moment. It’s the second Friday in August. I’m using one of the office’s three Dell PCs to do my listings: The Fell’s Point Antique Dealers’ Association, the Fell’s Point Citizens on Patrol, and the Fell’s Point Homeowners’ Association all have meetings coming up. I also need to remind readers again to have their recyclables out by 7 a.m. on collection days.
But I don’t feel like reporting. I’m exhausted from a late night. I met someone and we ended up drinking, then arguing. He drank way too much, and I don’t know if he ever got home. His girlfriend showed up and that was stressful. I left them at the Rec Pier, him still talking his shit. He was one of these cocky dudes-you know, the kind who thinks he owns the place, the kind who would never buy a beer at Casey’s. Anyway, the night ended poorly.
We have the windows open in the office because it’s so damn steamy. We first heard the sirens at 8 a.m. and now the Baltimore City Police, three patrol cars, are at the Rec Pier. EMT people are here, too. Traffic is stopped, even the Duck Tour had to somehow brake.
“Go see what that’s about,” my editor says. Paulette means well, but she knows how I feel about covering news. News is stressful. It lacks jazz. “Go,” Paulette says. It’s a short walk along Thames. It’s ninety minutes past low tide but the harbor water is still receded and it’s shallow enough to see dismembered crabs swaying in the flotsam. At the water taxi landing, a city garbage skimmer has anchored-its chop-sticked wings have locked and apparently stalled on a particularly bulky piece of trash. I’m supposed to be asking questions and taking notes, but I just watch. Albert, my old friend from Casey’s urinal, finds me in the crowd. He’s back in town and back on the Duck Tour. We both watch as police in gloves peel seaweed, tree branches, Doritos bags,
“Low tide! You were right!” Albert says, zooming his digital camera. “You think the Duck boat can get in the water so I can have a better look?” It’s a fair question.
“I’d ask.”
At the office, I tell Paulette it was nothing, just another body, maybe a suicide or an accident-some drunk guy from last night toppling into the harbor, getting hooked under a bulkhead. “A mystery,” I say. She says to get a name, which I do three hours later from the PIO at the police department. My reporting day is through. I walk to my other job at Casey’s. Lori says she has a present for me: Us3’s rap version of “Cantaloupe Island.” Their 1994 version, “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia),” is better than the original, she says. Maybe. Either way, I want her.
“I have something for you.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You know that body the skimmer choked on today? It was a Steven J. Marsh, thirty-four, of Canton, a commercial real estate agent with Harbor View Realty. Our close friend.”
“Carpenter Hands,” Lori says.
“You don’t have to sell.”
“Michael, I was thinking. I mean, $800,000. We could go somewhere. Aruba. Someplace?” Lori lifts my sleeve over my Timex, a gift from a new friend. She suggests we close early to discuss current events. I tell her I have nothing further to report. I feel I have done enough for us both, and I feel about as happy as a man melting ice. Lori puts Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” on the jukebox, then Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t That Peculiar.” I’m thinking we might not need a house band.
She brings out two
We’re so upscale.
THE INVISIBLE MAN BY RAFAEL ALVAREZ
Crime in Baltimore was brutal but old-fashioned in those days, before the riots and all the goddamn dope. I blame those longhaired fairies from England.
All of ’em.
I had that detail too, standing guard outside Suite 1013 of the Holiday Inn on Lombard Street after they played the Civic Center; all them young girls running in and out, doing Christ knows what when they should have been home in bed with their parents
Brass said: Long as nobody gets killed, let it go. So I let it go.
That Holiday Inn was the first hotel built here after the war. Got a whole lot of attention ’cause the restaurant on the roof spun around while you ate, the full 360. By the time you were done with the crab cakes and started in on your ice cream, you’d get the whole panorama, from Beth Steel to Memorial Stadium.
Hotel’s still there, but the restaurant don’t revolve no more. Or serve crab imperial. Civic Center’s named for some bank and we
A radio still seems like more of a miracle to me than television, especially when Krupa is coming out of it. I keep it on the AM when I’m down here in the den with the knotty-pine and my citations on the wall, and when the end of the year rolls around, I pull a file or two that walked out of headquarters with me and chew on the ones I can’t forget.
Like this one.
She said that she and her “friend” were sitting on a bench at the corner of Light and Redwood Streets late in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve, “just passing time,” when the call came into the Central District.
Answered all my questions and some I didn’t ask; told it better than I’m telling you, so I let her talk.
“We’d just found a bench to sit on when the sun went down,” she said in the kitchen of her row-house apartment up near City Hospital; two black eyes, a broken nose, and a lump on her head the size of a quail egg. A bench somewhere once or twice a week, she said, “to watch the day die.”
Gray sky bruising to violet, factory lights sparkling in harbor oil, as they nibbled some bread and cheese; the city waiting on the last party of the year.
Pitiful? What are
The guy’s name was Orlo, a junk collector from the Clinton Street wharves. What he was to her is hard to say, although I could guess. His story checked out. Lucky man, as far as that goes.
“He was peeling an orange,” she said, “and the spray chafed his hands.”
Chafed… who talks like that anymore?
I guess it was a little picnic on the bench. They weren’t waiting for a bus, just sitting down. Gave her age as fifty-four-you could have fooled me, even with the beating she took-and said the junk man was “going on sixty- six…”
“Orlo Pound?”
“Is he in trouble?”
“Why would he be?”
“Am I?”
“Not that I can see. Except, you know, the reason I’m here.”
“It was cold,” she said, “so I’d eat a little cheese and put my hands back in my coat.”
“Anyone speak to you?”
“Nobody pays attention. People got their own problems.”
Headed to their own midnight truths.
They sat and watched people come and go from the Southern Hotel across the street. It had been important once, back in the railroad days, but not anymore. The only thing that revolved was the front door.
Something about the hotel bothered her.
“They were bringing cakes into the hotel and each cake had a big number on it-one followed by nine followed by six followed by four,” she said. “Do you remember back in Prohibition when the Southern had orchestras playing jazz on the roof?”
