How to Live Like Li Po in Pittsburgh                                 Dave Newman

 

Ten days before this, I completed a master’s degree in poetry, something I realized early on would embarrass me but, because I had paid the tuition, because I had no idea how either the worlds of poetry or the academy operated, I stayed on until graduation and felt exactly as I had imagined I would during my first class: humiliated. Degrees cost money, and the degree I’d earned wouldn’t be paying me back. I’d gone into the program expecting to come out with a book or credentials or a job teaching writing at a community college. What I had was a job driving industrial parts around Western Pennsylvania and a stack of poems I would have written anyway. I was twenty-five years old. My older brother, who’d gotten me the job delivering to factories, said, “Why the fuck would you get a degree in poetry?” He wasn’t being cruel. He wanted to know. The answer was: I loved poetry. The answer was: I didn’t fucking know.

        Now I sat in Denny’s Bar, drinking Coors Light bottles. Denny’s was a dump: ten stools, three tables, two dartboards, and a tiny upstairs that reeked of bleach and urine. If you wanted to make out or finger a woman in the bathroom, and if it took her more than twenty seconds to come, customers got pissed and you had to step into the alley. Old barflies and young drunks always dry-humped out there. Or threw up. Or both.

        The bartender was a big guy who wore v-neck t-shirts stretched over his gut. His skin glowed bright white even in the dimmest of bar light and his eyes were pink dots. He hated to be called an albino. Everyone called him an albino. He was finishing his PhD in something, some science or maybe history, but he looked as old as my dad. I liked him. Despite his education and inability to finish his degree, he was kind, appreciated a good tip, and floated free drinks when you needed a free drink. He hid a small bat under the bar but I’d only seen him pull it once and he looked confused as to how to swing it when he’d come around the bar to break up a fight. Then he stepped back behind the bar and cleaned his eye-glasses with a napkin.

        Now a couple regulars came in, old men who set crumpled singles and loose change on the bar and looked at their sad piles of money like the dollar bills and silver change were seeds that only needed to be planted on hardwood and watered with beer to grow into bigger piles of money to buy more pints and stronger mixed drinks, more confidence and better stories to tell the young strangers who played the jukebox too loud and needed to hear the facts about this horrible world.

        I looked in the long mirror behind the bar and felt as old as the men with their white whiskers and dirty knit hats.

        The bartender brought me a beer and said, “Where you been?”

        I said, “Working.”

        “Teaching?”

        “No, driving a delivery truck.”

        “You looking for a teaching job?” he said, wiping up the beer sweat with his rag.

        “I am,” I said, but I wasn’t. How you even looked for a college teaching job was another one of the things I did not learn in college.

My best friend, a guy who called himself JoJo Crash, who worked and was fired regularly from all the bad jobs you could work at and get fired from in Pittsburgh, was supposed to be here soon. JoJo painted houses. Before that, he made submarine sandwiches. Before that, he waited tables. Mostly he drank. Sometimes, when he was really broke, he came to Denny’s Bar with his own bottle of cheap whiskey and used the bar’s glasses and ice and bartender but never tipped, just drank his own rotgut, and everyone thought it was fine because he was JoJo Crash and every bar needs someone like that, a character to mooch free drinks and run the jukebox and dance with beautiful ladies and promote nicotine by waving his cigarette dangerously close to your eyebrows and generally bring cheer to those of us who don’t easily access recklessness. JoJo Crash was loved for not giving a fuck.

        I gave a fuck and felt I’d fucked up plenty. My job paid eight bucks an hour and I worried about that. My student loans were coming due and I worried about that. All my resumes went unanswered. I was over-educated for some jobs, lacking in qualifications for others. My four-cylinder car operated on three working cylinders and barely climbed hills. My oil cap had popped off, so I used a rag. My tires were bald. I drove my car to the bar and sometimes drove home drunk but without a woman when I’d specifically gone to the bar to meet a woman. The poems I wrote were not as great as the poems I wanted to write and now I wondered if I would ever write anything anyone would want to read. I wondered if anyone would want to read any poems, good or bad, by me or anyone else. I worked fifty-six hours a week. The best thing in my life was the time-and-a-half the company paid for overtime, though the overtime was required, not optional.

        For years, I had imagined living my life like Li Po. Li Po was a Chinese poet from the T’Ang Dynasty. How you pronounced T’Ang, like the breakfast drink or with some foreign accent, I didn’t know, but I’d read every Li Po poem that had been translated. Li Po did not live like American poets. He did not reside in New York and wear scarves and sleep with his freshman students and believe in the power of the sonnet to stop war. Li Po was a badass. He knew martial arts. He read Confucius. He used swords and killed other men in arguments over women. He loved wine. He really loved wine. The Emperor loved Li Po and made a job for him. When the Emperor summoned Li Po, Li Po was often very drunk and the Emperor did not mind. Then the Emperor did mind. He grew sick of Li Po’s drunkenness and sent him away. Li Po spent the rest of his life wandering China, writing poems and guzzling wine, with long periods alone to create and long periods to celebrate creation with friends and strangers who liked drink and poems. Pittsburgh was not China and people generally did not give a shit about my poems but I still wanted a life of poetry and wine. If I couldn’t afford to roam, and I couldn’t afford anything, then I would work at whatever job I had to work at and I would come down from whatever place I was living and I would be in the bars again, drunk and happy, talking poetry with anyone who still believed that poetry might matter in the world.

