
(1993)

(1993)

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)

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)

(1990)

(2003)

What do we think? Exploitative, like frames of the destitute? Should she not be seen nor remembered because she’s developmentally disabled, or should I have held back because she had no agency in the moment? She was the grown child of the family in the house next door. I don’t remember her name, and that’s too bad right now. She would sit there with her radio for hours upon end, rocking, literally and figuratively, in that chair. She screamed like a banshee, sometimes endlessly. (She could be heard through the wall.) But she loved my dogs and came to associate me with them. Here, she’s happy to see me. So, I took the shot. (1989 or 1990)

This is Emily, who was called Alto, my precious little girl who deserved a better life than I gave her in my twenties. She curled up with me anyway, until I had to go away to New York City to claim a life and left her behind. She lived out her years in the ample lap of a friend of my mother, with another dog and plenty of love, while going blind and deaf. She was put down when the old woman died, I learned after the fact. It’s not worth touching up the debris on the shot. We lived a dirty, meager life. Might as well own it. (1987)

(2014)

(2019)

(2018)