Walking Broad: Looking for the Heart of Brotherly Love

1

HOME

Cheltenham Avenue to Chelten Avenue

Home

is where we

love each other

and where we

come to look things up.

Everything else

is Away.

—Dorothea Grossman, Philadelphia poet

LOOKING for the Big Red B at the start of the street, I find only a handwritten sign on the front door of a furniture store: WE DO NOT HAVE PUBLIC BATHROOMS. The young black salesman reiterates that policy as I enter the cavernous space. I ask him if he remembers the Big Red B in the sky. He calls for backup. Two older gents saunter over, sipping their morning brews. I have not yanked them away from any customers, for there are no customers in this armory of a showroom; what Gordon’s Furniture has in great abundance are empty seats, thousands of them, and the two senior salesmen decide to sit on a Contemporary Living Room Group—Sofa and Loveseat, only $899—with Chaise Lounge available in 30 different colors.

I introduce myself and offer my hand.

He wants our names now, says one salesman to the other.

What good could that do us? is his response.

How could it hurt you? I ask.

Who knows? says the first salesman. If it can, it will.

The philosophy rings true. Philadelphians live by that jaundiced rule: if it can hurt, it will. It’s the local version of Murphy’s Law, a macabre Irish pragmatism tinged with a Jewish awareness that God possesses a perverse and ofttimes unkind sense of humor. Philadelphians have thin skin and deep insecurities; they are skeptical by nature and zetetic by training. If a team can lose, it shall. Winning is not a naturally occurring event in this town. It’s not a simple matter of the glass half empty: Philadelphians question the size of the glass and the quality of the liquid—where are the bubbles, cuz?

How well Philadelphians know they reside in the former business center, former manufacturing hub, former music factory, former boxing haven, former seaport, former this, and former that. Their city is the I-95 rest stop between NYC and DC, the nation’s current capitals of culture and politics, commerce and clout. Little in the last half of the last century has done anything to warm Philadelphians to the Fates, and vice versa.

You try living in a punch line without wanting to punch someone.

The two men sip their coffee in silence. More than caffeine and sugar will be needed to stir them from their lassitude. They have been selling furniture for seventy-five years between them. With some coaxing, they confess to remembering the Big Red B, and how it was removed eighteen years ago, and how nothing has gotten any better since that day of extraction, not that they blame the missing B on their chronic dyspepsia. They are openly dispirited about people shopping online, the pharmacy chain that moved next door, competitors cropping up in the neighborhood, the lack of foot traffic in their own store, the war in Iraq, global warming, the corruption in City Hall, the corruption in Congress, and, worst of all, they concur, is the goddamned economy, the shell game that feeds the rich and screws the middle class, no matter what the experts tell you.

I work only two days a week now, says Estragon. Just to give the old lady a break.

He’s a sweetheart, isn’t he? says Vladimir.

It’s killing me, this economy, says Estragon. After someone pays $75,000 for a fixer-upper, who can afford to furnish it?

Philadelphia, laments Vladimir. Philadelphia is down the piss-hole.

There is a long silence. Too long. I hear my heart beat. They gaze into their respective coffee cups. What do they see?

May I use the bathroom? I hear myself ask. The salesmen look at each other as if I have just requested their spleens.

Only joking, I say and gesture toward the lavatory sign on the front door. They don’t smile either.

This is not a good start at the start of Broad Street. Good starts are invaluable. The first people you meet on a journey are omens, adumbrations, and no matter how you cut it, this is a bleak beginning that augurs ill for an adventure of my own devising, the walking of Broad Street, all thirteen miles of who-knows-what. It is something I never wanted to do when I lived here, but now, after residing in New York for a quarter century, it seems to be an essential exercise. I suppose I am searching for something. I don’t know what. Or when. The past brings sorrow and the future anxiety, warn the Buddhists, so one concentrates on the moment. Can I keep my history cordoned off from the now, and hold the future at bay? These sofa salesmen, these sullen gray gents sipping on fumes and apprehension, are unable to come to grips with the impermanence of all things, most notably themselves. They are selling furniture to a world not very interested in furniture. I am wondering if this trek is the worst idea I ever concocted, if I am selling Philadelphia (or me) to a world (or me) not very interested in Philadelphia (or me). Aren’t there important things for people to read about?

