PRESSURE PRESS ARCHIVE

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH RON ANDROLA 10/15/94 7 a.m. - 4 p.m. I was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania, on August 7th, 1954 to a first-generation American Syrian girl & second-generation American Italian guy just out of the Marine Corps. Nine months later, after staying in New Castle with my mother's mother, my dad bought a house in Ellport, Pennsylvania & we moved there, about 12 miles away. He landed a job at the B. & W. steel-mill. His parents also lived in Ellport. Ellport's population was about one thousand people all immersed in the American Dream of that time, & was purely Western Pennsylvania. It was the hey-day of steel-mills & hopeful futures. I was 2 when my sister Kathi was born. I know I lived a happy, joyous childhood, sheltered probably too much by an over-protective, full-of-love mother. I existed in two worlds tho: the Syrian & the Italian. I was the first-born male in America on my grandmother's side, & to the Islamic way of things that made me special. My Syrian grandfather was Sheik Sleman Abda-Rabbigh from Sophita, Burge, Syria. He was a religious leader in the community & his family pulled much weight. He married Mariam Omar in the early 1900's, brought her to America where she bore him two boys, Albert & Joseph, & then she died, so according to Islamic laws he traveled back to Syria to marry Mariam's younger sister, Jamile, then 13 at the time, my grandmother. He brought her back to New Castle. She had four girls. My mother was the first-born. On Ellis Island my grandfather's name was reduced to Samuel Abdoe. In New Castle, in the Syrian community, he retained his status as a religious leader, able to perform marriages & preside over funerals, & he taught the Koran to the boys (girls were not allowed to learn). He died in 1953, a year before I was born. As a child on weekly Sunday trips to New Castle I frequently attended Islamic services, or hung out in the back-room drinking pop & eating cookies. I did not, nor do I now, speak or understand Arabic; Arabic was the language used when the adults didn't want the kids to know what they were saying. My mother still does this. I was also raised Roman Catholic. The Androla family originated from Milan, Italy. On Sunday mornings my father wld take my sister & me to Saint Agatha's Church. I was Baptized & did that Confirmation thing, attended Sunday School (on Saturdays!), & once kissed a Bishop's ring. My great-grandfather, Christopher Androla, came to America as a teenager & became a farmer, & raised a couple boys & couple girls. My grandfather, Frank, carried on a small farm, but when he married moved into Ellport & working in the mills. My father was the second-born boy. He served in the Marines on the U.S.S Coral Sea during the Korean conflict, ending his stint with a rank of Sergeant. I have a wonderful photograph of him on my wall drunk in a bar in Morocco in his uniform. As children we used to sing the Marine Anthem, & I loved looking thru his Marine manuals & stuff from his duffle-bag in the attic which soon became our upstairs bedrooms. My dad was always working. He was always busting his ass. Eventually he was promoted to a foreman. In grade-school I was an honor student, & sometimes made the high honor-roll. Things seemed pretty easy. I was very well-behaved. My father was one of the coaches in Little League baseball, & I was a star. I was a good pitcher, & when I wasn't pitching played short-stop. I wasn't a power-hitter, but did ok at the plate. In Pony League I made the All-Star team, but for some reason I was assigned first-base. It was the proverbial last of the 9th, bases-loaded, two outs, tie-game, & shit if a hard grounder wasn't hit down the first-base line & I flubbed the ball & we lost. I didn't continue my baseball career. I wasn't as enthusiastic with my studies in High-school. I discovered the magnetization to girls. My mother tells me I was always drawing & writing little poems as a youngster, but I don't recall writing anything until I was 13. I wrote a science-fiction story, long-hand, something I cld stop & continue, come back to, cut into chapters. I read most of the classics most kids read, but the science-fiction stuff was more fun & opened my imagination. At the same time I began learning to play drums, & some of my boyhood friends in Ellport were learning guitar, we'd jam in basements & garages. We got paid for playing at some birthday party for somebody, & there I met Gail. She sd she loved