Baltimore Noir

to sell you a piece of your future. Bertha’s bar and her worldfamous bumper stickers are still here, and the immortalized The Horse You Came in On, and my favorite watering hole. Casey’s is two blocks down from the Recreation Pier, where they filmed the TV drama, Homicide. Baltimore’s amphibious Duck Tour grinds by, as tourists with duckbill-yellow quackers hope to witness a shooting or maybe just a chalk outline for old time’s sake. But all that’s left is a plaque: “In This Building from 1992-1999 a Group of Talented People Created a Television Legend-Homicide: Life on the Street.” The city wants to turn the pier into something called a boutique hotel, according to the community newsletter and my employer, the Fell’s Pointer

My name is Michael Flanagan: I’m twenty-three, collect snow globes, eat entire rolls of Butter Rum Lifesavers after lunch, had a girlfriend once who convinced me to paint my toenails cobalt; have promised myself to one day see Aruba; Sundays wreck me (I should be thinking hopefully of the week ahead, but my mood reverses itself: the dull bulk of the past pins me), and I think Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island” might be better than Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.” Since last year, I have been a staff writer for the Fell’s Pointer, which firmly believes in an apostrophe. I write about bicycle master plans, the harbor’s garbage skimmers, and once I wrote a feature about Twiggy, a water-skiing squirrel that is pulled by a remote-controlled boat. My stories have also warned readers about leaving bricks on their property because they tend to be used as weapons during robbery attempts.

My newsletter salary is $950 a month, so I also offer my services at The Love Joint, an adult movie emporium on Broadway, walking distance to Casey’s. My employer, Mr. Harland Grimes, and I continue to differ on the artistic direction of the store; I believe Grace Kelly was the finest vision on film, but he stubbornly stocks the store with Paris Hilton home videos. Mr. Grimes often sports avocado-sized bruises on his upper arms. His forehead is large enough to accommodate a second face. Snap beans for legs, icebox chest. And he never wears socks, just old- lady-blue tennis shoes, just the three eyelets on each side.

I work weeknights, stacking Paris videos into attractive pyramids by the front door. My days are spent reporting newsletter stories, investigating the tattoo magazines in The Sound Garden record shop, and having the mussel chowder at Bertha’s. By 5 p.m. I’m in Casey’s, which is across from a toy store that once featured a bubble machine on the second floor. Bubbles would parachute and pop onto cobblestoned Thames Street-and the “th” is pronounced. I wrote the story when they shut down the bubble machine-an exclusive, you could say.

I accomplish three things in bars: consume quality adult beverages, bribe the jukebox, and form crushes. This Palm Sunday, I had planned to start my novel, but I got hung up again on the title-either Flight Risk Clumsy Heart, Save the Bows. Unable to commit, I channeled my creative thinking into imagining a dancer coming in from Larry Flynt’s Baltimore strip club. She would make herself at home in the John Wilkes Booth. She would tell me her name is Amber or Savannah or Misty and she has a boyfriend named Ronnie, and Ronnie initially was very cool about this stripping business because the money is extraordinary and she never kisses her customers or tells them her real name. She just takes the money over and over again. But then Ronnie, with his dumb-fuck mind, switches his thinking and thinks she owes him more. He just doesn’t know how to confess his loneliness, his jealousy. I could save her! You see why the novel writing is not going well. The jukebox carries Wilson Pickett, so I play “Mustang Sally” and “Funky Broadway” and order another Bass. But this is no novel; this is the truth. A woman does come in.

“I’m Mel.”

“I’m Michael.”

“Hi, Mikey.”

“No, it’s Michael.”

So, she’s no Amber or Misty. I’m way off with the names. (Mel later tells me her boyfriend’s name is Steve. Go figure.) Mel says she quit her job today. She was working as a topless cleaning lady for a new company called Dirty Minds Not Houses! She had responded to an ad in the alternative weekly, City Paper, and was surprised to learn she could start that day. During a cursory employee orientation conducted via e-mail, she was told cleaning supplies would not be necessary but she would have to provide her own transportation. Her first job was out in the suburbs, one of the new Irish-themed developments along Padonia Road. Mel showed up at the Tullamore Townhouses with a half-dozen rags (her niece’s hand-me-down diapers), Pledge (with natural orange oil), and Windex. She’d be damned if she wouldn’t get some cleaning done, at least the windows. Maybe if he’s got a vacuum…

No one was home. Or, no one answered the door, Mel says. Just a note was left: “Come back tonight after 11,” with one of those sideways smiley faces people use in e-mails.

