THE SPEW POLICE . . . SUFFERGUSH RETURNS and TWO WHEELS GOOD
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Actor, writer, Curious ensemble member Mark Comiskey worked for a time as a bicycle messenger, and Two Wheels Good is his one-person show based on that experience. Comiskey spends no time talking about how he got into the business or recounting the adventures of other messengers. Instead he leaps right into his own head, delivering the stream-of-consciousness chatter of a man who spends too many hours alone riding against the clock and traffic to get a package from point A to point B.
Like James Joyce’s adman Leopold Bloom, who can’t keep his wandering mind off his job (he keeps spotting places around Dublin one could paint an advertisement), Comiskey’s mind buzzes with thoughts about a life spent peddling around the Loop. “I am a straight line,” he muses as he zips along taking a package from 400 S. LaSalle to 430 W. Erie. “Time is an endless series of bricks and buildings,” he says a few blocks later.
O’Reilly, the writer, deserves some of the praise for the power of this piece. Spew Police contains examples of his evocative beat-poetic prose at its most inspired. At one point he describes the “big Irish German beer-mugging faces” of Chicago’s early settlers.
