You Ever Heard of Kelso?

“Fall off a cliff and die Dominguez! Fall of a cliff and die! Any other jock and 'dat horse woulda’ been ten to one!”

I look over thinking this might be the same Puerto Rican I saw about a month ago at the OTB a few blocks from Times Square who grumbled to the TV after losing on a turf race, “Castellano, your mother is a whore.” Yes, rrrr’s rolled and all.

Well, it’s not, but this man dressed in army fatigues frustration shares a striking similarity. He leaves the grandstand full of anger and I can’t help but wonder what he’s going to sound like by the time we get to the ninth race. I’m taking it he didn’t have money on Keechi Bullet. I don’t see what the big surprise is. Ramon Dominguez has had the best winning percentage at Belmont for years and, even with average horses, he’s at the top of his game on a muddy track.

It’s a quiet, sunny Wednesday in September out at Belmont Park just after a night full of rain. The horses and jockeys are covered in mud; stuck in the elements as we sit comfortably under the sun and blue sky, studying and marking up our racing forms like Bibles, searching for unknown truths and wagering small dreams on two-dollar exactas, trifectas, and Pick 3’s. In the third I keep it simple and put ten dollars to win on Wishful Tomcat, watch him run a perfect race, and come back with twenty-five.

The stands are rather empty, hollowed remains of what once was. The pictures of Secretariat, War Admiral, Seattle Slew, Bill Shoemaker, Sunny “Jim” Fitzsimmons above the tellers remind us of a different era. Still, a few folks come out. I hear the senior couple next to me planning on the next race. The husband, his eyes hiding behind a huge pair of black sunglasses, looks through the past performances and gives a detailed description of each of the races and the conditions. The wife says she’s going for the four horse. Four was her mother’s favorite number. The husband laughs, but knows she’s got just as good of a chance as he does.

Mystery Man, dressed in slacks and a tie and straw hat, shows up and takes his usual seat at the lower part of the bleachers. Meticulously, he wipes down his seat over and over with a napkin, trying to get rid of any leftover germs and bad fortuity. He then sits down, crosses his legs, pulls out his notebook of numbers, and gracefully chews on a yellow apple that fashionably matches his shirt. He surveys the track and the tote board with the air of a man that knows what he’s doing. In the three months I’ve been coming out to Belmont I’ve never heard the man speak a word to anyone and I’ve always watched him leave by the seventh race. He must be winning.

A man with very few teeth, dressed in what appears to be a mechanics uniform and the nametag, Gus, stands next to me in the back of the stands. He looks at my notebook with random notes on each of the horses running. Despite hours of research and systems, it really hasn’t done me any good.

“You keep records of all this shit?”

“I try, but I’m starting to wonder.”

“You got any tips?”

“All I know is don’t bet the horse out in front first and the one likely to get on the rail.”

“Oh, the track’s biased. The rail’s bad, eh?”

“Seems so. If they get stuck on the rail, it’s like they’re running in quicksand, they don’t have a chance.”

“I hate an uneven track. There’s no way you can win. Hell, a closer like Kelso couldn’t even win on an uneven track. You ever heard of Kelso? Yeah, one of the greatest horses ever. I was here to see him. I’ve been coming here since 1953 and I ain’t never seen anyone win out here. Not one. You can’t. How can you win when you bet a hundred dollars and you’re already down to seventy-five?.” (He’s referring to the twenty-five percent the track automatically takes out from exotic bets.) It’s impossible. Where’s my program? I’ll show you.”

Gus goes rummaging through a bag of what looks like newspapers and oranges. “Ah, where’s my program? What a schmuck, I left my program at home. Can you believe that? Shit, I’ll see ya.”

“Good luck.”

“Yeah, right,” he says, lacking any sense of confidence.

The races go on and Tom Durkin sits in his spot up top, his voice resonating on the speakers, giving us the play by play. “And…they’re off.” I watch most of the regular denizens throw their tickets to the ground as their horses fail to come in. Some go running around the crowd, shouting, “Easy Money!” and then head for the tellers. I spot the closest to a sure thing in the fifth with That’s Rich. I put ten to win, five to place, and a little two-dollar exacta. All three of them hit and after losing thirty bucks I’m up a hundred for the day and feeling a little better.

I get to talking to a small, Italian that’s wearing black-rimmed glasses. He looks a lot better than most of the folks I see at the track. You might mistake him as a college professor. He’s telling me these small bets are just a waste of time. The only way you’re going to win is if you put the big money down. Play the pick 3’s. He’s got one ticket for fifty bucks and another for thirty in his hands. Says he already hit one for 220.00. Not bad for most of the odds on favorites coming in. There’s no way to win with just single race bets, he tells me. He then covers the racing form over his face giving me secret words of wisdom he doesn’t want the other folks to know about.

“I don’t listen to Andy Serling or read the Daily News picks. I don’t listen to what any of these guys out here are saying. You have to know what’s really going on. Trainer angles. Jockey moves. Shippers. I’ll show you. You’ve got to break it down to three or four horses and then bet with those. It’s just like the stock market. Value for your dollar. That’s the name of the game. I know a guy who does well out here. Just to be in the action he plays 10-15 to win or place on races he doesn’t really care about. He does o.k. with those, but that’s just play money. Then when he sees something he likes, boom, he lays a couple hundred down. He wins a lot too. Dollar investment.”

With only a couple of minutes to post I’ve enjoyed listening to the Professor, but realize I’ve been distracted and put twenty on Tar Beach who finishes up in the middle of the field.

An unassuming, rather lanky, and soft-spoken man named Roger asks if he can borrow my form too look at the 7th and 8th races.

“You got any tips?”

“I don’t know. Seems like all the horses from the inside posts are winning.”

“Oh yeah? Bet the inside. You got anything else for me? Anyone look good?”

“Horses just off the pace are winning. You just got to figure out who the hell’s going to run that way. Honestly, I don’t know I’m talking about. Don’t listen to me.”

“Yeah, this is a rough game. I met a guy one time out here that was real bad on his luck. Living out of his car. He was real depressed. Wife left him. Then he hit the pick 6 and won 80,000. Well, at least that’s what he said.”

“Let’s hope he didn’t come back to the track after that.”

“Yeah, you hear about these people that win big and than blow it all gambling again. Half of them go out to Vegas. Not me. I’d just take a trip somewhere. Maybe go down to Florida. Take a cruise. Well, I don’t want to take any more of your time.”

We part ways and place our bets. The sun is starting to fall low as we head into early evening, casting shadows along the infield. The birds are circling and somewhere in this crazy world winning tickets are chanced upon.

I watch the eighth race unfold and for the first time all day a closer actually gains ground. Bhangaloo Ruby gets up in the front towards the final turn and bursts down the final stretch. She’s the first outside horse of the day to win and paying decent at 5 to 1. But that’s not what everyone’s hooting and hollering about. It’s the fact that following her is Fivefifteen at 42 to 1, and Yo Karakorum at 32 to 1. For all the wild long shot players who toil through winless months, this is their day. The exacta pays $366.00 and the trifecta pays a handsome $3,281.00. And who’s riding the winner, but none other than Castellano.

A large, jolly looking, black man is running back towards me with the most wonderfully animated expression. He’s so excited he can hardly get the words out.

“I knew it! I just knew it! I was sitting at the machine and I don’t know why, but I picked all the outside horses. You know, my dad always came out here and that’s how he’d play. Always betting three horses in a row. He never won a dime doing that. I used to tell him he was crazy for betting that way. I said, you’ll never win. Damn, I knew I should’ve played the trifecta. It’d be the same thing for 12 dollars. Oh man! Three thousand dollars? Oh man!”

“Hey, 366 ain’t bad. Be thankful for that,” I say, quietly crumpling my ticket and letting it fall to the ground. I’m a little jealous, but I’m happy for this guy. At least someone’s winning out here.

“Oh, I know. It’s crazy, something told me to do that right at the last minute.”

“Maybe it was your old man looking down on you.”

“I think so. It had to have been. Oh boy, that just paid for the year.” He looks up to the sky, as if to thank pops.

Roger walks back over to the two of us.

“Hey, you said the inside of the track. Your 6 didn’t even show up. The 7 looked good at the paddock, but didn’t run worth a shit.”

“You should know, always bet the opposite of what someone tells you. I guess it was time for a change. Bet the outside.”

“Yeah, I guess. Hell, I’m out of here.”

The jolly man comes back after telling someone else about his big win. He’s still beaming. He looks over at Roger as he leaves and says, “Damn, you look like my father, I mean, you’re like the spitting image. Jesus, this is weird.” He then runs toward the victory circle. I wonder if there’s some kind of spirit channeling going on right before my eyes. Stranger things have happened. I wait around for the ninth just to see if some kind of miracle takes place, but no such luck. The favorite Fastus Cactus blows away the rest of the field and everyone heads home.