“I know, I know. It was stupid to even go. But I thought, hell, why not show some tit and make $75?” Mel says. “Yes, I know! Stupid.”

Plus, you can’t do business in this world with people who make those smiley faces, we both agree.

Melanie Rogers is twenty-two. Her hair is the color of a metallic brown Hot Wheels car I once owned-either my Camaro or Chaparral. She’s wearing brown corduroys with a wide black belt, but she’s missed a loop off the right hip. Mel has a man’s Timex watch, and some girls look good in men’s watches, they just do. She’s drinking Miller Light and starts a story somewhere in the middle.

“I put one of them in a Victoria’s Secret box. Their boxes are so pretty.”

Wilson Pickett is through. I need to hear the Stones, and fortunately the bubble-tube Wurlitzer jukebox maintains a disproportionate ratio of Stones-to-shit music. A dollar will buy me two plays, and I choose “Happy” and “Stop Breaking Down,” both off Exile on Main St

“Tino died the next morning. So I put her and the Victoria’s Secret box in the freezer.”

“Who?”

“My stray cat. She had eight kittens in my basement. All white. I gave them all away except for Tino. The one in the freezer.”

Behind the bar, I look at the skyline of Yukon Jack, Southern Comfort, Jack Daniel’s, Montezuma Triple Sec. Signs and bumper stickers garland the cash register: “Street Girls Bringing in Sailors Must Pay for Room in Advance,” and “Save the Ales,” and “If It Has Tires or Testicles, It’s Going to Give You Trouble.” Lori Montgomery owns the bar and has been kissing off six-figure offers from the suits over at Harbor View Realty, which believes every old bar should be a new bar. Lori doesn’t want to go upscale. If she’s got to peel away like the Old Point Hotel and Lounge, then to hell, she says. She likes her French Tickler condom machine. She doesn’t want “No Limit Texas Holdem” tournaments; she wants her John Wilkes Booth. She stole the booth idea from Vesuvio’s, a beatnik bar in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Booth, after all, is a native son.

Lori got married at Fort McHenry with a reception at the Clarence “Du” Burns Soccer Arena (it was one of my newsletter items), but I don’t know her status now. She’s Alison Krauss pretty. But Lori is old enough to be too old for me. I don’t want her to sell the bar. If I want upscale, I’ll drink in Annapolis.

Tonight’s live band at Casey’s is Tongue Oil, a dog-eared local group known for its curious and ultimately unsatisfying version of “Stairway to Heaven.” I’d rather hear Mary Prankster-why can’t she drop by Casey’s?-when she headlines at Fletcher’s, and there’s Gina DeLuca Fridays at Leadbetter’s and Paul Wingo’s trio at Bertha’s. What I’m really thinking about is Mel’s frozen kitty. I tell Mel I want to see it. She smiles, takes her index finger, wets it with her studded, manta ray tongue, and mats down a twig in my eyebrow. Must have slept on it wrong. This is as close to foreplay as I’ve experienced in four months (no, six). Her face is nearby. Mel has an asterisk blood vessel under the iris of her left eye. I imagine someone hit her. “Are you all right?” I ask. The wrong answer is yes. I want her to be lonely and in danger. Lori slides over a bowl of oyster crackers. I question her timing sometimes.

“Why do you want to see my kitty?” Mel doesn’t say it dirty.

“I don’t know.” Liar boy.

I squint to see what must be Steve, Mel’s boyfriend, hauling into the bar. I can tell a 33” waist a mile away. He’s got these meaty carpenter hands, too. A handsome fuck. Steve can’t bring himself to order a beer in this place, so he just hands Lori a business card. She doesn’t field it. Mel is still fiddling with my eyebrow, which hovers like some randy katydid.

“Are we dating now?” I say.

They say I woke up three minutes later, according to Mel’s Timex. I’m on a saggy sofa that has that sofa armpit smell. I was moved to Lori’s office, where a white kitten named Marble is playing footsies on my stomach.