When I visited Dublin in 2008, I learned of something called the James Joyce Walking Tour, a casual stroll that follows the journey of Stephen Dedalus, the young hero of Joyce's Ulysses, as he wanders about The Pale. I had not read Ulysses, so when taking the portion of tour that I took, the landmarks lacked any literary significance. But when I returned to the States, I was inspired by my trek through Dublin to visit the local library and check out a copy of Ulysses. It seemed only right to read this great novel with the added insight of having actually visited its landmarks.
The other day I was going through my Facebook photos when I came across this picture of myself in Dublin next to the statue of James Joyce. That's when it hit me ... if taking just a portion of The James Joyce Walking Tour inspired me to slog through Ulysses, perhaps a similar walking tour of Emporia, Kansas, the setting of Pitch, would inspire others to read my book.
It just so happens that I have a number of photos of Emporia that I took in 1994, about a month before I got sober. I had taken them on a Friday, my day off at the time. I was drinking that day and feeling nostalgic, so I went out and purchased a disposable "widescreen" camera to document my favorite landmarks of the town, places where many "meaningful" events of my life had occurred. In hindsight, none of the events were of interest to anyone but me, but when I drank I tended to over-romanticize my past, the way 20-something male writers only write about the women they have bedded (and 20something women only write about the men who have cheated).
Anyway, I ramble. Here, without further adieu, all it's glory, is the official Matthew Krause Pitch Walking Tour of the historic borough known as Emporia, Kansas.
You've been warned ...
The Towers
Our tour begins at the Towers Complex, a dormitory on the Emporia State Campus that was referred to as "Twin Towers" by students when I was in school (only now, looking at a campus map, do I realize that "Twin" is not part of its official name). In the novel Pitch, our young narrator, Travis Lembeau, lives on 4th Floor North (the tower on the right in this picture) in the northwest corner next to the fire escape (which was my room when I lived there in 1984-85).
A bit of history: 4th North was notorious for housing the rowdiest group of boys each school year. We trashed our lounge nightly, crawled out the south window to play handball on the roof above the lobby (that section of roof between the two towers), vandalized the women's floors upstairs, and left the fire escapes littered with hundreds of beer cans. It got to be a tradition for incoming freshmen: if you lived on 4th North, you had a reputation for cretinism to uphold. Rumor has it that the reason 4th North was switched from a men's floor to a women's floor in the mid 1980s was because each incoming crop of 4th North men became progressively harder to control. I'm not sure if that was the case, but at some point the gender of the floor did change, and in fact, in 1988, the time my character Travis lives on 4th North, I believe the floor had already switched to female. That is an inaccuracy in my novel with which you will have to contend.
A bit of history: 4th North was notorious for housing the rowdiest group of boys each school year. We trashed our lounge nightly, crawled out the south window to play handball on the roof above the lobby (that section of roof between the two towers), vandalized the women's floors upstairs, and left the fire escapes littered with hundreds of beer cans. It got to be a tradition for incoming freshmen: if you lived on 4th North, you had a reputation for cretinism to uphold. Rumor has it that the reason 4th North was switched from a men's floor to a women's floor in the mid 1980s was because each incoming crop of 4th North men became progressively harder to control. I'm not sure if that was the case, but at some point the gender of the floor did change, and in fact, in 1988, the time my character Travis lives on 4th North, I believe the floor had already switched to female. That is an inaccuracy in my novel with which you will have to contend.
The Party House
Travis meets Melanie Claypool, the woman he will eventually marry, at a party held at a fraternity house on the corner of 15th (I think) and Highland, catty-corner from the Towers Complex parking lot. This house had a notoriety on par with 4th North when I was in school, and during my first week of classes at ESU, I meandered over to this place for a kegger that quickly got out of control. I stood on the porch watching people dance in the street pictured above, just as Travis does in the novel, and like most angst-ridden 19-year-olds, I contemplated the emptiness of my existence.
I am not sure when the house was torn down, but it was some time before 1994 when this photo was taken (note, it is a vacant lot). I recently looked on a map and saw that 15th no longer goes east past Highland (that section of road to the lower left of the frame). Today, that road is a driveway into the Sauder Alumni Center. But when I was a reckless youth, 15th led to a row of houses where cheap apartments could be rented, and many a party was held along that row. At least I think it was 15th ... I could be totally wrong about this. God, growing old and stuff ...
