The City of Refuge (Part 2)

 

I’d been in New Orleans for about two months, subletting a house over in mid-city.  It was a nice neighborhood by most standards, but it kind of lacked the grit I was looking for at that time.  One night I ventured back into the 9^th ward and found myself over at Vaughan's, a small juke-joint type bar on Dauphine St and Lessups.  The 9^th ward had a reputation for violence, yet seemed to be where much of the city’s art and music was coming from.  With the sounds of Kermit Ruffins and the BBQ Swingers and the wild carnivelesqe mix of bar patrons I instantly fell in love.  One of the best jazz trumpet players, Irvin Mayfield, showed up and battled Kermit.   There was hootin' and hollering and jazz rhythms bouncing off the walls.  Drugs and booze, red beans and rice, beautiful women and much laughter and dance.  I was mesmerized by it all and wanted to somehow be close to it. 

For the next week I drove all around the streets of the upper and lower Bywater looking for a place I could afford.  Then one day I was sitting in a dark, gothic-type bar next to Vaughan's and saw a flyer that was advertising a shotgun 1BD for $400 two blocks away.  I called the number on it and by that late afternoon I was drinking bottle after bottle of wine with Harold and Holly, my new landlords, at their home off of Louisa St.  Though they were in their mid-fifties they seemed to have the energy of a high-school couple.  Harold was wild and electric, dressed in his surfer shirt and Bermuda shorts, cloud-white hair and beard and little lightning eyes.  Holly seemed to be just as animated, a little more refined and intellectual, but fun to talk to. 

Harold and I found ourselves later that night at BJ’s, the dive bar across the street from my new place.  It reminded one of an old living room rather than a bar.  It seemed like the type of place where everyone knew everyone and if they didn’t know you they were going to make sure they did real soon.  Harold was bouncing all around the bar, throwing quarters in the jukebox, pulling women off their stools to dance.  He would kneel down on the floor with an invisible microphone, doing some bastardized Elvis impersonation, as the sounds of Fats or Ernie-K or the Neville Brothers played on the speakers. 

He brought me over to the Triangle later that night, a small warehouse by the railroad tracks a few blocks back.  Inside were broken-down VW bugs and computers and records and paintings and stacks and stacks of old suitcases.   There were all kinds of different cameras, a huge barber’s chair, and a make-shift kitchen and a mattress.  Out of those suitcases he pulled large black and white photos he’d taken years earlier, all of them mostly documenting the punk/new wave/art scene in San Diego in the late 70’s and early 80’s. 

To this day, I consider them to be some of the greatest photographs I’ve come across.  Why they’re not sitting in some museum or never made it to the pages of LIFE magazine is beyond my understanding.   His portraits of girls with Mohawks, men being ripped down to the ground by policemen, Asian cooks in front of old diners, seemed to beautifully portray a different time and place that is no more.  

He also once gave me a memoir type piece he wrote about the origins of punk rock in San Diego during the late 70’s.  At the time he was a struggling jeweler living in a house with hippies and then punk/new wave bands started to pop up: The Penetrators, The Dils, The Zeroes.  He writes about their first shows put on in VFW halls and small clubs.  Tragically, much of the scene came to a crash just as fast as it started.  Violent crowds took over shows, cops were shutting down clubs, and before he knew it, much of that era was gone.  What he wrote isn’t necessarily the best in form, but the feeling of longing and missing of what once was a time of rawness and freedom of music and art, comes across in a rather beautiful way. 

Me:  How did you meet Harold?

Eddie:  Actually, that’s a weird story.  I kind of met him years and years ago when I was a punk rocker living in California.  He used to have a magazine in San Diego.  He had a little space where bands would play.  He doesn’t really remember it, but I remember him.  He was kind of eccentric and weird and I was more of kind of a straight punker.  I wasn’t into that side of the scene. You know that wave, arty stuff.  He was a genius to talk to though.  We'd talk about art. He was incredible.  He used to build his own 360 cameras.  Just a genius.  His story is his dad died.  His dad owned a lot of land.  San Diego a long time ago was mostly military and really small cottages and there wasn’t much of anything but there was a lot of farmland that took care of all the navy personnel.   His dad owned one of those and he died and he gave Harold and his sister a few million dollars. That’s how he was able to buy all those houses. When I first knew him he made jewelry.

Me:  Didn’t he have a store in the French Quarter?

Eddie:  Yeah, he had a store in the French Quarter when I first moved there.  And Holly was a semi-famous sign painter in San Diego.  She did a lot of signs.  She was the first person I ever saw do wallpaper, but in a way that was like painted art.  She’d do all that high brow, multimedia shit.  She made a lot of money doing that.

Me:  I actually have a memoir type piece Harold gave to me all about punk rock starting in San Diego in ’77.

Eddie:  Yeah, he was a punk rocker in that area.

Me:  He talks about the Zeroes and The Penetrators.

