Issue 33: Gray

With our NEW nutrition benefit, when you buy more green you get some back.

Introducing money-back rewards for buying fresh fruits and vegetables.

This new benefit is one of the ways Independent Health supports our members in making the right lifestyle choices. For every two dollars you spend on fresh fruits and vegetables at TOPS Friendly Markets*, you will receive a one-dollar credit back, to be spent in-store on future grocery purchases.

You can earn up to $1,000 on your family’s food purchases each year. We also offer fitness options you can personalize to your approach to health. These kinds of benefits and services are designed to help you take charge of your health – as well as your costs.

To learn more, visit RedShirtTreatment.com.

Well. Informed.

SM

That’s the RedShirt Treatment. ®

*Available on select Independent Health plans. Excludes Medicare Advantage plans. Benefits vary by plan. ©2013 Independent Health Association, Inc.

P A I N T I N G S • F R A M I N G • P R I N T S • G I F T S • H O M E / O F F I C E • E S T. 1 9 0 1

KARL H E E R D T

T h e L a n d s c a p e i n H a rmony

E x h ib itio n : S e p te m b e r 1 3 - O c to b e r 12, 2013 Artis t’s Re c e p t i on : S e p te m b e r 1 3 , 2 0 13 6- 9 p.m.

F a ll E a s t Au ror a A r t Wa l k : F ri d a y, O ct ober 4, 2013 5- 9 p.m.

AMO S W. S A N GS T E R (1 8 3 3 - 1 9 0 4 )

S angster’s Nia ga ra

O r i g i nal s t u d i e s a n d e tc h i n g s E x h ib itio n : O c to b e r 1 8 - N o v e m b e r 1 6, 2013 O p e n in g Re c e p t i on : O c to b e r 1 8 , 2 0 1 3 6- 9 p.m.

478 MAIN STREET

EAST AURORA 14052

716.652.0940

MEIBOHMFINEARTS.COM

contemporary design for timeless pieces.

HAND-MADE IN BUFFALO, NY Atelier & showroom opening mid-October 433 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, 716 867 8937

Give the gift of

HANDCRAFTED CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN Gift cards valid at all Aroma Group locations.

AROMA on BRYANT AROMA on MAIN AROMA on N. FRENCH

307 BRYANT ST., BUFFALO 881.7592

5229 MAIN ST., WILLIAMSVILLE

631.2687

4840 N. FRENCH RD., EAST AMHERST coming soon!

Caffé Aroma

Vino Aroma

957 ELMWOOD AVE. BUFFALO 884.4522

5223 MAIN ST. BUFFALO 633.3433

thearomagroup.com

Find your color at the co-op.

Open to everyone 8am-10pm daily 807 Elmwood Ave, Buffalo, NY 716-886-2667 | www.lexington.coop

WE SPECIALIZE IN BRANDING AND MARKETING FOR FORWARD-THINKING BUSINESSES AND ORGANIZATIONS.

The branding and marketing agency that wants better.

BLOCKCLUBONLINE.COM 10 BCM 33 BCM33-BC-Ad-1.indd 1

9/25/13 2:27 PM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 33 STOP

CONNECT

12 Issue Contributors

DESIGN & MARKETING SERVICES blockclubonline.com

15 Letter from the Editor

DESIGN & OFFICE BLOG clubhaus.tumblr.com

18

The Conversationalists Interview by Ben Siegel Color theorist Becky Koenig sheds light on the misunderstood beauty of gray, its black and white roots, and the prosepct of life without color .

FACEBOOK, TWITTER, VIMEO and INSTAGRAM @blockclub #blockclub #BCM33

22

Clearing the Air Case Study by Patrick Simons Erin Heany’s community-driven mission to clean up Tonawanda Coke.

24

A Tale of Two Cities Column by Michael Farrell Unexpected lessons learned in the pursuit of greener pasteurs. A writer meditates on life in the gray zone.

30

Blank, Void, Scattering

By Geoff Kelly Photos by Steve Soroka The confessions (and indiscretions) of a well-educated, democracy-loving, card-carrying patriot. Indecisiveness in the voting booth, and all its options.

40

East of Liberty

By Laura Zorch Photos by Deion Kim In one Pittsburgh neighborhood, longawaited progress has begun to take shape. But with a rich legacy hanging on, who does East Liberty belong to?

56 Hindsight

Short fiction by Lizz Schumer

Darryl finds clarity in the school yard.

SUBSCRIPTIONS blockclubonline.com/subscribe

ADVERTISING & DISTRIBUTION advertising@blockclubonline.com EDITORIAL & CONTENT ben@blockclubonline.com PRINTED SUSTAINABLY. This magazine is printed on FSC®-certified post-consumer and post-industrial recycled paper. Production of this brand of paper consumes five times less water than the industry average, reduces air emissions, frees up landfill space, and saves the world’s mature trees.

731 Main St. Buffalo, NY 14203 716.507.4474 blockclubonline.com ©2013 BLOCK CLUB INC. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 Unported License. This work may be reproduced and shared for personal or educational use only, and must be credited to Block Club magazine. Such use for commerical purposes is strictly prohibited.

FPO

Please recycle this issue and pass it along to a friend.

61 Me Likes You

Comic by Lauren Barnett

ABOUT BLOCK CLUB Block Club is a branding and marketing agency founded in 2007 in Buffalo, NY. We work to develop and strengthen brands for forward-thinking businesses and organizations. In Block Club magazine, we tell stories about a better Rust Belt. We help locals save money with City Dining Cards, and create fun, inspiring gift products with Fridge Phrases. We do this because we want better.

BCM 33 11

ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS

Lauren Barnett pg. 61 Lauren Barnett is a comic artist from Buffalo who currently lives in Queens, New York. Her first book, Me Likes You Very Much (Hic & Hoc Publications) was nominated for a 2012 Ignatz Award for Promising New Talent. melikesyou.com laurenmbarnett.com Michael Farrell pg. 24 Michael Farrell’s work has appeared in The Buffalo News, Boston Herald and Buffalo Spree Magazine.

He also wrote the novel Running with Buffalo, and attributes most of his life’s problems to Cameron Crowe, Otis Redding and the Buffalo Bills.

Geoff Kelly pg. 30 Geoff Kelly grew up in East Aurora, is editor of Artvoice, attended Canisius High School and Middlebury College, lived briefly in Pittsburgh and Qatar, voted Caitlin for mayor in September’s primary, and frequently finds himself at sixes and sevens.

BLOCK CLUB MAGAZINE EDITORIAL STAFF

PUBLISHER PATRICK FINAN patrick@blockclubonline.com

EDITOR BEN SIEGEL ben@blockclubonline.com

Deion Kim pg. 40 Deion Kim is an artist at heart. Along his artistic journey, you may find sketches, drawings, illustrations, paintings, designs, and photographs that make up his creative skill set. He has now pursued a career in photography and has never looked back.

CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRANDON DAVIS brandon@blockclubonline.com

PHOTOGRAPHER STEVE SOROKA steve@blockclubonline.com

Lizz Schumer pg. 56 Lizz Schumer is a writer, reporter and photographer in Buffalo. A 2012 Pushcart Prize award nominee, her poetry and prose has been published on Salon, Thought Catalog and Thrillest, among others. Lizz currently works as editor of the Springville Journal.

Laura Zorch

pg. 40 Laura Zorch lives in Pittsburgh, within walking distance of no fewer than five bakeries. She is the coauthor of two books, Food Lovers’ Guide to Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Chef’s Table. Her next project will need to include exercise or fasting.

12 BCM 33

DESIGNER JULIE MOLLOY julie@blockclubonline.com

DESIGNER TIM STASZAK tim@blockclubonline.com

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT COPY EDITOR PATRICK SIMONS patricksimons@blockclubonline.com

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER MAX COLLINS

BCM 33 13

14 BCM 33

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Gray It sounds as flat as it looks. Just sits there, lame and bored, begging for a ticket out. Please, give me air, it says. Please, I need some color.

As if the mocking tone of the word weren’t enough, the color gray doesn’t entice either. Find pretty in crushed cement, in home insulation, in stormy tea.

It’s not all about pretty, though. Our values are diverse, and along with the shocking reds and mellow yellows, the cool blues and grounded greens, there exists a coat of primer.

We all need a basecoat.

Gray is our foundation. It anchors us when our light glares too bright, sustains us when the caves get too dark.

It’s between two places, fragments of both. It’s neither here nor there, up nor down, you nor me. But like a trusted deputy, it waits in the wings for you to need it. And it never lets you down.

If you’ve been alive long enough to witness your city’s reincarnations, to remember when downtown blocks were busier and outlying lots were sparser, when something good turned worse, and depression wasn’t figurative—if you’ve seen the best and the worst of days—then gray means something more to you. Something more romantic.

Transition is the key to change; it is the change. Anticipation fades after a while. Real growth happens along the way, where answers are not absolute.

Our cities are never complete. The roads of infrastructure always get re-routed. Leaders come and go, usually, and in between groundbreakings and demolitions, civic narratives are created and developed. New identities come into focus and older ones are cast into legacy. The regeneration of our buildings, our blocks, our neighborhoods and hamlets, cities and regions, they need room to break bones, to mend in time, to regroup.

In this middle ground between the familiar and the unborn, the gray zone is not a pit of hopelessness, but a platform for vision.

Consider the virtues of being stuck. You can go anywhere.

And no, it’s not always pretty, or easy. But the work must be done. These walls need insulation to warm. Those sidewalks need cement to support. That tea needs milk to temper. Because figuring out your next step can be difficult, and sometimes you need to sit and dwell a little, to assess your options and figure out your next move.

