Every town and city has its share of genuine characters and eccentrics, but I think you could say that it’s somewhat easier to get a real feel for the personalities of such characters in a smaller town, where there are so few public secrets and mysteries, and where what might be mere sidewalk spectacle in a big city is often fleshed out with well-known family histories and personal anecdotes from actual encounters and conversations.
True oddballs also seem to appear in even starker relief when looked at against the largely homogenized backdrop of an average midwestern small town.
In my own hometown, a place of almost abject modesty and blandness tossed up in the middle of flat farm country, there were a number of such characters –flamboyants and dandies, for the most part, colorful fellows whom I now suppose were probably homosexuals– but the one who made the biggest impression on my adolescent self was a guy by the name of Adelburt "Burt" Sikorski.
Burt was perhaps a dozen years my senior, and by the time I was really aware of him he was a rumpled, shaggy character who always wore bright polyester pants and what I now recognize were ironic tee-shirts (featuring musical acts like Rick Wakeman or Styx, or phrases along the lines of "Up Your Nose With A Rubber Hose," "Kiss My Grits," and "Keep On Truckin’"). He was also one of those muttering guys who was constantly walking all over town, and I guess in retrospect he was sort of the local one-man counter culture.
You’d occasionally see him downtown, standing on a corner across the street from the courthouse and waving a sign that said something like "Don’t Rush Me Out!" or "Stop It!" He was also, so far as I know, the town’s only street musician, and he’d often play his guitar outside the Sterling Drug Store. I remember one time a friend and I rode our bikes over to the store to buy some candy –we were probably 12 years old– and Burt was out front with his guitar and said to us, "Hey, little dudes, want to hear something by your main man John Denver?" Which, even then, we thought was funny. I also recall him playing a manic version of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree," which was at the time in heavy rotation on the local AM radio station.
The town’s only movie theater was a single-screen affair that mostly showed family films, and it seemed like Burt Sikorski would be there every Saturday afternoon, sitting by himself in the back row, heckling and lobbing Sno Caps at the screen. One time I was with my parents and my little sister, and we were watching some Disney comedy –"Son of Flubber," or something like that– and Burt kept shouting out stuff like, "Fred MacMurray’s an adulterer! He’s a sociopath! The man’s a stone-cold killer!" until some of the grown-ups complained to the manager and Burt was asked to leave.
By the time I was a teenager Burt Sikorski was regularly engaging my friends and me in conversation on the sidewalks around town. We were always "the little dudes," and Burt was always after us to join his band. His old man, Adolph Sikorski, had a meat market on the east side of town, and there was an abandoned smoke house out back that was Burt’s purported "practice space." Sometimes we’d ride our bikes by there and we could hear him pounding away on drums or creating distortion on an electric guitar.
I knew a few guys who eventually got roped into jamming with Burt, and they all said he was crazy.
When I was a junior in high school Burt opened, for a very short time, the town’s first and only head shop, The Soviet Revolution, and once when I went in there to poke around with a couple buddies Burt gave us a cassette tape of his band (which, of course, we all knew wasn’t a real band; to the best of my knowledge they never played a single public show in that town, or anywhere else).
"What’s the band called?" we asked.
"It used to be called Burton Veal and the Dead Baby Cows," he told us, "but that proved too provocative for local mores, so I’ve settled on the less threatening but classy Burt Sugar Trio." We spent a lot of time driving around in the country outside town getting high and listening to the Burt Sugar Trio, and I have very fond memories of that time in my life.
After I graduated from high school, though, I moved to the Twin Cities, and I’d been living there for almost a decade when my mother called me one night and told me in passing that Burt Sikorski was dead. He’d died, she said, from an allergic reaction.
"To what?" I asked.
"I have no idea," she said. "The obituary didn’t specify."
My father, who was on the other line, said, "My best guess would be life."
"Burt had grown very fat in recent years," my mother said, "and he always seemed so depressed. Last time I saw him he was working at his father’s market."
My parents are preparing for a move to Arizona, and I recently went down there to help them clear out the house. As I dug through the boxes in my old bedroom I was surprised to find my original tape of the Burt Sugar Trio. I listened to it on my drive back up to Minneapolis and it sort of broke my heart.
Listen to a sampling by clicking the audio links in the left column (go to permalink).