Eddie: He was a punker and a surfer.  What happened was I was living up on Magazine and Tchopotoulis, by Tippitinas, over by Grandma’s Place and My Mother’s place.   I’d hang out at this place called The Nest .  There was a bunch of punk rockers, artists, and musicians that hung out there.  I’d broken up with my girlfriend and one of the guys that lived there was a painter and knew I also did some painting.  He told me there was this guy across town that had a house that I might want to know about.  So I met up with Harold and it turned out we’d known each other 15 years before, but we weren’t great friends. I worked on the house and he let me stay there.  He kind of knew me from the past, but honestly, I was kind of scared of him.  He was sort of like a father figure though.  I was in a bad place at the time, and in a financial way, he kind of picked me up, you know what I mean, kind of my savior, actually.

Me:  What was with the little warehouse he had over by the railroad tracks?  

Eddie:    Him and Holly had been married since they were really young.  And they were going through some problems.  She was a little overbearing and he wanted a place where he could go study,  do photography, get back into it, listen to his records.  It used to be a repair place for printers.  And he bought it for nothing.  I think maybe $40,000.  I’d step out and visit him over there. 

Me:  I remember he had all of those broken down VW bugs in there.

Eddie:  Yeah, he had a VW affinity his whole life.

Me:  A bunch of records.

Eddie:  Oh yeah, a great record collection. From punk rock to blues to jazz. 

Me:  I remember all of the old suitcases with the black and white pictures from San Diego.

Eddie:  Yeah, he had all kinds of suitcases from the 1950’s that he kept them in.  He also had that doctor case.  With doctor intials.  It was made of Buffalo hide, tan black.  He was a genius, but I kind of stopped visiting him.  When he moved into the Triangle he got kind of weird acting.  Girls would come around and he’d get drunk and go right up to them and touch their boobs.  Not in a cool way though.  Reckless acting.  I’m not really sure what was happening, but he kind of scared me.

Me:  Yeah, I liked him though.

Eddie:  I loved the guy.  I have nothing but full respect and admiration for him.  I don’t know where I’d be without him.  He was such an incredible artist.  Almost too good though.

Eddie’s probably the only artist I’ve ever known and respected that also knows how to frame a wall.  Who knows how to raise a house from its foundation and replace the beams.  Who’s hiked in the dead of winter and slept in the mountains of Canada.  Who’s crashed on people’s floors for months at a time and who’s constantly roaming the earth.  Survivalist is the word that comes to mind.  At one time or another he’s lived in D.C., New York, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angelas, England, the small towns of Northern California, Hawaii.  Tell him he’s a great photographer and he’ll just laugh at you.  His last set of camera gear and lenses got stolen out of his jeep years back when he was hiking and he’s not like those other rich kids with other people supporting him.  I tell him he needs to get back into taking pictures and he laughs and says, “You got twenty grand to give me?” 

He’s an aging punk rocker from back in the day living somewhere in the strangeness of the modern world.  Some of his friends have either gone on to be quite successful, artists, businessmen, screenwriters.  Some of them still popping pills and supported by the government.  Some of them still playing the same three-chord songs from years ago.

He's an artist, but you’ll never see his work in any museum.  You won’t even see it on the walls of the coffee shop.  If you lived in the Bywater you might have come across him roaming around with his camera.  Maybe you’d wake up to find a picture he printed out stuck in the shutters of your front door.  Art for art’s sake.  There’s thousands of them.  Mardi Gras Indians.  Street musicians.  Cheifs eating Fritos.  Funeral Marches.  Hawaiian cemeteries.  Kids fishing.  Spanish moss and the swamps of Lousiana.  Shrimp boats.  Abandoned cars in the snow.  Torn women drinking whiskey in junkyards.  A man in camaflogue who spends his life walking from the south of California to the north and then back again.    A local band playing in a bar to a crowd of blow-up dolls.  A fat man standing over a pot of gumbo.  Tent revivals.  Snow in New Orleans.  Beautiful women in innocent moments.   The list goes on and on.

He can take things that sometimes at first glance are perceived to be ugly and make them beautiful.  A polished keyhole into the underbelly of America.  He’s got that ability to capture irony and certain moments that put words to images.  He has very little need for trickery or fancy camera angles, but when the pictures are blurred there’s a reason, there’s a sense of poetry and style to it.  When you look at his pictures you don’t get the feeling he’s just walked up and snapped a photo.  No, he's known all of these people in one way or another.  The camera was second thought and because of that, the photos tell stories.   If that’s not art, I don’t know what is.  But, the world can be a fucked-up place.  The real artists struggle without a dime to their name and it seems as though a lot of the time the losers get most of the fame.

In the end, Eddie’s got a good heart.  Through a lot of ugliness he sees the humanity in folks.  I suppose it can be frustrating at times, but its’ something that should be admired.  He spent ten years living in New Orleans. Before Katrina hit I was there for a year.   One night I decided to turn the tape recorder on and let it roll.  Is there any wonderful insight, any magical quotes?  No, probably not.  This is just an hour long conversation of two friends talking about our memories of a time and a place.

Me:  What was the story behind Poland St?  Was it haunted?

