Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
American singer/songwriter/actor and author Jake La Botz has published his first book of collected fiction, Your Place in this World. In it La Botz gives us a street-eye view of Steve Bardo as he grows from childhood to a young adult.
Steve is the son of two junkies who keep themselves in heroin and other essentials through petty theft and prostitution. The streets of Chicago are his home. Fending for himself from an early age he scrounges and steals change to buy food and go to the movies. The movie theatre is his escape when young. He can vanish for hours and not think about his reality.
One day when he and his father are panhandling, they head down to Maxwell Street on the lower South Side. It’s here that Steve first hears the music that will take him even further from his life than the movies do. While Maxwell Street at the time was home to many bluesmen, one in particular caught young Steve’s ear.
Alonzo Thompson – aka Diggy Nubbit – wasn’t famous like Lightin’ Hopkins but had a certain infamy. He was known as “Bad Luck Nubbit,” as every label he recorded with went bust soon after his records were released. Nubbit was reduced to playing in an abandoned lot on Maxwell Street. That’s where Steve found him and became enthralled with his music and the man.
Maybe Nubbit’s songs resonated with Steve because they were about death and they were down and dirty. They were a reflection of his life and the streets he lived on. Something in them struck to Steve’s core and stayed there.
La Botz doesn’t make the music “save” Steve. Sure he changes and moves away from the life he could have had with his folk, but at core he remains the damaged kid who suffered the abuse and neglect of living on the streets.
Midway through the story La Botz switches perspectives to that of Carrie, a fallen-from-grace girl who got hooked on drugs in high school and stumbled across Diggy. It’s here she crosses paths with Steve when he’s 14 going on 15.
Another lost person, she’s going to disappear down the hole in her arm eventually. She has just enough left inside her to leave him and tell him to write his stories like the beat writers he has learned to like.
In La Botz’s hands Steve’s story isn’t romantic or cool. It just is. He’s an abandoned and neglected kid who grows up to be lonely and lost. Music and movies and books aren’t salvation but escape mechanisms. However, the book does leave us with a little light at the end of Steve’s tunnel, so there might just be some hope for him.
Alongside the novella of Steve’s life, La Botz has included two connected short stories. One is about Steve’s father, the other the story of Diggy Nubbit and how he came to Chicago. Both are good companion pieces to Your Place In this World and supply us with backstory of two of the strange father figures in Steve’s life.
Your Place in this World by Jake La Botz is a hardscrabble blues song telling the story of a neglected and abused kid from the streets of Chicago. At times difficult to read for obvious reasons, it is an empathic and caring story of someone just desperately trying to find a way to be.
