(1997)
Sunbeam, New York
Smokers’ corner, Wilmington, Del.
(2019)
The W&J, Northern Liberties, Philadelphia
“Youth must keep decently away.” (Eugene O’Neill) The first time I entered this joint, on a late night in spring, my friends and I had to be buzzed in. It was named the W&J, at 5th & Poplar Sts., and both Walter and Juliette, the aging Polish couple who owned it, were on the other side of the door along with absolutely no one else. There were handwritten signs prohibiting cursing. This was the Philadelphia few knew. I moved into the neighborhood a couple years later, at the cusp of its gentrification, and not long after that the place was sold to a couple of guys in their 30s who turned it into what would then have been called a hipster bar. The guys were OK, but the secret weirdness was gone. (2001)
Boardwalk guys, Wildwood, N.J.
Tony, tonight is going to be special. It gets weird at the Jersey shore after Labor Day. No one’s driving slowly anymore because the cops don’t care, or the cops were part-timers anyway and are back on the mainland. The whole barrier island becomes a construction site. Some businesses are still open, others already said fuck it. More than any other place here, the boardwalk — home to three piers of amusement rides and you don’t want to know what else — really loses it by mid-September. Behind the lens at this moment there’s a guy giving a shopkeeper the business about Jesus Christ, and the shopkeeper is having none of it. Two old dames are driving too fast in their motorized chairs and laughing hysterically. There are no rides running and no one young enough left to want them. And then there are these two guys. (2020)
Restaurant staff, Hong Kong
(2014)
Parole officers, Philadelphia
Might have a problem. One of their fellow officers, somewhat incongruously, was a member of a squash and tennis club on the Main Line where I tended bar. The Fox show COPS was just in development, and this outfit was featured in the pilot (something like that). The club member invited me to tag along with the guys for a while, with a story in mind for some publication. But there was competition for my time and what would pay for it, and the story was never written, to my lasting regret. Because dear God it was an insane story. Like the predawn raid (for which I was given a Kevlar vest) when they all went bursting into a crackhouse rowhome, leaving the entrance uncovered. Who’s got the front door? I shouted, because I had learned a couple things by then. “You do.” (1989)
Haircut, New York
So helpless It was an Upper East Side barber shop, where little boys rolled up jeans cuffs and sat in Jeep chairs instead of on the plank that spanned a man’s barber chair when I was a little boy. If today I had the choice of looking back at a photo of myself in the old man’s plank seat or this one, I would go plank. I’m visible to them on the sidewalk outside the barber shop. I think the woman far right gets it. The woman to her right: not sure. The barber/stylist is either discussing the cut or is flagging my presence. But the boy, the boy is taking dead aim. Perhaps he knew. (1995 or 1996)
Spring evening, Philadelphia
(1993)
Wailing souls, Philadelphia
Is that a juice box? Looks like a juice box. I was driving home on the morning of Sept. 12, 1987, in my first car, a 1966 Pontiac Catalina, after ending the previous night’s party on my host’s couch. The car had 421 cubic inches under the hood, an aquamarine Lucite steering wheel, and the profile of an Indian head in the dash that lit when the high beams were on. The radio, however, was AM only, so I kept a seriously giant boombox in the back seat. That grey morning, the box told me Peter Tosh had been shot to death in Jamaica the night before in a botched home-invasion robbery. At the time, I was mixing sound for a Philadelphia-area, white-boy ska-reggae band, and the news hit us hard. A year later, Tosh’s son, Andrew, taking up the mantle, brought some of the Wailers on tour. A very short-lived magazine assigned me to cover the son with his father’s band. (Carlton “Santa” Davis was drumming with a bullet still inside him somewhere, my memory says.) Here’s the boy Tosh, age 19 or 20, with, I think (pretty sure), Earl “Chinna” Smith outside the former Chestnut Cabaret, 38th and Chestnut Sts. (1988)
Ennui, Glen Mills, Pa.
Not a yurt. When we were kids, my cousin, Carter, whom you’ve met here years ago, and I used to explore the ruins of the once-mighty Whitemarsh Hall. (We called it Stotesbury Mansion, but that was actually the name of its predecessor.) Inside, it looked similar to this. We never had the urge for graffiti (if only I’d had a camera), but the energy was the same: a hidden place for adolescent notions of liberty and exploration. And destruction. This is an outbuilding at Sleighton Farm School. We’ve been here before and we’ll come back again. (2020)