The old woman with the smoke wrinkled face of a Sharpei that’s probably been sitting in the general admission booth since they opened the racetrack bids us a good afternoon. Her small, beady eyes and sharp smile have a beautiful resignation about them. I imagine she’s got more than a few stories to tell. I follow the regulars out to the parking lot and count what I’ve got left in my wallet. It’s about nine dollars less than I came with. I figure it’s hardly much of a price to pay for a day of small victories. I’m quickly brought back to reality though, as a swaying drunk a few feet away mumbles to himself and pisses in the open for all to see. I’m thinking it’s probably been a while since he picked a winner.

.

Sitting at the Round Table

From the outside you’d never know our apartment was any different than the other brownstones that lined the streets of Baltimore’s Mt. Vernon neighborhood. The bricks were a bit weathered, the front steps cracked and tilted to the side, but otherwise, the place looked like something you were more likely to come across in the nicer neighborhoods of New York or Boston.

What set 822 Monument St. apart from the others wasn’t something you could necessarily put your finger on; it was more of a strange vibe, a sense of twisted reality, a feeling that things weren’t quite right. The first time I walked into the building I felt it. Maybe the darkly lit hallway with the flickering lights or the sweating plaster that seemed to always be peeling off of the walls had something to do with it. Maybe it was the strange creaking noises that came from the empty basement or that musty smell that had one thinking they were inside a two hundred year-old bookstore.

I’m not sure why I decided to live there. I’d like to say it was because it was cheap or because the landlord had been kind enough to overlook my bad credit; but I’d be lying. I suppose part of me was curious and the other part of me was just plain old out of my mind crazy and didn’t give a damn. And now that I look back on it, nearly all of the people that lived in that dingy place were crazed in their own right.

There was Gomez, the big Mexican with the lost look in his eyes who never said anything and would climb up the walls in a panic if you walked past him in the hallway. Rumor was that his parents gave the landlord a check for the entire year of rent every January 1st. Then Old Man Pops on the floor above me – his underwear always half way out of his pants – standing outside of his door pounding on his chest and yelling, “You took my beer!” Gary and Lilly down on the first floor, friendly as hell when you saw them on the street and then arguing and beating each other up every night.

But at the epicenter of that madness and that unexplainable year of my life was Arthur.


I had apartment #6 on the third floor and Arthur lived in #5, directly below mine. With the freckles, the enormous brown bug-eyes, and ring-horn Afro, the man looked like a carnival clown that had fallen on bad times. He also happened to be a heavy drinker and nightly crack-smoker. What set him apart from the stereotypical street-walking crack head was the fact that somehow, despite hardly any sleep, every day of the week he would wake up at six and put in ten hours working at the laundry mat a few blocks away.

About a month after I moved in Arthur and I were sitting out on the front steps. We were just hanging, drinking beer, catching the last glimpses of summer and spouting off to one another our own versions of gutter philosophy. As the afternoon wore on I noticed Arthur getting pretty drunk. He made a few trips upstairs and it was obvious by the look in his eyes when he came back, that he wasn’t going up there to use the bathroom.

I’m not sure exactly what spurred the change in conversation that day, but suddenly, with a straight face, Arthur explained to me how he’d lived through five different lives. He was four shy of a cat. A lot of the details weren’t clear, even to him, but he was absolutely certain of it. He was sort of this immortal spirit that hopped throughout time from body to body. Arthur new it was hard to fathom for the average person like myself, but he swore on his mother’s grave; this wasn’t no bullshit.

In a nutshell, Arthur experienced what he referred to as Life-Forces. He had the magical ability to see things beyond our control. Basically, the man was blessed with some strange form of telepathy, something that went far beyond the realm of simple, everyday coincidence. Randomly, he received messages from up above. Whether those voices were from God, Saints, Angels, he didn’t know.

I remember staring Arthur directly in the eyes, trying to see if he was messing with the new guy, and then saying, “Man, you’re fucking crazy, you know that?”

Arthur put his hand on my shoulder and laughed aloud, the elder statesman, dismissing my foolish response. “No way, Larry. You see, crazy people don’t know they’re crazy. Like that guy that walks up and down Charles and always knocks three times on the trees and speaks all that gibberish. Now that guy’s crazy. And he don’t even know it. But see, guys like you and me, well, we already know we’re crazy, so we ain’t crazy.”

In the following months I had a handful of wild nights with Arthur, but the closest glimpse I actually got into the interior of that man’s twisted mind was when he gave me a book of journals that he had been compiling for the past five years. In those wee hours of the night, when the drunks were staggering home from the neighborhood bars, when the drag queens were hustling over on Calvert for a score, Arthur was busy finding his muse.

Arthur had mentioned the journals to me a few times before. He told me he was creating a modern day masterpiece, a work of art that was well ahead of its time. Inside of those journals lied eternal truths, prophecies, the answers to all of man’s deepest and most profound questions. One day he would get it published. He was going to make millions off of it.

I’ll admit I was actually kind of looking forward to delving into the literary mind of Arthur. If you were able to catch him in a relatively sober state, which wasn’t all to often, you’d realize he was a fairly intelligent guy. He swore by the works of the old classic writers, guys like Montaigne, Socrates, and his favorite, Machiavelli.

I made it as far as thirty pages into his masterpiece and to this day I still have no idea of what those words he had written amounted to. As far as the style of writing, the closest explanation I can come up with is unintelligible biblical verse. There was the constant use of thus and thou and begot this and begot that. The problem was that none of it made any sense. Large asterisks and all caps denoted what I assumed Arthur considered the more important quotes. Taking up half of page 12 was:

“A MAN IS MAN. BUT ONLY OF A MAN.”

On page 17:

“WALK THE CORNER AS SCREAMING WALLS.”


In some of the left-hand margins Arthur had written an entirely different language. It resembled a cross between mathematical symbols and Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was written so meticulously that at one point I almost wondered if these were the words of those voices he told me he received from above. Maybe there really was some truth to that whole Angels and five different lives business. Hell, maybe those religious people had Jesus all wrong. That good-looking tan guy with the long hair and compassion and healing powers and amazing carpentry skills was just a scam for all the suckers to buy into. Maybe the real Jesus was sitting down at his cluttered desk in the middle of Baltimore, burning the midnight oil and putting down the mighty word.

Five hours into the journal I had to stop. I couldn’t read any more. All I came out of the experience with was a vicious headache.


A few days later I gave the journal back to Arthur. He asked me excitedly, “So what do you think man? Pretty deep shit, huh?”

“Uh, yeah, little hard to follow, but it’s good,” I said. At the time I didn’t really have it in my heart to tell him that it was the most insane thing I’d ever tried to comprehend.


Well, the weeks passed by and then one day I looked out my window and all of the trees were dead and naked, the streets covered in a blanket of white. The ferns that covered the walls of the church across the street had disappeared and the sun was a distant memory. Winter had hit. It was a brutal one too; the most snow the city had gotten in over a hundred years. Driving around town I noticed a strange look in people’s eyes. Everyone seemed on edge. For the most part, I tried to stay away from them. During the day I went to my job driving a van delivering mail and at night I kept to myself. My life wasn’t very exciting.

Arthur was still up to his crazy antics. He hadn’t gone completely overboard, but he was getting there. A couple of times a week he’d come up to my apartment at ridiculous hours of the night. I awake from a deep sleep around three in the morning to the sound of his secret knock.

I’d open the door, my eyes barely open, my hair shooting out ten different ways.

“Shit, Larry, didn’t wake you, did I?” he’d say, his eyes lit up like a Chinese New Year.

“Uh, no, what’s up?” I’d mumble.

“Hey man, got me a lady-friend down three, if you know what I mean. Got to ask you a favor. I need some milk. Cooking oil. Oh yeah, and ten bucks!”

I wouldn’t even try to put together what those things amounted to at this ungodly hour. I’d stumble over to the fridge, shaking my head in disbelief, dig through my wallet, and hand him the goods.

“Damn, thanks Larry! You know I’m good for it. I’ll get you on Friday. Say, I can bring her up here after I’m done. You know, she’ll suck your dick for five bucks!”

“No thanks. Think I’ll take a rain check on that one.”

I’m not really sure why I put up with Arthur’s wild ways. It would’ve been easy for me to not open the door. Pretend to be asleep. I could’ve just stuck to my own boring, solitary life and been all right. But when it comes down to it, that way of going about things has never really worked out for me. For some reason, I happen to always find myself in the most unordinary circumstances. Really, I don’t go looking for that life; it just has a strange way of falling into my lap.

In my younger days I had dabbled here and there with the drugs, some coke, acid, that sort of thing. Maybe I tormented my neighbors a few times too. That said I also new that at some point the drugs begin to wear on you. It’s just the natural order of things. Arthur was close to fifty and the ill affects of that lifestyle, compounded with sleep-deprivation, was beginning to show. His sense of reality was quickly evolving into an extreme sense of violent paranoia.


One Sunday morning I woke up to a skirmish going on outside of my apartment. I had no intention of opening my door, but I had a feeling Arthur was involved. Suddenly, a sad yelp echoed against the walls, then a gasping for breath. I could just picture it: someone’s little beady, red head doused in sweat, their eyes popping out of their skull. Then came the sound of Arthur’s deep, roaring voice. He sounded like a lion in a dark tunnel.

