Monday, April 28, 2003 5:57:12 PM Joe Coluccio
Harmarville Redux
"Where the hell did you go last night, Cleveland." It was my father's question two or three times a week. "You put 300 miles on the car last night!" He would punctuate the last with a sneer that was meant to show me that he knew the depths my wrong doing. He would write it down in his accruing accounting columns for later consideration.
I take a little comfort that for the last year I have been back and forth to Cleveland, about 240 miles by the way, round, about fifty times and that my father sits somewhere with a knowing smile that finally and forever proves his conjecture.
The truth is at the same time so much more plebeian and so much more sinister. It would start like this.
I would hop in the car at about six pm after dinner. I would first pick up Phil in East Hills, then Jake just off Lincoln Road and then Art in Verona. The thought of that travel exhausts me as much now as it enlivened me then. We would empty out pockets, snake all the change that we had between us and head down to Allegheny River Boulevard and purchase gas at one of the feuding gas stations. Thirteen cents a gallon one glorious evening. Across the road it was fourteen cents. We were not loyal customers and would flock to either owner that would show us an even imperceptible price advantage. Wished they would give it away. Sometimes we would manage to put in about thirty-five or forty cents worth and we were off. "Uh give me thirty seven cents of regular, please!"
To the Eat 'n Park in Harmarville. Across the Hulton Bridge and to the right, zip on by the Harmar Pool Hall, we would stop later after we tired to pick up chicks. The words we used for chicks were far more picturesque and pungent than I will state here. We had all been influenced by equal parts Nick Romano, Live Fast, Die Young and have a Good Looking Corpse, Fast Eddie Felson (yes, I felt compassion for Piper Laurie. I knew that Fats would win in the end, it was just the way of the world in those days) and, for a quirk, a smattering of Elmer Gantry as portrayed by Burt Lancaster. "What is love brother? Love is the morning and the evening star.....!" We talked tough, smoked cigarettes and bought beer down at Billy Kays in Verona and consumed it by the quart. It cost less than the gasoline. Either I looked older than I was or the picture of the guy with a moustache and gray hair on the license fooled them. "Two quarts of your finest, please." It was a miracle that no one could hear the very loud Tom Tom drumming of my heart.
Like a shark in a zoo aquarium we would endlessly drive through the curb serve at the restaurant. Honking our car horn and squeaking our voices. We would stop and just say the most embarrassing things possible to the delicious girls that bobbed nervously on car seats to loud music that we now call oldies. One Two Three I Shot Mr. Lee. Did we ever score? Well, I never did. Too hung up and it is true to this day that women just scare the hell out of me. But it didn't keep me from imagining. I have vivid imagination.
Someone would always want a ride back to East Hills, so we'd hit 'em up for a quarter or more go back to Verona, pump some cheap ethyl and take them. Two or three times around the environs of the shopping center. No one in front of the Eastwood Theater. Scare up enough money for a pack of Luckies and back down Verona Road to Harmarville. Billy Kays for more brew if we were flush. This was definitely the night. Once we were convinced by a school chum to ride down to Garfield to see the 'morphadike'. The 'morphadike' must have been safely in his/her room that evening for we never saw the slightest glimpse of that female deception.
Bold, cigarettes out of the side of our mouths, we would walk into the pool hall. Nod to the fellow pool players that we knew. Rack 'em. O! and it was a dingy place. We would have had it no other way. Yes, spittoons sitting at strategic places on the dirt encrusted wooden slat floor. If this wasn't heaven, it couldn't have been too far away. In the back room was the legendary card game. We would walk around the card laden table on the way to the bathroom. Two brothers both in tieless white dress shirts, brown pants, black shoes, and hats from the Canal Zone presided. I have heard since that these nightly poker matches, made up mostly of the coal miners from up on the Harmar hill, were truly tough games. And that a winning night of hands wasn't safe in the dark parking lot. I have no way of proving it now, but it has a romantic kind of symmetry.
