Leave Dickens out of it. I never worked for a lump of coal or ate a rotten bit of potato for lunch but I did go to work at a dreadful tender young age.
I believe my parents thought it would teach me a thing or two about responsibility. So each morning at the crank of something that I later in life came to recognize as the pre-dawn, new to me in that summer of my lost vacational, I would awaken to the smell of coffee that was too adult for me to drink.
I was a scant 13.
I couldn’t drink wine, hell, the Roman Mass was still in Latin, wine was for the priest, and I found the wafer a pasty sticky transubstantiation, and the heavy smell of incense as mind expanding as Baba Ram Dass tempting Tim and his Harvard colleagues. Or beer, thrust thrice down my young gullet, a trick that my old man was sure would keep me out of the trough and upstanding. A puff on a Camel was a stark impossibility for years to come.
How I longed for the totem.
There was milk and a cake donut that had been minted from the Mayflower Coffee Shop where my mother worked.
“As you ramble on through life dear brother, whatever be your goal, keep your eye upon the donut and not upon the hole.”
My mother’s waggish boss once suggested, when she asked him to sponsor her bowling league, that he would only do so if the team wore that slogan on the back of their shirts. He surrendered. A smile on his face. A cup of steaming coffee stitched on their blouses.
Summer of 1958.
I am in working clothes and heading down the North Side of the Allegheny River in the back seat of whatever clunking mobile that we owned in those days. The car smells of cracked abused leather, years of construction cement and lime and dirt stuck deep in every recess, under the rug even in the glove box and a heavy hand fashioned wood tool box that holds my feet aloft loaded with bastard files, red headed hatchets and golden plumb bobs. The heat is blowing in the window with the breeze as we slowly travel with the traffic, mixes with a summer musk off the river. It is still dark.
And we are on our way to make a living.
The traffic light at the HJ Heinz plant, hang a left down to River Avenue. There’s always an old barge or derelict river crane to feed my sense of dark adventure. A sneak on to the Sixth Street Bridge, now named for Roberto hitting .311 or .314 in those days the Pirates two years away from glory. Over the hump and split into downtown Pittsburgh. Pull up close to the curb on Penn and let my mother off. Sixth and Penn. Walk. Don’t Walk. I believe there is a glint of day to come.
Then a vigorous course through every alley and back street, under skeletal fire escapes, garbage cans with loose round tops, the odor, grease, hash browns and buttery eggs from breakfast eateries turns to urine and beer out of the back of saloons. Which leads to
The Smithfield Street Bridge. Trolley’s to the left and scant room for motor vehicles on the right. Pedestrians on the walk. An early wooden version the bridge burned in minutes, the fire of 1845. The Mon River gray. Barges beat their way to and from the heated heart of the steel valley starting a mile or so up the stream.
A turn to the left and we are at a long thin gas station build into the steep side of the hill. My father is talking to the owner Bill, a small man in soiled dark blue coveralls. His forehead his cheeks his chin are trapped with dirty grease. He reminds me of Charlie Allnut as played by Humphrey Bogart in the African Queen. I imagine that his stomach is making a loud grumbling sound. My father laughs. Bill explains the ins and outs of the lives on the South Side of Pittsburgh. Gasoline spills over the rear fender of the car. Wiped with an oil dirt rag. On to South Sixth and Bingham Street.
The building is still there. Houses a similar business. At the head of the street on Carson a wild field leads up to the train tracks. One year hence Rennekamp will build a concrete yard, built gray with concrete block. We park at the rear of Beighley Hardware and Tool close to the garage door that never opens. One of my lifetimes ago.
I began.