by Jess Row
If you weren’t from Baltimore, I’m thinking, and you arrived here, out of nowhere, you’d be utterly lost. Not a Target in sight, no supermarket, no ATM, no Dunkin’ Donuts. Not a food desert so much as a desert, period. No commercial signifiers, none of the reassurances of home. Pick a random block here, I’m thinking, or in Philly, or Detroit, Cleveland, Bridgeport, Milwaukee, St. Louis, any of the lost cities, the gutted and ruined cities, and you may be in the one place left in America with no solace left at all, not even the satisfaction of opening your wallet.
Let’s turn back, I say. Back to the park, okay? We’re not going anywhere in particular, are we?
• • •
I’m going to say something that’s going to break your heart, Martin says, after we’ve walked a few minutes in silence, crossing DeVine, circling the park’s southern edge. I tried to care. I really wanted to get into it. I mean, I could see it in your face, Kelly! I used to watch you almost crying when you played the drums, do you know that? You were transformed. I took home our practice tapes and listened again and again. What the hell was I missing? Well, I never got it. I liked being in a band. And it’s not like the bass parts were difficult. But I never drank the Kool-Aid. I never thought of it as art.
Well, okay. I don’t know if I’d call it art, either.
Don’t apologize, he says. Don’t do that. Look, Kelly, I’m not asking you to be ashamed. I’m not asking you to disown anything. It’s not your fault. There was nothing wrong with L’Arc-en-Ciel. There was nothing wrong with any of it. Look, it’s your own history, your being, for god’s sake! It just wasn’t mine.
As if a camera has just swung out in front of us on a boom, as if we’re being filmed for some documentary, I’m suddenly aware of what a picture we make: a black man and a white man, same age, side by side, close enough to imply a certain friendly intimacy. A conversation in low voices.
Define that. Define my being.
You know what my father said, the first time I played him one of our tapes? He said, Jesus Christ, it’s like you’re trying to invent music all over again. Without knowing how. And isn’t that true, just a little bit? What did Alan know about playing the guitar? A couple of chords and a lot of screwing around. What do you have to have, to pull that off? That special self-righteousness. That arrogance. That cocoon—that special Willow feeling, you know what I mean?—that sense of being the arbiter of all things. That, that transparency. That sense of living in a world of hypothetical questions. I could go on and on. What would it feel like to start a riot? You see what I mean?
And that’s your definition of whiteness?
Let’s put it a different way, he says. Why did you leave Baltimore, Kelly? I’ll tell you why. Because you felt you could. Right? You felt that freedom. Much as you loved it. There was nothing here for you. Why stay in a city that’s a ruin? A broken city, a looted and betrayed city, with all these vacants, all these empty lots, a city that bulldozes its beautiful theaters? Why stay, if you have the option of leaving? It’s a stupid rhetorical question. You left because you couldn’t stand looking at all those hopeless poor black people anymore.
What do you do when someone quotes you back to yourself, practically speaking, more or less, without knowing it? A little knot has lodged itself in my esophagus, enough to breathe, but not to speak, not for a minute.
And what about you? I manage to ask, finally.
What about me? He could go on talking like this for hours, I’m thinking, extemporizing this way. He’s leaning into it. I couldn’t leave, he says. Even when I had the chance. Drawn back like a homing pigeon. From wherever I happened to land. Even Bangkok. And I love Bangkok. But wherever else I was, I just felt eventually like the earth was going to swallow me up and bring me back here. I just had to go deeper and deeper into Baltimore. Bind myself to Baltimore. Hopeless and fucked-up as it was. But then I realized something, and it’s business school 101. One man’s vacant lot is another’s man’s gold mine. Absence and anonymity: that’s the twenty-first-century recipe for success. I was going to be a black man one way or another, but I wasn’t going to just up and disappear because my city’s off the map. Because, truthfully, the world is going to come to Baltimore one day. The world is Baltimore.
Hold on. I scrabble in my bag for my notebook. Let me write this one down, okay? I’ll have to use that line in the book.
