Report #2 from the FIRST FICTION TOUR--Lisa conquers Milwaukee!
My hotel room in Milwaukee looks out onto Applebee’s. It’s a special Milwaukeean Applebee’s, in their revitalized downtown, which does have some actual human beings walking around in it. I make the same observations I make every time I leave New York City: there are so many tubby people out there in the U.S. of A, and so many smokers. I walk around searching for Lake Michigan, which you would think would be pretty hard to miss. I finally find it, hiding behind a building that looks like a giant concrete swan, trying to lift off the ground. It’s their contemporary art museum, a big disruption in the blue.
In Lake Michigan, I see the biggest fish I have ever seen swimming around in water before -- a good three feet -- and I look around for a little pebble or something I can chuck into the water, coaxing it back to the surface in its search for food. There is not one single person. That’s the other thing I notice when I go to cities that are not New York: they are so clean. Pebble-less. Everything in its proper place. I don’t miss the smell of stale urine, but I would like access to a little emergency makeshift fish food right about now.
I come across a beautiful old building -- Richardsonian Romanesque, but with a lighter touch than most in this style -- and it’s been converted into, you guessed it, luxury lofts. Around the corner from luxuryville is the cheese tourist trap, where I have a cube of gouda and warm my ears, stinging with cold from the wind off Lake Michigan. It’s a beautiful city, Milwaukee. Who knew? There’s just the matter of the wind -- I’m freezing, but to locals, this is a warm day. A man sits outside on Juneau Avenue, shirtless, in Birkenstocks.
The reading is across the street from the wonderful bookshop here, Harry Schwartz. It’s in a sweet neighborhood on a street called Downer, and we try not to take that as symbolic. We read in a room on the second floor of a restaurant down the street. We compete with the clanging of plates being tossed into the dishwasher, and a couple chatting loudly in the corner. There are 15 people in attendance. I sell one book, to the chatting couple. I am remembering what the other tour-goers told me when I asked if it would be worth me funding this trip myself: it was packed, they told me. We sold piles of books. St. Louis, my tourmates and I decide, will be better. Now I realize that the New York reading was great. What was I complaining about?
--LISA SELIN DAVIS