll be a perfect afternoon of "Afternoons."

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com

Feeling the Pain

"600 Words" by Esther J Cepeda

If you live in Chicago, or any other world-class city like New York or LA, you have a unique civic pride, a knowing that wherever your travels may take you – the South Pole, New Guinea, or Beijing – anyone you bump into will know where you’re from.

Rarely do you encounter someone in Guam who will respond to “I’m from Chicago” with “Oh, isn’t that where the schoolchildren get killed on their way to school?”

That doesn’t make it any less true.

The harsh reality is that thirty-four Chicago Public School children died violently in 2007, at least that many are gone so far this year, and we haven’t even begun to imagine how many more will be claimed by New Year’s eve.

The million dollar question is what to do about it. Everything has been put on the table: SWAT teams have been deployed, gun laws proposed, anti-violence curriculum put in schools, even trained ex-gang members have trickled into the streets to help “mediate” turf battles. But no silver bullet, if you’ll pardon the pun, has put a dent in the tensions roiling neighborhoods all over Chicago.

The politicians and the church leaders have had their say about what it will take to end the carnage. Look at “Letters to the Editor” pages in Chicago you’ll see the general public weighing in, mostly heaping blame on “careless parents.” They’ve all got good points, we’ve heard them all before.

Since innovative solutions are in order, I thought I’d ask for one from a different kind of expert. I called up Marco Marsen, aka the “Billion Dollar Problem Solver,” a marketing wiz for the likes of myriad successful corporations, “one of America’s top Out-of-the-Box thinkers,” and author of “Why We Haven't Won the Wars on Poverty, Drugs or Terror" to get a different take on things.

Now don’t get too excited, he didn’t have “an answer,” but did throw out the beginning of one. It goes a little something like this: we need to start caring.

“We’re all in this together,” he told me recently, while on tour for his new book The Lion’s Way. “But the people who live in poverty, the people who don’t have health care and have to choose between getting a tooth treated and paying the rent – they’ve been forgotten.”

“Whether you like it or not, the people who are pulling the triggers are the victims of all the failings of us as a society,” he says, “The feeling of ‘I don’t have any choices so I’m going to take matters into my own hands’ is what’s driving this.”

Marco thinks we Americans – who claim to live in the greatest country in the world –

consider those who lash out in our inequitable society a problem we have no part or responsibility in.

And he’s right. How many of us have thought: “‘I’m’ never part of the problem, so ‘I’ can never be part of the solution.”

We’re all worried about our wallets and the economy, but not overly concerned about who dies in the “bad parts of the city.” Its human nature: the gas tank bill is in your face, while dead children on the 6 o’clock news is sad, but doesn’t affect your life past the sound-byte. Unless you live in those “bad parts” of the city, that is.

The actual impact of what happens in those “bad parts” affects us as members of our society in immeasurable ways – spiritual, emotional, economic – that message just hasn’t hit home yet.

“I don’t blame people – why would anyone want to feel the pain?” Marco says, “But at the end of the day, we’re all in this together.”

From the Billion Dollar Problem Solver: not an “answer,” just the beginning of one: we need to start feeling the pain.

Esther J. Cepeda writes the “600 Words” & “Pregunta del Dia” columns, and is also a Director at the Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization. Her reporting and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of UNO. “600 words” is a registered trademark of EeJayCee, Inc., Copyright 2008. May be reprinted with permission, contact eejaycee@600words.com