Mount chicago, p.1
Mount Chicago, page 1
Also by Adam Levin
The Instructions
Hot Pink
Bubblegum
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Adam Levin
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
doubleday and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
Cover photograph © Dorit Bar-Zakay/Moment/Getty Images
Cover design by Michael J. Windsor
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Levin, Adam, author.
Title: Mount Chicago : a novel / Adam Levin.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022019201 (print) | LCCN 2022019202 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385548243 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385548250 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3612.E92365 M68 2022 (print) | LCC PS3612.E92365 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220425
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019201
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019202
Ebook ISBN 9780385548250
ep_prh_6.0_140632922_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Also by Adam Levin
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Carrying Pictures of Chairman Mao
Wrong Body
Politics and the Chicagoan Language
Animal Psychology
A Young Jewish Schoolkid
The Downsides
Time Management
A Portrait of the Apter Schutz as Young Men
Face Problem
Another Downside
White Part
Endeavor
Unbecoming
Jewish Problem
Me Too
Stepping Up
Wounded Birds.MP4
Sound Body
Exit Apter
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
About the Author
for Camille
In order to grasp what was taking place within me at that moment, let us imagine that we each have an inner self of which the visible us is the sheath, and that this self, brilliant as light, is also as delicate as a shadow.
—Balzac
And then the storm of shit begins.
—Bolaño
Je chiais la nuit,
Je chiais le jour,
Je chiais partout,
Je chiais toujours!
—Man Bites Dog
Carrying Pictures of Chairman Mao
None of this happened. None of it will. The events I’ll describe, most of which will be set in the early twenty-twenties, will all be described in the late twenty-teens. The characters who those events will affect do not exist outside these pages, not even those characters who’ll strongly resemble certain people I know, and not even in those cases where the characters resembling people I know will have the same names as the people they’ll resemble. It’ll all be made up. I’m making it up.
* * *
—
No one I’ve been close with has ever died. I’ve met a couple Schutzes, but never an Apter. Not a single Gladman. I have never had more than $106,019.00. I have usually had less than $4,000.00. Today—February 2, 2018—I have a little less than $30,000. The seventeenth of November, 2021, will not fall on a Sunday, but a Wednesday. The Rainbo Club doesn’t serve Corona. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds wasn’t released till 2009. The Grant Park Lollapalooza Festival never takes place before the end of July. I have never had tenure or nieces or nephews. I’ve known comedic actors, but none of them were stand-ups. My dealings with mayors have not been extensive.
* * *
—
Once, at a Chicago Public Library ceremony honoring the author Don DeLillo, my wife shook the four-and-two-thirds-fingered hand of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who, later that evening, in his speech to those gathered, twice pronounced DeLillo like this:
Duh-lee-lee-yo.
* * *
—
Two decades–plus prior, when I was fourteen years old, summer-jobbing downtown at my father’s insurance firm, I spotted the city’s second Mayor Richard Daley, i.e. Richard M., a quarter block away. I was out on my lunch break. He was walking up Wacker with a couple other men, and he appeared so very squat and red-faced that I, who had started eating acid earlier that year, thought that maybe I was finally having a flashback, and so I approached him to get a closer look. I got closer than I’d meant to.
I wasn’t, it turned out, having a flashback.
* * *
—
I’ve never had a flashback. I no longer think that flashbacks are real. The only people who ever report having flashbacks are people who have had bad trips on acid.
Bad trips are panic attacks one has while on acid. If someone is on acid the first time they suffer a panic attack, they don’t think, “I am having a panic attack,” but rather, “I am having a bad trip.” And then, the next time they suffer a panic attack, they think, “This is kind of like that bad trip I had. I am having a flashback,” and that’s what they tell people about their panic attack: “I had a flashback.”
And people believe them. And the ones who like acid but who haven’t ever had a bad trip on acid imagine that a flashback will not feel like a panic attack, but like whatever being high on acid had felt like to them—like some kind of fun. So they imagine a flashback must be some kind of fun. But they never have flashbacks. There’s no such thing.
* * *
—
I have had bad trips, which is to say that I have had panic attacks while high on acid. But I didn’t have my first panic attack while not high on acid until I was nearly thirty years old, by which point I’d long since quit taking acid, and had long since worked (and, not so long after that, quit working) as a psychotherapist.