        This night was a night like that. For three weeks, I’d driven through and around Altoona and Holidaysburg, Hollsopple and Duncansville, all the little industrial towns east of Pittsburgh, dropping off ball bearings and cable and other industrial products I couldn’t even name. The truck I drove lacked air conditioning and FM radio. For ten hours a day, I listened to talk radio and bad country and parked on backroads to write poems. Nights I ate subs from Sheetz or boxed macaroni-and-cheese and read and wrote and woke early to deliver more ball bearings to paper mills and quarries and tiny metal shops with three employees, always dreaming poetry. But now it was time to quit poetry for a couple days and get smashed in Pittsburgh, just like I imagined Li Po doing if Li Po had lived in Pittsburgh and was deeply in debt and working a bad job while managing dreams of literary fame and free drinks from adoring readers.

        JoJo Crash stepped into the bar and said, “Let’s get fucked up.”

        I lifted my beer and said, “Already there.”

 

***

 

 

JoJo was drunk on three beers. He was an alcoholic and he did that. Three beers into the night he was bombed and thirty beers into the night he kept drinking, sometimes going for days. Once I found him with a cab driver, seventy-two crushed beer cans in a plastic garbage bag, three empty cardboard cases of Keystone Light on the floor, neither JoJo nor the cabbie making any sense. Tonight JoJo was pissed at his boss, also an alcoholic, who lived in a one-room basement apartment. JoJo said, “That fucking asshole.” Alcoholics do not like other alcoholics. JoJo was pissed at his boss for calling off when JoJo wanted to be the one calling off. It was senseless to wake with an enormous headache, struggle through a shower, and be told, “No work today,” from a man who could barely clear his throat from inhaling sixty Marlboros the night before.

        I bought the next round. I bought the round after that. My job paid terribly but the overtime helped and I had eaten ramen noodles three times last week to save money. The scratch still in my pocket I wanted to spend until I was blind.

        JoJo said, “We should get some drugs.”

        I hadn’t considered that but now I did.

***

Three women we knew stumbled in the bar. They were all drunk. I’d banged the one, Sue, a few times, until she’d said, “Dave Newman, when are we going on a date?” then I knew we’d been doing the same thing at the same time, in the same room, in the same bed, but in a completely different way. She sat beside me now. She was buzzed and happy. When she was buzzed and happy, she liked me okay, thought I was funny, and did not act concerned at my inability to commit to something as casual as getting a pizza or seeing a Kevin Smith film. Drunk, she wanted to get drunker and get laid and I was fine with that, not just fine, but grateful, happy to be around a woman horny enough to abandon her romantic dreams for a night of cheap beer and screwing.

        Sue said, “We went to a strip bar this week.”

        I said, “Like a strip-bar strip bar?” thinking she meant women, thinking she meant the Cricket in Oakland or maybe one of the skuzzier strip clubs out in Smithton where truckers on speed paid for handjobs in backrooms. I imagined Sue sticking a dollar bill in another woman’s g-string. I imagined a lapdance, Sue’s hands on the stripper’s hips and the stripper grinding her ass into Sue’s lap. I drank my beer and looked at Sue with her boring blond hair-do and her practical jeans and her comfortable sweatshirt and I thought: nah.

        She said, “Yeah, a strip bar.”

        I said, “With chicks?”

        She said, “No, of course not,” and smiled and pushed into me. “With gorgeous boys.”

        “Where do they have a strip club with gorgeous boys?”

“Gloria’s, up on Route 30.”

“Gloria’s? By the fire department?”

“Exactly.”

“And they have nude male dancers?”

“Yes,” Sue said, smiling, a little proud.

I said, “I thought that was just in the movies,” and I pictured some buff guy in a top hat pulling off his tear-away tuxedo pants like a comedy act. I said, “Like Chippendales?”

She said, “Sort of.” She said, “Not really.” She said, “Buy me a beer. I can’t talk about it right now,” and she looked down the bar at her two friends, one cute and tiny, the other with a chin like Jay Leno.

“This sounds important,” I said, and ordered her a beer.

        “Embarrassing important,” she said, and shrugged.

        “Are you still pissed at me?” I said.

        “I’m always pissed at you,” she said, but nice and with a smile, as she lifted her free beer.

***

Sue went somewhere. JoJo Crash came back.

        He said, “I’m working on the drugs.”

        “Good,” I said.

        JoJo had been on a payphone. Getting drugs then was not like it is for young people in this new shiny century with cell phones and texting and tractor beams that magically deliver bags of oxycontin to the bar. In 1996, to get a bag of blow, you had to hustle the whole city and sometimes talk to an idiot dealer with a gun on the table he was too tired to load because he’d smoked pot and watched bootleg Nirvana concerts for seventy-two hours straight. In 1996, scoring drugs was a long-lasting and sometimes pathetic gig.

        JoJo said, “You want to do crack?”