Sometimes you need some confusion to find your clarity.

BCM 33 15

16 BCM 33

BCM 33 17

THE CONVERSATIONALISTS

BETWEEN TWO

OPPOSITES TO UNDERSTAND COLOR THEORY IS TO UNDERSTAND SOME OF LIFE’S BIGGEST QUESTIONS: WHAT IS OUR VALUE? AND HOW DO WE RELATE?

B

Interview by BEN SIEGEL

ecky Koenig literally wrote the book on color.

(Well, one of them.) “Color Workbook,” a textbook now in its fourth edition and published by Prentice Hall, is a mainstay in color theory classrooms. It diagrams the scientific conditions and asks the abstract questions about the colors we see. In her own classroom, in the Department of Visual Studies at SUNY Buffalo, where she is also an academic administrator, Koenig imparts the mysteries of how color informs our perception of dimension, range and identity. Where black, white and gray are concerned, Koenig explains how these foundational values establish context.

An artist herself, she is keen on exploring these questions.

BCM Tell me about the color gray.

BK It’s a blank slate. It’s an achromatic color, which means it doesn’t have chroma, which means it’s a sort of a neutral [air quotes] “color”; it’s a color but it’s also something else.

Gray represents a stage of light. If we think of white and we think of black, it’s one of the stages between those two poles, those opposite poles of pure white and pure black.

BCM I’ve heard white and black be described as non-colors.

BK White represents light, not only symbolically but in that when we look at a white surface of something, we’re actually seeing all the wavelengths of color—RBG [red, blue, green]—being reflected back, giving us a sensation of light.

We have sensors in our eyes that pick those up, and that mix those colors up and create that.

BCM This is where it becomes difficult to grasp.

BK It’s a mind bender. Color is all in here. [Points to her

forehead.] The whole thing about color is the human experi18 BCM 33

ence that helps us identify things. So it’s actually a biological device to help us find what’s what, to find a berry on a bush, and so on. It’s interesting to think of it that way.

BCM It’s fascinating the role light plays in our read on color.

BK I know it seems like we’ve always had the color wheel, but, of course, we haven’t. Aristotle had this theory that all the colors were actually steps between black and white, and they were somehow black and white mixed. Which is counterintuitive to us, because when we think of black and white mixed, we think of gray. So when we talk about gray, we’re talking about the stages between light and dark, because we use grays to describe these stages incrementally. They can be very fine increments, or they can be gradated smooth tones.

So we can call them tones, we can call them stages, shades, shading—all those things are gray. But the main thing is that it doesn’t have any “chroma,” per se, which means from the color wheel.

BCM So you can’t create the color gray from the color wheel.

BK Well, now, you kind of can…[Laughs.]

BCM I feel there are going to be many caveats in this conversation. [Laughs.]

BK Yes there are. I wish I could say it was [that easy]. That’s why people teach color theory. It actually is a sort of everevolving theory. A lot of it is perceptual theory. We create it [in our heads].

The influence of teaching and studying color theory is evidenced in Koenig’s artwork, much of which explores nature, vision, optics and science.

photo by MA X COLLINS

BCM 33 19

BCM Color theory didn’t come out of thin air, but we created this in order to understand it, and it’s not all scientific fact.

BK A lot of it is, as we know it. That’s for the philosophers to figure out, whether it’s such a thing as scientific fact. But what I’m talking about is basic color theory.

When I teach color, the first thing we do is we talk about the theoretical aspect of things, and that’s usually the hardest thing for people to understand—how we actually are perceiving, and how color works, as far as light reflecting off surfaces to our eye, the physiology of our eye, and so on.

There’s three aspects of color: the value, which is the light and dark, which is hugely important; the hue, the exact color it’s based on; and saturation, which means, how intense or dull is it. Those are the three basic ideas that are the variables of color. Once we think about all those things, we realize why we see such a variation in color, it’s so huge.

So even with gray, people have different levels of gray perception. If two grays are really, really close together, some people will be able to see the difference, and some people won’t; it’s like a contrast perception. And the opposite, for some people who are color blind may see things only in grayscale, or see just a couple of colors and the rest in grayscale. It’s hard to visualize what that feels like, because we can’t know that, but that’s their experience of the world, of course. It is an impairment that people have to work around.

BCM So if our understanding of color is dependent on our own tools of perception and the light available to us, then this green book is green only based on whether my brain tells me it is.

BK Exactly. And there’s also one other aspect: in a reason-

able lighting situation, with those three wavelengths we talked about, the main one that’s being reflected back is green, and the red and the blue are being absorbed.

BCM Could you then say, if those things are true, that this book isn’t really green?

BK We don’t know what it is. To our eye, it looks green.

BCM Then color is not inherent or inborn to any thing.

BK That’s exactly correct, as far as we know.

BCM So how and where does color exist?

BK I don’t know the answer to that question. [Laughs.]

There’s something about the chemical makeup of things

20 BCM 33

that gives us that sensation, as human beings. It is dependent upon our humanness and our wiring, and our visual system. But there are things in the trees and the leaves— chlorophyll—that makes them green. I mean, we know about some of it. We just know we get the sensation if we use them.

There’s a lot of gaps in this, so I think that part is a gap. It’s a real big question in reality, which makes us uneasy.

BCM It’s a great place for an artist to begin their vocation, with not just learning tools, but grasping at what truth is.

BK I almost try to downplay it a little [with students], because sometimes they get disillusioned hearing that.

BCM But it’s a fascinating marriage of art and science.

BK Think about a computer screen. All the color we’re seeing on computer is the color of light; it’s not pigment, it’s not paint, it’s light coming through a screen. So the colors that are being used, the system of that, is the light system. So it is important that they understand.

BCM The emotions of gray draw great parallels with this notion of blending and shading.

BK Everyone reacts differently. I think of a gray day. Things feel very muted. But the positive thing about it, that since it does have little color personality, or low or no saturation, other colors can play off of it very well. It’s a blank slate for artists to use, as a sort of rest from brighter colors. It tends to go with other things well.

A lot of people use gray in their homes as a wall color because it’s neutral and doesn’t intrude with art or fabrics or rugs.

When we’re looking at space, at a distant landscape, for instance, colors, because of atmosphere, tend to dull as they get farther away and go towards a neutral. If you see trees that are way far away, they look more like a duller green, or a bluer green, or a grayer green than they do closer. So taking something down to gray can sometimes give us the illusion of distance, because that’s how we perceive things that are farther away. Because air is not as totally transparent as we think it is, and also because of weather conditions.

BCM Gray feels static, but it really has a lot of range.

BK When you’re drawing, the first thing we’re doing is translating a 3D world on a 2D plane. But the other thing is, often we’re using pencil or ink, and you’re taking all the color out, right? You’re translating the lights and darks of

There are gaps in color theory.

It’s a question of reality, which makes us uneasy.

colored objects into essentially a black-white grayscale. And it never bothers anybody when they look at the drawing.

It’s just a way of recreating reality in a very acceptable way, and for some reason, for charcoal drawing, pencil drawing, everybody’s OK with it, and it’s not considered depressing.

It is a different connotation. It’s considered an acceptable form. Or black and white photography, or film; some people think it’s more beautiful.

I really like film noir, especially the restored ones. Often they’re hinting that somebody’s wearing a certain color but it’s all in black and white. When we put our imagination on it, it doesn’t seem that way. Usually in film noir—of course, it’s all about the light and dark parts of persona, a lot of shadows—but there’s something so fascinating about that limited range. They don’t have to deal with color. They’re just dealing with lighting effects, camera angles, usually striking light-to-dark lighting situations. It’s something within this very limited world, and it works very well. I think visually, it’s a pure kind of form. There’s no color whatsoever, and it always seems fine watching it.

BCM There are many metaphors here: the tug and pull between two opponents, the compromise of two views.

BK People see things in terms of black and white. They don’t have any median, like the shades of gray. So when somebody is neutral, they don’t have an opinion. If you’re neutral, it’s like the color’s been sucked out of you. You might be wishywashy, or apolitical, or you really just don’t care.

BCM The important element of that metaphor, though, is that there’s not white, black and gray. There’s actually white, black and all the shades between. Just like there are many different versions of red, there many different versions of gray. But there is only one white, and there is only one black, which make them so significant.

BK And white and black, visually, are the most contrasting colors. It’s the harshest of combination. If you saw a pattern of white and black, it can be stark, hard to look at. It can actually move a little.

BCM They’re the only two absolutes in color.

BK One is everything, and one is nothing. That’s why we use that metaphorically. We see everything in these polar opposites [of] yes or no. But we don’t see any shadings of between. We have no sense of nuance.

BCM With that understanding, if we look at white and black and two opinions on a matter, you could flip the perspective and interpret them differently.

BK I think culturally, we see black as negative and white as positive. And that’s because white means light, daylight and morning, and as the day progresses, we go into black, which is night. And I know some people like to live at night, but the fact is that it’s just always perceived as a more negative thing. They’re definitely opposite poles, so it doesn’t matter.

If you’ve got somebody thinking this way, and somebody else thinking [that] way, then they’re not meeting in the middle at all.

BCM And it depends on what side of the fence you’re on, how you perceive it. If you’re playing tug of war, depending on your position, A could be winning, but only because B is sacrificing its strength; or you could say that A is winning because it is stealing B’s strength.

BK When you’re mixing paint, when you start with white, all it takes is the tiniest little bit of black to make light gray.

