All my life, I’ve heard stories about Philadelphia. I didn’t grow up in Philly, but my parents did, and it was only natural that they would come to learn the stories of their youth in the city. My parents met in high school (Mercy Vocational High School), and have been together ever since, and though the circumstances of their respective childhoods were marked with abuse and financial hardships, these stories were most often recalled with fondness. My father left Philadelphia at 18 in 1985, moving an hour south in Ocean City, New Jersey, with my mother followed shortly thereafter. While living in Ocean City, my parents would get married, find work, build careers, and raise three children, of which I am the last. If not for the Covid-19 Pandemic, which forced my first year of college onto the computer and into my bedroom, I would have left Ocean City for Philadelphia at the same age my parents did the opposite. It wouldn’t be until a year later, at 19, I would step out and move to the city that raised my parents. Since moving to Philadelphia, I’ve found my mental health to be of a superior quality than when I resided within the salt water boundaries of Ocean City.
My high school, as seen from the boardwalk in Ocean City.
In a way, I feel closer to them than I have when growing up in Ocean City. The locations of so many of their stories used to only exist in the abstract, but now that I actually live here, they have substance and take shape. There’s one story I recall, where my father recalls climbing with his brother on the cliffs near the Art Museum, which lies a great distance from his Germantown home. At one point, he said he fell off the cliff a good distance, and his brother’s first reaction was “Oh my god, Mom’s gonna kill me.” Theirs was a home under constant stress. My father, like myself, is the youngest of three children, and like me, he has both a brother and a sister. Their father, my grandfather, died in 1970 as a result of a heart condition he contracted while suffering from Polio as a child combined with years of otherwise ill-health. My grandmother never remarried, and raised her three children on her own. My father was three when his father died, and has no memory of him.
My grandmother more recently, in 2022.
His brother, my uncle Joe Walsh (not of Eagles fame, but rather of Mummers obscurity) suffered from Hemophilia, which resulted in my father’s family spending most of their time in hospitals. By the 1980s, with the onset of the AIDs epidemic, my Uncle began losing a good lot of his friends. They went to a lot of funerals. It’s a miracle he survived. A formative experience for my father is accompanying Joe to a camp for children with severe illnesses like his in the early ‘80s. That was the summer he says he became a good person. The soundtrack to that summer for him was the then recent Moody Blues album Long Distance Voyager, which has since gone on to be a favorite of mine. Much of my parents’ music tastes have been handed down to me.
Growing up in Ocean City, I was squarely a recluse. I didn’t go out except to go to book clubs at the library or the record store, and I was never invited to anything. I never really had a solid set of friends that I was very close with. Ocean City just didn’t have the space, the people, or the environment to foster the kind of social life I think I’ve needed. It took until 2022 to find a group of people I can spend my time with in joy, and even then finding them and establishing these relationships was a slow-going process. The difference, I believe, is that Philadelphia provided the opportunity and the chance for me to branch out as I have by having more variety and a wide heart, something Ocean City would never and could never have.
My father and his siblings were all involved in The Mummers, who are a colorful cast of characters (Literally), with one story involving my dad at age 14 or 15 driving a jeep full of drunk Mummers down a flight of stairs before it was mutually decided that they were better off having the least drunk of the Mummers drive instead. There was also a Beach Boys concert that occurred on July 4th of 1985 where my Father and his friends got drunk, got sober, and got drunk again. At one point I think they left their sleeping friend in a car? The concert was quite a spectacle, taking place on the Parkway, which was shut down for the occasion. Jimmy Page and Mr. T were among the guests who joined the Beach Boys for their performance. Is that a combination that makes sense? Absolutely not. Why did they do it? The 80s. That’s why.
I graduated High School in the year 2020, when the world was having a collective breakdown at the onset of the Covid-19 Pandemic. My graduation took place in my family’s backyard with select family members in attendance. For a year I was trapped in my bedroom, essentially, waiting for my sophomore year in Temple, which would be my first as a resident of Philadelphia, something which I now feel was a long time coming.
When my parents left Philly, they weren’t alone in their flight. It wasn’t until the mid aughts that the population of Philadelphia started increasing after decades of a declining population. The population of Ocean City hovers around 11,000 people who live on the island year-round, anyone else is a seasonal resident. The ultra-conservative Christian vacation destination found me, a weird queer kid struggling with depression, feeling trapped in a dead end. There was nothing there for me. An empty town full of empty people who seemed to hate me for being myself. Leaving that place was a step, but it was actually reaching out and meeting people who live here in the city that opened my eyes to the fact that I can be with people who actually care about me and enjoy my company.