        “No,” I said. “I do not want to do crack.”

***

Sue came back.

        She said, “You can sleep at my place tonight.”

        “Excellent,” I said.

        I would have rather banged Sue than smoked crack.

        Down the bar, JoJo Crash flirted with the woman with a chin like Jay Leno.

        Sue said, “Buy me a beer, and we’ll pretend like this is a date.”

        I said, “No.”

        “You are a jerk,” she said.

        “I’m not,” I said, and led her to the bathroom to make out for thirty seconds or less.

***

JoJo said, “What’s going on with this strip club story?”

        “I don’t know,” I said. “Sue started to tell me something and stopped.”

        He picked up a beer, a draft, a big twenty-two ounce thing that turned warm half-way down and looked like it should have been filled with ice cream, hot fudge, and whipped cream.

        “That’s a terrible looking beer,” I said.

        “Awful,” JoJo said. “Someone bought it for me.”

        “What’s going on with the chick with the Jay Leno chin?”

        “Really?” he said. “A Jay Leno chin?”

***

Sue was drunk and wanted to make out in the bathroom again. I wanted to head to the alley, to get some air, to get my hand under Sue’s sweatshirt. Because Sue was often too frustrated with me to have sex with me, I paid attention to the times when she was not frustrated with me and I focused on not missing the chance to get laid.

        She said, “Buy me a beer.”

        I said, “I always buy you beers.”

        “You should take me on a date.”

        “Hmm,” I said.

I bought her a beer.

Every man has a moment, an epiphany even, when he decides he either wants to spend the rest of his life lying to women about who he is, pretending to be a sensitive soul in search of deep connection and long walks in the rain, or something else, a less sensitive soul who is honest about his interests, or lack thereof, in long-term relationships, meeting potential in-laws, and buying tickets to The Nutcracker every Christmas. I had long passed this moment, the moment where I promised one thing to get another, where I said, “Sure, I’ll call,” when I didn’t plan on calling, or, “Sure, I’d love to see The Phantom of the Opera,” or, “It’s great that you’re still best friends with all your sorority sisters and you ladies are all in your mid-fifties, wow!” When I decided to not be what I imagined women wanted, I assumed I would never get laid again, but the women generally said, “Whatever,” and either banged me or did not, moved on to the next guy and banged him or did not, or went back to grad school for poetry and started to experiment with bi-sexuality. Nothing changed.

        Sue said, “Buy me a shot.”

        I bought her a shot.

        Her friend, the woman with a concrete block attached to the end of her face, shimmied down the bar and sat next to us. She waved at me and said, “Buy me a beer.”

        I bought her a beer.

        I said, “What’s up with this Gloria’s strip club story?”

        Jay Leno looked at Sue and said, “Seriously, bitch—you told?”

        Sue said, “I didn’t tell anything.”

        Jay Leno said, “You obviously did.”

        Sue said, “You told that JoJo Crash guy.”

They kept fighting, a little friendly, a little mean. I waited for someone else to come along and ask for a drink. Denny’s was the kind of bar where you bought people beers and your money disappeared at slower rates because other customers, not Sue and JoJo and Jay Leno, but better ones, people on welfare and assisted living, people just of mental hospitals, would buy you drinks back. My original twenty had disappeared from the bar but my next twenty hadn’t been touched and I was plenty smashed.

The bartender came along and asked me about my poetry. He was sweet that way.

He said, “And you publish in magazines?”

“Sure,” I said. “Sometimes.”

I failed to mention that no one read these magazines.

He said, “That’s pretty cool.” He said, “You should publish a book.”

I nodded and thought: no shit.

The bartender walked off. He tucked his t-shirt down the back of his pants and hitched everything else up. The bar was crowded now. The music was loud. We were mid-run through eleven REM songs, which meant JoJo Crash had mooched someone’s five-dollar bill and fed it to the jukebox and played Document, the whole CD.

I looked at Sue and I wanted her to ask about my poems. I wanted to be shy and humble and steer the conversation away from what I loved most, my own writing, still a pathetic self-absorbed thing to admit, so maybe we could talk about Li Po and how he wrote to Tu Fu, another great poet, in a letter, “The wine can’t get me drunk. / The local poets bore me.” I wanted to have that kind of power, to say that the local poets bored me, but I was a local poet, and I’d bored people, so maybe I just wanted to say, “I love poetry,” or, “No poetry is truly boring,” even if it is, even if it mostly is, because the world needs confidence too, someone to say something matters, that it’s not all shit, that you might be boring now, all of us, but we could not be boring, we could figure this out and make poetry interesting again.

Sue said, “I might let you fuck me tonight.”

I said, “I appreciate that.”

She said, “You sure you don’t want to take me on a date?”

I said, “I’d definitely fuck you tonight, for sure.”

In walked a dude named Killer.

***

Killer was weird with his pompadour hair-do and faded jean jacket. All of him was skinny but especially his face where you could see the muscles in his jaw flex when he ate a pretzel or chugged a beer. I had no idea why he called himself Killer or what his real name was. He was quiet and gentle and too odd to maintain a conversation past a couple jokes. He said he worked as an actor and he may have but I imagined his acting was like my poeting, for free and pretty much anonymous. Killer washed dishes in a couple restaurants. He often smelled like bleach.

