(Reposting/emailing the Foreword, even though the first three chapters have been sent, as this didn’t make it to the intended audience previously.) Welcome to this wild novel–picture, if you will, a head-on collision between Ulysses and Mad Magazine, written in "aggressive Pittsburghese,” all taking place during the chaotic final week of 1972. Below, please find the novel’s Foreword, which sets the stage for the intense vernacular that is to follow. The Foreword is written by a linguist/diphthongologist who finds himself trapped by COVID in Pittsburgh ("a city absolutely notorious for its monophthongization, as evidenced by the morbid house/hahs and that double-murder downtown/dahntahn...").
The tone of the Foreword may be vaguely familiar to those who have seen horror movies that begin with an archeologist who stumbles upon a "forbidden text"... after which police crash a linguist conference, circa May of 2020; while the Foreword is (ostensibly) written by an academic who uses scholarly, pedantic language, the cop is a hardcore Yinzer, which provides a sampling of the Pittsburghese in which the rest of the novel is written. A glossary of Pittsburgh terms and pronunciations will follow...but, no, this isn't for everyone, as we see with the clearly marked WARNING label on the novel's back cover:
So...consider yourself warned. And now, the beginning of the beginning:
FOREWORD
If you would have told me two years ago I would be here–Pittsburgh!--doing this, or anything approximately close to it…you would have enjoyed the fragrance of onions, leeks, bacon and clams as I laughed my chowder in your face!
Indeed, though it seems as unlikely as a bizarre football play that has become legend, here I am, the foremost American diphthongologist of our generation (not my words–from a Linguistics Today review of my excellently-received autobiography, From Auld Boy to Yowling Zoospore: My Claustral, Zealous Life Stalking the Great Vowel Shift), putting my reputation at risk via my role in the book you have in your hands. Ut periculum damnetur!
These last eighteen months threatened to put an end to a life’s work I had so painfully, meticulously crafted for decades…A violent nightmare began shortly after leaving my offices in Boston for what I thought would be a three-week stay in Pittsburgh, where I was leading a series of seminars on Mobility, Indexicality, and the Enregisterment of “Pittsburghese.”
Though I went into this almost-intentionally blind, I was assured by my colleague (a word I use here with savage, even bestial irony) that this would hardly be a hindrance, as she was providing an introductory text for me to recite and thereafter my role would be purely as a rather highly-compensated moderator. In the interest of disclosure, allow me to reveal that money was hardly a lure; no, the “bait” at which I leaped like a blind, famished cod was Pennsylvania’s most radical linguist, Dr. Barbara Luna, or, as I overly-affectionately call–called, perhaps better put–her “Babs.” She had originally agreed to moderate the conference, until her long-dead project F*cking Shakespeare: Linguistic Foreplay and Tongue Movements Toward Ecstasy was suddenly funded by Oxford University, which provided a three-month research stipend with living expenses in London.
Well! An “invitation” extended to such a beloved dipper–as we diphthongologists call each other–to what I call “the land where diphthongs died,” objectively a city absolutely notorious for its monophthongization, as evidenced by the morbid house/hahs and that double-murder downtown/dahntahn… But what began five years ago as “professional flirtation” was growing, on my part at least, into a raging romance. “You’re such a gentleman–won’t you gallantly take this over for me? You can stay at my house…or ‘our house’?” How could I resist! I was easily hooked and boated, putting up precious little fight; and, like an unlucky cod, I was soon fileted…
I did make it through the first seminar in the series, which took place in a small conference room of the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, on the University of Pittsburgh campus. I was just returning from a restroom break when I spotted a smallish, squat, middle-aged man in a too-small, faded black jacket with gold sleeves and the word “Steelers” on the back (costume de rigueur, I came to understand) placing a thick, stained eleven-by-fourteen envelope on my seat at the dais. My name was scribbled on the envelope, but I had not the time to look at it; thus I simply scooped it into my briefcase and resumed my moderator’s role.
