What it means Two tales of a city (and a state) BY DAVID ANDREW STOLER

What I think should go in this space is an entire piece about RISD girls — those loft-loving metrosexuals make Providence what it is as much as the politicos and Portuguese. Only it would have to fall to someone else to write it — when I lived in Providence I wasn’t particularly sound at what some call the Romantic Arts, but I was especially poor at getting the attention of the punk-haired Loreleis whose paint-splattered Dickies and always-injured fingers set my heart a-pitter-pattering more than anyone.

Which, ultimately, might be for the best (he said, not really believing it). For when I think back to my time in Prov, writing for the Phoenix, what strikes me most — what I miss, what became a part of me — is instead something that much more informed who I am than who I did (beg pardon) ever could.

Because the time I would have spent at Babe’s On the Sunny Side with design majors trying to be cool was instead spent (often at Babe’s) with two people — bookends of my stay in PVD — who taught me as much about being a person — a writer, an adult — as much about being human — as any two people have. Two people who were in this city for a reason, chose Providence specifically for what it is, for that peculiar mix of small town intimacy and big city scale that we hear so much about and that allows for a very certain relationship with it and the people in it.

No, not RISD girls, not "How Great is the ____ Here," not a rehashing of Buddy or the Renaissance, though all those things are a part of it — as the 25 years of the Phoenix are a part of it, in a way — no, this is a coming of age story: I was lucky enough to do it in Providence, at the Phoenix. The two people combined to create a piece of me: through pinball, basketball, a lot of records — Providence and the Phoenix, two people involved in them, taught me how to live, write, be. They showed me what counts.

THE DJ

Forget Prospect Park, or Lincoln Park, or Cranston’s rugged coastline: beautiful things all, but the best view of Providence was revealed to me in the winter of 1993-4, a decade ago now. Do you remember Wendell "G." Clough? Wendell G. — this is about him — DJ’d what was then WBRU Night at the Strand, the Saturday night party in the city, always packed well beyond capacity, before recent events made that as scary as it is now.

The 2000-plus kids who poured into the Strand weekly remember Wendell leaning out from up in the balcony, leaning dangerously over the crowd below, screaming along with the Beastie Boys, Nirvana, New Order, the Farm, drinking liquor from the bottle, exhorting everyone to dance, to give it up to the weekend — giving a good party. He was an entertainer, people would line up to pop their heads in the DJ booth and give a request, slap him on the back, buy him an f’in’ beer.

And I’d be up there with him. I first got assigned ’BRU Night because I was an up-and-coming DJ at the station and most established DJs didn’t really want to spend their Saturday nights working, after all. First time I met Wendell he was just back from Mexico or Cancun or somewhere and had shaved his head, had a fat goatee, was packing black leather and some seriously illegal rum that just him offering me some made me turn green and have to head for the lav. He was scary.

But it wasn’t like I needed to keep Saturday nights reserved for dates or anything — the Strand was loud, fun, and I had the purpose there that I didn’t wallflowering in clubs or parties. I kept going back. Every week. Wendell and I eventually became a team there, the night grew, kept growing, and then Wendell and I pretty much became a team everywhere else too:

We spent the summer in his blue Saturn, touring the Ocean State during what is clearly its most welcoming time, in search of the best chili cheese fries, the best fried smelts, fried clams, clam cakes, clam chowder, anything fried or with clams in any part of it — Smithfield, Woonsocket, Little Compton, West Warwick, Point Judith, and Galilee — we ate hot wieners at every possible counter, sliders on the Miracle Mile, a ton of raw seafood washed down with tequila; Wendell knew someplace with the best something in every town, and he also knew the guy working there. He played the car stereo too loud, the AC was too cold, wind in the open window too strong, he probably shouldn’t have been driving after that many drinks, I didn’t care, I was drunk too and the sun was beautiful and so was the State.

And when winter came, too fast, and Rhode Island turned hard again, the clubs grew dark and warm, weeknights moved from the seafood platter at the Sandbar to Scotch at the Providence Bookstore Café or pinball at Babyhead (remember?) or darts in EP dives with $2 pitchers of Bud. I wasn’t very good at darts, but Wendell was, he was good at everything, especially drinking, and especially chatting up the tired women working behind the bars.

