The Tire Garage
I grew up in a poor working class neighborhood on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. My mother raised my two brothers and I on her own after she left my father who was suffering from severe PTSD after fighting in the Vietnam War. Parenting three boys isn’t an easy job for two parents, but at least the often stressful work of raising a family and paying the bills can be shared.
But my mother had to do it alone. And my brothers and I were hellions. There wasn’t a day that one of us wasn’t skipping school, vandalizing something, shoplifting, throwing ice balls (hardpacked snowballs left out over night) at police cars, smoking pot or drinking and the list goes on. One day I stole a handgun from a local hardware store and the police apprehended me. Fortunately I avoided getting shot. And not only did my mother have to deal with our behavior she also had to put food on the table, pay the rent, buy us clothes, pay for countless trips to emergency rooms and the list goes on ad nauseum.
My mother had me when she was seventeen. She was expelled from high school for being pregnant. Her parents kicked her out of the house because she refused to have a dangerous, illegal abortion. Abortions weren’t legal in Pennsylvania at the time and women often died from botched procedures. So she spent the first few months of her pregnancy living on the streets. When it came time for her to get a job to raise three kids, well, there weren’t any good paying jobs for an already overworked single mother who was also a high school drop out. She couldn’t make enough working a full time job to raise us. Instead she took welfare and worked lots of part time jobs under the table. Most of those jobs were cleaning houses for rich people from the fundamentalist church she had started attending. She was treated poorly and often humiliated by her self-righteous Christian employers who viewed her as a fallen woman. But it’s not like she could do anything about it. And lacking adequate material and emotional support it’s not surprising she became a fundamentalist Christian herself and joined the church.
Being young boys we weren’t interested in the strict, bizarrely superstitious world of Christian fundamentalists; a world that was steeped in fear, intolerance and hatred of anyone who wasn’t their brand of Christian, white and straight. This created more tension in our cramped apartment above a thunderously-noisy, tire garage because my mother subjected us to daily bible studies, prayer sessions and we had to attend church three times a week. She also constantly played cassette tapes of her favorite televangelists giving sermons which consisted of them mostly shouting about damnation or asking for money.
This introduction has become a longer read than the poem below so I’m gonna shut my yap. I hope you enjoy the poem. It’s from my debut poetry collection Allegheny, BC published by Nightwood Editions. https://nightwoodeditions.com/products/9780889712744
The Tire Garage
When I was thirteen years old we lived
above a tire garage set in an alley.
Mornings, as my brothers and I
readied for school, below us
the racket sounded: the clank of tools
against concrete, buzzing air guns,
loosening lug nuts, and men
shouting while they worked.
Occasionally, through the linoleum-covered
floorboards, as we
ate breakfast or brushed our teeth,
a word or phrase would float
up as clear and close
as if we had spoken it.
Sometimes FUCK! or SHIT!
or JESUS CHRIST! — my mother’s
face hardening as we grinned.
Sometimes a name LARRY
or GREG or an object: CROWBAR
or GENERATOR. Sometimes a command:
GET THE FUCKIN’ PHONE! or SHUT YER YAP!
My mother would play cassettes
to mask the noise from below
with the frenzied shouts of evangelists.
But God’s apocalyptic word blaring
from my mother’s tape deck
was never as thrilling to me
as the voices sounding
their toiling speech
into the living air around us.