Polish Hill

Polish Hill is a Pittsburgh neighborhood that clings to a steep hill above the Allegheny River. An ornate Catholic church stands near the top of the hill, and a disorderly grid of streets zig-zags down, lined with old row houses and tenements. It is the kind of neighborhood found in northeastern industrial cities that contains echoes and shadows of left-behind Europe.

I knew Polish Hill only in passing. I lived there for a month or so, at the end of 1989, when I was just 21 years old. I'd already dropped out of college in New York, had a quietly brutal falling out with my parents, randomly chosen Nashville as the place to collect myself, broken up with my first boyfriend, and rented my first apartment of my very only own. And then I went back to Pittsburgh to go back to college, and to claim it as my home.

Back, even though I'd never lived in Pittsburgh proper. Pittsburgh seemed like the best compromise of the places I could legitimately consider home and the places I might want to call home. It seemed to me that my life had gotten off track when I was thirteen and my family moved from small-town Western Pennsylvania to the suburbs of St. Louis. I hadn't been particularly happy in Pennsylvania in the first place, but that was before I knew how miserable I could be in the cheaply thrown up suburbs of the burgeoning Midwest. Pittsburgh was, roughly, the place I was from, before I got lost. This was not my first or my last attempt to solve the puzzle of where I belonged.

I'd gotten accepted into Chatham College. I didn’t know out how I was going to pay for everything without my parents’ help, but the financial aid office assured me we could work things out. I picked Chatham and not the more obvious and more affordable University of Pittsburgh because Chatham had a film program. I thought I wanted to be a filmmaker, because I really wanted to be a writer but had concluded that writing was no longer an important art form. There were so few readers compared to film watchers, or so my thinking went.

My mother told me explicitly that I was on my own, but I’m not sure I completely believed her. My parents were still angry that I left Fordham after a year to live in sin and misery with that hapless first boyfriend. They wanted me to move back into their house, where they could keep an eye on me, nag me into going to church, and send me to school at UMSL or someplace like that. But that was unthinkable, impossible
So up I went to Pittsburgh, driving the first car I had ever owned, a 1980 Chevy Citation with a stick shift and a distressed paint job. The first night or two I stayed at a Red Roof Inn by the airport. Then I found the apartment in Polish Hill. It was one boxy unit in an older building of four apartments. A cheap renovation had stripped out the period details from inside, but it was basically clean and decent. It had two bedrooms, and I thought I might find a roommate to help me pay the rent. I bought a new economy model refrigerator. Fifteen years of credit problems might have started right there.

I don't remember how I got the money for the move. I'd been working at Tower Books in Nashville and I couldn't have saved much. My first credit card had barely been used until the refrigerator purchase. Maybe Edd gave me some money, although he didn’t have much to give.

Edd and I slept together, finally, on my 21st birthday, on the futon on the floor of my apartment, just days before I left Nashville. Earlier that spring, I noticed how he looked at me and I got the feeling that he was attracted to me. I wanted him because he wanted me. He was ten years and ten days older than me. I talked myself into thinking he was good looking. We started to fool around on our first date, but he i panicked and ran before all the clothes came off. I didn’t understand why, and was left feeling like he’d taken my insides with him when he bolted. He told me that he liked me but he didn’t think we should see each other anymore, and I still didn’t understand why. He was recovering from a divorce and a self-induced financial disaster, and he was hoping to be promoted to assistant manager at the store where we both worked. I spent all summer and fall tortured and heartbroken until he finally came around when I was planning my move.

I remember that he came with me when I drove up to Pittsburgh the second time, with my futon and my cat and all my worldly possessions. I remember having a hot dog with him at the "O," a hot dog institution near the University of Pittsburgh. The scene is a foggy and dim, but I can see him, stocky with his hair clipped short around his incipient bald patch. In his trench coat he looked like a bit-part detective in an old movie. A young trash-talking black guy insulted the trench coat while “Word Up” by Cameo was on the stereo. I remember that moment, but I don’t remember how Edd got back to Nashville, leaving me there in Pittsburgh alone.

I remember only one in-person conversation with another human being during this time in Pittsburgh, with a girl my age who worked in a restaurant where I had gone to ask for a job. We talked about how Pittsburgh, like Nashville, was really kind of a small town where everyone knew who had a cocaine problem. But I didn’t know anyone in Pittsburgh, drug addict or not. In my memory the town is nearly deserted and I am alone. I don't remember ever going to the grocery store when I was in Pittsburgh, although I remember eating, more than once, at a bagel place in Shadyside, one of my only memories distinctly populated by other people.

It was such a dreamy and disconnected time that I would doubt that any of it really happened, except that I have photographs. I took black and white photos devoid of human figures. There is a photograph of an empty swimming pool on the South Side. The painted crosses that mark the ends of the swimming lanes look like religious symbols in the hilly old empty neighborhood.

Fall deepened into winter soon after my arrival. The weather turned dark and grey. It snowed early, and then warmed up just enough for the snow to turn to grey slush. My cat ran away the night before the snow and I worried he would not survive the weather. I sold my electric guitar to a music store for money to pay the phone bill, ending my pretense of being a musician. I’d given my old acoustic as a parting gift to the old boyfriend.