Eddie:  Well, Poland has a really weird history.  At one time everyone on that street committed suicide.  Everybody in every house committed suicide all the way up to the wine place, which used to be a carriage house and also was a place where they stored ammunition during World War II.  Everybody from St. Claude, all the way to the Poland Pier, every single house there had a suicide.  Isn’t that bizarre?

Me:  And what did people in the neighborhood say?

Eddie: Well, for a really long time they said it was haunted from back in the slavery days.  The houses were really beautiful at one time.  If you look at him they’re really big.

Me:  Yeah, the lots were huge.

Eddie:  They all had carriage houses in the back for the slaves.  Our section was more blue collar.  That section was more expensive.  I always liked working on the French homes.   Some guys I worked with  would be digging out old bottles from under the house, but I’d always go under the front door and find old coins.

Me:  Damn, all I ever found was an old Budweiser can.  So back to Poland, no one knew why it was haunted?

Eddie:  I guess if you look into it you might find something.  I just remember what they said.  I know when I lived there was one person that killed themselves.    But I don’t really know what was going on.

Me:  I remember sitting on the steps with you and the neighborhood seemed to be changing and lots of gay yuppie couples were looking at houses to buy over there and we were kind of laughing, wondering if they knew the real story.

Eddie:  Who knows, maybe they’re all dead now.  France Street had some really wacked out stuff that was happening.   At one time there was a lot of Mafia dudes and then it turned into a gay mafia,  these guys from New York, I forget the name.  The something Ferries.

The City of Refuge (Part 1)

(Intro note: From 2003-2004 I spent a year living in New Orleans. It's a hard place to explain to people. Often when I try to describe what it was like to live there, it seems as though jumbled words get in the way. The first two things that come to mind with most folks that have never been there are Mardi Gras, and of course, the tragedy of Katrina. Those two aspects are entwined deep into the culture, but there's so much more to the city. It's unlike anywhere else I've ever spent time in. I only saw a small glimpse of what was there, but I'm thankful for the time I had. Even years later I have to laugh as I look around my apartment. A fleur-de-lis sits on my bookshelf. A record of Rebirth Brass Band in the front of my collection. A picture of a street musician playing a guitar on Royal St hangs in my bedroom.

A while back I decided to record an interview with my friend Eddie who captured a lot of the spirit of New Orleans with his photography. Basically we just let the tape roll and talked about the people and the times we had, some good, some bad, with the city and the part of the 9th ward we lived in.)




Early sunrise cutting in through the windows…the sound of the rhythmic beat of drums and a trumpet, a trombone, a tuba, out there wailing somewhere in the distance, gradually becoming louder, like an approaching freight train gathering more steam. Carol is out on the corner of Lessups and Burgundy in her short shorts and flip-flops, drinking gin out of a large softball mug and screaming profanities to the ghosts of morning. She’s the Bywater’s rooster. It has similarities to the familiar Cock-a-doodle-doo except down here in the 9th wooard the rooster screams “You stupid shit motherfuckers!” The older fat man at BJ’s is dressed in his pajamas and rather oblivious to her, sweeping the sidewalk and bringing out the bottles from the night before.

Much of the neighborhood is still asleep as I open the front door of my shotgun and pull back the shutters that just barely hang on to the hinges. The music is now crossing St. Claude, coming back from the ghettos like a restless thunder, a slow wave, a heart-beat, the bright notes lifting into the air and being blown by the soft hot wind in the direction of the Mississippi.

Down Burgundy I see a crowd approaching, mostly high-school age black boys and mothers who look too young to have children. Behind them a brass band. They now take up the whole street and are dancing chaotically over the cracks in the asphalt and sidewalks, waving their hands around, hopping onto cars. One boy is holding up a stick. On top of it sits a large-sized photo of a boy who can’t be more than fifteen. R.I.P. Another brother dead. There’s no eulogies or prayers or packed churches to cry over with his senseless shooting. Music and dance and a fair amount of booze. This is how New Orleans sheds tears.

The funeral march continues and a couple of kids jump on my car no more than a few feet away. We stare into one another’s eyes and there are no words to be said, just an acknowledgment, a sense of remorse, a feeling of pain and the release necessary to keep moving on. Breaking free. I do a little nod of the head and one the boy’s just stares at me. He then hops off the car with no damage done. The music follows along as the crowd parades down to Poland St. and then turns towards the direction of the river.

As the music fades and the fog thins, out comes the sun. It’s a reminder of awakening in the wake of death and how way down here the two constantly walk hand in hand; with light, with movement, with life. Down the street comes George, the 9th ward’s thrift store on wheels. The spokes of his bicycle creak and as he balances a large television set on the handlebars. Like the man on the trapeze, with the greatest of ease. He’s brown-bagging it with his other hand. George looks over at me with his contorted face and mouth that seems to stretch all the way up to the bottom of his eyes. He smiles and gives me a big one, bright and full of color. He shouts, “Heya’ Pyaaainter!” “Heya George,” I shout back. He brings the 40 to his lips and miraculously still keeps a hold on the television set. I marvel at his dexterity as my emotions transform from sorrow to laughter. I wave and then watch him drift off towards the French Quarter.

Me: You remember George?

