When I landed at the Pittsburgh airport earlier this spring, my phone glowed with paragraphs of notifications.
The first was Twitter saying Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson tested positive for the novel coronavirus. The second was that the NBA had cancelled its 2020 in-person game season due to coronavirus fears. The rest were all reactions to my job implementing a work from home mandate.
The storm of the COVID-19 pandemic had come to America, and here I was, stepping off of a plane in the City of Bridges the day it touched ground – March 11.
Even though I was filled with joy to visit my best friend Joey, who I hadn’t seen in a couple of years and had promised to visit for much longer, the guilt riddled inside my belly. It was a cold and crisp night outside the car windows. The mountains and the naked winter trees looked familiar, yet foreign, and as they brushed by on the way into the city, I felt further and further from home.
While Los Angeles was sold out of toilet paper, the panic from the virus hadn’t yet revealed itself widely in Pittsburgh. And still, the warehouse art parties I was longing to indulge in, the Twin Peaks rock show I was aching to let loose at, all cancelled. Joey’s presence comforted me, but I still found myself constantly tripping over the fact that the country was on the verge of a shutdown, and I was on vacation across the country.
After the initial shock somewhat settled when we landed in his old-fashioned Pittsburgh house, we ate some dinner, called it a night, and I spent the rest of my waking hours scrolling through headlines on Twitter.
The weekend would bring plenty of new memories and plenty of last pre-pandemic memories. It feels strange when I think of how I spent the rest of the trip meandering around eccentric art museums, like The Mattress Factory and The Andy Warhol museum, or that I drank and ate in restaurants without a mask in sight. In many ways, it still felt normal romping about town with Joey, shooting film and making each other laugh. On my last night, we sat inside a dark dive bar and ordered four pitchers, gulping the cheap beer down like it was the last round. And it was.
Everything changed when I landed back in Los Angeles and braced for the March 2020 shutdown. But in that brief moment before shit hit the fan, I enjoyed exploring Pittsburgh and soaking in the fascinations of its vibrant neighborhoods, decadent bridges, rusty steel mills, and groovy people.
– Tyler
Tyler Nicole Boudreaux 