Avoca PA
Conversations with either Jean or John are unique. They both like to leave little bread crumbs for you to follow into the forest of the absurd. When the trail eventually comes to an end, you turn to make your way back out, using the crumbs that took you there, but those are gone as well. While you work on getting re-oriented, they are fashioning together the next piece of bait. They can each carry this off solo, or team up like the scene in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where George and Martha eviscerate Nick. There's no malice intended, it's just their way of asking if Johnny wants to come out and play.
In 1996, I was working in Chicago and had a chance to spend a weekend in the town that John talked about so often. We agreed I would join them in Avoca, Pennsylvania where they were visiting John's dad. His dad was living in the home where John had grown up prior to serving in the Navy. Jean was originally from New Zealand, married John, and along with John, began to cultivate an obsession with all things old. They had driven their van to Avoca from their place in Southern California to see John's dad, and collect antique odds and ends along the way.
They picked me up at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Airport and drove on to Avoca. The town, along with some houses, seemed to be made up mostly of churches and bars. This may have been a reaction to the 1888 Mud Run railway disaster. Two trains carried passengers returning home from a Catholic abstinence gathering that had drawn over 20,000 attendees. On October 10, 1888 around ten in the evening, one of the trains ran head on into the back of the other, which had stopped just past the Mud Run station in Carbon County. The speeding train managed to ram itself inside the rear two and a half cars of the stationary train, extruding limbs and bodies out of the fused cars like toothpaste from a tube. Of the 66 killed, 37 were Avoca residents. Some of the trains' crew members were charged with gross negligence but all were acquitted in the end.
Avoca today has a population of 2,652 with 99.2% of the census responses checking the box for "white". The town's name comes from Ireland where a few villages share the name. Interestingly, there's even an Avoca River in New Zealand that Jean probably never knew was there. Today's Zillow listings show an 1,800 square foot home, four bedroom with three baths, built in 1930 on Cherry Street asking $124,000; and another four bedroom on Vine Street for only $40,000.
John's dad is close to eighty, big, and reminds me of my dad. It may be something to do with being blue collar and living through the depression. The antithesis of pretense or fluff, an absolutely no-nonsense guy, not easily engaged in conversation, yet not gruff. Entertains himself by simple means, one of which being small folk art constructions like the ones the appraisers shit their pants over on Antiques Road Show. You can tell he really likes Jean but may have never said so.
The highlight of the trip for me, was overhearing a conversation between Jean and John's dad one morning. Jean can rattle on with the best of them. She'd talk to a lamppost if it would let her have her way with it. I was in the living room and was amused to hear John's dad uncharacteristically, yakking away. At one point he realized Jean had once again sucked him in to where he was nearly jabbering away like an old bitty. He suddenly shouted, "Damn it Jean, enough!" It wasn't said in anger; he was mostly astonished by how easily he had been duped.
Avoca is coal country and John's dad worked in the mines. John remembers after school let out, he would go to the bar on the corner and bring home an open pail of beer just as his dad would be getting home from work.
The most amazing thing about John's house was the cellar. I took a narrow twisting stairway from the hall down to under the house. There was his dad's workshop at the base of the stairs and beyond it was Injun Joe's cave straight out of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. I couldn't tell if it was natural or man made. It certainly hadn't involved the use of any modern equipment. It most likely was hand-hewn with pick and shovel. It was chilling to look at. I wondered how John could have ever fallen asleep as a kid with this macabre gash in the earth sitting below his living room.
In the evenings, we stopped in to see some relatives and old friends of Johns. At one of John's cousins' places we were given a tour of the recently remodeled dining room. The room had been lengthened 4 feet to accommodate a new dining room table that exceeded the dimensions of the original room. For once I held my tongue. Not because I wasn't mystified by all of this but because I met Lyla, John's niece.
Lyla looked youthful, healthy and pleasant but my eyes were drawn to her one-in-a-million nose. It was long, as in pre-rhinoplasty Paula Jones long, but without any of the comical and grotesque elements. Had Michelangelo been presented with this nose, he would have abandoned his artistic pursuits, knowing that recreating it was beyond his talents. I remained hypnotized by it throughout the visit. I couldn't keep my eyes off of it. She could have been buck naked and I wouldn't have noticed. Abraham Tamir, an Israeli scientist, announced the results of his recent study of nearly two thousand European noses photographed at random. His findings assert that all Caucasian noses fall into 1 of 14 fundamental types. His research included matching photos of current day noses with those of mosaics, paintings and sculptures going back to Hellenistic times. I have reviewed the 14 types, and as I suspected, Lyla's was not among them.
Saturday afternoon, Joe Dills came over to John's house. They were friends growing up and I had heard plenty of tales from John about Dills. Dills displays some arresting characteristics. He is barrel-chested, intensely animated, voice like a bullhorn, and all together mesmerizing. His presence is overwhelming. At times I became concerned whether there was sufficient oxygen in the small house for this human locomotive and the rest of us. Dills has a cadence to his speech that is infectious and I soon begin speaking in a similar manner. I couldn't get rid of his speech pattern until after I went back to Chicago. He is also hysterical. We were having the best of times and were soon on our way to meet Dill's wife Pat, at a pizza place in Avoca.
The pizzas were brought to the table on large rectangular trays and cut into squares. I liked the pizza, the beer, and the conversation. We had made our way through most of the pizza when Pat reached over to bring together the pizza squares that were strewn randomly about one of the trays. Dills caught this out of the corner of his eye and started in on Pat.
Dills said, "Here we go with the OCD again. When Pat was a baby, her parents would come into her room in the morning to find her arranging little hand-made poop biscuits across the top of the mattress……."
Pat cut him off at this point rather abruptly, evidently having mastered how to keep him in check. I wished I could have heard the rest of it.
Sunday afternoon, Jean, John and I planned to leave Avoca and drive to Pittsburgh. They were headed back to California and were dropping me off at the airport for my flight to Chicago. We said our goodbyes to all, were fed pieces of fried chicken through the van's side window by Aunt Millie in the rain, and made our way out of town.
The two of them weren't quite done with me. Forty five minutes into the ride, Jean spotted a collection of hi-vis orange earth moving equipment and made John pull off the highway. She had me out of the car, standing in front of these mammoth blinding orange bull dozers, in a steady drizzle, while she looked for her camera. Once I extricated myself from this farce. It was John's turn.
I had noticed a carcass or two along the side of the highway and quizzed John about this.
John said, "Yeah you really have to watch for the deer. They can shoot out of the bushes and come right through the windshield. It's an ugly way to die".
The van's windshield suddenly seemed immense; a yawning chasm, begging for some beast to come hurtling at us from out of the black. I was sweeping my eyes rapidly back and forth, straining to catch the slightest movement. My legs remained coiled, ready to absorb the inevitable collision. I gripped the arms of the bucket seat with white-knuckled fists. After a harrowing twenty minutes I shouted, "Damn it John, enough!"