The seminar resumed after the break, but was quickly interrupted by a noisy altercation outside our first-floor conference room: With great gusto, police were “detaining” a huge young man. We all rushed to the back of the room to witness the struggle, with many of us taking out our phones to document the brutality–until the door of the conference room crashed open, a man with a pistol drawn entered and commanded, “Picksburgh Police! Owl yinz get away from tha winda, get aht here like itz a fahr drill an let yer phonez awn tha front desk as evidence soze you won’ get arrestedt! All be watchin yinz like a all!” I froze, feeling like I was being barked at by a dog able to mutter a smattering of English; as the detective threateningly pointed a gun at me, a colleague led me away. Outside, even though the three hundred-plus pound suspect was noisily (and, from what I could see, rather successfully) wrestling with a half-dozen police officers, my seminar’s participants were abuzz, dissecting the detective’s transposition of “all” and “owl”–then, in the very next sentence, back the other way not once but twice! (“It was like watching a caterpillar metamorphosize into a butterfly–then turn back into a two-headed caterpillar!”) One presenter tried to steer the conversation to the detective’s even more unique (according to her, at least) dropping of the “t” in won’t–followed quickly by the addition of the “t” to the “ed” for “arrestedt.” (“It was like the ‘t’ jumped back in his throat, just waiting for a past participle to surf!”)
When I asked the colleague who saved me what the “close drill” was, as opposed to the “far drill,” he shook his head knowingly. “Fahr is the local Hungaro-Germanification of fire. It’s in my presentation.” Alas, I was not to hear it; after the exhausted suspect gave up and we were allowed back in, I exercised my authority and ended the conference for the day; still shaking, I collected my briefcase and rushed back out into the cool, refreshing air.
This was St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2020. It was a pleasant day, 65 degrees or so, with swirling, rainless clouds and a light breeze; I enjoyed the weather as I strolled from the urban campus to my temporary–so I thought–residence in Shadyside, at the lodgings Dr. Luna so graciously offered me. En route, I passed a dozen bars with green-clad revelers, hooting and hollering as they poured beer down their throats and upon each other. Being from Boston, such “St. Paddy’s Day” hijinx were hardly new to me, though I do recall pondering that the new, highly-contagious disease that was in its infancy was likely making pubs around the land giant petri dishes. As I was pondering thusly, a young woman with a face painted (one hopes) green rushed up to me, literally belched in my face and cried out, “Kiss me–I’m Ahrish!”–before leaping on me and stuffing her tongue in my mouth, which had opened in astonishment. A muscular young man I took to be her boyfriend dragged her away, and when I mumbled an apology, said with a laugh, “No sweat, bro–you’re like the twentieth guy she’s did that to taday.”
When I retreated from the madness to Dr. Luna’s comfortable, early-20th Century home, while arranging my day’s work at the dining table, I came across that fat, repulsive–it reeked of cigarettes and beer–envelope the mysterious visitor left upon my chair. Inside was a hand-writte (scribbled, really, in crayon) note on torn paper:
“Hear is somethin my ex-wifes cousin got given to her from some guy who lives up Hazelwood he said it was up his attic. He said he don’t know who wrote it cause so many people lived there it was a rental for Pitt frickheads.” I pulled out of the envelope a two-inch thick manuscript, punchole-bound together, with a title page reading All Yinz R Jagawffs. I read the first few paragraphs and pushed it aside, vowing to feed it into the impressive fireplace that night.
But that night proved too warm for need of fire. And the next day–I was making my own fire.
At the end of a third truly hellish day of alternately burning up and freezing, coughing and spewing mucus, throwing up and collapsing into feverish dreams, I crawled to my phone and dialed 911–and passed out.
When I came to, I was in a hospital room. “What happened?” I asked a powerfully-built nurse.
“COVID just punched you in the face,” she said.
I had been intubated for nine days!