But also — and here’s the key — but also at chatting up not just the tired women working the bars, but also the tired men hanging out there, the college kids at Babe’s, the prepsters at Goff’s, the P-Bruins fans at Trinity, the soured bouncers at the Living Room and Nick-a-Nee’s. He had a history with them, with the city, they were glad to see each other. There were free drinks at the Custom House and chat about McCoy everywhere and it was like every bar or restaurant was Cheers and Wendell wasn’t Norm so much as Sammy himself without the soda water and before the Whoopi business ruined it all.

Blue collar, white collar, no collar, girl or boy, old or young, you sat at Wendell’s table, Wendell wanted you there, it didn’t matter if the talk was Taco Bell or The Bell Curve, he was equally excited, and to a shy kid who couldn’t talk to anybody, this was a big deal: it was about not being full of yourself, being full of pretense, being cooler than, hipper than, more in than, more educated than. Talk to everybody; listen to everybody — Wendell taught me this: it’s the only way to learn anything, especially a city, to be a part of anything, especially a city, to find out what’s good, what’s fun, what’s real about being a person; it was, in fact, the only way to be a person, to live anywhere, to live.

This is the way you learn a state — music, car, the desire to push outward from a small world and see everything there is. The best of everything. Wendell’s record and CD collection was . . . jesus . . . forget trying to help that guy move apartments, and he always knew what should be on, often surprising me, talking about what Paul Weller, Public Enemy, Wire, the Cramps meant, all while hitting farmers’ markets in North Kingston in search of the perfect ear of white corn.

And driving down 95S that winter — we had spent the day in Boston, had driven up on Route 1 because that was the only way to do it — the sun was coming down, it was cold, gray, we were just out of Pawtucket’s S curve — My Bloody Valentine’s "Loveless" was on the CD player, had just started — and we were lifting up on that raised part of the highway before the mills, the train station — and if you drove along there right now this wouldn’t be seen, couldn’t be seen, because there’s something else there now, in the way of this — but as we lifted up above Providence, the gray winter light changed. Something happened.

Sun coming down. Music on the stereo maybe even the most perfect thing ever. They came together then in the cold day — Wendell and I were tired, had stopped chatting, were just driving, listening, looking, and the sun outside the car windows fell purple and clean off the skyscrapers of Downcity — things got bright, lit up like after-rain, we were driving through it, the city was someplace I was about to become, I didn’t know it yet, the light was incredibly clear, fading, it was getting darker but the sun threw itself — like a lover, really — onto the Hospital Trust Building, the Fleet Building, the new Westin, onto the gleam there, reflected off them, off the river, off the new park being built below, off College Hill and the capitol’s dome and Roger Williams in the distance, the white steeples of the churches, the First Baptist, the gray trees and brick streets and brick RISD buildings, the sharp slopes all drawn in red, purple, orange — and with the music this sight took me, lifted me, drew me out of the car and into it in the silence and music — I felt a rush and a pang in my chest — I was overcome — by the beauty of the time, my friendship, the loss of the summer and the depth of the winter, time in general, movement — but more importantly — most importantly — simply by the beauty of this city. Of Providence. I felt like it was calling me. Showing itself to me for the first time for what it could be.

It became clear to me then — consciously clear — that Providence was a city like few others. The river winding, College Hill rising steeply behind the State House, Smith Hill’s gentle curve — each neighborhood and history reflecting the sun. That Downcity was somewhere I wanted to be, that it was somewhere people were going to want to be: it was emerging, and as the river was finally unbound by the Crawford Street Bridge — as it glistened again and in new, exciting ways — I felt that I too was coming out of something — the slumber of childhood, shyness, adolescence — that Wendell that summer had really shown me, not only the best everything there, but how to search for it, look for it — had shown me how to talk, listen, not simply watch and think. He forced me to be in the city as the light was forcing me to see it — they were both forcing me to act, to interact — with every conversation at every diner, with every drunk clubgoer and tired account exec, Wendell had forced me to learn to dive in.

No more living in your head — for an intellectual, quiet — shy — kid from upstate NY — Providence didn’t eat me alive when I dove into it, yet there was something to dive into. No — it allowed me to dive in in a way few places might have.

