A Brillobox Elegy
by Brendan Kerr
The night in question we found ourselves amongst a packed crowd at Gooskis, watching a locally adored rock band, and I wasn’t having a good time.
When looking for a laugh, my friend Dan likes to raise the subject of my bad behavior on one of the first nights after we met one another. This was in September of 2004, before there was such a place as the Brillobox. We were both new to Pittsburgh, Dan from Atlanta, me from Brooklyn, and had met at the orientation events for new grad students in Pitt’s English Department.
My transition to western Pennsylvania had been rocky. A couple of weeks earlier I’d been to the funeral of close friend who had died during a routine surgical procedure. My New York City girlfriend and I had decided to call it quits rather than try to keep things going long distance. I had a corked jug of pent-up anger that I’d not dealt with. Now I was at a rock show, I’d had too much to drink and the cork popped. I threw a tantrum.
First off, I’ve seen that band several times since, and they are good. Secondly, I’m a lousy musician who doesn’t always pick up on the difference between a 4/4 and a waltz. But in my shadowy memories of that night, for whatever reason, I am pacing circles, banging amongst the sweaty shoulder-to-shoulder audience, raving loudly and idiotically about the band’s time signatures.
Looking back on it, I recognize that I was having a moment. I’d stepped into a new scene in a new city and it was different from what I was used to. I wasn’t sure I saw a place for myself. I didn’t know how to break through, or what I’d signed up for. My inflated young ego flared, and I panicked. You’ve seen drunk dickheads like me at bars like Gooskis before. All the time.
Today, Dan and I laugh like hell whenever he recalls this anecdote. It’s hilarious because so much has changed. I was very lost then; I’m less so now. I was not a Pittsburgher then; now I very much am. With sixteen years of Pittsburgh life behind me, I've arrived at an age where I have Pittsburgh nostalgias. After hearing that the Brillobox had closed, I was spinning down one of these memory lanes when it occurred to me: I would never have gotten away with shit like that at Brillo.
Another friend of mine likes to tell the story of the time Lou threw his buddy out of the bar for “ironic dancing.” Lou could never stand to see good people acting a fool in that bad way. He wanted everyone to get their shit together. He rooted for it. Because it would make his life easier, yes, but not only because it would make his life easier. That night in Gooskis I was left to languish, to make an ass of myself, to struggle with my demons alone. Lou would have had to step in. He would have tried to save me from myself. He wouldn’t have been able to help himself.
***
At work today I was looking through our copy of the Pittsburgh Business Times and I came across an article speculating that the “Brillowbox” [sic] may open again under new ownership. Now that Lou and Janessa have had to shut their bar down (“The shutdown was 100% Covid-related,” the article confirms), a hospitality service is rubbing its chin over the idea that it might cash in on a name that means something to people. I suppose there is a backhanded sort of compliment in this, but I can’t imagine it makes Lou happy. Hundreds of people, ten thousand tiny decisions and a truckload of why-the-hell-not went into making the Brillobox a great Pittsburgh bar from 2005 to 2020. Making it work took a complex leader capable of seemingly conflicting characteristics: whimsy and integrity, delicacy and strength, impetuousness and commitment.
Lou is barrel-chested and could break you in two with his bare hands. He’s a painter and a poet. Though from time to time he shaves them down, he usually has a bushy red beard and wild curls of ginger hair. He’s a Tae Kwon Do master with a drawerful of Grateful Dead tie dyes. Lou likes Van Halen and plays competitive hockey. His deep, dopey laugh has a southwestern PA accent. He makes his money selling booze and would prefer to keep things light, but if your drinking goes dark and stays there for a while, he’ll take you in the back, tell you he loves you and ask you what the hell’s going on. Lou has a lot of patience, he has had to, but not an endless supply. You don’t want to be on Lou’s shit list. Lou cares more than he wants to. Lou stands his ground. Lou is resilient. Lou doesn’t give up easily.