        Killer occasionally chatted but mostly he smiled and acted shy. Once he told me a joke three times, each time a little quieter, each time I blamed it on my hearing, until he said, like something out of a Vegas spoof, “When my wife lays around the house, she really lays around the house,” and he did a bad Rodney Dangerfield chuckle. I tried to laugh. I did laugh. I thought it was some kind of meta-joke, a joke about jokes or something, a joke right out of joke-writing graduate school, but Killer saw the confusion on my face and said, “I really should leave,” and he did, his jean jacket still hanging on the back of the barstool.

        Now he said, “I’m moving to New York.”

        “For real?” I said.

        “For real.”

        “For acting?”

        “For real, for acting,” he said.

        “That’s great,” I said. “Let me buy you a beer.”

        “No,” Killer said. “Let me buy you a beer.”

***

JoJo looked pretty serious about Jay Leno now. He kissed her a little, affectionately, then walked across the bar to the stool I’d barely moved from. I’d been in Denny’s Bar for something like five hours and I hadn’t pissed yet. I looked at the bathroom and all the people between there and the bar and tried to judge if I could wait. I couldn’t tell. Maybe my bladder was so drunk it no longer realized when it had to piss. Maybe my bladder was infected and about to dump poison into my body. I deserved it, death by bladder, for being such a lousy unknown poet. Or maybe I was gifted. Maybe I owned the greatest bladder in the history of barroom bladders. My bladder was legend. It deserved its own book.

        JoJo said, “You look serious.”

        I said, “I’m thinking about my bladder.”

        He said, “Don’t.” He said, “I’m having trouble getting the drugs. Do you know anyone?”

        “I know you. You always get the drugs.”

        “Buy me a beer.”

        “You look pretty serious with that chick.”

        JoJo said, “I think she might have jerked off that stripper-guy or something. She won’t tell but she’s being really weird about it.” He said, “Give me some money for the jukebox.”

        I said, “No.” I said, “I’m going to sleep at Sue’s place, I think.”

        “Just bring her back to my place.”

        I noticed Killer over by the jukebox, leaning, being cool, not talking to anyone.

        I said, “Killer’s here.”

        “I know,” JoJo said. “He’s moving to New York.” He looked at Killer. “Do you think he really acts? I know a guy who works with him, washing dishes.”

        “He might act.”

        JoJo said, “I should move to New York and start a band.”

        “Why would you do that?” I said.

***

Sue wanted to talk about the night at Gloria’s, the strip club out in North Huntingdon, by the fire department, across the street from the dive motel on Route 30. Sue was drunk. She was shy and not shy, wanting to tell her story but not wanting to be shamed by it. I prompted her on. I loved a good story, especially this one about women in strip clubs.

        Sue said, “You can’t tell anyone.”

        I said, “I won’t tell anyone.”

        She said, “Seriously. If Tiffany’s boyfriend finds out, he’ll kill her.”

        Tiffany was the third friend, the tiny and cute one. I barely knew her. She seldom drank at Denny’s Bar and when she did drink she drank very little and acted responsibly. Her boyfriend, maybe her fiancée, worked as security guard but held dreams of being a state cop. He did not look like a cop, meaning tough or violent. He dressed in fashionable sweaters, probably from TJ Maxx, and slacks. One time I complimented his shoes and he said, “On sale at Marshall’s,” and turned his foot a couple different ways so I could see the style.

        I said, “Did Tiffany bang a male stripper?”

        “Not really,” Sue said.

        “Just being in a strip club would get her in trouble with her boyfriend?”

        “Sort of.”

        “Or you could just tell the fucking story,” I said.

        Sue told the story. It was Jay Leno’s birthday last week and she wanted to do something fun, something outrageous, something more than coming to Denny’s Bar and bumming drinks off ugly dudes like me, so everyone agreed they would go see a male revue.

        I said, “They call it a male revue?”

        “They do.”

        “How was it?”

        “It was only one guy.”

        “The male revue was only one guy?”

        Sue said, “Yeah, but he was built like a wrestler.”

        “Were there a lot of other women in the place?”

        “Just the three of us.”

        I started a mental recap: three young women outside the city for a wild birthday romp, drinking in a dingy strip club with no patrons and only one dancer, a dude built like a wrestler.

        Sue said, “It sounds gross, huh?”

        “It sounds interesting,” I said. Then added, “But kind of awkward.”

        “Very awkward,” Sue said. She said, “If I tell you this, are you still going to want to come home with me? Don’t judge.”

        “I’m not judging anything,” I said. “Did you bang the stripper?”

        “No!” she said, appalled. “Are you kidding?”

        “Did he dance?” I said. “Was there music?”

        I tried to imagine the inside of club. I pictured chipped wood and vinyl chairs, flimsy plastic cups and bottom-shelf liquor. I tried to remember why I knew the name Gloria’s and why I’d never been to her club when I’d visited every other dumpy strip club in southwestern Pennsylvania. My one literary pal, Bobby Pajich, worked as a cook in a strip club and he wrote brilliant poems about it and now, remembering, I thought he might have cooked at Gloria’s, that Gloria’s might have been the job he worked before the bag factory or after the gig where he drove a tow truck, but he never mentioned the male revue, or anything about naked men, only women unhooking their bras and the smell of provolone cheese on the grill.

