¿Til Death do us Part

“SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE…”

In the summer of 1975, I left my studies in Theater Design at Penn State University to follow my then girlfriend Eileen to Pittsburgh, PA.  To be as near to her as possible (she had temporarily moved back in with her parents), I took a room above a bar about 18 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.  The bar, situated off Freeport Road, was typical of the area; a falling down, two-story, asphalt-shingled wood structure that catered to the after-work and weekend “beer and a shot” laborers of the surviving PP&L and other industries situated along the highway.   The building was surrounded by empty lots where once-thriving businesses had been razed as the economic slump of the mid-seventies took over. The bar took up the most of the first floor and consisted of metal tables, chairs and a wooden bar with high, vinyl covered stools.  A few dim neon signs and beer posters on the walls completed the decor.  An old jukebox from the 60’s played hit parade and country western 45’s for a quarter.  The mirrored shelves along the back wall were stocked with half-empty bottles of cheap vodka, rum and bourbon.    Iron City, Pabst, Budweiser and Yuengling beer was served on tap and in bottles and cans pulled from an aluminum cooler behind the bar.  

To the rear of the building was a separate entrance that opened onto two 5’ x 8’ first floor rooms divided by a narrow, wooden staircase leading to one room and a bathroom on the second floor.   I rented the second floor room.  It was furnished with an old king sized bed and box springs set on a squeaky metal frame.  There was a parquet wardrobe with a few metal coat hangers.  A dusty window in the room looked out onto the parking lot.  Needless to say, it was cheap and adequate for an in-love young man in his mid-twenties.  I think I $30 or $40 a week in rent.  Shortly after moving in, I added a hot plate and, unbeknownst to the owners, bought and dragged up the stairs an old, second-hand refrigerator, both of which I precariously connected to a multiple socket that I plugged into the single outlet in the room.  Below me in one of the first floor rooms lived a tiny and frail 85 year old retired mill worker named Angelo.  He would shuffle from his room to the bar each day when it opened, remaining there until closing, sitting at a table in the corner nursing glasses of beer with an occasional shot of cheap whisky.  The other first floor room was occupied by a thin indeterminate-age alcoholic woman with bad teeth and jet black-dyed hair.  The greatest disadvantage of my living situation was the rank stench of alcoholic bowel movements that would periodically filter through the uncarpeted wooden floors from the shared bathroom below.

I had found a job as a maintenance man at a 30-room motel about a quarter mile up the highway.  I spent my days fixing toilets and replacing light bulbs, occasionally working the front office that consisted of a counter holding the cash register, a registration book and a coffee machine, a cubby hole box on the wall behind for room keys and a 1960’s telephone switchboard complete with plug-in wired jacks to connect incoming and outgoing calls to the rooms.

I later became a carpenter’s helper working for Joe Bernardic, a 60-year old Czech immigrant who spoke only a minimum of English and who ran a small construction business with his 22 year-old son, Bronco (Bronco Construction with the painted head of a stallion on the side of the company vehicles).   Once, when we were building a second floor onto a Jewish deli and restaurant operating in the Squirrel Hill district of Pittsburgh, I was tasked with laying fiberglass insulation between the floors over the dining area of the restaurant.  I was walking backwards along the wooden beams, rolling out the insulation, when I slipped and fell - my left leg crashing through the false ceiling panel below and dangling about three feet above a table of Jewish businessmen who were having their morning meeting over a breakfast of bagels and lox.  Bits of plaster and Styrofoam fell from my flailing leg onto their heads and plates.  The manager of the restaurant came running upstairs as I struggled to pull my leg from the hole in ceiling.  Both the manager and Joe arrived upstairs at the same time as I was regaining my balance.  For the rest of week, I was assigned to another project where I could do no harm, gutting an abandoned house down the street.

