At least Thomas Wolfe had the decency to die.

           I get to sit here in the Panther Hollow Inn, groggy from three hours sleep, worried about a poetry reading that I’m a part of, and nursing my fifth Miller Light draft, as the other local drunkards get into a conversation about next week’s Steelers game (this is a by-week for the black and gold).  I think nothing has changed here except the decor, a couple coats of wood gloss and a puke-pink bar liner.  Is this really what I missed, what I mused, while sitting in my Brooklyn apartment getting high on scotch and water?  It couldn’t be.  But, sadly, the PHI is the safest bet.

             I have already been through Oakland.  I have been up and down Fifth and Forbes, looking for traces of my past and youth, and I have been confronted with aberration after aberration.  A coffee shop used to be there, but now it is an American Apparel Outfitter.  There was once a restaurant here; a record store, but they have become Panera, Blockbuster, and a whores-gaggle of Mexican Grilles.  Hemingway’s is still standing, but its once-regal facade is bedecked with Pitt’s blue and gold, its windows where I used to stare in at the ambient dim-orange of elegance, wondering if a professor or a local poet was having a champagne brunch, has become smeared with collegiate war paint.  Peter’s Pub is a haven for the dim-witted.  I found nothing.  Gone.  It was all gone.  It was enough to make me sit down by an unused carousel and have a good cry.  Imagine that?  A carousel in Oakland.

            So I decide to get drunk.  Alcohol is how I’ve learned to deal with both past and present, and it works for me.  Booze is a form of acceptable suicide from life.  People look down on such behavior.  They think it is wrong.  But I’ve never been a happy, social type. And while I understand people’s feelings about alcohol consumption, I don’t really empathize or sympathize with their feelings.  You see, I drink yes, but I spend a good deal of time around people too.  I listen and pay attention to their errant consumerism, public dramas, banal conversations, their art, their bullshit scenes, and adherence to stringent conventionality, even when they think they are being original.  I watch them freely slurp on coffee after coffee to get a caffeine high and escape the bullshit inherent in the day to day.  So with my need for quite a few drinks a day, I consider us all even in terms of what weights bring us down.  Why shouldn’t I be allowed to get drunk with a poetry reading hanging over my head, and the colossal ramifications of a gentrified America blaring before me in the city of my birth? 

           By the time the reading comes, I am beyond common functionality.  I am a golden God and you could tell me no different.  Yes, I could make conversation.  Did I want to?  No.  I was happy being alone.  I was ready for an affable death.  I remember crossing Liberty Avenue on the way to getting some beer with a few poets, and watching a car come careening toward me.  I slowed.  I imagined it hitting me.  My death would be on the driver’s head.  I would be free.  Except for what my wife would have to go through, I was of clear conscience.  With that mind state whom was I going to talk to that night?  Who would honestly have made any sense, or had anything of substance to say?

           People from the past showed up at the reading, as all the poets gathered and put their books out on display; a display of drivel paid for in cash and your time.  I didn’t know what to think seeing old friends, people whose relationships I’d run my natural course with.  Call it the curse of the MySpace Generation, and ceaseless, minute self-promotion.  Nothing ends regularly anymore.  I hate to think that Andy Warhol was right.  People love to stars, and to be beaten over the head with the past.  I was in Pittsburgh again.  Pittsburgh poets surrounded me again.  I knew what it was like to get beaten over the head with the past.  So to get through it, I drank beer after beer, and the room became a blurry vision of hell, and each rambling poet on the stage another vomit blotch exposing all the damage we’d done to art.  Art should be left alone, I thought, listening to the diarrhea streams of this pap.  We should quit making art in America because none of us has any original to say.  Let’s give it up, I thought.  Let’s let Van Gogh make sense again.  How dare we bear our souls in monotone musings!  Using projectors!  If all the artists in America died, it wouldn’t do shit to the stock market, and next week’s football game would go on as planned.

           At the break, I realized I would soon have to go on the stage and empty my soul.  But this is what I wanted, right?  I thought back to my Brooklyn apartment, and the wife I was missing.  I thought about the quiet of our street and tender nights with the scotch bottle and the classical station, and the cats running around like mad.  I missed Mozart.  I missed Paganini, too.  And I regretted Pittsburgh.  I regretted wanting to come home so badly, and at any cost.  And in an instant I wanted to be away from the art gallery hosting the reading and all of the shitty art on the walls, and the poets with their poet books, and the poetry-groupies who don’t know shit about shit.  I stood in the cold by myself and watched the chaos of the Garfield night go by.  I thought I’d kill the next man who spoke to me.  But then it was time to go back inside, and listen to more poets read flowers from hell.

            I knew I was coming up soon.  I knew everything was resting on everything.  Ha ha ha!  I stepped away from the crowd, and I found myself alone again in the gallery.  The room was illuminated.  Outside I could hear the Pittsburgh night roar.  People were going by in cars with bass blasting into the fall sky.  Something was always happening somewhere that I wasn’t.  Later on, I would find myself in a home full of strangers, in another room alone, listening to Aretha Franklin, but for now I stood there.  Then I started throwing blows.  One right, one left, and then a few jabs and uppercuts.  I couldn’t stop.  This wasn’t home, man, this was a boxing ring.  This wasn’t a reading, man, it was a fight to the death.  I threw combinations.  I went at the world.  The poet on the stage before me announced my name, and I walked through the gallery the way I used to see Tyson or Holmes march toward the ring.  Here, you fuckers, I thought.  Here’s your son.  I looked out onto the crowd, and I opened another beer.  I adjusted the mic.  I wasn’t a boxer.  I was just another monkey in a cage, doing tricks for love an attention, doing my bit to kill art in my old hometown.

 

John Grochalski is a writer formerly from Pittsburgh. He lives in New York now with his wife and two cats. Grochalski's book of poems The Noose Doesn't Get Any Looser After You Punch Out is forthcoming via Six Gallery Press.