“Luke 6:31: And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise!”

Poor Arthur. He’d really lost it. As much as I didn’t want to be involved, I couldn’t let him murder someone. I didn’t want to have something like that on my conscience. I was just about to open my door when I heard Arthur throw the person down the stairs.

“Now get the fuck out of here! I said get the fuck out! And next time I see ya’ I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

Coughing, heavy breathing, and then scurrying steps followed down the two flights of stairs. Then I heard the front door open and slam shut. Arthur went into his apartment and turned his radio on full blast so that everyone in the building could be blessed with the awe-inspiring power of the Gospel. As I lay in bed the rest of the morning for some reason all I could picture was some old Baptist granny, nodding her heading saying over and over, “The Laud show works in mysterious ways.”


It’s strange how things have a way of working out. You know, it’s like there’s nothing really going on in your life. You exist, physically, mentally, spiritually so to speak, but there’s no point to it all. You wake up, go to work, come home, flip on the television, listen to the neighbors bring down the walls and you’re thinking, is this all there is? You keep going over and over it in your head until you drive yourself straight up the doorsteps of the nearest ward or you give up. Sometimes you take long walks around the city. You sit in parks watching the sun go down and try to clear your head. You see the mother’s pushing their children around in strollers and then you sit off to the side in the restaurants and see the couples, young, old, they look so happy and maybe they aren’t all that way, but you’re just sitting there, chewing on your tongue, going plum out of your mind.

I guess sometimes you got to hit rock bottom to luck out.


I met Sophie at a coffee shop downtown. I had twenty minutes to kill between deliveries and I hadn’t slept at all the previous night and was in bad need of some kind of pick me up. Normally, I never go into those places. Something about those pseudo-intellectuals with their laptops and their Café Lautas, or whatever they call them, trying to look like they’re doing something important, but probably playing Solitaire or mulling over how to spend the next five years in college. Not my crowd is all. I just wanted some coffee.

Once I saw her I knew. I don’t know how to put it; there’s just this warm-blooded good feeling you get. It’d been a while since I last had it.

Sophie looked completely out of place amongst the heard. She was wearing a bright, shiny blue blouse with small nipples pointing out of it. She was skinny as hell, all bones, and her hair was black and choppy and almost looked like someone just put a mop rag on her head. A large scar cut deep into her skin, starting on her forehead and ending down the middle of her nose. Her green eyes were big and crazy and seemed to instantly give off this sense of unique beauty, a friendly warmth. I can’t say exactly what it was, but right away I was nuts about her.

That first day we just made the typical small chat. I could tell I was kind of nervous and fumbling over the words, but I was trying to see if she was giving off anything. I took my double espresso, downed it right there in front of her like it was a shot of whiskey and headed towards the door. Almost outside I heard her yell, “Hey, I’ll see ya’ tomorrow?” I turned around and saw her standing behind the counter looking like some kind of angel gypsy. I gave her a smile full of wrinkled scars and waved.


It was all so exciting and new in the beginning. Sophie was a wild wandering spirit. She was an artist, a poet, a spiritual healer. She’d traveled all over the world. Thailand. India. China. Scotland. She’d ridden on elephants outside of Bangkok and fed monkeys from hotel balconies. She’d hiked the Himalayas by herself and had slept with Shamans in villages I couldn’t pronounce the name of. Somehow her travels had taken her to Baltimore where she was just hanging around until the next adventure came along.

I didn’t know what Sophie really saw in me. I was a pretty plain, boring guy who didn’t have much going on. I’d moved around a bit and had lived in big cities like Chicago and L.A., but I didn’t know anything about all those crazy places she’d been to.

I spent a lot of the next couple of months at her place. Her apartment was vibrant, full of color and life. There were blue Picasso prints and framed Chinese poems by guys with short names like Li Po and Tu Fu, and it was all foreign to me, but I felt comfortable there. Sometimes she’d bug me about how she’d never been to my place, but I’d always try to change the conversation. Things were getting strange back at the apartment anyway. There’d been rumors of a gun going off one night and in the past week the cops had been over a couple of times.

I was coming back from Sophie’s when I ran into Arthur. It was freezing and Arthur was looking batty as hell. He was wearing a Russian fur hat with flaps around the side and a cigar that looked like it’d been dead for over an hour was dangling from his lips. I hadn’t seen him for a while and now I was realizing why.

“Larry, what the hell you doing out here? It ain’t safe around here at night. There’s crazy fuckers running all around this neighborhood! Things ain’t like they used to be. These are hard times! Thousands people are out of work! They’re not in the right mind.”

I looked past Arthur and stared into the lights of the cab cars running up and down Monument. Despite the chill, the Queens that always came out after ten were still wearing their glittery bootie shorts and doing their best to make a buck. A couple of Bohemian looking kids sat on a stoop a few buildings down.

“Hell, you’re a nice fella’ Larry. I know. Remember last summer when we sat on the steps talking about The Prince? And all those times I knocked on you’re door and you gave me shit. You never asked me for nothing. That means something. But things are changing around here. You know that guy Eddie? He’s all fucked up! Been doing stupid shit! Do you know he broke into Dianne’s?”

Dianne was in her early thirties. I think she was studying to be a lawyer, but she was always nervous, scared when she walked by anyone else in the place. I never quite figured out how she ended up in our building. Eddie on the other hand was sketchy as hell. He was the neighborhood dealer. Sometimes I’d run into him at one of the local bars. Occasionally he’d say hi to me, but he was always jittery and running all over the place. I usually kept my distance.

“You remember what I told you when you first moved in the building? How this was our home and how we need to make sure it stays safe? Now look at it. That fucker Eddie’s been living in the basement, cutting all his coke down there with some other dudes. Do you know he was sawing up through the ceiling into Dianne’s bedroom? I told him the next time I see him around I’m going to kill him! I will! And now we got that damn ho who keeps sneaking in the building. Hanging with Gomez in #3. Everything’s going to shit!”

It was about twenty degrees and my fingers were going numb. At least now I knew who Arthur had been choking that one Sunday. I wondered if the landlord knew anything about what was going on. I thought about mentioning it, but Arthur was charged up. Ready to serve and protect. He was a man of justice; noble, despite the fact that everyone he was talking about were at one time people he’d been friends with. I guess that was the life; in one minute, out the next.

Arthur would’ve gone on for another couple hours, but I calmly told him I’d watch my back and walked towards the apartment.

I lay in bed for a couple hours, but I was feeling pretty restless so I went back over to Sophie’s. She could tell I was a bit out of sorts. As much as she’d seen, and as many places as she’d been, I didn’t really get the feeling she knew anything about the kind of life I surrounded myself with.

That night Sophie turned off all the lights and lit a bunch of candles. She put on some weird music with sitars and chanting and gave me a Reiki session. I sat down Indian style and she told me to hold my palms face up and she placed hers a few inches above mine. I was skeptical about the whole business, but it was real important to her so I went along with it. After a minute Sophie stopped. She backed away with a frightened look in her eyes.

“What,” I said.

“I don’t know. That was really weird. I’m getting a real bad energy from you. I’ve never felt something like that.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Larry, let’s just stop. Forget we ever did that.”

We hardly talked the rest of the night. It was obvious whatever Sophie had seen wasn’t good. I pried her on it for a while, but she wouldn’t tell me anything. God, I had crazy spirits floating all around me. Palm-reading angels and psychic junky demons and I was just wondering where I fit into it all.


The next day at work I was in a daze. I drove around the city in a cloudy fog, my thoughts roaming, unable to form any concrete images. I liked Sophie, but maybe things would be easier if I just kept to myself. Less complicated. Bad luck had a way of following me around and hurting the people close to me. The girl I had lived with in Chicago was now in a mental hospital. The one before her was paralyzed in a boating accident. Call it intuition, but I just had a feeling.

I didn’t talk to Sophie for a week. She left a bunch of messages on my answering machine, but I didn’t call her back. I’d go to work, come home, and drink to the point of near retardation. I felt like I had to tune everything out.

If I could do it all over again I would’ve kissed Sophie the second I saw her standing on the front steps. I would’ve taken her in my arms and told her I was sorry for being a fool. We would’ve kept walking up the stairs straight into my apartment. Wrestled under the sheets for hours and then laid in bed listening to the night. Maybe we’d blast the stereo and parade around the room like naked fools. Sometimes I wonder.

I was sitting on the couch going dizzy staring at the walls when the buzzer went off. I went down to the front door and Sophie was standing there. We just looked at each other, all silent for a while, and then she said, “So, you going to ask me in?”

“Yeah, yeah, “ I said, still out of it.

On the way to the stairs I noticed Sophie curiously surveying the dilapidated interior and I made some kind of joke. “Well, welcome to my own private dump.” We both laughed and I felt a little better. We were almost to my apartment when Arthur opened his door and came up to us.

“Hey Larry. Oooh, lookie here. Didn’t mean to interrupt. Who’s this cute thing?”

