The first time I heard about it, I was sitting in an Oakland restaurant on a Sunday, having a conversation with a friend and watching television during the breaks. There was a break during a weather report; a huge man was suspended in the airspace above The Point. It seemed like a prank at first, something to shock some meaning into the day. We finished eating and paid and went outside and sure enough, there was a small dot about the size of a caper imbedded in the skyline of Downtown.

“How do you think he got up there?” she said to me.

“Cranes.”

My friend was raised in the middle of the state, and she went to school in Chicago, but she was thinking of moving here and visiting for a little while in the first few weeks of December to test the waters. I tried to convince her to show up in July, when the weather was warmer, and the city was altogether more presentable. It couldn't be worse than Chicago, she told me, and showed up at my door on a Sunday afternoon with a dose or two of clouds in the sky.

Outside the restaurant, we looked from the sky back down to Forbes Avenue and began walking toward Squirrel Hill. I started my pitch.

“Did you know that all this used to be farmland?”

“Everything everywhere was farmland,” she said, “The whole country used to be farmland.”

So I began telling her about the museums, and the stadium and the galleries that began popping up around the turn of the century. How Oakland had so many hotels and theatres and who's who with things to do making vectors between all of them.

“And now they're gone?” she asked.

“Now they're gone,” I said, trying to remember why the history of it had seemed so impressive just a few seconds earlier.

We were over on the South Side the next day, working our way up one side of Carson Street, and then back down the other for fun, stopping into the stores that looked appealing. Outside a magic shop, one of the employees was doing a trick, the kind with a long story attached to it.

“So as I was walking to work the other day,” he said holding a deck of card in his fingers.

I looked over again and the man was still slung in the air, carefully dropping with the speed of the moon, but still low enough that he had not set past the horizon of the apartment rooftops. A few people were walking past and looked over their shoulders occasionally to smile or mark progress. The magician noticed me staring off and asked if I would help him find his lucky ace, which ended up being in my wallet.

We wanted to get lunch later that day, but couldn't decide where to go. Oakland was boring. The students had all gone home for the holidays, and it was just too quiet for too long. We waited for a bus on Fifth and Bigelow and took it into Downtown. On the way, a very large man was sitting on the stoop in front of his house in shorts that exaggerated his paunch and crotch, waving a bell over his head. He had a pressure cooker next to him, and a sign that read Hotdogs and Hamburgers $2 ea. My friend had her eyes closed and her head back. I nudged her and pointed.

“You can have more fun here in an hour than a week in Manhattan.”

Read the rest of this piece in Pittsburgh Love Stories. Order your copy now.

April 13, 2005

Salinas, a city in Northern California, is the birthplace of John Steinbeck...

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