He loosens his collar and glances at me sideways, as if we’ve become sparring partners and he’s waiting for an unexpected move.
I didn’t make that up, he says slowly. Alan did.
When was that? I never heard him say that.
Later. After you left. When Cheryl used to bug him about applying to college. He would say, I don’t need to go anywhere. The world is Baltimore.
I stare at him, my mind buzzing with the white noise of the traffic below, for a moment not quite digesting the words.
What, you mean, after he was back from rehab? When I was away at Amherst?
You thought we never saw each other, Kelly?
He never mentioned anything about it.
Maybe he was afraid to freak you out. He knew I was changing, that’s for sure. Changing into what, of course, is a different story. But he knew something was happening.
My chest has become a giant ticking clock, a wound spring releasing itself in tiny increments.
Where was this? At his house?
I don’t remember. Who cares? I saw him there; he came downtown; we had lunch together; we hung out in Fell’s Point a couple of times at night. He needed help. I tried to help. I took him to a methadone clinic. Hell, I took him to get an AIDS test. This really bothers you that much?
It’s just all news to me. He never told me that he’d seen you. Aren’t I allowed to be hurt by that? It’s a betrayal. What else could it be? I wanted to know what happened to you. I was curious. I didn’t abandon you; you abandoned me.
Isn’t that a little strong, Kelly? Abandoned? I don’t recall you wanting to hang out so much senior year. After the band broke up. I don’t recall you leaving me a lot of messages. Did you ever ask him about me, directly? Did you ever mention me in his presence?
How was I supposed to know he had seen you? Anyway, it wasn’t the first thing on my mind. He was dying.
He wasn’t dying. He died.
However you want to put it.
No, he says. It’s different. His death was a discreet event. Not natural. Suicide is never natural.
Didn’t he ever say, you should call Kelly? Didn’t he want to know why you’d disappeared like that?
Haven’t you been listening? He detaches himself from the railing, finally, and begins walking back to Pierson Street, his street, pumping his legs, hardly looking back to see if I’m following. He knew there was something going on with me, he says. He kept talking about my journey. To tell the truth, it bugged me. All this New Age stuff he picked up from NA. The hero leaving home. The three obstacles. Growth. God, he went on and on about growth. Of course he was right. I was able to see that, later. After I stopped being angry. I realized he never really wanted me to be like him.
It took me a long time to see that.
He gives me a look, over his shoulder: you, too? And then, with recognition, or pretending recognition, he nods.
I mean, he says, in a sense you could say it was Alan that gave me permission. He opened that door. He said, there’s more than one way to live. He was into radical solutions, after all. No halfway measures.
No, that’s true. No halfway measures.
—
Rolling toward us on Howard Street, slowly, deliberately, is a Baltimore Police squad car, with two shadowy figures underneath the mirroring glare of the windshield. The driver’s-side window rolled down, a beefy, red-haired forearm adjusting the mirror. And without touching his body, without looking over at him, I feel a change in the envelope of energy around Martin, a crackle of static electricity: and I draw up my breath, stiffen my spine, and open my hands, keeping them in plain s
ight, keeping my gaze straight ahead, an unworried, unselfconscious man, as I imagine a black man would always have to be, though I’ve never imagined it before in quite this way. It occurs to me that in a way, on this street, in this odd place where pedestrians rarely stray, I am his alibi. There is a percentage by which a white man and a black man walking together by Tilson Falls Park are less likely to be stopped than a black man walking alone. You could do a study. You could measure it. This is the calculus that a black man lives with every day. This is a theory I’ve always understood but never experienced, not once. And, too, it occurs to me, as it should have, long ago, that there’s a reason Martin puts on a suit and a silk tie every day when he leaves the house, whereas I, in my current state, have worn the same hooded sweatshirt, the same jeans, the same black Converse, for three days running. Were I a black man, it occurs to me, working or not, in this city, I would have a dry-cleaning bill. And I want to turn to him, though I won’t, and say, I understand the part about hypotheticals.
I realized something recently, I tell him, instead. Two times nineteen is thirty-eight. We’ve outlived Alan by exactly one lifetime.