After endless rounds of eight ball and nine ball, of course after the Hustler, straight pool we would hop back into the car and head for the Eat 'n Park. Round and round the parking lot. A hundred times, a thousand. I don't think that we ever had a single meal there. All our money went to gas, beer and cigarettes. Who could afford a burger?
Back to East Hills. A urine stop somewhere in the dark coolness of Verona Road after Lincoln but not yet to Mt Carmel. Eventually after about three hundred miles. I would make it home.
It never occurred to me to look at the speedometer.
Monday, April 28, 2003
Monday, April 21, 2003
4/19/03 6:58 PM Joe Coluccio
It's only Harmarville, Joe
I had just filled the cassette with CD's full of the music of Bernard Hermann and slipped it into the player in the trunk of my car. Sure, you know Bernard Hermann! He's the guy that wrote the music for one of the most renowned scenes in movie history. And drove to Harmarville. Crossed the Hulton Bridge turned the right and I began to pass a motel that looked like either a hot sheet haven or a place that would be right comfortable for Mom and Norman Bates when the shrill pizzicato strikes and shrieks of violins issued from my car speakers. Yes, Bernard Hermann wrote the music for the movie Psycho and is as famous audibly for the shower scene as Hicthcock is visually. Citizen Kane, North By North West, The Twilight Zone, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Spellbound, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Gidget Goes Hawaiian (just checking to see if you read these lists that I prepare so lovingly).......
I took it as a sign.
I began, car wheel firmly in hand, like a craftsman in the restoration of a palimpsest to apply solvents to the world around me and started to work off the lacquer of time. First I loosened and erased Super Route 28 and all of its car wheezing glory. Then I scraped off the two mile long cacophony of Gas Station, Fast Food Joints, Fast Slapped Motels, OTB Palace and Retail Shopping Mart. Next came a more delicate operation. I had to apply a mask of old road, just enough to get me a short distance down from the old Harmar Drive-in Theatre. I restored the pool hall closer to the bridge and finally placed the Stop and Sock back in its rightful frame, proud Freeport Road Center. And worried the Hulton Bridge
I spent my summers (and a cold winter day or two) in the company of my father in Harmarville. My old man was a carpenter and a contractor, had been all his life. He was working those days for the man who owned both the Stop and Sock Driving Range and back toward Pittsburgh, a scant mile or so beyond the Harmar Drive-in Theater, the Pitch and Putt Golf course. He lived in a trailer (mobile home they are more prudently called) next to a Luncheon Diner on the gravel bumpy lot of the driving range. My father's best friend Bettino Fragale lived in an even smaller rounded trailer in front of it. We would drive to work over the Hulton Bridge, which in those days had a frightening metal plate deck, stuck together by loose rivets and coat hangers that caused it to shake and sway as our car wheels rolled over the cold dark steel. I still dream of plunging into the Allegheny, gasping for breath, looking for a way out pounding on the closed windows while catfish and carp looked on from the murky depths.
Mornings, my father, Betts, the owner, would sit in the trailer at a small Formica kitchenette table, drink whiskey, swear, introduce me to the sweet enticements of women. I would look out the window at myself, the dew rinsing my shoes as I scooped the golf balls that dotted the meadow from the deep grass into a wagon hooked to a small tractor. The land was wet and sweet and was bound to the North by the hills that led up to the Gulf Research Center.
I was learning. Becoming. Bad instruction and good tinted my world view. Some was laughable and foolish, some served me well. They would drink whiskey and swear and tell me the finer points of the feminine. My father a secret smile on his face, Betts with an innocent seeming irony that could have convinced poor Socrates that life was preferable to hemlock even when the high ones get their ways. Politicians were as trustworthy as a man desperate to sell you a used car. Nothing including electricity was as it was advertised or seemed to be. Religion was in the hands of the boosters and not the saints. Capital or Marx the world rode heavy on the shoulders of poor working people. Kings, popes and presidents are not divine. And the Bucs would never win the pennant again.
