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CHAPTER 1
First they won the clay. They knew how to choose it. They knew clay with high iron content produced a deep red brick after firing. They dug in the autumn, exposing the soil to the wind and ice and snow from the rivers, from the Atlantic, from the sky. They knew the freeze-thaw cycle made everything softer in the spring, that it rid the soil of oxides: science not yet in books but known to the immigrants who came here. They knew how to get rid of impurities that ruined bricks. They knew the steps.
Pennsylvanians. These are my people who built the brick buildings. These are my people who won the wars. Stone-hard people. The English, Welshmen, Irish, Dutch, Swedes, and Scots. Quakers and Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Calvinists, Adventists, Abolitionists. Slaves. We are ended here in the Mid-Atlantic, all of us. We are not brash New York or briny New England; not aristocratic Virginian or separatist, agrarian South; not toothless, semi-animal, frontier Western. We are the people who finally ejected the British. We burned the South when the rest were too tired or too dead to finish the Civil War. We have been here. Someone has stood by the cradle. We are underrated by history and underestimated by the rest. Come see the Bell, motherfuckers.
We are a cold weather–ready people, white skinned, hard-hardened in that deep pale white. The blacks are blacksmith black, anvil black. We were mule skinners, tanners, smiths and forge men, fishmongers, horsemen and cavalrymen, union men and masons. We are the bankers of the Revolution. We are the best lawyers there are. The middle soldier raising the flag on Iwo Jima was Pennsylvanian. We came back from the wars. We built houses and churches and courthouses and schools from red brick and stone. We drank ale and whiskey and followed priests and bishops and ministers. We are the people of John Reynolds and Thaddeus Stevens and Winfield Scott Hancock. Come see the Bell.
And we are the hard redbrick people of the ever-since. We are the southernmost north but we are the North, don't forget it. Long nasal oo's. "Are you hooome?" Friday is Fridey. Tuesday is Tuesdey. We drink wudder and touch our farheads. You might not think so, but we call people niggers, we call people harps, we call them kikes and wops. Pick a category. You want the writers, take Jeffers, take Updike. You want the ballplayers, take Honus Wagner and Red Grange. You want quarterbacks named Joe, take Namath and Montana. Try Wilt Chamberlain and Arnold Palmer. You want the music, the real music, the too-true-to-face-it music, you got Coltrane. In this red brick we are the song. Come see the Bell.
CHAPTER 2
If you really get down to it, the Indians were first. The Lenape — the Sankhikan, Atsayanck, Remkoke, Armewarmex, Mantaes, Naranticonck, Little Siconese, Sewapolis, the Big Siconese — lost to the Susquehannocks in 1634 and took south. They had it first, before William Penn got here.
I'll take Penn over any of the others. He's my founding father. The P encyclopedia had a long entry on him. He was a serious guy, religious and rebellious — rebellious because he was religious. He said:
I had no relations that inclined to so solitary and spiritual way; I was a child alone. A child given to musing, occasionally feeling the divine presence.
Such were his beliefs that he left his cushy life to become a Quaker, to join the Religious Society of Friends, haters of symbols, silent meditators. They were persecuted throughout England. As a young man, Penn was jailed in the Tower of London, where he wrote a pamphlet called No Cross, No Crown, which had sixty-eight citations from memory. Sixty-eight fucking citations from memory. C'mon. Hum babe.
Pennsylvania was actually named after his father, the old admiral, William Penn Sr., who helped the Stuarts retake the throne after Oliver Cromwell. To repay the old man, William Penn Jr. was deeded everything between New York and Baltimore. All he had to do was give the king three beaver pelts a year and 20 percent of any gold. Twenty percent of all the gold in Pennsylvania for anything is a good deal.
The city, Philadelphia, was his great idea. Having had the shit kicked out of him for being a Quaker, he wanted a place for tolerance.
A greene country town, which will never be burnt, and always wholesome.
He chose twelve hundred acres between the Delaware and the Schuylkill and planned a rectangular city with four main streets, four quadrants. He planted trees. He wrote The Frame of Government, which predated the Declaration and Constitution. The only white man of the time who tried to be square, he made a treaty with Chief Tamanend of the Lenape. The Quaker schools were open to everybody.
He was obsessed with the Great London Fire of 1666. He wanted people to build on the middle of their lots, so fire couldn't spread. By the 1680s, Philadelphia was a hopping place with shops and merchants and newspapers and all forms of religion. Redbrick buildings were everywhere. Three hundred and thirty years ago it was fully formed. Agreene country town, which will never be burnt, and always wholesome.
Sad part is that is all gone. Reality is stark. The city might have been an invention, but now it's soft pretzel wrappers flying in the wind. It's broken glass, cigarette butts, cummed-in rubbers, and other shit on the ground. I don't think it's a greene country town. I think it's detritus; I think it's what's left after the show.
CHAPTER 3
This is my Philadelphia story.
