The Yeti and the Shangri La

Jesus. It was supposed to be a simple weekday lunch with my father.

I was fourteen years old that bitterly cold December morning in 1969 when my friends Paul Grunwald and Mike McKay rode the train with me to Chicago’s Loop.

  We visited the extraordinary music shops on Wabash Avenue to look at sheet music and records. We couldn’t buy anything because we had spent everything we had on the train tickets.

Developers had only just started building the suburban malls that eventually sucked most customers out of city centers. In the late ’60s, State Street in The Loop was still Chicago’s shopping mecca, and seven department stores and many specialty retailers still survived—but there was a seedy side to the whole affair. On the south end of State, there was a burlesque house called The Follies. The Pacific Gardens Mission sat nearby. At the mission, winos got a meal and a cot for the night if they listened to a sermon.

A sleazy theater, the Shangri La, resided on State north of Lake Street. The Shangri La featured adult films twenty-four hours a day. Apparently, the drunks from the mission needed a little something to think about during the sermons, and the bankers sought relief from the stress arising after screwing their clients.

Paul, Mike, and I walked past the Shangri La on the way to Andy’s Bar to meet my father for lunch. Andy’s was a block north of the river near Pop’s office at The Chicago Daily News. He was a journalist. The paper had moved to this location in 1962 from its original building in the West Loop. Andy’s Bar was around the corner from that first location and followed the paper north to this new site because Andy knew who buttered his bread every day.

The bar was packed, but Pop met us at the door and ushered us past the line of waiting customers to the only empty booth. The old guy had some pull with Andy. He said hello to several acquaintances as we walked to our table.

The place was crammed full of men. There might have been two women, but this was a testosterone-rich environment. The crowd included newspaper guys (pressmen and reporters), regular business jamokes, and ironworkers. The ironworkers sat at tables covered with empty beer bottles. They drank their lunch before going fifty stories up into the skeleton of a building under construction. The atmosphere inside Andy’s was loud, hot, and humid, with a thick fog of rank smoke from the cigarettes and cigars sticking out of almost every face.

Once we were seated, I introduced Paul and Mike to my father. The waiter came over and greeted him by name. We ordered lunch and settled into an awkward silence. This was a new experience for all of us. I had never met my father for lunch before and he probably intimidated my friends. He was distracted and kept looking towards the restaurant’s door. It seemed that having lunch with me and my friends was an imposition.

Thankfully the food arrived, and we all had an excuse for not talking.

I was chomping on my burger when a man with a heavy Chicago accent bellowed above the cacophony, “Is dere a Tony Smith in de house?”

All of the customers stopped eating and talking to focus on the source of the interruption.

In the middle of the room stood either a yeti or a Chicago cop; it was hard to tell which. He wore a huge black fur hat, heavy leather mittens, a long dark coat, and massive boots encrusted with slush and road salt. The left earflap on his hat flopped down over his ear and the other earflap rose like a bent horn on the right side of his noggin.

As he turned to scan the crowd, he pulled out his baton and roared even louder, “Is dere goddamn Tony Smith in de goddamn house?”

Now everyone started looking around the room for a goddamn Tony Smith.

I thought, “Please, Jesus, tell me there is another goddamn Tony Smith.”

Goddamn. I was the only goddamn Tony Smith in the goddamn room.

My father stood and loudly proclaimed, “Here’s Tony Smith.”

Thanks, Pop.

My friends’ eyes bulged out of their sockets like ping-pong balls. Paul turned purple, while Mike lost all color in his face.

Officer Sasquatch steamed our way through the tables and chairs as the other patrons cleared a path. He loomed over our booth and stared down at me with steely blue eyes and ice in his mustache. Up close I spotted a massive drop of clear snot hanging at the end of his nose.

“Are youse Tony Smith?”

His voice carried a nasal quality. He was beyond loud; you could have heard him from two blocks away during a thunderstorm.

“Yes, sir.”

Everyone kept quiet so they could hear what came next.

“I have reports dat youse were seen exiting da Shangri La teater twenty minutes ago.”

“I walked past it on the way here. We didn’t go in.”

People near us laughed at that one.

I noticed the drop of snot wasn’t dangling from his nose anymore. Whose sandwich did it fall on?

“Were you loiter’n in front of da Shangri La? Looking at da posters and stuff?”

“No, sir.”

“You sure? I got dese reports.”

“We walked on the other side of the street.”

Louder laughter rose from a wider circle of listeners.

My father’s eyes drilled holes in mine from across the table.

“Who’s we? You mean dem two?” He wagged his baton inches from Paul’s and Mike’s Faces.

They slouched down and stared at their food. They were suddenly fascinated by the presentation of their meals. I didn’t have many friends and had probably just lost two of them.

“Yes, sir.”

He waved his baton at me and said, “Well, I’ll let youse tree go dis time, but I got my eyes on youse.”

With that, he walked out of Andy’s. Bigfoot had left the building.

Everyone in the place was laughing and a few applauded the performance.

I sat there shaking, desperately trying to hold down the contents of my stomach.

When I looked up my father grinned at me like he was the Cheshire Cat.

He explained that the cop was a friend he’d put up to the whole performance. He said this guy was assigned to a miserable beat on the subterranean streets north of the river because he repeatedly ticketed the Cadillacs illegally parked around city hall.

Pop arranged all this before cell phones. It took planning. He reserved the booth, told Andy, talked to the cop, and made up the alleged crime. It came together flawlessly.

Who does that to a kid and why? Pop did it because he found it hilarious. Looking back over fifty years, I too find it kind of funny.

Some of the emotional scars have begun to heal.