The two members of the poetry collective SevenTenBishop stride up Milwaukee Avenue toward Myopic Books. Zebulun is sturdy and bespectacled and sports a bushy red goatee, a straw fedora, and a blue button-down shirt. Daniel Nagelberg is pale and thin, with dyed black hair and wearing a thrift-store T-shirt. When they stop outside the store, ready to improvise a block-long free-verse poem in bright pastel chalk on the sidewalk, a scowling manager emerges. “Yeah,” she says, a preemptive hostility in her voice. “We’re not going to do the sidewalk chalk thing today. OK? We’ve decided not to do it.”
They duck into a small boutique next door, where Zebulun knows the woman behind the counter. “That’s the first time I ever told anyone we were gonna do it,” he says. “And I’m never doing that again. I was really being courteous. And she was really nasty. ‘Go and do it at Quimby’s and make sure you ask them first.’ Well, man, I’m 32 years old. I was raised right. I came here, goddamn it, and told you what was gonna happen! We’ve done this a dozen times, police have even walked right past us.” They briefly discuss calling someone they know who works at another bookstore, but soon it begins to rain, so they head across the street instead to get some coffee.
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Zebulun was also something of a misfit. “I wasn’t an outsider because of my mode of dress, I was more on the outside because of my behavior. No matter what I did, I didn’t belong anywhere.” After moving to Chicago as a teenager and playing in a series of local bands, he moved to 710 N. Bishop in the early 90s and became a hermit of sorts. “For a while I was communicating with most people solely by E-mail. Something would happen, I would be really hungover, and I’d say, ‘Man, I got this idea,’ and I’d blow this little four-line thing together and send it out to my whole mailing list, like a little message in a bottle. A letter of affection. And they were the only bulk E-mails I ever sent out that people replied to. I just got this sense that this is the first thing, and the only thing, I’ve ever done that has communicated with people.”
“I think we sold one each,” says Zebulun. “On the last night.”