        Sue said, “He didn’t really dance.”

        She stopped. She drank some beer and looked around the bar. Lots of people in their fifties and sixties crowded the bar and drank with their eyes on the muted TV or their piles of money. The older barflies were all men. I wondered where the older women went, if they were sick of the men, sick of the flirting, sick of the chance for free drinks and being hit on.

        Sue said, “Why’s that guy call himself Killer?”

        “I don’t know,” I said. “I think he’s an actor.”

        “He bar-backs up at Mitchell’s. I saw him there on Monday night.”

        “Maybe he was just playing a bar back,” I said.

        “Don’t you want to hear my strip club story?”

        “I do.”

        “It wasn’t, like, very sexy. At all. He just sort of talked to us for a while. We bought him a bunch of drinks.”

        “Did you tip him?”

        “Sort of,” she said. “You can’t tell anyone.”

        “I won’t,” I said, though I think everyone knew already or was about to know from all the chit-chat. Sue dropped the story in pieces like things she wanted to empty from her purse while Jay Leno leaked bits of the narrative to JoJo and JoJo told me and Killer and Killer told the bartender but too quietly for the bartender to understand and the old man on the next stool eavesdropped all of it and smiled to himself and only Tiffany sat quietly with her boyfriend, drinking club soda, looking worried.

        Sue said, “The stripper danced a little, not really danced but just posed on stage, then he sort of whipped it out, which you’re really not supposed to do, but he did it.” She stopped and took a sip of beer. She said, “I’m too drunk to be drinking this.” She put the beer down. “He whipped it out and it was sort of hanging there, so we put some money in his g-string, then he put it close to Tiffany’s face and started flopping it around.”

        “What did Tiffany do?”

        I couldn’t picture Tiffany, polite and sober and devoted to her security-guard boyfriend, responding positively to a strange dick being bounced around her face but then I couldn’t have imagined her tagging along to a place that advertised a male revue and Steak-Ums off the grill.

        Sue said, “Tiffany put it in her mouth.”

        “She sucked the stripper’s dick?”

        “She sucked it for a while until he sort of moved it down to me.”

        “Then you sucked the stripper’s dick?”

        I found this all fascinating, a glimpse into some world I suspected of existing but had never been privileged to see first-hand. I had no idea that women, young women, conservative, moderately good-looking, somewhat-responsible women, would pay money to suck your dick as long as you called yourself a male revue and looked like a wrestler.

        Sue said, “I didn’t really suck it, I just held it in my mouth.”

        “Of course,” I said.

        Sue had blown me before. Holding it in her mouth sounded about right.

        She said, “I wasn’t going to swallow.”

        “No, of course not,” I said, but climax hadn’t seemed a possibility until she’d said it. Coming was not the same as flopping your dick around, even if your flopped-around dick ended up in the customer’s mouth. Coming involved intimacy and pleasure, not just goofy fun, no matter how outrageous. You had to pay attention and work to give someone an orgasm.

        Sue said, “That’s just gross.”

        “Making the stripper come?”

        “I wasn’t even considering swallowing. Gross.”

JoJo Crash and Killer talked by the jukebox. They were very serious, probably corroborating on how to get drugs or maybe how to become strippers. Tiffany sat near the dartboard where her boyfriend played cricket with a couple other guys, one with his own darts. Few things ruin a bar faster than grown men who own their own darts. Sue looked very drunk, too-drunk-to-fuck drunk. All the beer sloshed around my stomach. I still couldn’t feel my bladder. Jay Leno sat next to some guy I didn’t know, leaning into him and talking with sloppy lips. I looked back at Tiffany. I hoped her boyfriend never found out about the stripper. Some relationships demand honesty and others require deception. I hoped she knew which relationship she had. Jay Leno kissed the guy she was talking to.

Sue said, “Swallowing is for boyfriends, that’s it.”

I said, “Did Jay Leno swallow?”

“It’s not nice to call her Jay Leno. Her mom has the same chin.”

“But did Jay Leno swallow?”

Sue said, “She did. I wouldn’t have done it in a million years.”

“That’s it?

“What else could there possibly be?” Sue said.

Then I wanted to recap it again, out loud, to verify the truth. Truth firing around the inside of your own brain is very different than truth spoken.

I said, “So you guys went to this strip club, paid to get in, paid for drinks, paid for the stripper’s drinks, then, to top off the night, paid to suck the stripper’s dick?”

“That makes it sound worse than it was,” Sue said.

“That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”

I started to clap. I kept clapping. I kissed Sue on the forehead then the cheek then the mouth, something I did not do in public because I did not want to be her boyfriend, but the kind of honesty she delivered deserved some sort of acknowledgment, some prize beyond my means and commitment. Sue put her face into my chest and I held her there.