Eddie: Yeah, he was staying in a little old house behind his mother’s house. His mother was a nurse. She was really religious. He was too and sometimes he’d stop what he was doing and I’d see him because I worked at that house over on Poland for that writer lady.

Me: Yeah, what was her name?

Eddie: I forgot.

Me: Mary?

Eddie: Harriet Swift. She helped write a Vampire book. She was a ghost-writer. Anyway, I’d be working inside her house. I’d periodically go back and forth and I’d see where George lived and sometimes I’d see him on the ground praying. He was really trying to change his life around, but then you’d see him coming and going with something on the street he’d find.

Me: I’d always see him with his big bottle of beer, riding down the street.

Eddie: Yeah, he’d try not to drink around his mom, but.she would go to work and then the party was on. Hah hah hah.

Me: He pretty much sold everything, right? TV’s, books, chairs?

Eddie: Yeah, anything he found on the street. You remember when he picked up that chair and rode around on his bike with it on his head? Those people saying, “Now George, how you gonna carry that?” And he said, “Just watch me.” He’d do that all the time. I seen him with coffee tables, you know, and he’d come back and sell it to somebody, a big old lamp or something and then he’d be drinking his 40, all smiling and happy. (laughter)

Me: Didn’t he work in the French Quarter somewhere?

Eddie: He told me he did, but I don’t really know exactly where. I know he did some sweeping for a store, think some antique place, but I don’t really know. Sometimes he did gardening. I saw him with gardening tools.

Me: Do you remember why his face was so messed up, you know the way he talked?

Eddie: I’m not really sure. I don’t know if he was in a fire or what happened to him. He never really talked about that. I sat down with him. You remember how he’d sit down with you and have a beer? He did the same thing with me sometimes when I got off of work. But I never really asked him about his face. I don’t really know.
To be honest, I was always a little cautious of that guy. If he was your friend you knew your house wasn’t going to get robbed so that was kind of cool. (Laughter). Oh, oh, I remember one time he came up to me and said, “Hey Mr. Eddie man, what’s with all these bones in your backyard?” This was before you moved in. The guy who was living in your place went to a slaughterhouse and got a bunch of skulls and types of, you know, cows and stuff.

 Me: Like Voodoo shit?

Eddie: Yeah, like voodoo shit. This lady that lived in the back told him to do that. She told him she did the same thing and that people worry about going back there. So he says to me, I had the long dreads back then, “You’re into that Voodoo shit and stuff, aren’t ya?” but I didn’t say anything because I was kind of scared when I first moved there. To the day I moved out he thought I was into Voodoo.

Me: Well you were.

Eddie: I know. Isn’t it weird? He’s not the only black guy that said something. I’d walk by some other folks and they’d say, “He’s into Voodoo.” It’s weird how they’re scared if you’re involved with it or they think you’re into it.



Me: What about Mr. P? You remember him, shuffling all around the neighborhood? “Hay, hay, hay.” (shouted in high-pitched nasaly voice)

Eddie: Mr. P. Everybody treated him like royalty. I know he’d been in the neighborhood forever. That guy was cool. He always had younger women around. He must’ve been 98 years old.

Me: For some reason I have boxer and bluesman with question marks. It was a mystery of who he really was.

Eddie: Yeah, he must’ve done something. I remember when he went into Vaughn’s because everyone would buy him beers.

Me: BJ’s too.

Eddie: Yeah, they’d get up off the stools and let him sit down. (Mystified)I really can’t, man, it’s weird you brought him up because to this day, I don’t know what he did.

Me: (laughter) A man of mystery. I remember he lived around the corner down by the railroad tracks.

Eddie: Yeah, I don’t know what he did. I don’t know what he was about. I’d ask questions and no one would really tell me. A black guy over at Vaughn’s told me he was somebody at one time, but he never really put it into detail.

Me: Ah, maybe he was nobody.

Eddie: Nah, too many people knew him. I don’t know what the hell he was. Maybe he was a player at one time.

Me: He was a pimp.

Eddie: Yeah, he was a pimp. He was a pretty cool guy though.

Me: All I remember ever hearing him say was (in high-pitched voice) “Hay, hay, hay.”

Eddie: “Hay, hay, hay, hay,” like Fat Albert. “Hey Mr. P, Where y’at?” (laughter.)

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.

.

Books on the Nightstand

Roughing It by Mark Twain
Complete Essays of James Baldwin
Essays of George Orwell
Essays of Aldous Huxley
Granta Journal
Side Show: My Life with Greeks, Freaks, & Vagabonds by Howard Bone
The Complete Guide to Thoroughbred Racing by Tom Ainslie
Various short stories and plays by Sam Shepard
Long Days Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neil

"And, they're off!"

