 It happens at times when one's birthplace becomes one's hometown, which then ultimately turns into one's home for life: a constant point of reference for life going forward. Tony Fitzpatrick was born 40 years ago in Chicago's south side to parents born also in the same neighborhood. His life as an artist and the addictive inquisitiveness that fuels it has taken him all over the world. He has lived at times in New York (Coney Island), New Orleans, and Saramento, Italy, to name but a few of many places, but he has always been anchored in Chicago. This group of 25 drawings is a visual translation of a verbal narrative passed from father to son, a documentation of a way of life in a very special place. It is a unique collaboration of two storytellers, and a record of an invaluable personal legacy.
Tony's father, Jim Fitzpatrick, died on September 17th of this year. I had met him and had a sense of his immense presence as a real comic and lovable character, but I really got to know him during the last six months of his life, while he was suffering and when his prognosis had become clearly hopeless. In these last months I never spoke with him, but I spent many hours on the telephone with Tony. He talked, I listened; to stories of Bum Town, of 'The Back of the Yards', 'Richard Drinking in the City', and of 'Death Finds Johnny "the Snake" Mundo'. These characters were brought to life for Tony through the eyes of his father, at moments and in ways that all sons would envy. As a child-a childhood that seemed to last to age twenty-five-the younger Fitzpatrick found trouble with ease. One of eight children, with all seven siblings leading exemplary lives as students and professional people, Tony opted for street fighting, criminal mischief, and ultimately a rather unconventional and unpredictable (albeit now quite successful) career as an actor and artist. While always able to charm his mother, in his youth he was the absolute calamity of his father's existence. He was permanently expelled from a series of Catholic schools, and regularly dismissed for the day for various misbehaviors. Jim Fitzpatrick would fetch Tony from the nuns, promise them that he would never commit the offense again, and assign him the passenger seat for a punitive day of riding around with him as he made his rounds as a burial vault salesman calling on Chicago area funeral homes. According to his father, Tony's was 'a perfectly good Catholic education shot in the ass'. The ride would start of with a few menacing 'Jesus Christ's, and threats of an impending ass-kicking, but the mood would shift and defer to the raconteur's need to describe the passing landscape. The stories would include Cubs Park legends, The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, and the tale of Dion O'Bannion's murder by Capone henchmen across the street from Holy Name Cathedral. They would drive through Bum Town, a name for a neighborhood also known as Roseland and Pullman on the far southeast side of town. Bum Town is also the title of this series of drawings, and serves a metaphor for, as the father saw it, the great and rightful place of Chicago. The stench of death at the stockyards, for example, would precipitate a defense of the institution of slaughter. Cruelty was a part of it, perhaps actual evil as well, but it was a necessary evil, and an institution that was part of Jim Fitzpatrick's hometown. In 'The Back of the Yards' the artist translates the subtle sense of pathos implicit in his father's justification of the industry. The rail yards were in Bum Town. Hobos jumped the trains there, headed for nowhere. This was the moment for a father to present an object lesson. 'You'll end up like them,' he warned. 'This is where their American dream begins, and see those guys jumping off?... maybe this is where it ends too.' This struck me as an effective measure of paternal counsel of a delinquent son. The result perhaps can be seen in 'The Gentleman Hobo', a dignified bum, and a religious man, tuxedoed but heading nowhere nonetheless. Saint Theresa was Jim Fitzpatrick's savior and spiritual partner. She traveled with him every day of his life and provided him with strength and a sense of peace through his suffering and final confrontation with mortality. When Jim won a few bucks in the lottery, St. Theresa's flower society would get a cut. In 'Saint Theresa of Western Avenue' she protects the Funtown Game Room while watching over the car wash and the Waveland Bowl, indelible memories of father and son activities preserved uniquely in this image. In 'The Invisible Man' the artist, now in his 15th year of recovery, sees himself as a defeated drunk. He walks the streets of his father's Bum Town, spiritless and guilt-ridden as a young man, broken and destroyed, in his own view a thorough failure whose self-hate is worsened by his father's love and acceptance. Tony's issues with his father over his own failings have been extremely painful, and the pain is quite evident in this drawing. The characters of Bum Town are rooted in the real, and altered by their existence in the intersection of the minds of the artist and his father. The drawings are a fusion of the powerful emotion of grief, the miracle of the imagination, and the skill of the hand. They commenced as a living tribute and continue still, as this is being written, as a memorial--a unique elegy to a man and a citation of the tradition of folk story telling carried out in the contemporary moment. How blessed Jim Fitzpatrick is to have his own idiosyncratic story of the place he loved, and his own take on its people, told in this way. Mickey Cartin P.S. Hey, Tony, you know how you feel you could never repay your father for all he gave you and all he did for you. Well, I watched your soul go into these drawings, and with them you evened the score. Your own fatherhood, and your life's work as an artist brings great honor to his memory. |
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