"If I walk through the grass and under the trees and go to the back of our two acres and then walk around to the other side -the side I couldn't see when I was standing out there by the road in my driveway- then I have a place where I can sit and watch things happen. Maddy goes running by, with Little Pete toddling behind, and the dog casually following. The dog’s attitude is praiseworthy. She accepts her role well. She’s at the bottom of the pack yet at the same time is responsible for the entire pack. Our two smallest children, Maddy and Pete, know instinctively that they rank above Berry the dog. Yet Berry understands quite clearly that she’s truly in charge of the young ones."

the tallest tale ever told       The Bacchanal was a little bar on the corner of a little street in the middle of the block. The little street was called Clarion Street. It wasn’t much more than a dark alley. At the end of the alley heading south were the High Rise Projects. Broad Street, our city's main north south avenue, full of traffic day and night, was only a half block west. And South Street, which ran east past the Bacchanal’s doors down towards the Delaware River, was also full of traffic. But the cars didn't stop here, on this block of South Street between Broad Street and 13th Street. The neighborhood was in ruins. When Joe Tib and his partner the Mad Russian bought the bar it was just a beat up old wino bar. It opened its doors at seven in the morning, and it served only the cheapest booze. It was a three story brick building, part of a row that went right to 13th Street. Across tiny Clarion Street, looking west towards Broad Street, you saw only bulldozed lots. Some said better times were on the way. Joe Tib brought in his crew of artist friends and they did some rehab work. Everything was done on the cheap. Joe Tib and the Russky had picked up the little building next door as well, and they knocked out a couple archways and joined the rooms. They put up plywood on the front of the buildings, across the old plate glass and glass block windows, and then Joe Tib hung his murals. If you sat out in front of the bar on a sunny summer day, as I did, and watched the cars going by, you’d see a lot of heads turning. Maybe you’d see the passenger in the front seat turn and look, and then say something and point, and then maybe you’d see the people in the back seat look as well, and you’d see the same look of surprise on their faces. The murals were cut from plywood and built in layers and the plywood was painted and then bondo, a car body filler, was used to create contours and that was painted and then real artifacts, clothing and all kinds of objects, were attached and painted into the composition. The figures were dramatic and startling and they always caught your eye. 

Here’s the painted figure of a man and he's wearing the front of a real hat and the front of a raincoat and the tip of a shoe and he’s holding the sliced off half of a carafe of wine and walking towards you and practically coming right out of the mural to join you on the sidewalk. And here’s a life-size young boy on the front door with ivy around his head and a sweet innocent smile wearing a loincloth and beckoning you to come on in. Over there, in front of the second building, here’s a big man with a rock jaw dressed as a customs inspector holding out his hand in warning as immigrant mothers and fathers laden with luggage and with little children beside them pass through Ellis Island and help create the American experience. And the bar’s sign, which was on a pole attached to the second floor, and which swung out over the pavement, showed you the god himself, half naked and drunk and with a big belly and wine spilling from his cup. He has his beautiful young women all around him, and they're all nearly naked with only a little cloth draped over them, and they’re hanging onto him on both sides, and wild glee is in their faces. That was Lord Bacchus, who was called Dionysus when he came from the East. Dancing blue dolphins carried him across the golden waters of the Indian Ocean, whose copper-rich cliffs beyond Sri Lanka shine like armor when the Sun pursues Venus in the early days of Autumn. He was born of a human mother, a girl who had been bred in an ancient ivy covered temple. She was a priestess of Persephone, the goddess from whom all fertility issues. Persephone rules deep in our hearts, at the very center of our Earth, where all life begins, and nothing anywhere in our entire Universe lives unless it first lives in her. His father was Zeus high on his mountaintop, the almighty master of lightning whom all the gods fear, who casts his bolts and brings death wherever he pleases. His message was simple: In the chaos of my wilderness, beyond all laws and customs created by men, in the ecstasy born from love and beauty and dark night and above all from my wine, the brew of my wild maidens, that’s where you’ll find rebirth and transformation. It’s the biggest lie anyone ever told, and the best. You can transcend your fate. You are not locked into the past. Come join the party.

This is about how Joe Tib rescued me. It’s how I happened to be sitting in front of the bar on this bright summer late afternoon, Friday, the first crowds of people already coming out of work, that feeling of freedom in the air. I had on a cowboy hat. It wasn’t white, it was a sort of light tan as I recall. It wasn’t my hat. Someone had left it behind the bar, and I grabbed it to keep the late day Sun out of my eyes. It was only the second or third time I’d worked at the bar. I was the bouncer. When it first opened I'd been through the bar a few times as part of the poetry crowd, and my friend had recommended me for the job. I worked one shift and then decided it wasn’t for me, and didn’t go back. But Joe Tib kept calling. So I went back. It was a good thing I did. I was at the end of my rope. Had pushed the solitary artist crying out in the wilderness thing to its absolute limit. Had written a long eighteen page poem called “Songs of Avatar” which I carried around on a scroll in my pocket and read out loud on street corners with my friends around me playing whatever musical instruments they happened to have on them. That gig was over and I knew it. There was no place to go with it anymore. I’d taken a one way trip to the Moon, and was a full time guest in the land of the dead. But Joe Tib didn’t give up on me. He kept calling and brought me back to the bar, and that’s how I returned to the land of the living. So I dragged a bar stool out onto the pavement at the end of day on a hot summer Friday and watched the passing parade. It was still daytime so people came by on foot as well. With night everything changed. That’s why I was here, to watch the street at night, and guard whatever bar patrons might show up on foot once the Sun was down.

Our major reality was the High Rise Projects a little ways back down Clarion Street. They weren’t good places. Ninety nine percent of the residents were decent folk. But a small criminal element terrorized the place and made it unfit to live in. Drugs were a complete scourge. Guns were everywhere. The Projects seemed like a good idea when the Federal government built them in the ‘50’s, but the idea was flawed at its very root, the kind of thing that only looks good in the architect's drawings. The police didn’t respond to calls. Maintenance wasn’t done on the buildings. As Philadelphia lost its industrial base things only got worse. It was mostly in the night time, that's when I was dealing with the low level riff raff, the small time predators. Shine a light on them and they’d scatter. Men who were out of options. Who had nothing and were just stringing things out. But we had to find a way to get along. The bar was here to stay, but this was their neighborhood. I knew that. We weren’t all that different, not really, at least in terms of options. Almost like two sides of the same coin. I’d been raised well, grew up in a good place with good parents, knew a safe home and was always treated well. Yet I also was out of options. Now here I was sitting outside a bar on South Street in 1983 on a warm Friday afternoon, wearing a cowboy hat somebody forgot to take home, and Joe Tib came out of the bar with a couple friends and they got in a car parked across Clarion Street, and as they pulled out and drove past, Joe Tib, in the passenger seat, looked at me and smiled, and I knew what his smile meant. It said, Look at this crazy character in the cowboy hat sitting in the Sun. He fits right in here.