Worthy Of This Great City Read online

  To be fair, I would have made a decent, even excellent teacher, but I had no interest whatsoever in scholarship. Therefore the system rejected me.

  Naomi and I moved into a tiny, toddler-dominated apartment in West Philly, close to my new slum-encircled but properly ivy-clad campus. It was a decent existence, a life of academic challenge with my remarkably self-possessed, observant baby daughter whom I immediately and completely adored, who taught me that even a minor deviation from conventional beauty, a too-short nose and naked round eyes of no outstanding shade, can inspire infinite absorption. Who proved the ability of mere humans to create life, although I still find it unbelievable.

  I cheated on my marriage but I don’t want to make too much of this; for one thing, my memories of this period are confused. I kind of believed in it; I thought I could be someone else from long ago, so I tried it out and it was a mistake. Naomi tried being hurt but gave it up when she grasped my revulsion. Her heart wasn’t in it any more than mine; evenings she was diligently pursuing an MBA, developing this shark’s smile to complement her middle-class avarice, getting even more self-disciplined. Picking out her next husband, it turned out.

  Meanwhile at my university I experienced the inevitable vicious, clichéd pettiness, the endless watchful departmental jealousies that seemed at first blush admirable. Didn’t that prove how much all this theorizing mattered to the initiates, mattered essentially and intimately and not just in a narrow professional sense but to their whole lives and values and worldviews? Like an idiot I sat at those cramped seminar tables feeling proud of myself, although even back then I realized most philosophy is basically crap. Look at Kant and Hume; it’s just simplistic shit wrapped up in dense layers of jargon. Validity is determined by timing and credentials, that’s all there is to it. Value’s all in the packaging, otherwise no one will notice except to mock.

  Those openly shabby, overheated, companionable but endlessly suspicious proving grounds of we stressed contestants, the entire clever, hip, narrow-minded ethos of that subtle arena, the notice boards with yellowed cartoons and faculty profiles, the torn orange vinyl on the lounge sofas, the classrooms with scarred wooden tables pushed together, the huge whiteboards crisscrossed with scrawled, recondite abbreviations differentiating postmodernism from structuralism from deconstruction: Foucault and Habermas and of course Derrida breaking apart those hidden oppositions, searching within and only within but never just fucking turning around. So much intense, urgent argument and analysis dedicated to describing an already circumscribed human prison, plus of course that ongoing defense of brilliant but eternally misunderstood Nietzsche. Styrofoam cups set next to laptops carefully recording every precious syllable of some shrewd middle-aged professor’s exploratory word games, those little testing pokes at your cultural prowess and intellectual potential while you stared at the spotless soles of his heavy work boots propped oh so casually on a desk drawer. Faithful predictions of the return of socialism permeated those days despite that great dream’s apparent demise, as did a courageous refusal to retreat from implacable atheism even in the face of overwhelming victory.

  Look, I’m being unfair here if not outright lying. I understood the importance and supreme difficulty of all that work, I saw the literal enlightenment, the practical comprehension following in its wake. Not the work I wanted to do, although I couldn’t admit that then, but admirable.

  But still.

  I adored it even as I wrestled with my complicit cowardice, despising myself. Not because I disagreed, precisely, although occasionally I did, but because there was clearly no use for any argument or discussion but merely for further exacting clarification. All of us carrying out an endless autopsy of human thought.

  I suffered for my increasingly clouded future and often enough for my fellow students. That pervading stench of intellectual desperation was easy to confuse with normal graduate student angst, but I can recall a Husserl seminar that devolved into three full hours spent gleefully shredding a friend of mine, a decent man who’d missed a paper deadline because he was unwell, and who was unwell because he’d submitted himself to some university medical experiments to cover his tuition. In retrospect I think I escaped that kind of treatment because nobody there ever took me seriously. Well, and because I was coward enough to keep my head down. On another stupefying afternoon as I was watching the light climb down from the tall, sealed windows - rumored legacy of a jumper - and ignoring a discussion of I think Kitty McKinnon, this rather troubled-looking older woman raised her hand.

