“Out here to see your dear old mom, hey?”
“Yeah,” Tom replied. “And she’s dearer than ever.”
“Yes indeed,” Tyler said. “Nothing like the old homestead. The smell of fresh hard crabs, snowballs in the alley, and Mommy’s tender kisses.”
“Stop before I puke,” Tommy said, laughing.
“Well, I suppose you’re tied up, which is a shame and a pity, because I’m heading downtown to the fabulous Bertha’s Mussels and I’d love to carry you along with me.”
“Sorry,” Tom said, “but I’m not free for another few hours.”
Tyler smiled and put his hand under his chin, a real-life parody of
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “I’m really tired and I’ve got to get my mother to bed.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun to get out and about. You really need to make this trip, Tom. Get in touch with your old hometown-self, so to speak.”
Weeks could feel something inside of himself pulling him toward Tyler. Unlike Tom’s fake bad-boy friends in Hollywood, Tyler was always an inspired imp. A night with him might be terrifying but at least it would be real. And wasn’t that the reason he came back to Baltimore now and again? To experience something he couldn’t buy or fake his way out of?
“Fuck it,” Tom said. “I’m on. See you at 8, Ty.”
“Attaboy,” Tyler said. “I promise you something special. You’ll see.”
After the movie, Tom took Flo out for a drink at a mall bar called The Firehouse. It was loud and brash and filled with obese guys with scraggly facial hair and plaid shirts, which they wore hanging outside of their pants. Their girlfriends and wives wore bright red lipstick and dyed their beehive hair in primary colors.
“I hate it here,” his mother said. “I always hated this side of town anyway. Parkville, the Belair Road. Buncha hairhoppers and rednecks. Christ, I’d rather live over in the Northwest with the Jews. ’Cept the Jews don’t live there no more. Now it’s all the so-called black nations.”
Weeks liked to think he was up on the latest demographics in Baltimore, but he was shocked when he heard the Jews had moved away from Northwest.
“Where
“Further out, hon,” his mother said. “I heard from Harvene that the Jews have just about taken over Pennsylvania. They nearly run the Amish out. Of course, as soon as they left Pikesville, the jungle bunnies moved right in and had about ten million kids, and started killing each other over drugs at the drop of a hat.”
Weeks shut his eyes and imagined blacks all over Baltimore, dropping their funky baseball hats and firing 9’s at each other. The hats floated down like leaves, followed by their wiry, blood-soaked bodies.
“What kind of drink do you want, Mother?”
“Vodka,” she shot back. “And not that cheap well shit either. I want Grey fucking Goose.”
“Good for you,” Weeks said, as he watched three fat men in Ravens T-shirts roll by. They were all singing along with George Thorogood’s version of “Bad to the Bone.” Weeks felt an intense jealousy for their innocent belligerence. When was the last time he had sung anything with his pals? That was easy, 1968. The year the singing stopped.
“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking,” Flo said, with a mischievous grin on her face. “I get good and drunk, then you can drop me off back at the goddamned prison camp and go see one of your old girlfriends.”
“I haven’t got any girlfriends, old or otherwise, in Baltimore anymore.”
“Bullshit,” his mother said as the waitress approached. “You’ve always had girlfriends everywhere you go. Girls made fools of themselves for you, because they don’t know what a rotten bastard you really are.”
She laughed and looked up at the waitress, who wore two-inch false eyelashes and enough rouge to make her look like a clown in drag.
“Gimme the Goose,” Flo said. “A double. And keep ’em coming. My big shot son is here and he can afford it.”
The waitress looked at Weeks, and when she smiled she showed about a half-inch of gum.
“Your mother is soooo cute,” she said.
“Yeah,” Weeks said. “Mom’s a living doll.”
By the time Weeks carried the drunken, cursing Flo up to her apartment, he had a screaming headache and a pain in his chest. He thought about popping another blood pressure pill, but they tended to wear him out and he still had to drive all the way downtown to see Ty.
Fuck it, he thought, as he gently lay his mother down in her bed and kissed her sweating forehead. Maybe he didn’t really need to see Ty after all.
And yet there was something about meeting the old convict that was impossible to resist.
He was about to leave his mother’s side when she reached out a bony hand and grabbed his wrist. “Hey,” she said. “You can fool those pinheads out in California but you can’t fool me. You know what you did the first two months of your life?”
“No,” Tom said, feeling dizzy again. “What?”
“You wet the bed every night. Every damned night. And it wasn’t your father who came in and cleaned you up and walked you around when you were screaming. It was me, your horrible old mother. The one you hate so much.”
Weeks felt something cracking inside of him. Like his bones, his heart. All of it cracking and falling into splinters.
“I gotta go, Mom.”
“Well, you have a good time,” she said as she shut her eyes. “Have a few laughs with your girlfriend. Tell her what an old fool your mom is, asshole.”
Weeks pulled his wrist out of her grasp and made his way out of her apartment. When he got outside it was snowing and he stood there for a minute, letting the flakes come down on him, hoping somehow they might make him feel light and white and clean. Like when he was a kid.
But the snow-magic didn’t work anymore. All he felt was soggy, middle-aged, and cold.
When he’d been a student at Calvert College, Tom rented an apartment on Thames Street, right across from the pier on which he’d once been in Sea Scouts. Back then, he thought, as he parked his car on Aliceanna Street, Fell’s Point had symbolized freedom, sex, drugs (black hashish right off the ship and carried in a seaman’s trunk right into his apartment), and an endless party. Even the names of the bars had seemed so quaint and cool. Besides Bertha’s, there was The Horse You Came in On, and The Admiral’s Cup, and The Brass Monkey… The cobblestone streets, the arty girls from Maryland Institute, the student filmmakers, the folksingers, the occasional Goucher Girl in rebellion against her rich parents… God, it had been great back then… a place where every day seemed to have an unlimited possibility for surprise and romance.
Now, however, as Weeks walked the few blocks toward the bar, he was stunned by how small and seedy everything appeared. The ramshackle little bars with their neon lights looked tawdry and trashy. Dead End Ville. Drunken students wandered from bar to bar looking for girls and drugs, just as Weeks himself had years ago-but now, to his jaundiced eye, they seemed hapless and lame.
He walked by a man sitting in the gutter with a torn shirt and a bloody nose. Behind him a woman screamed, “If you weren’t such a pussy you’d go back in ’ere and kick his ass, Terry!” The beat man looked up wearily and said, “Fuck you, babe. Don’t try and promote that Who Struck John shit wif me.” Weeks looked down at the guy and realized he only in his early twenties. He felt that he could already see the downward trajectory of the boy’s life… a few years of stumbling about in Fell’s Point, perhaps pretending to be some kind of artist, then either jail, addiction, or worse.
That’s what had happened to most of his old pals. So many of them gone the way of drugs, like Mike who died from a hot shot in The Bottom, and Brad who had been killed by a head-on collision while driving on pills down to Ocean City.
It had been a mistake to come back here, Weeks thought. What could he possibly find but sadness? The old story of the middle-aged man who tries in vain to find the lost spirit of his youth in a place that’s forever changed.
