Baltimore: A Memory

It’s the middle of March on a Friday afternoon in Baltimore. I’m standing on the corner of Howard and Lexington in that loose, fragmented realm of solitary mind; watching the forty-hour work-week crowds stumble by, listening to the rhythmic beats of hip-hop echo against the old store fronts, staring at the sewer smoke as it floats above the streets rusted potholes. The light rail slowly plods along and all the while I’m thinking, damn, I’m really back in this crazy old town. It’s been three years since I set foot here and to be honest, I never thought I’m make it back, but life is funny like that, and so here I am, figuring what have I got to lose, nothing like one more go around.

I’m holding up a brick wall across from one of the dollar stores that line Lexington St. when I see a homeless looking man – thick red beard, dark drunk eyes – stumbling towards me. He’s got one pant leg rolled up above the left knee and a big, purple-yellow scar that takes up half of his leg. It looks all infected. It’s gradually eating away at the bone and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some form of maggot nestled somewhere in the fine cracks. It’s disgusting to look at, and yet, for some unknown reason, I just can’t keep myself from looking. I know it probably sounds strange, but I think there’s a strange beauty, a sort of comic sadness in the most grotesque of things. The French artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec once wrote, “Everywhere and always, ugliness has its beautiful aspects; it is thrilling to discover them where no one has noticed them.”

And there we are: this bum and me. Two roaming souls, meeting eye to eye for a brief split second. Then in a husky voice he says, “Damn! It’s hot today!” That’s it. Nothing more. No startling truth. A simple observation. My only acknowledgement is a silent nod and there he goes, limping upstream and disappearing behind the faded eyes of the crowd.

I walk towards Lexington Market and wait for the light to change. An older man is sitting behind a table of various colored vials selling skin oils. A tall man dressed in a black suit with a checkered bow tie and top hat with a purple feather in the brim passes out Muslim newspapers. Across from him there’s a ‘fella that’s about as animated as a crack head at 2 a.m. Three men stand guard in front of him dressed in purple and black robes. They look like Arabian knights. The man yells into the blow-horn about Isiah and how the “righteous shall prosper.” Now he’s waving his hands in the air holding a book, a bible I presume. He’s going into gesticulations, screaming about the White Man and true origins of the Black Jesus. A small crowd looks on, nodding their heads in approval.

To go along with all that religion you’ve got shady characters with crooked teeth and nervous eyes lining up and down the street. They’re trying to hawk their stolen goods; everything from socks to batteries to headphones to bootleg videotapes to nose trimmers. Yeah, how the nose trimmer guy gets any sales is beyond me. People wait for the busses, cigarettes dangling from their tongues, cursing the damn schedule. Somehow I find the whole scene a bit comical and so my laughter drifts along with the unexplainable, strange rhythm of it all.

Lexington Market is one of the few places you can enter and feel like your really seeing Baltimore for what it is. It’s been standing here since 1782. Here you’ll find all kinds of different people from different parts of Baltimore that otherwise wouldn’t normally be seen together. It’s sort of like the city’s temporary melting pot. On a Friday afternoon you’ve got construction and factory workers covered in dirt standing along side of businessmen with tacky ties and brown collars. There’s wandering bums with their food stamps and fat mothers trying to keep track of their children. Everyone is talking, laughing; a brief worry-free interlude with their cashed paycheck in one hand and a cheap beer in the other.

There’s food vendors from every place imaginable: Greece, Italy, China, Japan; fruit stands, meat butchers selling everything from rabbit heads and ribs to maroon slabs of liver and pag maws, and to be honest, I haven’t a clue what a pag maw is, but it looks pretty tasty. There’s various dead fish on ice and oysters and fresh crabs sitting in wooden buckets; greasy fried chicken and gizzards and chitterlings, bakeries with their carefully assorted displays of cakes and cookies and pies.

I stumble around passing the food stands, listening to the various catcalls, unable to decide exactly what is I want: a two-dollar corned beef on rye or a crab cake? Maybe a greasy dog at Polack Johnny’s (How can you go wrong at a place that has the slogan: Polack Johnny’s is our name, Hot Dogs are our game.”) But in the end I always head over to that same Soul Food stand, order my plate of bbq chicken, two heaping sides of Mac ‘n’ cheese and yams, grab a cup of beer and a newspaper, find a table of my own, stuff myself, all the while constantly looking around at this curious constant bustle of life that surrounds.


And then I’m back on the streets, filled with a sense of renewed strength and spirit. I continue north up Howard St., past the closed-down shops and vacant buildings that were once department stores – that decaying part of Baltimore the city always talks about renovating but never does. I’ve seen the pictures of what this area used to look like back in the early part of the twentieth century. Old Fords lining the streets, men dressed in suits and top hats, the women all done up in sleek dresses and high heels. At one time this was the center of shopping and entertainment, but unfortunately those days seemed to be a distant memory.