I shortly thereafter escaped from the room above the bar by buying, with Eileen, a broken down wood frame house in an “other-side-of-the-tracks” settlement along the highway.  Known as Werner Camp, the community had evolved from a makeshift 1950's fishing camp built along the Allegheny River into a year-round residence of haphazard shacks and trailers of varying size and condition, inhabited by a combination of retirees, welfare families, recluses and misfits.  The cottage that we bought for $3,000 (the purchase of the structure was through a simple bill of sale, the land that it was on was rented) consisted of a combination kitchen and dining room, one bedroom, living room and a falling down screened-in porch at the back.  There was a ramshackle shed bordering the rear alley.  The floors and many of the inner particle-board walls of the house were warped, and there were noticeable gaps between the walls and the windows.  There was no plumbing and for the first month (we moved in late summer) we had to bathe in the river.  The need for outdoor bathing might have been shorter if I hadn't chosen to do the work myself, deciding to “do it right”  using copper tubing.  I would turn on the water supply after soldering the pipes, only to discover one or two bad welds requiring me to drain the entire system and start over again.  After several frustrating attempts, I ended up going with PVC.   Shortly before winter set in, I installed a wood burning stove that was meant to heat the entire house.  We would have to get out from under several quilts in the early morning hours, run over in the freezing cold to throw some more wood on the dying embers, and then run back to dive under the covers until the house heated up again.  I had changed jobs once again, driving into Pittsburgh each day to work as a direct care provider for a group of people who had been officially designated as Severe and Profoundly Retarded Adults (the terminology used at the time).  They had been “warehoused” in a large government-run hospital in the country for most of their lives and were now, under new state mandates, being cared for in smaller, “state-of-the-art” facilities.  Eileen, a successful and accomplished theatrical set designer, worked in a downtown theater. 

The neighbors were what made living in Werner Camp most unique.  Next door was a single mom and her young son who had multiple birth defects that had left him confined to a wheelchair.  The boy was smart and hungry for any kind of conversation or intellectual stimulation that he obviously wasn't getting at home.  He would wait by the fence separating the two houses for one of us to come out so he could talk to us about something he had read or thought about.  Across the alley in the back was an elderly couple, both alcoholics who began their drinking early in the morning and continued on throughout the day; we managed, for a while, to keep our interaction with them to a minimum.  Next door to them was a retired mechanic and his wife, quiet and friendly, who kept their small cottage neat and organized.  Down the alley was Buzz, a bearded “Grizzly Adam’s” type who was quietly and deeply mourning the loss of his young wife the year before when she slipped from a rock into a roaring mountain stream as they were backpacking in Europe.  There was also Buzz’ Cousin Bud who lived right next to the railroad tracks.  Bud was a “follower” of Carlos Casteneda and the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” way of life.  His back yard was surrounded by a high wooden fence that kept from prying eyes a large and healthy marijuana garden – his “totem” or some such mystical thing.  Basically, he just got high a lot.  Buzz, Bud and I (hmm…Buzz, Bud and Bill.  I hadn't ever thought about that before) used to take early-morning winter walks on Sundays – crossing the highway and hiking through a copse of woods and up over a small mountain.  I guess we must have been a pretty scraggly looking trio, because once when we wandered out of the woods into a new townhouse development, the police were called, came and interrogated us about our “suspicious walking.”  

Eileen and I pretty much kept to ourselves, exchanging pleasantries with the majority of our neighbors but not really mixing in.  Until, that is, the first New Year’s Eve we spent in Werner Camp.   My old army friend Tim was visiting from Cleveland (he had joined me at Penn State for a while after we had left the military – he to study acting and me theater design).  We were sitting around the cottage celebrating the advent of a new year when, around 11:30 p.m., we decided to take a walk about a quarter mile down the railroad tracks to a bar known only as Mary’s.   We hadn't been in the bar, but we had passed it many times.  When we walked through the side entrance we were overwhelmed with cries of “Hey!  Look at this!  It’s the new neighbors!!”  It seemed like half the population of Werner Camp was carousing in the bar, waiting for the New Year with tinsel topped party hats on their heads and noisemakers in their hands and mouths.  We were hustled in and invited to drinks as neighbors that we had seldom talked to were drunkenly telling us “We knew (hic) that you were jush reglar folks!  Here, have anosher beer!” “Hey every(hic)body, theesh are our new neighbors!”   At the stroke of midnight, people began to dance about, sloppily spilling their drinks whle shouting incomprehensible toasts until, suddenly, a door behind the bar flew open and Mary, the 50 or 60 year old owner of the bar, dressed in pajamas covered by a flowered housecoat, her feet in fluffy slippers and her hair done up in large pink rollers, growled, in a thick middle European accent:  “Hokay!  We is closed!  Everybody go home!! Go!  Go!  Everybody out!” 