Well, it's been quite a while since I put anything on this site so I'm figuring, it's about time. Life plugs along in the big city and I have no complaints; things are good. The dog days of summer seem to be over. There's a slight breeze, blue skies and hints of the leaves changing right under the eyes of the sun. On the way to move my truck earlier walking over a rickety industrial sidewalk littered with trash and foul odors I heard the sounds of guitar and somewhat off-tune wailing from the Iglesia the size of an apartment above a little warehouse. I stood outside a while unable to see through the windows, but listening to what I imagined to be a short Spanish woman, eyes closed, arms raised, feeling the power. I walked a couple blocks down the street and saw the aftermath of a storm that recently hit New York. Trees were resting on power-lines, sidewalks broken apart, and an enormous tree, now uprooted, was lying in the soccer field. Two boys were playing on top of it, climbing far up the base and onto the branches. What had before been an imposing form of nature was now part of a neighborhood playground. As I watched them, I couldn't help but think of how life, even in destruction, transforms, into something else, and sometimes, if we're lucky, becomes beautiful in its evolution.

...The police blotter from the local paper is rather bland these days. A few muggings, a knife here and there, but for the most part tales of stolen IPhones seem to fill the pages. I can't complain about violence in the neighborhood if these are most of the crimes. I suppose if these people were looking up from their phones they might be able to detect the shady characters zoning in on them, but whom am I to judge?


The mind wanders. To and fro. Bare with me...


Aside from work, I have no woman exploits to brag about, and this joke of sporting mustache's for the month of September at the restaurant isn't helping any. Just the other night I tried to hit on a pretty twenty-one year-old coming out of the hoochie-jersey club next door and found myself being slapped multiple times. I don't blame the girl. She probably thought I was some sick perv. So, in between entertaining friends and relatives visiting, I've spent my off days amongst the male-dominated senior-citizen, large sun glass wearing, denizens out at Belmont Racetrack just outside of Queens. It's my hidden spot for vice and meditation and when I mention to folks at work that I bet on the ponies, they look at me a little curiously, thinking, I think my grandpa used to do that shit.

In my travels over the years I've found myself a few times out at the horsetrack. I remember years ago taking a train from Greenbelt, MD over to the Laurel Track. The whole car was filled with old men, hacking up their lungs, wreaking of cigarettes, forms out, making notes. The whole thing seemed so mysterious and I had no clue to any of the terminology they were using. Exactas. Boxes. Trifectas. Win. Show. Place. The chalk. Sucker horse. I don't even know if I bet that day. I saw a lot of war vets hobbling around, putting their retirement checks to good use. Later I stood waiting for a train home as a small Chinese man raced around with a fifth of cheap boos. He had plastic cups and kept yelling, "Whiskey! Whiskey!" and was giving away free drinks. Maybe he'd hit it big, but now, looking back on it, he probably didn't. I've been to the dying track in Portland a few times and in my foggy haze, I recall an afternoon at Fair Grounds in New Orleans.

Fast forward years later and I seemed to continually come across horse racing in a number of writers I admire. A lot of people point to Charles Bukowski when literature and horse racing comes up, but honestly, he was just following the path of a lot of other writers he was influenced by. William Saroyan. Nelson Algren. Ernest Hemingway. Sherwood Anderson. All wrote about different aspects of "the life," well.


This past April I found myself out at opening day at Belmont. I came prepared this time. I taught myself how to read The Racing Form and I checked out a stack of books from the Brooklyn library. I read everything from the study of horses, interviews with the people on the backside, trainers, grooms, jockeys, owners. I read books by math majors that have gone on to make a living betting. Formulas. Statistical analysis. Track Biases. Trainer angles. Horses on grass. Horses on dirt. Front-Runners. Stalkers. I've amounted stacks of numbers on just about every aspect of a race. The list goes on and on. An insane never-ending portal into god knows what. During the two months I had some good days, a couple hundred bucks, and some bad days, a hundred loss. I'd venture after about twenty races I most likely came out a couple hundred under. The past two months the horses went up to Saratoga for the annual, top of the class, racing, but now they're back in New York until the end of the year.

Belmont is a huge, imposing place, stadium seating with the stands nearly entirely empty. You can't help but wonder what this place used to be like and the pictures of great horses, jockeys, and trainers above the tellers gives a little hint of an idea, but those days seem to be a distant memory. Still, the races go on. We watch the horses in the paddock as if they were Wall Street investments and not living, breathing, beautiful animals that sometimes feel like running and sometimes don't. The whole idea of it all is a bit odd and foreign, but I guess that's what attracts me. And the challenge of somehow knowing something the other guys you're sitting next to don't.





I won't lie, I like to make money despite the overwhelming odds that you won't, but the big attraction for me, is observing the human condition. In all it's ridiculousness and deformity. The track puts a lot of this on full display. It's true, there's a lot of ugly aspects to the sport. There's the down-and-out gamblers who've spent everything they own begging for a couple of bucks. There's the guy in the mens room cursing that he just blew $2000. There's another picking up tickets off the floor, and then running them all through the machines looking for a winner. There's the men staring up at the TV's that simulcast the races coming from the fancy tracks like Del Mar and Santa Anita, to the rundown tracks like Arlington out of Chicago and Colonial in West Virgina. Staring big-eyed into the races so that all you hardly see are the whites, slamming their forms against their legs and shouting numbers and jockey names. Reaching up towards the horse as if they were the jockey and that that extra push might get their #6 across the line by the neck. Coming around the final stretch, looking at those horses as if in this one race lied all the answers, the prophecies, the eternal truths. Then groans, cursing, maybe one lucky soul, letting everyone know about it as he walks back over the floor of crumpled tickets. Then there's the guy next to me at the computer teller that says, "Gotta' play this mutha' fuckin' track and I hate it!" as he places twenty dollars in the machine. I can't help but think, that's got to be bad luck.




