Voices in My Head

Martha and I drove to Pittsburgh last Thursday and despite a disturbing amount of road kill and rain, I would say we had a great trip. Four of the five nights we were there we stayed at a 4-Star hotel downtown.

4-Star Living

Martha gets these crazy rates and I must say it is an interesting level of life in the 4-Star world. It’s no secret that I love the hi-rise living with room service and a gym.

The hotel that we stayed in is an elegant marble building that was built around the turn of the century. I first became aware of the building around 1980 when the lobby and second floor balcony was an notoriously expensive and insanely crazy gay disco with the delightful name of Heaven.

Move to the Music

The entire lobby is the same, even the bar—now a snooty restaurant—is in the same place. Every time I walked through the lobby a little soundtrack of pulsating disco beats were in my ears.

The second night there Martha stayed out in Coraopolis, PA with some friends after golfing all day and then an evening at the track. I walked around downtown Pittsburgh with my camera. I am so used to a different level of street roaming that I managed to walk the entire length of the city along the Allegheny without realizing it. From PPG to Edies Records.

When I lived in downtown it seemed bigger. Some days were just total hell. I thought I would die walking from the bus station to Hornes Department Store. It might have had something to with the big fucking portfolio I was always carrying. Being totally loaded down every day with a 24 x 30 wood drawing board; a set of drawing pencils; a 18 x 24 pad of Stonehenge Drawing Paper, and a miserable attitude can make it difficult to move around freely.

Some things are gone. I’m not sure what the fuck they are doing to 5th Avenue, it seems as though it has been in a perpetual state of remodel since I was a kid. I was sad to see that the Adult Books store had been demolished. Not sure what they are building there but I was hoping to snag a photo like this one (fourth in from the left).

Also why am I the only one who remembers Sweet Williams on the corner of 5th and Liberty Avenues?

You can’t really do street photography here because there isn’t that much street. You have to shoot everything. Shoot all the things in all the places. Shoot the people. It’s actually more difficult to shoot in Pittsburgh in some regards than it is in New York. No one gives as fuck in New York. In Pittsburgh everyone wants to know what the hell you are doing and what could you possibly be taking a photo of. If I walk around with two cameras around my neck – something that I do when I am working the holga/Russian camera thing - people think I’m the media. I must be the press and something must be happening. What ever I am pointing my camera at people stop to look at.

I thought to myself, I remember this. I remember shooting here and what that felt like. I remember all of it and I found it all. Big slices of my life around every corner. One building is from when I had a vanilla milkshake with my dad. Next to that is the alley that I used to smoke joints in with friends before class, (while I did have an attendance problem, I did get straight A’s.) and next to that is where I used to work decades later. Pittsburgh is more home than home – in some ways.

This visit, I spent the majority of my time walking through old photographs. Suddenly I would be standing in the exact spot that I took a picture years ago. It would come into frame that very minute that I did. The negatives long gone, only to them at that precise moment.

Some things are still very there. Like my grandma’s house. (Photo to come, I have ten rolls left to develop and I’m out of chemicals)

Technically, while not in Pittsburgh, but in the coal mining town of Bulger, PA in the middle of nowhere, I found the house that my grandfather built. The house that he lived in with my grandmother until the day he dropped dead in front of the fireplace – which he built stone by stone. One April morning in 1969, he bent over to tie his shoe and his heart exploded. Grandma was five feet away from him when it happened. It took her forever to get someone on the party line to call the police. It then took 20 minutes for the ambulance to find the house, drive up the drive and pronounce him dead.

So some 40 years later my daughter and I drove up my grandparents driveway.

Phillis Road

Just as we came around the bend, I saw a guy on a riding mower with a wet towel draped over his head. Did I mention that it was 92 degrees and Jazz’s air-conditioner is broken? No? Ok well it was hot but at least we were in the woods.

Anyway, I see this guy on the mower and he has a white towel over his head and between the mower noise and the angle of the driveway, he never looked our way.