It’s amazing how powerful black is—this is just from paint mixing. So when students start, they always take white and they put a big blob of black in it and mix it, and it always goes dark. Or they have so much white in there, and they can never get to black. You’ll never get the full scale if you don’t start in the middle and work to either end.

BCM Gray is such a diplomat.

BK The shadings of gray are the way that we interpret light.

Being able to manipulate those steps, or shadings, or gradations, between black and white, is the integral part of a lot of what we do. I think that’s a positive. It’s probably one of the biggest tools that we have. It conceptualizes a light scale.

BCM We think of it as a place of indecisiveness on that scale, but we really use it to decide so much.

BK It describes things. I think if we say, Gray, we think of just that middle point, and in that way that does have this [one interpretation]. But I think that if we think of this being this span between lightness and darkness, or black and white, it’s definitely a lot more exciting.

BCM 33 21

CASE STUDY

Clearing the air ADVOCACY GROUP, CITIZENS POUND DOWN CORPORATE DOOR.

O

by PATRICK SIMONS

ften discussed in the past tense, industry benzene was the Tonawanda Coke Corporation. still has a home in the Rust Belt­; Buffalo Members of the community asked to meet with company still has major international border cross- owner J.D. Crane, in hopes of collaborating on a solution. ings, so does Detroit. Our location on the Their letters and requests went unanswered. Their focus Great Lakes—the largest group of freshwater lakes on the shifted. They started meeting with local leaders and elected planet—plays a major role as well, hydroelectric power officials, everyone from the town board all the way up to among the main benefactors of these natural resources. But members of Congress. They held rallies outside the gates of with industry, comes unhealthy emissions. the plant, where cancer survivors, scientists and concerned “When most of the facilities in this region were built, we citizens spoke on behalf of reforms. didn’t know the things about emissions that we know now,” “The folks doing this were working-class folks, blue collar says Erin Heaney, director of Clean Air, a community- folks, the people that make up the Rust Belt,” says Heaney. based organization in Western New York that informs and “They did not consider themselves activists. Most of them organizes residents to reduce pollution. had never partaken in a political process other than voting.

Heaney started at Clean Air in 2009, shortly after finish- So this was all really new territory, and they definitely did ing college, joining a tiny team that was in the midst of a big not think of themselves as rebels.” discovery. At the time, citizens of the Town of Tonawanda Grassroots efforts and community-driven persistence were noticing what seemed like particularly high levels of paid off, and at the end of 2009, there was a federal raid of chronic illness. Wary of the more than 50 industrial plants Tonawanda Coke. It lead to the arrest and indictment of the that operate within the town, questions were asked. company’s environmental control manager for violating 20 At first, New York State brushed them off. Unsatisfied, federal laws including the Clean Air Act and Clean Water the community took matters into its own hands. With help Act (both names unrelated to Buffalo’s Clean Air), and the from the Global Community Monitor, Tonawanda resi- Resources Conservation and Recovery Act. The EPA also dents were trained to take their own samples of air in the issued more than 100 notices of violation. area. Samples were then sent to labs for testing.

Tonawanda Coke was forced to clean up its practices, Those results were startling enough that the New York and what followed was an 86 percent drop in benzene levels State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) throughout the town. In March, the criminal case moved and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) revisited to trial. In less than two hours, the jury found Tonawanda the town’s claims. The organizations conducted a study of Coke guilty of 14 out of 18 criminal charges, making this their own, placing four large-scale monitors in and around only the second time in U.S. history that a company has been found guilty under Title 5 of the Clean Air Act (the the Town of Tonawanda to take readings of the air.

“It was an example of [how] Buffalo was, and is, ahead of most basic part of the act, giving air-permitted facilities perthe curve,” says Heaney. “The vast majority of companies mission to operate). across the country self-report, so this was really novel that These are meaningful successes for Buffalo’s residents, our government would actually put air monitors in a neigh- but there is still much work to be done. borhood to check what industry was telling us.”

“You are where you live,’” says Heaney. “Our industrial After one year, the monitors revealed that benzene, a car- past has made our communities very very sick. If we want cinogenic but common chemical used in industrial plants, to really see significant changes in some of the public health was found to be 75 times higher than the New York State outcomes we have in our region, we’ve got to address the Department of Health’s recommendation. That same test fact that people are breathing toxic air, and that really matshowed, based on wind direction, that the main source of ters. That really impacts people’s health.”

22 BCM 33

illustration by TIM STASZAK

Benzene Benzene is used mainly as an intermediate to make other chemicals. It is often used in the production of polymers and plastics, as well as certain rubbers, lubricants, dyes, detergents, drugs, explosives, and pesticides.

BCM 33 23

VIEWS

A tale of two cities CHOOSING HAS A PRICE, BUT SO DOES STAYING STILL.

by MICHAEL FARRELL

C

hange can be cast as an exhilarating experience. It’s exciting. It is generally accepted that change is brought on by discontent, a transition from an obviously detrimental place to a more advantageous or improved one. It is colorful, bold and empowering.

But there’s another side to change. There’s an excruciating side, one void of the artistic expression of it in paintings, verses and music. It can pull you three steps back to push you one step forward. It can quell a clench in your stomach. It can be the unpopular pursuit of not want, but need.

It’s not the Hollywood ending; it’s not even the Facebook status update. And, it doesn’t always act as a prelude to a dramatic beginning. Sometimes, it’s simply an instance within a gray area of endless possibilities.

This was the version available to me inside my South Boston kitchen in April 2011. It wasn’t sensible or sexy. It wasn’t as uplifting as I’d always imagined it would be. My Massachusetts-born wife had been accepted to attend SUNY at Buffalo for graduate school, and with her admission came an opportunity I’d long given up on: the chance to return to my New York hometown.

The exit from, or return to, one’s hometown has always been projected as a seismic change. Heroically escape the girded restrictions that raised you and you’re a character in a Bruce Springsteen song. Willingly return to your roots and you’re lauded for biblical loyalty, heaped upon you by those who never fled. I loaded my car and left Buffalo for Boston in November 2000. The move signaled the start of my postcollege life, to a new place with new people in search of the yellow brick career path. It was exciting, the promise of a new reality.

Unfortunately, my transition never shed the loyalties of my previous 22 years. I spent most of my New Englandbased hours thinking about, talking about, and defending Buffalo. When I’d introduce myself, I’d volunteer my 24 BCM 33

hometown directly after my name. I got into weekly disputes about myths associated with my home, about its Rust Belt image. I was a castoff, who remained loyal to myself but who tried to exist in a new environment. But, while hometowns can cling, Buffalo clamps.

These euphoric voyages are never advertised with a luggage rack. Baggage isn’t featured as part of the deal—but it usually is. Though I would eventually bask in the beauty of one of America’s most picturesque cities, I still longed for late nights at my hometown bars aside my unhinged friends.

I became addicted to the Boston Red Sox, and the Bills still destroyed my Sundays.

I found love with a local, one whose family was as rooted in her hometown as I was in mine. Her streets became my streets. Days and nights were full of new memories made in my new town.

The benefits weren’t immediate. Just like it took time for me to reconcile my struggling loyalties, it took me seven Massachusetts years to escape the delusion that occupational happiness could bloom from conventional nine-to-five employment.

I abandoned this assumption after three cubicle disasters and, in their place, cobbled together freelance writing jobs, a regular sports reporting gig with the Boston Herald, and nights bartending at three music venues. I began to look forward to going to work at night, covering games for the Herald or slinging drinks in at the bar. On paper, my decision to veer left was the kind of rebellious risk extolled on vinyl.

In actuality, it was simply the byproduct of impatience.

A break-up. A relocation. A series of job changes. At various points of my young adulthood, I assumed each would be an absolute start, shift or conclusion to the story of my life—but none of them were.

Why do we expect a clear beginning, middle and end to every experience we have? And, why do we expect single moments of change to act as segues to succinct conclusions?

Is it because our teacher conferences, parental lectures and playlists have all insinuated that there is an end point of contentment? Professors guide students to careers. Parents advocate for marriage and grandchildren.

We know there’s life on the other side of these suggested destinations. There are job-related annoyances we never studied for; sobering complications following the thrills of wedding days and birth announcements; and an accepted realization that heroin-aided lyrics should never be taken as absolutes. Change in and of itself is not absolute; it’s merely an action. It’s its aftermath that’s transformative.

When my wife’s grad school acceptance letter ar-

illustration by TIM STASZAK

Why do we expect a clear beginning, middle and end to every experience?

We know there is life on the other side of these suggested destination. rived, it provided an unexpected opportunity. All I needed to do was sign off on our stable jobs and lives in Boston for a return to the place I’d exhaustedly supported since leaving it in my rearview. It required me to act, but the possible aftermath riddled me with anxiety.

There was exhilaration, but it wasn’t uplifting. It was the terrifying kind, one met with doubt, fear and uncertainty.

This is the underpublicized agony of change. Sometimes, the repercussions of making the wrong decision prevent us from making any decision. Choose one and you’ll lament the numerous spoils associated with the other. Marriage.

Children. Career. College. Address.

There’s a finality associated with every one of these lifealtering decisions—and maybe this is the problem.

Maybe we need to embrace opportunity instead of focusing on the starting or finish line. We need to understand that life is not a straight line, but one full of unfolding moments off the beaten path; one loaded with illuminating transitions that can expose the idea of happily-ever-after as a con, but reveal possibilities of genuine contentment. Maybe this acceptance can ease the fear.

