“People sacrifice the present for the future. But life is available only in the present. That is why we should walk in such a way that every step can bring us to the here and the now.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
It would come to me first as a single dead leaf scraping across the sidewalk.
Tchh-Tchh-Tchh-Tchhhhhhhh
On the loose strings of some blustery gust, the leaf would rise in a ghost swirl of trash, joining with a Cool Ranch bag and a Funyuns bag and a Swiss roll wrapper with a dried cream face looking out from the inside of the plastic on the Philadelphia night which I was walking into/ walking though.
In the air the lone leaf would rotate — mid-air — in silhouette as a cop car went by, its low beams taking the twisting dead body and forcing it into the weak spotlight like a criminal up against the wall or a stage actor moving into the next scene alone.
And I would watch this, is what I’m saying.
I’d watch this all go down as I moved up the night street, up through the northern fringes of South Philly, up through Queen Village, up past the old Merlino mob clubhouse with the Greenpeace sign out front, traveling briskly up East Moyamensing (which is an old Lenii-Lenape word that means ‘the place of pigeon droppings’) towards where she slips into Center City, unnoticed, a few last blocks of real South Philly, a few last blocks of 2 Street Creek streaming into the dirty neon South Street River.
That then, would be how I knew it was autumn.
I had a backpack on my back. Back then I always did. Slung over one shoulder, I’d walk swiftly but observantly with my stage clothes gently bouncing against the back side of my ribs. Each step, I could feel them, the steady cadence tapping out bup-bup-bup/ my wool striped vest and my pink button-up Goodwill shirt and my pair of tight black dress pants/ and I would drag deep on my Marlboro Light/ my body pointed towards the club, towards the venue, towards the front door and the people filing in in twos and threes and the people already inside, stood at the mass of antique bar, watching themselves in the old mirror behind the Wild Turkey bottles and the Smirnoff bottles and all that, witnessing their own laughs unfolding before them in real time on a Friday evening in late October, when the air began to smell cool and musky and thin like metal rods.
Inside of my heart then, back then I mean, these walks to gigs, my skin freshly showered, my Right Guard leaking into the scent of headless horsemen/ of crackling leaves/ of 45 degree autumn chills settling over all of us/ each of us/ the people at the gig/ the people heading to the gig/ the people walking right past the gig/ the guy on the door/ the cops in their cars/ the woman in her kitchen, Queen Village pots and pans hanging from her ceiling, soft, lovely, dim glow/ the shadow of a guy walking a hot dog down Bainbridge/ the Society Hill high rise where they said that Astrud Gilberto still lived in fierce privacy/ the neighborhood bars giving way to the more touristy ones/ the man who cursed at TV football as I walked by/ his words finding me: Fuck the Cowboys!/ making me smile/ making me feel connected through some kind of loose collective spiritish thread that neither exists or doesn’t exist depending on the scent in the air or the words from the bar or the run-in with the street leaf, as chancy as that is, telling you without a doubt that you are present at the scene of a magic night unfolding.
I had guitar picks in my back left pocket. That’s where I always kept them. 3, maybe 4 although I’d only usually use one. They were thick plastic, wide triangles we bought with band money from the indie guitar stores where my brother would do business while I stood off to the side, always uneasy, always feeling aloof and lost in the presence of other people who called themselves musicians.
But on nights like these, alone in my city, I existed differently. All of my insecurities, I could hold them at bay, talk to them quietly at knifepoint just so they understood what was what in the autumn dark, spice and wind. Fathering my own sort of frayed confidence, letting some kind of good feeling get born, up out of my direct loneliness, up out of my jangled nerves/ my shivering anxious liver and spine and finger bones/ all of me trying desperately to talk myself out of bathing so naked in this dark stretch of downtown, on streets where people used to sneer at weird Ben Franklin and stagger drunk past Mike Schmidt with a wool hat pulled down low on his iconic head and pass the Unknown Smoker (Serge Bielanko) as he floated by colonial graveyards and through back alley steak smoke and across streets with the scratching tap-tap-teeeeez of dragging leaves following him from the South to the North like rats on the heels of some long ago soldier arriving back from the mud holes of Petersburg, deep in the night, a bayonet hanging from his chest as he drifted, intently, towards the lively tap rooms down by the creaking night docks/ these rotting wood canopies shielding the ugly river catfish from the spell of the moon as they hang there — suspended — between the shining surface and the hellish bottom/ this cretinous dark river older than time, where the mud smells of sour sucker eggs and righteous brutal murder.
Fucking all of this, of us, everything tonight: old city vomited up from the guts of the Delaware.
My cherry embers: GLOWING then fading: my cigarette partner: my silent street smart torcia. I smoked for a lot of reasons, people smoke for all kinds of reasons, but the taste of tobacco on my lips on those nights, as I wandered towards Marah, towards our intro music (Rocky) and our climbing up onto the tiny stage under the simple colored lights between shitty monitors that had been shitty for so long now and for so many legends/ so many tight beautiful bands from far away lands and cities/ that the sound of the canons firing around you as the first song would kick in/ the driving hammer hits to your head as sounds collided/ bass drum beats piling into bass guitar plops and the electrics hissing like jet planes bashing into your bedroom/ me covered in burning fuel with such an excited heart, such a wild look in my eye because I am so scared and happy and hopeful and self-loathing all at the exact same time: I would drag my cig and bust through a scratchy skirmish line of dead leaves blowing across the sidewalk by where I’d go to see art films on lonely Tuesday afternoons suddenly/ magically/ transformed: from a silent lonely human trying to be found in a city of millions to a smoky-lung’d Titan emerging from my impossible bones to seize upon something that few have ever seized in the history of the entire world.
That’s what happens when you play in a band.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