Later in the day working in a hot wooden building that contained a green box filled with smudged golf balls, I would be confronted by the visiting visions of passionate and romantic love, dream stories that inflamed the strong pull of lust that accompanied each and every young woman who would hang on the arm of her date as he paid for a wire bucket brimming with golf balls that heaped on the counter like a visit to the hen house and a brushed aluminum headed steel shafted driver. I hungered obviously and pathetically at the petite freshness of blush brushed faces as I handed back the change and Romeo swaggered away victorious, the prize captured, my ego crushed. My eyes would follow in a long soul filled solemn camera pan as a parade of Bermuda and short shorts walked toward the tees, white blouse neatly tucked under a slim pastel belts.
The evenings were cool. My father would drop me at the Pitch and Putt. It was nine short holes. Customers would get a ball, an iron, a short eraserless pencil and a score card. I learned to play a more than adequate game and would show off at the drop of a flag. One twilit evening we walked down the stream bed below the course and snuck into the Harmar Drive-in. Peyton Place. The movie did little to cool my ardor and desire for a mature relationship.
I don't know when or if the hunger left me. My passion flares on occasion under the most peculiar circumstances, but mostly I'd just rather read or write or play the guitar. But in Harmarville this Sunday I buzzed for quite a moment. It was glorious!
It's only Harmarville, Joe
I had just filled the cassette with CD's full of the music of Bernard Hermann and slipped it into the player in the trunk of my car. Sure, you know Bernard Hermann! He's the guy that wrote the music for one of the most renowned scenes in movie history. And drove to Harmarville. Crossed the Hulton Bridge turned the right and I began to pass a motel that looked like either a hot sheet haven or a place that would be right comfortable for Mom and Norman Bates when the shrill pizzicato strikes and shrieks of violins issued from my car speakers. Yes, Bernard Hermann wrote the music for the movie Psycho and is as famous audibly for the shower scene as Hicthcock is visually. Citizen Kane, North By North West, The Twilight Zone, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Spellbound, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Gidget Goes Hawaiian (just checking to see if you read these lists that I prepare so lovingly).......
I took it as a sign.
I began, car wheel firmly in hand, like a craftsman in the restoration of a palimpsest to apply solvents to the world around me and started to work off the lacquer of time. First I loosened and erased Super Route 28 and all of its car wheezing glory. Then I scraped off the two mile long cacophony of Gas Station, Fast Food Joints, Fast Slapped Motels, OTB Palace and Retail Shopping Mart. Next came a more delicate operation. I had to apply a mask of old road, just enough to get me a short distance down from the old Harmar Drive-in Theatre. I restored the pool hall closer to the bridge and finally placed the Stop and Sock back in its rightful frame, proud Freeport Road Center. And worried the Hulton Bridge
I spent my summers (and a cold winter day or two) in the company of my father in Harmarville. My old man was a carpenter and a contractor, had been all his life. He was working those days for the man who owned both the Stop and Sock Driving Range and back toward Pittsburgh, a scant mile or so beyond the Harmar Drive-in Theater, the Pitch and Putt Golf course. He lived in a trailer (mobile home they are more prudently called) next to a Luncheon Diner on the gravel bumpy lot of the driving range. My father's best friend Bettino Fragale lived in an even smaller rounded trailer in front of it. We would drive to work over the Hulton Bridge, which in those days had a frightening metal plate deck, stuck together by loose rivets and coat hangers that caused it to shake and sway as our car wheels rolled over the cold dark steel. I still dream of plunging into the Allegheny, gasping for breath, looking for a way out pounding on the closed windows while catfish and carp looked on from the murky depths.
Mornings, my father, Betts, the owner, would sit in the trailer at a small Formica kitchenette table, drink whiskey, swear, introduce me to the sweet enticements of women. I would look out the window at myself, the dew rinsing my shoes as I scooped the golf balls that dotted the meadow from the deep grass into a wagon hooked to a small tractor. The land was wet and sweet and was bound to the North by the hills that led up to the Gulf Research Center.