I am not sure when the house was torn down, but it was some time before 1994 when this photo was taken (note, it is a vacant lot). I recently looked on a map and saw that 15th no longer goes east past Highland (that section of road to the lower left of the frame). Today, that road is a driveway into the Sauder Alumni Center. But when I was a reckless youth, 15th led to a row of houses where cheap apartments could be rented, and many a party was held along that row. At least I think it was 15th ... I could be totally wrong about this. God, growing old and stuff ...
Silent Joe
In the novel, Travis rises early one morning and takes a jog, heading west along 15th and then cutting north along Wooster Drive to jog past Trussler and Singular Hall. The building on the right in the photo is Trussler, I believe (it could be Singular, for all I know). That road on the right that is lined with the row of trees is indeed Wooster. The road in the foreground that runs along the bottom of the screen is 15th, and that small structure you see beyond the SPEED LIMIT 15 sign is Silent Joe.
Silent Joe is a bell tower, so named because the bell was only rung when the ESU Hornets football team won a game. I'm not saying the team was bad because I didn't follow football at the time (and I'm too lazy to dig out my old yearbooks from the garage). All I know is that Silent Joe did not ring often when I was there, and whenever the team did win, the guys made jokes and said, "How 'bout then Horny-Nuts?"
Another legend of Silent Joe has to do with that space back in the bushes on the right side. Apparently, this was supposed to be a great spot for late-night extracurricular activities when the weather cooperated. Rumor has it that many a couple snuggled in those bushes for a tryst after the bars closed, more for the adventure of it than anything else. Was I ever in on a late-night bounce alongside Silent Joe? Hey, I'm a married man; I have no sins to confess.
Wooster Lake
More of a pond than a lake, this small body of water in the center of campus was named for Lyman Wooster, former biology/geology teacher at Emporia State back when it was called the Kansas State Normal School. You can see my Towers dorm room in this photo, or the room above it anyway. The North Tower is the far tower, and I lived on the farthest corner of the western face. The top floor is the eighth, so count down and you will see that my room is blocked by the tip of a tree.
The most interesting thing I can say about Wooster Lake is that at the end of the school year, students dumped their aquariums into it, and the subsequent fall you could see giant goldfish gliding about just below the surface. The other interesting thing has to do with Wooster Bridge, from which this photo was taken. Read on, Macduff!
Wooster Bridge
Legend has it that if you kiss someone on Wooster Bridge at midnight, you will marry that person. Travis and Melanie kiss on this bridge ... not sure if it's midnight. I tried to kiss a number of girls at midnight on that bridge but only succeeded with one. She recently celebrated 25 years of marriage to another guy (also a friend of mine), so I guess the legend is bullshit.
Plumb Hall
This is not the front facade of Plumb Hall but rather the back entrance at the northeast corner. It was the means by which I entered this building, which was sort of my home away from home. The English Department is on the 4th floor, and I did a couple of plays in Albert Taylor Hall on the main level. Not much to say about this photo other than the fact that I rode my mountain bike down this row of stairs quite often, just to annoy the other students.
Bruffs/Night Movies/The Attic/Bruffs again
Silent Joe is a bell tower, so named because the bell was only rung when the ESU Hornets football team won a game. I'm not saying the team was bad because I didn't follow football at the time (and I'm too lazy to dig out my old yearbooks from the garage). All I know is that Silent Joe did not ring often when I was there, and whenever the team did win, the guys made jokes and said, "How 'bout then Horny-Nuts?"
Another legend of Silent Joe has to do with that space back in the bushes on the right side. Apparently, this was supposed to be a great spot for late-night extracurricular activities when the weather cooperated. Rumor has it that many a couple snuggled in those bushes for a tryst after the bars closed, more for the adventure of it than anything else. Was I ever in on a late-night bounce alongside Silent Joe? Hey, I'm a married man; I have no sins to confess.
Wooster Lake
More of a pond than a lake, this small body of water in the center of campus was named for Lyman Wooster, former biology/geology teacher at Emporia State back when it was called the Kansas State Normal School. You can see my Towers dorm room in this photo, or the room above it anyway. The North Tower is the far tower, and I lived on the farthest corner of the western face. The top floor is the eighth, so count down and you will see that my room is blocked by the tip of a tree.
