The City of Brotherly Love

            I made Carmen watch 1776 before we went to Philadelphia. 

            This, in case you don’t know, is a musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  Not the Revolutionary War: no, just the excruciating process of signing the Declaration of Independence.

Carmen was easily bored with the dialogue (Why does no one ever love that movie as much as me?  Its wit?  Its drama?  Its completely accurate portrayal of the founding fathers?), so we skipped to all the songs.

            “I hear the chirp, chirp, chirp, of an eaglet being born…”

            John Adams, the hero of that notable film, informs us in song that Philadelphia is “foul,” “fetid,” and “filthy.”  I’d been to Philly once before, in high school.  On this my unbedazzled visit, I found it to be a town of unhealthy food, strange smells wafting from underground, cheap prices, angry people, abysmal heat, and carefully preserved history.

Before we went, Greg’s dad tried to dissuade us by explaining that a Philly pretzel vender once tried to fight him over whether or not Thomas Jefferson slept with his slaves.

This, of course, only hardened our resolve.

&

            “Do you know where I left my car?”

            “No, sorry, man,” Greg said.

            Our interlocutor swayed forward plaintively.  “Can I touch your hair?”  Without waiting for assent, the young man gave Greg’s hair a good tousle.  Carmen and I giggled behind our hands: this was the same guy we’d seen wrestling a friend in the street, while a taxi cab drove past flipping them off.  He wobbled backwards, gave Greg’s hair another pat, then repeated, “Do you know where I left my car?”

Perhaps some explication is in order.  There were three of us, on this summer adventure: myself, Greg, and Carmen.  Carmen, like Greg and I, was born in California and went to UCSB—but after graduating, she moved to New York, lived in Harlem, and worked for Starbucks until she landed an internship with a branch of PBS.  She’s the bravest person I know, and one of the most cheerful—but even she admitted, after a few hours in the cheesesteak city, that we’d washed up in a strange place.

            We started from Manhattan, and crossed an entire state (New Jersey) in less than two hours.  We’d booked beds in a hostel next to Independence Hall.  As it turned out, this hostel was also next to a graveyard, Ben Franklin’s privy, a bookstore that regulated everything not written by Nabokov to a slim shelf labeled “Pulp”, the house of the inventor of the soda, and a bar called the National Mechanics.  We got to Philly on a Friday, little knowing what was in store:

The Bar Crawl.

            It was a hostel-sponsored event.  The friendly staff provided booze before we set out (cheap gin, cheaper ginger ale), then led us on a whirlwind of bacchanalian delights.  There must have been twenty drinking establishments in the area, and most of them sold $2 cocktails.  One even offered a $1 taco, which Greg ordered and inhaled while Carmen and I were talking about relationships.

            “Mmm,” he interjected.  “That was a tasty taco.”

“I did not see you eat a taco!” Carmen kept exclaiming for the rest of the night.

            There was a map in the kitchen of our hostel.  Tacked to it were pins from the cities of everyone’s origin, and one held up the note, “I got drunk here.  It was clean and no one spoke.”

            This statement was quite true: our hostel was very clean, and all its occupants were very content with silence.  The only people we made friends with were two British girls (Rach and Harry) who taught us a card game and told a delightful story of renting a yellow VW Beetle.

We lost Rach and Harry, however, sometime around the third bar.  That was when Greg, Carmen and I decided to stumble back to our hostel.  We got sidetracked on the way by the National Mechanics.  This establishment was once a church (the booth benches were pews), once a bank, and once a private club for steampunk tinkerers, whose gewgaws still littered the walls.  They sold us delicious hard apple cider.

            On the walk back, there was a trail of human feces rubbed five feet along the cobblestones.

&

            “Now, don’t stick your knees into the gaps between the railings.  I know that those gaps are the shape of knees, and it might be very tempting to rest your knees there; but sometimes you’ll find that, once you put your knees there, you cannot get your knees out again.  In that case, I would have to call the fire department.  This has happened many times, so, I repeat, please do not stick your knees into those gaps between the railings.  I do not want to call the fire department…”

            Our tour guide through Independence Hall was charmingly fixated on details.  The above speech was given in the meeting hall of the 2^nd Continental Congress.  In the original Senate building, he spent half the time telling about how, when John Adams was elected President, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson got into a polite battle over who would exit first.

            We didn’t go see the Liberty Bell, but we did step into a white, peeling building that was once a branch of the National Bank.  It was being used as a portrait gallery of revolutionary war notables.  We saw the faces of Martha Washington, Thomas Paine, and many others, including, of course, Ben Franklin.  Philadelphia is proud of its original Renaissance man.  Thinking himself clever, Greg had taken to calling the fellow “B. Frank” whenever we saw another statue.  To my high jubilation, a teenage boy behind me in the portrait gallery told his friends, “Hey look, guys!  It’s B. Frank,” thus proving that Greg’s little joke was not quite as original as he’d thought.

            Two and a half days is a long time, in Philadelphia: at about the halfway point, we began devoting most of our conversation to how excited we were about leaving Philadelphia.  Finally, the long-awaited moment came.  As we were sitting on the bus, ready to head back to New York, I noticed a woman outside the window with bow-ties tattooed on the backs of her knees.

            This was the image of that great, patriotic, revolutionary city that I took home with me.  I offer no deep analysis: only, as we pulled away, my head began to ring with the words of 1776’s opening number.

“Vote for independency!”