A Bird in the Cage

Beginnings: A Kid of the Streets

I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — “the Burgh” as we who have lived there call it. Although I have not had a permanent residence there for more than forty years I still consider Pittsburgh my home. The Burgh sets its roots deep in those who have known it. The City gets in your blood. You can’t go away from home again.

The house where I spent the first fifteen years of my life fronted California Avenue, a busy thoroughfare on the city’s North Side: three lanes of traffic, two trolley lines. It could get hectic. We never played ball on California Avenue. Beyond the traffic there was a sharp drop to a leveled space some fifteen feet below the street. A dozen train tracks sliced their way to the horizon. You could not see the trains, either from the street or from the second story windows of our house. But their relentless presence was the most dominant aspect of daily life.

This was before diesel engines. Everything was steam. That means coal-powered. The air was filled with great plumes of grayish white smoke and phosphorescent cinders that glowed in the night air. Passenger and freight trains hurried by, their whistles wailing throughout the day and all the night. Everywhere there was the crashing sound of cars being coupled and uncoupled on the Hump. Great lines of cars, hundreds at a time — freight and oil, flatbeds and cattle — were strung together by the skilled workmen. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every day of every month, you heard the sound of heavy metal.

Everyone who lived along this sprawling artery that linked the coalmines of West Virginia to the steel mills of Pittsburgh belonged to the railroad. This was true even when, as in my family’s case, no one worked for it. The soot and smoke invaded your eyes and ears, your nose and mouth, the elastic around your underwear and the clothes in your dresser. When you took a bath, a black ring remained in the tub after you drained it, a reminder, lest one forget — how could one? — of the clanging world outside. My neighborhood was a child’s paradise, a place where a kid could luxuriate in the steamy dirt of industrial urban living.

That neighborhood is all but gone now. The house where I was raised has been demolished. In fact the entire small block of houses now is an open field, full of weeds and wildflowers. Even the railroad is all but idle. Most of the houses that remain have been boarded up, condemned by the city as uninhabitable.

When I drive through the neighborhood today, grown silent and all but deserted, I am a ghost in a ghost town. No one from my youth remains. Viewing the fading shrouds of what was once a vibrant neighborhood, where VJ Day and the Fourth of July were celebrated with patriotic fervor, where Jews mixed with gentiles, whites with blacks, every nationality with every other, no one would believe that there once were people here who loved these streets and narrow alleyways, the hard cement porches and creaking swings, the wooden steps winding to the hills above. But love it I did. It always saddens me to see the stilled emptiness “progress” has left in its wake.

As a kid of the streets, the animals I knew were mostly the animals of the streets. Mainly cats and dogs but there were horses, too. In those days vendors and junkmen rode four-wheeled wagons through the city, pulled by stoop-shouldered, weary creatures who were occasionally aroused from their dolorous fatigue by the high pitched clang of a trolley’s bell or the crack of the driver’s whip.

Tippy was another matter. One hundred percent mutt, she was an energetic, tri-colored wisp of a dog with a small but clear tip of white at the very end of her tail. She was eager for affection and designed by nature to be free. Give her just the slightest crack in the gate and pow! — she was gone! Like a shot she was through the gate and around the corner.

I understand now that she lacked the space she needed to be the dog she was. Still, Tippy did not want for warm human companionship. My fondest memory of her is when, wonder of wonders, thirty-six inches of snow fell on Pittsburgh in a matter of a few days. That kind of development suspends all the ordinary rules of behavior. Tippy spent long hours free to wander and play. She knew a good time when she had one. Some photographs of those days remain. It is hard to tell who is happiest — Tippy or me.

Excursions: The Country

Not everything was urban in my youth. Along with my parents and sister I enjoyed fishing along the upper Allegheny River. We also visited friends who had farms. Sometimes I stayed on for a day, maybe a weekend, occasionally a week.

The farm I knew best was small, devoted mainly to vegetables and flowers. In the winter, plants were grown in a long, low-slung greenhouse. It was bewildering to enter that luminous space, quiet as a church, feel the accumulated heat of the sun on a bitterly cold day and smell the sometimes dank, sometimes sweet odors of the plants. Without a doubt these were the most mysterious, most awesome moments of my youth, occasions when my experience was so full of inchoate meaning that I could not then, and cannot now, find the words to describe it. It was, I think, more a yearning than a fact I felt.

My guess is, many people of my generation had a farm like this in their childhood. Back then, families took drives in the country on Sundays; farms were places people visited. Urban kids of my time and place were bred and raised on the machine, but we took sustenance in our real and imaginary commerce with the garden.

Some children understand early on what meat is. They realize that a roast or a pork chop or a chicken leg is a piece of dead animal. A corpse. I was not that precocious. Like most Americans I grew up unmindful of the food on my plate and the death of the creature it represents. The animals I knew personally, Tippy for one, I considered my friends. But I lacked the imagination then to make the connection between my fondness for these animals and the silent pieces of flesh that came from my mother’s skillet or oven. The human mind is remarkable for its ability to see the world in bits and pieces, each part disconnected from the rest, like an expansive vista viewed through the narrow slits of a picket fence. It was not until much later in my life that the force of logic and the vicissitudes of experience overwhelmed the chronic idleness of my imagination.

Transition: The Burbs

Had my family remained on the North Side it is virtually certain that I would never have gone to college. People in that neighborhood grew up to work, not to study. My parents were products of that pattern. Neither finished the ninth grade. There was work to be done. Mouths to be fed. Education was a luxury. My parents were unable to pay the price.