I couldn’t believe my luck, that a story like this would walk into a bar, my favorite bar, Denny’s Bar in Pittsburgh, and reveal itself over beers and shots. True, the rest of my life consisted of bills, ramen noodles, and long hours at a job I hated, but this was like a paycheck for doing nothing, like someone handing you a poem, perfect and finished, and saying, “It’s yours.”

JoJo and Killer appeared behind me as I kissed Sue.

JoJo said, “We need to go now if we’re going to get drugs.”

“Really?” I said.

“Don’t leave me,” Sue said. “I’m drunk and lonely.”

“I’ll be back,” I said, and left her.

***

I assumed JoJo and Killer had found a dealer or a connection, something prearranged at some time and place with the drugs there or the drugs somewhere else with another time and place to be arranged.

        This was not that.

This was a trip to the Hill District.

The Hill District was one of Pittsburgh’s great black neighborhoods for a lot of years, back in the 30s and 40s and 50s, but those years were gone, much like the steel mills and the middle-class, and now the Hill looked like it hadn’t been built so much as knocked into place by a wrecking ball. Houses crumbled. Neighbors moved out. People got shot. Half the community lived at the poverty level. The schools were broke. The Hill didn’t have a grocery store and hadn’t had a grocery store in years. Imagine a neighborhood where you couldn’t buy a head of lettuce and a pound of cheese, that you had to plan for your lettuce and cheese, that you had to take a bus to make a sandwich, and imagine what that does to your collective psyche. That the neighborhood existed at all was a miracle. That the people living in buildings with bad plumbing and worse wiring didn’t give up and burn it all down said something powerful about self-preservation and hope.

Of course, self-preservation and hope were not on our agenda.

It was late and we were here for the drugs.

JoJo said, “Turn left.”

I said, “Whose idea was this?”

JoJo pointed at a building, a yellow brick monster with plywood windows, and said, “I smoked crack there one time.”

Killer leaned forward and said, “I’m not smoking crack,” then leaned back.

I’d driven through the Hill a bunch of times, as a tourist, trying to learn something about Pittsburgh, probably being intrusive to the locals. I’d read most of August Wilson’s plays and loved them, especially The Piano Lesson, a drama that somehow manages to tell an entire family’s life and history through a piano someone wants to sell and someone else wants to play. I knew the Crawford Grill, legendary jazz club where Dizzy Gillespie had played and Sara Vaughn and even Sam Cooke. I’d walked on Wylie Avenue and thought of all the brilliant black musicians passing through Pittsburgh to play here and I’d imagined Dizzy, cheeks fully-blown, on stage, nailing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”, and I’d looked around, and thought: this place is a complete shithole. Everything that was wrong with America—race and class and money—was wrong right here, in the Hill. For every building, there was a condemned building. For every business, there was a hole. For every decent person, there was a criminal, homegrown, or something worse, someone like me, coming back soon for the drugs.

        Now JoJo said, “That chick, there, talk to her.”

        “Not her,” I said, but I didn’t know why.

        Killer said, “What are we even doing?”

        I’d never heard Killer speak so much. I wondered if Sue was still at the bar or if she’d stumbled to her apartment, if I could knock and she’d still answer.

        Killer said, “I’m supposed to go to New York to be an actor. What are we doing?”

        I guessed that JoJo knew but maybe he did not. He was drunker than I was, meaning very drunk, as drunk as you could get, and I assumed there was a plan but maybe this was all an improvisation, some sketch JoJo scribbled in his mind as we took corners and bumped curbs.

        I said, “We’re going to get arrested.”

        JoJo said, “No, we’re not. We’re going to get some blow.”

        Getting blow was great so of course we were not going to get arrested. JoJo knew logic. He treated logic like magic, like a religion that could be manipulated. He was right.

        A big dude stood on the corner. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt, hardly a pimp outfit, hardly drug-dealer-ish, and when JoJo said, “Stop there,” I kept going and tried another street and another, thinking home and away, drugs and no-drugs, arrested or stoned.

JoJo said stop and I finally slowed down.

        The woman wore a white tank-top and stood by a gas station, what was left of a gas station, rubbing her own arms in a self-hug. She wore her hair short, straightened, pushed back. Her jeans sported rips, up her thigh to her ass, and I thought I saw white panties against her black skin. She could have been waiting for a bus. She could have been holding blow.

        JoJo rolled down his window, the passenger side window on my old Mercury. The engine sputtered as I tapped the brake. If we stalled out, and my car stalled often, the engine might not crank back over. Sometimes I drifted and dropped from neutral to drive to get moving.

        The woman leaned down and eyed us. Her face was chalky, her lips chapped.

        JoJo said, “We want powder, not rock.”

        The woman said, “I’ll suck all your dicks for fifty dollars.”

        JoJo said, “Powder, not rock.”

        She said, “Are you kidding?” and looked at us like mental patients.

        Killer said, “Shit, aw shit,” but not about the woman and the dick-sucking or the drugs we were not going to get but about the cop car rolling up behind us, red and blue lights spinning.

        The woman turned and walked off. JoJo rolled up his window. I rolled mine down. The cop car sat there, lighting up the Hill like it was often lit up.

        Killer said, “We’re dead. We’re going to jail and we’re dead.”

