On the porch of the condemned house on Ninth Street in Homestead, the paunchy guy half rose off his milk crate in anger. “This house is in Munhall, not Homestead! There’s a big difference and you get yourself in trouble confusing the two.”  I continue picking through the remains of the dead wrestler’s belongings inside the house, shoving aside boxes of soiled shirts, files of bank statements and tax returns from the 1970s, empty jars of mayonnaise and pickles, trying to forge a path to the rickety plastic bookcases behind the dusty TV with its drooping rabbit ears, almost tripping over the ruptured Philco radio hiding in the burgundy shadows of the wall-to-wall. “He was in the WPIAL Wrestling Hall of Fame and boy he loved the sport, he put his life in it. Nothing else. He gave everything he had and even after he got old and diabetic, he still kept his hand in by coaching a little. Loved those kids!” From what I saw, he liked to read science fiction and was inclined to believe in UFOs and reincarnation. He lived in chaos and grime and apparently subsisted on a diet of Pringles and baked beans; the empty cans and canisters could be found on every sill and ledge, holding dried-out ball points and stubby pencils, beer tabs, match books, or sometimes just standing empty, a rime of dark grease circling their lips.  Upstairs, I was assaulted by the amoniac odor of old urine along with the civet of a cat marking its domain. “You shoulda seen the shit we dragged out of here. You couldn’t even get in,” the wrestler’s friend shouted up the stairwell, “I’ve been here four days and I’m telling you I’m beat! On top of it, there’s no running water, so I been using the tub...”  But it was when I shouldered into the “guest quarters” and jimmied the doors of the faux-veneer console that the old man’s life acquired mystery and depth.  In it were dozens of vinyl photo albums with faded script laying out their contents: “1974 Junior Olympics, York PA...1976 Regional Finals vs. Carlinton...Kiski & North Allegheny, 1978...” Thousands of snapshots, taken with an Instamatic, of boys crouching, boys sweating, boys hugging and tussling and straining for the advantage, hoping to pin each other down, stills of boys in wary stances, their hands outstretched as if in supplication; boys with their 70s and 80s hairdos jerking me backward twenty-five years: these were the guys I hung out within Shop and Gym and who could often be found out by the

rear smokestacks of Allderdice, sneaking smokes, the offspring of hunky millworkers and pockmarked mothers, shards of central Europe’s poorest  villages. They were brought up to be polite and to abhor the weird. You can see it in their eyes in the photographs, the suspicion that the photographer might have some crazy reason for taking such pictures.

What was he seeking to find by snapping them so endlessly? Did he adore them? Was this a genealogy of ancient rivalries so complex and intertwined that only the participants could grasp its significance? Was this a history of love or of war? What boundaries had he either defined or transgressed--and who was I to step over the ropes and crouch over the corpus of his work?

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John Schulman is co-owner of Caliban Bookshop in Oakland.

Tim Brown knows he can dance. He enjoys roasting marshmallows over tiki torch fluid. Tim is currently working on a comics series called Gumption, hopefully due out in the fall.