drummers, & I was a drummer, & I fell deeply in Love with her. She was 15, almost 16. Thus I let my heart pour thru Poetry for Gail. Love poems. Her father owned & operated an ice-cream stand, & she worked there. When she was old enough to drive she'd come & pick up & take me for rides, but I don't believe we did anything but kiss once or twice. She became the head cheer-leader for our rival High-school, & by then we'd fallen out of touch. When I was 18 Gail was killed in a car accident, & that was more an impulse to write. I had a steady girlfriend as a later teen, was much in Love again, & wrote a 120-page poetry collection to Kathy Wright. Everything was very Rod Mckuenish. I was an A, B, C student in all the accelerated courses, & when the Guidance Counselor asked what I wanted to go to College for, I gave her the collection of poems. I was an Editor of the High-school paper, taking Journalism, so after some thought it was decided I'd apply to Point Park College in downtown Pittsburgh as an Industrial Marketing major, which was half Journalism, half Business. As a teenager I began smoking cigarettes & drinking, stealing them from my parents or from the homes of my friends. I distinctly remember one night I was about 14, 15, & down the hill from my house it was wooded, "the woods" we always played in, sled-rided into; me & johnny mason & billy boy had managed to steal a bottle of sloe gin from my next-door neighbor, & we were sleeping out in the woods in the community shelter, a little park & ball-field there, & we got drunk. I remember running thru the field under the stars & laughing & laughing. I was somewhat of a delinquent, but kept balanced by being relatively conservative in High-school. I was not a part of the "in" crowd who had discovered drugs, but I grew my hair long & dressed like a hippy. I smoked cigarettes in the bathrooms. I felt ecstatic at Graduation, felt free, & that summer before College I first experienced drugs, purple haze actually, with a bunch of friends down at the creek which surrounded Ellport. It was very joyful & wonderful. I remember trying to eat supper with my parents, & they thought I had had a few beers, so I was excused from the table & spent the night with my little stereo in my room listening to Steppenwolf & the Beatles. I no longer had qualms nor fears about trying marijuana, & the wide variety of drugs available in even a place as tiny as Ellport. When I arrived at Point Park College, it was only a matter of days I hooked with other people who were into the early 70's drug-gorging life & Rock & partying & sex &...Kathy Wright was a year younger than me, waiting for me patiently back home, but I exploded away from her the instant I met all these other girls from all around the country. Also that summer before College I worked in the B. & W. steel-mill with a bunch of other college-bound worker's sons, saving up money. I got a few small grants, but mostly had to take out student loans to pay for tuition. It was a wild first semester. I did not care about classes, the shit they were trying to teach me. I cared about Debbie's blond pussy & dope & black beauties & Bob Dylan. I was writing. I guess they were what might be termed drug poems. It was eons from the early days of Mckuen love poems. Thru the drug grape-vine I met a guy named John Hennessey, a Preacher's son who was obviously in complete revolt. We started a crazy mimeo underground magazine titled NART DWEEPHOR & THE ETERNAL EYE OF POINT PARK THOUGHT. We'd do an all-nighter in his room typing out all this insanity smoking dope, tripping, speeding, drinking -- Hennessey was a great artist, & had a very quirky, acid mind. We published my poems, & his essays & cartoons & a real hodge-podge of material all cranked out on his inky mimeo. Friends wld help us collate the thing, which we'd hand out free to whoever wld take a copy going to classes in the morning. We were slanderous & libelous & fearless. We pissed people off. One of John's cartoons was a skeleton with a baseball cap & P on it & the captions read "I yam roberto clemente"..."I yam not dead", & this was just after Clemente's death. I think we did 2 issues. My second semester I went to the College's European extension in Lugano, Switzerland, the price of air-fare was all the more required on a first-come, first-serve basis. I signed up fast along with about 30 others, & I was ok'd. There was a problem tho because I was playing drums in band at the Pittsburgh Playhouse for a play titled "Salvation", under the auspices of