CULTURE
Gone Are Those Eyes
By Dave Jones
Who knew that when we bought our house 18 years ago – a big old box
of a “Catholic” family house in Old Irving Park – we were
also getting a piece of what Mayor Daley’s people today like to call
“street furniture.”
His name was Bob Strauch.
Of course, I didn’t know his name was Bob Strauch until I read the name on the community message board at our local Starbucks, in a short note informing us that Bob had died. “You may have noticed over the years a man who was seemingly always sitting on the street bench near the intersection of Irving Park Road and Keeler Ave...” it began.
The notice went on to tell us that a memorial service was being held for Bob at the local United Methodist Church. But it was an old message, by the time I saw it. Bob had died two weeks earlier on May 6 – of “natural causes,” unbeknownst to most anyone, eating a sandwich in a room at the Irving Park Hotel. The service was being held on the Wednesday before Memorial Day, and I was reading about it while picking up a tray of iced coffee drinks for my family on our way out of town over Memorial Day weekend.
When I got out to the car with the drinks, I told my son about Bob Strauch’s death. For the very first time in this life I pronounced the name of Bob Strauch, and my son and I both sat together in surprising silence for a moment, thinking of this sudden, strange absence in our lives. And how odd and sad it was, at this moment, to be knowing this previously omnipresent person’s name for the very first time.
Because it was true – for the 18 years we’d lived in the area, Bob really was “seemingly always sitting on the street bench near the intersection of Irving Park Road and Keeler Avenue.”
When I would push my son’s stroller by the once-busy shops along Irving as a baby and toddler, introducing him to the corner grocer and launderers and butchers and barber and bookseller and coffee shop waitresses (themselves mostly all gone now), there out on the street would be Bob Strauch with his thin, wasting body and lank reddish hair and mild, pale, blank blue eyes.
In the wintry days when we’d be out spreading Holiday spirits up and down the street, Bob would be out there hunched in an empty doorway, his thin jacket collar pulled up to protect him against the cold winds, asking us quietly if we had any money to spare.
On the steamy summer days in the full noon sun, he’d sit absolutely still on his bus bench, white T-shirt-shrouded body quietly curled in a hunched posture like a human question mark, as if afraid to make the slightest move and perish of heat prostration, eyes staring straight ahead out over the hot, passing traffic of Irving Park Road.
As my son grew to an age when he felt comfortable about approaching “street people” or “bums” on his own, engaging the hustlers and panhandlers with stories of his own telling – learning their names and their stories, and bringing them home to tell to me – Bob was always out there, yet somehow his name and story never came to my son or to me. For some reason, we never approached him, directly, to learn them. Something about the eyes…
For us, he was as much a fixture on that street corner as the light poles, the mailbox, the street bench itself. And now he is gone. And the street feels, strangely, so much emptier for his not being there.
He wasn’t an old man, though with the obvious ravages of alcohol he never looked young to us; he died at the age of 54, which would have made him about 36 when we first laid our eyes on him, but even then his face was a bruised and burned mask of abandoned hope. The pale eyes burned out with a flicker of faint, sage bemusement that seemed both to beckon kindness with the lure of his clear loneliness and spiritual need and simultaneously snuff that kindness out with bleak, certain knowledge of how the badly needed alcohol would soon be burning any human bridges down. In his eyes you could see that he knew what he needed, and it wasn’t ever really “you.”
Still, people did approach him, did try to take care of him. The death notice at the Starbucks referred people to an information line at the Irving Park Food Pantry. The director of the pantry, Barbara Cohn, had an ongoing relationship with Bob over the years, dispensing food supplies to him on the Wednesday mornings when the pantry is open in the basement of the United Methodist Church. They talked. She cared.
“Bob had his problems,” Barbara Cohn said when I called the pantry line. “He knew what his problems were, and he never tried to deny them. But, even so, he was a gentle, intelligent man. I enjoyed talking with him.”
Before he made regular use of the food pantry, the former owner of the long-shuttered Jay-Bees corner grocery used to feed Bob and sent him out on simple tasks and errands that he would or wouldn’t do. Still, he was fed. In recent years, Marty Arens, the proprietor of the House of Hansen store of religious books and artifacts was putting Bob up every night in a room at the Irving Park Hotel, our local SRO, occupied by many Bobs who have “flunked out” of their rooms at the nearby Irving Park YMCA. So, he had shelter.