  “But isn’t it self-contradictory? I mean, you can’t actually give someone rights or freedoms; they have to be invested.”

  Hesitation all around while awaiting word from on high; it came in a mild enough tone with only a cursory glance up. “And unfortunately that ability is stifled by those protecting the status quo.”

  And of course that stern, unanimous agreement rising from the pierced and leather-clad guys on the floor by the back wall, from the career track scholars lounging at the table with thoughtful, approving nods, from the oft-petted TA with a dismissive if polite shrug.

  They were all majestically tolerant, those experts, even more than their compatriots in the other humanities departments; they were masters of thorough political theory, eager delineators of the limits of human knowledge, geniuses of refutation, intolerant only of their analytic colleagues down the hall, those ignoramuses so bogged down in the deluded past they still sought certainty in matter and the material self and went nattering on about logic and consciousness and especially language. Imagine! The level of inter-departmental animosity was enough to make you shudder to your least dendrite and hold tightly to the pitiful shreds of your academic optimism. Those educators who knew for an absolute fact how philosophy was over. And it’s true that there hasn’t been any real philosophy done for decades, but that’s because no one’s had the requisite balls. Momentously, the department cut down on admissions to the program, limiting intake to future scholars, no more mere dabblers in this business of higher thought. Even in retrospect, even taking my considerable resentment into account, it was pretty much an incestuous, self-perpetuating shithole.

  All of this leaving me somewhere near the elevators, pretending to read the notices on the corkboards in order to protect myself against some passing professor’s derisive interrogation.

  Inside my mind, inside the car, I considered my child, the soft, colorless flesh encasing the developing woman. “Do you suppose we’ll ever stumble across a really new idea? A new way of looking at everything? That someday, maybe thousands of years from today, we’ll look back and be dumbfounded by how blind we were?”

  This naturally disgusted her; she ignored me and went back to staring out her window. Being a teenager, Sophie’s genuinely disturbed by the notion of a world that doesn’t adhere to sensible rules and explanations inscribed somewhere official like D.C. or Heaven. Anything less would constitute an incomprehensible betrayal, which is precisely why I continue to torture her like this.

  “Especially poetry, don’t you think?” Ruth said. “Where words run ahead of the present, leaving grammar and logic behind and leaping straight into the future, feeling out the truth for reason to follow. Music, too, of course; music even more so.”

  No doubt I escaped a life of scrounging for crumbs in adjunct hell. Okay, it wasn’t as obvious back then: the rot in the tired, over-inflated humanities business. But it was there: the growing caution, the sense that an expected future was receding, that something radical and utterly unfair was afoot and all those properly annotated research papers were to no avail. Surely they sensed the approaching collapse up on that tense, shabby floor.

  “Listen,” Ruth said. “The unheard people are the past that creates us. You can’t ignore them without losing your way.”

  After my aborted stab at academia I trashed two precious years of my youth pursuing a meaningless career in financial services, breaking even but gaining nothing, living an excruciating cubicle exis
tence where I literally struggled to survive another empty, exhausting day, wishing my life away in hourly increments, watching the good guys filter out and the creeps advance. But I knew I was lucky to have benefits and a chance, however slim, for an actual career, what with the Great Recession already on the horizon, so I numbly endured the my sense of inadequacy and the women’s fake office voices until one afternoon I was running another superfluous report in order to export another irrelevant spreadsheet when I passed some inevitable tipping point.

  I went to law school.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At the station the fallout from Ruth’s formal debut as a prophet, while obviously pending, hung in temporary suspension, just another troubling reality set aside until some responsible executive found time to make an informed decision. Meanwhile the business lingered in a tension of imminent crisis. You might think it was still 2008, economic recovery seemed so distant, a looming Sisyphean mountaintop insisting on staying in the story. When inevitably even more troubling news filtered down, those in supposed authority proved mysteriously unable to provide any real information regarding exactly what to expect or how soon. And then another round of remedial measures was adopted, and so on.