My sister was different: She graduated from high school. But then the pattern took hold again. She went directly from the classroom to the workforce. A much better student than I was and natively much smarter, she was certain to have had a distinguished university career had she had the opportunity. And I? I was destined to follow my sister’s lead. The duty of work called. It was not a matter of whether but where to get down to the task of making a living.

But then a momentous thing happened: We moved. To the suburbs. My parents decided that they had had it. That grime-filled heaven of my boyhood had been their hell for too long. We were getting out! No ifs, ands, or buts. And I? I was fifteen, with deep roots in the friendships and places of my youth. If ever a child was resentful and full of anger, these powerful emotions found a home in me. I was determined to be unhappy.

The world did not cooperate with my resolve. In the end, the move was not as traumatic as I was bent on making it. I made new friends and soon found myself a part of a quite different environment. Many of my friends’ parents had gone to college. They had professions — in medicine, the law, education. Their taste for culture trickled down to their children and, through them, to me. I soon found myself reading and talking about Camus and Andre Gide, discussing Nietzsche and Norman Mailer, listening to Bartok and Stravinsky. With my companions I drove into and around the Burgh to watch foreign and classic films. We debated God’s existence and free will into the morning hours. For the first time in my life I began to write. Horrible fiction. Worse poetry. But I took the demands of the Muse seriously. And my teachers liked it. They told me I was a writer-in-the-making.

Music was important. By my junior year I was making a little money playing in big dance bands and in small combos. I played any reed instrument but mainly clarinet and tenor sax. I doubt if I ever would have become a really good musician had I continued playing. I enjoyed the camaraderie as much as the music. In the civilian world the closeness of musicians may be the nearest thing to those legendary wartime friendships formed in foxholes.

After graduating from North Allegheny High School I went to college. This I did for a simple reason: it was what all my friends were doing. I then had only the faintest idea about what a college was. All I knew firsthand was that people “like me” went to one because — well, because that’s what colleges were for. I was encouraged in this belief by the testimony of my teachers and other interested persons. I had a good but hardly outstanding academic record in high school (top tenth of my class, as I recall). Every Open House all my teachers told my parents the same thing: “Tommy could do much better if only he would apply himself.” “Who couldn’t?” I wondered at the time. And still do.

One person in particular, Reverend Luther Fackler, who was the minister of the Lutheran Church I attended, encouraged me to give college a try. I thought I felt a “calling” for the ministry. But I was unsettled in my faith. Even before I went off to college I was unable to join in the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed. The words stuck in my throat. Reverend Fackler told me not to worry. God would find me — but only if I stopped trying to find God. This seems as unsound to me now as it did to me then. Any God who would find me only on the condition that I was looking the other way is a God not worth finding. That much hubris any human worthy of being created by God ought to have.

I wrote an essay on this issue at the time, called “The Seeker.” Neither perturbed nor distracted, Reverend Fackler counseled me not to worry. A true faith is measured by the depth of its temptations to deny, he said. As I was sorely tempted in the latter regard, off I went to college, to find (or, perhaps, to be found by) the Divine Mind. I chose Reverend Fackler’s college — Thiel College, a small liberal arts college affiliated with the Lutheran Church, an hour and a half drive north of Pittsburgh. I applied to no other. My friends’ parents were most supportive. My mother and father for a variety of reasons were less sure. I was too. Folks from the North Side could smell trouble a mile away.

On the Banks of the Shenango: Thiel College

At the beginning, college was everything my last years in high school had not been. I had a hard time making friends during my freshman year, despite playing (at 138 pounds) halfback on the football team. To say I played halfback in college may be — well, actually it is an exaggeration. I did letter in football (and in track and golf) in high school. College was a different league. I was in over my head and should have had enough sense to quit. It was not until my sophomore year that the Age of Wisdom dawned. I never played varsity football again. But even to this day I harbor the belief, as deep and unfalsifiable as any I have ever held, that I have good hands. You throw a ball near me and damned if I wonít catch it!

Whatever Red Barber might write about my sporting life, my early academic career at Thiel was unspectacular. Something like a 2.5 average on a 4.0 system. Before going off to college, as I mentioned earlier, my teachers encouraged me in the belief that I might someday be a writer. My teachers during my first two years at Thiel seemed to be intent upon demonstrating how reprehensible my high school teachers had been in fostering this belief in me. I received a more or less steady stream of Ds and Fs for my early compositions. This gave me second thoughts. Perhaps the Muse I was listening to spoke in dangling participles? I even managed to flunk Spanish. Elementary Spanish at that. Believe me, I thought long and hard about quitting more than once.

But then — and this was perhaps the most important event in my early years as a prodigal scholar — I stopped wearing socks. You need to understand: back then, no one, I mean absolutely no one, went sockless. Back then baring your ankles in public was the social equivalent of walking around in your underwear. Moreover, as I embarked on my sophomore year, I stopped going to class. In a course in English Novel, for example, I showed up twice. Once for the mid-term. Once for the final. When I received a B+ for the course, who could doubt that I was above the common fray? I was becoming somebody. As my parents scrimped and saved, I spent my time burnishing my public image by not wearing socks, not going to class, staying up to two or three in the morning winning pocket money at poker and bridge, playing in dance bands and combos, and (on most days) sleeping well past noon.

In retrospect, I count my lucky stars in the knowledge that, throughout this period of my life, my parents never knew I was wasting their hard-earned money as I squandered opportunities they could never have imagined.

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