But don't worry, it's not all glum. There's the fun fans, drinking six-packs, out for their once a year visit to Belmont. There's the old couple, hunched over, all wrinkled up and still in love, celebrating over their horse coming in. Whether it paid $3.00 to win or $10.00, it's still a small victory. And sometimes small victories are enough. There's the little girl or boy resting on their dad's shoulders as they look at the horses with fascination and wonder. And despite the cruelty of the sport, the abuse it takes on the only ones that don't have a voice, you can't help but admire the sheer beauty and definition and size of these animals. You've got the older black guys all together in the grandstand, betting on longshots in trifectas, one of them always yelling, "Don't be scared grandpa. Don't be scared." Then the conversation switches to Michael Jordan and why doesn't Scottie Pippen have a statue? Lebron James and Tiger Woods, and how that girl took him for all he got. There's a big fat Italian yelling for all of us to hear, "Lights Out Lisa! Easy Money." She comes in at 12 to 1 as the rest of the crowd shakes their head studying the form for something they missed.

I take my losses and wins with little emotion. If you're smart, you'll come out on top. If you make stupid bets, follow the hoards, you'll go home with your wallet empty.

This past Wednesday I was out at the track for the first time in a couple of months. The horse I'm back and forth betting to win on the first race is going off at 9 to 1, good odds for a horse that run just a length behind the odds on favorite in the last race. I've got 0-30 wins on the turf for the trainer so I shy away from making any bets. Of course there's always a first time for everyone and today's it. Fourth Chapter comes in paying $18.80 on a $2.00 bet. A long shot follows him up with the exacta paying $260.00. The favorite, Opera Heroine, is nowhere to be found. A missed opportunity and the track makes you pay for it. The rest of the day seems to follow like this and I can't pick a winner for the life of me. I've had some pretty good days at Belmont, but I realize by the 6th race, today isn't going to be one of them. I keep the bets minimal and leave $60.00 under and head back to the parking lot, not cursing under my breath, just considering it entertainment of a sort, and maybe next time.


...On the writing front, I always feel like I'm not doing enough, but there's a few things currently in the works. Up on www.razorcake.org is a long travel piece I wrote. It's called High, Low, and In Between. A new chapter is posting every couple of weeks and when it's done, I'll most likely put it on this page. I've also got a short story that'll be on Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, a well-done site with various New York stories. www.mrbellersneighorhood.com.


...A year and a half ago, I put together a demo cd. I made a few copies, sold what I had at a few shows in Portland and that was about it. Since coming to New York I really haven't played them. I mess with the guitar every now and then, but find myself easily distracted. It's always a matter of the art and whether it's good enough. I suppose that's part of the struggle. I don't think the music matches what I had in mind, but the lyrics tend to read like poems and stories, at least that was the intention of it all. A concept, a bigger story about various characters, some real, some made up. A lot of them down and out, living in the underbelly, but all in search of something. What that something is, if we only knew. Anyway, thought I'd throw them up here.


My Days at the Prairie Cafe
(For a long time I had the vision of an older diner waitress sitting in an empty coffee shop in some small town in the Midwest. I also pictured a younger man living in his car and just roaming around and the relationship of these two different people. A year later, strangely, I would put the words into reality and find myself sitting at the counter of The Rose Prairie Cafe in Laramie. Breakfast was decent, but unfortunately, there was no Lilly there.)

Well the sun is just rising in Laramie
as the Union Pacific rolls down the line
they built these tracks in 1868
and the books tell of the Long Brothers back when this was a lawless town

I came to Wyoming with a hundred in my pockets
and just a shell of a name
I did my best to live the good life
but no matter how hard I tried
I just couldn't play the working man's games

now I'm driving through bullet-thin shadows
giving my songs to the wind
in the carnival land of dancing highways
if only to be young again

I've been sleeping in a station-wagon I picked up in Denver
got it parked behind the old paper-mill
Lilly at the diner gives me coffee
says I make her laugh
but I can tell she's been lonely for such a long time

so she visits me late at night
and we lay on the hood
and listen to the far off sounds from the open plain
and for the first time since I don't know when
I don't want to be anywhere else than right here
and that's where I am



The Man from Paris
(I wrote this after watching the movie Paris, Texas. Any time I watch this movie I end up in tears. Harry Dean Stanton's role as Travis, the loner man who's riddled with guilt and trying to make amends, is a character I see parts of myself in. I pictured words from his point of view.)

