Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [2]
How, after all, would you expect normal Philadelphians to operate when this way lies the house where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration, and that way offers some smelly street bum doing his business on the sidewalk? We negotiate our lives between Philadelphia Blanc— the city with more higher-ed institutions than any in the country, a sterling concentration of medical and pharmaceutical professionals, an arts tradition that boasts the nation’s oldest theater, an exhaltation of delicate virtuosi at the Curtis Institute of Music—and Philadelphia Noir. In the latter town, a Starbucks barista gets beaten to death on the subway for sport, a lawyer gets gunned down at his regular ATM machine, and two Chinatown officials bite the dust when a maniacal speeder barrels into them by the Immigration Services building.
You can get cut or smashed at any moment in Philadelphia—see Duane Swierczynski’s taut “Lonergan’s Girl,” or Aimee LaBrie’s caustic “Princess.” It’s a city where pretend glamour falls apart fast, as in Jim Zervanos’s sly “Your Brother, Who Loves You,” a city where the frustrated tumble into bad choices like Laura Spagnoli’s Beth in “A Cut Above.” (Readers who follow Philadelphia’s tabloid tales will recognize familiar elements in Zervanos’s slumming TV news anchor, and Spagnoli’s credit-card swiping couple.)
Violent crimes in Philadelphia often prove matter-of-fact and of the numbskull sort—the kind of feats by fabulous losers that the narrator of Diane Ayres’s wry “Seeing Nothing” deals with, that Dennis Tafoya’s Jimmy Kelly profits from in “Above the Imperial.” The saddest kind resemble a type of destiny, one captured in the desperation of Solomon Jones’s breakneck “Scarred,” Asali Solomon’s subtle “Secret Pool,” and Keith Gilman’s tragic “Devil’s Pocket,” where good deeds do not go unpunished. It doesn’t matter, in Philadelphia, whether you’re Irish or Italian, Jewish or Black, Latino or Polish, Korean or a hundred other things. It won’t help if you think salvation lies in escape to the privileges of the Main Line, as does Meredith Anthony’s wannabe suburbanite in “Fishtown Odyssey,” or that safety can be preserved in the quiet deceptions of a bordertown like Narberth, as the shifty psychiatrist of Halimah Marcus’s “Swimming” seems to believe. Shit can happen at any time.
Per capita, Philadelphia matches any city, weirdo incident for weirdo incident. But we trump everyone on history. In this volume you’ll see that a few top writers who know the city best—the kind who can tell you that Schuylkill means “hidden stream,” and that “Mummers” are “people with masks” (okay, with sequins and feathers too)—wind up decades or hundreds of years in the past when asked to channel their inner noirista. Cordelia Frances Biddle’s cocky stroller in “Reality,” Cary Holladay’s eerie bartender in “Ghost Walk,” the neutral narrator of Gerald Kolpan’s “The Ratcatcher”—all experience the Philadelphia truism that if you think you’ve got local history under control, you don’t.
With apologies, you won’t find the obvious here. Having served as literary critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty-five years, and written more stories on “Philadelphia literature” than anyone living, I thank my contributors for their very limited references to hoagies, cheesesteaks, water ice, soft pretzels, and waitresses who call their customers “Hon.” There’s no glimpse of Claes Oldenburg’s Clothespin or the rowers by the Waterworks, and only one passing mention of Rocky. Truth is, we don’t talk much about those things. We just live our lives.
Carlin Romano
Philadelphia, PA
August 2010
PART I
CITY OF BURSTS
PRINCESS
BY AIMEE LABRIE
South Philadelphia
It’s Saturday at three a.m. and I’m coming off a