the College. I had brought my set of Ludwig to college with me, & somehow became the drummer in this play which became a finalist in like the Northeast Region of College Productions, & the winner wld perform for President Nixon in Washington D.C., & that was a few days after the jet left for Switzerland. "Salvation" lost to a Shakespeare play, but because of the time intersection I had to fly a day or 2 after the rest of the people went together. I had never been on a plane before, 18 & there I go across the Atlantic Ocean, a quiet, stunned kid reading Herman Hesse. Two people from the Villa met me in Zurich, & we took a train down to Lugano. I was to share a room with Mike DeNardo, my near best friend drug-addict Dylan freak from the Bronx from my 1st semester experience, & we had "the party-room". We had a steady, cheap supply of hashish off a Swiss guy we met a local restaurant, Octavio he sd his name was, a buck a gram & we were pigs. There was also a steady supply of 10 mg. valium, & much wine & beer. Debbie was there too, but we weren't steady. Susie was a Junior from Titusville, & she was my steadiest lover. Poor DeNardo always fell in love with the girls who ended up in MY bed. I was filling note-books with poems. Dark, strange & surreal poems. The continuous hashish & valium & wine had created amy visions. We went all over Europe, me & Mike. We DROVE thru the Swiss Alps in a rented Fiat! still tripping off red micro-dot we scored the night before at Nino's Bar down a dark alley in Lugano where the Swiss Hippies hung & smoked hash & tobacco out of broken wine-bottles. We used to roll these giant "Swiss joints", crumbled hash & a bunch of tobacco packed together in like 10 papers. We hitch-hiked to Milan, Italy where I found it unbelievable there were crumpled beggars in rags on the streets, probably one of my family! We hit the Italian & French Riviera, Amsterdam, & once to Germany to a concert. One of my favorite memories is being lost in the middle France at 3 a.m. with DeNardo smoking hash & passing thru the black farmlands under incredible stars. We didn't care we were completely lost & 18 years old in the middle of France. We had our car stopped once, & the boarder guards searched our belongings, but we had the hash hidden in the backseat & they didn't check the car. After the second semester in Europe I came back home to work in the steel-mill again to have money for the next year. I worked in Yard Shipping, mostly 3rd shift, on the trains & tracks. It's a wonder I wasn't killed, stoned & hopping on the moving trains & spiking down track & railing back de-railed trains. I had, however, got "good grades" in Lugano, somehow, tho I barely made any classes at all. My next year at Point Park was both disastrous & a blessing. I was accepted into a Creative-Writing course taught by a rather cool, young, English Professor, Dr. Sam Sipe. The first day of class he ripped out pictures in some magazine like LADIES HOME JOURNAL or something & passed them around to everybody telling us to write a story about whatever our picture happened to be. Mine was an old couple drinking coffee or tea, & I just naturally did like a four seasons sort of time-thru-life thing, Sipe loved it, read it to the class as an example of fine writing. I was always very quiet & shy in class while Sipe wld go nuts over my stories & poems. I wrote a Greek Tragedy 30 pages long. Sipe acted astonished. It was the only A I ever got in College. I dreaded all my other courses. I hated Business Law & shit like that. I was getting C's, D's & failing things. Dr. Sipe took me aside one day & asked what I thought about applying for a particular Scholarship, but I sd hey I'm failing everything & I don't care. Astonished, he asked then what are you doing here? & we went about the option of checking for a more suitable institution of Higher Education. I had it narrowed down to 3 colleges: some place in California, the New School in Florida or something like that, & Franconia College in New Hampshire. Sipe composed an outstanding recommendation-letter for me, & I went to visit Franconia the summer of '75 since it was closest of the 3. My first morning there in the White Mountains as I was hitching up the hill to get to the College, 2 young girls from Goddard College in Vermont picked me up (they were attending a Children's Literature festival put on by the College that summer) & we eventually ended up drunk off White Russians on my giant water-bed at Franconia Inn where I had a room. I knew Franconia was for