On a clear, traffic-free day, it takes seven and a half hours to drive from Pittsburgh to midtown Manhattan, and that’s if you only stop once for gas. But there’s always traffic. And somewhere between Scranton and Elk County, down below the Allegheny National Forest or thereabouts, clouds will often roll in no matter how fine the weather when the drive began, and rain will come, moody and gloomy. Giant trucks zoom by, blinding the windshield with wake water. I know all this because in 2007 I was offered and accepted my first academic job, in Pittsburgh, a city I’d never thought about.
Since then I have driven from Pittsburgh to New York and back more times than I can count. I drove in all types of weather, from blizzarding snow that sent my VW Beetle skidding off the highway to smoldering heat with broken air-conditioning and the windows down. I drove in the endless dead of night, downing 5-hour Energy shots, my brain vibrating. I drove throughout the first year of Trump’s presidency, when the last face a middle Pennsylvania white man wanted to see was a black one. I did so with fortitude, my body tense with focus, my hands and legs numb and tight, just trying to reach my destination. I did so out of love, devotion, and a sacred respect for the artmaking we call poetry, and because I needed a job. For reasons that would become clear to me many years later, I could never get settled in Pittsburgh, could not let go of the coast, even though I’d dreamed for so long of a university position just like this one.
The university on my mind, I realize now, was a fantasy. It was born of a grand idea of academia and freedom that I first encountered in college, after taking Regina Barreca’s class Sex, Politics, and the British Novel. I found myself in a select group of Gina’s friends — young professors in English, art, and French, and a couple of graduate students, including my housemate Krys, who was a poet like me. I was a senior and the only undergraduate invited to their Wednesday pizza nights in Willimantic, Connecticut, where we sat around drinking red wine, smoking cigarettes, and talking late into the night about ideas, film, painting, and who had modeled for which artist. I was mostly silent, soaking in the vibe, feeling like this could be a life. I remember one professor there told me that the way I held my cigarette made me look like someone who didn’t smoke. This confounded me — I’d been smoking since high school — but I still made a mental note to hold my cigarettes better, more naturally.
The whole scene made me feel like a character in a James Baldwin novel. The pizzeria transformed into “open French doors and a balcony, more than a hundred people mill[ing] about, some in evening dress . . . High above [our] heads an enormous silver ball . . . so bright with jewelry and glasses and cigarettes, that the heavy ball seemed almost to be alive.” I felt so grateful to be there that it never registered that I was the only black person at the gala.
Gina, with her short skirts and big hair, reciting from memory whole passages of texts and telling bawdy jokes in class, was the primary siren. A this is what a feminist looks like type of feminist, she introduced me and the other students to the trope of the madwoman in the attic. With Gina and the rest of the Wednesday pizza crew, the highest form of education came on the tightrope between studious discipline in the classroom and laxness outside it, breaching (but not in the vulgar sense) the border between professor and student. It was while walking that titillating tightrope that I fell in love with the idea of being a professor. The romance of it all flowed inside me like a beautiful venom for decades.
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