6-28-15—Just as there are so many ways for a man to die, there are countless methods for a place to be destroyed. Unlike a dead man, however, a wrecked city or country most often doesn’t disappear entirely, but lingers on as a shadow or zombie, or it becomes an entirely different place. Most American cities have become zombies, while the country itself is a swearing, staggering, fist-waving zombie with a gazillion cruise missiles strapped to its bloated and festering carcass.
Come up to Northeast Pennsylvania, my friend Chuck Orloski urged, and he’ll show me Centralia. Fifty-three years into its famous coal mine fire, this dead town only has three houses left from over five hundred, and out of its seven churches, only one is standing. Its current population is 6, and its last unpaid and unofficial mayor died in May of 2014 at age ninety. Centralia does have a fire station, however, and inside its municipal building, there’s a bar that opens twice a month for old-timers to drop by and reminisce. Also, Centralia’s four cemeteries still honor reservations. Forced to flee, many come back to lie down. Dead, they can reclaim their community.
Chris Perkel and Georgie Roland made a searing documentary on Centralia, The Town That Was, and in this 2007 film, one meets fascinating John Lokitis. With its population down to a dozen, Lokitis tried to maintain normalcy by mowing acres of grass, painting benches and, most absurdly and heartbreakingly, hanging candle, tree and lantern decorations from utility poles each Christmas. By refusing to let comatose Centralia die, Lokitis was hoping against hope that it could be revived, but, alas, Lokitis himself was evicted in 2009 and his memory-laden house torn down. Following Lokitis around, the camera often lingered uncomfortably on his face after he had stopped talking, as if expecting this sad yet defiant man to break down. Every now and then, Lokitis would chuckle nervously. Combating nature, fate, the damned government and time itself, Lokitis couldn’t will the Centralia story to a different outcome.
Taking a bus from Philadelphia, I met Chuck in downtown Scranton, but before he arrived, I had time to grab a very sad fish sandwich at Curry Donuts. The other patrons did cheer me up, however. Copiously inked and in daft or menacing T-shirts, they guzzled Mountain Dew, greeted each other and jived. Sitting alone, a squinting black man wore cheap plastic glasses sans nose pads and a once-orange T-shirt that declared, “YOUR MOM WAS HERE.” Pushing a stroller, possibly the shortest woman I’ve ever seen came marching in and grandly announced to the frazzled cashier, “We’re having lunch!” Visibly and audibly ecstatic that the fish sandwich with fries special was just $4.99, she ordered the dismal meal I just had. Standing outside the plate glass window, a young man in a white muscle T spat extravagantly between puffs of American Spirit. I never knew a seemingly healthy body could generate so much phlegm.
Joining Chuck and me on the trip to Centralia was Jack. Sixty-five years old, Jack has had a turbulent life and was locked up for twenty-two years altogether for dealing drugs. He has at least eleven children by eight women. When not chasing pink sweatpants, Jack works at a soup kitchen. A man who has never been in battle or jail can feel inadequate in the presence of one who has. It is as if true manhood consists of a capacity to endure endless humiliation and pain. It is this psychology that is exploited by the softest of men to convert millions of other men into draft animals and soldiers.
Running from the Scranton police, Jack settled in Fishtown in Phil-adelphia. Living within sight of a police station, in fact, Jack did honest construction work, but on cold nights, he would let a young prostitute in. In exchange for warmth and crack, she would give Jack some attention. By four in the morning, she wasn’t likely to hook up with another john anyway.
“Isn’t it funny, Jack?” I said. “These girls come in from all over, small-town New Jersey, Kansas, and they end up in Kensington, which is like the worst fuckin’ neighborhood in the world—well, the country—so they have to act all tough and shit, but they’re not.”
“They’re not.”
“They’re just kids.”
“Yeah, they’re just kids, and I knew what they wanted, you know. I’d get them a bundle of crack, two bundles. I didn’t give a shit. I was making 16, 17 an hour under the table, and my rent was only 300 a month. I didn’t care too much what they looked like. The backs of their heads looked good to me.”
Always looking, Jack was constantly pointing out notable sights to Chuck and me as we were driving. No square inch of soft flesh escaped his attention. A thickly built man, Jack has a Jesus tattoo on his barrel chest. In any fight, you’d want him on your side.