me. My Poetry Professor was Robert Grenier. He was only like 27 years old. The college was famous for having the youngest College President in America, & for being right behind Antioch as to drug-availability & experimentation. It was accredited, but billed as "experimental". There were no grades given. You wrote a report on the class & professor & he wrote a report on you & yr accomplishments or mis-firings. I took an Existential Philosophy course, & was hooked on Nietzsche. I studied Modern American Poetry. Grenier did a good job. I think I was writing like a Bly, when he pulled the rug & hooked me onto Larry Eigner. Grenier & Eigner were friends. Language was torn from its idiocy of monotonous dialogue, & I imitated Eigner's poems & visuals & the sculpting of words on a piece of paper. I had much interest in the Black Mountain school of writing, avidly read Charles Olson, & then of course Pound &...a wide array. Grenier brought in Poets like Eigner, Creeley, Alice Notley, Clark Coolidge to the College to read. In my Poetry class Joel Oppenheimer made fun of a word I had in a poem he was given to read, asking dryly "is that POLL-ISH or PAUL-ISH?". I know I blushed & sweated, & as usual, kept quiet. Grenier laughed. I began a correspondence with Larry Eigner who lived in Swampscott, Massachusetts then. He was very generous with his understanding & critiques & suggestions. His letters AMAZED me, how crammed & packed everything was, & he's typing all of this as a severe cerebral palsy victim in a wheel-chair! Eigner showed me how writing letters cld be so joyous & free. I was involved with a girl named Ann Dexter Herron. She was an artist & intellectual happy Southern girl from Waynesboro, Virginia. She believed in me as a Poet, but I was such an insensitive motherfucker as our relationship developed. Grenier & I decided I needed an intense concentration on the act of writing, on writing vastly, & somehow with Ann on my bed with a map of the world spread out, I chose the island of Corsica where I cld go & write on an Independent Study Program sanctioned by Grenier's recommendation. Originally Ann was going to accompany me, but as the semester approached I insisted I do it alone. I needed to be alone to accomplish such a feat of saturation. I took all my books, which cost me $140 to fly there. I think the route I took was Pittsburgh to Paris to Nice to Ajaccio, Corsica. Again, I worked the summer in the mill to finance my trip, tho I ran out of money fast & my parents had to send a check which the banks wldn't cash for a week. I lived on French bread & oranges the manager of the hotel, Hotel Spunta Maria, gave me when she must have noticed I was starving let alone pay the bill for the room. I woke & immediately went to my manual typewriter & typed EVERYTHING about everything I cld for hours & hours & days & days & weeks & weeks & then months until I realized I was very lonely, especially for Ann, who was acting distant in her occasional letter to me tho I was her big epic letters all the time. But I continued typing & reading in my little room over-looking Ajaccio Bay. I sent all the material to Grenier back in New Hampshire, who I heard from maybe twice during my stay. Eigner sent me a poem he composed from a letter partially destroyed by rain-water I had written him. I was reading Pound & Olson, & Olson's hip way with language seemed to overtake my voice. I did not communicate well with the Corsicans I met. The Maid, Maria, at the hotel, frequently made fun of my English words I tried to stretch into French, which I barely knew. Maria wld come in & change my sheets & give me fresh towels & an extra desk in fact, I'd be there typing & Maria wld whistle & sing as she did her thing & I did mine. She was not very attractive, but I loved her laughter. Sometimes I'd walk into the City, a mile or 2 walk around the bay, & explore, & submerge myself into the Mediterranean Sea. But as my initial mission was, I wrote. It was a good exercise for the later life of a Writer. Upon my return from Corsica, everything is mixed & conglomerated. Ann was not infatuated with me any longer, but I was DEEPLY, HOPELESSLY in Love with her. It was a very trying emotional time I have little reason to elaborate, but coming out of relative 3-month isolation, the intensity of my emotion seems naturally human now. I was back in Ellport, still as an official Independent Study student, but had run out of money & I felt insane. I traveled back & forth to Boston & New Hampshire to be with Ann, who broke my