Sitting in a chair inside a room at the sprawling Rush University Medical Center, in its intensive care section to be specific, hooked up to tubes and monitors and other medical gizmos, Tony Fitzpatrick and his disposition are as sunny as the day outside.
“I have great doctors and all the people here are just terrific,” he says, going on to explain that the reason he is here is that he has long had pulmonary fibrosis, and a few weeks ago, that infection started to spread. He could no longer breathe without tremendous effort and so his doctors determined that he would have to undergo a double lung transplant once his body was in better shape.
“It’s not like I’ve never been on a diet before,” he said. “I’ve got to lose 40 pounds, already down almost 10, before I’ll be eligible but I know I can do that.”
That’s Tony being Tony, optimistic in the extreme, talking about all manner of things that he will be doing, wants to do, after he gets new lungs. “Or if they can’t get me new lungs, then I’ll just be attached to oxygen for the rest of my life, but I will have a life,” he said.
He has had quite a life to date. A child of a loving family but a rather aimless young man, he was raised in suburban Lombard. I met him in 1981 at a memorial service for writer Nelson Algren and he started rambling in dizzying fashion about Algren, boxing, Chicago, the White Sox, growing up in Villa Park, bartending, bouncing and booze. He told me proudly, handing me a crude but striking portrait of Algren, “This was drawn with old cigarette butts.”
He was something of a wild child, but after giving up booze on, he says, on”Oct. 5, 1983, at 8 a.m.,” in the wake of a car crash that almost killed him, he began to focus on a creative career that has made him successful as an artist, with his work in many private collections and museums around across the planet. He has had success as a radio host, in films and on local theatrical stages.
Along for most of this ride has been his wife Michele, an interior designer, wine store owner and a delightful woman to whom he has been married since 1991.
She tells me a story: “When Tony and I were newlyweds, we stayed with my grandmother in New Jersey. This was the first time she had met him and was of course very charmed. She sized Tony up and down, looked at me and said, ‘You will never have a dull moment with this one.'”
She knew that when she met him, and it has been quite a ride, a few bumps along the way, but she has been at the hospital with him daily, as have their adult kids, the actor and filmmaker Max and filmmaker and social activist Gaby.
There has also been a steady stream of visitors. Fitzpatrick has lived a life jam-packed with friends and his hospital stay has not been a quiet one. He has been visited by colleagues from the worlds of theater, film, visual art and journalism. He has cast a wide net in his 66 active years. He has been visited by friend Dave Bonomi, the owner of Peanut Park Trattoria, only blocks away on Taylor Street, which delights the hospital floor’s support staff because he always brings food. He has been visited by the actor Richard Kind, who, a day after seeing Fitzpatrick in the hospital, was at Wrigley Field where he dedicated (“Tony Fitzpatrick, this is for you”) his rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
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On the afternoon I visited, Fitzpatrick was wearing a Bears cap. He was typically talkative, about politics, sports, life, various mayors in Chicago history and books. There were some piled on the tray in front of the chair in which he was sitting. “This, this chair is where I sleep,” he said. “It’s so much easier for me than being in that little bed.”
He will be in that chair for a while, on Oct. 4 “hosting” the opening of his new art exhibition, “Songbirds and Crucifixions” at Great Lakes Tattoo (1148 W. Grand Ave.). “Doing it by Zoom,” he says. “I’m actually curious to see how that goes but I’m sure I’ll be my same old self. It’s just a new way of doing things.”
There were plans to open a play based on his new book, “The Sun at the End of the Road.” Scheduled to open in early October as part of Steppenwolf Theatre’s LookOut series, it has understandably been postponed indefinitely at this point, with ticketholders being contacted by the theater.
But the book is available for your reading pleasure. “The Sun at the End of the Road: Dispatches From an American Life,” published by Eckhartz Press, which was founded here in 2011 by David Stern and Rick Kaempfer. Kaempfer tells me, “We leapt at the chance to publish this book. Tony’s words pack punches like a grizzled boxer, and his artwork is just beautiful.”
It’s a spectacular book, 113 pages filled with Fitzpatrick’s distinctive art, poetry and prose, his mind. There will be some who see it as memoir and indeed that is one element. But here is how Fitzpatrick puts it, “here is some of what I remember, some of what I have learned and damn near all of what I love — birds, stories, people and dogs,”
He writes of his friend Ted Kooser, the Iowa-based Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and also Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006. He credits Kooser for the inspiration for his book’s title.
This is that poem. It is titled “The vernal equinox.”
How important it must be
to someone
that I am alive, and walking,
and that I have here written
these poems.
This morning the sun stood
right at the end of the road
and waited for me
Sitting in his hospital chair, he grabbed the book and read the poem and when he finished, quite moved, said, “This poem has kept me alive.”