“Sophie, this here’s Arthur,” I said.

“Hi,” said Sophie. She stuck her little hand out and Arthur shook it with a little too much force, though I knew it wasn’t done purposefully.

“Well, damn Larry. That’s why I never hear you around. Say, I got a new friend staying with me. I want you to meet her.”

“Huh, who is it?” I asked, not really feeling up for Arthur’s antics.

“Just come on in.”

We walked into his apartment. Lamps, torn-apart stereos, empty cereal boxes, and dirty clothes were scattered all over the floor. Long sheets of aluminum foil were hanging from the ceiling and computer monitors were positioned in each corner. There was an army banner hung on the wall. The place kind of had an Apocalypse Now thing going on.

“Ruth! Ruth! Come on out!” Arthur yelled.

A pit-bull slowly walked out from the bedroom. She was black and white with cherry-veined eyes. Sophie and I took a step back.

“Don’t be scared guys. She’s totally harmless.”

Yeah, harmless if she wasn’t getting that second-hand action. I figured that stuff Arthur smoked was bound to make a mouse violent.

“I’m just babysitting for the next couple of weeks. Say y’all want a beer?”

I couldn’t tell what was going through Sophie’s mind at that minute, but before I could say anything she said, “Sure, thanks.”

“Well, all I got is Old E. Think I’ll have some too. Hah hah, don’t mind if I do.”

Sophie grabbed my hand and smiled. I guess this was all new for her.
Next to the ashtray on the cardboard box that worked as a coffee table I saw the glass pipe. Beside it, a zip-lock bag filled with little white rocks. Arthur came back from the kitchen with three cups of beer and sat across from us on the couch.

“You don’t mind, do you?” Arthur said to Sophie.

Sophie shook her head. Arthur filled the pipe and brought it up to his lips. He lit it with a Zippo, closed his eyes, and took in the smoke. He held it for a while and then blew it out. The room had the smell of burning plastic.

Twenty minutes later that bag was getting pretty empty and Arthur was talking nonsense. He was walking all around the room, waving his arms every which way, going on his crazy rant about keeping the neighborhood safe shit. I don’t think Sophie knew what to say. Ruth started circling Arthur. She kept her own distance from us, but I knew how animals were always the first to sense when something strange was about to happen. That dog was making me nervous.

I’m sitting there thinking, I’m going to grab a hold of Sophie and we’re going to get the hell out of here. We’re going to get out before anything happens.

A couple of seconds later there was a knock at the door. I glanced back and Sketchy Eddie stood in front of Arthur. He was looking like the Grim Reaper. He had big black bags under his eyes, like he hadn’t slept in a month. Arthur let him in. I took a good look at both of them and they were all jittery: a couple of Chihuahuas. I didn’t get it. A couple of weeks ago Arthur was telling me how he was going to kill this guy. He’d nearly choked him to death on the stairs. Now they were hanging out? It didn’t add up.

I whispered into Sophie’s ear, “Finish your beer now.”

Eddie nervously said hey to the two of us and followed Arthur into the kitchen. I didn’t hear what started it, but two of them were arguing. “Look man, all I’m saying is to chill man. Chill! I’ll get you the shit by tomorrow.”

Eddie was walking out of the kitchen when I saw Arthur come up behind him with the gun.

In the movies it always takes forever. There’s this build-up and then the back and forth dialogue and the guy with the gun says something witty and then the other guy says something equally witty like “Go ahead and shoot me,” and then the guy with the gun has a real serious, squinting look and then the gun finally goes off. It was nothing like that.

It all happened so fast, and yet, at the same time everything felt like it was in slow motion. I wanted to get up and stop it, but there was this uncontrollable force keeping me pinned down. It was like some crazy nightmare, where you want to scream but no matter how hard you try no sound will come out of your mouth.

Arthur grabbed a hold of Eddie’s shoulder, spun him around, and bashed him across the face with the butt of the gun. Sophie screamed, but in a matter of seconds, she was silenced by two gunshots to Eddie’s head. His body was slumped halfway behind a table. I couldn’t see his face, but I saw the blood splattered all over the walls. I watched his leg twitch a little and then go still. Ruth leaped from where we were and sunk her teeth into Eddie’s puny arm. Arthur stood over him screaming out:

“So rejoice, O sons of Zion, and be glad in the LORD your God! For He has given you the early rain for your vindication! And He has poured down for you the rain, The early and latter rain as before!”

I didn’t really have time to think. I grabbed a hold of Sophie and made for the door. Before we reached the stairs I quickly glanced back and Arthur was still standing in the same spot, eyes popping out of his head, his gun in one hand, the other raised in the air.

It must have been three blocks before we stopped running. Sophie’s face was pale-white. She wasn’t crying or nothing. Just blank-eyed and out of breath and as I stood there looking at her with nothing to say I knew that all the Reiki, aligning of the stars, moon signs and auras in the world wouldn’t have prepared her for something like that. We held each other on that corner for I don’t know how long. I could hear the sirens in the distance.


I didn’t go back to the apartment for a couple of days. I didn’t want to have anything to do with the place. The day after it all happened there was a blurb in the paper. It was on one of the back pages of the Metro section. They mentioned the murder and how the police had shown up with the suspect sitting on his couch with his dog in his lap. Arthur didn’t put up any kind of fight.

The cops came around asking questions, but no one else in the apartment would come forth about hearing anything. I didn’t even know if anyone had seen Sophie and I leave. I called the landlord and told them I was moving out.

I tried staying with Sophie, but things were never the same after that. She never
wanted to talk about what happened up in Arthur’s apartment. Neither of us did. I told her I understood if she went to the cops. She didn’t. We didn’t talk for a few weeks and then one day I went to her work. They told me she’d moved away.

For months after, that night went over and over in my head. The whole year in that apartment. Utter insanity. No one would ever believe me if I tried to tell that story so I didn’t. For a while all that went through my mind was what if this, what if that. These days though I try to think about other things. I picked up more hours at work and even joined the gym. Sometimes I take weekend trips out to the Chesapeake Bay or down to D.C.

I still live in Baltimore, but I stay clear of my old apartment. Every now and then though the company has me do a delivery or pick-up at one of those lawyer’s offices off of Monument and I have to pass by the building. I look up at what used to be my bedroom window and then I look up at Arthur’s wondering what the hell he’s thinking about in that jail cell. I see Sketchy Eddie lying there like a piece of meat and that pit with that stupid name all lock-jawed and Arthur waving his arms around and speaking a language I don’t even think God understands; and it’s strange, because part of me goes running out the door, but there’s this other part of me that’s just standing there, curiously watching the whole thing take place. I don’t really know what to make of it, but what it comes down to is that I guess I really want to see how it all plays out.

Sunday's at Leo's

“Hey John, the usual?”

“No, just give me a cranberry juice,” said Big John.

I was a little surprised since in the three months I’d been working at Leo’s, Big John had always ordered cherry brandy. Like most of the clientele that came into Leo’s, he was old and he was a heavy drinker.

I poured him a glass of cranberry juice and placed it next to the napkin full of breadcrumbs that he always saved for his birds at home.

Big John was in his late seventies. He came in every Sunday at eleven in the morning always dressed in the same black suit. With the nice red lapel and black and white striped tie he looked like he had just walked out of church. Though he was Irish, I think he was far from being the religious type. Hunched over, he was about six-two and he probably weighed at least two-fifty. His head was enormous. It looked like a massive watermelon. When he laughed you could see his decayed and jagged teeth on full display. His cheeks and eyes were all baggy and puffed out and all the fat seemed to reside in his double chin.

“You wouldn’t believe what happened to me last night,” said Big John.

“Oh yeah, what’s that?”

“Well before I went into bed I went into the bathroom. So I was peeing and at first everything seemed normal. Then, all of a sudden, this big gush of blood comes pouring out of my dick. I mean it was enough blood to fill that catsup bottle over there. Hah! I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never seen anything like that. All that blood floating around in the toilet. I tell you, it was dis-gusting.”

“Jeez, did you call the hospital?”

“You’re damn right I called the hospital. Jesus Roy! I lost a pint of blood! The ambulance came and they took me to the emergency room. They had all these tubes going into my arms. Amazing!”

“Damn John.”

“Doctor says I’ll be all right though. It was just a little hemorrhage. They gave me all kinds of drugs. Now I feel like a drug pusher. A drug pusher! As long as I stay away from the booze I’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.”

Big John lowered his eyes into the Sunday newspaper and I walked back to the end of the bar and straightened up the bottles in the cooler.

About a half-hour later Jack walked in. Jack was another one of the Sunday, suit-wearing old-timers. He was a little younger than Big John and always wore a blue suit with a black top hat that had a red feather tucked into the ribbon.

He sat down a few stools over from Big John and I put a mug of Bud down in front of him.

“Hey Jack.”

“Hey Roy. Hey, how goes it John?”

“Ugh,” grumbled Big John, not looking up from the paper.

