Grace Faustino
Trying to Keep Up with the Hippest Bookkeeper in Chicago
Grace Faustino was running — sprinting to the bank, a check flapping in her hand — and I was struggling to keep up with her. The check had just come in from the mom of Jimmy Weinstein, the editor and publisher of the Chicago-based democratic-socialist weekly In These Times, and not a moment too soon. The utilities were about to shut off our electricity, plus we were maybe going to get kicked out of our office space. So the check needed to be deposited, like, right away!
Despite the pressure of the moment, Grace, the paper’s overworked bookkeeper, was smiling — sometimes laughing, even. We ran past stores selling really cheap furniture, arranged in the windows so you could see how they might look in your really cheap apartment, along with similar shops and a Burger King that would, over the next two years, elevate my cholesterol levels for a lifetime. At the bank, the depositing of the check was a joyful experience: The teller knew Grace; everyone knew Grace.
Afterwards, Grace took me to a nearby taqueria for lunch. It was my first week on the job; I was just out of college (Class of 1980, but did I graduate? Don’t ask!) and a newcomer to Chicago. I’m not sure how, as the paper’s newly hired proofreader, I had found myself accompanying the bookkeeper on her breakneck run to the bank; maybe Grace had just seen me sitting alone at my desk and said, “Come o-o-on!” (She’d stretch words out sometimes, as if they were delicious taffy.) As we ate, Grace told me a bit about herself. She’d grown up in a Chicago suburb in a large, raucous family — all of whom I’d later meet when Grace invited me to their home for Thanksgiving (her dad, always encouraging me to take more jumbo shrimps from the platter he was holding, struck me as a totally benevolent version of Jackie Gleason’s character on The Honeymooners). Before coming to In These Times, Grace had been the bookkeeper for the company that made Reggie! bars, named after the baseball superstar Reggie Jackson. (As I recall, Grace told me that that the company paid Jackson by buying him anything he asked for: car, boat, whatever.)
I had just rented my first apartment, a little studio on the North Side. I never washed my dishes, so they just piled up in the sink until I was out of dishes, at which point I sometimes ate out of to-go cartons — but mostly I’d just walk a few blocks over to Grace’s place. She lived in a sprawling, cluttered apartment that she shared with her friend Janusz and a quiet, mysterious woman who was the first cousin of Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a former member of the Manson Family who had attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975.
In the living room was a record player, with the nearby vinyl records stacked way up high, none of them still in their sleeves. Grace liked to put on a record and play the same side over and over. In heavy rotation was Siren, the Roxy Music album with “Love Is the Drug” on it. I never got tired of that song.
Oh-oh, catch that buzz
Love is the drug I'm thinking of
Oh-oh, can't you see?
Love is the drug for me
Grace and Janusz were usually in the kitchen (their roommate was a recluse), where there were three TVs stacked up: one had a picture but no sound, one had sound but no picture, and the third one mostly had wobbly static. Grace loved pretty much any food that contained a lot of fatty dairy (e.g., cornflakes in heavy cream). She also frequently fried up her own pork rinds. (It was, perhaps, not the healthiest diet.) She and Janusz smoked a lot of pot — a lot — and were passionate viewers of The Three Stooges and The Rockford Files. As she got higher and higher, Grace would frequently smile blissfully at me and stretch out my name: “Jo-o-o-o-osh …” Though I abstained from the pot (my dad’s warning to me as a child, that it would stunt my growth, somehow still frightened me long after I’d stopped growing), I happily soaked in the vibes and the music, and felt loved and included.
After two years at In These Times, I had the opportunity to go back to the East Coast and take a position as a copy editor at the Boston Phoenix. By this time in Chicago, Grace had come over to my apartment and, in a heroic act reminiscent of Hercules in the Augean Stables, washed all my dishes, which had become encrusted in a spectacular ecosystem of mold. On my birthday, she surprised me with a cake she’d baked with our friend Becky — constructed out of a huge number of Twinkies in a giant casserole bowl, covered with pink-dyed whipped cream and tiny, multicolored marshmallows. I’m proud to say that, months later, the uneaten part of that Twinkie cake looked (and probably tasted) exactly the same as on the day she presented it to me! Grace and Janusz helped me pack all my stuff into a rented U-Haul truck for my move to Boston (I’m pretty sure we left the cake behind), and then they drove me cross-country, the three of us squeezed in together in the truck’s cab.
After I’d been in Boston for a bit, I heard from Grace that she’d fallen in love with a wonderful, funny guy named Jeff Felshman, a gifted writer who later became a stalwart at the great Chicago Reader. Grace and Jeff got married and had two kids. One day, years later, Grace called me from Chicago to tell me she’d just gone through treatment for metastatic breast cancer. She sounded very tired, but otherwise just like her usual self. She told me she was fighting to stay alive. During pauses in our phone conversation, she’d say, “Jo-o-o-o-osh …” I thought of her when we’d first met, running to the bank, check in hand, laughing. I thought of all the many days, and evenings, when she gave me comfort and joy.
After Grace died, I stayed in touch with her husband, Jeff, who eventually found another wonderful woman to be his partner and help raise the kids. Then Jeff died, suddenly, of a heart attack.
When I was in Chicago a few years ago, helping my mom move from one apartment to a smaller one at the Selfhelp Home after her husband, Frank, had been transferred to nursing care, I kept having this happy thought: I’ll go visit Grace! And then it would hit me that she’d been long gone. That period in my life that I got to spend with her in the Windy City — 1980-’82 — retains a warm glow in my memory, lit by three busted televisions, with the smells of pot smoke and homemade pork rinds in the air and “Love Is the Drug” blasting on the record player. Here, for a time, there was peace.
Yes, that was Grace. The pot was a lot of Indiana hemp so it took a fair amount for even a minimal effect.
Twinkies! I was raised on them. And Tang, Fizzies, and Sugar Smacks. My parents were obviously more worried about my being too thin than the effects of junk food. Not thin now, sorry to say.