And it demanded questions — what’s real about this city? What’s important? About this state? What’s there under the politics and the Ital. food, the Colonial houses and, yes, RISD girls? And I didn’t know it then — it would take two more years to figure this out — but it also led me to one of the many ways of starting the long and constantly evolving and sort of Heisenberg-ily momentary process of answering those questions: no, not just sitting in bars listening and talking, though that’s a part of it:

I was a poet at the time, another quiet art, and one also disconnected from the Providence that needed listening to. The switch: a reluctant one, difficult at times — also freeing — came in the form of the single-fold newsprint Wendell and I scoured each week in search of what was. The NewPaper. The Phoenix.

THE EDITOR

The Phoenix, what it was doing, it seemed to me, was not simply a daily hashing out of the facts — it got into it. With 15 years of being in fact Downcity, of knowing what was going on where and in every field — not just music but politics and sports and, more, people people people — it continually tapped into the pulse of the city in a way throwing a party, e.g., never could.

So I tried writing for it. Was bad at it. Really bad. Luckily, there was someone there with enough patience to guide me through both my naïve beginnings and my cranky journalist adolescence: Jody Ericson, then news editor at the Phoenix, took me in, challenged me again and again: Do this, do it again, do it differently, do it better.

And though Providence’s willingness to cultivate — look at the arts scene, the restaurant scene, for examples — is something great and also specific to it, this isn’t about Jody, or about my other great mentor in that way, Gale Nelson of the Brown Creative Writing Program — they were the books between the bookends.

No, tick-tick, years pass — this was smack in the middle of the "Renaissance," a wicked time to be in Rhode Island: food, people, art, grit — colliding all over the place, the Phoenix forcing me into it all, into figuring out how it all connected, the Phoenix in fact drawing a line through the middle of it, from La Prov’s dark, punky days through the ugly ’80s, the greedy ’90s, into networktelevisiondreamarama that then came. The history of the Phoenix was the history of the city, and writing there was both being part of it and noting it for time. What I first saw that one day riding with Wendell G. — the beauty of the city calling to me — I then got to experience on a daily basis, riding to 150 Chestnut Street, then driving around and talking with people. Just talking. Writing it down.

And therein the other bookend: Lou Papineau, the Phoenix’s managing editor and a guy who has been there almost since its NewPaper beginnings. He is the line through the Phoenix, as it is through the city.

Though, like an Anti-Wendell, when I first met Lou his quiet seriousness scared me shitless, we slowly began to develop a relationship that was every bit as informative as that first. A quiet man, a family man, his style was the dead-opposite of Wendell’s: instead of screaming at the top of his lungs the chorus to "She Sells Sanctuary" ("Sanctuary, yeah!"), Lou’s biggest endorsement was a bit more subdued:

"Did you get the new Beth Orton?" he would say, but what it meant was, "Get the new Beth Orton right now, fool, I can’t get it off repeat in my CD player or in my head."

Lou had seen it all in Providence, and he taught me to look at the city with a deeper perspective, a more critical eye, was a great editor, blah blah blah, but in the winter of ’98 did something more incisive, more important than just being a really good boss. During that previous tick-tick things in my own life had taken some funny turns — we’ll call it a dark period, how about — a long breakup, some bad choices — things of which my mother wouldn’t necessarily be entirely proud, if she knew — etc. Lou, who I knew primarily as a work-friend, noticed, and did the two things any real friend would do: first, he didn’t say anything about anything. Second, he invited me to play ball.

Weekly, in a dark gym set under the highway in Olneyville, a collection of the motleyest hoopers I think in history ever would sprain knees, play toreador zone D, throw up ridiculous threes every time down the court — would clank and clank and clank off what must be the stiffest rims in the city — rims, I swear this is the reason I sucked so bad there, that are 10-and a-half feet from the ground.

It was freezing out, the air of the gym like paint, heavy, and we’d sweat for a couple of hours — miserable hours, I promise, but something solid and true every week after work that didn’t have to do with girls, drugs, deeper questions of what why when. We’d sit there me and Lou on the bleachers and not mention any of those things, then we’d play — and those two hours would disappear, they’d be gone, they’d have passed quickly in a winter that was one long insomniac night; I’d be tired, sweaty, get in my car and drive forever in the late dark listening loud to music Lou had probably given me and get home and shower and fall asleep. It was the only time, during that time, that time would pass.

