There’s a fraternity of people who grew up in small rooms in ancient working-class homes in ancient cities who my sympathies will always lie with. Despite architectural differences — from New Orleans shotguns to Boston triple-deckers– the experience is similar. The senses are triggered with a connecting familiarity. It radiates the way we move, breathe, interact. It defines us. 

My room was at the end of a long hallway on the second floor of a two-story brick Baltimore rowhome located in Hampden, a north central city neighborhood. Without an HVAC system, my living conditions were defined by the seasons. Springs and falls were pleasant, but in the summer the humidity would seep in and cooked the horsehair plaster ceilings and walls. For circulation I’d throw away my sheets and keep the screen windows open. Through the night dogs barked at each other in conversation, and delivery trucks rumbled and backed into the loading dock at the nearby grocery store. In the winter the floorboards in my room would moan in contraction, and steam would burst from the nozzle on the end of the nickel-plated radiator that sat next to my bed.  

Around third grade I decided I wanted my walls painted ocean blue. I don’t know why but I liked the idea of living underwater, constantly submerged in a state of aqua meditativeness. I bought a green lava lamp and burned votive candles and lit incense and the feng shui worked for me. My bookshelf was filled, and LEGO sculptures covered the display case at the foot of my bed. I hung a dartboard on the front of my bedroom door, and, in lieu of darts, my brother and I would fling multi-pointed ninja throwing stars at it. The metal stars would hit the wood with a thunk and splinters would fly.

My one electronic escape was a clock radio I’d won after hitting a certain tier on a school fundraiser (my laborious work usually began and ended by giving my mom the box of chocolates to sell at her office). WBAL, an AM station with a 50,000 Watt signal, was located about a mile from my house on nearby Television Hill. They owned broadcast rights for all the local sports, so I’d listen to Orioles games called by John Miller or University of Maryland basketball games called by Johnny Holiday. When the games weren’t on, I’d listen to local Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks’s evening variety show, which celebrated the quirkiness of the city. Music-wise, 92Q educated me on hip-hop, and WHFS and 98Rock brought the grunge. 

At 18 I jumped a plane to New Orleans for college and didn’t particularly look back. I’d come home in the summers and Christmas, and I don’t know what changes in that time, but there is one and suddenly it was just a children’s room to me, a tether to the past. I stayed in New Orleans after college and worked and didn’t plan on ever moving back to Baltimore. Then Hurricane Katrina hit and I lost my car, apartment and job, and without a ton of resources I moved home, into a room painted like it was submerged in water. I spent the months after the storm honed in on escaping that room. And once I did move out, I worked hard to make sure I never ended up back there.  

After 38 years, my parents finally sold the house and moved to more comfortable surroundings, which most importantly includes working HVAC. I’ve been glad to spend some time in the old house while helping them move, but I realize I don’t have a strong connection to the space anymore. It was an experience, but now it’s over and our time is done. Hopefully, though, someone with vision buys it. The old lady still has her charms. 

The pre dawn morning was crisp and I’d just finished a frustrating game of tennis as the sun rose over the courts at Druid Hill Park on the border of West Baltimore. The first red-winged blackbirds sang po-to-twee and the Canadian geese honked before splash landing on the nearby reservoir but I was too angry at my inconsistent backhand and wild ground strokes to care.

After my match I drove to the grocery store to buy paper towels and toilet paper, precious commodities in a pandemic, along with frozen shrimp and tuna and shallots for a dinner I was imagining for later.

At checkout I loaded my items onto the grocery conveyor belt. The cashier stood behind plexiglass. She was older and blonde and she wore a black facemask for protection.

She scanned my items and bagged them for me, and the total amount came to $66.66. I thought it a funny occurrence, and said the number out loud.

The cashier looked at me quickly. “My son used to play that number all the time when he was alive,” she said. “The Devil’s number! I played it a few times too and won.”

She tore my receipt from the register, circled the coupon with a neon yellow highlighter and placed it in one of my plastic bags.

“Thank you for shopping, “ she said. “Be safe.”

Aug. 4, 2020

Hurricane Isaias is careening through Baltimore right now, and I remember that there are good storms that embolden and excite. For a brief moment in 2005 I lived at a friend’s house in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood not far from S. Jefferson Davis Highway near Finn McCool’s Irish bar. It was a rare two-story shotgun-style house, with a second apartment and parking pad underneath, and I was subletting it while my friend traveled to Tennessee. That July Hurricanes Cindy and Dennis hit the city, two concentrated, impactful storms forgotten in the wake of bigger events. They arrived at night, their tropical winds and warm rains caressing the shotgun homes and corner bars where people threw the last of the great hurricane parties, soaked in Dixie beer and Jack Daniel’s, and on those evenings the New Orleans sky was emblazoned with the purple light of electric transformers exploding across the city landscape. Then, later, Katrina hit and brought hell with it and you realize that, like Werner Herzog said, nature can be vile.

