Hopeful Things

The guy at Krick’s Tavern holds up a middle finger in front of the big screen TV so his finger casts a shadow over everyone, especially the Pittsburgh Pirates who, for once, are winning. The miracle of that. From outside, Krick’s looks like the kind of place that would play Fox News on a loop and new-country songs about kick-ass trucks on the jukebox. But inside Krick’s, Fox News seems as distant as Mars.

Here there’s only sports on the TV and 80s hair metal on the jukebox. This is Trafford, Pennsylvania, a tiny slice of Northern Appalachia, no elegy necessary. Trafford, Pennsylvania--the last stop in Pittsburgh’s Electric Valley, a town founded by George Westinghouse, who said “If someday they say of me that in my work I have contributed something to the welfare and happiness of my fellow man, I shall be satisfied.” And tonight, Krick’s, a dive bar in a dive town, my divetown hometown, my rust-belt country, is packed.

Even though I live here, it’s my first time at Krick’s. I can be judge-y. Outside, Krick’s, like most bars in town, looks rough—jagged fire escape, rickety screen door, glass block windows, a sign that says, “Smokers Welcome.” It’s not a place I’d usually go. I’ve grown fancy and soft, all wine-bar-ish and artisanal, despite my Trafford working-class roots. I lived in New York City, and some days I still carry the arrogance of that like a designer purse or the way New Yorkers say “the city” and mean there’s only one worth mentioning.

“Homing pigeons,” a man in a fancy New York bar called Pittsburghers like me. “You move away, you move back. You can’t help it.”

My father was dying. So I came back and, when it may have been possible for me to leave again, I stayed for reasons too many to count. Now a decorative license plate shaped like the state of Pennsylvania graces the bumper of my used Chevy Trax. It reads: Home. There’s a star where Pittsburgh would be.

The plate is one way to recognize my car in the landscape of nearly identical cars in the Wal-Mart parking lot. My husband bought the license plate. He has a tattoo to match, though instead of a star to mark Pittsburgh, there’s a blue-and-green globe, the world he loves carved into his skin. Today, regarding Krick’s Tavern, it’s my husband who wants to be here. “It’s close to home and cheap,” he said. “No drinking and driving.”

My husband got a DUI when he was in his twenties, coming home from a party. He worked as a trucker back then and the DUI made a mess of his life. Now my husband, 30 years later, is more responsible. He also loves dive bars. On one of our first dates, he took me to another dive bar, this one in his own hometown a few miles from Trafford, off Route 30. The Irwin Hotel, from the outside, looked run-down and scary, but inside the regulars were beautiful. A man who looked like Sam Elliott wore a leather hat and boots. The Irwin Hotel’s Sam Elliott was in love with a woman who was trying to make him jealous by flirting with another regular, not nearly as handsome. Sam Elliott leaned back in his bar stool and said many things that night about love and violence and heartbreak. I wish I remembered now. What I know: The Irwin Hotel bartender was sweet. Sam Elliott, drunk, stoned, said gentle true things and though I already loved my husband, I loved him more for taking me there.

“Date night?” I said about going to Krick’s. “Okay, whatever. My hangover’s on you.”

When I get angry about the lies people like J.D. Vance spread about Appalachia, or about the assumptions strangers make about the place I’m from and about the people who live here, I should start with myself. I’m a writer and, dear god, a college professor. I’m conflicted about my home in the way the great playwright August Wilson was conflicted about Pittsburgh.

“This is my home and at times I find it tremendously exciting,” Wilson said in a 1994 interview. “Other times I want to catch the first thing out that has wheels.”

My husband, that lover of dive bars, is a writer and a college professor too. I’ve taught for 25 years. He’s been a professor for two. Our journeys to being professors were wildly different but we’ve both worked many other jobs. Me: waitress, caterer, flight attendant, journalist, PR hack. Him: truck driver, slaughterhouse worker, social worker, burger-flipper. There are others, too many to mention.

In one of his novels, my husband wrote: “In Pittsburgh, you are tough or you are not….You start hearts or allow hearts to wind down like old clocks. I almost never think about what Pittsburgh means because I know it.” See why I love him?

