Anna M. Barry

(Anna Barry's essay "our explosions and hallucinations" is designed to be read in three parallel columns. The essay is reproduced below in a single column to make it available to screen readers. To read the essay in its orginal format, click here).

our explosions and hallucinations

Twenty-one year-old George Washington rode through Western Pennsylvania to survey the land that would become Pittsburgh. On first seeing the area, he wrote to Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie: "The Rivers are each a Quarter of a Mile, or more, across, and run very near at right Angles: Aligany bearing N.E. and Monongahela S.E. The former of these two is a very rapid and swift running Water; the other deep and still, without any perceptible fall."

Whatever was supposed to happen there,
didn’t happen there, and all of us wept
when it didn’t; our expectations glided
on a lost hope, over a milky
dream.

We drowned our sorrows and loneliness
in bottles of gin and rum and vodka to
defend our case against the world, which
would not make us. We were not much
older than two scores and yet we had
lived forever and yet we hadn’t lived at
all. In Hemmingway’s, on the corner of
Fifth and South Bouquet, in Oakland,
when we were young undergraduates, we
buried the dreams of "one day" and
"what do to with my life" into
conversation about women in
Shakespeare and quantum physics and
funny YouTube videos. We heard and
spoke soliloquies about being cheetahs in
this world of panthers. We memorized
all of Michael Jackson’s "Rock with
You." If we scored in coolness, then we
won, sort of; our hookahs puffed the
grape flavor out onto a dark cityscape
night, the incense for our great cathedral
of rivers.

We were everything delicate and small
and fragile like lace and snowflakes. Our
bodies (like our confidences) flimsy as
paper, able to be tactfully, easily ripped
apart by a drunk guy and his fast car
from across a
median, but our lives were
made for blossoming, loving. Like
Samantha (18)
and then Candice (19).

That place, our city, ruptured with a
kind of sensual steam which makes the
dangerous cool and the gruff sexy. Our
bodies meshed into one on rooftops and
in steel mountains and on soft grass
where we watched the universe and our
lives drip down into what we thought
was adulthood, into what we conjectured
was a funneled black hole. The moment
when the night’s stars and the sun’s
dawn beamed together formed our
transubstantiation, our transcendence into
realizing our mortality.

Though the gentle graze of death met
us at every corner (sometimes, even
living in our very flesh), we prohibited
dust and age. We force-fueled and
pumped our hearts, took each pounding
beat as another opportunity for colliding.

We congregated at the gay biker bars in
Lawrenceville and wore green fish-net
stockings with stained leopard prints as
we watched our friends dance with drag
queens and as they became drag queens;
our queer out in the night. There was no
way we could contain our sex. We peed
in the alleyways behind our bar, Remedy,
like ants marching on parade; how the
stream flowed down Butler Street, close
to our little café, and into the Allegheny
below. We, a part of the ecology, the
biology, of moving, drifting, squirting,
smoking, ashy, bumping Pittsburgh,
roaring from decay and bringing youth
back its beauty. A machine and a mob
and a terror and a smoking gun and an
orgy. We never stopped or started in any
one season, but we kept moving, brought
people into what we were, despite their
strangeness and their depression and
their fears of us.

Amanda (21)’s smile used to bejewel any
room, and it was a sin for us to remember
her in a casket. She was our prom queen,
our dance leader, our idol and the one
who died peacefully in her bed, without
reason, without solace.

We lived in faith, reckless.

Do you remember the night that our
bodies separated across a universe as we
lay down on that concrete pasture in the
middle of Schenely Park, waiting for the
cosmos to shout our names and give us
luck, waiting in the meantime for what
we knew was love and what we wouldn’t
dare touch? Silence became our glory,
not a weapon, our saturating hope of
things not meant to be said.
We protected each other’s innocence.
That one time, your roommate was high
and confessed his transfixion with me,
when I was sitting there sad and thinking
of us, and then you snapped him out of it,
me out of it. We laughed at him. He
was a just fool and so were we.
But I’m sorry for the way that I treated
you. You should never be. I imagined
so much hope in the green light at the
end of your dock. You could call them
delusions, those qualities about you that I
believed in.

What were we but the shell of an egg, a
leg of an insect, a petal on a rose, a
strand of hair, a human heart?

A 20-year old Harvard University female student
was discovered in her residence
hall, according to a report in the school
newspaper. Massachusetts State Police
found no signs of foul play and a cause
of death has yet to be announced. She
was the valedictorian of her high school class
and a biology major.
In other news, girl finds it impossible to
erase the deceased’s eleventh grade
American Dream from her memory as
the deceased’s other friends suffer post-
traumatic stress disorder and insomnia
and depression because of the
deceased’s suicide. They ask: what
should we have done?