As a psychotherapist, I worked with a number of clients with anxiety disorders, which is to say a number of clients who suffered frequently from panic attacks, so when I had my first one while not high on acid, I wasn’t confused: I knew it was just a panic attack. It wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t as terrible as having a bad trip. Not remotely.
* * *
—
Bad trips are worse than anything. Mine were, at least. Unrelenting fear and pain. A sense of being on the verge of inflicting permanent damage on yourself. A sense that if you aren’t vigilant enough, you might—to pick just a couple examples—you might accidentally choke on your tongue, or swallow your lips or portions of your cheeks before having even realized you’d chewed them off.
I had all my bad trips at the age of seventeen. Three out of three trips in a row were bad. I’d taken acid some eighty-ninety times before that. I’d thought the world of acid, had faith in acid. I believed that taking it was central to who I was, and I suspected I was God. Not metaphorically.
* * *
—
I suspected that I had made the universe, filled it up with things and beings, and that I, wanting to experience my creations as one of my creations, had inflicted amnesia on myself, then birthed myself as the human being Adam Levin, and that when all was said and done, my amnesia would lift, and I would know what the experience of the universe I’d created was like for those who weren’t God, i.e. for those who I’d created. That seemed to me like something that God would really want.
* * *
—
When I was not high on acid, I didn’t feel like an amnesiac God, but often I would think as though I were—I’d been doing so since the age of four or five. Why? I’m unable to say why exactly, though I think I remember the moment it started.
My mom and I were watching Sesame Street. Or The Electric Company. I don’t recall which, but we were on our couch, watching one of those shows (or maybe it was The Great Space Coaster), and one of the puppets on the show kept saying, “I think therefore I am.” Repeating the phrase, over and over, changing the intonations and stresses. “I think therefore I am. I think therefore I am. I think therefore I am? I think therefore I am.” Etc. It went on for a minute, maybe two.
Confused, I asked my mom to explain what the puppet was saying.
“It’s saying,” she said, “that because it knows it thinks, it knows it’s real.”
“It’s a puppet, though,” I said. “It doesn’t think.”
“But we’re supposed to forget it’s a puppet while we’re watching the show. We’re supposed to pretend that the puppet can think, and that since it knows it thinks, it knows it’s real.”
“That’s true?” I said.
“Well, not for the puppet, unless we pretend. But what the puppet’s saying is true for people. They know
“I know I’m real because I know I think?”
“Yes.”
“How do I know I think?” I said.
“Because you can hear yourself think,” she said.
“That’s it?” I said. “That’s the only way?”
“Why are you making that face?” she said.
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“How do I know that you think?” I said. “I can’t hear you think.”
“I’m telling you I do.”
“But I can’t hear you doing it.”
“You can hear me talk,” she said. “What I’m saying is the sound of what I’m thinking.”
“How do I know that?”
“Because I’m telling you.”
“That doesn’t mean…That doesn’t make sense.”
“Calm down,” she said.
“I can hear the puppet talk.”
“Calm down,” she said.
“I can hear the puppet talk and the puppet isn’t thinking!”
“I’m not a puppet, Adam. I’m real.”
“I can’t hear you think!”
“Baby, come on, calm down,” she said, and hugged me close. I don’t know what happened next. I assume I calmed down, but I don’t remember. I asked my mother recently if she remembered, and she said she didn’t. She didn’t remember the conversation at all. She suspected, she said, I’d made the whole thing up.
“Why would I make that up?” I asked.
“No idea,” she said. “I’ve never understood why you make things up. You or your sisters.”
* * *
—
But that incident with the puppet reciting the cogito—right then is when it started, I think. The suspicion that I was an amnesiac God. Perhaps it was easier to harbor that suspicion than it was to contend with the possibility that the world was merely a dream I was having.
* * *
—
When I was high on acid, I not only suspected I was an amnesiac God, but I felt like an amnesiac God. I sensed connections between things and beings that I believed I couldn’t have sensed if I weren’t God, and I was happy to sense these connections and to think of myself as God. I believed the connections were real, were true. I was a serious boy, a boy who wanted as much truth and reality to be revealed to him (or by him) as possible, so I took the stuff whenever I could. It was the central occupation of my high school years, and I thought ill of people who’d had bad trips. I thought they were weak, and maybe even ugly, deep down in their souls (I believed in the soul). Which is why, after my first bad trip on acid, which lasted something like forty hours—far and away the worst forty hours of my life—I took acid twice more. One time a week later, the other time a month or so after that. I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t weak or ugly deep down, that that first bad trip—and, later, the second one—had been anomalous, and that the source of the badness could be discovered and thereby repaired by taking more acid.