        I said, “Killer, don’t talk. At all. Anymore.”

***

The cop had all three of us outside the car. He was middle-aged, in good shape, white. He held his flashlight like a hammer and laughed a lot but not kindly, not inspiring laughter from anyone else. His partner, a fat goon, stood there, bored. The partner never spoke.

        The main cop said, “Let me get this straight. You paint houses but this bozo is an actor and this other bozo, the driver, is a poet.”

        JoJo nodded. Those were the facts of our night, and never had they sounded so diminishing. The cop might as well have said, “Loser, loser, fuckface.”

        The cop handed me my driver’s license and registration.

        He said, “Why are you here again?”

        No one said anything.

        The cop said, “Or I can just take you in.”

        Killer said, “I’m moving to New York to act.”

        I said, “I just graduated with a master’s degree in poetry.”

        JoJo said, “We were trying to get blow.”

        The cop said, “So the poet, the actor, and the house painter decided they would get blow, powder not rock according to the house painter, at 2 AM. In the Hill District. On a Friday night. Off a crackhead hooker, to boot.”

        JoJo said, “Yes sir.”

        The cop said, “That’s too stupid to arrest.” He said, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my whole fucking life.”

        I said, “It is,” and I meant it.

        The dreams I had of Li Po did not involve getting arrest in the Hill. China, and the T’Ang Dynasty—my beautiful romantic version of it—had never felt so far or been less real.

        The cop said, “Tell you what. You, poet, lock up your car. I’m giving you guys a chance. I could arrest your asses and ruin your lives, but tonight you ride free.”

        I meant to move, maybe moved in my mind, but I stood there, confused.

The cop leaned with just his neck and said, “Lock the fucking car, poet.”

        I moved to lock my car. I didn’t have power locks, so I had to crawl around inside, clicking nobs. In the backseat sat my backpack, an old green thing, filled with clothes, sweatpants I’d planned to pull on after I’d banged Sue. I hit the final lock and stepped back outside. The cop waited. He did not appear impatient—frustrated, yes—but not rushed, only waiting to finish his lesson. I thought he would scold us some more, cuff us, possibly smack the backs of our heads, maybe break our noses, maybe hammer us with his flashlight then, lesson taught, he would drive us to JoJo’s apartment on Lawn Street where we could heal.

I stood next to JoJo, Killer on the other side, and I looked at neither.

        The cop said, “That car locked? Good. Now you fuckers are on your own. I know all three of you are drunk, and if you try to drive that car out of this ghetto, I will arrest you. I will put you all in jail and leave you there until Monday morning. All you need to do to stay out of jail is this: get out of the Hill without driving. Am I clear?”

        I nodded. Killer and JoJo bobbed their heads in the corner of my eye.

        The cop said, “Drive, get arrested. It’s that simple. Understand? Good. You gentlemen have a real good fucking night.”

        The cop, his fat partner beside him, drove off.

***

We stood like streetlights looking down on our own squares of concrete until the cop car disappeared deeper into the Hill. I looked at JoJo and JoJo smiled. This was not so bad. To get mugged, to get shot at, to get shot, period, anywhere but the face or chest, to run like fuck, to run like fuck with a mob at our back—these were all things better than arrest. This was a whiz.

        Killer said, “We’re dead.”

        JoJo said, “We’re not dead.”

        Killer said, “We are dead.”

        For a James Dean looking motherfucker, he sounded like a baby.

        Killer said, ‘They are going to kill us.”

        I said, “Act like they won’t.”

        Killer turned and walked. He took three steps and came back. He shook, visibly shook. He started to mutter. The mutterings were of death. JoJo and I stepped away, to plan something, some escape. Killer followed, then circled. The circles came faster. They made me dizzy. Killer was worse than the neighborhood, worse than the crack we never inhaled. If I never saw him again, fine. Whatever acting he was going to do would be without me in the audience. Or he would never act because he could not act. He should learn to act. He should act like an actor acting like something other than a fucking crybaby. He should act like a cop, like a tough and fair cop. He should shut the fuck up.

Killer muttered, “Dead,” and turned and walked to the pay phone, a battered box of metal and ruined glass, and stood there.

        I turned to JoJo and said, “Let’s call a cab.”

        JoJo said, “I don’t have any money.”

        Killer said, “The phone is broke. Of course it is.”

He choked the phone with both hands.

I felt the same about his neck.

        People moved along the streets, not many but enough, and they moved like it was daytime, with casual purpose. No one appeared to have a gun or a knife or anything. I walked up to the phone and stepped in front of Killer. I listened for a dial tone and heard a dial tone. I pulled out my wallet and the phone card I used for work, the card I used to call factories when I was on the way, and I punched some numbers.

        Killer said, “The phone doesn’t work.”

        The taxi company answered. They took my information. They told me they only had two cars running and it would be awhile. I was polite. I was happy.

        I said, “We’re in the Hill, by the—“ and I looked for a marker.

        The dispatcher said, “You’re fucking kidding,” and hung up the phone.

        I held the phone, not choking it but close.

        Killer said, “Well?”

        I said, “They’re slow.”