The most interesting thing I can say about Wooster Lake is that at the end of the school year, students dumped their aquariums into it, and the subsequent fall you could see giant goldfish gliding about just below the surface. The other interesting thing has to do with Wooster Bridge, from which this photo was taken. Read on, Macduff!
Wooster Bridge
Legend has it that if you kiss someone on Wooster Bridge at midnight, you will marry that person. Travis and Melanie kiss on this bridge ... not sure if it's midnight. I tried to kiss a number of girls at midnight on that bridge but only succeeded with one. She recently celebrated 25 years of marriage to another guy (also a friend of mine), so I guess the legend is bullshit.
This is not the front facade of Plumb Hall but rather the back entrance at the northeast corner. It was the means by which I entered this building, which was sort of my home away from home. The English Department is on the 4th floor, and I did a couple of plays in Albert Taylor Hall on the main level. Not much to say about this photo other than the fact that I rode my mountain bike down this row of stairs quite often, just to annoy the other students.
Bruffs/Night Movies/The Attic/Bruffs again
It's a bloody tragedy that this building burned to the ground several years ago and is now nothing more than additional parking. When I was in college, this was one of three or four go-to places for the discerning 20something alcoholic. I enjoyed this place so much that I even set a small scene there in my novel, when Travis waits and watches baseball while Melanie attends an AA meeting further down the street.
Too many adventures here to mention. I drank too much beer, I fought too many men (and lost most of the time), I fondled too many women (and got slapped all of the time), I danced the white man shuffle so poorly that I became something of a joke to the patronage. But I did watch baseball here sometimes, and enjoyed their hamburgers, and drank their beer. I have this bizarre memory of trying to watch a game somewhere in 1993, and the sound system of the place was blasting loud grunge rock of the time by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, et al. I was crouched along next to the pinball machine, watching the game on a tiny TV suspended from the ceiling, and next to me, a rather large bearded man from the music department was playing pinball. He was clearly a voice major, for he sang in the most beautiful operatic tenor. What was he singing? Each and every song that was playing on the sound system.
Imagine, if you will, trying to watch a ball game while Luciano Pavorotti played pinball next to you singing "Even Flow" by Pearl Jam, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, "The Day I Tried To Live" by Soundgarden, or "Plush" by Stone Temple Pilots. Just close your mind and picture that a minute. I'll wait right here while you descend into madness. In fact, maybe I'll listen to some old Stone Temple Pilots on YouTube while I wait ...
Too many adventures here to mention. I drank too much beer, I fought too many men (and lost most of the time), I fondled too many women (and got slapped all of the time), I danced the white man shuffle so poorly that I became something of a joke to the patronage. But I did watch baseball here sometimes, and enjoyed their hamburgers, and drank their beer. I have this bizarre memory of trying to watch a game somewhere in 1993, and the sound system of the place was blasting loud grunge rock of the time by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, et al. I was crouched along next to the pinball machine, watching the game on a tiny TV suspended from the ceiling, and next to me, a rather large bearded man from the music department was playing pinball. He was clearly a voice major, for he sang in the most beautiful operatic tenor. What was he singing? Each and every song that was playing on the sound system.
Imagine, if you will, trying to watch a ball game while Luciano Pavorotti played pinball next to you singing "Even Flow" by Pearl Jam, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, "The Day I Tried To Live" by Soundgarden, or "Plush" by Stone Temple Pilots. Just close your mind and picture that a minute. I'll wait right here while you descend into madness. In fact, maybe I'll listen to some old Stone Temple Pilots on YouTube while I wait ...
The House On Exchange Street
I lived here. It was my whole world for many years. I did not start following sports until I had roommates who made me watch football here. The first Super Bowl I watched from start to finish was at this house (January 22, 1989, Super Bowl XXIII, Bengals 16, 49ers 20). My roommates and I used to sit in lawn chairs on that patch of roof next to the porch with our stereo cranked up playing KISS and old Van Halen. It was a good place to live, a good place to die. Thankfully, I never died.
And in the back yard was ...
And in the back yard was ...