Krick’s is not anything I imagined it would be. The bar is polished wood and brass. The spotless bathrooms smell like fresh-cut flowers. Happy Hour starts at 7 p.m. and runs to 11. Here, no matter what politicians or pundits or the media say, no one talks politics, not even three months out from an election that has torn the rest of this country apart, not even the guy with the middle finger raised like a flag, who is pissed and pissed off and who’s probably been drinking since noon. The bartender—long glossy black hair, dark eyeliner, silver press-on nails—says, “Now Jerry, be nice,” and keeps everyone else’s drinks coming. She moves like a dancer in a boozy ballet. She moves like a crow with angel wings.

Happy Hour at Krick’s means $2.50 domestics. It means $7 Sgambetti’s pizza, pretty much a dough shell slathered in tomato sauce but, everyone at the bar agrees, still tasty. You almost have to be from here to pronounce Sgambetti’s. You almost have to be from here to know what hope looks like: Krick’s new deck seating with fancy umbrella tables; Krick’s new cocktail menu; the way an older woman at the other end of Krick’s bar, her white hair done in dollops of whipped-cream curls, raises one of those new cocktails, a Mojito I think, fresh mint even, and pinkie-up wishes Jerry at the other end a safe trip home. She calls him sweetheart. “You be careful, sweetheart,” she says, “Tomorrow is another day.”

What hope is: tomorrow, another day.

You almost have to be from here to see Jerry and not a Yinzer, a hillbilly, a jagoff. You almost have to be from here to see the complexity of the man who smoothes his raggedy beard twice, then pats his pockets for his keys and wallet and cigarettes, before he turns to all of us at the bar and raises his finger again and says, “Screw you and you and you,” that middle finger like a gun but almost sweet-like, maybe, like this is Jerry’s way of saying “Have a good night!” and also “Tell your mama I said hi!”

Who knows what’s in anyone’s heart? Jesus or internet psychics, maybe, but politicians? Never.

Days from now a kid not old enough to drink here, from a town not far from here, will take a real gun, an AK, a gun politicians rallied for, to a political rally. People will die. None of them will be politicians, none of them will be regulars on Fox News or CNN or NPR. The dead will include a father who’d also been a firefighter. The dead will include the kid who wished death for others and who instead will lie dead on a rooftop. Two other people will be seriously injured. Others—too many to count—will carry the trauma of that day like stones in their throats.

On the news, bystanders will lift beers and cartons of Turner’s Tea and stand around looking at the kid’s dead body like they’re watching a baseball game or waiting for some terrible movie to play out. There will be videos: the kid getting his high school diploma and smiling to “some applause,” The New York Times will report. Imagine the kids’ parents. Imagine the family of the dead father who shielded his daughter and wife from bullets meant for someone else.

“Fight, fight,” the politician will say, and pump his fist and invoke God.

“Chickens coming home to roost,” Malcolm X said about violence before he was killed.

“Violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul,” Robert Kennedy said before he was killed.

But for now, let’s push aside the news and soundbites and ominous quotes. Let’s pull the camera back. Let’s focus on Jerry, his stupid middle finger rising up like Stonehenge. The way his finger stands like a prophet, proselytizing--what a word. Jerry’s finger, standing in judgment of us all. And then the screen door of Krick’s Tavern slams shut and Jerry’s gone. No one says a word. No one says, “Screw you Jerry,” or even “Good riddance.” The beautiful bartender goes on dancing. No one at the bar has to wait for a drink and everyone seems happy. The miracle of that.

The Irwin Hotel? It burned down years ago. A man who lived in the rooming house tried to make breakfast—fried eggs on a hot plate. The hot plate caught fire. Where the Irwin Hotel used to stand there’s a fancy dining car. It’s supposed to look historic, but it’s new I think, shining silver and red. The dining car hosts receptions after shows at the theater next door. The theater is called The Lamp. On the roof of the building, there’s a huge sculpture, Aladdin’s Lamp, gold and glistening.

