There's Blood in the River and It Isn't Mine

First he went with me to Hipster Mass, The Mountain Goats at Mr. Smalls in Millvale, so no really I meant it, actual Hipster Mass. It exists. No one smokes there anymore. There is whiskey at the bar. Girls will go wild. I waited at the bar down the street from his house for him to get off work, and so I might have been a little sparkly and excited. I might have felt that grip of fandom in my chest, turning my cheeks pink. I remember the first time I saw Dylan in high school, smoking weed with the old guys at Nautica. Or the first time I saw R.E.M. Or staring intensely at Scott Spillane a few weeks ago. Like that. Exactly like that. Oh, let me take off work for a few days, drive to another city, meet up with a friend, and then go to the hills to see my hero play in a church with blacked out windows. Let him play at least two songs I had on my short list. More in love than ever.

I think Pittsburgh may beat Cleveland because they have more church based venues. Didn't we just close all those churches? Lets do something about that, people. Also let's build some mountains. And listen to Flashdance a little more. And drink way more than we should, so that we forget the people with us are also drunk, maybe forget we are drunk at all.

Then there was the obligatory trip home, gathering up people, being late to meet other people, handing over of the keys to people who know how to parallel park, more whiskey and at some point I ordered a cherry lambic which was disgusting why did I do that? There were meetings in booths with curtains, and being kicked out by bouncers There was walking in the rain. There was pretty much the whole Southside thing, which is a thing I can get behind, as long as it's not a Saturday night. There is a bath house I have to go back to, because it has the same stone window work as my old high school.


The next morning I set out to explore. Well first we slept till 12, and then ate pad thai, and then I set out. His house is so fucking clean. I had a general idea, and a phone with google maps, but the Pittsburgh highway system exists to mess with me. I found a beautiful abandoned place, but it lived alone, across three lanes of backed up traffic, on 28 North. Which took me about an hour to get to, all because I took a wrong turn right as I left his house. But now I know that Greenwood exists. I guess. I finally made it back to where I wanted to go, only somehow I was in Millvale again. Millvale loves me. Millvale never wants me to leave. It held me close and tight, up and down the one ways and hills and pretty much any way you can get on Grant street ever. I knew where the bridge was that I wanted across the river (which river? I have no clue. There are rivers?), but every time I got to the place I thought I wanted, I took a wrong turn. It was adorable. Millvale is like a puppy dog you really want to take home cause it keeps following you down the street. It was like "Look Bridget, a park! Look Bridget, really old signs! Stay here, love me!"

But finally, ultimately, I made it to Lawrenceville. So I could relax and get really lost there.

The general rule, you know, go to where the water is. Always head towards the banks, that's where the stuff you want to see is. The industrial rollercoasters and chunks of broken rock and train tracks with boxcars sitting on them. Dear Pittsburgh, paint your bridges as much as you want, but I know where you really live.

Lawrenceville was great, except for this one strip that had trash cans painted with the artsy community logo. That part, geez, why do people paint their trash cans? I was the worst driver down Butler, peering down the side streets, looking for the dark dinosaur silouhettes at the water's edge. People were getting pissed at me. Another thing I noticed, and maybe this isn't true really, but I saw very few trucks and SUVS, which given the hills surprised me, and made me feel safe.

I wandered around the train tracks, the soft cold gravelly mud squishing into my ballet slippers left over from last night. I walked between the depots and the sun kept teasing me, until finally it gave in, slut. I said hi to guys in hard hats, and listened to a lot of guitar rock, and at one point I did actually taste that whiskey again in my mouth, but only for a moment and then the wind washed it away.

Someday I will buy an entire city block. Or I will just take it over, with dogs, it will just become mine because I choose it.

I took Butler down to 8, and drove through the strip mall paradise that I can't help but like because the crazy on top of each other bright store signs are backdropped by such pretty undeveloped hills and trees, and all those little broken mechanic shops and bike shops and ancient gas stations. I saw that cellphone tower/giant cemetery cross we found once. I had a conversation with Sam recently where he said that he preferred states with natural borders, and I thought about that as I crossed the state line, how flat Ohio got almost immediately. And how much flatter Michigan is further on. The flattening, the rolling out pancake like of Middle America. The trucks were lined up on the toll road like migrating elephants.

Journal Entry from April 23rd, 2004

She sat at the computer desk, headphones on, mug of ice water beside the monitor. She was listening to Tchaikovsky, having bought that day two collections of him, plus one double disk of “50 Classical Performances”, the kind of thing you found cheap that invariably had “Flight of the Bumblebee”, and “The Nutcracker, Op.71.ACT II, Scene III, No.12:Divertissement. Trepak (Russian Dance)”. She realized this was all a cliché, the blocked writer, high as fuck, desperately trying to write something with glow, the night before a deadline. But as a cliché it felt full and useful. She had even gone to McDonalds to get ice cream, it was sitting in the freezer. It was like being in high school again, that awful rush of power the night before a paper was due. But it seemed necessary.