July 29, 2020

It’s 100 degrees and the sun’s set but I’m still sweating through my shirt. The Orioles game is playing on the radio while I sit on my front porch, and there are more people outside than usual because the world is crashing around us. They’re walking dogs and racing scooters and I remember when this was normal, before air conditioners were ubiquitous and neighbors would sit on their porches and you could catch an entire O’s pitch sequence walking down a city block. Those were nights when my brother and I would huddle on the floor of our parent’s room because we only owned one air conditioner so we’d lay on cushions and fall asleep to the hum of electric comfort.

July  28, 2020

Birdland Schadenfreude: In lieu of this week’s games being “postponed” due to COVID, I submit “stuff you remember as a long suffering Orioles fan.” Aug 16, 2003 – Human Gold’s Gym Jack Cust beats a Yankee rundown on what would have been the game-tying run, only to fall flat on his face inches from home plate. As was his tradition, manager Mike Hargove watched the play then pulled another shot of gin from the “special” Gatorade cooler.

July 22, 2018 · 

Late evening summer thunderstorms remind me of my grandfather, the late Dr. William H. Shannon. We’d visit Trusty Friend, the family’s Italianate farmhouse located just south of the city, on humid summer days, looking for relief from the bubbling city heat. As the sun descended, the family would sit on the front porch, kids on the floor, aunts and uncles in plastic chairs, my grandmother in a rocker. Grandad would lean against a white porch column, wearing light summer slacks and a crumpled short-sleeve button down shirt, a bow tie tucked under his chin, his feet stuffed in a pair of bone white loafers, his hair the color and peak of whipped egg whites.

From his pocket he’d pop out an unfiltered Pall Mall from a soft pack and light it. Like clockwork, summer thunderstorms would roll through central Maryland, and the sky would slip into a deep blue hue, then open wide, heaving rain that pelted the leaves of the three dozen white oak trees towering throughout the property’s front grove. Thunder rumbled overhead, Rip Van Winkle thunder, echoing off the mountainous clouds that concealed the bearded men throwing strikes in a primeval game of nine-pins, as Grandad would tell us.

Later, he’d finish his cigarette, the embers burning crimson in his fingertips, and flip the butt into the front gravel driveway. His cough was amplified by thunderheads peeling violently above the creaking oaks, and his profile illuminated in lighting strikes.

May 20, 2018 · 

Late Spring Evening

I ordered two fried soft shell crabs from the seafood market, took them home, cut up tomatoes and cucumbers, toasted a couple slices of whole wheat, grilled the rest of the asparagus and made sandwiches. It was a perfect Maryland evening, warm and sleepy in late evening sun. Afterward I set up in my yard among the peonies and roses, and the wild thyme in bloom, and smoked an Arturo Fuente anejo and drank a tequila blanco and lime.

Earlier in the day I sat high over Annapolis, high enough to see the boats floating along the Severn, and the bone white cupola of the state’s capital glazed in noon sunshine. I watched as young men’s youth passed before them. I mulled over the dead in Santa Fe, the dead in Baltimore, the dead like Christopher Clarke and Devin Cook and Ray Glasgow III. I thought of America at this stark, cruel tenure. I thought of my wedding day, and the bright colors and bright faces and hard dancing in the neon. I remembered the day before when the slop splashed up from Pimlico, as Justify squeezed out the Preakness by a neck, chest throbbing, legs pounding through the mud, his victory lost in fog, just an animal doing his master’s bidding.

Victory, agony, acceptance, defeat.

Back in the city, the smoke from my anejo twirled skyward toward the alley streetlight. A handful of ancient stars poked through the black haze. I decided I wanted to read more Tolstoy, but really I’d rather just swim forever in this particular night’s blankness.

March 11, 2018 · 

Bad Nana took the day’s single Allowance race, nosing out Dorthyfromdublin for the Win. I missed my $4 exacta box by a length when the 2X horse Fleur de Force fell to Show, but the Arturo Fuente Gran Reserva smoked rich and oily in the late winter sun so it wasn’t a total loss. I took sanctuary inside the club house, passing a collection of jockeys’ wives who spoke quietly in Spanish to their toddlers while they patiently awaited their husbands.