A couple of months after the Coronavirus shut everything down and sent us to our rooms without dinner, Lou completed a project he had been working on for seven years. In Search of Pittsburgh Bigfoot is a cheap, gritty movie filmed on “shitty iPads.” It’s a love letter to everything that makes southwestern PA strange. It is what it sounds like: a feature-length movie about bigfoot hunters, featuring ample footage of a giant sasquatch slowly sauntering around locations in and around the city. Lou gets a kick out of watching unsuspecting people react to a bigfoot. That’s his jam. The movie is simultaneously ambitious and slacker, serious and unable to take itself seriously, important and absurd. It’s the product of a restless mind, of someone with a whole lot of dedicated friends and an inability to sit still.
Lou deserves a break, but I’m not sure he’ll give himself much of one. I wonder where his restlessness will take him next. I am sad that the Brillobox is gone and upset that Lou didn’t get to close it on his terms. I’m certain that no hospitality service can replace it.
We all know who the enemy is here. No one was surprised when (was it 2016 or early 2017?) the dismembered head of a Trump mannequin appeared between the jaws of the enormous plastic shark that hung on the wall above the back booths. We know all about the crushing crisis and the abject failures that have drawn it out, multiplying its lethal scope. We know that congress failed to have the backs of small businesses. Even so, it was shocking to hear that the Brillobox is folding. There is a lot of anger that something so important has been stolen from us by the stupidity of one powerful clown and the cowardice of those around him. Had Trump been here, Lou would have thrown the racist son of a bitch out before the end of the inaugural happy hour.
***
My first weeks in Pittsburgh felt something like a trust fall. School hadn’t yet started, and I wandered the hot August streets alone, popping into bars, talking to no-one, trying to intuit what the hell this little city was about, and waiting for something or someone to catch me. At the English Department orientation, Dan and I sat in folding chairs before professors who leaned in forced casual poses against tables and promised our cohort that through some grad school tooth fairy magic we would form the greatest friendships of our lives among the people in the room. I’ve never been much for school spirit, and I didn’t believe these dusty old men for a second. That’s not, I knew, how it worked. If I wanted to find my people, I’d have to find my own place.
I spent a lot of time on campus in those early months, or in my apartment, or squashed into awkward “house” parties in the small places other students lived. Through these limited means, I came to know a few people whose opinions I rated as valid, so when they told me that they’d heard good things about a new bar that had recently opened, I was eager to check it out.
To enter, I opened the second door in from the southeast corner of Penn Avenue and Main Street and stepped into a tiny black-walled entryway with announcement corkboards and a stool where a bundled bouncer might huddle with an esoteric paperback on a snowy night. Behind the absent bouncer, stairs led steeply up to the performance space. Across, a red, diamond-windowed door opened onto the bar. In those early days, before the decorators went wild, before the giant Grande Odalisque was hung upstairs, Brillo was a blank slate. It’s hard to remember what the place looked like on that first visit, the same way it’s hard to imagine that back then people smoked in there, or to recall what that block of Penn Avenue looked like before the Children’s Hospital.
The neighborhood was different in 2005. Lawrenceville’s real estate prices were a small fraction of what they were on the brink of becoming. This was before developers uprooted residents in the Strip District and Bakery Square to build glamorized dormitory resorts to cater to tech neophytes wanting to luxuriate in extended childhoods. This was before the artists and students were priced out of the cramped housing plots, a time when people still gutted their own properties, did their own tile work, drywall and backyard landscaping, and afterwards washed their hands and went out for a drink. It was still possible to pack a performance space as a late Tuesday night turned to Wednesday morning. Back then, more pedestrians walked the streets. Everyone mixed. Some of the walkers wore generations of the neighborhood’s history like a coat; some, like me, were new to the city, wide-eyed with discovery while trying to remain mindful that we had welcomed ourselves into someone’s home.
Brillo’s neighborhood lay just beyond the reaches of the constrained triangle of Squirrel Hill, Shadyside and Bloomfield that the English Department’s new student orientation guides introduced and promoted. I did not have a car and was developing a walker’s intimacy with the city, so I knew well the Bloomfield span of Liberty Avenue between my apartment building and dollar beer night at the BBT. But to that point I rarely crossed the Foodland intersection to Main Street, and I hadn’t found a bar that I really liked. But I could feel something in the air. I had begun to understand that somewhere in this city my people did exist. I could sense them out there, working, partying, loving each other. I would find them. After my first few claustrophobic months in the city, I was beginning to break through, coming to an understanding of how expansive and free my new world in Pittsburgh could be.