Jack was a retired card dealer. He did fifteen years in Vegas and then twenty up in Atlantic City. He also had a penchant for always passing out at the bar. The strange part about it was that it only happened when he was on the fourth beer. All of the sudden, you’d look over and he’d have his face flat on the bar, his big white mustache right in the spilled beer, snoring away. I’d usually let him sleep for a couple minutes and then I’d bang my fist down on the bar and say, “Wake up Jack! This ain’t a hotel!” Every once in a while there’d be a few people in the bar and they’d laugh and then Jack would open his eyes, lift his head, and in one fluid motion, he’d grab the glass of beer and resume drinking.

“Say, Roy, get John a drink for me,” said Jack.

“I’m not drinking!” screamed Big John.

“What’s wrong John, you going soft?” goaded Jack as he winked at me.

“Why you…I’m sick of your talking, Jack. You know, you never know when to shut up.”

Big John’s eyes looked they were going to pop right out of that huge head of his. I never could quite figure out what Big John had against Jack. Maybe it stemmed from something way back in the day. He turned towards the window and covered himself up with the paper.

“Oh, come on John.”

“Just shut up, Jack!”

Jack looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. I thought about filling him in on the whole blood incident, but I figured it really wasn’t any of my business. I walked back to my stool in the corner and looked out the window. Families all dressed up were coming back form church. People were jogging and walking their dogs. I noticed Jack had a deck of cards in front of him and was shuffling them.

“Hey Roy, come over here and shuffle this deck.”

Jack had done his card tricks for me a handful of times. I didn’t mind. They were pretty amazing and even after carefully studying his hands, I still had no clue as to how he pulled them off.

I shuffled the cards about four times and then put them down on the bar. Jack had me cut the deck and then he shuffled them once.

“Here he goes again with those damn card tricks,” grumbled Big John. I noticed he had now moved from the Metro section to the comics. Maybe that would lighten his mood up a little.

Jack got up from his stool and walked over to the far side of the bar.

“Now I’m going to call out each card as you flip it over. There’s no way I can see the cards from where I am.”

“All right,” I said.

Jack yelled out for the Four of Clubs. I turned the first card over and it was the Four. He then called out for the King of Hearts. I turned the card over. Sure enough, it was the King. Jack stood by the bathroom, moving farther back, smiling as he tipped his hat. “Eight of Diamonds…Queen of Spades…Six of Hearts.”

I must have gone through half of the deck and he knew every single card.

Jack walked back to his stool. “I got another one for you.”

He shuffled the cards and I watched him intently, waiting for any slight of hand movements. Nothing.

This time he had the trick worked out so that every time I pulled four cards in a row they’d out as a straight. The whole damn deck came out straights.

“So, you were a card shark or a card dealer?”

Jack smiled, drank down his beer, and said slyly, “Dealer.”

“Well, if I ever make it out to Vegas I think I’ll stick to the slots.”

Roger, a Korean War vet who owned a refrigerator repair shop, walked in half way through the trick.

“I knew this guy who was a card shark in Vegas. He got caught so many time that he started dressing like a woman just to disguise himself. Even got away with it for about a year before they found out.”

Big John, who had been awfully quiet, waved me over. “Roy, get me a brandy.”

“You sure John?” I asked.

“Damn it, one drink isn’t going to kill me.”

I figured he was right. Besides, you get to that age with that kind of liver and
really, what difference does it make? I placed the drink down on the bar.

“Say, I’ve got a trivia question for you,” said Big John.

“All right, shoot.”

“How does a baseball team with no men on base hit a grand slam?”

I thought about it for a minute, but couldn’t think of the answer. “I don’t know John.”

John kept me hanging for a minute with a big jowly grin. His eyes got all big and electric as he prepared for the punch line.

“It’s a girl’s baseball team. You get it? It’s all girls on base. It’s true. I saw it once when I was a kid. Up in Pennsylvania. All the men were in the war so they had girls playing. Oh man, haha, a girl’s baseball team.”

“Yeah, that’s a good one.”

Down at the end of the bar I heard something that sounded like a cat choking on a hairball. I looked over and Jack was passed out, the side of his face drowning in the beer foam. Big John shook his head in disgust and said, “Just look at him.”

Despite the awful sound coming out if his nose, Jack looked so peaceful, like a little baby. He was far far away in dreamland. I walked over and motioned to slam my fist down, but at the last minute I held back. I figured I’d just let him stay like that for a while.

Playing in Portland

June 2009

Woke up late again today. Around noon, man, I feel like a bit of a bumb when it’s that late. I ought to be up early doing something productive, right, anyway, rummaged around the house, doing what exactly, I'm not sure, but finally I got in the truck and drove down to the park downtown off of Burnside. I've been hanging in the park quite a bit of late. For some reason the folks from the halfway houses and city run facilities provide much more entertainment than the rest of the Portland people I’ve come across; let’s just say they’re definitely more up front about things. Some times what they're saying might not make much sense and there may be the foul odor of death in the air from too many days away from the shower, but, I suppose that’s part of the deal….

So I sat down on one of the benches with my guitar, figuring if nothing I could at least get a good glimpse at the women walking by. In the center of the park was a woman lying down. Dressed in sweatpants and a tanktop, she looked like she walked straight out of bed and over to the park, which I imagine, is what probably happened. There were alot of bags surrounding her, like a barricade of sorts. All of these folks get booted out of the missions and houses during the day so they hang out in the park and then file back indoors at night. Anyway, some crippled guy with a bad limp, who appeared to be drugged out, joined her a few minutes later and they laid down together Soon a cop came by, nudged them, and told them they couldn’t do that, and “No sleeping in the park.”

Sometime later an old, petite man with a Vietnam vet hat and cowboy boots sat down next to me. He smelled like piss but seemed nice.

“What kind of guitar is that?”

“A Martin.”

“Wow, is that a good one?”

“Yeah, it treats me good.”

He seemed curious enough and not like some of the junked up kids over in Pioneer Square that ask to play your guitar and then bang on the thing not even playing chords and look at you and say, “You know that one, that’s ACDC.”

So I took it out and handed it to him. He seemed to like the dark mahogany wood, holding it in his hands and staring at it.

"You mind if I play?”

I said sure. He tried to strum a chord, but he didn’t know how to play. I then noticed his nails. They were rather disgusting, pukish yellow and with black dots, long like they hadn’t been cut in over a year. All I could hear was nail on strings. I wanted to grab it back but I didn’t and he realized he really didn’t know how to play so he gave it back to me. I played him some songs and he tapped his boot along.

“So what do you like?” I asked.

“Oh, old country, some rock.”

I played him a Hank Williams song and The Carter Family, songs I’ve been practicing of late. It’s quite amazing how just a simple instrument like a guitar can become a magnet for people and conversation; without it I imagine I would sit in the park all day and not say a word to anyone. Shortly after a large man named Jon sat very close to me on the bench staring at my fingers as I played. He had a mustache and a derby cap and looked like a fisherman and it turned out he was from Alaska so I guess that look comes born out of the water up there. He asked me if I new any John Prine and I smiled and said of course I did. A new gained respect is garnered when someone mentions someone like that. Think I played Souveneirs.

"Yeah, he’s got that song “some humans ain’t humans.” Hell of a song. Great fingerpicker, good sense of humor.”

He asked if he could play the guitar and I passed it over to him. He actually wasn’t bad and knew far more of the blues chords then I do. He new some music theory, said he had studied it in college.

Well, we’re just sitting there when all of the sudden three cops show up. They’re standing in front of the old country man, all of them wearing latex gloves and I got worried for a minute thinking, shit, maybe this guys got some disease and he just spread it all over my nice guitar. A very attractive 30 something woman cop asked him if his name was Jon. He looked at her with one of those looks you know when a little kid has done something wrong, trying to lie but just unable to do it.

“No.”

“Well, what is it?”

“It’s JJJJaack,” he said, hanging his head.

“You sure it’s not Jon? I don’t think you’re telling me the truth. When were you born?"

He gave some date, think it was June 1951. Then they asked him again. This time it was July.

“You wait here,” the woman said to the other two cops.

They were silent, a pair of mutes, just staring off into space as the old man held his cap low over his eyes. Jon looked at me and said, “You know the difference between outlaws and inlaws? Outlaws are wanted. Ha ha ha", he laughed, spitting and hacking a few coughs from his clogged lungs.

The cops handcuffed the old man and took him away. One of the cops came up to me a few minutes later and said he had escaped from some facility and was dangerous. Exactly what that entailed I wasn't sure. Maybe he was suicidal. Who knows. I told her he seemed pretty harmless and he went away peacefully. He just seemed real tired to me. Looked like he just wanted to sit on the bench in the park and forget about things. I suppose there’s a whole other story to it though.

A few minutes later I played a Spanish sounding fingerpicking song and the woman that had been lying down in the middle of the park came towards me. She looked like she could barely open her eyes, face all red. She got real close to me as I played, all contorting, looking at the guitar as if it was this foreign creature.

“Oh yeah, that’s a nice sound there, nice sound.”

I continued playing, and hid behind the sunglasses smiling as her face was about six inches from mine.

