There has been some excellent reportage on Jesse Jackson's love child scandal, but this week's scoop belongs to Michael Sneed of Jackson's hometown paper, the Chicago SunTimes: "The Rev. Jesse Jackson likes to chill out in a bathhouse, the Division Street Bathhouse." Who knew? Who knew that Jesse hung out in a schvitz, or that this venerable Division Street establishment was still in business?
"This place is like a sanctuary," a bathhouse source told Sneed. "Rich and poor come here from every ethnic background. It's like a brotherhood. You close the door and leave the world behind. You put on a sheet or a robe and chill out. . . . Like most of us, Jesse likes the experience of the heat room and the soap rubdown. And it's a place to reflect."
But why rely on this anonymous description? Nobel laureate Saul Bellow immortalized the place a quarter of a century ago in Humboldt's Gift:
"These Division Street steam-bathers don't look like the trim proud people downtown. . . . They have swelling buttocks and fatty breasts as yellow as buttermilk. They stand on thick pillar legs affected with a sort of creeping verdigris or blue-cheese mottling of the ankles. After steaming, these old fellows eat enormous snacks of bread and salt herring or large ovals of salami and dripping skirt-steak and they drink schnapps. They could knock down walls with their hard stout old-fashioned bellies. Things are very elementary here. You feel that these people are almost conscious of obsolescence, of a line of evolution abandoned by nature and culture. So down in the super-heated subcellars all these Slavonic cavemen and wood demons with hanging laps of fat and legs of stone and lichen boil themselves and splash ice water on their heads by the bucket. Upstairs, on the television screen in the locker room, little dudes and grinning broads make smart talk or leap up and down. They are unheeded. Mickey who keeps the food concession fries slabs of meat and potato pancakes, and, with enormous knives, he hacks up cabbages for coleslaw and he quarters grapefruits (to be eaten by hand). The stout old men mounting in their bedsheets from the blasting heat have a strong appetite. . . . There may be no village in the Carpathians where such practices still prevail."