The House Behind Exchange Street
My first ever apartment was in the basement of this house. You can see that weird angled structure on the left side of the brown house in the frame ... that was the stairwell to the basement. A few years later, I moved to the ground-level apartment. I parked a sporty 1983 Dodge Omni under that carport on the right. On warm spring days with summer closing in, I would sit on the porch on the left and drink beer with my friends. When a local vagrant came down the alley to fish in the dumpster for cans to cash in, I would give him all of my empties and a couple of beers to boot. My friends told me I wasn't doing him any favors, that I was just contributing to his alcoholism and his poverty.
Maybe I was.
I did a lot of writing here. Back in those days, I drank and I wrote, and on occasion I slept. The place was something of a dump, but it felt like the Taj Mahal to me. When I had a day off, I liked nothing better than going to the local mom'n'pop video store, renting a stack of VHS tapes, and spending the afternoon watching movies with my friends.
I had a lot of weird things happen here. I had a couple of break-ins, but all they ever stole was my first edition hardbound copy of The Dark Knight Rises. Later, a friend of mine told me she knew who had stolen this rare graphic novel, a guy she had been seeing who bragged about it, so one night when she was at his house she stole it back for me. The guy was later arrested when he was caught stealing a license plate since his own had expired.
As you can probably guess from this walking tour, nothing much happened in Emporia while I was there, at least not enough to write a book about. The crazy thing about fiction is we must take those moments that perhaps resonate only with ourselves and work them into a narrative context. As I said in the afterword of my novel, Emporia was magical to me when I first arrived. It was the first place I lived away from the town I grew up in, and thanks to some really fine instructors at ESU, I was exposed to a lot of culture I might have otherwise missed.
Today, I return to Emporia, and realize it is just a small town in Kansas, a fine town to be sure, but certainly not the Paris of the 1920s that I imagined it to be way back when. Still, like Abbie Hoffman's enigmatic Woodstock Nation, Emporia travels with me always.
One of my favorite instructors, Dr. Mel Storm, once told me that when I left Emporia for graduate school at Kansas State, it was one of the best things that could have ever happened for me. In hindsight, I realize he was correct. Nevertheless, at the time, leaving Emporia was almost as hard as putting down the drink. To punctuate my time there, I got a DUI the night before I moved my things north to Manhattan. It was as if a part of me wanted to sabotage the move.
In hindsight, I guess I didn't know how to leave Emporia. Just as I don't know how to end this walking tour. So I guess I should just pull the Band-Aid off and be done wi--
Maybe I was.
I did a lot of writing here. Back in those days, I drank and I wrote, and on occasion I slept. The place was something of a dump, but it felt like the Taj Mahal to me. When I had a day off, I liked nothing better than going to the local mom'n'pop video store, renting a stack of VHS tapes, and spending the afternoon watching movies with my friends.
I had a lot of weird things happen here. I had a couple of break-ins, but all they ever stole was my first edition hardbound copy of The Dark Knight Rises. Later, a friend of mine told me she knew who had stolen this rare graphic novel, a guy she had been seeing who bragged about it, so one night when she was at his house she stole it back for me. The guy was later arrested when he was caught stealing a license plate since his own had expired.
As you can probably guess from this walking tour, nothing much happened in Emporia while I was there, at least not enough to write a book about. The crazy thing about fiction is we must take those moments that perhaps resonate only with ourselves and work them into a narrative context. As I said in the afterword of my novel, Emporia was magical to me when I first arrived. It was the first place I lived away from the town I grew up in, and thanks to some really fine instructors at ESU, I was exposed to a lot of culture I might have otherwise missed.
Today, I return to Emporia, and realize it is just a small town in Kansas, a fine town to be sure, but certainly not the Paris of the 1920s that I imagined it to be way back when. Still, like Abbie Hoffman's enigmatic Woodstock Nation, Emporia travels with me always.
One of my favorite instructors, Dr. Mel Storm, once told me that when I left Emporia for graduate school at Kansas State, it was one of the best things that could have ever happened for me. In hindsight, I realize he was correct. Nevertheless, at the time, leaving Emporia was almost as hard as putting down the drink. To punctuate my time there, I got a DUI the night before I moved my things north to Manhattan. It was as if a part of me wanted to sabotage the move.
In hindsight, I guess I didn't know how to leave Emporia. Just as I don't know how to end this walking tour. So I guess I should just pull the Band-Aid off and be done wi--
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