Jon told me a few more cheesy jokes I can’t remember and then left. Twenty minutes later he was back with a guitar and a small box. He opened the box and there was about six different harmonicas in there and strings and pieces of torn paper with sloppy handwriting of Gratefull Dead and Rolling Stones songs, along with what looked like some lyrics. All I could see was the words in child-like writing, “Rock n’ Roll”. Instantly he was playing classics like “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” and “Summertime.” I played along with him and anytime I asked him what chords he was hitting he’d say, “Oh, it doesn’t matter anyway.” He sang loud and off key, kind of mumbly, but it worked and the local folks in the park seemed to be enjoying it. We played a few Stones songs. An older black fella was now sitting where the country guy had been. He seemed fairly well dressed, was digging the music and kept talking to me as I was playing.

“Now, did you see that? No one in their right mind gives their money to a junky. She just told that man she’ll back in ten minutes and there she is taking evey bag she has with her. If she going to be right back why she wanna go and carry all that stuff? Makes no sense. And she’s telling him she loves him and then gives him a kiss on the forehead. That just ain't right, ya heard me? I mean all these folks doing their shit right out in plain sight, I do my thing too, but I do it behind doors, under my roof, ya know. Maybe that girl do come back, but she won’t have all of it. He won’t be getting what he paid for I tell ya.” He definitely had a keen eye for observation and could probably tell a story for all of the people slumping on the benches in the park.

Jon says to me, “You know I jammed with this other guy out here one day, some young kid, but he thought he was some kind of Johnny cash; that’s all he could play, you know, boom chick boom chick, but he didn’t have no rhythm. He had stupid songs like 'Alcohol is the poison in my blood." What kind of stupid shit is that? And then he invites me to this gig and when I get there he pretends like he doesn’t even know me, like he never seen me before. Fuck that.“

“Say, you want to hear a song I wrote? I got my heart broke up in Anchorage so I had to write this song. Everyone says I ripped off the Doobie Brothers, you know, the rhythm, but I don’t care. I got my heart broke. I had to write something.”

I don’t remember the words to the song. but I didn’t play along for this one. Just stared out at the other folks and sat back and listened to Jon scream out about lost love.

Paradox Road

I was sitting on the couch, naked and reading Turganev, beads of sweat dripping from my chin down onto the yellow pages. It seemed that with each passing minute the heat became more and unbearable. Louisiana summers weren’t no joke. I tried to do my best in ignoring this fact, and undertook the illusion that if I could somehow escape into the dinner table conversations of Russian intellects, my life might suddenly make a change for the better.

Carol lay stomach down on the sheet-less bed with a magazine in front of her. She wore a blue slip hiked up to the bottom of her ass, and a badly stretched white tank top, loosely displacing each of her breasts out of the shirt.

Held by two screws, and dangling like the root of a loose tooth, the ceiling fan blew gusts of hot air across my face. Armies of flies lay dead; belly up; buzz-less; melting into the dust-caked carpet. Empty cigarette cartons were strewn across the room. A half pint of whiskey stood at the edge of the couch. I took a sip. It was room temperature. I could feel blue flames dancing on the back of my tongue. I spit the whiskey out on the floor. Steam shot up to the ceiling like an exploding gieser. Just a hallucination. Caused by dehydration. Yes, that was the logical explanation for it.

Here we were in a dirty rooming house in New Orleans, Thursday night, and the weekly rent due the following morning with five dollars to our names. Hastily, I found myself raising an imaginary fist into the air; cursing the South, money, unemployment, God, humanity, and anything else I could foolishly label as the cause for our unrighteous suffering. I conveniently blocked out the fact that we had partied in nearly every bar in the French Quarter for the past three weeks, oblivious to any thoughts of work or income.

Catching myself in between thought, I came to the realization that it was too late to be thinking like this. I was only wasting my time. I opened the book and continued reading about nihilists rambling page after page.

A couple of minutes later I noticed what had been a regular occurrence since we first arrived in New Orleans; a roach the size of my palm was casually making his way from one side of the room to the other.

Grotesque as these insects were, I was willing to let them be. After a week I’d learned that no matter how many you killed, there would always be a second regiment marching full steam ahead, pulling up the ranks. True soldiers. Hell, they even roamed around the homes of the rich. Carol, on the other hand, was determined to have every last roach in New Orleans brutally murdered. She considered them to be vile, ghastly. She wanted them all dead. In a desperate hope that the roach might go unnoticed, I pretended to read.

“Ahh! Oh my God! Look at that thing! Get him! Kill him! Get him! No, he’s getting away!”

Carol stood straight up on the bed screaming. The cooking magazine flailed around in her left hand while her right index finger hysterically pointed in the direction of the roach. She looked like an army scout that had just spotted a spy crossing into foreign territory.

“Oh, come on, let the poor guy go,” I said calmly.

“Let him go? Let him go? What are you crazy! Get that bastard! Get him!”

If I didn’t kill the roach I was only setting myself up for an unnecessary futile argument. Plus I was mostly to blame for this mess we were win. It was my idea to come down here in the first place. I put the book to the side and grabbed one of my tennis shoes. I proceeded to get down on the carpet on all fours like a bloodthirsty predator. I thought about taking the shoe to myself and calling it good.

Creeping up behind the roach, I raised my arm back behind my head – with an uncanny similarity to those twisted evangelists one sometimes comes across alone in late-night hours of TV channel changing – and with what little strength I had, brought down upon him my non-existent vengeance. I lifted the shoe. Unscathed, the roach darted towards the bed.

“It’s sill alive!” screamed Carol.

“I know!” I yelled back.

Like a hyperactive child yet to learn the world on two legs, I chased after the roach and slammed the shoe down again. Despite missing half of its body parts, the roach made a desperate attempt for the dresser. With the last hit I took all the life out of him. You had to admire one’s tenacity for survival.

Carol, now sitting on the bed with her legs crossed Indian style, hardly resembled the hysterical woman I’d just had to deal with. Her eyes had that glassy look of tranquility, and a partial smile was emanating from her thin lips.

“Baby, you got him. I’m sorry you had to do that. You know much I hate those things,” she said.

“Sure, no problem,” I said, nearly out of breath, stretched out on the floor.

For what seemed like an hour, but was probably only a few minutes, we sat alongside one another on the bed. We said nothing and stared straight ahead in a sad state of lost-eyed wonderment. Restless thoughts bounced back and forth in my brain. I found myself questioning how, in a matter of three weeks, after moving from Baltimore with the excited hopes of starting over, we’d managed to blow all of our money and couldn’t find any work. We were down to saltine crackers and a jar of peanut butter for lunch and dinner.

Carol placed her hand in mine. All the life was now gone from her eyes. The bright green that surrounded her pupils was fading away. It hurt me just to look her in the face.

Breaking the uncomfortable silence, Carol asked me, “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“No, seriously, we don’t have anything. How the hell are we going to eat?”

“Maybe one of us will find a job tomorrow.”

“We haven’t found a job in three weeks. We’re not going to find one tomorrow. I don’t even want a job now. I hate it here. I hate it”

“Yeah, but where are we going to go? We’ve got nothing.”

As if she was about to burst into some unwanted form of hysteria, Carol said, “Oh God, I don’t want to be homeless. We’ll be stuck here.”

“Maybe you can call your mom, have her wire out some money.”

“What about your parents.”

“I can’t.”

“Well, I can’t either.”

“I know, I know.”

The conversation made an abrupt halt, and suddenly I found myself ready to run out the door. I couldn’t cope with the reality of the situation. I’d been wandering aimless around for quite some time, town to town, job to job. I’d come to the realization that I’d probably never settle down. But then I met Carol. We’d been together for three months now. I’d somehow convinced her to move down to New Orleans with me. I told her this was the city where wild things happened. I told her about the magic of the Big Easy, despite the fact that I’d never even been there. All I had to go on was the books I’d read. But now, finally sober, I felt a need to be responsible, to find ourselves a way out of this mess. Instead, I grabbed a hold of her hand, dragged her outside, and walked towards the Mississippi River. I convinced her that what was needed now was some fresh air and a place where we could think clearly.

As we walked down Esplanade Ave. and past the million dollar mansions on the border of the French Quarter I looked into the immaculate living rooms with a sense of disdain. The only word I could think of was opulence. I wondered if those people that lived there had actually worked to buy those homes or if they had been passed down by their parents. Were they just the offspring of all the old plantation owners that ruled so much of the south? What difference did it make? Here we were, struggling to find some kind of sense in life, and ten feet away, comfortably at the dinner table and living room couch, sat the representation of what I thought to be, distorted success. These people didn’t have a clue as to how us on the other side of the street lived, nor did they care to. I found myself filled with a somewhat violent and jealous anger.

Finding a bench along the river, I wearily put my head on Carol’s lap. What would Twain do? I let my eyes drown in the sight of the small ripples in the water and the reflection of a half moon.

Resting her fingers on the top of my head, Carol asked me, “Do you think we’ll ever be happy?”

