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.