***
My most “official” Brillobox role was as one of an alternating cast of quizmasters for the weekly trivia night. Every Wednesday night, golden-voiced Dave Mansueto cranked a catchy playlist to 11 and performed an emcee act that would easily outcharm the most satiny game show host. In 2006, Brillo provided the only bar trivia in the city, and the downstairs was always packed elbow-to-elbow for our irreverent version of a British pub quiz. The top three teams won prizes, and ties were resolved with arm-wrestling matches that were taken so seriously that a few years in someone was seriously injured, the arm-wrestling was nixed, and from then on Dave and his quizmasters came up with a different solution every time there was a tie. We held dance-offs, a-capella sing-offs, joke-telling contests. Quiz was rarely finished before 11:30 at night, and spirits were always high, but I remember one October Wednesday when things continued well beyond midnight.
Anticipating Halloween, some patrons wore masks. So many of us sang along with Rod Stewart’s “Young Turks” that when the chorus rolled around Dave slid the master volume down to catch a bar full of voices naked in the air and, behind the bar, Brian hilariously toggled the dimmers to strobe the lights. That night, three teams tied for first place, and from somewhere the idea arose to settle the situation with a race around the block. The winning teams and spectators poured out into the night. Independent verifiers were sent to distant streetcorners and alley entrances to prohibit contestants from attempting a shortcut.
I stationed myself across from the abandoned convenience store that would later become Hospital Corner and waited for the race to start. A loud cheer rose above Lawrenceville and three runners appeared at the top of the hill in streetlight silhouette, their footfalls furious as racehorses’. The first two were grown men, screaming taunts and elbows at each other as they approached, their voices cracked with strain and laughter. I gestured them around the corner like an officious airline marshal, but as the leader negotiated the turn, his feet skidded on the stony ground. He fell in a twisty tumble and his flailing legs entwined with those of the man hot on his heels. The second man went down atop the first and they lay in the street, laughing and bleeding over each other while the third runner, a slight girl in her twenties, skipped gracefully over them and up the street to claim her prize. The fallen racers were inseparable the rest of the night, clinking glasses and slapping gravelly palms while Mansueto played the hits.
By the time I found the Brillobox, I thought I knew what bars were all about. In my West Virginia hometown, we had the Church Key Pub and the Jabberwock, and I snuck into these as an underage kid to idolize truly terrible local bands. After college, I lived for a year above a place called the Southern Inn in Lexington, Virginia. The Southern Inn had a shiny oak bar, a cockney barkeep from London and bluegrass trios on the weekends. In New York, I had the Alibi around the corner, the bar on St. Marks where my friends and I gathered every Tuesday, the place on 4th street where I went after work to write my novels, the Rififi on 11th where a dynamite girl name Lindsey worked behind the stick, and a different new must-see venue to explore each weekend. I had worked up certain expectations about bars.
Most bars age as predictably as a drunk. They surrender to the multitude of liars, thieves and scoundrels that the world incessantly throws their way. They gradually dim their lights and grow cynical. They stop believing in fun, learn to despise newcomers, eventually limit their provisions to beer and shots. Eventually, their patrons sit two stools away from one another and cast violent glares at the crack of light each time the door opens. As a drunk myself, I understand how inevitable this descent into gloomy isolation can feel, and though I am happy to report that there is redemption available to those who bottom out, I also admit to being baffled by anyone able to freeze the freefall in midair, when things are still joyful. It always seemed to me that it would be easier to bring oneself to a halt on a vertical waterslide greased with Crisco.
The Brillobox never succumbed. It never turned into a dive. But it wasn’t obnoxious or pretentious, either. From its first day to its last, it remained a creative force. Despite entertaining their fair measure of liars, thieves and scoundrels, Lou and his team never crossed the line from harried to bitter. Sure, Lou enjoyed the adrenaline rush of a good fight. He reveled in the occasional opportunity to throw out a bad drunk – and why not? What good is Tae Kwon Do if you never get to use it? But these scattered moments purified and energized the place, never stained or dispirited it.