When people ask me how I got so smart, I say television. When people ask me what I love, I say music. When people ask me what made me so successful, I say basketball. When people ask me my plans for the future, I say getting out of here.
I came close to being a real guy. I had chances, good breaks gone to waste. I know I fucked up — with Dottie, with Janice, with Tia. When I was young, I had promise and hope. I thought my makeshift family, my friends, and basketball were God's way of giving me things — sparks, extra bread crumbs — to make up for having dead folks. Almost as though he was saying, "Jump in. It all happens for a reason." But all that was simply a story I was telling myself. Those things were only slots to drop through on the way to being alone.
I might be scattered, but that's okay. At least I'm not one of those guys who just talk about themselves, hyperarticulate, so clever, writing footnotes about their own names. They look at prisms through prisms, reinventors reinventing. Really now, is that all the fuck you can do, talk about yourself, preening in front of the irony?
I'd like to see you tell me your story without lies.
I will tell you what I can, but I will tell you this: you with your thirties story you had the Depression; your forties story you had the War; your fifties story you had the Russians; your sixties story you had Vietnam. You had the wars and Ozzie Nelson and the Generation Gap, blah blah. But it was all clear-cut. You never had to pick over dead bodies through empty popcorn boxes covered with Afros and leg warmers and Jane Fonda commercialized. You never had to wander with masked wrestlers through the postmodern bullshit of this Postmodern to find a new song.
I remember every face of every man who put me here.
I am Joe, sometimes Joey. Ordinary Joe. Average Joe. Joe Blow. Joseph Michael Knight Jr. Joe Knight. All night long. All Knight Long. All Knight.
I am a great player. The music of basketball was part of me, like my skin, like my big jimmy. I won hundreds of trophies, one-on-one tourneys, summer league championships, all-star medals, and foul-shooting contests. I made all-tournament, all-league, all small-college, all you-name-it teams. I played every day, like water, like blood, even when I didn't want to, like piano scales, like tooth fillings, until I fouled out of my last game in my last year of college. Even when I didn't start, even when I wasn't the star, there was never a doubt of my special ability to play the game. You want me on your squad. I am a gym rat. I will school you. Game, faggots. I'll light you up all night long. All Knight Long.
My favorite moment in all of basketball is when a guy goes to the foul line after time has run out. The refs clear the players off the court and the shooter gets the ball. This happened to me twice. First time, I was ten, playing for Optimists against Rotary at the Penwood Boys Club Championship game. We were losing 49-48 and I got fouled as the buzzer went off. Two shots. The paint of the square above the rim was faded red, worn from thousands of bank shots, the nylon net gone gray.
I made them both. I could have missed them both. Or made one. The point is I made them. Despite what people say, you know if you are going to make it or not. It is a discovery, not a skill. I didn't know it before that day, before I got fouled by a guy on a twelve-and-under team wearing jerseys bought by the Optimist Club of Penwood, guys who drank at Len's Place on 352 and had spaghetti dinners for the Heart Association. But from there on I knew.
There are windmills at the Dairy Queen on Barren Road and some in Dutch Country. You want to talk about the worst vacation possible, consider hauling a pack of brats around Pennsylvania Dutch Country. I had to go there three times when I was a kid and I honestly don't know what the fuck people think is tourist-worthy about that place. Not the Amish. They want to be left alone. It's like going to a zoo. Or a make-believe world. There they are with their own rules, living in a magic universe.
And even with all the time that's gone by, I still go to the Dairy Queen on Barren Road where my father crashed. Still think there is something about a Dairy Queen that is fantastic, like an illusion, like the windmill that is part of the sign. Dottie took me there and we sat under that windmill. She got me a Dilly Bar with nuts. She ordered a hot fudge sundae. I've relived it a hundred times — getting mad about that. It was the only time I was shitty to her. I said, "You shouldn't have that. You don't need that, look at you." When I pulled it away, she tried to shovel the black-and-white mixture really fast into her mouth, three more quick spoonfuls. She loved the fudgy topping.
All she said was, "I wish you would be sweet." Dottie never said anything else but that when it came to me. She saw I had a black streak like the shoe polish in my father's hair. Truth is by the time I came around, I'm not so sure old players recognized young players through some eternal bond, basking in the light of the passed torch. That meant little to us, the sad and plain enduring beauty of connection. I hate to say it, but that's too hopeful. It is old-fashioned and it imbues the whole thing with too much meaning. Life as I see it is more dire, less romantic. Like our asses are flat-out hanging over a cliff, over the abyss, out in the air, with us here wondering what, if anything, we can do about it.
CHAPTER 4
My aunt Dottie loved to talk about the first time she took me to church. We walked into St. Ignatius and the priest said, "Christ is the one." I was a really little kid. She'd promised we were coming to see Jesus. I was excited. The priest was at the altar in the modern building, part of the new church, the New Word. There was a tapestry of Him on the cross.
Before she could sit me down, I said, "Where's Jesus?" I kept saying it to her, "Where is he? Where's Jesus?"
