Chicago's Club of the UnClubbable

  

Above - Mycroft Holmes - Below Mike Houlihan in manly Pre-Labor Day Panama tan suit gives a stern temperance lecture to an obviously clubbable and reed thin chap at a charitable event. Absent from this charitable event were members of Chicago's Union League Club.


Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes, the talented and cerebral sons of Bob and Tess Holmes, coal carters from Yorkshire, remind me of Mike Houlihan: Like Mycroft, Mike Houlihan is cerebral, philosophical and poetic:Mike Houlihan - Author, Actor, Playwright, Film Director, Columnist, Patriot, Wit, Gadabout, Free-Spender, Arch-Goodguy, Pugilist, Censor.

Like Mycroft given to deep thought to the point of ennui:

...he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right. Again and again I have taken a problem to him, and have received an explanation which has afterwards proved to be the correct one. And yet he was absolutely incapable of working out the practical points...

– Sherlock Holmes, speaking of his brother in "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter"

From our friends at Wikpedia

And yet like Sherlock (- Ratiocinator extraordinaire, dope fiend, tobacconist, actor par excellence, musician, grifter, and wower of hot chicks) a man of the world, .

Houli is a complex man of universal tastes and inclinations - at once private and thoughtful and concurrently a Rabelaisian Rounder of the First Order.

Mike Houlihan,an 18th Century man of Johnsonian ( Samuel Johnson ) exertions and talents trapped in a faux-Edwardian world of stuffed shirts and phonies.

Houli got clubbed by the membership committee of the Union League Club - a dusty and pretentious convention center for low-brows with American Express Gold Cards. He was deemed 'unclubbale' - to use Dr. Johnson's 18th Century coinage. His heartache cried up to dry our eyes from the pulpy pages of Cliff Carlson's Irish American Magazine and made them moist with brotherly understanding - Page 28 - click my post title for the link:

Here is a poignant passage:

Of course I’m happy now that I
couldn’t join their club. Who wants
to go where they’re not wanted? But
these schmucks wouldn’t even put it in
writing, no letter, just the word passed
on to me, “Sorry you’re not our kind
darling.”
It’s all for the best. I couldn’t afford
it now anyway. However I would suggest
they remove the word “Chicago”
from their moniker at the Union League
Club. As Eddie Vrdolyak once said, “In
Chicago, we don’t stab you in the back,
we stab you in the front!” Well not
these guys.
So I will take pride in their snub and
remember my mother’s words “the bitter
lesson is best taught”. It’s what I got for
sticking my nose into a wasps nest.
Of course I forgive them and even
though I may announce to the world that
the Union League Club can kiss my fat
Irish ass, I’m actually, in my own way,
just turning the other cheek

Christian Gentleman to the backbone!

Houli, My Dear Fellow, a man of your expanded worth should not be confined, much less defined by a membership. You do more in a day than most of the Union League Club's overpaid ambulance chasers in two-tone broadcloth $400 shirts do a lifetime.

Who was it that said 'Study everything; join nothing?'

Mike Houlihan's Giant's eyes take in the cant and hypocrisy of our world right here in Chicago. This man is not Clubbable? Pish Posh!

Houli, enact a Club without Walls; found an Association without a Membership Committee. Make it an open membership to whomever you have the grace with whom you deign to congress.

To the phonies, snobs, louts, boors, tightwads - you might be unclubbable.

Yarns From Cleek of Chicago -The Singular Case of Cole Day

Note to Dear Reader - An earlier Post recounted the low blackguarding of Mike Houlihan by the snobs of the Union League Club - on response Mike founded the Cleek of Chicago - the Driver of the City:Mashies, Rakes and Niblicks are for smaller souls. The Cleek of Chicago is Big, Big Club!

New York – Workers at New York's Bronx Zoo found the poisonous Egyptian cobra that escaped from its pen a week ago and has kept area residents alarmed ever since.
The serpent is alive and under observation and will be on view to the public again if the planned checkup finds it in good condition, according to zoo officials cited by the online edition of the New York Daily News.
The search team caught the hooded snake Thursday with some special tongs and hooks inside the Reptile House at the zoo, which the cobra had never left.
Zoo workers brought the Egyptian cobra out of hiding with a scattering of wood shavings that rats and mice use for nesting around the building, according to the CNN online edition, so that it would smell like mealtime to the serpent and lure it into the open.

Among the Doric Columns of Chicago's Newest Club, Renaissance Man Mike Houlihan explains International history and Morality to Journeyman Reader Pat Hickey - no mean task that: ( hushed quietude erupted by outraged incredulity!)

