Letter from Philadelphia

A few weeks ago, a police officer, by all accounts one of the finer soldiers of our Philadelphian streets, picked up a gigolo at 13th and Pine and took him home. They got it on, argued over money, and the guy stabbed the cop to death.

For several days, this was big news, but not compared with the revelation that two trained pit bulls had fatally mangled a local firehouse cat. The gigolo was caught immediately, but the dogs remain at large, and the local press is offering five grand for their apprehension. That story was drowned out by the arrests of some of the people accused of perpetrating a December massacre in an alledged crackhouse in West Philadelphia, one of the largest mass murders in the city's history. Then there were the two men, in separate incidents, getting shot to death after minor traffic accidents, both in daylight in busy neighborhoods. Also, a woman running for a SEPTA train to Trenton fell onto the tracks and lost her foot, and a few days later a ballet dancer lost several toes, also running for a train.

This prompted John Leary, SEPTA's general manager, to mass-distribute a note on every train line. I found one on my seat coming back from New York one day. It was the most obvious lawsuit dodge ever:

"We live in a society that moves at a frantic pace; we rush to work, to school, to shopping, and rush back home at the end of the day. We juggle schedules that never give us quite enough time to get everything done. We spend much of our lives simply trying to catch up. So, it's almost understandable that sometimes our passengers run for moving buses, trolleys and trains. But this is incredibly dangerous. We at SEPTA are heartsick because of these accidents. Time and time again, in every way possible, we have repeated the message to our customers: Never Run For a Moving Train."

I learn so much here.

My wife Regina and I moved to Philly three months ago because we wanted to have an urban life, in all its horror. There aren't many places left in this country where you can live in relative fear and still go out for a nice dinner and see a cheap rock show once in a while. In Philadelphia, you can also own a house and not really have to work for a living. Such was our rationale for leaving Chicago, which has mutated into a hideous, bland urban amusement park for Nebraskans, with a good music scene. You can't even afford to live near Cabrini Green anymore.

Not so in Philadelphia, where in many neighborhoods, including the one directly to the north of our house, Cabrini Green would be considered a luxury high-rise. Reality lurks never far away, and merely being in your car can summon up fresh weirdness. One afternoon, while driving to pick me up at the train station, Regina came across a phalanx of black men, ranging in age from 15 to 70, trotting horses across a busy bridge, their leader a skanky white guy in dreads. They smiled and waved as though they were in a ticker-tape parade. A friend of mine testifies that one night, driving through one of those miserable mists that seem to develop here every other day, he saw a disheveled clown teetering down the centerline. Not hitchhiking. Just walking. But so what? Here, such matters do not register high on the Surprise-O-Meter.

You have to be affectionate toward a town with a mayor who, in his inaugural address, proclaimed that Philadelphia was going to become the next "Silicone Valley." One must also love the Wing Bowl, which occurs on the Friday before Super Bowl Sunday, and involves the balls-out eating of chicken wings before a large number of spectators. The contest is sponsored by WIP, a local AM station that is supposed to be a sports-talk outlet, but the jocks talk about little else, it seems, other than the Wing Bowl and occasionally the Eagles. Throughout the year, WIP holds Wing Bowl preliminaries, in which prospectives have to prove their worthiness of a celebration of cheesy indulgence. One of this year's finalists made it because he sucked down an entire jar of mayonnaise.

Wing Bowl 2001 was held at the First Union Center in front of an audience of 20,000 that began drinking beer at dawn. Once inside, at 7 a.m., they continued to drink beer. An acquaintance of an acquaintance attended this year's happening and filed a report: "By 7:30, I'd had two beers, and I started to feel a little bad. So I decided I needed some coffee. I went to the concession stand, and the woman there said, 'We're all out of coffee, honey. Why don't you have some beer?' So I did. It was the right decision."

No one was surprised when the Wing Bowl was won by El Wingador, a caped behemoth who had also won in 1999, missing last year's competition because of undisclosed gastrointestinal problems. El Wingador ate 137 wings. Also, between rounds there was midget boxing, and female strippers wrestling in a pool of hot sauce.

Our situation at home is sadly normal by comparison, with our little stir-fry dinners and digital cable-watching habits. But Philadelphia has a way of creeping through, like the light that oozes up through the floorboards if we forget to flip the switch in the basement. Around 10 p.m. each night, Regina sits on the living room couch and looks out the window, waiting for the man in the house across the street to go to bed. Soon after we moved to Philly, she discovered his secret. He likes to sleep without any pants. The night Regina first gazed upon his full moon, I had been out for drinks. When I came home, she was flushed.

"Oh my God," she said. "The man across the street. I saw his butt! He got into bed with a book, and I swear his butt was right there!"

Since then, spotting The Butt has been part of Regina's evening. The man tends to a regular schedule, and she knows when to look. Some nights, she will grab my arm and shriek, "Look! Look! The Butt! The Butt!"

