In January 2002, MikeNewell took a train to Philly. Now, he's reflecting on how that pit stop became a second chance. 'I’ve changed. The city has, too. For both of us, there have been promise and triumphs, sorrow and setbacks. That’s how it goes, right?'
I rode the rails — or at least my comfortably cushioned bar car seat — to the City of Brotherly Love. It was meant to be a pit stop.I was heading South to start a life I wasn’t sure I wanted amid a past I hadn’t fully reckoned with.
Jimmy ran the bar. Jimmy was retired NYPD, wore a gray pompadour and a miniature gold badge that dangled in his open shirt collar. He kept a club tucked under the taps, and stranded me — and my scribbled bar napkin poetry — to slow shifts, until he heard I had brandished the weapon one night, in a desperate, fumbling attempt to fend off a belligerent customer. Despite my brightening career prospects in the service industry, I had made up my mind to leave my hometown.
I ascended the stairs at 30th Street Station, gazing up into its vast, gold ceiling, the clickety-clack, ticker-tape whirl of the oldsignifying arrivals and departures. The truth was, I didn’t know if I was coming or going. Or where I was meant to be heading. The sign struck me, well, as a sign. While I had been knocked to my knees 90 miles north, in this bruised and alluring city, the fine citizens of Philadelphia and their mayor were lighting the heavens luminous. It was starting to feel like a place to run to. A place to be broken.
The railings wobbled, the hallways were bleak, and the kitchen floors were so uneven the refrigerator door hung open. My neighbor would be the gas station. I could see the old radio sign from my window. The “P” in WPEN. It was half-lit. When I wasn’t taking in my new town, I traded in those bar napkins for an old Royal typewriter that I set up on a place mat on my table and banged away at it relentlessly — hey, neither the gas station or the mice complained — even if the prose was as uneven as my floor.
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