I was learning. Becoming. Bad instruction and good tinted my world view. Some was laughable and foolish, some served me well. They would drink whiskey and swear and tell me the finer points of the feminine. My father a secret smile on his face, Betts with an innocent seeming irony that could have convinced poor Socrates that life was preferable to hemlock even when the high ones get their ways. Politicians were as trustworthy as a man desperate to sell you a used car. Nothing including electricity was as it was advertised or seemed to be. Religion was in the hands of the boosters and not the saints. Capital or Marx the world rode heavy on the shoulders of poor working people. Kings, popes and presidents are not divine. And the Bucs would never win the pennant again.
Later in the day working in a hot wooden building that contained a green box filled with smudged golf balls, I would be confronted by the visiting visions of passionate and romantic love, dream stories that inflamed the strong pull of lust that accompanied each and every young woman who would hang on the arm of her date as he paid for a wire bucket brimming with golf balls that heaped on the counter like a visit to the hen house and a brushed aluminum headed steel shafted driver. I hungered obviously and pathetically at the petite freshness of blush brushed faces as I handed back the change and Romeo swaggered away victorious, the prize captured, my ego crushed. My eyes would follow in a long soul filled solemn camera pan as a parade of Bermuda and short shorts walked toward the tees, white blouse neatly tucked under a slim pastel belts.
The evenings were cool. My father would drop me at the Pitch and Putt. It was nine short holes. Customers would get a ball, an iron, a short eraserless pencil and a score card. I learned to play a more than adequate game and would show off at the drop of a flag. One twilit evening we walked down the stream bed below the course and snuck into the Harmar Drive-in. Peyton Place. The movie did little to cool my ardor and desire for a mature relationship.
I don't know when or if the hunger left me. My passion flares on occasion under the most peculiar circumstances, but mostly I'd just rather read or write or play the guitar. But in Harmarville this Sunday I buzzed for quite a moment. It was glorious!
Tuesday, April 01, 2003
Tuesday, April 01, 2003 6:14:31 PM Joe Coluccio
A Tribute to Picksburgh
Late Friday afternoon last I had barely dropped my duds when I was forced to make a trip city side. Out at the car I turned the ignition key, roiled the motor up.
The entire week prior maps and people had been guiding me around the unknown environs of York PA. Go South on I 83 and turn East on Route 30 and you will find, for example, the Harley Davidson plant. A world of Soft Tails and Fat Boys. How remarkable, head due south! and then turn due east! These directions are the things dreams are made of when you are from Pittsburgh.
Legend has it that the roads here follow old wild deer and perhaps domestic oxen paths. Around the hills. Into the dark hollars. Along the edge of the creeks. Then came an industrial overlay of tarmacadam on the animal stamped frontier corduroy and the Roebling's steel rope that created bridges over the gaping valleys. Streets with no good reason now could end abruptly at a cliff edge and start again one half mile to the south only to hiss and cross their own existence several times like some mad Moebius Strip. No cartographer from the nether regions could create a more tormented landscape. Vespucci rolled over in his grave
My God, the frantic thought came into my brain, what if it was my charge to tell someone new to the city how to get to say East Liberty from say Penn Hills?
No verbal instruction could be devised. You'd have to lead them in a caravan down Lime Hollow up Verona Road to Lincoln and Nadine down Allegheny River Boulevard to Washington Blvd past the old state police barracks, where I in a moment of extreme shame and perilously low self image bumped the curb and was denied my driver's license on my sixteenth birthday, up over Negley Run to the Circle that forever forbids you access to what was, I swear I remember it, at one time an area as vital as and as beautiful as any City Reverie. I, a long time native, (raised on Carver Street in my younger day) can find entry to the new and devastated East Liberty (Sliberty to the cognoscenti), but this poor posited new comer to the region would be forced to circle forever looking hopelessly for some means of entrance. 'Course if they were lucky enough to divine the magic entry and slip into the realm of Sliberty, there wouldn't be much to greet them. Glorious glimpses of the past in pasted shut buildings. Ah! Three Cheers for Urban Renewal!
Pittsburgh (more generally Western Pennsylvania) is truly renowned for "you can't get there from here". We revel in it. Highway planners take it into serious consideration. (Go ahead try to get to the east end of the city from I 279 South, our newest highway.)
