Sitting on the passenger side of my best friend’s ride, I listened to a song on the radio. “Walking in Memphis” by Marc Cohn was playing on the station in the rented car and reminded me of my thoughts about walking in Pittsburgh, rekindled by my reading of Michael Chabon’s novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.
I have two copies of Chabon’s first novel, one of which I have owned for more than 25 years. I thought that I was re-reading it when I opened its pages in January of this year, but so much of the book was unfamiliar to me. Not so, the references to the city where I was born. The opening page refers to the narrator’s uncle “juggling three sandwich halves in the back room of his five-and-dime in the Hill District,” an area in Pittsburgh where I used to live. I can still see the sad-eyed owner of the little store across the street from my mother’s apartment, a man who granted credit to the welfare recipient with 5 children, and who often sold me .25 cents worth of braunschweiger.
Chabon’s protagonist is enamored of a young woman who works in a library that must be the Carnegie library that was a refuge for me and my siblings. He refers to the museum that is attached to the library, and which was accessible to patrons via a tunnel that, when I was young, had a caged parrot that cried out “Grandma” as they passed. Arthur Bechstein walks across the Schenley Park bridge that I traveled, looks down at the “Lost Neighborhood,” and marvels at the production of the “Cloud Factory.” He and his father visit the South side of Pittsburgh via the Duquesne Incline, a funicular that I took my youngest children on when we visited the city.
Art works at a bookstore, and his adventures take him all over my city: Squirrel Hill, where my mother’s employer lived, and where a racist gunman murdered 11 people in a synagogue; Shadyside, where many of my art school mates lived, and East Liberty, where my first bride and I had our first apartment. Art often mentions the outline of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, a building that I spent four years entering and exiting for my job as a page in the library’s closed stacks. He walks on the streets I traveled, takes buses along the same courses that were familiar to me; he has no car and neither did I, so walking and busing were our ways of moving about the city. He even mentions one set of the city’s steps. Pittsburgh has 739 steps, of which, 344 are listed as streets. These steps connect communities, and I walked down one set of those steps each weekday on my way to my “alma mater,” Schenley High School.
Art spends time at Market Square in Downtown, where my bride and I came across an outdoor concert by famed jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, to whom I had been introduced when I was 8 years old. (I followed him across the street when he took a break and sat in the bar near him, in awe as he drank two shots of whiskey; I trailed him when he went back out to play.) Kaufmann’s department store, which was down the street from the Art Institute, figures in Chabon’s fictional narrative and my living experience.
Michael Chabon was 24 years old when The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was published in 1988; I don’t know how I missed it, but I was glad he allowed me to revisit my city.
cjon3acd@att.net