And then, like a friend, when shit got really bad, Lou would look at me and I wouldn’t have said anything at all but in the middle of the chaotic and deadliney day he’d look at me and say, "Beer?" And we’d walk over to Trinity. And would talk about it.

Does this make sense, what this meant? First of all, think about your boss doing that. Respecting you enough to do it. Or that this was a man, doing this — a man who worked hard, worked quiet, believed in things, music, art, books, movies — he loved the Celtics and had season tix to Friars games forever and had brought the Phoenix from wee-ism into an institution itself, had seen a lot of shit, a lot of young punk writers come in and out of the NewPaper, a lot of editors, interns, people — had definitely earned the right at that point to let angsty-twentysomethings work through their shit from a distance. "I remember whens" would have been totally acceptable — "kids these days" annoying but fine too.

But not fine for Lou. Because that’s not — not — what people are supposed to do. People are supposed to do better than that, and many don’t, but think about it — think about how we want to be? How we imagine ourselves? How we want to imagine ourselves? And isn’t that what mentors do? What real men and women do?

That is, in fact, what Lou did, in those dark nights in Olneyville, in the summer after, the winter after, the summer after again — and then again as I prepared to leave the Phoenix, as I prepared to leave the first city I truly loved, a city I had gotten to be a part of as much as Wendell G. had: Providence. It’s what Wendell did too, and ultimately it was what Providence did — it is what that city means — what the Phoenix means, but especially Providence.

Because call this piece "The Best Thing About Rhode Island" and for me it wasn’t RISD girls, or the A&W out in Johnston, or the scent of sea and summer sweat out in Fox Point in July, basketball fat in my hands and light fat in my head.

No, it’s that Rhode Island allows for two people like Wendell G. and Lou Papineau to exist in the way that they do, take time, do what they did: teach me to be a person, teach me what people do: not sit watching a city, living in a small circular world of people and things — a world of disparate community, of bumping into people walking in the street, or getting into fistfights in bars, or not really giving a shit, not helping, etc. No, what people do is they enter cities, learn them, love them. People know their FedEx guy, run into him at bars, share a beer — same with their stylists, their car dealer, the woman at the bank, the woman at Olga’s, at Ocean Coffee Roasters — they see each other at Nobody’s, at hockey games, at Fellini’s, at the Arcade. Biggest Little, you’ve heard it a million times, small-town-big-city, the repetition is annoying but it’s true: People do that in Providence better than anywhere else I’ve been — whether they’re DJs or editors or the mayor or whatever — Providence is the least pretentious place I know, and there, quietly, what people do is they do better.

When I left, I knew people like Wendell knew people — I knew the other people who were like Wendell, too — and I knew someone in every bar, bumped into someone every night out, every lunch and dinner. And Wendell left Providence, too, before I did, moved on to Portland, Maine, where the last time I saw him he was being a part of Portland in the same exact way, learning its redbrick factories and wharves, its scallopers and lobstermen and its computer guys and, yes, barmaids.

I don’t hear from Wendell much lately — he did his job by me, hopefully I did something by him, too — and shortly after he moved up the coast I moved down it. Every time I hear My Bloody Valentine, though, he’s here, we’re there — what he did for me — the potential of the city on that day, what it could do, is.

Lou is putting together this 25th anniversary issue, is stressed out of his gourd right now, and this piece too is late, not helping, he doesn’t even know if I’ll get it done, it’s too long, what it looks like, where’ll it go, what it’s about. What he’s doing is serving as witness, raising his kids, taking care of his friends. Making sure that the equation stays the same, while changing every day: that the words Phoenix and Providence equal each other.

I e-mail Lou a few times a year, usually for advice on a piece or on something totally non-journalistic, often in a panic: "Lou, what the fuck am I supposed to do about this?" Maybe I taunt him about the Sox. Or ask him about a CD.

He breaks it down for me, slow and clear, this four years after I left. Lets me know what’s going on with the paper, with the people there (who I miss — the Phoenix, the people there, the city — they are of me, and I them — this is what happens when you grow somewhere — I miss you all). And at the end of the last update from him, these words, reminding me of what Providence did — how it met the potential I saw on that day with Wendell:

"By the way," he wrote. "Olneyville starts up next week. You in?"

David Andrew Stoler was a New York Times Fellow from 2000-2002. He currently lives, writes, and teaches in New York City. He can be reached at david_stoler@hotmail.com