Shirt Tale
“I made an appointment with the Cook County neurologist on April 29th,” Mike Bradley was saying. “Do you know when my appointment is? August 25th! And until then I take 48 aspirin a day.”
The other T-shirt, which hung above the door where no one could miss it, really set him off. There was Mike Tyson inside a rectangle and the legend “Tyson was framed.”
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The security guard came over. “He wasn’t unfriendly,” Bradley recalled. “He said, ‘Come on, man, that’s just the way it is.’ He was just trying to get me to be quiet. I am sorry I caused a little fuss. But I did get my point across to everyone in there, I think.”
“I don’t know why it’s down. Librarians are accommodating, I don’t know . . . ” grumbles Wilfredo Cruz, who speaks for the library system from downtown.
“One point he made which sticks in my mind,” Drew told us, “was that some of the powers that be indicate they’re willing to let the cities stew in their own problems. He felt that because of what’s coming down the tube we should be very quiet in our communications. Where we as community arts organizers feel the answer will come out of increased communication, not less communication.”
Bradley rubbed him the wrong way. “It was just the way he spoke certain words,” Conner remembers. “He would point up to the picture of Tyson who was framed and say, ‘That’s where he belongs, a convicted rapist.’ And he’d put an emphasis on it, a convicted rapist. But my opinion is, what’s a woman doing in an unmarried man’s room at two o’clock in the morning? To pop popcorn or something? I think he was railroaded.”