Four years in Texas walking where I don't know
a slow trail of sadness going down to Mexico
my memory is shot and I got holes in my boots
swallowing my words 'cuz I don't know what to do
I got a little boy with my brother in L.A.
but I just keep on walking
day after day
some folks get married
I guess they live the perfect dream
but things didn't work out that way
with me and Darlene

outside of 'Frisco an angel from the sky
down and out
and crazy old
I guess the lucky guy
the first few weeks how our love was strong
nights of dancing laughter
and the rooms full of songs
but I had a thirst for liquor
jealous and mean I became
more than any wife or child could ever stand the pain
so one night I rolled off
never once looking back
'till they found me in El Paso
lying on the railroad tracks

a wise man once told me
regret grows longer with age
and now here I'm sitting in this chair
and you're dancing on that stage
it's a strange life we lead
and I know words can kill no wrongs
but there's this boy in the parking lot
he hardly knows his mom
so when you see me leaving
don't think i'm not thinking of you
it's just my mind's so tired
and I got figuring to do

The Disciples of St. Paul
(The first apartment I got on my own was on St. Paul Street in Baltimore. It was a divey studio I think I paid 200 dollars a month for. I had just dropped out of the U. of Maryland creative writing program and moved out of the punk house I'd been living in for the past two years. I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew that whatever I was looking for wasn't going to be found in the safe confines of collegiate life. They were insane times, maddening, sitting for hours with a typewriter, working shit jobs, far too self-absorbed, spending countless hours at the library, sometimes lonely, sometimes with lovely and beautifully crazy women, walking the streets at night with the rest of the derelicts. I lived among crack-addicts, drug dealers, drunks, and schitzophrenics. It was an apprenticeship of sorts. I can't say I'd have any desire to go back to those days, but I'd be lying if I said there aren't times when I miss "the action." As much you age and move on and change, some places and times always remain with you. This is one of them.)

Elenore stands with her innocent gun
and points it clockwise towards the settin' sun
some folks here they fell for the fix
in the alleys of this world's dirty tricks
so we dance on the corners like fallen clowns
on the crumbling steps, we just hangin' around
shots in the dark, they drift through the night
and King Charles is on the hunt for another dead pipe

The barbershops are filled with bald men
telling war stories from way back when
I've been shaking hands with the solitary man
and the fire-escapes tell what's left to understand
the mountains got a way of tellin' tales
and poets drive down highways with stolen names
ride on through you dreams, all my chosen ones
if we can't find what's lost, it's all just the same

so raise one up high for the good times
let the morning come in its own disguise
cheap motels and an East Coast summer
time drifts slow down on St. Paul St.

Roger has a cheap suit for sale
and the kid in 305 is still in jail
the drags parade down the avenue
and love can be strange, yet beautiful too
so hold your ears tight to the blue dreams
and listen well to the good ol' soft breeze
think well of all the girls you once knew
let good faith determine all that you do




New York in the Springtime
(I was sitting in Central Park while on a vacation to New York. I was still living in Oregon, but I'd come to the realization that New York is where I wanted to be. I was just kind of watching the scene and talking to what appeared to be a homeless guy, sitting next to me. He wasn't dressed in a robe but he inspired this.)

I'm the modern day Cesar
yelling through the crowd in an old tattered robe
tourists throw change in a bucket
just a little too dumb to know
I was once the king of Washington Square
I used to run on Wall St.
a suit and tie millionaire

tattoo all my thoughts
on the hands of the dancing girl's smile
drawing pictures of the carnival
in the corner of the New York Times
man sits on a bench and he gets lost for a while
I guess what they say is true
maybe I haven't been right for quite some time

diamonds shine through the windows
all along Madison Ave.
and the Broadway lights play with the neon nights
and the Bowery pushes straight on through
New York in the springtime
It’s a sight for all of us to see
so come along my friends
grab my hand
take a long walk with me

The Ballad of Big Mama
(Big Mama was a street musician who used to play in the French Quarter in New Orleans. The last time I was in the city I didn't see her around. She was one of those, unique, one-of-a-kind Southern characters, that was either bound to cause confused raised eyebrows, or beautiful laughter. I wondered what Big Mama's story was.)

She came from a small town
somewhere east of Tennessee
a poor little fat girl
filled with starlit dreams
well down in Hollywood
the neon lights are bright
but there ain't no movie stars
just lonely midnights
she got a room off of Sunset
place called the Mark Twain
but L.A.'s no city
for a southern girl to go insane

across Arizona and New Mexico
truck-stop-tricks when there's no place to go
a Grehound Texas
running straight down Ten
Louisiana
that's where she begins

spent her money on a Casio
and started banging on them keys
down on the corner of Royal St.
way down in New Orleans
stockings high purple feathers
and an old straw hat
she couldn't keep a tune but sure loved Fats

late one August the rains and floods came
she pulled her dress over her eyes
things would never be the same
so these days you'll find her down an abandoned dirt road
her stage a wooden porch
a roaring crowd all she knows





Mick Kelly
(a tribute of sorts to Carson McCullers best novel, "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter." The fact that she wrote this at the age of 22 after moving from the South to New York to become a musician was quite amazing. Years ago I took a road trip down South and into the delta/blues region of Mississippi. Traveling down 61 from Memphis towards Louisiana, I felt as though I was in a different country set apart from ideas of time. Carson's portrait of this region and the people that inhabit it is my idea of art, true to form. )