If you grew up in a city, it was common for mothers to warn children that they had to return home once the first street lamps flickered on. On late summer evenings kids playing freeze tag or rundown would see the first glimmers of incandescence flickered on, drop whatever it was they were doing and book it home to avoid a parent’s wrath.

This summer, fireflies are became my street lamp. They warn me when it’s time to retire, a flickering coda to the end of weary days that could stretch forever if it weren’t for nature’s nightlights.

In the long evenings I sit on my front porch patio couch, maybe smoke a cubanito and or sip bourbon in a glencairn glass. The crows are first to arrive, flying in split wing formation in the half dozens. Swallows swoop in behind, picking off gnats and mosquitoes above the treeline and electric wires.

At sunset, when the sky fades purple to navy, brown bats emerge from the steeple of a nearby church and skim the peaks of the building-sized pine trees planted in the yard of a large single-family property across the street from our house before heading west, toward the nearby Jones Falls river that slices through Baltimore.

They hunt for dinner in peace there, safely away from the rest of us. 

Finally the fireflies arrive, sprinkled through my and my neighbors’ front yards. Crickets and tree frogs providing musical accompaniment for the light show. My cigar is usually burnt to a stub by then, my whiskey gone, so I head to bed. 

This is how I remember time. The idea of a Wednesday is lost on me now. Instead, I remember the day two bullfrogs sumo wrestled each other for a place of dominance over my in-laws coy pond up in the northern county. They grappled with their tiny front legs, pushed with their powerful rear haunches and croaked and ground each other down fighting for leverage, until, tired, they bounced away to regain energy for a second round. 

June was the month we visited my uncle’s vacation house on the Choptank River, located just east of Easton. There are bald eagles there. We spot them with binoculars when they emerge from the tall pines down river. Their calls are ear-splitting, the natural equivalent of running a pencil eraser over a linoleum desktop. They wake up before dawn breaks and wail while we’re still curled in bed trying to sleep.

In March we adopted two tuxedo cats, a pair of brothers named Tango and Cash. They hid under the couch in our entertainment room for a month, moving only by the cover of night to feed. They’ve since learned to assert themselves. Tango has explored the rest of the house, laying claim to the basement, while Cash continues to rule the upstairs entertainment room. They both fight for Sam’s affection, which helps me understand them more.

Our pink and scarlet roses bloomed again, and we harvested peas Sam planted earlier. We picked the perennial lavender and the early basil. Summer arrived with cayenne peppers, fresh tomatoes, purple coneflowers and black-eyed susans, which the local goldfinch population fought over. From our dill we captured three black swallowtail caterpillars and raised them in an aquarium, then later pulled a monarch caterpillar off the front yard milkweed. They ate, spewed frass then hibernated in chrysalis.

On nights with fireflies we sometimes drink with our new friends from the West Coast, who moved into the neighboring row house in the first days of pandemic. They are Californians, more importantly Los Angelenos, which is welcome. I’ve spent important days in Los Angeles, eating tacos, walking beaches in Santa Monica and Huntington, bathing in the warmth of Pacific Ocean sunsets. It’s good to know people familiar with those experiences.

We’d love to show them our neighborhood, but we haven’t been to a bar or restaurant since March. We spent that last night on the Avenue, the main thoroughfare of shops and restaurants located in our neighborhood of Hampden. We drank margaritas and ate tacos at Golden West,  a southwestern themed restaurant, then watched Jeopardy and drank whiskey with the regulars at our favorite dive bar Frazier’s before finishing with a nightcap at Eightbar, a cozy tavern space located in the back of Atomic Books store.

I remember our potential future hinted at but not fully realized, as if everyone knew the Germans had crossed the Maginot Line but we’re still waiting for better news while we drank up all the good champagne. At Eightbar we discussed the implications of catching a new flu. We’d survive, some thought, but a local teacher who was drinking his beer wearing blue rubber gloves warned us that his wife, who worked in medical administration, had already prepared him that rough days were ahead.

Still we sat there together, regulars and friends, shoulders aligned until 9 p.m. hit, closing time for the bookstore bar.

Then Benn, Atomic Book’s co-owner, shouted last call and we all walked out into the night.