In this region, the landscape has no dramatic markers. There are no snowcapped peaks or wide rivers spanned by spectacular bridges. Everything is tranquil. For a century and a half, however, there was much drama below. To keep America heated and lighted, an army of men and boys toiled in virtual hells, with many of them blown up or crushed. From 1877 to 1940, 18,000 died in Pennsylvania coal mines.
Three miles from Centralia is Ashland, and we stopped here to examine an unusual statue. Like nearly every town in coal country, Ashland is almost entirely white. God, family and country are their holy trinity. Each man is expected to go to the war(s) of his generation. If returning in one piece, no matter how truncated, he has earned himself a stool at the VFW Legion. In such a town, flags and patriotic declarations are everywhere, and war memorials, often with a piece of artillery, torpedo or even tank, are conspicuous. Ashland’s most prominent monument does not feature soldiers, however, but a symbolic mother. A bronze rendition of the famous Whistler painting, it rests on a stone pedestal that reads, “MOTHER. A MOTHER IS THE MOST SACRED THING ALIVE.”
After his mom died in 1992, Chuck went to this statue to recite a Hail Mary. There, he thought of her last, troubling decade when she often clawed herself bloody or yanked her hair out, so much so that she had to wear a wig in public. Climbing down the monument’s steps, Chuck was suddenly accosted by an old, limping woman. “They should call that Our Lady of Memory,” she barked. To honor the mother, then, is to acknowledge our roots and history. It is to define, as best we can, who we really are.
On the edge of Ashland, we met up with Remo. An old Teamster friend of Chuck, he would show us Centralia, his hometown. White-haired and -mustached, Remo had a dog tag and pair of glasses dangling from his neck. A second pair perched on his hunting cap. Six eyes, this man had. In two cars, we drove into the “outskirts of hell,” as it’s described in a 1981 newscast. Are you ready for toxic steam to crawl up your legs and into your nose? Perhaps you will be sucked into an inferno, as happened to twelve-year-old Todd Domboski, though, unlike him, no miraculous hands will pluck you out at the last second. Into hell you will go.
Photos of Centralia posted online are often taken in winter, to emphasize its desolation, but the town I saw was mostly green trees and shrubs, and lording over this verdant expanse was a beautiful white church on a hill. Outside the fire zone, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary has not been razed. Completed in 1912, it was one of the first Ukrainian churches in the US. For its construction, each family in the congregation contributed $50, or $1,290 in today’s dollars. Remo was married here, and his dad and maternal grandparents are nestled in the soil out back. When he and his ma die, they will join them. Thanks to lung cancer, Remo only has one bronchus left. The church’s steep steps pose a unique challenge for pallbearers. Remo joked of hearing many a dead man’s head bouncing against the coffin as it’s tilted upward. Though there are no more Sunday services, weddings and funerals are still performed here. Mostly funerals.
Under a red granite slant headstone, Nicholas and Mary Bazan rest. Outliving her husband by thirty-eight years, Mary died only in April of 2015. Having moved to Highlands, North Carolina, Mary knew she would come back to a plot she and her husband had paid for decades earlier. Such fidelity to man, memory and land has become much rarer, no doubt, though we blithely call it freedom. When not blown hither and thither like husks, many of us still disown everything.
Remo showed us another cemetery, Odd Fellows. The fatal fire started right next to it in 1962. As a teenager, Remo and his buddies would get it on with their girlfriends among the tombstones. The hellish heat from below kept those young entangled limbs on the surface balmy even in winter. A mile away, snow may be falling, but here they could disrobe under the stars.
“You could walk around with no shoes on. It was like the beach.”
“Remo, didn’t you feel guilty having sex next to a bunch of crucifixes?”
I asked.
“It’s only a sacrilege if you’re sober. It’s not a sacrilege if you’re drunk.”
We all laughed. “You didn’t feel funny having sex on top of grandmas and grandpas?”
“I crossed myself before I did it.”
I, too, have a teenage cemetery (sorta) sex story. Perhaps it is an archetypical scenario. Above an astronomical mound of bones, we make love. Bones against bones, on top of bones.
Chuck and Remo worked together as dockworkers for Roadway Express for a decade, so they have plenty of shared memories. As we walked around, they brought up many frightful characters. They spoke of an intimidating ex-Marine who had the disconcerting habit of suddenly grabbing another man’s genitals or kissing him. Suspected of stealing guns from the dock, the nut squeezer even smooched an FBI agent. He finally killed himself with a.357.
