Collecting stories on sunny afternoons

Writers collect stories and anecdotes and blend reality into fiction. So be careful being my friend, I guess, as you might wind up in a novel, provided I ever get around to writing one.

Maybe that’s why writers are lonely by nature – at this point everyone is on to this and nobody wants to be a character, a Springer show guest there on the page. Then again, a good many people want to be famous, so maybe some people act even more outlandishly for a writer, hoping to be immortalized.

Either way, this past weekend, I gathered a few nuggets worth mentioning.

First, there was a guy named Joel who was next to me at the bar Francesca’s in West Dundee. Eating alone, he said he was a talent scout for the California Angels. He has been doing this for a couple years after retiring from a long career as a baseball coach at Western Kentucky where he and his wife still live.

They were moving back up to Chicago, as he grew up in the far north suburbs, heading to Napervillle, which is one of The Blends I mentioned in my last post, but which still is a more interesting place than most suburbs.

Joel has the upper Midwest as his territory and was heading to Rockford, Champaign and then Cedar Rapids, Iowa for his weekend to scope out high school kids.

They don’t seem to have talent scouts for writers, or if there are, I haven’t impressed anybody. Maybe I'm not quick enough with my release. So it was interesting to meet someone who has to evaluate developing abilities as well as personalities and do it well enough to keep his job.

The second interesting story came Saturday afternoon at a backyard party after the Arthritis Walk in Lake County, at my buddy Gerry’s brother Doug’s family home.

A guy named Bryan was talking about sailing. His dad, who hails from Holland, went to a boat show back in his homeland and wound up buying a sail craft that he had shipped back stateside.

That’s right – a boat on a boat. It would have been ironic if both had sunk.

Bryan also was/is in band and knew the guys in Material Issue, a power pop group from the Chicago burbs that almost made it big in the 90s. Lead singer and chief songwriter Jim Ellison, who wrote a lot about girls and heartbreak and dated a friend of Gerry’s brother, wound up committing suicide in 1996, killing himself off moped fumes in his garage.

Story three came Sunday afternoon. I met up with a new buddy of mine, novelist Don Evans, who, unlike me, actually finished a book. Good Money After Bad, which is set in the world of Chicago sports gamblers, circa 1995, when the summer was unbearably hot.

Evans was giving a reading in town, and before he did I met up with him and his family and a friend of his at JB’s a bar in Elgin where some psycho opened fire in April, 2001.

Anyway, George Rawlinson, a total Chicago guy living out this way now was among Evans' guests and George mentioned having a meal with some fine looking lady who was a dancer. The dancer had a cute friend who was dating an heir to some big fortune, then dumped him to snag a mediocre baseball player who was pitching in Japan and making $5 a year.

That begged a couple questions, one being that George seems to meet a lot of colorful people like this. My vinyl sided suburban life, like my Irish complexion, pales in comparison.

The other is how do attractive women always wind up with rich guys? Is their some sort of service that hooks up the sexy with the wealthy? Is it just a matter of knowing where to look for loot if you have looks? Or is there a Web site for them where they hook up?

Not having a lot of money and not being one of People magazine’s hottest 100 bachelors, I am completely puzzled by all of this.

So I do what I do best when I get confused: After the reading, I took a nap, then mowed the lawn.