Now and then, when the pay is enough to entice me to drive, this gig economy serf sometimes ends up back in his old hood, the place where the North Oakland Player toiled away at his craft until as luck would have it he became the King of North Oakland... for the uninitiated his name is El Kono, the anti-hero of many of the stories laid out here in the lounge.. and recently much to my own surprise due to my not paying close enough attention to the map in the app i found myself on those very streets that i spent years roaming and running and hustling...
Damn near twenty years ago, by cosmic accident, i was sitting in a bar a Lawrenceville when i lucked into a chance meeting with a brooding young man who would become one of the best friends i've ever had, even luckier for me is his curious mind which often introduces me to new things, be it music or art or philosophy or sandwiches.... oddly enough on this occasion he re-introduced me to an old acquaintance of mine via a new discovery (for me not him)... the new discovery was Mark Fisher while the old acquaintance was Jacques Derrida, the concept they shared was Hauntology... thus began my education in the hauntological world, which is still quite new to me and how it has altered the way i look at things sometimes... more coincidence was the fact that in my ill-fated stint in graduate studies in English at Podunk University all the rage in the department, particularly among Dr. Rockstar and his tribe, were the hot French philosophers of the day, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and even now somewhere Robert Anton Wilson is giggling at the coincidence? but then again it was Mr. Fisher who sorta tied it all together with his take on Hauntology and how it related to a certain genres of music... which of in turn leads to my take on it as a delivery boy in my old neighborhood....
The short definition of Hauntology... it explores the lingering presence of the past and how it shapes our future... which is interesting for those Zen like minds who understand there is only the present but at the same time realize the past informs the present informs the future in and endless cycle that seemingly morphs and changes which each passing moment... which leads us back to the my late morning drive into my old neighborhood, the original hood, the days of the White Trach Pleasuredome and the 759... what one could call the halcyon days of El Kono before he moved out to the vast wasteland known as suburban Dumbfuckistan... to steal more from the definition, the personal history and culture of those days still exert a bit of influence on myself today while reminding me, dare i say haunting, of what was and what could have been... and of course there is one thing, well person, who looms largest of all in this context...
I'd spend the next couple hours in my old hood working and in that time i'd drive streets where i could practically see the ghosts of what was, the streets and buildings all still there but so much had changed... and the absence of what was loomed large over the thoughts that raced through my mind... but first and foremost was what happened on my way to drop off one of my deliveries... it was one of those moments where i literally caught my breath... sitting at the light and looking up i realized where i was, for a moment i felt lost, not in the physical sense but in a psychological sense, as if lost in a time warp... and where exactly did i find myself? in what at one time may have been the title of this post... The Street of Big Dreams and Broken Love...
The intersection of S. Aiken Ave. and Baum Blvd.... at one time one could say i owned these streets but this street in particular, fuckin hell, it was like an indescribable wave of something, melancholia? a warped longing? a distorted happiness? honestly i don't really know what it was, maybe it was a haunting in the most real sense of the word... down S. Aiken about eight or ten apartment buildings on the right was a red brick building, the swing still on the front porch, and in that building on the third floor was Veronica's old apartment... and it was sitting at that light that i said out loud to myself, the street of big dreams and broken love... one might ask why not big love and broken dreams? but it just made more sense the other way around... but there i was, on a street that i'd driven thousands of times before, a street where i used to get butterflies in my stomach knowing i was about to see her... the nights spent there, the secret afternoon visits, the early chill and morning darkness of the time i stopped on my way to work as she sat on the porch swing smoking a cigarette, party raging in her place, the sadness in her eyes as we stood and talked and how she wished i would come upstairs, tell everyone to leave and climb into bed with her, mainly because as she said she just wanted to wake up next to me... sitting at that light the faded film of a past life, a haunting, was taking place in real time... and then the light turned green and i had to continue on my way...
And that was just the beginning of this haunting, these distorted memories in black and white... driving around these streets was like remembering a forgotten history lesson, remembering the dates and times and places, the people gone both physically and psychologically... at times it was bordering on not sensory overload but memory overload, the physical structures still there but the ones from my history gone, ghosts to progress and gentrification, ghosts moved on to bigger cities and so-called better places, some of the people ghosts in the sense that they are not only psychologically gone but physically non-existent as well.... and maybe one of those ghosts is me, the man named El Kono is no more, the king of these streets, the guy who sold more weed than Jesus tossed out fish and bread, who was the patron saint of strippers and bartenders everywhere, hood rich and hood famous, was gone, nothing more than a ghost in his own mind, a fiction typed out so that the history isn't lost... and those ghosts...