There’s the Mayfair: that abandoned theater with the gothic building façade and the faded billboard painting of Billie Holliday and some Benny Goodman-looking group. How many times I used to walk by that building with the urge to take a crowbar and pry open the front doors, my imagination dreaming up what jazz ghosts I might be able to summon up from the past. Thinking about it now, the place has probably been infested with hoards of roaches and rats and ever other vermin imaginable for years, and whether or not any big names ever played there I don’t know, but still, it’s the thought…

Mt Vernon Park: I use to idle away countless hours in this park, smoking the tongue dry, staring at the stupid pigeons, watching the couples walk by, hand in hand, all in love. My friend Katalin would often sit with me and we’d watch the sun go down behind the old mansions that line Monument St. We’d go on for hours talking about every damn thing we could think of: art and religion and love and the places we wanted to see, all the places we wanted to go, how crazy and fucked up and confusing and amazing and unexplainable this world is. And now Katalin, there you are, off in India and here I am, three years later, sitting on the same bench, puffing on a lost dream, and yeah, I guess you could say some things never change.

Go down Madison, take a right on St. Paul, pass the nice red brick building on the corner, and you see that apartment with the ugly gray bricks, the one with the lopsided cracked steps leading to the front door and the “NO LOITERING” sign. 712. Home to six months maddening, lonely and drunk as hell, fist cursing nights. You got to take the three flights of stairs up to 301. Watch out for the deaf lady that’s always sleeping on the stairs. Usually all doped up and passed out in lala land. One small 10 by 10 room with a puke colored carpet. Five dollar chandelier dangling like a loose tooth. Two lights burned out. One window looking down on the back alley and fire escape ladder. A fridge with dead roaches belly-up in the butter section. By no means was it high class living.

The couple next door would argue every night; 2 a.m. screaming matches going lost into the night. There were the crack-heads upstairs and the heavy-set guy downstairs that wore neon parachute pants and blasted Madonna every Sunday afternoon. And then there was the mysterious schizophrenic who was constantly cursing at his television. You heard multiple people in the apartment, but after a month I realized it was just him.

And there was Wendy and her five-year-old son Joe Ross who lived next door in 300. Wendy always had a strange group of people visiting her and through the walls I’d often hear Joe Ross singing to himself in the bathtub and I remember that one afternoon when I sat on the front steps with the two of them. Wendy shared her cup of vodka and orange juice with me and she told me how she suffered from bipolar disorder. She was being treated over at Johns Hopkins. Joe Ross, little angel of a kid who has these wild, magnetic eyes, all full of jazz and light, and I’m sitting there, looking at him, dreaming about the wonder of youth and how strange time is, and there’s Joe Ross, all two and half feet of him, taking a hold of my finger with his little, innocent delicate hands, saying in a high-pitched squeak, “Look, there goes the tour bus, the tour bus…” and I’m looking down the street and I don’t see any tour bus, but there he is excitedly grabbing on to my hand and I smile and say, “Yeah, Joe, I see the tour bus.”

St. Paul and Madison, watching the cabs and cars and busses and people go by with these thoughts, staring up at this ugly façade of what once was a home, struggling to put where it is I’m heading into some form of coherent thought. But it’s all jumbled images, lost days and nights, somewhere a conversation, and hell, now I can’t even tell if these are things that actually really happened or if it’s just my crazy mind writing out its own historical fiction.


Corner of North and Charles: dirty liquor stores, alley ways full of trash and the CVS is all boarded up; but you’ve still got the fried chicken take-out place and the gospel church across the street. A couple blocks up there’s a bar over on 20th. No sign on the outside. Just a building with the paint peeling off. Besides the non-functioning Budweiser neon sign, you wouldn’t even notice it. This is a dive. Not in the cool, modern sense of the word “dive”, you know, those bars where the drinks are cheap and all the kids that are convinced they’re artists or outcasts but really haven’t gone through shit go to hang out. No, this is the kind of dive you mention to someone and their eyes light up, their eyebrows raise, the lines on their forehead shoot out, and they say, shockingly, “You mean you’ve actually gone into that place?”

You got to get buzzed in by the bartender just to open the door to the bar, and it’s not the cleanest place, but it’s really not that bad. Predominantly a black joint. Threre’s a pinball machine, an old shuffleboard, a jukebox with modern r &b and hip-hop and small selection of dirt-cheap alcohol. It’s a good crowd here though. I order a twenty-two-ounce bottle of beer and find the empty corner. I’m not really here for camaraderie or to get drunk. I’m here purely for the sake of nostalgia, hoping to maybe wrestle up a few comic demons on the way.

