I moved to Grundy Street because my girlfriend and her evil partner in crime—this other chick—ran—I mean our landlord was this insane old hippie who owned a bunch of West Baltimore properties—they pissed him off, the place was falling apart.

She was—you could write a book about this bitch—she had had this malpractice thing as a kid from them running this line into her nose, so she got the distribution once a year of $5,000 dollars which isn’t a good thing to do, to give money to a person like that. She had let me stay there a bit and she ended up dating this other dude and I was still living there. She and Sasha pretty much pissed him off—they were evil bitches in a lot of ways. They paid but he got sick of them. They were hell cats. They were strippin’ in a bad way, out of hand even by West Baltimore standards, a couple of crazy white girls living in the middle of the Congo. They’d get drunk and could not remember that they locked a door and have to bust themselves back in. They were class-A trash. I was better off for them having let me have a place to stay.

This is when I was working temp work for Labor Whore, sanding bowling balls, temping in warehouses and they’d let me pay them what I could. By the time we got to Grundy Street it was heavy drinking and a lot of cocaine. It’s pretty demoralizing living on a cot in the back room of a place where these bitches steal your records—vinyl LPs—and have to hear your ex-old lady getting railed out by some other dude.

I would hangout down at The Square in Fells Point. That’s where the white kids hung out. There was this hippie chick who used to let me stay at her place on Madera Street. There was this old Japanese lady who ran a diner, Nice and Easy, at Aliceanna and Broadway, who would let me hang out there all night. She was an interesting lady, a Japanese war bride who was eight years old when they firebombed Tokyo and met her husband when he was on occupation duty and she was sixteen.

That house on Grundy turned into a party house, a crash pad for bands, drugs, crazy shit. Not everybody was a piece-of-shit. I wasn’t making much money. During the Fells Point Festival in the fall, I went down to drink a cup of coffee—I didn’t want to deal with them—and read a book and I came home and the door was wide open and there is a blood trail, blood all over the floor, they had broken back in. They were all zonked on drugs and accusing me of stealing one of their pillows.

The last week I was there…there was this shitty rave club run by these Greeks, we were right around the corner from it. The hurricane had come through and the power was knocked out for blocks and blocks. Eastern Avenue and all the places south of the [Patterson] Park are blacked out. We go out walking, come back and are drinking Saint Paulie Girls and sitting on the stoop. These two grungy looking white guys drove up in a car and the passenger jumps out with a Molotov cocktail and breaks the window of a parked car and throws the cocktail in there and they peel off and that thing went up like a roman candle.

I got sick of driving to Harford County. My car was having problems and I started walking round on days I didn’t have work, looking for a job. I started on the ass end of Boston Street and every place I encountered I filled out an application and that’s how I got my first bartending job.

I walk into this first wave gentrification bar, straddling high end, in a book store and this guy approaches me. He’s a half Korean/half black gay dude and he’s like, “You never done this stuff before?”

I think they were desperate for people, someone had just left. It was a little of everything, bar tending, catering. I was the goffer. I asked him years later why he had hired me and he said, “You looked like you were hungry enough that you really needed a job and that you’d be loyal.”

That is when I met Tony, who was a cook and he had heard me bitching about my living situation and him and his girlfriend needed a tenant so they took me in as their roommate and that’s how I got up to Greenmount Avenue.

Big Ron's Baltimore: A Working Man's View of Urban Blight