Six Hours in Philadelphia
A last-minute road trip east offers a much-needed break from Pittsburgh and the amorphous dread that's consumed me for months.
I.
Last Thursday, I took a road trip to Philadelphia. My friend and brother-in-law, Jeff, had an extra ticket to a show at the First Unitarian Church and asked if I’d like to go. I knew the venue well, at least in name. For years, touring bands had been traveling from Cleveland to Philadelphia en route to New York, altogether skipping Pittsburgh, which always felt like a knock on the city. The ticket was for Slothrust, a jazz/grunge three-piece from Boston who were on tour to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their album Of Course You Do. Admittedly, I’d never heard of them, and I resisted my initial impulse to dismiss them based on their name1. Instead, I listened to some of their back catalog and my interest was piqued. When Jeff let me hear the band’s cover of the Ginuwine song “Pony,” I became weirdly fascinated. Sludgy bass beneath clean, jazzy chord progressions and melodic vocals, I was sold. And given the amorphous dread that’s consumed me the last fews months, it seemed foolish not to go. I told Jeff I was in.
Despite living in Pennsylvania my whole life, I’ve somehow never taken a proper trip to Philadelphia. The closest I ever came was back in 2003 when I booked an Amtrak train from Pittsburgh to New York to attend a conference at the Javits Center. I was working as an editor for a medical journal at the time and had been asked to staff the organization’s booth on the trade show floor. The idea of talking to conference attendees all day triggered my anxiety, but I was still looking forward to getting some personal writing done on the train to New York. Unfortunately, heavy rains the day before had flooded the tracks between Harrisburg and Philadelphia, and the train was unable to pass. Amtrak chartered Greyhound buses as a workaround, which means I traded a spacious passenger car for a cramped bus seat until we reached the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, where I only had an hour to kill before boarding a train headed for Grand Central—not exactly a surplus of time to check out what the city had to offer.
Last week’s trip was different. Ten hours in the car from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and back again, which left about six hours in Philly. More than enough time for Jeff and me to catch up on life during the drive—i.e., talk of music, parenting, getting old, the pros and cons of edibles, existential dread, etc.—and a solid block of time in the city. After getting parked in a lot on Chestnut Street, a few blocks from the Liberty Bell, I broke the news to Jeff about all the human feces I noticed in the empty parking space next to our car.
“Welcome to Philadelphia,” I said, arms spread wide as if presenting a gift.
“At least the shit’s all in one place,” Jeff said. “Otherwise it would be chaos.”
II.
After a short walk, we found a bar on South 2nd Street in Old City to order food and have a couple beers. It was hot, over 80 degrees, but a set of French doors that opened onto the street offered an occasional breeze. By the time our food arrived we were already two drinks deep and a little buzzed.
What I’ve always liked about Jeff is his openness to the world around him. He’s just always seemed comfortable in his own skin. It’s a disposition I envy because it’s taken me most of my life to reach a mental space remotely similar. He never appears to overthink things, but he’s not reckless either. My default tendency is self-consciousness and rumination, which, while the severity of it has improved over the years, still dogs me to this day. To be someone with an easiness about them would be nice. But I’m not wired for that. At least not yet. The older I get, however, it’s a state of being that feels more within reach.
Out on the street in Old City, a little more buzzed than before, we stumbled upon The Book Trader, an incredible used book shop with two overflowing floors. I wandered the aisles, happy, looking at novels and photo books and old pulp paperbacks. Jeff and I crossed paths a couple times, but remained trancelike in our own worlds. Upstairs I saw a copy of Hilton Als’ White Girls teetering atop a stack of books yet to be shelved. I reached for the book and cracked it open to the title page. It was signed in Sharpie but with no inscription. In my slightly altered state, I interpreted my discovery as a message from the universe.
Hilton Als intended this book for some stranger in the future, I thought. Maybe I’m that stranger?
After buying the book at the front counter, where the shop cat brushed against the back of my legs, I met Jeff outside. We wandered down narrow cobblestone side streets, which reminded me of past travels to New York and even Amsterdam. We wound our way, ever so slowly, toward the venue—slipping in and out of pubs and bars as we went.
Travel is most often a luxury of the affluent. Aside from our family’s summer pilgrimage each year to Michigan’s lower peninsula, where we disengage from the larger world for as long as we’re able, our lives are firmly rooted in the realities of Western Pennsylvania. Partly by choice, but also very much by economic circumstance. In many ways, idle status in my birthplace all these years inspired one of the many meanings behind the name of this newsletter. To be homesick can mean to miss the place you come from, sure. But it also speaks to my frustration with Pittsburgh. At times, I am just sick of living in this city.
III.
It was just before 9 o’clock when we got to the First Unitarian Church for the show. The basement was sweltering hot. Four slow-moving ceiling fans did little more than recirculate a sour potpourri of sweat, body odor, and weed smoke. Jeff and I caught three songs from openers Weakened Friends, an indie rock trio from Portland, Maine, that counts married couple Sonia Sturino (vocals/guitar) and Annie Hoffman (bass), and drummer Adam Hand, among its members.
“We’re Weakened Friends,” Sturino reminded the crowd after their second-to-last song. “It’s the worst band name. If anyone has a better idea please let us know.”
I looked over at Jeff and laughed. On the drive he told me how much he liked the band’s name.
By the time Slothrust took the stage it was after 9 o’clock. Still buzzed from the additional drinks we had during our purposefully slow walk to the venue, I was feeling good. Tired but happy. A distorted guitar chord struck by Leah Wellbaum, the band’s vocalist and guitar player, hung hypnotically in the air.
Behind us a brief commotion broke out as the set started. A man holding a beer near the merch table had blacked out and fallen facedown on the ground, blood streaming from his nose after hitting the cement floor. The crowd parted and workers from the venue tended to him. They attempted to have the man sit in a folding chair but he blacked out again.
Unaware, the band worked through its setlist, playing one song after another from the album Of Course You Do, with most of the crowd singing along. Released in 2014, the band and album were never on my radar. My sons were eight and four at the time—I was living in a much different world that year. Founding members Wellbaum and Will Gorin (drums), I later read, had been playing together since their days at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 2000s, and bassist2 Annie Hoffman of Weakened Friends and Rare Signals has been rounding out the trio on this tour. Hearing the band live after only briefly familiarizing myself with their catalog was profound in the way that only new music can be. It resonated with me in ways, I imagined, that most of the people around me had already experienced a decade earlier.
The fallen man, now lying on his back, head propped up in someone’s lap, was conscious again, drinking sips of water as an employee wearing rubber medical gloves used paper towels to soak up the blood from the floor. Not long after, two paramedics arrived and helped the man to his feet and out of the venue. The crowd closed the gap, as if nothing had ever happened, singing along to every chorus.
Full disclosure: my music snobbery, however superficial, runs deep. A band’s name shouldn’t be a dealbreaker, but I’m embarrassed to say it often has been.
Curious about what happened to founding bassist Kyle Bann, I visited Slothrust’s Wikipedia page and learned why he’s no longer in the band: “On August 7, 2021, two screen captures of a police report from the Columbus Division of Police were posted on image hosting site Imgur which detail a rape allegation against Kyle Bann. On August 13, the band announced that they were aware of ‘the current allegation against our previous bassist Kyle,’ and that he is no longer a part of Slothrust. On September 1, they announced that they would be touring with bassist Brooks Allison.”