Lost Yinzer : John Grochalski

We are all trying to make connections out there.  Some of us deny it.  I have gone lengths to prove what a reclusive bastard I can be.  I write poems about being alone with the bottle, and the blinds drawn.  I write about my disgust with the world.  I get drunk in public and insult people, and fail to make friends.  I call my cat a lousy whore when she meows in my face.  I don’t talk to people at work, and I ignore friends when they email me to go and get a beer.  But despite all of that, I’m like the rest of you.  I am.  Hell, you’re reading me trying to connect right now.  I send poems out and occasionally one gets published.  I have a MySpace page where I post poems and keep a rather pointless blog.  Just by going on the thing you can find out my vitals, my opinions, who my friends are, the music I like, the books I read, and sometimes I might just tell you how good a shit came out. 

Sure, sure, we can blame this on the times.  I’m as guilty of being a patron of the zeitgeist as anyone else is.  I don’t care.  Because as much as I try to paint myself as some sort of reclusive, modern-day Bukowski, throwing bottles on the floor and not answering the phone or buzzer when it rings (okay, I actually do the phone and buzzer thing), I’m out there trying to get to know each and every one of you.  I’m just doing it in my own way.

Am I losing my train of thought here?  Maybe.  But it’s 6:05 A.M. and I’m battling Inver House scotch and Natural Light beer, so bear with me.  I suppose what I’m getting at with the idea of connection, is that you never know where it’ll lead you and for what reason.

Case in point.  Last summer I got the pleasure of traveling the country.  I say pleasure not because America is any grand spectacle.  The southwest is.  New Orleans is.  Nashville can be.  But most of the country looks the same.  I’m economical so the pleasure now resides in traveling by car without paying $4 a gallon for gas.  That said, I could never explain the shear joy of starting off in New York and finally rolling down Pacific hills and onto Market Street, San Francisco, to someone who has never done it.  It is something I’ve wanted to do ever since the first time I opened Kerouac’s On The Road, and decided fuck this 9 to 5 shit, a house, kids, the prospect of decades of joyless conspicuous consumption, and picnics on Sunday afternoons.  Somehow I’ve managed to avoid most, except the 9 to 5.  The student loan people and the electric company dictate that I got to work regularly.

But I couldn’t help think, as my wife and I were accosted by a bitter homosexual on Polk Street, wouldn’t this trip have meant more had I left from my old hometown of Pittsburgh?  You’d have to connect with me to understand my rationale behind the thought.  See, I lived in Pittsburgh until my late twenties.  I was rather convinced I was never getting out.  I mean I did.  The how and why are personal, and maybe I’ll tell you over a beer one night (and if you’ve been reading, you know that’ll never happen), but the fact of the matter is I did.  It’s been anti-climatic.  But leaving a place in your late twenties, after having invested so much time, is a hard thing to do.  Pittsburgh had become my literary Mecca, in a way.  When I envisioned great happenings of poetic sport, I pictured them on the Murray Avenue or wandering aimlessly down Forbes, in Oakland.  So taking into account my life under the spell of Jack Kerouac, and seeing Pittsburgh as where everything great and literary was happening (it wasn’t then, but I hear you all have a decent little scene now), it just seemed natural that when I finally took to the road it would be by blasting through the Fort Pitt Tunnel.

So it seemed only natural that as I walked the streets of Frisco, a little bit of me ached to see Pittsburgh, even though I knew I would when traveling home.  And if I didn’t get to blast off through the Fort Pitt Tunnel, I would certainly be coasting into that smear of metal and gold on the journey back.  I’d get to be the weary traveler who’d seen his country, and then came home to tell the tale.  Still, I needed something to pacify my hunger for the old ‘Burgh while on the west coast.  So it seemed kind of odd and timely that my wife and I came across a restaurant right in the crosshairs of Broadway and Columbus, nearly right in the heart of North Beach, a little joint called Giordano Bros.

Entering Giordano Bros., I was thrown right into the heat of a Saturday night in the Strip District, or back into a lonely afternoon lunch on Forbes.  Basically these guys are doing it the Primanti way, albeit for the laid back folks in the bay area; a big huge sandwich of meat and cheese and steak fries, and oil and vinegar slaw thrown on two pieces of Texas toast.  Steelers banners adorned the wall.  Aluminum bottles of Iron were displayed like golden jewels behind a glass case (I thirsted for one, but they were only for show).  The owners were there.  They were giving Frisco businessmen and sporty Arians a taste of “dahn” and “worsh” while the guys were shoving down the sandwiches during their quick lunch.  I stood in the doorway and took it all in.  It was funny.  I’d found myself an odd paradise.

My wife and I took a couple of stools at the counter and ordered two beers off an effeminate kid with pale features, a thin frame, and a shy demeanor.  I mention the way he looks because I would’ve never seen a kid like this in a Primanti Brothers, let alone working in one.  He seemed out of place amongst the blow up Steelers dolls and photo homage to Jack Lambert.  I thought, poor Frisco kid, poor kid from middle America coming out here to make it on the coast, and you get stuck slinging beer and sandwiches in some Yinzer bar.  But that wasn’t the case.  As we talked to the kid, told him we’d traveled, where I was from, he opened up a little bit.  He admitted that he was from Pittsburgh as well, and as soon as Giordano’s had opened up, he came right in and filled out an application. 

I was taken a little aback.  I imagined nights on the Strip and in Oakland, and throwing beer after beer down my throat, or having someone lift my head off a counter to get their last bit of a Primanti cheese steak.  Primanti’s was usually filled with meatheads.  Was I a meathead?  It was packed with aging fraternity fools, getting a sports and food fix at the same times.  Museums had murals done by Diego Rivera.  Primanti’s had murals of Clemente and Lemiuex.  Giordano’s looked poised to keep the tradition alive.  I wanted to ask this kid why he came 3,000 miles across the country, only to go to work in a place he probably avoided like the plague back home.  But that would’ve been insinuating a lot about the kid.  Plus, I knew.  Home.  Pittsburgh.

It gets in your gut and stays there like red meat.  It’s the reason I can suffer Mets fans at Shea when the Pirates are in town.  It’s the reason I still hunger for a burger at Cody’s in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn (the waitress there is from Monroeville and the joint has become a de facto Steelers bar).  Pittsburgh is the reason I take an extra look at every Bed Sty kid rocking a Pirates hat.  It’s the reason I suffer Penn State fans and Pitt fans in a Hoboken bar while waiting for the train north.  When I hear it on the streets of Manhattan, the Yinzer accent sounds like poetry to me.  Pittsburgh is the reason why we had two more beers in Giordano’s, in San Francisco, all the way across the country with a thousand different places to get one, and why I shy kid from the Steel City was able to tolerate shoving them at us.

But all the same, after the beers, we went looking for Sicilian pizza on Green Street.  And when I got back to Pittsburgh a week later, no one wanted to hear my tales.  My old man just wanted to know when I was going to get a job back in New York.  He was trying to connect too.

 

 

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.