Reprinted here is my 2004 story “Available Properties” from the book Pittsburgh Love Stories (which I also co-edited). Despite what that link says, the book’s not available for sale anymore, and the remaining copies are trapped in a storage depot in Pittsburgh. If you’d like a copy, email me and entice me to access my secret stash.

Available Properties

HIGHLAND PARK
Eight-bedroom, 6500-square-foot Victorian. Fully restored. Must see! Wraparound porch, backdoor access to park, walking distance to shops, restaurants, and the zoo where you touched an elephant on its ear, a one-armed gibbon lives contentedly in the artificial trees, and a gorilla with a belly as round as the world once sat outside on the slope and drooled a long white string reaching straight to the ground. Lounge in front of the towering bay window, your eyes drooping like his did as he listlessly dug in his navel, maybe searching for a purpose to his adequate life, until he plucked his bottom lip and the drool didn’t break, and you laughed with a woman whose hand you grasped through her mitten as you slowly fell in love with her, whose lips, when she kisses you in the bedroom of your glorious new home, will feel much like you imagined they would on that day, as warm and soft as a polar bear gorged on the marshmallows you threw it when you were five.

SOUTH SIDE SLOPES
Classic over-two. The home where Donnie Iris came of age and crafted his best work. He composed “Ah! Leah!” in the bedroom, “Love is Like a Rock” in the kitchen, “That’s the Way Love Ought to Be” in the living room, and then retired to enjoy a beer on the toilet, as we’re told he did often, and may still, as far as we’re aware.

MEXICAN WAR STREETS
Three-story Victorian, five bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths. Hardwood floors, six working fireplaces, tucked away in the narrow streets of this historic neighborhood which tempts you like a snack ever since you moved away from Brooklyn, because the houses packed tighter than commuters remind you of the home you left behind. But in Brooklyn the dogs are not any more happy, the skeletal trees sigh and slight you outright, and the buildings don’t lean in to shelter you and tamp down while the silence mentions that Brooklyn was never really home at all, just a place to stay, where the sewage plant burns with a flame unlike the gaslights here, lit longer than your family’s life in America.

NORTH SIDE
Furnished studio/efficiency. One-of-a-kind stunning organic design, bathed in light, beautiful location right off park. Perfect for artist, student, young single. Must be willing to share with large carnivorous bird. No smokers, ungulates.

STRIP DISTRICT
Abandoned museum space. Excellent for conversion to music warehouse, ice company, or mattress storage facility.

HOMEWOOD/EAST HILLS
One-bedroom apartment with attached office perfect for medical or dental use. Centrally located above local pharmacy, which was a very progressive business in 1941 when your grandparents moved in here shortly after they were married so your grandfather could start his first practice, across town from his childhood home in the Hill District and even closer to his high school in Stanton Heights. They didn’t stay long here, not because of any problems with this modest apartment (an exceptional find at this price), but just because a young MD couldn’t make a go of it in a neighborhood with another well-liked doctor who’d been practicing for years, and it didn’t make things any easier that your grandmother had been let go from her job as an executive secretary at US Steel because of a company policy against employing married women. Even with a lucrative two-week stint treating falls and stomach-achey children as the store doctor at Gimbel’s on Smithfield, ends were not meeting, so your grandfather couldn’t really turn down the offer of a job as the company doctor in a small mining town with two telephones, four miles north of Indiana, Pa. Besides, it gave them a nice little house where they could sit out the war and have a couple of kids, plus enough of a savings to buy a practice in Monongahela, where they’d have one more kid who’d move to Mt. Lebanon and have a son who’d be sitting in a dorm room closet in New York City when he found out that his grandfather died from a series of medical complications he never understood and never bothered to ask about. Then, ten years later, would move within a couple of miles of this apartment, not knowing it existed, even though for sixty-two years his grandmother had been able to recall every detail: the floor plan, the curtains, the grenadine humpback couch they bought with the Gimbel’s money, and she could’ve told him about it if he’d just asked. She could have answered all his questions, about the large master bedroom, the stylish living room, and whether or not his grandfather would have forgiven him for taking him for granted for nineteen years.