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!