        Then, like some track star, like some scared white dude in a poor black neighborhood, he turned and sprinted away, not screaming, not looking back, just running, not going the right way, not getting out but going deeper, getting lost.

        JoJo said, “He’s running to New York.”

        “The cabs won’t come here,” I said.

        “Let’s drive out.”

        “I’m not driving,” I said.

        Openly defying a cop who gave us a break, demented as that break was, sounded like more than a night in jail, it sounded like a billyclub or mace or a punch in the throat.

        JoJo said, “I’ll drive.”

        “You’re smashed.”

        “You’re smashed too.”

        “Not as smashed as you.”

        “I’m not staying here.”

        I said, “They’ll arrest us.”

        He said, “No, they won’t.”

        We stood there in the Hill, a warm breeze blowing in from somewhere else.

***

JoJo stood by the driver-side door of my Tracer. He did not climb inside. He did not unlock his door or my door or anything. He looked at me and he looked like Killer, like he was about to cry. Or scream. Or both. He pushed both hands through his hair. He held his eyes with his palms.

        I said, “What?”

        He said, “You’re going to be mad.”

        I said, “You didn’t.”

        “Don’t be mad, please.”

        “Did you?”

        “I did,” he said. “I broke your key off in the lock.”

        I put my face down on the roof of my car. A Mercury Tracer is a tiny car, barely a bubble, and it had not been washed in months, and I put my face there, on the cool dirty roof and, for at least a second, slept.

***

We went back to the phone. I begged the taxi company. The taxi company hung up and I called back and begged again. I was begging when we noticed a man walking circles around my Tracer. He was a small man, black as everyone else in the neighbor but JoJo and me, and he looked older, maybe sixty. I thought he might smash the car’s glass but he did not move like a man about to smash glass. He moved like a man who was curious. Or bored. He moved like a man who cared about what happened in his neighborhood. I walked to him and I begged him like he was a taxi company, like he was a mechanic, like he was a car thief. Come here, fix it, rob me.

        I said, “My key is broke off, and I can’t get it out. I have another spare key in my backpack but this key is stuck in the door. There’s a little nub sticking out but I can’t grab it. Can you turn it? Is there anyway way you can turn it?”

        “Maybe,” he said, and shrugged like this was everyday stuff, like he’d come here specifically to save my puny life from whatever the night and the police had imagined.

        He reached in his pocket and pulled out the contents—lint, pennies, half a stick of gum—then found a small pair of nail clippers. I looked at those nail clippers, how they were shaped perfectly to withdraw broken keys, my broken key, the key to my 1988 Tracer, the four-cylinder car with three cylinders, and I prayed, not to God exactly, but to this man from the Hill as he reached down and popped the lock like nothing.

        “Not a problem,” he said.

        “Thank you,” I said, again and again.

        JoJo came around the car, offering his thanks too.

        “Be safe, you guys,” the old man said.

        I pulled out my wallet and grabbed a twenty, what I imagined a cab would cost, folded it in half, and offered it.

        “Thanks,” he said. “But I don’t need your money,” though he reached for the money and took the money and, if he would not have walked way and waved the bill over his shoulder, I would have given him more. I would have given him everything I had.

***

A writer I greatly admire recently said in an interview that there are no narrative arcs, meaning that fiction, that novels especially, are a lie. That may be true for him, but my life has been defined by narrative and the ups and downs of story, sometimes in retrospect, other times I can feel the punctuated moments as they happen. This night was like that. I had been doing one thing, and now that thing was over, and a new thing needed to be started, and I was the author of that thing, my life and its new narrative direction, just as I am the author of what you are reading now. I was not yet done with what I was doing, and I wouldn’t be for years, but dangerous things can happened in safer ways, and I knew that now.

        JoJo Crash went back to the Hill that night and lost a little piece of his face in a crackhouse and came back to his apartment dripping blood. He did not stop what he was doing until much later. He moved to Jersey and died a little bit in the bars there, pushing his liver, burning his stomach, until he spit blood in the mornings and still drank nights. When he finally quit, he realized he had his own stories and he wrote them well enough to publish them and people loved them and he went on to teach writing to other people, young students who needed to hear what he had to say. He does this still.

        I do not know what happened to Sue, if she found love or learned to love sex for what it was or combined the two like we all aspire.

        Killer ran out of the Hill and straight to New York. Where he is now or what he is doing or if he ever acted or washed another dish or found his way into a life of people better than me and JoJo Crash I do not know but I hope he is safe and maybe telling this story too but with his own artistry, his own skills.

        I am still dreaming the same dreams but smaller now, less ambitious, the writing still there but quieter, the actual poetry having overtaken the desire to gain attention from poetry, the drugs gone, the drink still here but safe and mellow as I grow older and take care of my children, a boy and a girl, sensible kids whose stories have gradually consumed my own. Everything has changed, except when it has not changed at all, up here on the mountain of my life, a place I never imagined and yet am happier than I have ever been.

        See you when I come down.

 

 

Dave Newman is the author of the novels Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children (Writers Tribe Books, 2012) and Please Don’t Shoot Anyone Tonight (World Parade Books, 2010) and four poetry chapbooks. He lives in Trafford, Pennsylvania.