Maybe I just want to prove I can walk thirteen miles. I feel trim and frisky as I near sixty. Now that so many relatives have passed away and my visits to Philly are infrequent, maybe I need a reason to return to the old hometown to get reacquainted with some homeboys or rekindle my subterranean homesick blues. Hearing myself describe myself as a kid from Philly no longer surprises me, even though I haven’t lived here for twenty-five years, since my twin boys were born, since we packed up and ran off to New York for fame and shelter from my mother, and now all I want to do is walk Broad Street, all of it, through the best and worst, through the blood and guts of North Philly, through the blight of Tioga, down the Avenue of the Arts, through Little Italy, past the stadia, and into the old Navy Yard, to see what’s happened to it, to me, to us.

Those salesmen were me. Everyone I will encounter is me. Is that baby boomer perdition or Walt Whitman rapture?

I feel a funk coming on. It is not an unfamiliar sensation. I know what needs to be done: walk it off, exhaust the presentiment, unleash the endorphins, summon some distant knowledge that any trip, like any day, or any life, can begin inauspiciously and somehow end up swell. Or less than tragic.

The address of the northernmost house on Broad Street is 7206, which means City Hall is seventy-two blocks, approximately seven miles, due south, address of One, and then the numbers start to climb on the Southside. Philly is a city for idiots. Linear, rectangular, straight ahead. I love how they named all the nonnumbered streets in Center City after the trees they tore out to make room for the streets. Chestnut, Walnut, Cherry, Vine, Locust, Spruce. This row house at 7206 North Broad Street has been converted into a day care center called Leaps ’n’ Bounds. Carolyn Pettigrew is looking after eight children between the ages of two and four. They are adorable tykes who need much looking after. You wish they were at home. Four, five, six hours is a long time for a toddler to be socializing away from home. Down the block, a larger, more colorful, more institutional day care center is under construction, Your Child’s World. It is an offshoot of a facility that operates in another part of town. That one is open from 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. and some of the thirty kids spend ten hours a day at that place. Ten hours a day. You wish they were home and not there.

Know the child left behind.

That I will pass by another two dozen day care centers on Broad Street indicates that more and more mothers are working hard at jobs and more and more kids are working hard at being children without mothers.

Old men with no futures. Young kids with absentee mothers. This walk is off and limping. What could possibly come next? How about a funeral parlor? How about two?

Philadelphia Jews have an inexorable if clear-cut choice to make at the end of life and the beginning of Broad Street—Levine’s Funeral Home or Goldstein Rosenberg Raphael-Sacks Inc. Of the fifteen funeral homes on Broad Street, the two for Jews are very close to each other geographically, financially, and spiritually. The veneer of secular harmony suddenly cracks in the face of the afterlife—for eternity, everyone wants to be with his own. Heaven must be segregated.

Goldstein Rosenberg Raphael-Sacks Inc. will be avoided today not because it sounds like a law firm or the result of a corporate merger, but because it was there where I last saw my mother. In her final repose. Five years ago. ’Round midnight. And it was a gargantuan error. Knowing she would not want to make such a long trip without photographs of her grandchildren, I went to Goldstein’s to place a few snapshots in her plain spruce coffin ($550); she would have loved a pack of Pall Malls too, but I was hoping she was going to a no-smoking zone. She had smoked enough.

This is not my mother, I said to no one in particular when I first saw her body in the wooden box. The two guards who had allowed me some private time pretended not to hear me from their safe distance in the hallway. This is not my mother, I repeated, and took a few deep breaths, backed away, looked again, and then again, and was convinced that this corpse could not even pass for a Madame Tussaud version of my mother. They had made a grievous error. It happens. Hospitals dish out wrong babies to right parents, so why can’t funeral homes dish out the wrong parent to the right son? Babies in cribs, old ladies in boxes. One group entering, one exiting. Near the end, almost all the old ladies, God knows, looked like my mother, matted white hair over hunched shoulders, timorous gaits behind metal walkers; how many times did I rush to help my mother cross a street even though she seldom ventured out of her apartment and I rarely came to Philadelphia? My mother’s dotage and my guilt turned me into a Boy Scout. (Rarely, by the way, was her word to describe my visitation frequency, which included every holiday, every birthday, every fall she took, every hip she cracked, every firing of a nurse, every new doctor, and every time she wound up in one of five local emergency rooms, which she considered a mini-chain of private clinics.)

