THE READER

"THE CULTURE CLUB"    
Chicago Reader August 6th, 2004 -- Deanna Isaacs

"The Underground Is So Over"

     
photo: LLOYD DEGRANE

For a while last month, it looked like Fred Burkhart really was down-and-out.
On the evening of June 29th the old beatnik climbed a stepladder to mount a
six-foot-long sign he hoped would reverse the fortunes of his weekly open mike
and coffeehouse, Burkhart Underground. He'd been operating the performance
space for six years on the lower level of his ramshackle rented home at 2845 N.
Halsted, right below the art gallery and photography studio he's maintained there
for many years. His alcohol-free Sunday night soirees usually attracted an
audience of 20 to 80 mostly underage would-be hipsters by word of mouth. They
paid a suggested donation of five bucks each -- if they paid at all -- for coffee, tea,
or soda and a turn at the open mike or simply soaked up the red-light and incense-
atmosphere, listening to bands like Milkbaby, browsing the gallery, and playing
chess in the backyard.

But in recent months attendance had lagged, and Burkhart, thinking a little
visibility might help, hit on the sign. It wasn't fully attached when he felt the ladder
shift and give way, trapping his legs behind the rungs as he fell. As soon as he hit
the pavement, he knew his back was broken. "I couldn't move, I was partially
paralyzed, and within two seconds the sign came crashing sown on my head," he
says. "At that instant I knew this was my fate. It was truly a sign from God!"

Burkhart's life story, as he tells it, is available to anyone with Internet access.
Three years ago( and this is part of the tale), a girlfriend gave him a computer, and
he taught himself how to use it. Now his Web site is a virtual version of his home,
with an online gallery showing the wo4rk of other artists, a section of his own
paintings and photographs (including his inventory of "naked white women" and
documentary shots of the Klan), articles profiling the coffeehouse, his take on
everything from sex to religion, and extensive accounts of his background,
beginning with his childhood in an Ohio garage with a coal miner grandfather.
Told that his father died in World War II and that his mother had abandoned him,
he was adopted at age nine by a couple he would later learn were his paternal
uncle and aunt. (Just eight years ago, Burkhart relates, he learned that it was his
father that left town, and that his mother was a woman he'd known as a waitress
in a local restaurant, who treated him kindly but never let on about their relationship.

Smart but socially maladroit, Burkhart drifted into delinquency in adolescence,
ripping off record stores and falling prey to drugs. "It didn't take much to put a boy
away in those days," he says. He left his college-prep high school in the tenth grade
and spent the next three years in reform school, pursuing a higher education.

After getting out, Burkahrt worked on riverboats, had a "real" job in 1963 at an
office supply company (where he did double duty as a union steward of a Chicago
local #743, meeting Jimmy Hoffa that same year of his strange disappearance.)
Vowing never to work again, he he lived the hobo life from New York to California,
waking up one day like Ulysses of old, stranded on Venice Beach to find that more
than a decade had gone by. Back in Cincinnati, still deep into alcohol and drugs,
he wound up in jail, took a look at his then 40-year-old self, swore off the hard stuff,
grabbed a piece of contraband butcher paper and ball-point pen and began drawing.
"I drew my way out of jai, and I've never been back since," he says. He moved to
Chicago with a girlfriend and rented a storefront near where he lives now. On the day
their lease expired, they stumbled on the century-old house on Halsted, which had
amazingly been vacant for nine months... apparently waiting for them. It had a
For Rent sign and a "compassionate old Jew" of a landlord who, when he heard they
were expecting a baby, told them to keep their first month's rent. That was 18 years
ago.

Burkhart's daughter, Trinity Valentine, the love of his life (and queen of his web
site), was born on Valentine's Day, 1986, and became his constant companion --
until her mother left him nine years ago, taking the child with her. (and the scripture
reads... Jesus wept.) Burkhart sees his daughter irregularly now. He says he built
the coffeehouse out of the love she left him, and so she'd have a place to come home
to, filled with the art and awareness of her peers.

Burkhart had hoped that the coffeehouse would be a communal project, with
others pitching in to help, but that never happened. Instead, he was spending 30 or
35 hors a week on it. In a flinty letter to his e-mail list, written upon his return from
the hospital, he noted that the coffeehouse kids, who with rare exception "never
showed up to do anything, yet ironically continued to profess their undying gratitude
for the place" weren't pitching in now now that he needed money for food and rent
either. "I'm asking you to help me stay a float in this time of crisis... I can give you
photos and art in exchange for your donations," he wrote. As for the coffeehouse,
"unless someone wants to take it on themselves and organize future events around
here, don't expect me to either... I am using this time to prioritize, and return to my
own art, not yours."

Burkhart says he needs"about two grand a month" to pay the rent and utilities. In
July people came through with some help -- not the Underground crowd, but mostly
others who've know him for years, and there's been talk of a couple of benefits, to be
held at venues other than the house on Halsted.

Burkhart's on the mend and says the coffeehouse may reemerge at a later date,
for special events, but it won't be back on a weekly basis without your commitment.