We have, all of us tied, clumped and dried to this region, maps in our minds that are as complicated as a fishing line tangle. My shoe laces, cut in several places where they have been grazed by the shoe eyelets and bound again with a sturdy half hitch knot, tied in a pretty bow, outline a path less complicated than the way I drive to work every morning.
I believe that this mass of misdirection makes the people here uniquely capable of keeping tabs of overwhelmingly complex and chaotic situations. I predict that many citizens of the city of Pittsburgh will become preeminent thinkers in this new millennium characterized by the innovative laws of chaos. Hell, if the thrumming wings of a butterfly in Tokyo can change the global patterns that make weather seem nigh impossible to predict to those who live in areas where east crosses north crosses west crosses south with tedious predictability, it is a snap for the denizens of this city, where SSWNE is a legitimate direction, to provide a deft yet incomprehensible analysis of the insect incited typhoon.
That being said, tomorrow, I travel to Turtle Creek by way of Wilmerding.
A Tribute to Picksburgh
Late Friday afternoon last I had barely dropped my duds when I was forced to make a trip city side. Out at the car I turned the ignition key, roiled the motor up.
The entire week prior maps and people had been guiding me around the unknown environs of York PA. Go South on I 83 and turn East on Route 30 and you will find, for example, the Harley Davidson plant. A world of Soft Tails and Fat Boys. How remarkable, head due south! and then turn due east! These directions are the things dreams are made of when you are from Pittsburgh.
Legend has it that the roads here follow old wild deer and perhaps domestic oxen paths. Around the hills. Into the dark hollars. Along the edge of the creeks. Then came an industrial overlay of tarmacadam on the animal stamped frontier corduroy and the Roebling's steel rope that created bridges over the gaping valleys. Streets with no good reason now could end abruptly at a cliff edge and start again one half mile to the south only to hiss and cross their own existence several times like some mad Moebius Strip. No cartographer from the nether regions could create a more tormented landscape. Vespucci rolled over in his grave
My God, the frantic thought came into my brain, what if it was my charge to tell someone new to the city how to get to say East Liberty from say Penn Hills?
No verbal instruction could be devised. You'd have to lead them in a caravan down Lime Hollow up Verona Road to Lincoln and Nadine down Allegheny River Boulevard to Washington Blvd past the old state police barracks, where I in a moment of extreme shame and perilously low self image bumped the curb and was denied my driver's license on my sixteenth birthday, up over Negley Run to the Circle that forever forbids you access to what was, I swear I remember it, at one time an area as vital as and as beautiful as any City Reverie. I, a long time native, (raised on Carver Street in my younger day) can find entry to the new and devastated East Liberty (Sliberty to the cognoscenti), but this poor posited new comer to the region would be forced to circle forever looking hopelessly for some means of entrance. 'Course if they were lucky enough to divine the magic entry and slip into the realm of Sliberty, there wouldn't be much to greet them. Glorious glimpses of the past in pasted shut buildings. Ah! Three Cheers for Urban Renewal!
Pittsburgh (more generally Western Pennsylvania) is truly renowned for "you can't get there from here". We revel in it. Highway planners take it into serious consideration. (Go ahead try to get to the east end of the city from I 279 South, our newest highway.)
We have, all of us tied, clumped and dried to this region, maps in our minds that are as complicated as a fishing line tangle. My shoe laces, cut in several places where they have been grazed by the shoe eyelets and bound again with a sturdy half hitch knot, tied in a pretty bow, outline a path less complicated than the way I drive to work every morning.
I believe that this mass of misdirection makes the people here uniquely capable of keeping tabs of overwhelmingly complex and chaotic situations. I predict that many citizens of the city of Pittsburgh will become preeminent thinkers in this new millennium characterized by the innovative laws of chaos. Hell, if the thrumming wings of a butterfly in Tokyo can change the global patterns that make weather seem nigh impossible to predict to those who live in areas where east crosses north crosses west crosses south with tedious predictability, it is a snap for the denizens of this city, where SSWNE is a legitimate direction, to provide a deft yet incomprehensible analysis of the insect incited typhoon.
That being said, tomorrow, I travel to Turtle Creek by way of Wilmerding.