I stared out at the water and watched the ferry cross the river over to Algiers. I also thought this is not a good sign when the girl you’ve been with for three months is asking this kind of question. I don’t know if it was the moon or the Turganev, but I started to talk nonsense.

“I don’t think you’re ever just completely happy. I mean overall demeanor. It’s just more of something that comes and goes. You don’t really have any control of when it’s going to hit you or how long it’s going to last.”

“I mean I love you, but it seems like I always feel sad. I didn’t like Baltimore. I don’t like it here. I’m starting to think wherever I go I still won’t be happy. I feel like the more I’m around people I can’t stand them. Why do they have to be so stupid?”

“I don’t’ know baby. Maybe we should find a cabin in the mountains. I’ll hunt rabbits, go fishing naked, and read Thoreau and Whitman. You can cook deer meet over a blazing fire. We’ll brew our own beer, sit on the roof every night, get blind drunk, and scream at the unforgiving moon.”

We sat silent for a couple seconds and then joined in an uncontrollable fit of laughter. It was a strange sounding laughter. The kind of laughter that seems to have stayed idle for countless years, nestling in the gut of one’s stomach in solidarity. Bottled, pressurized, waiting for one good, hard, unleashing twist of the hand. All of my bodily functions went numb and I fell to the ground. I wiggled feverishly. Lying on the cement with my legs and arms in the air, I looked like an old dog scratching its flea-infested back.

Finally the laughter died and that all too familiar silence took a hold of us. The depressing thoughts of just seconds before came back to me. At that moment I was overrun with the desire to somehow – with a magic wand I suppose – reverse the earth, planets and cosmos into a chaotic orbit; back to the time of my birth, or just prior to. All of these actions would cause the path of my life to be altered. After a few seconds of closed eyes and puerile meditation, nothing had changed.

I took Carol’s hand and walked back to the room. We stopped at a convenience store and bought a couple of sodas and a pig tongue bringing us down to two dollars and change.

When we got back to the room Carol headed over to the bed, undressed herself down to her slip, and put her head on the pillow. I sat in my regular spot on the couch with my hands in my hair, and stared at the carpet.

Seconds later, Carol walked back and forth across the room. Her nose was raised and a curious expression painted her face. She smelled something burning. I was unable to smell anything besides the distinct malodor of our room. I dismissed it as someone who might have burned some food in the kitchen on the second floor. Either that or someone was hitting the crack pipe hard.

Nearly everyone in our building was using crack. There were the regular users and then the recreational, weekend types. It didn’t bother me. I just didn’t want any part in it. Most places I’d stayed in before had their share of drug users, but everyone in the Treme seemed to be hooked on crack.

Now it was a little after midnight. Soon the landlord would be banging on the door for money we didn’t have. I asked Carol if she wanted to go for another walk, but she declined.

I was just about to put on my shoes and a tee shirt when Carol leaped violently out of bed. She said something about seeing a flame from above shoot down on to the street. We ran out the front door and around the house. We looked up at the room above ours, and there it was.

On the balcony a man was wrestling with a mattress half engulfed in flames. The room lit up like yellow madness behind him. Carol and I stood there, stoically caught in a brief moment of shock. The whites of Carol’s eyes filled with flames. The man yelled into the night, “Somebody help me! Help me dammit!”

Carol rushed over to a payphone and dialed 911. I didn’t have any words of wisdom to the man on the balcony so I ran back into the house and pounded on the doors of the other two rooms on the first floor. I shouted, “Fire! Fire!” I stood at the bottom of the staircase and yelled as loud as I could to the people upstairs. My neighbors leisurely walked down the stairs. Most of their eyes were half-open and bloodshot. As each one came down, they said, thinking this was some kind of surprise party, “Eww, it’s a fire drill, a fire drill!”

“No!” I screamed back. “This place is burning down!”

I ran outside with the other roommates and looked up at the second floor. The man with the mattress was gone, the room all flames. I felt the powerful heat of the fire on my cheeks. Windows shattered. Pieces of wood flew out into the street. A luminous torrent of red and yellow flames shot up in the air. The thick black smoke devoured the night. All of us stood there like horrified spectators.

I thought everyone had made it out of the house safely, but suddenly, my attention was drawn by the blood-curdling scream of the woman next to me; “Oh shit!”

Trapped in the last room on the second floor was a quiet older man I’d often seen sitting on the front porch. I’d say he was close to eighty and senile. Every time I walked by him I thought how horrible it must have been to be that old and to have to live in this kind of dump. Faintly, I could see him looking out the window at the flames. The fire blocked the staircase. The only way to escape would be to make the twenty-foot leap.

The old man opened his door to find ten-foot flames no more than a few feet away from his room. He looked confused, still half asleep. Everyone yelled for him to jump off the balcony. He stood there looking down for a couple seconds.

“Jesus Christ! Jump man! Jump!” the frantic crowd yelled.

He didn’t move. His face told you all there was to know. He realized this was the end of the road. All over. Not much you gonna’ do. He walked back into his room and closed the door. In my belief, he lay gently down on his bed, inhaled a big gulp of smoke, and closed his eyes. Maybe death was easy for him.

Woman screamed. Two men next to me pelted the old man’s door with rocks. Carol turned her back to the fire and covered her eyes. I watched it all like it was a surreal movie playing before me in slow motion; the flames shooting into the air, the stupefacted look in everyone’s eyes, the mouth’s wide open like dead fish on ice at a Saturday market, the people running in circles like headless turkeys. It was chaos at midnight and as I stood there expressionless, I consigned my emotions by violently pulling on my hair. The room went up in flames. We stood there like frozen statues. The stars went dim. The moon turned Halloween orange. The cosmos fell off the merry-go-round. Behind the curtain the sun let out a reverberating laugh. Purple flames. The whole spectrum. Just darkness. It was all fucked up.

You could hear the sirens in the darkness. When the fire trucks arrived three rooms were destroyed. The fire took on a schizophrenic life of its own, switching back to the other side of the house. The whole neighborhood was out in the street. Soon complaints began to arise about ruined stereo equipment and furniture being destroyed. These same people just moments earlier were crying, “That poor old man. Stuck up there. All alone.”

Struggling to find some kind explanation for all of this, I slumped against a wall and cried. I just couldn’t control it.

There was a group of us standing out in the street, helpless and not knowing really what to do. I noticed a woman that looked completely out of place for this neighborhood talking to various people. Countless layers of makeup caked her face, giving it an appearance of plasticity. I realized that she was a reporter from one of the local stations. She would place her hand on someone’s shoulder and say, “Yes, I’m sorry this happened. I know how you feel. Yes I understand you don’t feel like talking about it, but did you know the man? But I was just wondering if I could have a little word with you on camera.” I knew she was just doing her job, but I had a great feeling of disdain for her right then. A few of the crack heads liked the attention and obliged. The others stared at her coldly and kept quiet. The reporter made her way over to me. She wanted me to tell her what I knew. I said nothing.

At this time the cameraman set his camera up off to the side. He was determined to focus in on the group in an attempt to capture the morbid and sorrowful look on each of our faces; that if he angled the camera just right, he might find his award winning work at the beginning of the morning news. For whatever reason, I was set on doing all I could from allowing this to happen. I unbuttoned my shirt, placed my hands on my hips, and fully exposed my pale-skinned beer belly. I proudly displayed the cigarette burns that marked my stomach from previous nights of drunken boredom. The cameraman gave me a dirty look, covered the lens, and turned the camera off.


Hours later the sun made its way into the strange and humid morning sky. The smell of smoke and ash was everywhere.

Late that morning Carol and I were allowed to go back into what was left of the house. As we walked through the downstairs hallway a light layer of smoke visibly floated beneath the ceiling. We opened the door to our room. Inside it resembled a southern swamp. Black, murky water a couple inches deep flooded the floor. Ash, wood, and drywall were scattered across the room. The few things we owned were somewhere beneath the rubbish. I attempted to lift a large slab of drywall covering my clothes, but painfully watched it dissolve into a milky substance and fall back to the floor. It was hard to believe this was the same room that just hours before had harbored our ruminations of failure and disgust.

All I wanted were my books. I’d given up on the idea of the typewriter still functioning. Carol wanted her jewelry that had been given to her by her grandmother. We found both of our wallets under a piece of wood. I was determined to cover one book in particular. Saroyan’s Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. Scraps of wood and wall flew every which way. “Come on Willie, where the hell are you. Ah, not Willie!” I could feel the smoke melting into the pores of my skin. The stinging in my eyes became unbearable. I don’t know how firemen do it. I gave into the fact that finding Saroyan was not only hopeless, but quite idiotic. I’d tortured Carol enough. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

We gathered what we could into a trash bag. At the time of the fire all Carol had on was the tank top and a slip. I had no shirt and a pair of shorts that had a rip going all the way up to the waist. A couple kind souls from across the street donated some of their clothes to us. Carol was given a red and yellow flowered muumuu dress fit for a 250 lb woman. I was given a flannel, knee-high stockings, and a pair of battered, paint-stained penny-loafers. We looked like two deranged clowns that had escaped from the local mental ward.

