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Lost Yinzer I am a sick man. I wish I wasn’t such an incorrigible drunk, and I wish I wasn’t sitting here, right now, writing this, wasting a holiday on beer and intermittent glasses of scotch. I know that I will go to bed without remembering going to bed tonight. And I know that somewhere around three in the morning, when most of you are asleep, I will wake in a panic, wondering where I am, wondering who I am. And then I will hear the sounds of the cars and buses as they careen up Bay Ridge Parkway, and I will hear the sounds of Mexicans wandering up the midnight streets, and I will see my wife asleep next to me in the bed, and hear the neighbor’s television through the ceiling, and see my cats asleep on the pile of clothes on the floor, and I will know that I am home... for now.
Last night we were in a bar on 3rd Avenue, and I got so terribly drunk that I began crying again. I’ve been to this bar three times. I’ve cried in this bar two of the three
times I’ve been to it. The first was
over my sadness that all innocence had died for me, and that my wife and I were
living this bohemian life without kids and a home, and that somehow this was my
fault because I’d messed it all up for the two of us. As if I were responsible for her and I not wanting the same
things that everyone else wanted. But
my wife is good to me. She set me
straight. She said you and me, kiddo,
and if that means riding the rails, then so be it. Fuck kids. Fuck the home.
But this last time, last night, was
something different. You see, I started
writing another novel about home, about Pittsburgh again, because no matter how
far I run, I can’t escape the pull and draw of the place. I bleed it. I’m writing about me, and I’m writing about friends, and I am writing
fiction, but it isn’t really fiction because theses people are real to me. And even though the situations didn’t happen
between the groups of us, they happened to me, so therefore they are real. And Friday night we watched Wonder Boys again, all because I was
lonely for home in the swirl of Gotham, because of this damned novel, and
because I needed a glimpse of something tangible. I think Chabon is a terrible writer, by the way, but the movie
version of his book breaks my heart.
So you remember the scene where Grady Tripp
is in the parking lot of CMU, which is posing as PITT, and he is raiding
Crabtree’s bag for codeine, and is egging James Leer along. James Leer decides the hell with it, and
does like Grady Tripp does, and takes a couple of codeine pills with a shooter
of scotch. Remember that? Yeah, well my wife, and remember – I’m about
six beers up at this point – asks me what moment in Wonder Boys resonates the most for me, and I think of that
scene. And I start to cry. Why? Because I think of the cold. I think
of Pittsburgh cold and Oakland cold, and Western Pennsylvania cold, and I think
to myself that I know that cold. I have
suffered so many winters in that cold. I have discussed girls and Kerouac, and music, and everything else in
that cold. I have watched Kris Collins
write poems in that cold. I have gained
and lost love in that cold. I have seen
my future wife walk up to me in that cold. I have walked home for miles alone in that cold, hungry, starving,
crying, and wishing-I-were-dead in that cold. I hoped to never feel that cold again for the longest time. And lastly, in that bar, in Bay Ridge,
Brooklyn, I realized I’d never feel that kind of cold again. The kind that wraps you in the night, or
envelops you like a womb, like a child’s blanket, and you say, okay, everything
is as it should be.
I sound like a fool. I feel like a fool. And I realize that I am silly and crying, and the people around me are hoisting mugs and watching the Mets, and on their grills are hot dogs and burgers, and America is saying goodbye to another summer. And New York City is getting ready to vomit up the memory of 9/11 again. Forever, again. And I am sitting in this bar, and I am thinking about what the far reaches of February in Schenley Park feel like. And I’m missing it like hell. My wife hugs me. I stop crying and we steal a hotdog from a plate. And I am lost. We go home. And I read her the end of On The Road, crying again at that part where Jack says, “I think of Dean Moriarty. I think of Dead Moriarty.” It is too late. I think of Pittsburgh and the moments I’ll never have again. I think of Pittsburgh.
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