  By that determinative Folk Fest summer WPHA had downsized to offices in a Broad Street renovation on the Avenue of the Arts, Philadelphia’s music street. How happily appropriate! The broadcast studio itself, like many of its ilk, was deliberately neutral, a slick utilitarian space with very few decorative features and virtually no personal paraphernalia. A large corkboard over the console held a single sheet torn from a pocket notepad pinned way up in one corner as if intimidated, and a framed poster of the nighttime Philadelphia skyline covered much of one wall. That photograph, taken from the Camden side of the Delaware, was an unoriginal composition meant to imply metropolitan glamour, with lighted skyscrapers and river and bridge and the station logo in blue superimposed over the reality like a neon bar sign. One of those expensive, unoriginal ad agency designs, it generated the excitement of an inspirational poster at the dentist’s office if you saw it at all, and Ruth was vaguely ashamed of it.

  Another poster, this one an unframed cardboard placard not quite two feet square, leant against the wall at one end of the curved countertop so that you couldn’t help but see it from everywhere. This one, clearly a professional product, was nonetheless proudly juvenile and outrageously glitzy, with silver letters on a shiny azure field, the overall effect a cross between a kindergarten project and the cover of a gaudy paperback on an airport rack. Wide block capitals instructed you to REACH FOR THE STARS. Behind these words various improbable heavenly bodies evoked fifties sci-fi comic books featuring extraterrestrial sex. More silver letters running along the lower border explained that ATTITUDE EQUALS ALTITUDE.

  Ruth briefly but openly admired her reflection in the glass over the city skyline photo, pushing her thick hair up into a knot, raising her chin to view her profile. She swiveled back round and stared at the more prominent poster, sighed to be noticed, and slumped her shoulders in huge mock resignation.

  Out in the booth Bob Levine, her producer, almost grinned and almost shrugged but actually did neither because Rick Stanley, their latest Program Director, was standing behind him, leaning on the back of his chair, and the outdated, amateur initiative represented by that placard was Stanley’s bright idea, brought in by him as a kind of bona fide, a demonstration of readiness from the expert expected to organize the station’s traditional, comfortable chaos because no one could afford to be casual anymore just as no one could afford an untrained management team. All this reinforcing the suspicion of something seriously amiss, allowing more doubt to pile up in the corners of everyone’s psyche. Those suspicions currently focused on the upper echelons since we all read the papers; pretty much everyone recognized this silly new concept, this whole weirdly anachronistic philosophy as insulting and a personal threat.

  So a truly remarkable display of deceitful policy, and a hellish introduction for Stanley, coming in toting this predestined failure. But how could he in the first place? I mean! Fiscal success based on spiritual perfection! “You’re the company! It’s all up to you! It’s all your fault!” All those tired old exhortations plus a motivational motto under every signature line! And yet management encouraged this discredited shit with unflagging optimism, seemed even to be relying on it with a terrifyingly innocent unanimity, and the PHA employees suffering under the ridiculous scheme eventually turned fatalistic or chronically anxious or simply left.

  To further aggravate Ruth, all this crap was passably tolerable to Bob, her sidekick, her supposed good buddy. Because Bob, despite his comfortable music industry persona of scruffy beard and saggy clean jeans and occasional denim vest, was never anybody’s idealist to begin with let alone any kind of commercial martyr but ultimately just another sardonic realist with a family to support, another born cubby-dweller pretending to some kind of mellow authenticity. Whereas Ruth either didn’t understand about consequences or else genuinely craved the rush she got from pushing corporate boundaries. Childishly twirling in her chair, radiating danger signals, one palm flat on the slick surface of some unidentifiable composite with its top layer already peeling up at the corner.