This brought me back to Buffalo. My move home would

be not an ending, but just another scene in my life. The opportunity for my wife to attend graduate school was one storyline; the chance for me to satisfy a longing to contribute to the burgeoning vitality of my hometown was another.

Was it the right decision? Two years later, I still don’t know. Its aftermath is still evolving, and I struggle with the same questions every day.

What if I had stayed the course in Boston? Would I be writing more expansive sports pieces for the Herald, or would I still be on the steady, albeit uncertain, newspaper path? Would I still be content pouring pints amid guitar virtuosos, or would the routine have eventually soured the satisfaction? And, would I still feel content in Boston, or would I wallow in the wonder of whether I should’ve returned home when I had the chance?

I’ll never know. The future judges all decisions, so I’ll get my answers distorted by hindsight.

The exhilaration in change is not found in the initial decision, but in the infinite possibilities that follow. Some people can embrace this. Others are terrified by it. But, like the late Shannon Hoon once sang, that’s OK. They’re just afraid.

BCM 33 25

75458_PS_ProjectHopePrint / 6”w x 8.875”h / Block Club Grey Issue

“Creativity is a wild beast. It feeds on harmony.”

3945 Main Street, Amherst visualeyeswny.com - 716.832.3452 28 BCM 33

BCM 33 29

Blank, Void, Scattering

By GEOFF KELLY Photos by STEVE SOROKA

Twenty years ago, one of my best friends—Caitlin, in fact, who grew up three doors down from me, with whom I would eventually fall in love, settle down, buy a house, and raise a child—became a candidate for East Aurora School Board. All her friends were excited and proud of her; we were in our deeply uncertain twenties, and it seemed such an adult thing to do.

I was living a somewhat dissolute, hugely entertaining life in Buffalo at the time, but I was still registered to vote in East Aurora. I cast my first vote there in the presidential election of 1988, the year of Gary Hart’s affairs, Paul Simon’s bowtie, and David Duke’s shocking racism.

(I voted for Jesse Jackson in the primary and Michael Dukakis in the general, though I didn’t much like either of them. Like many people, including many people who don’t vote at all, I felt myself standing outside the narrow, centrist pound that both parties occupy.) In 1992, I watched the returns with Caitlin and our friend Tim at Wallenwein’s Hotel. East Aurora is a deeply Republican town; we were the only people in the bar cheering Bill Clinton’s victory.

The next year, Caitlin decided she’d step into public life. Both her parents were public school teachers. She had strong opinions about how the school district could be improved. She was—is—smart as a whip, and her family was—is—well known throughout town. She was a terrific candidate.

30 BCM 33

Now here is my confession: I didn’t vote. At all. I don’t know if I forgot, was too lazy, couldn’t get a ride out to East Aurora...whatever the reason, I just skipped it. There were five candidates vying for three spots. She lost by four votes.

She doesn’t hold this against me, I don’t think; she may even be glad that she didn’t win. (And she voted for Ralph Nader instead of Al Gore in 2000, while living in Florida.

In Florida. Her father nearly disowned her. I voted for Nader in the primary but dutifully pulled the Democratic lever for Gore in the general.) But I cringe when I think about this evidence of my fecklessness. Not only did I fail her, I also failed to allow my chagrin to alter my behavior.

Somewhere down the line, maybe 15 years ago, a switch flipped, and I’ve been a perfect voter ever since, even when I lived in the Middle East and had to vote by absentee ballot. But before that school board election and for many years after, my attendance record at the polls was spotty, especially regarding local races, which I knew very little about. When I did go to the polls, I voted the Democratic line, and I felt like a sap for not knowing anything about the people I was voting for.

That’s my confession, and now here’s the familiar complaint: Too many people don’t vote. Many are simply lazy, as I was in 1993. Many are apathetic, disengaged. They don’t believe their participation in the political system is effective. They find no home in either of our major politi-

BCM 33 31

cal parties. Many are torn between the values and policies each party expresses and manifests (and those are very different things), while others stand outside the center—liberals and libertarians, Trotskyites and Tea Partiers.

A much smaller number choose not to vote to demonstrate their disapproval of our politics and our government.

Many people do vote but, like me in my 20s, know so little about candidates and their policies that they might just as well have stayed home.

Whatever their reasons, those who don’t vote have made an interesting choice: They’ve opted to disappear.

They’ve chosen to be neither seen nor heard. They’ve made themselves to become faceless, voiceless components of a much-lamented set of statistics.

Some numbers In last year’s presidential election, 130.3 million voters cast ballots; that’s 2.3 million fewer than voted in 2008, the election with the highest turnout of voters (by percentage of the voting age population) since 1968. The number of registered voters dropped, too, while the number of Americans eligible to register increased by nine million.

So that’s not great, but there were mitigating factors: 57.4 percent of the drop in voting occurred in New York and New Jersey, which were dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. And several trends that began in 2008 continued: increasing participation by African-Americans, Latinos, and voters ages 18 to 29. The racial diversity of the youth vote is notable: 42 percent of voters ages 18 to 29 were non-white; for voters over 30, that number is 4 percent. In 2008 and 2012, blacks’ percentage share of the total vote were bigger than their percentage share of the total population.

(So maybe if you’re an apathetic voter, you’re just white and old. And maybe you live in Hawaii, where only 44.5 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot, the worst turnout in the country. Or from New York, whose 53.6 percent turnout was the eighth worst. The top five: Minnesota, 76.1 percent; Wisconsin, 73.2 percent; Colorado, 71.1 percent; New Hampshire, 70.9 percent; and Iowa, 70.2 percent.

Maybe that’s why New Hampshire and Iowa get first crack at the primaries.)

The big national trends are toward a larger, younger, more diverse electorate. But Americans are pikers compared to citizens of other countries. In 2012, 58.7 percent of eligible American voters came to the polls. In Taiwan, 74.33 percent; in Belize, 73.16 percent; in Germany, holy cow, 99.68 percent. France was about 80 percent. And none of these were shows of democracy by despots, like the elections the late Saddam Hussein would stage, afterward claiming 100 percent participation and 100 per32 BCM 33

cent approval. These are real, functioning democracies, with engaged citizens who feel compelled to participate, whether by a sense of the obligations of citizenship or a commitment to ideas about what their countries should be, coupled with belief that politics and politicians can (and will) help to realize those ideas.

Complicating matters, and aggravating the frustration that can lead a voter to abandon hope and the franchise, are voter suppression tactics historically employed by both parties but most cynically and effectively of late by the GOP. Restrictive election laws proposed or enacted in places like Florida, Texas, and Ohio, for example, overseen

by Republican secretaries of state, disproportionately prevent minorities from registering.

Take the case of Willie Steen, documented by the investigative journalist Greg Palast, who began tracking GOP voter suppression tactics in the wake of the 2000 presidential election: Willie Steen, a Gulf War veteran, was removed from the voter rolls in 2000 because the Katherine Harris, the Republican Secretary of State of Florida, listed him as a felon. I met Steen. He’d never got so much as a parking ticket. He was, like tens of thousands of others, guilty of VWB—Voting While Black.

Harris sent Steen a note of apology for the “error,” but only after the election of George W Bush. Then, in 2004, Steen was purged again. Steen’s name matched that of an Ohio felon named “O’Steen” on a database created by Republican hacks. The name-match game cost 58,000 innocent voters their registrations in just one year.

Palast reports that about 24 million people try to register to vote each year, but millions are rejected (and often do not learn of the rejection until they are turned away at the polls on Election Day). In 2006, California’s Republican Secretary of State rejected 42 percent of its new registrations, often because officials made mistakes inputting information or deemed names “suspicious”—names like Rodriguez or Li. Twenty-two states currently have some sort of voter ID law on the books. In 2007, Palast told me: “The Republicans are fanatic about voter IDs. You say, ‘Well, what’s wrong with showing your ID?’ Well, the answer is, what crime are we preventing? I’ve looked all over the country and found only one case out of 100 million voters where a person knowingly cast his vote in someone else’s name.

I’m just looking for, say, about 10 out of 100 million or 100 out of 100 million—wouldn’t that be fair if we are going to change our entire voting system? Shouldn’t there be at least one in one million cases of this? But we know 300,000 were denied the right to vote in 2004 because they did not have the right ID.”

Basic competence in government is often celebrated as brilliance; actual brilliance is seldom invited to and seldom interested in joining the table.

Anti-immigration measures that prevent Latinos and other newcomers from voting, inadequate election day resources for poor neighborhoods, language discrimination, and ever stricter voter ID laws—all in the name of fighting an entirely fictional epidemic of voter fraud. There are plenty of citizens who want to vote but are excluded.

Nothing communicates that more clearly than the ubiquitous video taken in minority-heavy election districts in 2008 and 2012, showing long lines of voters waiting hours to vote. And, as it demonstrated in July by diminishing the power of the Voting Rights Act, there is a majority on the US Supreme Court who feel that’s OK. What you don’t know does hurt you Quick, no looking: Who are your favorite candidates for alternate delegate to the Eighth Judicial District Nominating Convention? Where I vote, there will be 16 names on the ballot for judicial convention delegate, and 16 more for alternate. You pick three of each.

Some electoral ignorance can be forgiven. Is it reasonable that a voter should be asked to know so many candidates? Is it reasonable that a voter in New York State should understand and care about the Byzantine, clubhouse politics by which candidates for judgeships are nominated?

