Jax isn’t what you’d call an interesting place. Not much happens here, good or bad. Most people seem not to either like or dislike it. It’s just here, like tuna fish in a casserole, bland and moderately substantial, though not enough so as to disrupt your attention if it’s on something else. Tying your shoes, for instance.
It’s the kind of place that lulls you into a false sense of security, only most of the time it isn’t false. It’s just that one time when you’ve relaxed, when you’re sure you can take a small risk. You take it…and then pay.
I go to the library and, as I have before, leave my pack outside. I tie it to the bike rack like a cowboy looping the reins on his horse over the end of a hitching post. It isn’t going to stop anybody from stealing it but it looks secure. Inside I spend an hour surfing the news, and a half hour writing about one item, though my eye is on several others with more substance (there’s that word again). But the hard wooden seats of the library’s computer chairs – no cushioned desk chairs, shaped to your body and free to roll like in Charleston but severe, give-no-quarter oak torture devices, hard on the back and harder on the butt – have me aching for a break. An hour is about all I can take before I have to get up, move around, massage the lines of pain shooting through my thighs.
I go downstairs and outside, partly to smoke while I exercise my legs, partly to check on the pack. The cigarette in my lips and the lighter halfway up to my mouth, I glance at the bike rack.
The pack is gone.
It’s been stolen? I think with a species of wonder. Somebody actually grabbed a 60-lb pack and walked off with it?
Something doesn’t feel right. I search the park across the street, then the city bus station two blocks away. Thieves are notoriously dumb. For all I know, he’s sitting on a bench, going through his prize while he waits for a bus. Any money in here? But the pack is nowhere to be seen.
I am frustrated and depressed but not as much as I should be. Something’s not right. The pack hasn’t been stolen. Somehow, though I can’t tell you how, I know this with the certainty of an astronomer who knows the sun will rise in the east and Ursa Major isn’t really a bear. So where is it?
One of the only two places it could be. It’s either at the police station, where they’re about to blow it up because they think it might be a bomb (police depts all over the country have become excessively melodramatic since Tom Ridge told them anybody could be a target, a statement so monumentally absurd only an American could make it or believe it), or else it’s in the library, probably the security room, because somebody didn’t want it hanging around outside.
So I return to the library and ask at the security desk where they search all the small backpacks, the ones they let people bring in. Sure enough, my pack is in a room behind the desk. I see a raft of television monitors showing parts of the library when the door opens. A nice man hauls my pack out, explaining that they usually throw the packs they find outside away or let the police blow them up. He suggests I get a “buddy” to watch mine the next time.
I agree, apologize, thank him profusely for not exploding my clothes and medication, and throw the thing onto my back. I have no sooner actually touched it than another “knowing” slaps at the base of my spine like an ice cube.
I have to leave Jacksonville. Tomorrow. Next day at the latest.
Well, I was planning to anyway, but why this frightening premonitionary-type deal? Why all the drama? I don’t know but I believe it the same way I believed the pack hadn’t been stolen. I will leave, with or without money, in no more than two days.
Gary and Pitt
Gary (that’s what I’ll call him) is a kid by my reckoning, half my age. Or less. He’s good-looking, with an easy smile and a wicked glint in his eye. I like him immediately despite his appalling youth. He takes me to a bar in a section of clubs, bars, and restaurants that looks like it was once a back avenue of warehouses and grimy industrial eyesores clustered around the railroad tracks. Gary says that’s pretty much what it used to be but that it’s been yuppified, sort of.
The bar is an odd combination of modern chrome-and-glass antisepsis with down-home, shot-and-a-beer unpretentiousness. I like his bar, too. I write:
Pittsburgh has an identity crisis. Believed for years to be a dying if not dead industrial town devastated by steel mill closings and globalized outsourcing that’s a wasteland of boarded-up storefronts and empty apartment buildings, in fact it’s a lively little city that is anything but. It’s an eminently livable, affordable place that has maintained a blue-collar sensibility and a working class that’s still middle-class, one of the last such centers in the country. It’s staunchly Democratic (one of the reasons Pittsburgh’s economy hasn’t been hijacked by corporate raiders), strongly union-oriented (the unions are a prime component of the local political machine), and unafraid of embracing its blue-collar roots and even celebrating them.
“Pittsburgh is a small town,” Gary explains. “Actually a collection of small towns – 136 of them in Allegheny County. Even though Pennsylvania state politics is driven by what happens in Philly and Pittsburgh, the neighborhood orientation of Pittsburgh means everybody in politics here knows everybody else.”
Gary and Sarah’s house (not her real name, either) is bare practically to the walls. Most everytthing has been packed for the move, even the pictures that used to decorate the walls. They’ve left two couches in the living room, along with the tv, which is currently sitting on a packing crate.
Sarah is friendly but tense. I can sense that, for what I guess must be obvious reasons, she’s wishing I hadn’t come, at least not then. Can’t say as I blame her. I wouldn’t have if I’d had a choice but I am running on borrowed time as it is.
I try to make myself all but invisible.
As it turns out, that’s a skill I won’t need much longer. The homeless are automatically invisible, as I am about to find out.