I got out of the Jeep and walked towards the house. The minute I stepped out, the guy drives the mower over to the right side of the house and back towards the old chicken coup. With in seconds he’s out of sight. I turned around and looked at Jazz, who at this point is refusing to get out of the car and was waving at me to get back in the car.

I ignored her and looked up at the house. My grandfather built that house. How many days did I stand in the living room watching my dad mow the yard on a hot as hell August day while my mom and my grandma were in the kitchen shaving carrots and picking peas; every topic of conversation inevitably ending in an argument. All they did was bicker. The only thing they ever agreed on was that neither one liked each other and they both thought my dad was an ass.

I stood in the very same spot that my dad would unload the car and tell me under his breath “try not to bother your mother.”

The people who own the house have made a lovely area out of it. Grandpa wasn’t too big on curb appeal. He never even bothered to build front steps up the hill to the house, figuring that he spent most of his time in the back yard with the chickens and the garden.

I stood there in the driveway, in front of this family’s opened garage, open house open life. I fought the urge to go into his home. So instead I took two photos and just stood there, taking it all in. Jazz moved the car into the turn around area and got out, bitching at me to get back in the car, because “”someone is probably calling the police.” I shrug. My grandpa at one point owned all the land on top of the hill. When he died it became my grandmas, who lived up there alone and completely crazy until 1995 ish. She has only been dead for 8½ years. My dad died before she did. Go ahead call the cops. Everyone in Bulger is around 100 anyway and I guarantee that they have heard of my family in some capacity.

By the time I was 14, summers in Bulger were a fucking nightmare on the most surreal level possible. I would have to say that it might be one of the top four highlights of insanity that I’ve had to ‘go through’ with those people. My dad totally freaked out and became my grandfather, wearing his old clothes and speaking in one-word answers. Back then, we would stay for upwards of a month. A fucking MONTH of nothing but black snakes, wasps, well water, locus, Gin Rummy, potatoes chips, beer, liquor, rocking chairs, and sleeping in my dead grandfathers bedroom. Yep, by the time I was 14 I started bringing a pound of pot with me. Do not judge. Four weeks of that and I think it was in everyone’s best interest that I stay as high as possible. Besides, how the hell was I supposed to sleep in my grandfathers bed? On the nightstand next to my head were two 11 x 14 photos. One was my Grandfather’s WWI Army photo and next to that was my father’s WWII Army photo. At night, I would listen to the hum coming from the huge wasp nest that had formed outside the bedroom window above the headboard.

One Thanksgiving we went to Bulger soon after I had seen The Exorcist. I didn’t sleep the entire time. I would pass out in the daytime and then lie awake all night long. I remember driving up the driveway in the winter, almost sliding into the forest and I remember a few Christmases with the tree next to where grandpa died. The irony having been lost until that very moment in the driveway when I thought of my mother in her coffin next to the Christmas tree.

Standing in the driveway I looked around, remembering when my dad would position himself in the front yard and shoot at black snakes with my grandfathers’ rifle. Or when he spent the entire day hacking down weeds and vines from the edges of the front yard only to wake up the next morning with poison ivy covering his arms, legs and neck. Not to mention having a horrific sunburn. I never got a sunburn there because I basically never went out of the house and when I did, I walked down the gravel road that winded through the woods.

Five minutes in my grandmothers driveway and I felt more of a connection to my family than I did standing beside either one of my parents coffins. How screwed up is that?

Right, well, Pittsburgh was good. I shot Braddock PA a very very strange place. Went to a thrift store or two, visited a few friends and had a lot of cat action. I spent some serious time with Jazz and we even went to the new Star Trek Movie. Amazingly, the movie didn’t make me want to vomit. Considering the general abuse that both Jazz and I went through with Jim and his Star Trek issues, we both enjoyed it. And again, why am I the only one who remembers that Christopher Pike was the guy who had the melted face and everything was paralyzed from the brain down.

The Real Pike

His body was in a box that moved around through brain waves and he communicated by blinking the lights on the front of his box.

My memory is frightening.