There was no arguing with Mary, so we headed out into the brisk evening air and started to walk the tracks toward home.  We didn't get far.  Our neighbor from across the alley – the old alcoholic – insisted that we get in his car so he could drive us.  After holding our breath for the short, but dangerously drunken drive up the railroad tracks until we came to a jerky stop in the alleyway between our two houses, we tried ineffectually to ditch him and get back home.  There was a half- bottle of Jack Daniels waiting for us to finish off the night.  We were not to be so lucky:   “Shay.  Yinz wouldn’t mind if I come in for a while, wouldyinz? (note the classic Pittsburgh accent).  “I don’t want to go home to that bitch just yet! (referring to his wife.)”  He staggered along close behind us as we opened the door into the kitchen.  We pulled out some kitchen chairs and he sat down and began a lengthy tirade.  “She’s a bitch, I tell you.”  “Goddamn bitch!  I hate her.”  “I wish she would die.”  “I don’t know why I’m still married to her.”  His continued his drunken rant while barely maintaining himself upright on the chair, citing instance after slurred instance of why she had held him down all their married life.  Eileen, Tim and I glanced uncomfortably at each other, trying to figure a way to get him out of there.  Just as we thought he might be winding down and we could maybe hustle him out, there was a sharp knock at the back door. 

When I opened it, there was his wife in pajamas and housecoat and obviously as drunk as he was, peering past me into the kitchen asking shrilly “You got my husband in here??”  From behind me, he began shouting “Ah hell, tell the bitch to go home.  I hate her, the bitch!”  Without another word, she turned around and stormed back toward their house.  I went back inside and we turned once again to the task of getting the drunken neighbor out of our house without having to bodily pick him up and carry him.  He was continuing on with his imprecations against his wife when, incredibly, there was another knock at the door!  When I once again opened it, there was the wife, dressed now, saying “Can I come in!” as she brushed past me doing just that.  She pulled up another of the kitchen chairs and began telling us what an asshole her husband was and how much she had suffered, etc. etc.  He continued to call her a bitch, waving his arms in her general direction.  Neither of the two, sitting four feet away, looked specifically at the other, but both continued to address us with a drunken litany of complaints and accusations about the other.

They finally ran out of steam at about two in the morning and went home.  We never again had a significant conversation with either of the two, and they seemed to fall right back into their "drink through the day" routines.  Tim went back home to Cleveland the following day, and life in Werner Camp continued on.  Eileen and I split up a while later.  She stayed with the little house and I moved for a while into one room in a huge empty mansion in the East Liberty, close to where I was working.

I went back to Werner Camp about two years ago with my friends Tom and Jenny, just to see what had become of the place.  The camp had grown up a bit, and I had difficulty locating the house in the back-alley streets.  Occupied now by a middle-aged working-class type, it was almost exactly the same as it had been almost 40 years earlier.  The falling-down back porch was more falling down than ever, and was filled to the roof with a collection of broken kitchen appliances, old plastic swimming pools and other assorted junk.  I was pleased to see that the steel chimney from the old wood stove I had installed was sticking out of the roof and looked like it was still in use.  The yard was overgrown and littered with more junk.  I knocked on the back door and current owner came outside.  He told me he had bought it from Eileen sometime in the late 80’s.  As I was pretty sure that the neighbors that had been there in the seventies – the alcoholic man and woman, the quiet retirees, Buzz and Bud – had either passed away or moved on, I didn't knock on any more doors. I took a couple of photos, drove around the alleys a bit and headed on out with my fading memories of that long ago time partially refreshed.

While writing this, I stopped to Google the internet for Werner Camp and got one of those great aerial maps they provide.  I also saw a real estate link that listed a couple of the houses in the camp for around $25-$30k.   Humph.  Not bad for the other side of the tracks.  Go figure…