We would never be the famous
ones, the poets, the lovers, the writers,
the geniuses, the achievers; and we knew
this and we accepted it, our mediocrity
and our drunkenness.

We shed ourselves, our skin, our
clothes in the only place that made sense
for us: Allegheny Cemetery. Its
voluptuous hills and the night’s
blackness masked our nakedness from
Lawrenceville and Garfield and
Bloomfield and Friendship as we
pirouetted around like fairies, over the
tombs of our dead ancestors. We
decided that being dead was worth the
endless eternity if youth danced, naked,
fearless, upon our graves, placing their
ears against our headstones, listening to
us from their world. Someone ran into a
tree. We prayed that night to our
ancestors, to our children that they’d be
this free.

We were nourished by amateur
comedians at the local bars, community
service projects in our low-income
neighborhoods, and the voice of John
Lee Hooker. We worked hard in the
world, but it’d never be enough to have
what we desired: that vain and illusive
American Dream. Not the American
Dream of those white picket fences, but
something like having books and an
animal and some time to listen, without
interruption, to Colin sing his haunting,
seductive version of Zombie around a
campfire at the Hill District house, in
August and May.

Pulsing, pumping, jumping, pop.
Pop. Burst. His heart, beating on the
drums of life one minute, and the next,
exploded. With his last breath, the
oxygen fueled the rubicund hemoglobin
in his cytoplasm to produce one last blast
of red blood cells. The blood rippled
down the cavities of his heart and oozed
through his rib cage. Stomach acid
saturated with plasma. His heart’s final
attempt made red dribble from his
mouth. His body crippled over, and his
small, lanky frame slumped along pale
yellow tiles.

There is so much pain for us here in
this city.

We knew this when we took your
futon down the street, dragged it through
Oakland’s September chill on the
pubescent spring of our love, the trash
blowing like tumbleweed, Natty Light
cans and pizza boxes. I made the spiked
hot chocolate you liked, and we climbed
that precariously narrow fire escape just
to watch our emission into the stars. I
could have loved you forever then. The
hot chocolate burned our tongues, but we
held each other–coolly–through the
rest of the long night until the morning
moon woke us and we scurried to find
another place for our love. How volcanic
it was then, those nights when we lived
long but died infinitesimally in each
minute of the following day. I guessed it
too, how quickly we’d crumble.

Murph (18) was not brutally stabbed. He
was not maliciously shot. He did not
puncture the very heart that joyfully
pounded for eighteen years inside his chest. However, his
heart, like the ejecta
of a supervolcano, ruptured into oblivion,
flowing a mess of vitality throughout his
body, and left him cold, naked, and dead
in his shower.

We watched our friends get arrested from
rooftop towers. The policemen stormed
the dormitories thinking that they’d
found some rowdy protesters, but really,
the gangs were only college students
coming home from night classes. Girls’
dresses toppled over their heads as they
hit the ground, metal clasping their wrists
behind their backs. The tear gas rose
from the four corners of our world. We
took pictures of the G-20 no one wants to
remember, put them on Facebook, and
scoffed at the clean account on the local
news.

We were the generation that
morphed corporate America and SUVs
and marriage and three kids and a house
in the suburbs into graduate school and
bikes and singlehood and accepting the
unknown but feeling peaceful about it.
We wondered how much we could really
trust what we wanted as what we
deserved. We just craved learning and
changing the world in our small
communities. We didn’t know that we’d
stop breathing.

We grew restless, needed escape; we
couldn’t live there anymore. It was too
much, like when liquor excessively
pollutes the body, and it revolts, throws
up wherever it happens to be. That’s
what we had to do—throw ourselves up,
let Pittsburgh burn our esophagus.

There were six other men after you,
and I danced around in their cars and in
their apartments, but all the while, all the
while that I forgot myself in a haze of
cheap rum and their embraces, I thought
of how you looked after drinking that last
swig of brandy. Your red hair flipped
up, and your mind lost in the eternity of
our stilted moments together. We were
never meant to be. I know that now.

We lived in filth and then in less filth but
we survived it beautifully. We played
the harmonica and the banjo and the
guitar to remember their young voices
when we lost them, whose faces watch us
from the stars or up from their graves,
eternally smiling on their fellow youths.

We didn’t see but smelt and felt around,
our bodies clashing against each other,
minds blending while we experimented
with pot, mushrooms, and other things
we would not admit to our parents. We
wrote and stammered our expectations of
one another. We let each other live as
colors, puffs in the air, mist, so that we
could feel each other and not need
judgments, so that we could hear each
other and not need words.