  This was earlier in the year, when the latest company crisis was still new and the underhanded spiritual regulations first seriously in effect. She sat on display inside that plain box with its one wide window to the booth, not unlike a reptile on exhibit at the zoo, expressing that kind of disinterest and universal contempt. The studio held a sleek console with neon-colored sliders, a standard phone, a deluxe curved black keyboard, monitors, black foam-capped mikes on swing arms, and a gray-and-black marbleized plastic pencil holder containing two obviously inexpensive pens from sponsors and a used emery board. She had her two constant security blankets: a yellow legal pad jammed with various ignored memos and notes, and a mug with that blue skyline logo and the call letters in bold crimson. She tended to carry one or both around the office with her for something to do, the mug generally half full of congealed coffee that she drank anyway.

  There were generally three chairs, two at the guest side of the curving counter, just standard ergonomic office chairs upholstered in an inoffensive charcoal tweed. The carpeting was an industrial mulberry, and rough beige-and-tan fabric in a check pattern padded the walls. In sum, a business unit just short of sterile, imagined without consideration for anything whimsical or extraneous or creative like music or conversation.

  So foreign not only to its purpose but also to the vaunted PHA culture, the familiar image of the venerable station boasting a seminal authority that predated even the Bandstand days, commanding a survivor’s respect and a valid if indirect claim to courage and glory, something vague having to do with desegregation and sexual liberation if you could trace it all out, something once boldly avant-garde in an unapologetically entrepreneurial way. The product of the first post-WWII teen afternoon mainstreaming of increasingly whitewashed rock ’n roll and the Stroll in your neighbor’s basement and Saturday nights at a South Philly mixer for the whole family, toddlers to Grandma. Even from its beginnings handicapped by a reputation for being something of an amateur show, a family concern; today it shouted that proud appellation from billboards along I-76, additionally reminding everyone how the only independent station in the Delaware Valley was still here and thriving, no matter that people thought it commercial and lame.

  The late, often adulated Joe Merriwether accomplished that first leap into the youth market practically before there were official teenagers. Joe being one of those curmudgeonly local business legends that keeps everyone chortling indulgently, fond but embarrassed, a throwback to a cruder industry era, a man capable of creating both amazing progress and deep resentment. Tell a Joe story to get your latent racial or sexual venom out there in all genuine innocence. Or if in kindlier mood, a story about Joe on a rowhouse stoop, answering a fan’s complaint letter with a knock on the door and a bouquet o
f zinnias out of his own garden, old-fashioned mauves and pinks, stems dripping into newspaper. Those were the days; that was a better generation.

  Always an unconcerned bigot, he nonetheless had the sagacity to leave his private preconceptions out of business. His shrewdness allowed him to grasp the profit possibility in the relentless beat of reality and oblivion combined, a joyous shout perfectly matched to the post-war era of expansion and restlessness, integration and rebellion: Little Richard and Buddy Holly steamrolling over Frankie Laine and Patti Page. So I suspect Joe, high on unexpected success and the optimism of the decade, complacently expected to program the background music for the second half of the century; he certainly gave it a convincing try, only more changes kept flooding in, undermining his efforts, and his entire adulterated enterprise was soon enough drowning in an overcrowded cutthroat market, an exploding, frightening kind of scene: anti-everything and then into serious drugs. And anyway Joe was a businessman first, not really a visionary or an idealist or even that much of a music lover.

  Thus during the late sixties PHA gently mutated into a pap of generic, digestible soft covers and movie theme instrumentals for sentimental suburban mommies and daddies. Until eventually even that strategic corner fell subject to competitive pressure, the whole scene morphing to capture the new wave of young parents, sudden traditionalists seeking a safe family harbor. And again Joe displayed that insane spark of genius, that characteristic ability to risk literally everything on his own instinctive understanding of the market. He embraced a second roots revolution, except not really, marketing cleaned-up R&B via endlessly loving, immaculately cool DJs espousing a highly civilized spin on authenticity, the smooth jazz just then arising with The Sound Of Philadelphia, looking to wean an established audience from the familiarity of commiserative or uplifting pop.