goddamn heart. I got a job as a jitney driver in the little factory my mother then worked in; at age 44 in 1973 my father had had a massive heart-attack & was on total disability from the steel-mill. By this time the steel-mills around Western Pennsylvania were failing & I had a sort of pseudo-degree in Poetry? I think I ended up like 8 credits short of a degree, but sometimes I do say I have a B. A. in Creative Writing. Most of my boyhood friends were likewise stuck in minimum-wage shit jobs in the area, & Life became a Red-neck Heaven. Working & shooting pool & drinking & smoking dope in the parkinglot of Oak Grove Inn just over the road from the factory. I connected with a tough girl named Tomiann from the factory who cld drink more whiskey than me & cld actually beat me at pool tho I was fucking good! She cured me of Ann. I was writing miserable, lonely poetry until Tomiann came along, & then that burst of creative combustion began again wanting nothing to do with Language Poetry & Ezra Pound. I was a hick in a hick bar in my early 20's raising Hell, writing from that view, which was finally me. I went thru a few other jobs, & things were bad at home with my parents. Thru all this time I had kept in touch with Sandy Jackson, a black girl from D.C. who I met & became friends with at Point Park & she was also in Switzerland. She was straight & took delight in my insanity, my pushing-to-the-edge way of existence; she was a Psychology major & she enjoyed my psychology. We took a train to the Verona Zoo one day, lightly necking. She was a very very sensual girl. The sound of a saxophone wld bring her to orgasm! We didn't go further with sex tho beyond that train. She was doing her Master's at The University of Maryland now, & when I explained my unbearable situation, she invited me down to live with her. I did the occasional temporary job to have drinking & drug money, but I was spending much time at Sandy's diningroom table writing; & partying heavily with many people I met down there. Sandy wanted marriage, but again, I was an insensitive fuck. She was near virginal; I was the second man ever to sleep with her. She was beautiful, educated, & delightfully funny, & intensely in love with me for a time. I was hooked into an affair with Agnes, a French girl across the hall who was married to an American guy, Ed Colluci doing his Master's in Solar Energy; Agnes was very bored with him & I had no control against the woo of a lovely woman from France who mainly married Ed to become an American citizen, so she sd. We fucked everywhere we cld. While Ed & Sandy were in classes we'd get together in her place or mine(?). One night, smashed off Mogan-David 20-20, we fucked under a small pine-tree right off a traveled sidewalk on the campus, fucking as people walked by & no doubt heard & saw us there. I met with Reed Whittemore at the University, but he blew me off, suggesting I talk to the younger Poetry instructors. I happened upon a small mall bookstore in College Park, & fished like issue 2 of GARGOYLE magazine from the rack. Sandy talked me into sending them some of my poetry. But before I cld hear back I was forced back to Ellport after my father's second massive heart-attack. Sandy read Rick Peabody's acceptance letter over the phone, & he was quite enthusiastic. The reason I had fled Ellport was because Kathy Wright, who I saw again after the years in college & we long since split, was pregnant & she sd I was the father. We had intercourse a few times together, but I was involved with 3 different girls then & cld not commit my life to her. I later learned she had an abortion, & it wasn't until a year after my dad's death in 1988 that I found out he had to shell out the money for it. He never spoke about that. I saw Kathy a few years later. I got a job thru the State working at the Ellport Sewage Treatment Plant, at the edge of the woods. Only me & Greg worked there, & Greg was a year older than me lost back in Ellport after 4 years at Penn State with a degree & no job, except this deal with human excrement & the eventual drainage into the creek below the trees. We'd smoke joints & I'd write poems in the office, by then had connected with two magazines Peabody had suggested, ABBEY & BOGG. They were three Editors who seemed to whole-hearted support me & my flowings, my creeks of words. I considered them my Trinity, they consistently published my stuff issue after issue, building me up. I branched on my submissions a little, & a few other places took my work, but there was a