Didn’t he always say that he could die at sixteen? Martin says. Having lived a long and happy life? That was his downfall, that Ian Curtis crap. Self-pity. Self-aggrandizing pity. It made him vulnerable. He didn’t value life enough. He just gave it away.
Deep in my chest cavity, in some unmapped region, some imaginary town down a side road from the pancreas to the bile duct, a church bell is tolling, a deep, sonorous vibration, traveling across a lake, up forested hillsides. Something is waking up. A disturbance, an alarm. He knows something. What does he know?
What’s your point?
He stares at me and begins walking even faster, almost at a jog. We’re going somewhere with this story, I can’t help thinking, and he doesn’t want to get there, either. But there’s no other way.
I don’t have a point, he says. Just a good memory.
22.
Recording #4 (1:04:34)
Source:
(1) TDK Chrome cassette tape, 90 minutes, condition –
(2) Sony cassette tape, 60 minutes, condition ++
Labeled both tapes side one “Tape 4 PRIVATE DO NOT DESTROY” “Tape 5 PRIVATE DO NOT DESTROY”
This part has a soundtrack. Bob Marley, “Exodus.” One of the greatest riddim tracks ever. [hums] Bum, bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum, bum-bum-bum. Listen to it. Whoever’s listening to this, if anyone ever does: if you don’t have it, go out and get a copy. You should have it on as you listen to me. One layered on top of the other. Don’t worry about the words just yet. Just the bass and the drums.
What do you hear? Walking. Moving. The song is taking you somewhere. Right? Don’t you want to go? Doesn’t everybody want to go? Move. Move. Move.
So what happened from, say, 1994 to 2000, in my life? The lost years. Six lost years. What happens when someone goes out of sight, in this day and age, in this economy, in Baltimore, when they make every effort not to be found? When they have no visible means of supporting themselves? Well, okay. I’ll spell it out.
Pot.
I was running pot in its second heyday, when it was the chronic, the KGB, the Super Sticky, the Buddha, Sour Diesel—when the demand was skyrocketing and the supply, at first, was not that great. Most of what was on the market in 1994 was Mexican junk. Mota. People were adding other stuff to it just to get a buzz—meth, mescaline, even PCP. The Colombians weren’t in the market yet. Escobar didn’t believe in pot. Too much volume. And the American and Canadian growers were just coming in on a large scale. It was just the beginning of hydroponics, aeroponics, when costs were coming down and all those years of hippie research were finally paying off. That was when they invented the Sea of Green and the Screen of Green—autoflowering, cloning, using colloidal silver to feminize the plants. You could put in $50,000 and get yourself a house, racks, trellises, grow lights, carbon scrubbers, ozone generators, seeds, buckets, motion detectors. The whole package. The challenge was all in distribution. You had dealers everywhere, of course, demand was out the window, but most smokers were still used to paying twenty or thirty bucks a bag for total garbage; the high-end stuff was still a niche product. Friends selling to friends. There was a lot of paranoia about expanding your field. What we were doing was like Starbucks. Create a market, then feed that market. Convince people to spend four bucks on a Frappuccino instead of a dollar on coffee, then make sure that Frappuccino is everywhere they want it. In the mall. In the grocery store. Buy bulk and corner the wholesale market.
Seymour was the one who got me going. He was my lodestar, my mentor, my launch pad. My compass. I probably wouldn’t be alive today except for him. We first got together in ’94. First time I met him—it was at a party somewhere, I think at Willa Rodriguez’s mom’s place off Coldspring—he was just back from Miami. Kept going outside to make calls on his cell phone. It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone—other than a banker, maybe, or someone on TV—with a cell phone. The old squarish kind with the huge battery. So I asked him: who do you have to call so desperately, man, at two in the morning?
And he said, You really want to know?
Yeah. I really want to know.
You’re graduating high school, right? You have a job?
That was it for me. Curiosity killed the cat.
