“I represent the externalization of not fitting in. I don’t want to fit in,” says Mark Thomas, leaning his chair against the banana yellow walls of his office. He’s wearing black jeans and a black motorcycle jacket, and his long brown hair, which is usually in a ponytail, is hanging straight from his receding hairline to his shoulders. “So many people are fed up with the straight world but have to make a living. My complex is for those ‘weekend warriors.’”
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Thomas’s mother whisked him and his two sisters to Chicago. Yet Thomas says his mother was still reeling from the divorce when he was 16. “My mom couldn’t take care of me, so I got a job in Old Town, at a knickknack hippie junk store. It was in the 60s and nothing was priced. I was taught how to size up people, and I learned merchandising, display, and sales.”
Six months later Thomas left the store to work for an India-imports store behind Piper’s Alley. “I took them from making $1,000 on a Saturday to $3,000.” When he was 17 he met a man who owned a jewelry and candle factory, and he took the $3,000 in savings bonds that had been made out to him at birth and bought half the factory.
Around 1985 or ’86 the Woodfield Alley store closed, and Thomas moved its T-shirts, incense, and jewelry over to the Broadway store. In 1986 his lease there was up, and his landlord gave him 90 days to vacate. While looking for another location, Thomas remembered an old garage he’d seen on Belmont. “The place had become a shooting gallery for heroin addicts,” he says. He decided to move there anyway. “The walls were burned, and everything had to be remodeled.” Yet he opened the new store the day after he closed the old one.
Sales have climbed steadily, and last August Thomas opened a second Alley in the Ford City mall. Last June he opened the Gargoyle Bar & Grille, 3220 N. Clark, which is filled with gargoyles and dragons, and features tarot-card and rune-stone readings. “The Gargoyle has global dining–we may have a Jamaican sauce with tortillas or a teriyaki sauce on slaw,” he says. “I’m frightening the restaurant establishment. Because it’s associated with the Alley’s crazy retail market, they don’t think it can be serious.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Mark Luthringer.
