Several years ago, while stepping out of a CTA train in Chicago, I heard him: “May the Force be with you,” he said. For some reason I looked upward. It was the warm baritone of the conductor. Others looked upward. Smiles broke out, a wave of surprised laughter rolled through the platform, then the day returned to itself. The very next day, as I stepped from the train, the conductor told disembarking passengers to: “Stay in school. Call your mom.”
I had been a features writer at the Chicago Tribune about a year; I am still a features writer at Chicago Tribune. I asked around about the conductor and heard that he was a kook, and shy, and also difficult to talk to. Curious, one day, I got into a car near the front of the train and when my stop arrived, I sprinted to his cab, knocked on his window and got his name.
It became a short portrait of a lonely man, yet hilariously perverse: the CTA, confused by his good cheer, took days to decide if it approved or disapproved of conductors being nice.
It also became the most-read story on the Tribune’s website that year, though for myself, it was also unnerving: An editor told me that she loved the story but to not get used to doing stories about minor, everyday characters and slices of culture — “That’s going away.”
I got into journalism 20 years earlier because I loved tales of the prosaic, the old journalistic tradition epitomized by the New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell, who found the texture of the day on a sidewalk. I started out of college at Premiere, a culture magazine that still indulged narrative; I spent a decade at the Toledo Blade, juggling duties as film critic with a fever for finding the compelling in the seemingly mundane. But only once I left for the Chicago Tribune did I realize just how niche this reporting was becoming.
My specialty at the Tribune has become a kind of culture writing as viewed from the edges — a profile of an accordion-shop owner, a portrait of a zoo that removed every artificial tree stump from exhibits, a cataloguing of a massive warehouse devoted to movie props, a profile of the owners of the only Portuguese-Chinese restaurant in the United States.
My job has been the nooks and crannies exploding beneath our feet, and the marginalized who are being left behind — the texture and the context for our new American landscape.
Christopher Borrelli 