I yelled for the guards. They pretended not to hear me. I went to the hallway to tell them about the mix-up face-to-face. They told me it was me who was mixed up. They showed me papers. Embarrassment rolled down my cheeks. A man ought to recognize his own mother, the woman who had given him life, had taught him the fundamentals of reading, writing, and Scotch-and-soda before sending him away to boarding school at the age of seven, and then invaded his psyche like an occupying army promising liberation and bringing chaos for decades.

Jews don’t believe in viewings. They believe only God should see the dead. I stood there and shook and apologized through tears for not being a better son, more compassionate, more patient. I apologized for thwarting her suicide attempt. I apologized for everything I could think of that could be apologized for.

As I put the photographs into her casket, I wondered why the goyim put themselves through this kind of pain. Waiting for a resurrection? Making sure it’s the right body being buried? Not a day goes by that I don’t regret those moments, the last moments I ever saw my mother, lifeless, artificial, someone else.

By the time the guards came in to tell me it was time to go, I was smiling. I had remembered a joke. Not just any joke, but The Joke. I didn’t want to, but I had no choice. The Joke was intended to be a commencement gift of sorts, as I was sixteen and had just graduated high school, the esteemed hellhole called Girard College, and my mother wanted me to know that she considered me a man. I had never heard The Joke before and have never heard it since, except in my own head. There are not many presents that stick with you for a half century, but this one had, and I replicate it now as accurately as possible, in spirit if not syllable:

Sarah and Nathan have been married fifty years. One day, they go for their annual checkups. The doctor has bad news. Sarah has an incurable disease, with only three months to live.

What can I do for you, my precious Sarah? asks Nathan when they arrive at home. How can I make your last months more comfortable?

Well, Nathan, my sweet Nathan, says Sarah shyly, just once before I die I would like to experience oral sex. Would you do that for me?

This is not my cup of tea, says Nathan, but if this is your request, yes, of course.

A month later, Sarah and Nathan return to the doctor’s office. After the examination, the doctor says to the couple, in a puzzled tone, I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but Sarah has no signs of any disease whatsoever. She is one hundred percent healed.

At which point, Nathan slaps himself on the forehead and exclaims, If only I had known this when my mother was sick!

Yes, I will skip Goldstein Rosenberg Raphael-Sacks Inc. today and visit Levine’s Funeral Home.

How do people choose between these two funeral homes? I ask.

Based on their family history, their experience, their comfort level, says Joe Levine. Everything else is very similar.

Anything new in the business?

Graveside ceremonies and personalized eulogies are very popular, he says.

Cremations? I ask.

You’ll find more cremations in Denver and San Francisco than here, says Joe Levine. We are a community of roots. Philadelphians live here and die here and have a need to be memorialized here so their families can visit. Jews get buried. We don’t cremate.

There is no funeral today. Maybe no one died in a couple days. No Jews anyway. Joe Levine says more people die in the winter than in the summer, but he won’t hazard a guess as to why. You have to think it’s a combination of people missing their walks in the sun, and caretakers unable to get to work through snowdrifts, and cranky doctors who miss their golf games, and just old-fashioned poetic justice. Philadelphia winters are for dying.

How long you been here at 7100 Broad Street?

We’ve been here at 7100 North Broad for a half century, says Joe Levine.

And before that?

Fifteen twelve North Broad Street.

You’re very loyal to Broad Street.

Like they say in real estate, says Joe Levine, location, location, location. Broad Street gives us visibility and accessibility. Everybody knows where Broad Street is.