God, in the most fundamental ways, was taking care of this fallen and broken sparrow of a man. And he had the doorways of the closing, emptying Irving Park storefronts to hide from the bitter winds on the winter days, and that curbside bus bench on which he planted his bony butt to contemplate our fallen world on virtually every day of every year we’ve lived in this same neighborhood with him. Like some kind of Rodin statue welded out of rusty, smelly Old Milwaukee cans. His eyes . . . His eyes looking out, seeing nothing, seeing everything.
One winter morning, when my son was very young, and we set out together to Jay-Bees grocery by the Irving-Keeler intersection to buy the Sunday newspapers, we came upon Bob Strauch’s body (though of course we didn’t know he was Bob Strauch then) laid flat out cold in the doorway of the Odd Fellows Building, snowflakes slowly collecting on his greasy gray jacket and scraggly red hair and beard.
His glassy eyes were open, vaguely, and his chest appeared to rise and fall slightly with shallow breathing. His face was puffed up black and blue and scraped bloody, suggesting he’d had trouble in a nearby Saturday night 5 AM bar just a few hours before.
I wasn’t very keen on my young son witnessing this dire specimen of human dereliction up close like this – especially on a Sunday. But the boy beside me, as kids always will, asked me “what’s wrong with that man, Daddy,” so I went ahead and bowed down over Bob Strauch, peered into his eyes, and asked him if he needed any help.
“No,” Bob Strauch said. Barely audibly.
But a voice like coarse sandpaper on cold pipe. A voice like saying the word
Strauch. The eyes looking up at me like I was the biggest Sunday School simpleton
and nuisance on Earth.
We continued on our way to Jay-Bees where we told the proprietor, Jim Byrne,
about the bad drunk we’d seen laying out in the cold in the doorway
just down the block.
“Yeah,” Jim said, ever the soft Heart of Chicago. “Looks like he had a rough night at Joe E’s last night.”
We picked up our Tribune and Sun-Times, crossed the street to a sidewalk where there weren’t any drunks doing corpse imitations, and walked home. Mission accomplished. Rare were the times, apparently, when anyone bothered to call the cops or paramedics about Bob, everyone seemed to know his station in life so well. Even if we didn’t really know him, not even his name.
There were times when the bloody injuries to Bob’s face looked worse, and times when he went missing for a week or so – probably in jail or the hospital – but mostly he was out there, on his bench, hunched over and staring out at a world he’d obviously given up on long before. Smoking. Pondering. Anchoring that world, in a weird alky way, lending it a backhanded kind of stability by his simple and constant dispassion.
That would be when he’d get to me the most, when I’d notice him sitting there most piercingly. When I would wonder most deeply who this man was and what in the world he was about. Stopped at a traffic light while driving by him or just walking past his bench, I would look into those wasted ash-colored eyes, staring back at me – sometimes almost smiling, gently, piteously understanding of my pathetic need to move – and I would think: This is some kind of Zen master we have living in our midst here, our very own Fool on the Hill, and no-one ever bothers to talk with him, to learn his way. Some day, I would tell myself, some day I’m going to sit down with him and get his story, follow him around. Surely he has something to tell us about all our sorry-ass Ecclesiastical worldly strivings, inevitable failures.
And now, of course, he does. He’s gone. And I will never get that chance to know him, his story, some summary vision of his life, what it tells us about ourselves. It was only by a fluke stop on a family outing that I even learned his name. He’s told me his part of my story: that I missed it.
Now when I walk or drive by the corner of Irving and Keeler I see that empty bench and miss those wise and weary eyes of his. Those eyes were every bit as much a part of that intensely local landscape as the rivets in the bench slats, the little letters and numbers painted on the directional street and bus signs directly above. Those wounded eyes said something: Slow down, take a moment, get to know me a little, if only just my name.
Once, his SRO benefactor Marty Arens remembers asking him, “Bob, what are you doing out there on that bench like that?”
And Bob Strauch, eyes smiling, said, “It’s a dirty rotten job, Marty, but someone’s gotta do it.”
I’ll miss those eyes out there. The bearings and directions we all lose by Bob not being out there on his bench anymore. Not that I could hope to help or save him in any way. But maybe all the ways in which that terrible, abiding sense of sadness came through might yet help save me.
Bob Strauch's body was prepared for burial by the Cooney Funeral Home and buried in an unmarked grave at All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines, with expenses partially defrayed by contributions made through the Irving Park Community Food Pantry. Anyone interested in assisting the Food Pantry in this or any other capacity can contact its director, Barbara Cohn, at 773-283-6296. Contributions may be sent directly to Irving Park Community Food Pantry, c/o Irving Park United Methodist Church, 3801 N. Keeler Ave., Chicago, IL 60641.