Brian O’Korn, the trained lawyer who found more to love in serving drinks, regularly brought in homemade vats of infused vodkas until one corner of the bar before the mirror-glass looked like a mad laboratory of specimens in formaldehyde. He kept the liquor bottles numbered and allowed a game customer to pick three numbers at random, implicitly agreeing to test-drive whatever cocktail Brian threw together like an iron chef. A more serious cocktail menu held Brian’s refined concoctions: specialty toddies, Manhattans and Bloody Marys served with a familiar, mischievous laugh.
The bar had a hell-with-it, give it a shot attitude. The friends I met in the early days at Brillo were smart, creative people, bursting at the seams with ideas: bands, art projects, magazines, co-ops, campaigns, small businesses, fashion lines, films. We wanted to make so many things. Often, our ideas never got off the ground. In love with our own schemes, we massaged them right out of existence. Brillo did better. They encouraged us to stop thinking, talking and dreaming. Get off your ass and do the thing you want to do. The worst that can happen is you embarrass yourself, which, face it, will be funny for all of us. Grow up in public.
This is about what you’d expect from a bar run by a guy dedicating prime years of his life to making an urban bigfoot movie. Brillo understood that community-building is egoless work. Wisely, Lou allowed his patrons to be part of shaping the place. He listened to our ideas and lent people his platform.
Letting the patrons try things, even ridiculous things, had a remarkable effect. The lives of those of us invested in the bar began to expand. If I walked in and saw my friend talking to someone I didn’t know, I could expect that stranger may well be a new friend or collaborator. The mind-boggling drummer with famous construction skills. The hilarious filmmaker and activist. The stylish designer with a strange social genius. The heartbreaking poet rumored to have once been a standout athlete. The visionary DJ who worked in the movies and seemed to have known every celebrity worth meeting. We had all come up differently and traveled different paths to the same Brillobox evening, but if only for the length of a drink and a conversation, we became larger people, able to look around ourselves and feel more pride in what we shared together than the ideas we dreamt up alone.
Nudged by this new awakening of community, many of us began to find traction where we had floundered before. Real bands, art projects, magazines, co-ops, campaigns, small businesses, fashion lines and films began to sprout. And every time they did, Brillo provided a space where they could be shared and promoted. Meanwhile, empowered by Brillo’s walls, ceiling and stage, entire communities were elevated during and around dance parties that developed their individual identities, concepts and legends.
Obama was elected, the Steelers and Penguins had good years, and for a while we were the City of Champions again. I’d never lived in a city where everybody watches sports before, but here few people turned up their nose on Sunday afternoons. Everyone here loved a high five. I was gathered with friends in the back table one night when Sharon Needles came in with her entourage, fresh off her win on Ru-Paul’s Drag Race. Everyone knew her – Brillo was one space where she had spread her wings – and had watched the show in its entirety, cheering her on every week. As a happy crowd swarmed her, I remembered the night in 2009 when Santonio made that catch in the corner of the end zone, the Steelers won the Super Bowl and they had to shut down Liberty Avenue.
***
There is a magic feeling that happens during a night out, whether at a rock show, a dance party or just drinks with friends. You look around and realize that the spaceship you are riding is so much larger than yourself, and man, it is moving! It’s a giddy feeling, a feeling of letting go, possibility and gratitude, a hold-hands-and-hold-tight-because-here-we-go! feeling. Buddhists and psychedelics talk about surrender of the ego. It’s the point when the night opens up and takes us in. The Brillobox was a good place to feel this thing.
And then we’d show up again the next day. There was something essential every night. The starving artist veggie dinners, the sweet jams nights, the comedy nights, the literary nights, the bands stopping overnight between Chicago and DC. Where else would you watch the presidential debate? The Penguins playoff game? We couldn’t miss any of it. As long as we didn’t screw this up, we’d never be alone again. So, because we had to go back and show our faces, we had to learn to be responsible as well as ecstatic.