Well, sure, though understanding the system is as likely to cause one to throw hands in the air and walk away as it is to inspire righteous activism. Here’s what the New York Times wrote about New York’s judicial conventions a few years ago: “Independent candidates for judge have virtually no chance of bucking the system. To win the nomination, a candidate who is not backed by the bosses may need to recruit more than 100 delegate candidates to run in different districts. Those candidates would have to collect thousands of petition signatures to qualify for the ballot.

If they did qualify, they would need to do an enormous education campaign, because their names appear on the ballot with no identification, so there is no way for ordinary voters to make an informed choice among them.”

What do you do in the face of that? Pick three names based on how they sound to you, or on some some thin recollection, favorable or unfavorable? Pick them out of a hat?

Write in the name of your dog? (Something that’s easier to do nowadays, by the way, with electronically scanned paper ballots, where there’s a line for write-ins; in the old voting machines, you had to locate and slide back a panel, and you better have brought a pen or pencil. An Erie County elections commissioner told me that the board is studying ways to deal with an anticipated increase in the number and success of write-in campaigns.) Or do you spend the time and energy to vet candidates who are party to a seemingly corrupt, exclusive system that, in this example, offers you no reward for doing your homework?

The reasons to be frustrated with local politics are legion. In Buffalo, virtually the only path to elected office is through service to one of the bosses of the dominant Democratic Party. When voters in Buffalo are offered a choice in candidates, it is most often in the Democratic primary, and much of the time the choice is not between political factions, not ideas or credentials. Thus, even if you study the candidates carefully, you might not be able to distinguish one from the other in any meaningful way.

The names don’t even change: Seditas, Hoyts, Eves, Gorskis, Raths, Crangles, McCarthys, et alia—it’s all in the family. They even marry one another.

The city’s Republican Party lies doggo in order to depress the Democratic vote in general elections, to the benefit of GOP candidates for countywide office. The only minor party line that is not for sale is the Green Party’s, but the Green Party’s principled positions—it will only endorse members of the Green Party for elected office, for example—have rendered its line on the ballot largely irrelevant.

Basic competence in government is often celebrated as brilliance; actual brilliance is seldom invited to and seldom interested in joining the table. We aren’t allowed to vote for the bankers, real estate developers, and insurance executives who actually set our government agendas.

There is always hope, too, casting a light to dispel dark thoughts. There are sincere candidates, lucid debates, progress. There is also hope that Open Buffalo, a collaborative effort by four local nonprofit activist organizations, will win the $1 million-a-year grant for the Open Society Foundations “to bring about systemic change relating to equity, justice, and democratic practice.” Open Buffalo’s BCM 33 33

34 BCM 33

BCM 33 35

proposal has the potential to abet the creation of new political structures, to engage those who have been shut out of our local politics. If the names on the ballot and the content of the local political conversation grows richer and better informed, both goals of Open Buffalo, then maybe those who have opted out can be drawn back into the process as well.

Opting out Nothing seems to change, that cynical voice inside whispers, except that the change originates outside the political system and overwhelms it. Our major media are complicit in encouraging us to view elections as sporting events rather than conversations about ideas, as a result of which, all we really know about the candidates when we walk into the polling booth is who’s winning the marketing war. So what’s the point?

Many journalists don’t vote, in pursuit of objectivity.

There is a long tradition of generals in the military—David Petraeus, George C. Marshall, William Tecumseh Sherman—choosing not to vote, so as to stay above politics.

The libertarian pundit Lew Rockwell has said that he doesn’t vote and argues all intelligent Americans should stop voting, too.

I first encountered principled opposition to voting when I registered at age 18. I was required to register for the draft at the same time. Most of my friends joked about it, but two of them refused to register to vote because they were pacifists.

Later, in Pittsburgh, when I covered the peace demonstrations prior to the start of the Second Gulf War, I met social justice activists who opted out of voting on a variety of grounds. One of these was Kathy Kelly, a founder of Voices in the Wilderness, who has also abstained from paying federal taxes since 1980, which, as it happens, is the same year that Jimmy Carter reconstituted the draft.

I have friends here in Buffalo, too, who choose not to vote as a form of protest. “You’re engaging in an illusion,” one told me. “The two parties are two shades of the same color.

Nothing substantial changes. By engaging [in] the illusion, you’re approving of it. You’re culpable for what the people you vote for do in the world.”

I felt that powerfully living in Qatar in 2004, when George W. Bush—not exactly a popular figure in the Middle East—was re-elected handily. I’d visited Iraq the year before and found that Iraqis might curse Bush’s name, but they held faith that the American people were basically good and had been duped into accepting him as president.

(The notion of a rigged election is not shocking to a citizen of Iraq.) We hadn’t meant to elect him, they said, and as a people we could not approve of the suffering he’d inflicted 36 BCM 33

on Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. When he was re-elected, the looks I received from strangers on the street carried a clear, recriminatory meaning: Oh, I see.

You really meant it. I’d look at the electoral map on CNN, covered in more red than blue, and think the same thing.

Filling in the blank Most of the people I spoke to, as I considered the self-imposed exile of the non-voter, do vote. Most people I know would never willingly miss a vote, even if they’re agnostic about the fairness and efficacy of our elections. “I’ll say this,” said one, who is registered with the Working Families Party. “I think I hate people who don’t vote more than I hate people who drown cats.”

Back in Pittsburgh, when I was interviewing peace activists and proponents for progressive causes, I asked them all the same question: Do you consider yourself to be part of an inevitable, generations-long movement toward a more just and peaceful society? Or do consider your work to be fighting off the darkness that always threatens? Does the arc of history bend toward justice, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, or is its path undetermined or, worse, bending toward evil? The answer, almost every time, was both: They were optimistic that good prevails over the long run but wary of the powers of greed and hate working hard to bend that arc.

A few years ago, the day of a school board election in Buffalo, I considered the names I would see when I pulled shut the voting booth’s curtain. (I also considered how situating school board elections in May, originally a strategy to separate them from the party politics of fall elections, ensured ridiculously low voter turnout, usually less than four percent.) I’m a fairly well educated voter, and I didn’t much like the choices. In moments like that, I feel the futility of voting and am almost convinced to skip out on what I consider my duty in service of the greater good.

But I didn’t. Instead, I entered the booth, shut the curtain, located and pulled back the sliding panel for write-in votes, and wrote in Caitlin’s name. That’s my current voting strategy when our politics seem hopeless, or the menu of candidates in a race is dismal, or I don’t know enough about a person to comfortabl make a decision: I vote for someone I know and like and who’d be good at the job.

Sometimes it’s Caitlin, sometimes it’s someone else.

A couple weeks after that school board election, when the votes had been tallied and certified, I got a complete reckoning of the votes, so I could show Caitlin her name on the list with my one vote next to it. Meager compensation for my betrayal all those years ago, but at least something. Strangely, she’d received two votes.

And, stranger still, so had I.

BCM 33 37

DUAL INSERT 6 X 8.875 IN GRAYSCALE ONLY

East of Liberty

by Laura Zorch photos by Deion Kim In one Pittsburgh neighborhood, long-awaited progress has begun to take shape. But with a rich legacy that’s eager to hang onto its past, one question lingers in the streets: Who does East Liberty belong to?

40 BCM 33

BCM 33 41

“I

’m walking to the bar one night, and there

famous residents including industrialists Carnegie and is this guy who looks just like Toby Keith. Frick and financier Mellon. Once the most prosperous He’s on his phone just yelling to his girl- suburb of the city, the historic figures who shaped Pittsfriend: ‘Don’t walk away from me in the burgh had called East Liberty home. ghetto!’ I asked him, ‘Do you really think you are in the Fortunes changed in the 1960s when an attempt at ghetto? This is the ghetto to you?’ We were down the street urban redevelopment fell flat. Traffic was redirected from a Whole Foods.” around the central business strip by a series of one-way Pittsburgh-based filmmaker Chris Ivey laughs as he re- roads dubbed Penn Circle. Several high-rise apartments calls his East Liberty sidewalk encounter with a country replaced homes. The population plummeted. Businesses failed. Drugs were prevalent. Fifty-plus years in the future, star doppleganger.

Ivey has eight years of stories from this changing com- the neighborhood continues to deal with the repercusmunity. Building a network of trust, he talked with resi- sions of development gone awry. Revitalization, however, dents and recorded their reactions to housing imploding, is happening. Over the past 15 years, an influx of attention businesses closing, and new development sprinkling into has been paid to the area. Developers have begun the task the landscape. Ivey muses, “It’s survival of the fittest. Na- of reshaping and identifying a neighborhood that for so long had flown under the radar. tional Geographic.”

Ivey moved to Pittsburgh from Monroe, N.C. He came Walking through the business district and looking up to Pittsburgh for school and then stayed in the area. In into the stark blue summer sky, a billboard showcasing the late 1990s, he looked for film work in Pittsburgh to no short literary quips submitted by the public can be seen avail. resting above the buildings: “The person standing beside “I was a young director and black, so I was dealing with you, pointing at this billboard, has brought you here bea number of different discriminations,” says Ivey. When cause it was too hard to say ‘I am sorry’ out loud.” the opportunity to document a high-rise demolition in East Liberty presented itself in 2005, Ivey jumped on- “You know where Babyland is, right?” board. “It was surreal at the time, because East Liberty was Ngai Wharff, 39, has lived and worked in the East Liba predominantly black neighborhood. When I went to the erty area for more than three decades. He knows the area celebration for the tear down of the high-rise, there was at like the back of his hand, including how to get to any part least like 120 white people. It was kind of like ‘What the of the city from the now-defunct Babyland retailer which hell are these people doing here?’” sat at the intersection of Penn and Negley Avenues, on A group of students used a giant slingshot to splatter the border of East Liberty. Wharff, a previous employee paint balls on the exterior of the high-rise before the demo. of beloved music and performance venue, Shadow Lounge, The original sendoff plan included a farewell poetry instal- and current employee of a new neighborhood burger joint, lation by a local artist, but details shifted and paint was BRGR, watched years of transition and jokingly bemoans launched. As Ivey surveyed the scene, he knew he had the lost landmark. found a story “Worst tragedy in all of East Liberty is the closing of “The people who lived in the building were pissed off Babyland. Ask someone familiar with East Liberty, if you about it. You had all of these strangers celebrating the de- start your directions with ‘So you know where Babyland is, right?’ you can get anywhere,” says Wharff. molition of your home,” says Ivey.