slew of rejections too. I was back in Ellport, in the shit, crawling down man-holes, etc..., getting whiffs of the sludge, living at home where my parents' marriage was completely disintegrating into Hate, & if I wanted to escape I needed more money & somehow landed jobs as a bartender 40 hours a week too. I was indeed making money but I was of course spending it all frivolously on smoke & girls & drink. The one place I bartended was a strip-joint. That's where I met my wife, Diane, in 1978. She was a waitress in the midst of a divorce after one year of marriage. We had great laughing ticklish sex together. I strenuously maintain Diane knew I was Poet, & when all the shit broke lose, we literally escaped in a borrowed station-wagon 2,500 miles away to Seattle on like a day's notice. I had all my books & writings, & Diane had all her clothes & shoes, & that's how we left all the disintegrating shit behind us. We made it to Seattle with $50 left, & five ounces of black hashish I had traded my stereo & all my albums for, something I still regret, but we were able to sell it by grams & made enough cash in 3 days time to rent an apartment in a new complex. Friends we knew from the strip-bar were from Seattle, actually Auburn, outside Seattle, & they had relatives there who helped us. I got a job at a ladder factory with the brother of the guy I knew in one week's time. I continued the GARGOYLE, BOGG, ABBEY publishing, sending them my recent poems, which had become immediately autobiographical songs. Diane was pregnant. On December 3rd, 1979, our daughter Rachel was born. The sight & experience of her birth was absolutely electrifying. Both of our mothers flew out to see Rachel. They had never met before flying out together. By then, my parents had divorced. My dad came out in April. Rachel was their first grand-child. She captured everybody's hearts. A few months after Mt. St. Helen's erupted we cldn't stand not being closer to our families, not wanting to deprive Rachel, & when Rachel was 9 months we moved to Erie, Pennsylvania, where my sister lived after going to College in Erie. She was newly married & was now pregnant. My brother-in-law got me a job at the Plastics Factory he worked at as a foreman. At the end of my first day on the job I had bloody knuckles & grease & blood across my forehead, but I had been forced to be on Welfare for the first 3 months in Erie. We were down to survival by the pennies. Nobody had money to help us out, & I spent the winter of 1980 walking 2 miles thru blizzards to make it for 2nd shift work, way too poor for a car. I sponged rides back home at 11 at night. It was a terrible, hellish job I'm still astounded I worked at for 12 years. There was much alcohol & drug abuse, out-&-out slave labor chained to injection molding machines, going crazy in futility. But my writing had become to truly expand, & I decided I'd publish my own magazine of the Literary Arts after the Trinity's combined formats, hence NORTHERN PLEASURE was created. I showed the galleys for the first issue to the new Plant Manager at the Plastic Shop asking if I cld use the copier, pay for the paper in the offices, & he sd yes. Word got out & submissions began appearing. By 1982 I had done 4 issues, & connected with many writers & poets & editors in the daily mail bombardments. New magazines began springing up everywhere, & people began publishing my poetry as chapbooks. The New Underground was developing, & I began meeting these poets in person, going to readings. My son, Doug, was born in September, 1985. A slew of little small press chapbooks were published by then. Few reviews ever came about, but I was happy as a pig in pig-shit I was my own voice & had actually become a Poet, albeit a working-class Poet in Hell, Poverty, & Hopelessness. The 1980's will surely be remembered as a terrible, brutal time in America's 20th Century Culture. I hope the Poetry created then at least illuminates some of the shreds left by the vultures of Republican Rule. Much has happened these past 10 years. At age 40 I guess I have a body of work that magazines like ATOM MIND deem relevant. I'm humbled to a current silence, tho much is happening after the decades of writing, the Present, the Mythology of me, is a little embarrassing. Shit, I work in a hard physical labor plastic-reinforced fiberglass factory now, steady 3rd shift, thankfully Unionized. I drink & smoke too much, buzzed & surprised my career as a Poet is now here, in print, although there is so much more, so much more I can add.