We were given a voucher for two nights by Red Cross in a slum motel across town in the 9th ward. Shortly after boarding the bus an older woman stared at us, completely baffled at our appearance. I couldn’t help but say something. I thought if I didn’t, this poor woman’s going to live a life of quandary, all of it tracing back to that one Friday bus ride. I told her the place we were staying at had just burned down. These were the only clothes we had. Suddenly her perplexed face transformed – all in the drop of the eyebrows – to that of sympathy. The woman said, with a bobbing up and down of the head that made me think of a jack-in-the-box, “Oh, I saw that on the news this morning.”

Our voucher was for two nights, but we had no plans of staying more than one night. Carol made a phone call to her mother in California and I left a very distraught message on my father’s answering machine. We had enough money wired out to cover two Greyhound tickets to Northern California.

So, with our trash bags in hand, we embarked on a sixty-hour bus ride west. Through this may sound like a case of extreme paranoia, we thought if we stayed in New Orleans any longer, a hurricane would strike, pick us up off the ground, and with its tumultuous tongue, spit us in the trajectory of the Gulf of Mexico. Years later I would watch this unfold on television as I sat in my house in Los Angeles, a different woman at my side, old memories and tears in my eyes.

Shortly after we boarded the bus Carol was fast asleep. She looked peaceful and exhausted. I half-consciously stared out at the window as the bus crossed through western Louisiana and into the mundane vastness of Texas that seemed to stretch incessantly beyond the horizon.

I tried to put some order to my thoughts, some kind of logic. Sobering up was a bitch. It killed the illusion that you like to believe is your life and forced you to really look at things. I’d seen most of my friends go on into career jobs, they were all financially stable, most of them married, and here I was still living life on a whim. I thought it was romantic, and truth be told, it really could be, but like anything, there could be dire consequences. It was one thing to do the crazy writer thing, but I felt like I sort of had to get my shit together; or something close to whatever that meant. If I didn’t Carol was going to leave me.

By the time we got to San Francisco Carol and I were completely out of our minds. Sleep-deprived, traumatized, broke, we wrapped towels on each of our heads in the fashion of Hindus and yelled to imaginary people we saw running alongside the road out the window. Our laughter filled the entire bus. We kissed. We hugged. We felt each other up underneath the blanket we placed on our laps and passed out on each other.

I didn’t really know what the hell to expect. Maybe we’d make it. Maybe we wouldn’t. What was done was done. Onward and upward, as they say.

As the cab pulled up to the ranch home outside of Petaluma Carol said, “Ah, we’re home.”

“Yeah, home,” I said.

The Barber Shop

I’ve always been a sucker for the old style barbershops. I don’t know quite how to put it; there’s just something about the places that I love. It really doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of haircut either. When I walk into an old musty place I get the feeling I’ve suddenly stepped back in time, back to an era long before the fast-paced technological short-speak corporate strip mall world we now live in, back to a time when just sitting around and telling stories meant something, when the second hand on the clock wasn’t even a passing thought. I don’t really ask much of this life; just give me an old barbershop on a hot Saturday afternoon and I’m pretty happy.

Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not necessarily preaching the glory glory hallelujah of all the old barbershops, because believe me, I’ve been to a few that I probably wished I’d never set foot in. Take for instance the time I saw a boy of five be given a mullet cut and a duck tale, on his free will mind you, as his camouflag-toting father watched the news and said, “Hey guys do you know why there’s no A-Rabs in Star Wars?” Blank stares all around. “It’s because they’re not in the fuuu-ture!”

Yeah, let’s give it up for modern man. I mean, you never know what you’re going to get, but personally, I’d rather take my chances with the old guys than pay fifteen bucks to have me hair cut in a teeny-bop mall by some depressing middle-aged woman who goes by the name Bumpy.

Anyway, the other day I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, it’s time man; you’re starting to look like one of those terrorists on the infamous most-wanted Iraqi deck of cards. Since I had recently moved to New Orleans I had no idea where to go. After about an hour of driving in what seemed like an endless maze of winding streets (If you’ve ever spent any amount of time trying to navigate the city outside the French Quarter, you know what I’m talking about), I lucked out on a place over just off of Oak and Carrolton. I saw the blue-white-red spinning rod and a sign that read “The Family Barber Shop.”

Inside there were three other men waiting in chairs in a small room. There was one chair and one hunched over bald barber cutting another old-timer’s hair. A few flags were stapled to the walls, but besides that the place was pretty plain.

“Say, Bud, I came by here Wednesday and you weren’t around,” said the guy getting his haircut.

“Oh yuh’, closed on Wednesdays now. Gradually workin’ ma’ way towards closing the shop. Next it’ll be just Fridays and Saturdays. Yuh’ know.

Bud had one of those deep Southern drawls, the kind you’re more likely to come across in the small towns of Mississippi and Alabama. His eyes were big and round and the wrinkled skin sagged down onto his cheeks. Each time he talked you could see his leathery skin flab around. Slowly he trimmed the man’s hair, occasionally glancing up at the television that was showing the latest turmoil in the world.

“That girl not around no more?”

“Nah,” said Bud. “She jus’ up and left. Don’t understand it. Not a word. Jus’ startin’ to work out too. Was givin’ her forty percent of what the shop was takin’ in. Hell, on them real slow days I jus’ gave it all to her. Her momma’s been callin’ up, askin’ if I seen her. She says the girl don’t want nothin’ to do with her now. I’d understand if she had some problem, if she’da let me know, but to jus’ up and leave. Now I can’t understand that. Dunno if it’s drugs or drinking or what.”

“Yeah, that’s a shame Bud, she seemed like she was going to work out all right.”

“Ya’ jus’ never know. Hell, I’m gettin’ too ol’ for this.”


About an hour and a half later Bud called me up to the chair. I’d been sitting off to the side going through the old Times magazines and watching the lazy flies move about. Maybe a lot of folks wouldn’t stick around that long for a haircut, but down here, life moves along a little slower than it does in other parts. It’s not to say anything bad about the people, it’s just the way it is. I figure, we’re all going to die either way, so what’s the rush?

“How ya’ wahnit?” Bud asked me.

“Just short, but not too short, not a crew cut or nothing,” I said.

Bud started to work away at my hair with a buzzer and through the mirror noticed me staring up at a framed Army certificate hanging on the wall.

“That’s from when I was in the Pacific. I was twenty. Remember every single name of the eight other guys in my unit: Jimmy, Frank, Leonard, Ray, Joe, Bobby, Dave, Vinnie. Yah’ know, lotta’ of them didn’t make it out alive. Lotta’ times I didn’t think I would either. Leonard was only eighteen. Jus’ a kid. Not a day goes by I don’t think about those guys.”

Bud trimmed the hair hanging over my ears, every now and then stopping and staring off into blank space, as if the thought was too much for him.

“Got back when I was twenty-two. Four years latah’ I bought this shop. Eighty now. Hell of a long time.”

I pondered all the heads of hair he’d come across during that time.

“I wish I could tell some of those fella’s, hey, at least you didn’t have to see yourself go bald.” Bud let out a quiet laugh and tapped the top of his pale-skinned head.


“My wife was always convinced she was gonna’ die young.” Her mother died at fifty-two, heart attack got her and my wife didn’t think she’d make it past sixty. And now you oughtta’ see her. Seventy-Eight. Jus’ went ta’ the doc for her check-up and he said she’s as clean as a whistle. Well, the way I figure, it ain’t really up to us. The guy up there,” said Bud, pointing his scissors towards the ceiling, “decides how long we stay or go.”

I don’t put a whole lot of faith in religion, but the way Bud put it made sense.

Sitting in the chair in front of me was an old, frail man. He looked to be Bud’s senior by a good fifteen years. He was all bones and his shirt and pants were three sizes too large. Poor guy looked like he was going to drown in those clothes. His eyes were squinted as he tried to read a magazine. For some reason I couldn’t stop staring at his foot. He had these sandals on and wasn’t wearing any socks. Purple, varicose veins were shooting every which way and running up under his pants. As Bud cleaned the back of my hair, I sat there thinking about the mystery of age, how the body wilts away.

Eventually, Bud pulled away the apron and said, “How’s that?”

I glanced at myself through the mirror. To be honest, the cut was a little lopsided and I looked like I now had an unwanted pompadour. But I didn’t say anything. I said it was good, got up from my chair, and paid Bud eight bucks and left him a couple for a tip.

“Next.”

The old man attempted to get up without his cane, but he fell back into the wall. Bud and I each took an arm and walked him over to the chair and boosted him up.

“Hey, what you say Larry?”

“Hey Bud.”

“How goes it?”

“It goes. You hear about Frank Jippers?”

“Nah.”

“Had a stroke last week. Got out of the hospital yesterday. All paralyzed from the left part of his body. In a wheelchair now.”

“Ah, too bad. So you wahn’ it the same Larry?”

As I was walking out the door and into the hot New Orleans afternoon I heard the old man say, “Yeah, Bud, same as always,” as he brushed his hand through what little hair he had left.

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.