Born in Brooklyn, Wharff spent early childhood in Penn Avenue slices down the middle of East Lib- Trinidad and Tobago before moving to Pittsburgh. While erty. The throughway leads directly to Downtown Pitts- the snow-filled winters proved a shock at first, Wharff burgh, if one drives far enough. On a warm summer day, quickly melted into the neighborhood. A photo of a teendress and shoe racks spill onto the sidewalk, banter is ex- age Wharff skateboarding on Highland Avenue, a main changed near the bus shelters, and radio tunes from cars artery of East Liberty, shows a nicely executed jump over a and the tiny corner coffee shop drift in and out. peace sign drawn on the concrete wall nearby.

Intermingled with the signs of life is also a stillness “I would skateboard through East Liberty to get to evoked through a spattering of empty storefronts. Beneath school,” Wharff reminisces. “It is hard to look at the the graffitied window of an old movie theater, several poster frames announce nothing. A single print notes the previous screening of The Legends of East Liberty which The Beauty Shoppe, a collaborative office space, detailed the storied history of the neighborhood’s most operates out of a former beauty shop.

42 BCM 33

BCM 33 43

neighborhood and remember when it was shit, and think about it that way. When I was a child, the area was so alive, and staying here all my life, that’s just the way it felt to me.

It didn’t even occur to me how bad it was getting, how it was declining. I don’t remember the level of crime that some people remember; that I never really understood.”

The 1980s and ’90s were hard times for the neighborhood. With the rapid decrease of business and the traffic conundrum of the 60s urban renewal, the area struggled.

“With Penn Circle, you were always just forced to drive around. No one was coming in, and everyone was just going out,” says Wharff. “When they switched Penn Circle [and] rerouted the traffic, that very much changed the chi for the neighborhood. When the high-rise came down, it opened up air.”

A new plan of action for the neighborhood was instituted by East Liberty Development, Inc. during the late 1990s and early 2000s. The traffic flow was corrected and housing readjusted. Three high-rises were destroyed and new mixed-use housing facilities were built.

“The high-rises were an eyesore since basically the ribbon cutting ceremony,” says Wharff. Luxury apartment buildings and businesses have also joined the streets.

Wharff’s skateboarding days rolled back into the picture. The friends and networks he built through the years were influencing the change of tide. His circle had opened restaurants, music venues, and retail shops.

“When the neighborhood started to come back, it was kind of expected, you know, like we’ve been working at this the whole time,” says Wharff. “That’s the best thing about East Liberty: the people who stayed poured everything into it.”

As the streetscape continued to evolve, he had increased uneasiness.

“Housing is one of my biggest concerns. Once all of the new property is developed and new housing is built, the new people who are moving in are going to shape the neighborhood for the next decade. These people are moving in and thinking, ‘this is ours.’”

“If you were 25 years old, you were a senior citizen.”

Justina Harris sits in her kitchen. Through her open windows, newly constructed homes fill the view. A meeting was called years ago to encourage Harris and her neighbors to sell their homes. “The developers wanted everything to be new,” she says. “But no one wanted to move.”

The Penn Avenue business district runs straight through East Liberty.

44 BCM 33

BCM 33 45

46 BCM 33

Harris has been a resident of East Liberty for a lifetime, outside of a short stint in the nearby neighborhood of Homewood. Along the way, she witnessed decades of changes in her hometown. “When I was young, East Liberty was full of families. Lots of Italians lived here, like real Italians, wearing long black dresses and carrying rosary beads,” says Harris. “It was a thriving community and always about families. All different cultures, with dogs, you know, real families.”

The East Liberty of Harris’s childhood began to change during her high school years. High-rises were built, one of which, on Collins Avenue, she called home for some time.

The population shifted with each decade, with trouble moving to the neighborhood in the 1990s. Harris certainly doesn’t miss this violent decade.

“It was like cowboys and Indians for a while,” she says.

“There was no concept of family, just babies having babies, and young people at war with each other.”

Drive-bys, gangs, drugs. East Liberty played host to years of criminal activity.

“If you were 25, you were a senior citizen,” says Harris.

“They called them ‘old heads.’ If you lived to 25 or 30 as a black male, you’d pretty much made it.”

The tides turned in the early 2000s. Harris attributes the change to movement of spirituality in the neighborhood, with churches and organizations focused on nonviolence.

“Now, people just want to live better. The whole ‘ghetto’ mentality isn’t even in their vocabulary anymore. If someone says ‘that’s ghetto,’ it means you are acting poorly.”

Harris pauses. “A lot of people just want to live.”

Living and living well has become the focal point of the new developments infiltrating the streets. The adjacent affluent community of Shadyside continues to creep over the borders. Harris has taken note.

“The culture here is now Shadyside. It has taken over,” says Harris. “People here want to be a part of that culture.”

While the neighborhood continues to move, Harris hopes to hold onto the feeling of the old East Liberty, or as she calls it, the “true” East Liberty. The East Liberty of her childhood, with all kinds of families living and thriving together. A feeling of being home.

“I’m proud to say I’m from East Liberty. I’ve been here all my life.”

Pittsburgh is only very recently on the upswing.

Loss of the steel industry decimated a population. Each of

the 90 neighborhoods that comprise the city have felt the sting of a city’s population being sliced in half. The city needed to rebuild on a foundation of a smoky history and a strong will. Education, health care, and technology became the pillars of rebirth for the area. Enticing people to resettle inside city limits is still an uphill battle. Rebuilding neighborhood by neighborhood brings challenges anew. Thus, choosing which neighborhood to revitalize proves an interesting task.

Rabih Helou moved to the east end of the city four years ago so his wife could attend graduate school. Prior to landing in Pittsburgh, he lived in much larger cities like Washington D.C. and Montreal.

“I came here kicking and screaming, but now I don’t want to leave,” says Helou. “Fifteen years from now, East Liberty is going to be the center of this urban core.”

Helou greets East Liberty each morning through his windows and sees possibility.

“Overlooking the neighborhood, I look out my window and there is this beautiful red beam of light. I see the church steeple, the Target, Bakery Square, and it is inspiring. I see lots of trees and a town. It looks and feels like a town we have a say in, a town that we are involved in. We can make our mark in this town. We are seeing changes.”

One change manifested by Helou and business partner Matthew Ciccone is The Beauty Shoppe, East Liberty’s first “co-working” space. For a monthly fee, entrepreneurs, creatives, and small companies sign up to be members.

Membership affords the opportunity of a shared working environment, brainstorming with other organizations, and low overhead.

Befitting the name, the co-working happens in an old beauty shop which sat empty along Penn Avenue. Evidence of its history remains as a retro drying chair chills beside a work table with plenty of plugs for MacBooks.

The space isn’t large, but Helou and Ciccone both champion a mindset of more people in a small area produce interesting results.

“You don’t need a lot of space to do great things, you just need the right mixture of people,” says Helou. “The neighborhood is colorful, a little unpredictable and edgy, and we want it to stay that way. I know there is a school of thought and a team of people that want to change that other side of our street into a Gap and a Victoria’s Secret.

Then, there is the other group of us who want to keep it local and edgy, run by people here. This is the center of battle.”

Top: Rabih Helou, co-proprietor of The Beauty Shoppe. Bottom: Chris Ivey, documentary filmmaker.

BCM 33 47

Helou looks at East Liberty like Renaissance Florence.

The areas are about the same size. With many people, Renaissance Florence was able to change the course of the world.

“If we stuff enough people into the space here, we can do great things,” says Helou.

Ciccone is a Pittsburgh native and experienced urban developer. He began working in East Liberty in 2005 and founded a boutique real estate firm, Edile, in 2010. When the time came to pick an area for the co-working space, Ciccone knew East Liberty would be the right fit.

“I had been involved in development here and had been to years of community meetings. I clearly saw the groundwork for redevelopment,” says Ciccone.

“We don’t have enough humans here yet to make every neighborhood work,” says Helou about Pittsburgh. “This community has a lot of grass roots organizations that, fast forward 15 years, will make significant contributions to the area.”

Redevelopment is at the forefront of The Beauty Shoppe’s collective mind, but within a context. Ciccone maintains a watchful eye on developments in the community.

“How do you retain what was here before and also retain the history and nature of a neighborhood?”

Wharff remembers what is now the East Liberty Whole Foods as the city’s Yellow Cab headquarters. Pittsburgh taxi service is notorious for inadequate availability.

“When I heard about the Whole Foods, I thought, ‘Huh, so Yellow Cab, you are going to come get me from somewhere else?’” He laughs. “Now they just don’t pick you up at all.”

When the grocer opened its doors, filmmaker Ivey found more stories. Witnesses to soccer moms brawling for a parking space gave their accounts. “That is why there is security in that parking lot.”