If you had three wishes for this world, what would you wish? Take a minute. “I’ve got to stop pretending I’m something I’m not,” the Genie in Aladdin said. “Oh to be free!” the Genie said that, too, his one wish. In between jukebox songs at Krick’s, I eavesdrop on a couple in matching yellow work shirts. “I watched my mother die, then I watched my father die,” the man says, punctuating his words with a cigarette. “Ain’t nothing can faze me after that.”

I watched my mother die. I watched my father die. My father’s last words: “Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’ll be around.” Sometimes I see my father everywhere—an old man shuffling in a crosswalk, a young man with his hands clenched on a steering wheel, the man with the cigarette who repeats himself the way my father repeated himself because he believed no one ever heard him.

“Ain’t nothing can faze me,” the man says, “nothing after that,” and stubs out his cigarette on the edge of the bar, then wipes the ash away with his thumb. On Florida vacations, my father would stock up on cigarettes, Pall Malls, Lucky Strikes, Kools, my mother’s brand. He’d buy carton after carton and load up the trunk of his Chrysler. He’d freeze the cartons and would have enough cigarettes to last him a year. These days, people in my hometown go to jail for taking cigarettes across state lines or selling them from the trunks of their cars. These days, most things people like my father and the people in Krick’s Tavern might do to get by or get ahead would get them in trouble. “I’ll show all those cockroaches,” my father would say about his bosses at the mill. “I’m a survivor.” “I’m lucky,” my father would say. Then he’d call his bookie or go to Atlantic City and take the loss.

My father died. Lung cancer—the mills, the cigarettes, the losses, the sadness, the drinking, the giving up drinking, who knows. “What caused it?” people ask when something terrible happens, as if living and dying were equations to be solved. I’ve always been hopeless at math.

At Krick’s Tavern, there’s an old cigarette machine, the kind where you have to pull a lever to get the pack you want. The bartender keeps serving and the regulars keep drinking. The Pirates are winning for now. The Trivia Quiz over the bar asks, “How many colors are in a rainbow?” The answer: Seven. Seven, the number of wisdom and intuition. Seven, the bridge between the mortal realm and higher places. Seven, the angel number, slot-machine lucky, God’s magic digit. The cigarettes in the old-school machine cost $14 a pack. Seven times two. Even I can do that math. Who’s lucky enough to afford that? Elon Musk maybe. Mars dollars. $14 a pack is more than the minimum wage. $14 a pack may save lives because many people who like to smoke can’t afford to buy the things that will help kill them, and the people who can afford to smoke mostly vape instead.

“As more affluent people gave up the habit, the war on smoking, which was always presented as an entirely benevolent effort, began to look like a war on the working class,” Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, explained. “You can’t smoke indoors anymore. There goes the working-class bar. Where are these working-class bars now?”

Barbara Ehrenreich’s been dead over a year now. If she were alive, I’d like to tell her “Trafford, Pennsylvania” and buy her a beer at Krick’s, where right this minute the lovely bartender is bringing the lady with the whipped-cream hair another cocktail. The lady blows a kiss, first to the bartender, and then to the ceiling like she’s making a wish that will fall down like confetti and bless all of us here. The man in the yellow shirt lights another cigarette and offers one to the woman next to him.

The final score of the Pirates game comes across the screen--Pirates 4, White Sox 1, and everyone agrees this is good news, whether they care about baseball or not. “Last call,” the bartender at Krick’s says, “Drink up!” but I think she’s joking because it’s still early. There’s still time.

Lori Jakiela has been called "the queen of the wise one-liner" by no less than Stewart O'Nan. She is an award-winning memoirist and poet whose seven books include Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker and Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth Maybe. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Brevity, and others. Read more at lorijakiela.net.

My Home Town ::: Paul Anka

Ode to A Pittsburgh ::: Loudon Wainwright

The Old Bar ::: Alex McMurray

Happy Hour ::: Ornette Coleman

Last Call ::: The Altons

Down to My Last Cigarette ::: k.d. lang

Seven and Seven Is ::: Love

This Must Be the Place ::: Talking Heads