Above all, the Brillobox was a safe place for overgrown children to learn to be grown-ups. Spilling drinks and learning limits, it was a place to push against personal boundaries, artistic boundaries, matters of taste. It provided occasion for us to witness the impact of our actions upon our brothers and sisters. Lubricated with alcohol, people make all kinds of stupid decisions and mistakes. Here was a place for us to learn things that normal people figured out years younger.
If we got drunk and walked out on our tab, we had to answer for the fact that we had shorted people we liked and cared about. We had to accept that they felt hurt and disrespected. We had to handle the consequences of our own privilege, blindness and selfishness. The same applied if we made a bad joke or an inappropriate flirt. Simultaneously, we had to determine when to stand up to a friend when his behavior crossed a line. We needed to stake out ground, to make clear decisions about who we were and who we wanted to be.
It was harder, more nuanced work than we’d ever expected it to be, but when people scoffed at us – people who’d always followed the rules and took other people’s word for what’s right and wrong – when these people said better late than never, we took solace in our art. For most people, the introspection and self-correction necessary to be an artist is prohibitively hard. In some ways, more complex work was carried out at the Brillobox than at the grad school where I spent my days. It’s certainly more profound than the work they’re doing today in those glamorized dorms, occupied by laborers for a tech industry that’s tragically lacking in self-awareness and responsibility.
As Brillo welcomed our sorry selves back each day, it allowed us to believe that we were right to feel encouraged. It was okay to believe in ourselves and the mad, often internal, work we were doing. Brillo fed the message that being an artist is hard on every level, but if you keep working you will become a better person, your art will get better, you will become a better friend, a more thoughtful lover, a more engaged community member, a more supportive ally, a better voter.
And that is ultimately the greatest loss to a society that desperately needs places like the Brillobox. These places do not just pop up. They are not a dime a dozen. Once in a generation a place comes along that can welcomingly, yet sternly, nurture what is best in its patrons. There is something mystical, greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts about these places. The way some gatherings of people are a crowd, and others are a family.
In a crowd people don’t listen. They stake out their ground, entrench and face off. A family member tells us where we’re wrong, but encourages us to change and get better.
We say that a conversation is something that is “carried on.” Like luggage, it is hauled along with us, taken from place to place. It emerges and comes to life in spaces, in rooms. Each room has its own character, brings its own spirit to the words used, its tints to the ideas. As new conversations arise and ancient conversations shift in our country, we need spaces to carry them. Real, physical spaces where real, flawed, breathing, sweating, vulnerable bodies live, not virtual, algorithmic voids. When I imagine such a space, I see a room with red Naugahyde booths, outsized local art, schmaltzy knickknacks dancing with lovingly personal paintings, tree branches springing surprisingly from an interior wall, changing with the seasons.
Brillobox felt like a vintage store, a community theater, a high school dance, a loved one’s living room on a holiday. It was a place to breathe and talk and reunite. And finally leave, thinking thank god. Thank god I have created a life that brings me to such places, with such people.
A couple of days before Christmas in 2018, members of the band Midnight Snake returned to Pittsburgh for a reunion show at the Brillobox. Seemingly everyone from the bar’s early days showed up. Old friends whose lives had taken them across the country had returned to Pittsburgh for the holidays and once again we came together, forming a single sweaty mass that vibrated while, over and over, the jam took its rhythmic, circling hold and lifted us into the electric air. That lost, alone egomaniac pacing circles and ranting at the dark in Gooskis was long gone. People like Lou and places like Brillo had changed all of that.
After the set, no one wanted to leave. Here were familiar faces we’d not seen in years. We had shared important time together. Years of neighborly living. The madness of music. Loves and ended loves and addictions and losses and houses and families. All of that knowledge and love: because of this space. That giant laughing Santa head on the wall, the fake snow on the branches, the Krampus, the giftwrap, the train, the warm light, the 1:00 a.m. smokers with ears still buzzing, gesticulating in silent conversation on the sidewalk outside the frosty garage door.
Brendan Kerr lives in Polish Hill. He works at Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank and teaches fiction writing at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. His fiction has won prizes with Glimmer Train and Wordstock Press. His most recent work is the novella Gandy.
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