The Canals of Mars: A Memoir

Clemente Stuff

T his is where I fell and tore my arm open,” I say. “The time it got all infected.” My wife smiles. She knows this story, how I scraped my arm playing with Keith Osborne, and because he was threeyearsolder,believedhimwhenhesaid,“You’llbeOK,”afterhe ranwateroveritandcoveredtheworstabrasionswithBand-Aidsso wecouldrunbackoutsidetochasearubberballweslammedagainst a wall to simulate a baseball game. I wore a long-sleeved shirt for the next two days, not telling anyone about my arm until I noticed, that second day, gobs of yellow pus oozing from underneath the Band-Aids.Mymotherscrubbedthosewoundswithnearlyscalding water. She performed an amateur debridement while I screamed and writhed in the arms of Aunt Margaret. Iwassixyearsold,justfinishedwithfirstgrade.Inthesummerof 1952,thisblockinEtna wasbusywithpedestrians who walked from their nearby houses or parked on either side of the street to purchase jewelry, shoes, or appliances; candy, ice cream, or baked goods. My father had bought the bakery business two years before and was building a house we’d move into before Christmas.Ifthereweretrafficjamsduringrushhoureachday,that was just what you’d expect from the Etna bottleneck on the way to and from Pittsburgh. If those snarls became worse each year, that was what people put up with if they moved into Shaler Township, the first, fast-growing suburb north of Pittsburgh where our new house was rising. Six years later the Etna bypass would open and doom this block, parking banned during four key hours per day. But it was still a bottleneck. Traffic, enormous by then, backed up, beginning at Butler Street, further than it ever had. Ten years after I recovered from my arm injury without antibiotics, hardly anyone parked to shop, even during the legal hours, but horns honked and drivers cursed, and my father’s bakery, as well as most of the other businesses , gradually shut down. A familiar story, nothing remarkable, but I’ve come back to “ Clemente Stuff 98 ■ w o r k walk the block because my father, more than thirty-five years after he left the bakery behind, has told me the road, finally, will be widened—that eighteen months from now, the opposite side of Butler Street will be leveled. “CarlosFuneralHome,”Isay,pointingtothefirstbuildingacrossfromwhere we stand in front of what used to be Miller’s Tavern. Immediately, I know that’s not chronologically accurate. In 1952, the building housed McIntyre’s Funeral Home. To my parents, the change in names, after the bypass was built, seemed another sign of times gone bad. You didn’t go to a stranger named Carlos. Now that McIntyre was gone, you went to Neeley’s or Ogrodnik’s. My mother would check the names to see who had allowed their relatives to be laid out by Carlos. She would shake her head when she recognized someone she knew. Now the building has been converted to apartments, nothing that makes me consider the ethnic connotations of an owner’s name, but I remember my father’s family was laid out at home, so it didn’t matter. My uncle who died young before I started school, my grandmother while I was in fourth grade, my other grandfather, the one so stern and straight-laced I was unable to speak to him as a child, in 1965, the year the bakery closed—all of them on display in the living room of the house on Greismere Street, which runs along the cliffside overlooking Butler Street. The year the bypass opened, I became a teenager. My mother sent me across the street to Ben’s, a mom-and-pop store, on the Fridays I waited for her to close at six o’clock. The Press, not the Sun-Telegraph; the late edition, not the home edition. There were times when I was sent back to trade one “edition” in for the other, and I learned to check in the upper right-hand corner for the proper label; but on one particular day, I forgot a more important warning and darted from between two trucks bottlenecked going north and dashed directly into the path of a car going south that was somehow not backed up at the light. Thecarsquealedandstopped,justbumpingme.Itookastepbackandcaught mybalance.Itwasalmostastuntman’sperfection,mefrozen,thedriverrelieved, and then one of the truck drivers yelled, “You big, dumb, shitty bastard” at me, and immediately afterward, the driver of the car that had nudged me shouted, “Yeah, what’s wrong with you, you big, dumb, shitty bastard?” It was an odd version of call-and-response, the near tragedy turning into a profane...