A company executive would ask odd sexual questions during job interviews. “Do you like to wear your wife’s panties?” He claimed it revealed personality traits.
Irked at a newly hired supervisor from Boston, a black worker showed his sullen mamba to this annoying gent as he was talking on the phone. Traumatized, the man quit. This reminds me of a white friend’s take on a famous Robert Mapplethorpe photo, “That’s every white man’s biggest fear. To see a huge black penis from some guy in a suit.”
“Isn’t it weird, Chuck,” I said, “the guy’s reaction? I think it’s incredible he would let go of his job over that.”
“I used to see black penises all the time,” Jack added. “They were all lined up in a row. In the shower.”
Once, Remo grabbed the neck of a foreman but was not fired. Unionized and in skilled jobs, workers obviously had more leverage then. Now, you can be fired with no pretext, for there’s plenty of fresh meat waiting just outside the door.
Done with what’s left of Centralia, we all went to Dorko’s in Mount Carmel, four miles down Route 61. Remo’s wife bartends here, and this is where he goes regularly to chat and sometimes to play shuffleboard or shoot darts. Remo’s health prevents him from downing the cheap Yuengling. A while back, a reader complained that I was talking to too many folks in bars, but lady, people the world over talk to each other while drinking. It’s called socializing. At its peak, Centralia had a population of 2,761 but 27 bars, so go back to your chatroom, lady, and leave me to my fermented hop and Remo to his spring water. We’re talking.
Wine in, words out, goes a Vietnamese saying. In Dorko’s, I talked to a man who had lived in half a dozen countries during his Army stint. He spent three years in Italy, loved it, and almost married a woman there. He still thinks the USA is best, however, “We have the most freedom.”
“Ah, man, don’t you love the Italian food, people and pace of life? Italians taught me how to live, I’m not joking.” I spent two years in Certaldo, the birthplace of Boccaccio. “The health care, too, it’s a lot cheaper there. If I had the money, I’d live in Italy.”
“I still prefer it here, because we have the most freedom.”
“They have all the freedom that we have!”
“No they don’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They can’t own guns like we do.”
“That’s it?!”
“Yup.”
In the American West, you have thousands of towns quickly settled, then quickly abandoned. In China, there are grandiose urban projects that can’t find enough commercial or residential tenants. Founding Israel, Jews evicted Palestinians and razed their villages. When borders shift or political systems change, entire towns evacuate. People have always had to flee for their lives, but in modern times, the scale and range of refugee flows have become unprecedented and truly staggering. A refugee at age eleven, I slept in a tent in Guam, an Army barrack in Arkansas, then lived in Washington, Texas, Oregon, California and Virginia before graduating from high school. Such rootlessness is hardly unusual. When in Hanoi, however, I feel strangely at home, though I have never spent more than two weeks at a time there. It’s not just the accent, my mother’s, but a deeper resonance that comes from millennia of settlement by my kind. The entire Red River Delta has more gravity to me, but less so Saigon, my birthplace. Vietnamese haven’t been there as long. That said, I’m best adjusted to Philadelphia and can negotiate its maze better than any other place’s. My primary language is still English. I’m a Philadelphian.
With ghost towns all over, why should Centralia fascinate? First off, it’s extremely rare to see Americans fleeing en masse from a place, and here they’re even doing it permanently. An American refugee is still a very rare breed. Secondly, there are layers of symbolism to this catastrophe. Nourished by coal, this town has been destroyed by it. It’s a man-made ecological disaster that destroys a man’s home and all that he cherishes. Beneath a thin crust of it’s-a-wonderful-life normalcy, there’s a bubbling hell threatening to swallow everyone up, and you have to be an extremely smug American to be oblivious to this plot. Centralians also resent having their history and identity being reduced to a final disaster, and this happens, by the way, to all of history’s losers. Just think of the Amer-ican South or South Vietnam. Soon, you too will know the feeling. All Americans are Centralians.
Stories make a place. Without stories, there is no place, but without place, there can still be stories. If your stories are not organically grown, but imposed on you by those who hate everything about you, then you’re virtually dead.
After the last Centralian has come home to be buried, the town will be just its cemeteries and a section of lost road. Buckled and cracked, it’s filled with graffiti, much of it erotically inspired. Above bones, we screw, until we too become lost words. O mother of memory, forgive us for what we’ve already forgotten.