“I also talked to a girl who worked at Whole Foods. She watched as a mother told her young daughter to not take a cart back saying, ‘Leave it. That’s what they pay poor people for,’” recounts Ivey. “It’s just more tense towards class.”

Urban renewal is not for the faint of heart, or for those needing taxi service.

“People dance around the fact that it is very much a racial and economic story,” says Ciccone. “Things that you don’t hear about East Liberty Whole Foods is that it is one of the highest grossing Whole Foods per square-inch in the United States. It also has the most use of food stamps.

When you here about Whole Foods landing in the neigh-

borhood you think, ‘gentrification!’ But all of the population is using Whole Foods.”

Helou thinks gentrification is too liberally applied to scenarios like East Liberty. “For gentrification to exist you need a restriction of supply. So when people want to move in, people have to move out. We don’t have a restriction on supply here. Most of these properties that are being redeveloped were empty.”

Ciccone agrees: “My sense of the issue is that urban neighborhoods ebb and flow. Yes, there are people here now that won’t be here in a couple of years. But there are people here now that will be here in a couple of years. If you truly want a vibrant, mixed income neighborhood, then you have to have a mixed income neighborhood.”

“Some people think that changing the neighborhood is just weeding out all of the black people,” says Harris. “But that’s not true, because we are here to stay.”

More than a venue, Shadow Lounge was a place for the community to gather. Situated on a hard-to-access street, the venue hosted musicians, poets, dancers, and everything in between. Closed in 2013, Shadow Lounge spent more than a decade as an East Liberty institution of culture. During its tenure in the neighborhood, the street changed and grew. Shadow Lounge had neighbors like Conflict Kitchen, a social practice art project which serves food from countries the United States is in conflict with; Abay Ethiopian restaurant, which also shuttered this past year; and increasingly swanky restaurants like notion, an industrially hip burger joint, BRGR, and the fine dining destination Spoon. The first venue to open on the street, Ivey recalls Shadow Lounge as the “epicenter of change.”

A public cry of “no!” squeaked out when a closing date for Shadow Lounge was set and much speculation swirled around the departure of the social hotspot. Rumors of the space being pushed out by developers and other devious plots emerged, but all remain unfounded. A clear appreciation for its influence on East Liberty continues on even under this shroud of mystery.

Wharff, who spent several years managing the space, echoes Ivey’s sentiments about the venue acting as a catalyst for neighborhood rebirth.

“When Shadow Lounge came in, everyone was invited.

It became comfortable to be in East Liberty. People could feel safe. With the closing of Shadow Lounge, people try to stay away from the word ‘gentrification.’ But this wasn’t about race, it was about culture,” says Wharff.

He dubs the gig as his all-time favorite place to work

Top: Justina Harris, lifelong East Liberty resident. Bottom: Ngai Wharff, former Shadow Lounge employee.

48 BCM 33

BCM 33 49

for more reasons than one. “Every day was different, every event was really different. On Mondays you’d have jazz night, guitar hero, and a poetry reading in three separate rooms. You also had three types of people intermingling with each other. People come through and experience a bunch of different things in the same night. Shadow Lounge was where you could go to find people—good people. Everyone was able to participate.”

With a diverse menu of programming and relaxed attitude, Shadow Lounge attracted audiences to East Liberty when no one else was looking. The venue increased interest in the depressed neighborhood.

“That’s the story with Shadow Lounge,” says Ciccone.

“They are the frontier people that brought this energy to East Liberty. Experiments like Shadow Lounge can only happen when the prices are so cheap in an area that you are able to take risks.”

As the neighborhood gained momentum in the past decade, prices of real estate increased. Shadow Lounge has moved on.

“It just feels like they are forcing a cornerstone business out of the neighborhood, because the people they are selling condos to will be uncomfortable,” says Wharff. “People aren’t coming to this neighborhood to retire, they are coming here to be young! You are going to take a music venue away from me? You are crazy. You are going to take the best party around and move it elsewhere? That’s just ridiculous.”

But revival continues in the neighborhood. New bars and restaurants are filling the corridor near the now-empty venue. Says Ciccone: “It’s the story of capitalism. Something else will take.”

Wharff, however, can’t help but feel wistful: “It is unfortunate that Shadow Lounge isn’t going to be there to reap the benefits of everything that they’ve done.”

Pittsburgh is not short on awards. The list of attributes handed to the city grows daily. Most livable. American Comeback City. Most Literate.

“Pittsburgh is the most livable city, but it depends on who you ask or where you live,” says Ivey.

Stories of residents being marginalized and edged out of East Liberty have tainted Ivey’s view of the future. “Right now, for East Liberty, I have no hope,” says Ivey.

“The people that are moving into Pittsburgh in droves right now, they find Pittsburgh beautiful and amazing because they read it on the internet,” says Wharff. “I love that it is getting busy, but I’m a little concerned with potential pretentiousness.”

Several developments in the East Liberty neighborhood are sure to change the resident pool. Within the next few 50 BCM 33

months to a year, a luxury apartment complex opens, a new craft cocktail lounge, and construction begins on Bakery Square 2.0. Bakery Square is the redeveloped Nabisco Factory that sits at the boundary of the neighborhood. The current facility houses Google Pittsburgh and several major chains. Harris has a hard time understanding the housing situation.

“The new houses they are building are sort of New Yorkish. Like who can afford a loft? After you hit the Target, it is mostly black people living here, and I don’t know anyone who can afford it,” says Harris. “I don’t know the thought behind it.”

“It must be incredible to be young in this city right now,” says Wharff. “If I had just got here, I would think it is great. It just seems unfortunate that the area wasn’t developed for the people that are already here. Instead, it was developed to attract people to the area.”

Harris knows the makeup of the community will change, but thinks increased diversity will be a good change.

“The people who can afford the new houses they are putting up will be the new neighborhood. The people will make the neighborhood,” says Harris.

Ivey’s documentary series, East of Liberty, covers years of neighborhood changes. Speaking with residents and neighborhood stakeholders he claims to paint a balanced portrait of the area with a hint of fear.

“Right now it is like redevelopment Armageddon,” says Ivey. “There is some fear, but what I wanted to do was try to have people save themselves. You have to be the change you want to see.”

A passive approach to redevelopment by residents will end in heartbreak and anger. Ivey continues: “You have to really want it, or else you are gone.”

Wharff knows that challenges are still ahead for his community.

“Right now, we are still winning this game. Without a doubt, we have a voice, but it sometimes gets exhausting having to speak,” says Wharff. “When I was a child, it was kind of what it is now, or what it is becoming now. When we first moved here, Penn Avenue was booming. I would hope that the neighborhood is taken care of and well respected, given how hard it was to bring it back.”

The lifelong resident Harris isn’t quite sure what East Liberty will look like in the coming years, but she isn’t in fear of what will happen next.

“I hope that people will accept the change, because it is going to happen,” says Harris. “We are just looking for a better life, black or white. No one wants to go back to the old stuff.”

BCM 33 51

54 BCM 33

SHORTS

Hindsight The man pushed up his cap and looked Darryl in the eye, or what his eyes used to be. They were clouded over with a milky gray film and stared like marbles would, if marbles could see, which his eyes couldn’t.

by LIZZ SCHUMER

D

arryl knew better than to look back. Looking back makes you seem hesitant, like you haven’t decided what to do. But Darryl had decided, he sure as hell decided, that he wasn’t going to Math today. Ain’t no way he was going to sit in that class and watch Mrs. Saggy Tits Samson wag her pancake boobs around like she knew what’s up, when the finest set in the school­—no, the whole city—were sitting right there in front of him like he hadn’t even asked her out online during first period, like he wasn’t the best chance she’d get in that hellhole of a school. Like she was better than him. No way in hell was he gonna sit there, when she could’ve told everyone by third period and made him look like a jackass in front of the whole school. So he decided. He decided to ditch during second and forget the whole thing.

It was a bullshit day for bullshit school. No way was he going to look back.

“Yo wutsup? Centrl park. Are spot. Brng beer,” he texted Jake. Jake never went to school, not that he knew of. Never went anywhere, except to the bodega at the end of his block to get cigs, or to buy fast food with the money they lifted from Darryl’s drunk old man, or to the park with 40s they got with the fake ID Jake had made in Jersey. He shared them with Darryl out of paper bags. Jake was good people.

“B their n 20,” he texted back.

56 BCM 33

There was a grody old dude on the bench. Their bench.

It was one of the last warm days of September, and the guy looked like a bum, and bums smelled like shit in the sun.

Actual shit, sometimes. He was hunched over, his frayed hat pulled low over his eyes, his hair sticking out from under it like white straw. He could have been a scarecrow, or a corpse.

“Yo,” Darryl mumbled under his breath, flicking open his lighter as he flopped onto the bench. It creaked under his weight. Traffic roared past, horns blaring hurry, covering up what wasn’t cool enough to be overheard. The man snorted and Darryl exhaled loudly, blowing smoke in his face. He coughed. The man coughed.

“Whaddaya think you’re doin’?”

Darryl jumped a good six inches, his hat flopping backward, so he had to hold it on.

“Jesus! I thought you were sleeping or dead or somethin’.”

“Half right,” the man wheezed as he hack-laughed at his own joke, spit flying from his cracked lips. He kept his face to his grass-encrusted shoes. Their pattern looked like alligator skin, but Darryl knew they were just old and fake.

Bums, as a rule, usually were.

“What’s good?”

“What’s good.” It wasn’t a question, or it was a trick and Darryl didn’t like tricks. They made him look stupid and Darryl hated to look stupid.

illustrations by JULIE MOLLOY

“I used to be just like you, you know,” said the man.

