from PICC (A Poet in Center City): #2

 

Fast forward into the spring— it’s a chilly night in March. I’m sitting on a Septa train to Manayunk with Bill Rosenblum and Pete Lawson, two musicians. As always, Septa trains are a nightmare if you are, or happen to be, stoned. The no-bathroom scenario means you are forced to ride your buzz in a manner suited to suffering and general discomfort. Yet, as Center City develops for me, I learn the rigors of seeing what I can do when stoned. So, as uncomfortable as I am, I am also pushing at the bounds of what I can accomplish in the world as a guerilla-style Bohemian, a fighting flake. The weed we consumed at Bill’s apartment was Benzedrine-y. Christopher Severin, otherwise occupied on this night, is letting me run an open-mike night at a coffee-joint called La Tazza on Cotton Street. Bill, Pete and I are investigating the night’s buzz, digging in to the ambience, looking for apertures (of consciousness, of emotion) to fit into. I’ve brought a carton of eggs to break on my chest, as though our act was Iggy and the Stooges. But I wimp out, made fuzzy by E weed— I give the eggs to one of the attendees, once we’re ensconced in La Tazza’s red-painted basement, which has surprisingly high ceilings, making it an interesting place to read. Bill is short and stout, wears glasses and semi-rags— his day gig isn’t much. Having grown up and gone to college in West Chester, and forced to stay in West Chester until his mid-twenties, Bill has a permanent sense of in-built gratitude to be in Philly. The city was always to be his Manifest Destiny— doing an office gig while holding down keyboards for a prominent local band (while also working out studio wonk chops on Pro Tools) is not just what he wants, it’s levitational for him. Bill’s a talker and high-spirited and thus fun to get high with, whether he wants to discuss (a catholic-minded dude) the 13^th Floor Elevators, the novels of Philip K. Dick, or whether the PA system at Doc Watson’s has gone permanently haywire. Pete’s a lanky redhead with a bushy red beard— how he maintains himself is a mystery. Sort of. Pete spent his childhood, he says, in Chicago, and the confluence of circumstances which brough him to Philly is mysterious. Pete makes up for lacking Bill’s solidity by being an able leader-among-men kind of guy. He’ll direct action easily, set guidelines and strictures in place, draw up contracts, and his own gig at Office Cents on Chestnut Street gives him leeway to keep the store chop-chop there. Pete’s paintings are a graceful semi-rip on Abstract Expressionism, and he follows New York art closely, without having any concrete plans in that direction. The darkness of a kind of sadism is there— me and Bill have both watched Pete behave abusively by this time— but Pete and Bill and I are all bonded by a fierce determination to have a good time, no matter what, held-in piss (and held-in spiteful loathing of Septa) be damned. They’re in the game, as I am, to get high and have fun. At twenty-four, and in a state of constant excitement about what might happen in Philly, it’s enough for me to get attached to them, particularly Bill, because a studio wonk friend is important to cultivate, for music and books. I need man-power and they (Pete less so) need guidance. Christopher is a figurehead in his own right, centered here on Main Street, but his scene is master class but limited. The world converging around me is dynamic, shot through with people who mean it, but I’m obliged to shape it myself.