Butchblog

with apologies to Thomas Wolfe

The House on Baltimore Avenue

It was a red brick duplex with a wide front porch and a set of concrete steps that led down to Baltimore Avenue, a wide city street, abuzz with people and automobiles and trolley cars. It felt soothing to me, couldn’t sleep without that noise. Nowadays I can’t sleep when there is noise.  

            I loved that house, in a way only a kid can love a place, without being able to say why. I especially liked that there were three stories and three flights of wooden stairs that I could jump down when my father wasn’t around. I had it worked out so that I could make it down all three flights in four dare-devilish leaps. Made me feel like Superboy. It wasn’t like it was a big fancy house. Not like my friend Joe Cohen’s house, which was an actual mansion, with a tennis court and a regulation size backboard and hoop where we played endless games of pick-up basketball. Our house had only a tiny backyard where the dirt was hard and full of gravel and nothing could ever grow. The Cohens moved out of the neighborhood in 1956 and fled to the suburbs like all the rest of the well-to-do white people in West Philadelphia. But not my dad. He was the neighborhood doctor and everybody counted on him and he felt responsible for them. But by 1973 and soon to retire, he gave in and decided to sell our house.

            Dad’s car had been broken into a couple of times as it sat parked out on the street in front. Thieves stole the battery one time, and then after he replaced it, they returned and stole the new one.  Nobody had garages in our neighborhood. Houses weren’t built like that, no room when you had to squeeze in a bunch of buildings on one city block. For some reason, which wasn’t all that wise, Dad then decided to go out and buy himself a brand-new automobile. He picked out a jet-black Chevrolet Impala. I was shocked. My dad did not own cool cars. There had been a ’49 Frazer and a gray ’54 Buick Special and a couple other sedate looking sedans. But this Impala, man, was a great looking car, the kind with flaring rear fins and a big engine and, though he would never admit it, Dad was excited about owning such a sharp vehicle.

            And then, you can guess what’s coming.  He parked the car out on the street, as usual, turned on the TV, watched his shows, went to bed with Mom, woke up, looked out their bedroom window and saw only an empty space where the beloved black Chevy had sat.  Soon after he and Mom decided they’d had enough and put the house up for sale, and Baltimore Avenue disappeared from our life.

            I did make one last attempt to rescue it, told Dad I wanted to buy the place. I was married then and living with my new wife in a shitty apartment right next to the high school where I was teaching. Sometimes kids from the school would climb to the top of the bleachers in the football field and try to peek in. It freaked my then-wife out.

            “If I buy it then we can keep it in the family,” I pleaded. “I can take over the mortgage or something.”

            “There is no mortgage,” he said. “You must be crazy, boy. This isn’t for you.”

            I knew whenever he called me boy, there was no point in talking further. It was pretty clear that I was the only one who cared about the place, and maybe I was only looking for a way out of my current situation. Still, it was sad, and marked the end of an era for our family. As I moved on with my life and away from the East Coast, there was no longer a place to come home to, a place I still fondly remember.