In a manner of speaking, funeral parlors are in the real estate game. Whenever a cemetery opens, funeral homes purchase any number of plots, so that, in the event someone hasn’t planned well, a funeral director, like Joe Levine, can, on the spot, sell a place to spend eternity. Catholic funeral homes don’t enjoy this side business: the churches own the cemeteries.

A couple years ago, says Joe Levine, a golden opportunity came our way, and we purchased the whole of Salomon Memorial Park in Frazer, Pennsylvania.

You know who Haym Salomon is? I ask.

Excuse me, says Joe Levine, and takes a phone call.

Haym Salomon was an immigrant businessman who spoke eight languages and became known as the Financier of the Revolution. Many experts think he wrote the first draft of the U.S. Constitution. Some think he designed the Great Seal of the United States, explaining the thirteen colonies arranged in a Star of David above the eagle’s head. Salomon died penniless and was buried without a marker in any language in a Jewish cemetery in Center City Philadelphia.

According to state law, says Joe Levine, anyone can be a plot purveyor and buy twenty or fifty or a hundred cemetery plots and then resell them. The reason is for family togetherness; maybe you want a big family picnic in perpetuity, maybe you’ve had it with noisy neighbors. And then maybe someone in your family changes their mind or gets a divorce and decides to sell the plots. You can. At a profit. One at a time or in bulk.

Sounds like an interesting business venture, Joe, I say.

I’m not worried, says Joe Levine. Only funeral homes have the opportunity to resell the plots.

Ever hear of eBay, Joe?

I call my brother on the cell phone as I continue to walk.

Wanna corner the market on cemetery plots? I ask.

Are you sick? he asks.

You don’t like the idea? I ask.

I’m still asleep, he says.

Then you might like the idea when you wake up?

Buying and selling cemetery plots? he asks.

Yes.

No. It’s too creepy, he says.

Very little competition, I say.

Because it’s too creepy, he repeats.

You’ll be the only one on craigslist or eBay.

Because it’s too damn creepy.

All the aging baby boomers guarantee a spike in sales in the near future.

Can I have some coffee before we talk about dying baby boomers?

It is very early in Santa Monica, California, and my brother has not had his Peet’s yet. I call him nowadays with business ideas even though I have no intention of ever following through, and doubt he will either, but I hang on to the remote chance that one notion will grab his fancy and he’ll follow through and find his true calling and make a killing and live the good life and thank me. My baby brother, fifty-six, has owned a mail order business, a video business, and a publishing business; he can sell anything he sets his mind to selling: books on the Internet, antique French posters, blue-green algae, or movies directed by Robert Downey Sr. He is a charming Sagittarian who often gets offered overpriced drinks in moodily lit bars when he’s mistaken for Richard Gere; he cannot cash in on his doppelgängerness, since he is in his twelfth year of sobriety. He graduated Betty Ford with honors. He is an undergraduate at Antioch and a full-time drug counselor; big headaches, small wages.

Where are you? asks my brother.

City of Brotherly Love, brother.

Why?

I’m walking Broad Street, from one end to the other.

You’re what? he asks.

Walking Broad Street. From Cheltenham Avenue to the Delaware River.

You lose a bet?

No. I volunteered.

Why? he wants to know.

I don’t know. Maybe I missed something when we lived here.

I know what you’ll miss soon enough, he says.

What’s that?

The three Cs.

Three Cs? I repeat.

Cops, cabs, and Caucasians.

You think it’s dangerous? I ask.

Dangerous? he repeats. Let me tell you how dangerous. I’m willing to sell you a cemetery plot half price, right now.

You really think it’s dangerous?

Call me when you get to Girard Avenue. If you’re still alive.

You’re very reassuring, I say.

I gotta get some coffee, he says.

He has reason to worry. More people were murdered in 2005 in Philadelphia than in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, San Jose, and San Diego combined. Philadelphia ranked number one in the nation in murders per capita. Still, on average, only one person a day gets killed in Philly, and that person is usually young, usually black, usually involved in some crazy drama involving girlfriends or gangs or vague disrespect. I don’t like the numbers, but I like my odds. I’d like some coffee too.

The white letters atop the Oak