Young boy
weathered dog
memories in disguise
youth shines through September sun
an empty church
an open plain
the gas station's long gone insane
Jesus don't come around here anymore

Mama sings her courthouse blues
Singer walks under the morning moon
the hands of time hang on faded signs
engines roll down rusted roads
and the trains come in as fast as they go
and the truth of dreams is only as strong as your word

I was 14 when I first fell in love
it was the summer of '53
Mary-Ann made a man out of me
it was next to an old oak tree
in the cemetery feeling free
under them flashing skies we laughed with the dead

The Cross-Eyed Prodigal Son

(I worked a job for a couple of weeks in a warehouse in the outskirts of Baltimore. It was just me and an older fella' named Maurice. All day we would tug at these rubber tubes, adjusting them to proper measurements. Maurice had a lot of stories to tell and I liked listening to him. He had a way of making the job seem not so miserable. The last time I saw him we were leaving a bar after just being laid off. We parted ways a little drunk and wishing each other the best. I wonder where life took him.)

My name is Maurice
I was raised in East Baltimore
always dress in fatigues
but never been to no war
you can find me downtown
always talking to myself
just another crazy fool
drinking his way to hell

in the mirrored visions of my childhood dreams
I travel to all them places you only see in magazines
some say a good life can hold the weight of gold
sit down and read the good book son
you do what you're told

I've got my billboard sign on the corner of 'ol Lexington
Muslims are dressed in bo-ties
looking like butler's at a party with no friends
my jumbled words scrawled all about
and I know no one understands
that I'm the cross-eyed prodigal son
living among the weakness of man

they got me in the industrial wasteland
the sad side of town
and I can recite the words of Shakespeare
like some 16th century clown
I try to keep up with the numbers
but I guess I'm too old
got this kid covering for me
as I stare out into the cold

so I'm going to take what little i got
and sail for the Red Sea
go mine for diamonds in Africa
a place called Guinea
and maybe I'm talking straight nonsense
what's wrong with a good story
five grand is all it takes
come on best you follow me

Goodbye Alaska
(pure imagination)

Ray worked the boats, four months out to sea
Ruby had a job over at Myer’s Cannery
It was that time of the year when the sun don’t never sleep
Twelve hours on that line her thoughts were running deep

The neighbors talked when Sunday came around
That was the day Ruby drove the Comet right on out of town
She bought some earrings and a necklace with shiny pearls
Pedal to the floor with the look of a 50’s pin-up girl

She thought about San Fran but the engine said Midwest
A rosary hung from her mirror, with it she was blessed
At a gas-station in Sioux Falls she spotted the kid
Crooked nose and all of 18, he was half-Indian

She bought a sucker, licked it right then and there
Pulled her dress down a little to give the two of them some fresh air
“Kid, I got room for you out there in my Mercury.
You can sit behind that counter, but it pays nothing to be free.”

Flyin’ on down that open road
Singing along to the old-time blues
The kid kissed her on the back of the neck
She said, “We’ll get there, but we ain’t there just yet.”

Outside of Detroit, they got a room at the old Palm Tree
Her eyes told the kid, if you want, you can have all of me
They made love enough to kill any sense of time
And smoked Lucky’s for three days straight, in the thick of summer’s wine

Ruby knew he had a girl, the kid knew about the man
But there was something true and innocent in the way they ran
Throughout the small towns, across the wide landscape
It made as much sense as anything in this world could ever make


Bud the Barber
(When I lived in New Orleans I'd drive about 20 minutes to the other side of town and get my hair cut at a small place off of Oak St. Bud was the only barber and had owned the place for over fifty years. I pictured a man like Bud dealing with life after the death of his wife.)

Well the man you see
oh no it ain't really me
and tommorrow all these scars be turning 83
I went off to the Pacific
when I was just a little kid
came back an old man 22
and I've lived here ever since

living long hanging low
come on Lord
take me home
Mary-Ann sing a song for me
and put them healing hands in mine

remember how we used to spin them tales
in the shadows of the night
and even in the darkest days
things with you felt so right
but it seems as though you were much too big for life
so your soul flew on away
I took you out to Canyon's Grove
it was there I dug your grave




Jimmie Boyle Rides Again
(The past. Love lost. Love found. Redemption, dreams, hope, and whatever lies around the corner. All themes and aspects of life that seem to follow myself, and I suppose, most folks, around.)

Red suitcase yellow letters
they tell me who I really am
fumbling through these stories
like an upside-down man
words fall through my hands
good job
big house
they say I'm doing ok
but come this time tommorrow
I'm going to throw it all away
no sense in painting lies
I'll play my guitar
and make all them stars mine
drink to this moon
with a bottle of hundred-year-old wine
yeah I'm gonna tie one on

even with all of our love
I wondered how things could last
this road leads back through you
and all of our stumbled past
they tell me you got a good man now
dusted books and Chinese poems
and there ain't no wrong nor right
following these wing-clipped angels
into the middle of the night
my memories go running
all around this land

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.