I failed.
* * *
—
I’ve since become pretty sure that the bad trips’ badness had everything to do with my digestive system, which by then I’d all but ruined with hundreds of food-free breakfasts starring coffee and cigarettes, followed by hundreds of midmorning, evening, and late-night snacks of Rolaids and Tums. These intestinal abuses had begun to add up, and the thought that had announced the onset of all three bad trips was: “My guts are breaking down.”
I didn’t accept that at the time, however—the ruined digestive system hypothesis. I remembered the pain that triggered me to think “My guts are breaking down” as clear as I remembered the thought itself, but I insisted on believing that the pain and the thought were outcomes of the badness of the trip, not its causes.
In case this hasn’t come across already: I was very much a mind-over-matter kind of fool, a question-beggar, a chicken-or-the-egger. If someone accused me of putting the cart before the horse (many did; most often when I’d bring up the whole amnesiac God thing), I would deny the accusation by way of pointing out that a horse-pulled cart, if its driver so wished, could be deployed in the transportation of horses. As in: maybe other horses, bound for the glue factory, were riding in the cart behind the driver, lying on their sides, perhaps, half-dead. Or maybe the horses who were pulling the cart were all very sick, and were, themselves, to be turned into glue: maybe there were six of them pulling that cart, a cart that one healthy horse could have pulled, and the driver was planning to spend the cash the factory would pay him for these half-dozen horses to buy a new healthy one to pull him and his cart back home to the farm.
Were these irrelevant points to make in response to the initial accusation? Pretty much. Sure. Yes, of course. That is: unless they were full of so much brilliant insight and irony and paradox as to render the accusation itself irrelevant, which, by the time I finished making the “points,” they would have seemed to me to be. Furthermore, they would, in most cases, have seemed that way to my accuser as well, for he would not have likely heard me going off about my probable amnesiac Godhood to begin with—much less would he have bothered to attempt to argue about it—unless he’d been as high on acid as I.
Were I, at this writing, in a less self-sympathizing mood, I would delete the preceding couple of paragraphs, and just say I was an idiot. A solipsistic, juvenile idiot. But I wasn’t an idiot. Or I wasn’t just an idiot. I was at least, I would say, an interesting idiot. The premises I worked from were often false, my reasoning nearly as often unsound, and yet my dedication to both was uncommonly rigorous. I was, as I said, a serious boy.
A committed boy.
* * *
—
I was hard on myself. For six months or so after the third bad trip, things were…tricky. I believed myself to be a coward, and that was, I thought, the only consistent thing to believe, and, as such, the only courageous thing to believe. The only belief that could demonstrate to me the courage of my convictions was to believe myself a weakling with an ugly soul who was too afraid to face the truth, i.e. too afraid to keep taking acid.
And I was afraid. Afraid enough to quit taking acid. I haven’t taken it since then. I wouldn’t take it again for ten thousand dollars (twenty thousand maybe, fifty thousand for sure—I’m running out of money—but that’s neither here nor there, unless you’re offering, whoever you are).
* * *
—
I still think I’m a coward at times, but for reasons having nothing to do with drugs, which I still enjoy with some regularity—mostly alcohol, occasionally benzos, less frequently opioids, opiates, and MDMA. I think I’m a coward when I catch myself allowing that there might be some good, intelligent people—people as good and intelligent as any I care for—who have read my fiction without having loved it. When I catch myself thinking, “Good taste varies.”
We all know it doesn’t. Deep down, we know. We of good taste.
* * *
—
Perhaps I’ve gotten off track. What I was aiming to get at it is that the first time I encountered a mayor, it was the second Mayor Daley, on Wacker Drive, and because he appeared to be as squat and red-faced as an agitated piglet in an old cartoon, and because I was just fourteen years old and newly fanatical for LSD, I was hoping first and foremost that his exaggeratedly Daley-ish appearance signaled the onset of an acid flashback, and, curious as I was to explore the possibility that the mayor was somehow triggering the ostensible flashback—what did I know about the workings of flashbacks?—I moved closer to him.