That wasn’t a question either. He nodded his head, up and down and belched. Wafted something toward Darryl that smelled like what comes up out of the sewer after it rains in the middle of the summer.

“Yep. Used to know a thing ‘er two, or thought I did. I could’ve had any woman in this city. You believe that?”

Darryl laughed. “Yeah, man. You and me both.”

“Horseshit. You could lie like a snake between the train tracks, I know the type. But I bet you ain’t never had a woman like I had. Kid, I had a girl who’d howl like a wolf just to get me into bed. Couldn’t name the creature, once I got there, either. Dumb as a bag of rocks, that one, but pretty as sin and just as tempting. Why aren’t you in school?”

Darryl scowled and pulled his own hat lower over his eyes. It helped to hide his eyes, he learned. They didn’t ask as many questions that way. He saw her there, the way she laughed into her locker like the idea of going out with him was funny. Saw her toss her blonde hair over her shoulders like she was something.

He swallowed hard, frowned harder. Not like he cared.

He could get any other girl he wanted, if he wanted. But who did she think she was, laughing at him? At him.

“I don’t need nothing they got in there. Ain’t nothin’ I

don’t already know, and anyways, I didn’t feel like putting up with their bullshit today.”

The man shook his head. “Never do, when it counts.

Shoot, I hated school too. Only went because that’s where the girls were and it was better than working at the corner mart. My buddies and I, we’d go to school daytime, get that out of the way, and nighttime, we’d have us a few drinks, get good and loose. You wouldn’t know nothing about that, wouldja kid?” That wheezing laugh again. Like something died in his chest. Darryl frowned, thinking of his old man.

His chest sounded that way, too. Some days, they checked to make sure he wasn’t dead. Didn’t know which was better.

“We went to all the bars, those days. Just up and down the street, one after the other. Barkin’ at the moon til the sun kicked her out of the sky. The whole city lit up like Christmas trees were set out, all up an’ down the street. Like you ain’t never seen.

My buddies and me, we would get slicked up like you boys never did, no way. Get on our best shirts, pressed pants.

Shine our shoes and wax the bottoms so they would slide, oh brother. Your sneaks can’t glide like we used to glide, don’t care what you pay for ‘em or where you steal ‘em from.

We knew how to dance in our day, hoo boy! Did we ever.

Charleston, jitterbug, two-step, you got it. Dances with names I forgot, but steps I never did. No sir. We’d dance BCM 33 57

with all the girls who’d let us and after a certain hour, all ics that helped that internet put us out of even the garbage those who wouldn’t. I remember some girls, looked all coy. business.”

Did we have us some times. Did we ever.”

Darryl caught himself laughing. He’d seen a TV show The man stared at his feet for awhile in silence and Dar- once, about an old reporter. A guy who uncovered big storyl stomped out his cigarette in the dusty grass. He liked ries, smoked a cigar, drank champagne with blonde-haired to watch it smoke, make sure it stopped. It was mesmeriz- hoes who wore tight dresses and slept with them later, even ing, to watch the smoke drift into the air and join the rest though they couldn’t show it because it was primetime TV of the exhaust, food fumes and whatever else made up the and sex was only allowed on cable. He never finished the aroma of the city that infected their nostrils, day in and out. movie. He couldn’t see the old guy drinking champagne, He hardly noticed, except that time. His ass hurt and the although he could see him with a cigar. But he couldn’t see sudden silence sounded loud in his ears. The man almost his parents doing it either, and they must have. Couldn’t see seemed like he expected something from him but he never them talking to each other without screaming ’til the picknew what to do in the quiet between a question and his tures rattled on the walls. They maybe did that, back in the answer when he didn’t have one, and where the hell was Jake, day, too. Shit, anything’s possible. anyway?

“You were a reporter? Did you see wasted bodies and “Shit, I should bounce. I got this thing…” shit?”

“Kid, you ain’t got nowhere to be like I ain’t got nowhere “Kid, I’ve seen it all. And then some.” His voice grew to be. I know what it’s like. You get in a hurry to get ev- softer. “I became a reporter after World War II. My daddy erywhere and before you know it, you realize you weren’t went over. Uncles. Friends. We used to read the papers, evheaded anywhere in the first place.” Darryl had seen them ery day. Make sure our daddies, our neighbors were still before. Bums who’d talk your ear off, get you involved, and alive. Hoped they were. I remember sitting at the kitchen then before they’d ask you for money. They’d catch you table, drinking my orange juice and watching my momma with your wallet out and your cash in their scummy paws. read the paper. How round her eyes got. And I remember That’s where this one was headed, 10 to 1. He’d bet on it, but her shoulders, the way they’d creep up by her ears as she read he wasn’t a betting man, not like his pops. Not like him, not ‘em, and how they’d come back down, soon as she was done. ever.

Settled like dirt on a grave, if you can picture that. We lived in fear as much as hope. Those reporters, they brought that “I really gotta…” to us. That hope. And when our boys came home, hoo-ee!

“What do you want to be when you grow up, kid?”

You ain’t never seen nothing like that, neither. If you want Darryl grinned, in spite of himself.

“A rapper. I can break it down like…” He started to beat- a party … I think it went on for years. That’s why the sixbox, or like, he didn’t know how it went exactly, but he ties happened, you know. We just couldn’t stop celebrating, watched enough YouTube videos to get the general idea. He once our own came home. They had to invent more drugs, had rhymes and beats and all that. Putting it together was just to keep the party goin’. I could tell you stories that the shit he had to lock down. But raw talent aside … Some would shock the stains outta your underwear.” kids passing hooted and his face reddened. He stopped. “I He adjusted the hat on his head and Darryl noticed his mean, I got skills. You don’t even know.” fingers were curled with age, his fingernails black under the The old man smiled, or Darryl thought he did. Some- edges and ragged. Like his grandpa’s used to be. times you could tell when someone was smiling, even if you He hadn’t had a grandpa since he was a kid. Not since couldn’t see his face. his old man moved them to the city, after the divorce went “A professional criminal, I’d call it. That’s what my wife through. But grandpa had an apple tree in his backyard and woulda called ’em. She was a gem, my old lady. She’d nag the a pickup truck. paint off the walls. Good thing I never liked it anyway.”

Darryl used to ride in the back, get dirt under his nails, “The wallpaper, ya mean?” too. He played blues music so loud, he could hear it over “You get As in school, kid? Didn’t think so.” The man the wind. There had been a dog, he thought he remembered coughed and his throat rattled like old plumbing. “Never that. His fur was soft, and he slobbered. Beer in a can in mind. I was a newspaper man, myself. Used to work for the a little foam holder. A comb in his back pocket. And a Gray Lady. That’s the New York Times. You might’ve heard scratchy gray suit, when he had to go to grandpa’s funeral, of newspapers, in history class. Things we used to wrap fish- where grandpa’s face was too quiet, like plastic. That part, es and line birdcages with, back before those fancy synthet- he tried not to remember. It was too far away from the city, 58 BCM 33

BCM 33 55

his new reality. Reality smelled like exhaust and garbage.

“Shit, yo. How old’re you, anyway? World War II was like, a hundred years ago.”

“I’m in no-man’s land,” the man answered, a twinkle in his voice. “Old enough to know what I’m missing and still with it enough to remember it. Watch what you do with your youth, boy. Before you know it, you can’t shit yourself without an extra hand, or you can’t find your ass to wipe it.”

A bus rumbled by, blowing exhaust in both their faces.

Darryl checked his phone. No messages. No Jake. Half an hour and he had started to think Jake had forgot, again.

Where the hell was that dude? He stood, yanked up his jeans and turned to face the man.

“Going somewhere, kid? Decided you had enough of an old fart’s rambling for one day?”

Darryl shoved his hands in his pockets and scuffed the ground with his kicks. The man didn’t look at him and he felt a sudden urge to sit back down. It was like when his grandpa had sat on the porch, drinking his beer and staring out over the yard. Just staring. The man didn’t show any signs of going anywhere and Darryl realized he sort of, almost, liked the old guy.

“Look. You got somewhere to go? I mean, it’s gonna get dark soon and I got a phone…”

The man pushed up his cap and Darryl looked him in the eyes, or where his eyes used to be. They were clouded

over with a milky gray film and stared like marbles would, if marbles could see, which his eyes couldn’t.

“Now that you mention it son, I could use a hand to the bus station, block or two away. Wouldn’t take more than a second of your time. You seem like a nice kid, even if you do skip school and hang out with loose women.”

“Nah, man. I gotta roll out. My buddy’s meeting me here and he ain’t got no phone, so…”

“That last part was a joke, son. I’m sure your girlfriend’s a real nice gal.”

“I ain’t got no girlfriend.”

“Course you don’t. You don’t have anywhere to be, either.

My name’s Gary, by the way.” Now that the man had locked his marbles on Darryl, he didn’t look away. He held out his wrinkled paw and Darryl took it. His palm was dry, but strong.

“I’m—” “Yo, Darryl! I got some shit, let’s go!” Jake swaggered up and his smile was wide, his eyes unfocused. He’d had a few already, maybe smoked up before he came. He held out his hand for Darryl to shake.

“Just a minute of your time, Darryl.” The old man rose, unsteady on his feet. He held out his hand, too. Darryl’s name sounded weird in his voice.

“Hold tight,” Darryl said. “I got something to do.”

He could have sworn he smelled apples.

BCM 33 59

60 BCM 33

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS

Me Likes You

by LAUREN BARNETT

BCM 33 61