Back in Pittsburgh for my sister’s birthday party, I went with a few of her friends on a self-guided tour of the South Side Slopes, an old, haunted neighborhood improbably built into the steep banks of the Monongahela River.
The houses were narrow and a bit ramshackle, but charming. This is what San Francisco might look like, I thought, if it hadn’t been deluged with money from Silicon Valley.
Many of the hills were lined with public sidewalks and staircases, a remnant of a time when governments were concerned with pedestrian infrastructure.
This neighborhood is only a few miles from where I grew up, but I had not seen it until now. As a kid, I had no understanding of the potential and mystery that cities could offer. Trapped in a homogenous suburb, all I knew was a vague dissatisfaction with my surroundings, accompanied by a similarly vague hope or belief that other parts of the world — places I knew about from books and movies — might be more interesting and welcoming to me.
This geographic isolation was mirrored by a psychological one. I always knew that I was ‘different’ than my friends and siblings, and I even understood why. Because I was so isolated, I made many choices because I understood that participating in a ‘family tradition’ was a way to mitigate this difference.
When I was four years old, I told my father that I didn’t want to follow in my brothers’ footsteps and play hockey, and the look he gave me in response — cold and dismissive — led me to change my mind; when I told him a few days later that I had reconsidered, his face lit up with a kind of acceptance that made me feel pleased but also a little ashamed by my duplicity. When I went to the tryouts and discovered that I was a better skater than most — I remember going in circles around them in one of the corners at Rostraver, an old skating rink in Belle Vernon — I knew that I had a talent that I could leverage for my father’s love and respect.
I never liked the brand of 1970s ‘folk rock’ that my brothers favored (e.g., The Eagles, CSN, James Taylor, etc.) but I pretended to be enthralled at every family gathering when, inevitably, they would convene a ‘singalong’ and bask in the praise heaped upon them by the rest of the family. Watching — but never leading, just singing along softly, like a reluctant parishioner — these quasi-religious rituals made me itchy with desire to escape. As Morrissey said, the songs my brothers played said nothing to me about my life.
The irony was that my family, led by my mother around the time of my birth, had left the Catholic Church, but had managed to substitute one dogma for another.
For me, the youngest child, belonging to this church — by which I mean the family and its rigid traditions — mandated a kind of lifelong subservience, and when I finally left it, I was subjected to ‘you are literally dead to me’ levels of contempt, especially from my narcissistic oldest brother, who had positioned himself as a surrogate far more tyrannical and judgmental than my actual father.
But as this walk reminded me, the pain of even the steepest climb is often rewarded with a beautiful clarity that I for most of my life had only imagined.