"He's up there."
"It's a rug."
It became uncomfortable and after she took Communion, we left.
That's the thing: I've always felt that I was the one. That it's on me.
Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you, you must travel it for yourself.
Might be the circumstances or it might just be me, but I don't think so. I have not met many people who didn't think they were the one. Dottie, maybe, and the ladies like her, the selfless ones who raise children and believe in God, believe that Christ is the one. But if you ask me, you walk the last mile alone.
You must travel it for yourself.
Dottie met Uncle Artie on the train. Her face was a perfect circle with big eyes. She wore a Santa hat to work at the post office at Christmastime. She was ten years older than my father, Joseph M. Knight Sr. Their parents died of cancer within a year of each other when he was in grade school and their two brothers were killed in World War II. With everyone else dead, she took care of him. He got big and wild but they were connected at the heart; Dottie defended him to the bone. She was Irish like that, loyal and forgiving, especially of men. And she did not gloss over the fact that I had dead parents, nor did she pretend that she was my mother. That absence was not hidden, the hole in that place lived with us in plain and blatant truth.
Artie was a conductor for Amtrak, running the D.C.-to-Boston route for twenty-five years. Dottie took the big train into town because it passed through Penwood, where she boarded every morning after driving from Stuckley. Artie was quite a bit older. When they met, he lived in Baltimore with a wife and kids. He left it all to be with her.
She was five foot two, pudgy, with peach-colored hair about the consistency of cotton candy, the result of once-a-month trips to Betty's Beauty Salon on Pennell Road, where she sat under a hair dryer for twenty-five minutes and read Redbook. Her holiday verve did not end with Santa hats. She wore a sweatshirt with a turkey at Thanksgiving and she got mad if you didn't wear green on St. Patrick's Day. She was way into the Bicentennial in 1976. The worst thing she bought was a macramé red-white-and-blue Uncle Sam hat. She loved Reese's Peanut Butter Cups so much that she sneaked them when no one was looking. When she made me chocolate milk with Hershey's syrup, she made herself a glass, too.
Dottie graduated from Sacred Heart Catholic School for Girls in Nether Providence in 1948 with twelve years of perfect attendance. Then she went to work for Bell Telephone in Philadelphia and didn't miss a day for another ten. Artie used to say, "She's steady, that's for sure." He was already pretty old when they took me. He had to go to the old folks' home, Woodlawn Acres, when I was ten. But he was around long enough for me to see that he loved Dottie. I haven't really seen anything like the two of them since.
We lived on Mount Road, which was a quarter-mile strip at the top of a hill in Stuckley. At the other end was St. Ignatius, looking out over the town. Stuckley Road was perpendicular to Mount Road, running from St. Ignatius down the big hill, breaking into three smaller streets, each of which led to an industrial facility, each of which had been a textile mill 150 years before. The mills were gone, but industrial plants remained: two container manufacturers, CRI and Stuckley Container Products; and the headquarters of Karl Buttmann Handyman Services and Lawn Mowing.
Rusty cars on cinder blocks, redbrick and cracked, broken concrete steps and landings made Stuckley. Dirt and stone mixed in the yards of houses: black-brown soil with green weeds growing through cement and rocky hillsides with stones and blue glass shards from old-time medicine bottles. The winters were cold and full of trash fires. If you were a Stuckley kid, you walked. Down roads and through back porches and under clotheslines; through gravel parking lots and churchyards; in rain and snow and in the summertime, when it was so hot and bonkers-humid you wished to God for the end-of-the-day thunderstorm that brought steam off the roads and lightning so loud it scared the dogs inside.
Our house had two bedrooms, a living room with a sofa and two chairs, a kitchen the size of a jail cell, and a bathroom with a toilet, sink, and stand-up shower. It breaks my heart these days to think Dottie never got to take a bath. There was one special thing about the place, an extra space off the side of the living room. She called it "the parlor." When she wanted me to sit and talk with her, she put on the English accent and said, "Meet me in the parlor for tea," trying to make me laugh. Laughing because she was so silly when I was little and laughing because I loved her when I was not little anymore. If I whined, she said, "Heavens be ..."
Dottie and Artie looked out for each other. Artie was an Eschatologist and to keep him happy Dottie pretended to be one, too. But she sneaked off to Mass once a month and then all the time after he went to pieces. It was pretty bizarre of him to take up Eschatology. The things I read said it was a break-off from Christian Science, a system of beliefs developed by William Walter, a store clerk from Aurora, Illinois. It's somewhere between Old-Time Religion and the New Age. They say it deals with Last Days, which sounds like federal-agents-are-coming-to-the-compound kind of shit. They also say it involves telekinesis, which sounds like the Amazing Kreskin. Artie didn't really seem as crazy as all that. He was nice to me. He did not pretend to be my father, and that hole, too, lived in plain and blatant truth. He told me things to remember and he played me music.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "All Joe Knight"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Kevin Morris.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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