What was also necessary was the creation of something beautiful tonight. True, she did have to read something tomorrow night, but even that wasn’t the real deadline. It was nights like this when she would sit outside and feel that if she didn’t write something that moment, then she would sell her computer and give it all up forever. Balance was maintained with nights like this.

So tonight she was here, at the desk, “Variations on a Rococo theme for cello and orchestra” blasting in her ears. Outside the ghetto birds were buzzing away. The spring night air required a sweatshirt, which was the best kind of air. The blood was rushed to her fingertips, she saw them turn circulatory red, patched with veins, the frosted nail polish gleaming harsh against the swollen skin. She closed her eyes with the cellos and began to type. She wasn’t entirely sure what she typing, but it sounded good, the words seemed thick and firm. Sometimes she could almost smell the difference between good and bad, it evoked an olfactory reflex. Good words smelled like tangerine and mango, with a base of gold and jewels all wrapped up in dark black velvet. Bad words smelled like steel rooms, white hallways, romance novels in waiting rooms that have recently been cleaned with Clorox. That got her thinking about how rooms in the Pledge commercials always looked like they smelled. Gold and rich, with sparkling dust motes in the air, warm from the overpowering sunshine. That comforting summer baked smell. It gave her the most intense feeling of comfort, thinking about those designer rooms, she pictured houses in Nantucket with wide porches, kitchens in Minnesota with red flowered curtains, wicker love sofas with white lacy pillows on sun porches filled with ferns and begonias. In every pictures, the pitcher of lemonade on the counter or table, the plate of cookies. The cat sleeping, the small child playing. The perfectly washed floors. The nicely arranged rows of knickknacks, magazines, pots and pans gleaming.

All these things she thought about while she was mindlessly typing, and more things too, like soft serve ice cream, dreams about chickens, murder by being stabbed in the neck with a pen, random ims that would pop up, because she couldn’t spend any time on the computer with being signed on to AOL.

She did this so if he ever decided to talk to her again, he could find her. She did things like that all the time, it was a game she would play with herself. At work she pictured him walking in some day. Outside smoking a cigarette she looked in passing cars trying to see if he was in one. She didn’t know what kind of new car he had, so she would play “What kind of car do I think he would drive” at the bus stop in the morning. But she never once thought about calling him, or writing him another unanswered e-mail. He hadn’t been around at all for months at this point. He had become in her head a storybook character, a memory already stripped of flesh and blood. When she thought about him, it was without a face. The details of the room instead maybe, or sounds. But never him. She had gone at her nostalgia with a pair of scissors, and someday she would throw them all into a mental drawer in the linen closet, to be lost.

Tonight she had sat in her backyard, preparing to write desperately, when a vision struck her. She saw herself calling him on the phone. She saw him answering, and her telling him to listen to what she had written. Then she read him the most beautiful twelve lines in the world, a perfect poem, a rare shining jewel among poems, the kind to make young girls cry and queens fall in love. In the vision, she saw herself saying “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever written, and you had to hear it first.” And he would tell her he loved her. And it would be perfect. A perfect heartfelt moment. She could even feel the expression she would make on her face. She could see the light in his eyes, hear the Prokofiev in the background. And then she would write a novel based on their lives together, the first time and the second time, and even if it ended badly again, it would still be dreadfully romantic.

So she stopped typing for a minute and read what she had written.

In the beginning
A boy fell in love with a girl. The girl had big black eyes.
The girl who was a kraken said:
In the beginning I was floating in the darkness and the light would dance on my purple skin and I would push myself through the currents on long white arms.
And there was a speck floating in the darkness with me, following my wake, it was a tiny rock. And on this tiny rock were lots of tiny tiny creatures, and they lives tiny tiny lives and they worked hard and died and melted glaciers. And they had a god, his name was God. I could hear him talking to them as I floated along besides. But he never talked to me.
And one day I took a very big gulp and the little rock was swallowed.
God was angry, and he took away my purple skin and he took away my long white arms and he locked me in a tiny shell, with only my big black eyes. And there I stayed for ages and ages, with no light and no dark and no current.

The girl who is only a girl with big black eyes says:
And now I am here.
I sleep with a warm back and ankles entwined.
In the back of my throat there has been a trickle of blood all day. You can't tell when I brush my teeth, but when I bit his arm there was a circle of blood and it wasn't his. I can taste it when I swallow. It’s filling up my stomach. I’m never hungry.
I must be careful not to swallow the world or he will lock me up again. I must be careful.

Beings who can only relate to each other through symbolic representation are doomed to be imaginary forever.