Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): PICC (A Poet in Center City) #48

The map of John Rind’s brain: as I’ve said, complicated. As I got to know John, I sifted through the history he gave me. If I couldn’t figure him out completely, I could at least give it the old college try. Raised, with Kyra and Ari, in an itinerant way, by a card-shark father and a therapist mother. At a certain point, the Rinds were settled in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, right outside State College. They were there, it turns out, part of the time I was in State College, too. John never forgot seeing me around with Jena Strayner, while that was going on. The Rind kids received little conventional schooling. What they did receive was a thorough grounding in the rigors of psychology, psychoanalysis, and the therapeutic process. That was on one side. But the other side, which was also internalized, encompassed casino rackets, betting circles, fantasy sports hi-jinx, and what it meant to keep lines running in all directions. So, as he stood at the end of the long, winding way which led to the Highwire’s entrance, John himself was introspective about his complete immersion in outward reality. That inward sense of separation, of being yanked violently in two different directions at once, gave him a physiological quirk of feeling compelled to express himself from a deeper place than most, even in the middle of so many lines running that P.F.S. briefly towered over Atlantic City: “Um, can we end what’s going on in the factory space, please?” “Are the Temple kids done?” “Just about. By the way, thanks, seriously, for taking care of the coat room thing. I got sick of answering questions. After the next two acts, we can fly free for the rest of the night, right?” “Yup. I’ll take care of the Temple kids.” “I’m lobbying for a fifteen minute break.” “Go right ahead.” “No, I’ll wait for you, dude. I’ve got a roach. Tonight’s one to celebrate.” We were both lanky, me at dead-even, zero-sum-game 5’9, John up there at 6’3. “Right on.” Yet that John edge, of meaning it, in a general sense, more than most, had just a hint of desperation in it. At moments like this, I never forgot that John’s earlier life scored an 8 out of 10 on the trauma meter. Not many years before he joined up with us, John was forced to endure the murder of Ari Rind, on the college campus of the school Ari was attending. Ari’s murder, by all accounts, was an act of the most senseless violence. He was brutally beaten to death, for the sin of standing up to a group of thugs picking on a younger kid. When John was panicked, both strands of his personality— the introspective devotee of all forms of analysis, and the burgeoning card-shark following in the footsteps of his father, who, as is crucial, also died, this time from a heart attack, at around the same time as Ari, leaving an equal, irremediable gash— collapsed into one basic stance before the world. John saw himself as a fireball, a dynamo. He was going into the world to do everything he wanted, all at once, and he would brook no interference. With the corpses of his brother and his father behind him, he’d make one bold lunge at eternal life, and, as for the rest, que sera sera. I caught up with John on the Gilbert Building steps. Cherry Street at night tended to be free of cops. “You got that roach?” “Yup.” “We made money tonight. We can count it up and divide it with Jim when we go in. Did you see Lena?” “Yeah. She did an Oompa Loompa routine with me, but we’re going out some time this week.” “You having fun?” “Yeah. But remember— you get to go home soon. I don’t.” “Is Adelphia House locking you out?” He smiled and shook his head. It was always like that with John. Despite being several years younger than me, there was worldly business sense, of the dark variety or stripe, in John’s brain, which put John ahead of me slightly in the race-to-understand-the-world. Penn be damned. I knew that then, too. And did my own introspective routine about tragedy burning real, tactile understanding into the human brain. Roach done, up we went.

© Adam Fieled 2023