Avenue X
Autobiography of the coolest street in the world
The first time I came to Avenue X I can’t remember exactly, but was probably my freshman year at Carnegie Mellon University. I am basing this estimation primarily on the fact that I was with a guy I had some kind of amorphous friendship thing with, which at the time I thought was strictly unromantic, but in hindsight I wonder, because our friendship involved him sending me multiple CD mixes—yes, through the mail, if you can imagine such a thing—three over the course of summer break, and one of them included Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You.”
And nobody who has ever put “Fade Into You” on a mix did so ignorantly.
We came to a show at Pittsburgh Filmmakers. I think it was an art opening, because I remember the weirdness of trying to figure out what to say about the art, which was bad/conceptual, but the main thing was that Luna, which was essentially the ashes of Galaxie 500, was playing a show as well.
If you have never been rural, I don’t know if you can understand the intense, melancholy yearning I felt toward, I don’t know, “city artist life.” It’s all one very un-subtle collage of images from Andy Warhol’s Factory and black-and-white pictures of Patti Smith. I had grown up with the distinct feeling that real life didn’t happen in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where fairly often you’ll see a sign in the roadside grass that says PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD. It was easy in the ‘90s to get that impression, that the things that mattered happened somewhere else. Before the internet, cities were, among other things, a technology for putting you in proximity to culture. In high school, my best friend Scott and I fantasized about moving to New York City, because that was essentially the same thing as announcing your ambition to be an artist.
People elsewhere treat Pittsburgh as an essentially suburban non-city, but to me, when I was 18 and had never lived somewhere with crosswalks, it was the real deal. My main experiences with it previously had been field trips to the Carnegie Museum, the Warhol, and my godparents’ loft apartment, so it felt like a city of mostly art. And, as if to hint at the truth of this, here I was in a neighborhood of mostly warehouses and picturesque decay, standing on a glistening slab of pavement and hypnotized by Dean Wareham’s white guitar. My dream was real, and I was in it, and Avenue X was the way I had gotten there.
The second time I came to Avenue X, it was for an event capping the monthlong poetry tour I had just been on with five of my best friends. The idea was we would give readings and workshops all across the Midwest and East Coast, and film ourselves on the trip, later to edit this footage into a documentary. Our thesis was that poetry isn’t some precious thing but a weird situational mode and means of making jokes in collaboration with the world (I still stand by this), and we would demonstrate it by showing poetry in situ everywhere. It had taken exhaustive fundraising, but we did it. We hired a cinematographer, and we did something like 60 events in 30 days.
Our reading at Avenue X was supposed to be the triumphant close of this brave project; in fact, we were at the same venue where I had seen Luna ten years before. If I had been able to see through my own misery, which was so intense as to be nearly opaque at that point, I would have marveled that I was there in the world of my city artist dream life, celebrating the completion of an ambitious project.
But I didn’t think about it because, among other things, the tour had made clear that my drinking was not the casual, fun, party-girl thing I was imagining it to be. Only three of the six of us knew how to drive, and since we had to drive two vehicles caravan-style to get everywhere—and we were going somewhere new every single day—I had to drive a great deal, and when I had to drive, I couldn’t drink. It was the first time I had subjected my schedule to the needs of other people in years, and in that time, my capacity to take a night off from drinking had disappeared. Not in like, the literal sense: I could go a night without drinking, but I would get the shakes if I didn’t. And the shakes were nothing compared with the suicidal thoughts that went along with them.
Never mind that being filmed constantly is a buffet for the ego, or it was for mine, anyway, and I was shattered with anxiety about how I was coming off, certain that everybody secretly hated me, etc. etc. etc. And the constant churn of group dynamics—who gets talked over, who gets to decide where lunch happens, who sleeps on the floor vs. the couch, and that moment of hesitation when a group splits into two vehicles, trying to figure out which of the options is cooler and more appealing. All of that without being able to get totally smashed alone, which had become my one and only coping strategy, had left me a complete husk by the end of the tour. All I wanted to do was slam a door behind me and crush a box of wine. But I had to get through this one last event. And it was unlike the others because my parents were there, and our friends and teachers.
People think alcoholics are weak-willed people, but I’m telling you, I could have walked through fire to get a drink.
I don’t remember that much of the night, although I think it was genuinely a good one. Or I made it seem that way. I was fantastic at keeping up the exterior of an entertaining, engaged writer on nights like that. I was fantastic at it because I was afraid that if I failed to be so, somebody would suggest that my drinking was problematic and attempt to take it away from me.
But the consequence of pushing so much energy outward, into the superficial details, is that it evicts you from your inner life. There is nobody in there to pay attention, remember things. Anxiety demands that you keep all your awareness at the perimeter. Needless to say, it is impossible to enjoy anything.
The third time I came to Avenue X, I was on my way to pick up J for our second date. We were going to go shopping at the best thrift store in the Pittsburgh area (Community Thrift on Babcock Blvd.), then to lunch. We would end up making an unplanned detour through the one pristine neighborhood of Midcentury houses in the north suburbs, a secret which J knew about and let me in on.
I don’t think I had paid much attention to the address on the way there because I was too full of fun, jittery, second-date nerves, but once I turned onto the street I realized where I was. Of course he lives on Avenue X, I thought to myself, because everything about J had seemed uncanny, perfect, familiar, and we had had the best first date in the history of the world, and some kind of bizarre synchronicity had echoed around us when we were together. Synchronicities are fragile things when you share them with other people. They feel important because they touch the edges of your thoughts, but to anyone else, there’s nothing magical about hearing a certain song on the radio at a certain time.
But of course you might be able to understand, by now, why Avenue X itself would feel like a hint of something, a symbol or signal.
I pulled up to his house and parked behind his truck—J’s license plate, of course, has my lucky number on it. I was wearing obscenely flashy rhinestone-covered slides and an Ivy Street Block Party T-shirt which had a huge hole in the back, through which you could see my bra. It was the most beautiful house I had ever seen, and certainly which I had ever been inside, because J had been fixing it up methodically for years and putting in the kind of thoughtful, careful details which make a room feel almost like a space ship.
In my Tinder profile I had said that I liked money, pop music, and interesting stairs. People always asked me about the interesting stairs—what did I mean by that? I didn’t know; I didn’t believe in thinking too hard about anything in a Tinder bio. It just came to mind, so I wrote it down. J said he had a surprise for me: the stairs that descending into his living room were scalloped, modeled on ship stairs. Pretty interesting, no?
And now I live on Avenue X. It is still half warehouses, half woods, and half skinny rowhouses. I think some people would call it an ugly street. There are high-turnover apartment buildings, and you regularly see a whole person’s life out on the curb on trash day. There are all the small industrial concerns with pebbled '70s facades and junked vehicles. But I love it, and I still think it’s the coolest street in Pittsburgh. Maybe the world. I’m amazed, when I remember to be amazed. Falling in love is like: suddenly you get the joke. And it’s not a joke. Life is lucky, and everything makes sense.
I get the feeling that you’re not supposed to feel this way forever. People are big on reminding you: You won’t feel this way forever. Everything special loses its shine eventually. But what if it doesn't? Sometimes I suspect that idea, like so many realistic ideas, is actually a cop-out disguised as a kindness. Fine, I guess. Not my business. But I’m going to stay amazed.