4:30 a.m….lying in bed…naked….drunk….listening to Beethoven’s Overture to Egmont on repeat…room floating around me in some hovering form of cluttered haze. Phone rings. Beautiful wild and amazing girl who somehow, through my wave of loneliness and insanity, I’ve stumbled upon, is on the other end. Her and her friend are drunk and they’ve got a bottle of Jack. Want to know if they can come over. And so the night, or day, begins. The lights are back on and there we are, parading around the room…tripping over kitchen table and chairs…spilling boos left and right. I’m digging through a stack of papers and reading aloud a poem about a duel between a spider and a cowboy. There’s music and laughter, and sure, we’re all poor as hell….scrounging up the pennies and nickels up off of my floor…digging underneath through the old receipts and crusted toe-nail clippings…tossing away the dirty clothes and bread crumbs and the whiskey’s all gone and we’re thinking what’s open at this time. So we head up to North Ave., not the safest part of town, but it’s the only bar we know that opens at six a.m. We’ve got our Big Gulp filled with change and we’re standing outside the Magnet Bar, ten till, screaming for them to open the door, surrounded by this menagerie of carnival bums and druggies and drunk insomniacs. I’m off to the side with a guy that has rotten gums and foul-smelling breath, asking him if he knows Sam Cooke’s Bring it on Home and what the hell do you know, he does. He starts singing, and he’s good, I mean damn good! Not only he does have the soul, but he’s got the range to go along with it. Everyone is thinking, what the hell are these crazy kids doing on North Ave. at this time, but drink enough and logical explanations lose their worth, so finally they open the door and we bum rush in, empty our cup of change on the bar and say to the bartender who looks like he’s still half-asleep, “What can we get for this?” And next thing we know we’ve got three beers and three shots of Beam. Down the hatch…my girl runs for the bathroom…I gag and roll my eyes until all I see is white…the friend is over at the juke box putting in “Dancing Queen,” for the third time in row. And it’s all insane, the three of us free and drunk and my girl and I dancing and whispering stumbled thoughts of love into one another’s ear and I give her a good hard twirl and underneath our feet spins the black and white checkered floor and the bartender can’t help but shake his head and laugh and somewhere the sun sits under the horizon, somewhere lies the rest of the city, resting under a blanket of dreams.

Three years later, staring at my own reflection and whatever happened to that girl and those crazy times I can’t really say. All I’ve got to show right now is a dead cigarette and a thick layer of sunlit smoke that hovers above and I’m wondering why the hell I even came into this place. Yes, I’m getting sentimental.

An old guy with a derby cap is struggling to bring a can of Coors up to his lips and a few seats over is a lady the bartender calls Miss Lou. She looks to be around fifty, dressed in a janitor outfit. She’s got a lazy left eye and she’s mumbling to herself and drawing on the newspaper headlines. I take a glance over. She’s got George bush neatly marked up with a Rollie Fingers style mustache and devil horns. She takes a big sip of King Cobra and yells out, “That capitalistic mother fucker! No one else around the bar seems to pay any attention. I suppose it’s an every day occurrence.

Anyway, so there we are, starting at the television all comatose-like as Judge Judy tears into some kid who’s being accused of stealing his girlfriend’s stereo system. And Miss Lou’s yelling out, “Defamation of character! Defamation of character! She then stares directly at this couple across the bar who are arguing. I get the feeling Miss Lou knows what it’s about. The guy’s denying everything, says there is no other woman. Miss Lou laughs hysterically, mumbling something I can’t quite understand.

Miss Barbara, the bartender, frail-looking old woman with a midwestern accent, says to me, “Don’t worry, she’s totally harmless”

“Oh, I know,” I say. “I just wish I knew what the hell she was laughing at.”

Miss Lou scoots on over to the jukebox and puts a couple of bucks in. Suddenly the bar’s blessed with slow r and b. Whitney. Mariah. Other modern classics like “Get Your Freak On,” and “Shake That Ass.” She puts the beer down and sings and dances along to the music. She knows all the words. Her smile is big and bright and radiant. She seems like she’s truly content; almost as if she’s some free-floating soul, oblivious to the world around her, as if she belongs in some different time, in some different place.

Suddenly, I find myself laughing out loud, unable to take my eyes off Miss Lou. She does a circle around the barstool, and now she’s really getting down, every part of her body’s feeling the music and the other people sitting at the bar can’t help but look. She’s even got the guy in the derby cap’s attention and now we’re all a bit drunk and laughing and I’m even starting to tap my foot to this ridiculous beat.

Miss Barbara flashes an old cracked and wrinkled smile and asks, “Do you want another?”

I know I should really be going, but I take out a couple of crumpled ones from my pocket and put them down on the bar. “Sure, why not.”

Eventually the music stops. Miss Lou goes back to drawing on George W. The arguing couple has made up and is now over at the shuffleboard. The same stale smoke from an hour ago still sits under the ceiling. I put the beer down. Maybe it isn’t exactly the most poetic portrait of life, but hell, it’s something.