A few days later, I was cleared for release, and took an Uber back to Luna mansion. After two weeks, I had enough strength and stability of mind to begin formulating a plan to escape from Pittsburgh and return home…just as the first, Allegheny County-wide lockdown went into effect.
Thus began a cycle that would discourage Sisyphus: A month later, the lockdown was partially lifted–and my symptoms returned. Long COVID, my personal physician diagnosed this as. The symptoms would finally fade, my strength and sharpness of mind beginning to return–only for another lockdown.
One day, when I felt I was in relatively good intellect but tied to the home as if under house arrest, I picked up dozens of scholarly books from Dr. Luna’s hearty shelves; it suddenly struck me as all so boring–so dreadfully, frightfully boring!
Desperate for distraction, I turned on my laptop and checked my emails, sorting through dozens of professional notices, finding one rom “B.Luna.” Under the subject line “moving forward,” I was debilitated to read You may stay at my residence for as long as you wish, as I have accepted what we call a sexual sabbatical to be conjugated with a Scottish professor whose views are the Venus to my Aphrodite. Other lines, which plunged through me like sharpened knives, are simply too personal to share.
In addition to personal devastation, her derision of diphthongs as “academia for juveniles” was a mortal blow, coming at a time when I was already suspecting the very thing!
Moaning in desperation, I ransacked the three-level house for anything meaningful–in a utilitarian way–to read, if only to distract my fiendish mind: a phone book, a tour guide, a comic book, pornography–something real.
Finding nothing, absolutely nothing but scholarly doubletalk, I collapsed at the dining table.
And there it was.
I glanced over the first page of All Yinz R Jagawffs–and immediately threw it down, as if it bit me. Which, actually, it did. It seemed like…it seemed like…could it possibly be? The idea that this could somehow frame and give meaning to my life’s work slowly crystalized.
From this comfortable cave, I spent the next two months digging: reading and deciphering what would be gibberish to the common man. Judging by the state of the paper, the type writing and the use of blotchy correction fluid, I estimated the “work” was “crafted” circa the late 1990s, some twenty-five years after the action of the…memoir? Fantasy? Novel?
I don’t really know what it is, and, to be perfectly frank, I don’t care. Again: it saved me. Some days, I could only read half a page before falling into an extended stupor. Other days, I plowed through twenty, thirty pages–creating as many if not more pages of notes, references, cross-references. I gleefully “cracked the code” of the vernacular and accents–though it probably took me a hundred times longer than my pre-COVID mind would have taken.
I publish this so others may enjoy a game of linguistic checkers–granted, hardly chess. While those who feel they can “tackle this blind” are welcome to do so, for others I include a glossary of “burgh words,” prominent (if bizarre) pronunciations, local curio, etc.
I also decided to improve the title–whether the author approves or not. The writer of this book, I’m afraid, will have to remain a mystery. Was it truly some literary-pining, half-developed renter in that Hazelwood home? Or was the beady-eyed fireplug who dropped the envelope in my seat the true author?
All I know is what is typed, under the title:
By A. Noun Moose
As for myself: after a brief, third-party negotiation, several months ago I purchased Luna Manor. Was it a fit of adolescent revenge that made me renounce New England–and take up residence in a city that I so often sneered at? (Though never in the presence of her.) Perhaps, perhaps...
And yet, now that a muggy summer has passed, I look forward to gray afternoons and cool evenings (I’ve even invested in my first sporting attire, a Steelers jacket!), when I plan to rehabilitate my still-tender body and amuse my curious mind with long walks to “The Bluff,” downtown (no, I’m not ready to say it “the Pittsburgh way”), through Oakland and the South Side and Schenley and Frick parks, perhaps even Bird Park as I retrace the steps–fictional or not–of the three “rivers” you are about to discover: Clay, Scan and Lore.
Allow me to dedicate this book, which saved my life even if it assassinates my standing, to you, Babs.
You’re a real jagoff.
-Dr. B.E. Aggrandini, Shadyside, 1 Sept. 2022