American Pager, where i got my first beeper before the advent of cheap cell phones, was now a Wing Stop... the Olympic Flame, my weekend breakfast joint, now a BMW dealership, the old party store warehouse where i worked "redeveloped" as retail space... Joe's Bar, the place i used to get blind drunk and the place of Pizza Man legend (where i scored pounds of weed from Pizza Joe and would walk home with them in pizza boxes) a Chipotle... damn near everything i loved was gone...
On my first stint in this hood, in the apartment known as the White Trash Pleasurdome, another third floor walk up with a shitty balcony and a hole in the ceiling that during the winter when it snowed it would actually snow into the apartment (,the good Doctor and i pulled the drawer from the fridge to catch the snow), the place where i first started selling weed in the Burgh, the place i so lovingly referred to as the North Oakland Hub, the buildings still standing, the streets that made me so foreign and yet so familiar... of the the four bars that made up the Hub all of them are gone, every fucking one turned into a cell phone store or a vape shop or empty... this corner was an alcoholics and hoods dream, the bars opened early and closed late, it was a hive of activity and along with it was a laundromat, a grocery store, a pharmacy, a liquor store... all vanished into the ether, the grocery store has been empty for years, same with the pharmacy, the liquor store is gone, the little breakfast joint a memory...
None of the bars seemingly survived the pandemic, a virus that killed more than just people it killed neighborhoods, it killed history... Chief's, a legend among Pittsburgh boozers, a punk-tinged jukebox, a haven for the cool kid junkies in leather jackets... i once met a local rock star from a band that was a straight up Jane's Addiction rip-off, right down to the name and stage show, who thought it was shocking to greet everyone with "hail Satan", i remember actually laughing at him when he was introduced to me spewing his nonsense... Thirtsy's, the long running hippie bar with weekly bands and Dead night, now an Asian fusion restaurant... The Luna, named after the little amusement park (Luna Park) that used to occupy this neighborhood way back when, the place where a shithead bouncer and i almost got into a fight cuz my friend had left a funny note one night when he made us stop playing darts so a couple of his "ladies" could dance, only to have the bartenders come out from behind the bar and tell him he was about to get canned if he gave me any more shit cuz i was already a well known hood to which i replied, i like you guys but fuck this place while Mr. T works the door (said bouncer had a Mr. T thing going and would be found a year or so later dead of a heroin overdose)... and of course last but not least, my beloved Mitchell's Tavern...
Mitchell's should really have it's own post as it's lingering past has forever shaped my future, my present, my life in general... there were days i lived in this bar, from the original forays in 1993/94 where the 25 cent beer night kept me pleasantly drunk to the day in October 1995 and the cosmic accident of being introduced to Hippie Jack, this bar was an integral part of my personal history... drinking Dewar's and water with a beer chaser, throwing darts in the back, making deals in the red vinyl booths (i was incensed the day i walked in to see they had been removed) there easily could have been no Kono if not for this place... the characters i encountered in this place could fill a book, legends of the North Oakland hub now apparitions in my mind... now it's a coffee house, gazing on it in it's current iteration is Mr. Fisher's very definition of "ghosts of future pasts", the ghosts of my life indeed, there is part of me that wants, actually needs to walk in the place, to buy a cup of coffee and look around, not to see but to feel those ghosts again... in some way a beautiful haunting of the present by walking through a past that no longer exists...
And maybe, more accurately, the whole neighborhood, neighborhoods to be more correct, should be called the place of Big Dreams and Broken Love... or maybe it should be reversed and be it should be the neighborhood of Big Love and Broken Dreams... for it was not only Veronica that i loved but the streets themselves, the aura, the dirt and the grit and the life that i was living, the pure beauty of the vision that a young man once had, i mean the folly of it was almost too comical to comprehend to the sane and the square... grad school dropout living without a net hatches plan to pay off student loans and feed, clothe and house himself by the selling of an illegal substance (at the time) or substances, in a time where they were putting more people in prison for the possession of that plant with our anti-hero graduating to a place where had he been busted he would probably only recently would just been getting paroled... yeah sometimes, as i sit here in the lily white burbs i get a cold shiver, the ghost of that kid i knew, flannel clad in cargo pants, pockets bursting with gear, smiling and cocky, popular with the ladies and bartenders, his ghost still haunts the old neighborhood himself... now and then i'll catch glimpses of that ghost in the reflection of storefront windows, it's not him but it's him... and yeah, i'm not a believer in ghosts... but i see them from time to time... and yes there is that one... and she still haunts me to this day...
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