Other nights, she seeks but is disappointed. "I just missed The Butt," she will mope, or, on nights when we go out, she says, "The Butt probably went to bed long ago." Sometimes, we have people over, and Regina will say to them, "The guy across the street? When he goes to bed, you can see his butt. I call him The Butt. His light is on, see, but he already went to bed. He reads for about 20 minutes, and then he goes to sleep."

Of late, The Butt has taken a backseat. A crime spree is afoot. We found out about this by waking up on the morning of Wednesday, Feb. 21, and opening our copy of the Philadelphia Daily News. The headline was "Meaner Streets: How a neighborhood is dealing with newfound fear." Oh, shit. It was our neighborhood. Not only has there been a rash of strong-arm robberies, but there is also a rapist at large. One police officer said, "If you see someone lurking in the area, trust your instincts and if it doesn't seem right, stay in your car or drive to the nearest police station or call us and we'll escort you."

Thanks, Officer Friendly. Too bad one of your own didn't take that advice. Two weeks ago, I went out to get my cleaning during a snowstorm. At the corner were four cop cars, and a quantity of crime-scene tape. "What's going on?" I asked.

"Robbery," I was told, and that's all I got.

It turns out that the victim had been Joe, our neighbor across the street, a former Baptist minister who is now a cop. He got hit over the head and two guys lifted his wallet. When they found his gun, they beat him some more so he wouldn't come after them. Reportedly, he lay on the sidewalk for 15 minutes before anyone came to help him.

We aren't going to tell our families about this. They already think we're crazy, not for living in Philadelphia per se, but for wanting to live here, for moving here by choice. Nobody moves to Philly by choice.

Except for suckers like me, who wish to exist mainly in a self-spun fantasy of urban whimsy. In reality, Philly is wheezing. It saw its best days 200 years ago, and its last good ones 50. Everyone but the hip, the poor and the Phillies are going somewhere better. This is no way for an adult to live, which is why I live here.

On alternate Wednesdays, Regina and I catch a five-dollar movie at the local art-house chain, and then we head to Bob & Barbara's, a moldy tavern on South St. between 15th and 16th, for the Soul Barbecue, where they serve free fried chicken, greens and macaroni and cheese, and someone spins Marvin Gaye and the Isley Brothers. We order the three-dollar drink special, a can of PBR and a shot of Jim Beam, and pretend that it's 1975 or some equally wretched year. But we cannot fool ourselves, or each other. We are surrounded by white art students, and some black art students. The middle-aged guys in porkpie hats, the bikers, the hippies, the crazy poets?the cast of my dream city?appear only occasionally, and even then, it's like I'm imagining them.

Last weekend, some friends came from New York and Chicago to sip from Philadelphia's cup of urban reality. On Sunday, we took them to breakfast at a place called Carman's Country Kitchen, of which I had heard tell. I was looking forward to a true slice of Philly. To me, a country kitchen, and I have eaten in many, is a place where you can get grits and biscuits and gravy and coffee that will melt your molars. It is not expensive and everyone wants to be your friend. But if you want to read the paper, people will leave you alone. There is, naturally, country music playing, or at least some kind of music.

Well, Carman's Country Kitchen, located in South Philly, the authentic heart of this town, had none of those qualities. A country kitchen does not charge you 14 dollars for an omelet, whether or not it contains basil, plum tomatoes, sardines and Dutch goat cheese. French toast does not cost 12 dollars and does not come with persimmons. The waitress does not introduce herself to you as "Sara Lee" and does not advertise her upcoming art show on a chalkboard. She does not ask you for your names in an astonishing mix of insincerity and pretentiousness. The restaurant does not put a cute live dog on display out front and then put out a sign telling you that if you touch it, the dog will bite you. The waitress at a country kitchen does not "recommend" bacon with your breakfast; she just brings you bacon with your breakfast. Most of all, she does not take away your plates of runny, doughy food, for which you have spent your day's budget, before you are done and tell you that you have to leave. She does not seat a guy, dressed in studied hipster scumbag garb, with black thick-framed glasses and a t-shirt proclaiming himself the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, in your place because he and his friends are cooler than you. She especially does not do this after the guy has barged in and loudly announced that the previous night, he danced in his underwear in a performance cabaret. She does not tell you that you can stand by the door and finish your coffee. She does not, but at Carman's Country Kitchen on Sunday, she did.

I was truly crushed. I could have gone to any one of 100 restaurants for breakfast in Chicago and never have been treated this badly. I left Chicago to escape gentrification, but, I realized, anywhere you go in America, it's the same shit all over. Nothing is good and nothing is pure.

Later, we went down to South St. because my friend Kate wanted to buy some shoes. It was 2 p.m., and out of a bar burst a group of men playing the accordion, or the banjo, or saxophone, about 50 of them in all, enacting a little Mardi Gras parade that wasn't of interest to anyone but the participants. These were obviously Philly guys, to the core. No one else would wear beads with an Eagles jacket. The bad music and obvious midday beer consumption gave me a little comfort. This was not prefabricated or reaching. Still, that raw deal at the restaurant had left me feeling the same way I've felt my whole life, that I'd missed an important time when things were cooler. Something disappeared while I wasn't looking. I just know it. I've gotten here too late.