* * *

City:
Will
you still
love me
then
I’m no
longer
young
and
beauti-
ful?

Us:
I’ve
seen
the
world,
done it
all. It’s
not enough.
You
love
blow
and we
love
puff.

One of
us: I
want to
grow
up, be a
chef,
and be
happy.
That’s
my
Ameri-
can
Dream.

City:
You
and
your
head
high.

Us: But
we love
much.

Us:
We’ll
go back
to
black.

City: You
never
left.
You’re
only
pretty
little
fools.

Us:
It’s
so easy
to hate.

City: I
love
you,
and
you’re
home.

* * *

Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope
called Pittsburgh “the blackest city
which I ever saw.” In an essay for The
Atlantic Monthly, James Parton wrote
that Pittsburgh was “hell with the lid
taken off.”

Its eternal nighttime roared. The sky
was covered in black from dawn to
dawn, suffocating, especially from the
steel mills. The Eliza Furnace at Jones
and Laughlin Works in the South Side,
the Lucky Furnace at the Duquesne
Works, the Edgar Thomson Works in
Braddock; the Homestead Steel Works;
the McKeesport Works breathed hell
and contagion, pumping fumes and
exhaust into generations of lungs for
over one hundred years.

Irish, Slavic, Italian, German, and
African-American peoples flocked into
the city, wanting jobs at the coke plants,
the steel mills, the coal mines.

My great-grandfathers came from
Ireland and Croatia to slave under heat
and duress at the John and Laughlin
Works and the Homestead Works.

They settled in Oakland and the South
Side. They were young and did not
speak English when they came; soon,
they had the wives and children to start
a new life in the land of economic
prosperity, in the city of combustion
and steel.

Along a short street in Oakland, my
grandfather looked up at the
construction of the tallest academic
building in the world: the Cathedral of
Learning. He would enroll in this
school, the University of Pittsburgh, but
would never graduate. It was not his
grades or his discipline that kept him
from completing his degree, but his
parents died during the first semester of
his freshman year. He had to take care
of his younger brother and three
younger sisters by working as a
bricklayer at the Homestead Steel
Works. Soon, he would be drafted into
a World War.

From the 1920s thru the early 1960s,
jazz flourished as Pittsburgh was a mid-
point between New York City and
Chicago for big-time entertainers.

Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald
stopped in neighborhoods like the Hill
District to give inconspicuous shows at
places such as the Crawford Grill.

In the fall of 1945, my grandfather,
Michael, and his friends swaggered in
their pressed, white military uniforms;
they were on furlough from the war.
Feet tapped to the beat of a drummer on
a stage at a dance hall in the South Side.
Smoke puffed from long and elegant
cigarettes as the boys watched the girls
drift across the dance floor. The skirts
of women with scarlet lips and curly
hair whizzed in Michael’s peripheral
vision. But only one woman glowed–
the image of Aphrodite incarnate. She
had short, milk chocolate hair, a
voluptuous figure, and a busty chest.
Her cerulean eyes were cool pools after
a summer storm. She faced him and
then looked away. By the end of the
night, Michael had danced with every
girl in the place but not with the most
radiant woman he had ever seen. In a
final and calculated move, Michael
asked the band leader to play one last
song–one last song for his girl. He
pressured Olga to dance, and the rest is
a family legacy.

The Urban Redevelopment Authority
built the Civic Arena–a structure for
the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team–
in the mid-1960s and so demolished
most of the vibrant Hill District,
including the Crawford Grill, without
compensation to residents, who lived at
poverty level. As a result, Pittsburgh
divided into distinct neighborhoods: the
majority of African-Americans moved
to the North Side, Lawrenceville, and
East Liberty; the Jewish population to
Squirrel Hill; and the Italians to
Bloomfield and Friendship.

My grandparents, who were disgusted
with the smog and smoke and dust of
the city, moved to the suburbs to start a
family of seven girls and one boy. That
one boy was my father, Michael.

But Pittsburgh’s pollution, its decay and
mangling of the environment, and of the
human lungs who inhabited it, was its
strength. Steel forced the city’s bustle,
brew, boil, move into what it would
become.

My father remembered the dark of that
city, and my grandfather and
grandmother had lived it.

In the fall of 1976, my father threw a
Christmas tree out of the thirteenth floor
of Lothrop Hall on the campus of the
University of Pittsburgh in Oakland.
He and his friends had been drinking
rum and grape soda like the demi-gods
of disco. After this madness, they
decided to break into the medical school
to look at cadavers. My mother studied
in the library for a nursing exam and
was not aware of how much my father
drank that night. Theirs is not a
glamorous love story.

