Driving from Pittsburgh to midtown Manhattan is advertised as a seven-and-a-half-hour trip on a clear day, assuming just a single gas stop. However, clear days and traffic-free roads are fantasies, much like some career aspirations. The journey, much like life, is often filled with unexpected gloom. Just past Scranton and before the vast Allegheny National Forest, the weather can shift dramatically. Sunny skies can give way to heavy clouds, and rain begins to fall, creating a somber, introspective atmosphere. Trucks thunder past, spraying windshields with blinding sheets of water. This route became intimately familiar in 2007 when I accepted my first academic position in Pittsburgh, a city that was never part of my plan, a place I had not envisioned myself. This constant travel, this repeated journey, felt like a kind of Rerun Dancing, a set of movements performed again and again, hoping for a different outcome, or perhaps just to stay in motion.
Since that pivotal year, the number of drives between Pittsburgh and New York blurs into an uncountable sum. Each trip was a variation on a theme, a rerun dance across state lines. I navigated every type of weather imaginable. There were treacherous blizzards that sent my old VW Beetle careening across icy highways, and scorching summer days where broken air conditioning forced windows down, inviting in the sweltering heat. Many drives were undertaken in the dead of night, fueled by 5-hour Energy shots, my mind buzzing with fatigue and caffeine. During the fraught early years of Trump’s presidency, the tension was palpable, the anxiety of being a Black man in rural Pennsylvania a constant companion. Each journey required immense fortitude, my body rigid with focus, limbs growing numb and stiff as I relentlessly pursued my destination. This dedication was born from love – a deep devotion to poetry and the creative process – and the simple, stark necessity of needing a job. Yet, years later, it became clear that Pittsburgh was never meant to be permanent. The pull of the coast, the life I knew before, remained stubbornly strong, even after achieving the university position I had once so fervently desired. This constant back and forth, this geographical and emotional push and pull, became another form of rerun dancing, a repeated performance of longing and displacement.
The allure of university life, I now understand, was built on a romanticized ideal. It was a vision nurtured in college, ignited in Regina Barreca’s “Sex, Politics, and the British Novel” class. I found myself unexpectedly welcomed into Gina’s circle of friends – young, vibrant professors from English, art, and French departments, alongside a couple of graduate students, including my housemate Krys, a fellow poet. As a senior undergraduate, I was the anomaly, invited to their Wednesday pizza nights in Willimantic, Connecticut. These gatherings were filled with red wine, cigarette smoke, and late-night conversations about ideas, films, paintings, and the muses behind famous artists. Mostly, I listened, absorbing the atmosphere, imagining this as a potential future. I recall one professor observing that my cigarette holding style betrayed me as a non-smoker. Despite having smoked since high school, this comment struck a chord, and I mentally resolved to refine my cigarette posture, to appear more naturally at ease.
These pizza nights transformed an ordinary pizzeria into something akin to a scene from a James Baldwin novel, “open French doors and a balcony, more than a hundred people mill[ing] about, some in evening dress . . . High above [our] heads an enormous silver ball . . . so bright with jewelry and glasses and cigarettes, that the heavy ball seemed almost to be alive.” Overwhelmed with gratitude at being included, I was oblivious to the fact that I was the only Black person present at this imagined gala. This idealized scene, now viewed through the lens of memory, feels like another aspect of rerun dancing, a nostalgic replay of a moment in time that may not have been as perfect as remembered.
Gina, with her signature short skirts and voluminous hair, known for reciting entire passages of text from memory and delivering risqué jokes in class, was the central figure, the captivating influence. A feminist in the bold “this is what a feminist looks like” mold, she introduced me and other students to the archetype of the madwoman in the attic. With Gina and the Wednesday pizza crew, true education thrived in the space between rigorous academic study and informal social interaction, blurring the lines between professor and student in a way that felt exciting and liberating. It was navigating this exhilarating boundary that solidified my aspiration to become a professor. This romanticized vision, this intoxicating dream, became a powerful driving force for years, a beautiful, potent force, much like a carefully choreographed rerun dance performed in the theater of my mind, endlessly replayed in pursuit of an elusive perfection.