Before him I’d never really known a white criminal. Of course I’d known dealers, or at least knew of them, around the neighborhood when I was younger. But Seymour didn’t do anything at the street level. He didn’t have turf. His dad was some kind of banker at Alex Brown; he grew up in Roland Park, got kicked out of Boys’ Latin and then Dartmouth for dealing. Then his family cut him off, and he basically went to ground, went AWOL, and climbed up the ladder of the business—developed his own sources, his own clientele, all up and down 95. Maine to Florida, the Appalachian Trail of weed. I must have smoked two or three hundred different varieties with him. He got product from everywhere—Colombia, Peru, Thailand, Afghanistan, Nepal, Jamaica, Humboldt, Salt Spring Island, Paraguay. He carried around metal suitcases full of samples in the back of his Saab, and would go around having tastings, four or five stockbrokers or doctors or what have you at a time. Developing customer profiles he wrote up on his PowerBook. With him it was all classy, down to the way he dressed, super-put-together, all blacks and grays, Banana Republic style.
And so a month after I met him he had me signed up as a courier working the New York–to–Miami route. Trying to crack the distribution nut, break into the regional business. We drove these vans that old Cuban ladies took back and forth, visiting family. Pick up the abuelas on 125th Street and Lex, stop overnight at a Motel 6 in Richmond, drive all the next day and night to Miami, do the drop-off, pick up more abuelas on Calle Ocho, stop at a Motel 6 in Charlotte, same time, same station, and when you get back to New York take the van uptown to Inwood, leave it in this garage overnight. The chassis, the floorboards, the hood, the wheel wells—we could carry five hundred pounds and all it cost was a little extra gas money. Kept it at a cool 67 the whole way. Made sure the tires were solid, tested the lights, did everything to make sure we never had a stop. Because the thing was—no matter how hard we tried, how many air fresheners and pounds of coffee—you could still smell it. The abuelas would get all giggly before we stopped for pee breaks. You can’t have all that sticky bud in an enclosed space and not smell it. Triple-bagged Ziplocs and all. I would do three runs and then take the bus back to Baltimore and have two weeks off. A thousand dollars a run. Tax-free. It was a genius operation. White kids saving money for college; old Cuban ladies visiting their sisters; never had a cop give me a second look.
So anyway: that went on for two years. The entire time Dad was sick. Easy work, easy money. Then—overnight—the whole thing disappeared. The vans, the company, the garage up in Inwood: poof! Never knew why. Seymour thought they’d found an easier route. Shipping containers, maybe even commercial air. There were FedEx p
eople involved in those days, before the company came down hard on side deals. All those big planes carried a little extra weight. In any case, for six months, I was shit out of luck, work-wise. Seymour had left town; I didn’t know if he’d ever be back. I’d saved a lot of my cash, and of course I had the house outright.
So what did I do? I went to school. UMBC. Econ 120, Accounting 120, Con Law, and “Introduction to Holocaust Literature.” I registered late, and all the intro English courses were full. So instead I had Dr. Klefkowitz in this little tiny room with eight other kids. Klefkowitz must have been at least seventy. And he had the numbers tattooed on his arm. Never said a thing about it, but he didn’t hide it, either. He looked at me as I was leaving on the first day—I was the last one out of the room—and said, excuse me, Martin Lipkin, may I ask, you are a Jew?
My father was Jewish, I told him, my mother wasn’t, as far as I know, I never went to synagogue, never had a bar mitzvah. I know a lot of Jews. I don’t know. Am I a Jew?
He shrugged. You’re asking me? Don’t ask me. Ask a rabbi.
I don’t know any rabbis.
Well, he said, maybe you’ll read these books and feel something.
We read—who did we read first? Primo Levi. Elie Wiesel. Borowski. Danilo Kiš. But the best one was this guy I’d never heard of, Bruno Schulz. Who wasn’t even really a Holocaust writer at all. I mean, yes, he was killed by a Nazi. But everything we have that he wrote, just two little books of short stories, was written in the Thirties, before the Germans invaded Poland. He never wrote a thing about the Nazis. All his work was about his childhood and his family. And his debates with God.