My grandfather begged the Dean
to let my dad stay in the college that he was
unable to attend. Despite my father’s
recklessness and my mother’s rigidity,
they remained a couple even after my
father was kicked out of the dorms.

By the 1970s, the city began major
reconstruction and re-evaluation
of the smoke and smog that so characterized
Pittsburgh. Renaissance I and II
promoted neighborhood, cultural, and
environmental revitalization with great
success.

My father worked in production at the
Homestead Steel Works. On his first
day, a man’s head was decapitated
between two railroad cars. Pinched off,
he said. My dad, fresh out of college,
guided a crane that carried three
hundred tons of molten hot alloy steel at
3,000 degrees Fahrenheit from one part
of the mill to another. It was like
playing chess, he asserted. Eight hours
went real quick. The Bessemer
furnaces told you that you may not live
for your entire shift. They swung with
molten hot lava burning down the sides.
He blew black shit out of his nose for
hours after leaving work. He smoked a
pack a day.

And while my father slept, the mill
pumped into the night.

In the 1980s, the steel industry started to collapse.

My father toiled day and night, thirteen
hours a day, six days a week, and one
day, he was called up and laid off. In
five years, most of the mills in
Pittsburgh would be gone. But he
carries the anger of being let go with him to this day. It was his life blood,
his connection to his father and
grandfathers; the stem that planted him
into the city.

We passed the old chimneys at
Homestead, and the mausoleum looks
phallic against Pennsylvania’s rolling
hills. My father’s eyes water, and he
hates that there’s a shopping mall and a
bunch of bars on the soil of his old,
defunct haunt: Homestead Steel.

In 2009, Barack Obama chose
Pittsburgh as the site of the G-20
summit because he was impressed with
its economic and environmental turn-
around. In the late 2000s, when other
housing markets plummeted in value,
Pittsburgh’s rose. Green energy
development boomed as well as the arts
and education. In the 1990s,
large universities, medicine and technology
renamed the city. Fields in
neuroimaging, robotics, healthcare, and
business advanced.

My grandma Olga’s hair greyed and
thinned, and before her death, she held a
stuffed animal on her bosom as she
would have held a child. She did not
speak in the last few years before she
died. My grandfather watched her with
discerning eyes, and he left us before
we were ready. He just stopped taking
his heart medication. I wrote the
"Prayers of the People" for their
funerals and watched their caskets fall
down two dark holes, next to each
other, far away from their dusty city
origins.

Pittsburgh is the birthplace of Gene
Kelly, David Selznick, Rebecca
Harding Davis, Gertrude Stein, Andy
Warhol, August Wilson, Annie Dillard,
and Girl Talk. And also: "Oh!
Susanna!", Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood,
Myron Cope’s Terrible Towel, the polio
vaccine, United States Steel, pop art, the
Century Cycle, Heinz Ketchup. Phrases
like: chip-chopped ham, gum band, Jeet
jet?, yinz want a pop, and redd up your
room. And, of course: Penguins
hockey, Pitt basketball, Pirates baseball
and Steelers football. It is the City of
Bridges. Forbes, Places Rated
Almanac, and The Economist say it is
the "Most Livable City."

It is a town of emergence, coming out
of ruin and promising that it will adapt
to the weather of the current age. In the
last few years, many young
professionals and families started
moving back to the city.

Lawrenceville will be the new Squirrel
Hill. It’s no longer a rough
neighborhood where hypodermic
needles hide in the walls. It’s a place
safe enough to walk around at night in
heels. It’s the neighborhood with the
best coffee shops and most gay-friendly
residents in the city, though Oakland
will always be the place where youth
and beauty collide in a haphazard,
disheveled, gritty way; in a way that
makes people fall in love with it and
each other.

The South Side, where my grandparents
met, rests along the southern bank of
the Monongahela River. It matured
from a mill neighborhood into a
bustling college and nightlife scene.

And there, in the middle of its
restaurants and bars, in the multicolored
kaleidoscope of the traffic lights and
illuminated signs stands the catalyst of
this city. What was once the closest
thing to a man-made volcano is now
silent, solemn, brooding; the carcass of
an emptied Bessemer furnace, this
black, stoic chasm overlooks our home,
the City of Steel.

Anna M. Barry is a first-year graduate student at the University of South Carolina Master of Arts in nonfiction writing program. She is a Pittsburgh native and an avid philologist. Her interests are trauma theory, spiritual writing, place-based writing, and writing of the female body.