" Found him indeed! Found! Nay, those jackanape public service layabouts would not know a snake from a five iron, Hickey. Mike Bloomberg was at wit's end and asked for my assistance. Off to the Apple, I bustle, my Gladstone packed with Arctic foul weather gear, given the vicissitudes in the winds and currents of this our planet earth and Mother Nature's singular affinity for heaping snows upon the American eastern seaboard, and soundly counselled his ministers on where to find the Egyptian twister. No reptile -Democrat, Republican, or other cold-blooded creature flourishes in the open, mind you. This uncircumcised serpent would be found in the very same Reptilian Domicile from whence only the panic of louts and ninnies Twittering with thumbs akimbo emerged. I informed the Mayor's men that, in fact, fugitive meat rope had not left the Zoo at All. Why leave the Bronx, Old Man? Beckon the adder out of his lair with sprinklings of wood and leafy composite where a mighty meal of mice might be had."

Astounding, Houli!

"No less astounding than man's inability to recall past habits. Occam's Razor tells us that were one to be caused misty-eyed and worried by Dad's absence at mealtime, might just portend a brisk and healthful walk up to Keegan's Pub, rather than a call to Chicago 911. There, the Roistering Pater Familias might be found under a pile of great-coats forgotten by drunken young people -next to the GOLD CUP GOLF machine."


What common sense might do for man, Houli.

" A Quid Nunc for the ages, Hickey, my son. Now, about the current conundrum! Worthington, charge my Auchentoshan with the soda, there's a good man. This damned whisky I found wholly unsuitable to the snifter - it is as overrated as a Dick Morris insight. I prefer the Bruichladdich 15 -fresh coastal sea air, some oak, vanilla, nuts, honey and a touch of brine.Palate: Creamy and sweet, brine develops considerably, then notes of malt and pepper.Finish: Long, gentle, flavorful, and slightly oily . . ."

Houli, sound chap, your latest Gordian Knot.

" Indeed. Cole Day was one of the finest sprinters in the Chicago Catholic League - ran for Loyola Academy in the mid-1970's - at about the time you were applying the Socratic Method at Bishop McNamara. He went on to run for Villanova at the very end of Eamon Coglan's great career as Chairman of the Boards under the tutelage Jumbo Elliot. Cole Day the short distances and Coglan the mighty Mile and change. Cole Day emerged from the Augustinian university with a solid business degree; alas, sans the notoriety of Eamon Coglan.

Cole went into venture capitalism and made piles of money, that vanished in the recent national economic unpleasantness. Cole Day went missing and his life partner -Cole bats from the other-side of the plate -called me last Saturday -sharply at 3 PM at WCEV - Chicago's Voice AM Radio 1450 on your dial . . ."

Indeed, the very place for wholesome chat and pointed commentary on mankind's folly, to be sure my peripatetic friend, but to the case!

" The life partner was beside himself with anxiety and had yet to announce the disappearance of his sprinting sodomite on the Social Networks abounding - he called me to sort out the ramifications. Cole Day had gone missing a week ago Wednesday -March 16th."

Two weeks ago Wednesday . . .

" I went of course to the Exchange that had been the Temple of Doom for Day's Fortunes and every person there happened to be the same age as you and I - the darker side of Fifty and the Sunny Side of Seventy, Hickey! It was singularly interesting to be in a locale of such universally aged persons as myself - outside of Friday Nights at the Lounge of Beverly Woods . . .naturally.

I asked the Exchange President, a ruddy and solid man who had gone to Steinmetz High School Class of 1965, 'Cole Day?'

He replied, 'Boy, do I remember coal day the sound of the truck pulling up close to gangway of my Dad's two-Flat, while I laid in bed waiting for Chuck Bill's Adventure Theatre to come on and the clatter of coal cascading down the chute . . .' He was joined by other contemporaries who chorused -'I loved coal day! The guys pushing the wheel-barrows always put us kids on for ride. Hey, remeber when we all used to burn our garbage out in those concrete incinerators in the alleys -We used to climb in them and play army tank and kill maggots with our fingers. We used to take handfuls of maggots and use them to catch crayfish under the viaduct on Wood Street. I miss the cinders on the snow - remember that? Every lawn had snow dappled with coal cinders and nuclear fallout from the A Bomb Testing. How about Sonic Booms? And Nike Sites all along Lake Shore Drive? The stockyards only smelled on Wednesdays! & etc.

In bemused frustration I raised plaintiff hands 'Ladies and Gents, Please! Cole Day?'

They chorused - It was Wednesdays before noon! The big trucks came down Western and . . ."

Cole Day, Houli?

" Remember, Hickey, Cole Day was a sprinter of singular abiliity! I found out that he taken up another life partner - he had taken up with one the recent Wisconsin Democrat Exiles with whom he had become enchanted - they now reside in that Dairyland Arcadia of Madison-you know the heart wants what the serpent demands and such; thus, an unhappy ending for one. Nevertheless, the thoroughly enjoyable round of reminiscences at the Exchange. I had almost completely forgotten about Chuck Bill's Adventure Theatre -'Ding Hao Feather-merchants!' Old William of Occam! Snakes and Coal, Hickey. Snakes and coal.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamonn_Coghlan


http://skinnyhouli.com/