Drum Sticks: A Story From Scrap Mettle SOUL, Chicago

Eve Tulbert stage-managed "The Whole World Gets Well," a new community performance by Scrap Mettle SOUL in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood in May 2002. She shares the following experience.

—Ed.

Where does the story of Sticks begin? Could it be under a bridge in the pouring rain? Packed into that suitcase she pulls around? On a CTA train at 3 a.m.? In places not fit for sleeping. In dreams interrupted by the open-and-shut of the train doors at every station. Or maybe her story is a very old one, maybe it’s wandered for many years, addicted and yearning and seeking through these Uptown streets.

I first saw her again in the spring. "Man, why’d she have to come here?" I was scurrying around in my best stage-manager huff, and there she was at the door. Drunk. With a suitcase. Her dreadlocks covered in little pieces of metal. And she’s got on this jewelry made from pop-can pull-tabs. It was a chilly day, so she had on a lot of shirts, seven or eight at least. In her left hand were wooden drum sticks, covered in duct tape. And her right hand, as always, bore Uptown, a rubber monkey puppet who has the unfortunate habit of mimicking me when I speak.

Homeless performance artist, that’s her. Reeking of cheap liquor and sheer magic. "No time to deal with this," I thought.

We hadn’t seen her since last year’s show, when she was forced out of Margate Park, where we perform. She had come to a lot of rehearsals, but in the end, she blew it. Drunk, she turned a perfectly good five-character scene into a long, slurred soliloquy. Mouths dropped open. Total silence, until someone led her by the elbow off of the stage. The park supervisor told her not to come back.

But she arrived this spring again. Not quite like crocuses, but surely a sight. Richard Geer, the director, and I pulled her into a side room. "What’s up Sticks?"

"Now don’t you go and lecture me, " she said. "I’m in a terrible mess, you know. They kicked me right out of my place. My own mother hung up the phone on me. They stole all my stuff. That shelter lady, she don’t trust me. But I’m just trying to help people out there. I’m just trying to do the right thing. I just want to be in this play. And you gotta give me a lecture."

We reminded her of last year’s episode. "You remember that?" she said. "Who told you? You know I wouldn’t do that to you all again! Just come and let me be in this thing."

She refused to surrender to our common sense. So we began again. I remember her story as she spoke it that day. Behind every word were so many shadow stories. Everyone who’d given up on her. Burnt out and broke. Fed up, dried out, sick of it. But in there, too, was a woman who really did just want to do right, who wanted a second (and third, and fourth) chance.

So we came to an agreement. "You can come to the park. You can be in rehearsal. But only if you don’t drink that day. From sun-up till the time you come. Not a drop to drink. Then you can stay. Shake on it."

Now, part of me believes in second chances, and part of me doesn’t. She won’t make it through the rehearsals, I thought. Let alone the performances. How could she? Plus the fact that drinking wasn’t her only problem. In the following week, she got banned from the shelter for fighting. She got ripped off while sleeping–her pants pocket cut open with a razor on the Elevated train. And then there was that sudden April snowstorm–not enough room in the shelters, and not enough blankets in the park.

But she was there everyday for rehearsal. Everyday, I asked her "Did you have anything alcoholic to drink today?" An adamant No. A startled No. A "Ha, I got you this time" No. But always a No. And more or less, I believed her. Just one day at a time. She danced, and sang, and ventriloquized every line of rehearsal with that goddamn monkey puppet.

Not to say it was a smooth ride. Sometimes she really pissed me off. "Don’t you have anything to eat up in here? How about some pickles? Man. This isn’t as good as last year. WHERE’D YOU PUT MY DRUMSTICKS? They were right here!" I’d take a deep breath and send her off with a Styrofoam cup full of Chips Ahoy cookies.

But then there were the surprises. One night, we had some visitors from the U.K. As a group, the cast talked about what they wanted for their health and the health of their community. Someone called on Sticks to speak. "AAAWW, I knew you were gonna make me say it. Okay. I WANT TO STOP DRINKING! What can you do to support me? You know! Just give me a little love." She said it out in front of everybody. She said the unspoken thing that everyone knew about, but had only talked about in hushed whispering. The most cold-hearted among us knew she had a right to ask for that little thing.

That night, Patricio gave her a cigarette, and they had a heart-to-heart in a cold, drizzly rain. I watched their smoke curl up into the streetlights. I watched her lean in to catch his words. "I am alcoholic. Seven years ago, I live where you live, on the street. Pero, I said, I gotta change me. I got to cause nobody else can do this thing."

But could she change? Would this year’s performance be different than last? I fought for her in my late-night hoping, we all did, I think. When the pressure of performance picked up, and when audiences started rolling in, we all prayed in our way—for her and for the rest of us.

Now, on the very last day of our run, it was finally a warm day. The cast was late, and we started the show in a rush. Sticks had made it all the way through the run without drinking. I was silently proud, but I had slipped out of the habit of asking her the uncomfortable question "Did you have a drink today?"

During the middle of the performance, I heard some shouting. Some loud screaming coming from the corner of the theater. "Oh God, who was that?" I looked around from my perch while the audience whispered uncomfortably. Finally, the shouting stopped. I looked over to see Sticks at the corner of the stage.

"Oh, brother." But it wasn’t what I thought. She had whispered herself up to that very drunk man causing all of the noise. And she had silenced him. Silence. Even from the clatter of metal in her hair. I saw her nodding as she asked him to be quiet, on her face, a smirk of wisdom and experience.

She had the wisdom we needed at that moment—the wisdom of the unexpected, the disruptive. That crazy, magic, puppet-talking sort of wisdom. And through it, I discovered something. There is an artistry in craziness, in addiction, and in Sticks. In the way that she plays the drums into the air—with only the sticks. In how she dances passionately—her body aching under all of those shirts. In how she speaks her truth through a monkey puppet.

I don’t know why it is that some of us end up on the stage, and some of us end up on the street. But maybe it’s really the same thing that leads us there. They are both addictive places. Places where rules can get broken or set aside. Places where trash gets turned into art. The things about us that are secret, smelly, impolite, even lunatic–these things can be revealed. They become acceptable. They become useful, even, or suddenly beautiful.

How do we do this? How does this happen? It is as mysterious as alchemy to me. How do we turn the lead of suffering and trash and madness into gold? I toss and turn on the question, and I still don’t know the answer. But I know someone who does. And luckily, she refuses to go.

Eve Tulbert is manager of Stone Soup, a housing collective in Chicago, Ill.

See a review of "The Whole World Get Well" on the Community Arts Network Web site.

Original CAN/API publication: June 2002