I wanted Pittsburgh to feel like home, but it wasn’t quite the home I was from. It was a city, and I had grown up in the almost-rural suburbs of one of its smaller satellite towns. We visited the city when I was a kid, but when we drove near Polish Hill my mother would reach over and lock the door locks to protect us from the bad city people.

There were familiar elements that gave me some comfort. The once-familiar Pittsburgh accents and radio stations and supermarket products—Iron City Beer, TastyKakes and Lebanon bologna—marked a return to a place once known. The griminess, the dark of falling winter and the worsening weather were also things I’d once been used to, and I was willing to see them as badges of authenticity and toughness of spirit. While I might be uncertain if asked to distinguish between an oak or a maple or a poplar tree, I recognized the mix of flora and fauna, rocky hills and gloom that made up the landscape of southeastern Pennsylvania.

I wasn’t Polish like the first residents of the neighborhood, but I was Slovak on my mother’s side. My forerunners came over to work in nearby coal mines a little later than the Polish steel workers moved onto Polish Hill. These backgrounds seemed roughly similar, from the perspective of a descendent several generations removed from the immigrants’ realities.

The Poles and the Slovaks were Catholic, Pittsburgh was a heavily Catholic town, and I had once been Catholic, too. But I had already given Catholicism an inconclusive second try. In Nashville, I went to mass semi-regularly for a few months and I’d bought a new rosary in honor of the allegorically almost pagan religion that I wanted Catholicism to be. But the practice was unsatisfactorily pedestrian and the underlying creed preposterous. I wasn’t quite completely done with it, but in Pittsburgh I didn’t go to mass.

I read the newspaper want ads and filled out applications in stores and restaurants, but I couldn’t find a job. My parents were friends with a couple who had just moved back to Pittsburgh’s suburbs. I never saw them in person while I was there, but I talked to the husband on the phone and he told me how to apply for a job at UPS. I drove out to find the place, but I got helplessly lost and finally just went home.
The closest I came to employment was the one night I spent shadowing a waitress in a high-end restaurant. I didn’t go back because I found the work and the place terrifying. I was sure I would never be able to keep up with the constant criss-crossing orders and instructions. The kitchen staff was casually but ferociously rude to the waiters, who met the insult and demands with an equanimity that was beyond me. I was far too fragile for that world. I was already crying every night, on the futon on the floor of my apartment in an empty city.

If my choices had been retreating to in humiliation to mom and dad, or making things work in Pittsburgh, maybe I would have gone back to the restaurant the next day no matter how panicky it made me feel, or asked for better directions to UPS. But I gave up before I had to. Depression can make a surmountable obstacle into an insurmountable one. And I had no confidence in my choice of home. Pittsburgh had not embraced me, welcomed me and smoothed my way. It had rejected me instead. School couldn’t have but a few weeks away—surely I could have found something to do until the financial aid came in? Why didn’t I call the financial aid office? Because, I think, I didn’t want to do it any more. Because Edd was waiting for me.

I talked to him on the phone almost every day, but his letters were more satisfying because it was easier to read into them what I hoped to read. I thought men were important, and men who might love me were a precious rarity. We talked about him moving up to Pittsburgh but I didn’t really believe that future would materialize. Returning to Nashville began to seem the path of least resistance. Maybe I could even get my old job back. I just had the change the story I was telling myself. I’d been thinking of my time in the south as a little side trip to clear my head before I returned to the north to live my real life. But maybe I would find my home in the south instead. It certainly seemed an easier, and warmer, place to be. A man was there waiting for me.

I sold the refrigerator and a dresser that had my uncle painted for me when I was a child. I talked to my landlady on the phone, and she was reasonably understanding. She would let me out of my lease and would consider returning some of my deposit. But my cat, who had been gone for a week, came back on the night I sold my furnishings. I fed him and closed him in the extra room while the buyers moved everything out. During that time, the cat left runny diarrhea on the carpet.

The cat, Tony, had been a barn kitten on my uncle’s farm before we brought him home in the year before we moved west. He retained a little of a barn cat’s intractability, and it seemed that some of domesticated habits had worn off during his days away. He slept next to me that night and purred when I petted him. But when I put him in the car the next morning, he was loudly, violently unhappy.

It had snowed again, and the roads were icy. I drove carefully down the steep, winding street to the bottom of Polish Hill, the cat yowling all the way. I didn’t have a carrier for him. On the way up he sat on Edd’s lap or mine in relative content, but now he was angry and restless and wanted to get between my foot and the brake pedal. I decided I would stop at the vet’s office at the bottom of the hill to see if I could get some cat tranquilizers or a cat carrier or both, or something. But the vet wasn’t open.

When I opened the car door to get back in, the cat dashed out. I half-knew he was going to do it. I called after him, but I didn’t chase after him into the roadside weeds. I wept, but I left him there. I didn’t have the will to force him into a long ride he didn’t want to make, and I assuaged my guilt by telling myself that someone had fed him when he ran away, and he would find his way back up the hill to that person. I drove away.

I almost wrecked the car on the interstate through Cincinnati. It was warmer in Nashville and there was no snow on the ground. Edd took me out for Mexican food. We went back to the house he shared with three roommates. He played me Marvin Gaye’s divorce album, and we had sex within hearing of the roommates. Within days I had three part time jobs, an attic apartment to share with Edd, and a new identity to try out. I would be a Southerner.