————————————————————————————————-

We share the east wall with our Los Angelenos friends. We share our west wall with another neighbor, a life-long neighborhood resident, a sweet but spacey woman who lives by herself. She’s dedicated to her Methodist church, frightened of cats, uses a weed wacker to cut her lawn and is a bit of a hoarder. We’d say hello to her leaving the house or while finishing work in the backyard, forgetting how she can trap you in long conversations that wander into the decades of her past. We just have to nod and smile and slowly escape. 

Stricken with arthritis in her legs, the pandemic pushed back her regular inpatient therapy which was considered non-essential. Her walking became hampered almost immediately. We helped carry groceries and other heavy items for her, but she otherwise attempted to retain her independence despite her condition. One morning, she tripped and fell right next to her car, smashing her face and nose into the asphalt. We found her sprawled on the curb covered in blood. 

Medics were called, and weary looking EMTs arrived and loaded her into an ambulance. She visited the emergency room, was released and moved in with a local relative, fell again, returned to the emergency room, then finally wound up in a nursing home for a period of extended treatment and rehabilitation. 

She was tested for the virus toward the end of her nursing home stay, but was released before she was given the results. Inevitably she received a positive diagnosis, and was forced to quarantine for two weeks. We cut her lawn and pruned her hedges during that time, and neighbors and her church left food at her front door. We didn’t see her for seventeen days. 

During quarantine she stopped drinking liquids and her arthritis flared up again. She struggled to breathe, and the isolation strained her already delicate mental state. When church parishioners visited her she didn’t respond, so they called emergency services. Police arrived, then more EMTS and then firefighters. A ladder truck was used to pull her from her home. Large men in blue polos and strong work pants carried her on an orange plastic tarp and placed her in an ambulance, her mask-covered face framed by her delicate gray hair. She hasn’t been home since.

——————–

On a separate evening, I sat alone on my porch and sipped whiskey and waited for the birds and bats. As the sun set, to the north of me I could hear a drum line practicing cadences. They were out of sight but the rhythms were alive, echoing off houses and through the river valley. Over and over, kicking it up and then hovering down and then pounding it back again.

The cadences were human and ancient, and welcome on a summer’s night.

Then the sun set and the fireflies flickered on. I finished my drink and headed to bed, knowing I’d just wake up again tomorrow. 

1. There Will Be Blood One of those movies like the Godfather where it’s supposed to be an indictment of capitalism and cultism but, cause you’re American, you get caught up in the Daniel Plainview ride. I drink your milkshake indeed!

2. Boogie Nights A ’90s earthquake film. Wears its influences on its sleeve, but is carried by actors and a director all ready to take over the scene.

3. Magnolia A Robert Altman tribute hopped up on cocaine and Aimee Mann.

4. Inherent Vice An almost perfect film interpretation of a Pynchon novel, for good and ill.

5. Phantom Thread Exquisitely built, like your Aunt Tilly’s china cabinet that you’ll eventually inherit and then realize it’s sorta useless so you sell it to an antiques store.

6. Punch-Drunk Love Look, An Adam Sandler Can Act! movie that’s just this side of coherent. Philip Seymour Hoffman steals the movie in just five minutes.

7. The Master Too many acting seminar scenes to make up for the fun surrealism on the edges.

8. Hard Eight Raw talent awash in ’90s bro shit – Vegas Baby! Samuel L. Jackson! Assassins! Old Man Mentors!

I liked to joke with my wife on and off about hosting a ‘Golf Hampden!’ bar crawl.

There would be t-shirts with a golf dad on the front and a course laid out on the back. Score cards would be printed and tiny pencils handed out. We’d pace it so everyone was drunk but no one was dead. And it’d have to be played in the summer, forcing us to swim through Baltimore humidity as we moved from bar to bar.

We’d start on Falls Rd. and wind our way through the neighborhood down 36th St. to Chestnut Ave. to round out the 18-hole course. There would be a 3-par Baltimore Beer Chug at Atomic Books, the five-par Elder Rolls Guess’em at Golden West, Pickle Back Par-Fours at Rocket 2 Venus, etc. ending with the Hole-in-One Jamieson Challenge at Frazier’s.

‘Golf Hampden’ has always percolated, but when I spoke its name out loud the idea sounded too decadent, a Fear and Loathing on the Avenue that starts well but ends with all the potential terror and violence of a car wreck.

Now though, the idea has ample merit, and somewhere in the post-Corona I look forward to playing Bacchus with a 9-Iron through my neighborhood, the Sheltered and the Damned marching waggle-legged behind me.

As a friend once said during another bullshit event, “jaded atavistic freakout feels right at this juncture.”

Anyways, I miss happy hour.