My father has always held down at least two jobs. He grew up extremely poor and I believe his compulsion to always be on the job is a symptom of that. He was once mugged as a child, and afterwards he grabbed a baseball bat and went to the local grocery store, since that’s where he would’ve gone if he’d had money. When he would visit my mother in East Falls, her father always made sure that my father always went home with plenty of food.
Route 47
I haven’t taken my car to Philly. I’m too scared to. I’m a mediocre driver on the best of days, but I’m The Stig when compared to some of these drivers here in Philly. My car remains firmly at home in South Jersey. Instead I take public transit to get around. I most frequently ride the 47 bus to South Philly, where I work and where my friends live. One night in late February this year, I was riding the bus back to my North Philly apartment when a group of high school aged youths jumped on my back, stole my hat, shouted at me, and punched me in the face. Definitely not as bad as it could have been, but still, I was assaulted. I’m not sure if it was a hate crime or not (my hat was in the colors of the pansexual pride flag, and had a matching pin on it), or if it was because I was wearing a brightly colored hat with pink tinted glasses and maroon corduroy bell bottoms, but it was still very troublesome. A week later, a campus cop was shot in the head almost a block from my apartment. A few months prior, five students were held hostage at their off campus apartment. Despite these experiences, I think love Philadelphia, and I feel happier here than I have in a long long time. I’ve found friends and I have a plan for the future, which is more than I ever had or ever could have had in Ocean City.
Philly Pride 2023, taken by Fox Raab.
My mother was one of five children, the second youngest, with her younger brother Steve coming five years after her. I never met my maternal Grandfather, he died before I was born, and I’ve never quite known how to feel about him. By most accounts, he was an abusive alcoholic who would scream at and berate his family, but on the other hand, he made sure my father was well fed. One anecdote goes that he had his (at the time) four children lined up in the living room, scolding them collectively for one reason or another. While he ranted, my mother, aged only three or four, got an image of an Ace of Spades stuck in her head, and was desperate to figure out what the vision meant. All of a sudden, her father crouches down to speak to her, his young daughter, and inquires “You think I’m an ass, don’t you?” With her being a small child, she was more amazed that he had read her mind than concerned with offending her raging father, so she – without thinking – exclaimed “How did you know?” He then sent the children to their rooms without another word.
He didn’t seem to hold it against her, though. A number of years later, when my mother was 15 or so, she would ride with her brother’s girlfriend (Later wife) Jill to work. My mother’s job ended earlier than Jill’s, so Jill would let my then unlicensed mother drive her car around until she was done. One day, my mother was driving the car around in the cemetery when, with autumn leaves on the wet ground, the car slid horizontally down a small hill, lodging itself perfectly between two gravestones. Jill wanted my mother (Or at least her father) to pay for the towing to get the car out from between the headstones, but he reasoned that, since Jill was the adult who knowingly let an unlicensed minor operate the vehicle, Jill was responsible for the towing. Since then I’ve joked that my mom should send Jill a repayment unannounced one of these days.
I’d be lying if I said my relationship with my parents didn’t have its strains. There’s probably unresolved trauma between all of us, which affects the ways I interact with them. I don’t tell them a lot about what I do, how I spend my time, because I think I need that space, which is something I feel as though I wasn’t afforded growing up. Also being queer has presented its own challenges that have been exasperated by the anxieties between some of us. The unknown is not bad, and all I ask for is trust. I love my parents, absolutely, but they’re only human, and mental health wasn’t a priority in the 70s or 80s (something I’m sure Reagan made sure of, the bastard) when they were growing up. Lots of trauma potentially left unpacked.
Moving to Philly, I think, has been my kind of subliminal attempt at getting closer to my parents. I’ve been coming to Philly all my life, whether for extended family gatherings, car shows, conventions, concerts, or some other event. Philadelphia is forever tied to my family and my perceptions of family. To me, Philadelphia is a part of my parents. It’s by no means the same city my parents grew up in, but I’m sure that they think that’s a good thing. I think I hold that opinion too. Ocean City isn’t the same city they moved to, though, I’m sure, and living there was something I don’t think I could have survived. I moved to Philly to give myself space and opportunity, but also, I think, that moving to Philly has made me feel closer to some of the very people I needed space from. I love my parents, I love Philadelphia, and I think, after a long time of doing the opposite, I love myself.
My family and I, 2022.
note: this is late as I was not given posting permissions until after the due date.