Eighteen years ago I had a confrontation with four teenage drug-dealers who were using my oldest son to hold their pager. They blinked, and their forty-something mother interceded; the ‘queen pin’ of their drug network I suppose. I told her, “If those four boys in the BMW are the best you can do”…and then I descended into a rant about killing her son, torturing and binding her, raping her daughter, eating her dog, and roasting her small children over the bonfire that had been her house. I had become a psychopath as an adult, as I had as a teen, when backed against that wall at the back of the starkest part of my mind.
After that incident the young men in the area all avoided me. Her son was killed in the projects, and she moved. But I was still left with that hole in my soul that I had ripped open that day. I decided against trying to patch it up, and settled on a slow interesting suicide; letting the sick world filter through it in hopes that enough debris would get caught in the self-installed psychological orifice to effect a plug. I had no end game, and hardly realized at the time that I was beginning my journey as a real writer; not just a scribbling fantasist or history buff.
I immediately began accepting all solicitations: punks that threatened me on the nocturnal bus stop encountered a nut-job that just wanted to die killing them; panhandlers encountered a Mister Hide like animal; dope-fiends, whack-jobs [see Kid Sexy on the Contemporary Combat page] and sexual predators cruising around as illegal cabbies always got a $10 from me as I hopped into their ride and palmed my razor, wondering if this was the end. It was a dark time and has found expression in non-fiction form as When You’re Food, and in fiction, largely as the darkly lit life of Randy Sterling Bracken: white-supremacist, Hindu psychopath, time-traveling gun-nut…
I have evolved a lot since then. But I still let the insane currents wash me down the gutter of life on occasion. Most recently one such night generated the Harm City article Harm City Holdout. That was the Saturday before last. This past Sunday night, going into Christmas Eve, I had another such night, which I will use to illustrate how I use life’s curveballs as fuel for my fiction.
My boss had called and told me that the truck would not be in until 4:00 AM Monday, and for me to show at 12:00 to 2:00 AM for prep. I knew that heading in late on a Sunday was asking for a long commute, but embraced it as an adventure. It was cold! I dressed like a homeless guy and waited on Harford Road for a half hour from 10:00 PM to 10:30. The bus was late but I should still have made the downtown connect at 10:55. The only problem was the driver was being chatted up by a young cute thing standing next to his seat and he was taking his time. As we hit Baltimore Street the #23 was pulling off at 10:57.
I noticed that ‘The Block’ [our red-light district in Baltimore] was half-deserted and inhabited by far less savory characters on Sunday night as it had been on the previous Saturday night. A pack of big savage rednecks walked by smashing bottles at the feet of the black bus patrons—and my scrawny butt—and teenage drug-dealers plied their trade. There was not a cop in sight. That stop is so well used, and people in Baltimore spit so habitually, that, even at night, the entire concrete area is the color of ancient washed-out soot-stained chewing gum. I moved two blocks west to a deserted stop with a posted schedule and waited for the 11:55 Bus. At 11:50 a small skinny kid getting off work from a fast food joint followed me from the broken glass stop, “Excuse me sir, are you waiting for the twenny-three?”
I turned and looked at him and saw that he was shivering in his jacket, “Yeah man. Last Saturday it never came. I’m hopping on the next ten and walking out to Essex.”
He said, “Cool, thank you—this sucks sir.”
We watched a particularly active and industrious rat until 12:35 and then hopped the #10 to Dundalk. The ride was comical, as the woman operating the bus had to continuously scream at the Mexicans who tried to offload by way of the broken back door, “Two hands! Use two hands fools!”
She was beyond words by the time our stop came up. The Mexicans had been signaling for the wrong stop with the bell so I sought to ease her worries and walked up next to her, “Miss, I’d like the next stop, and I only have one hand. So can I get off up front here?”
She smiled but still griped, “Oh you’all be workin’ a sista tonight—Merry Christmas baby.”
We got off at Dundalk and Eastern and split up, me marching and looking into the shadows of the completely deserted street, and him skipping and rapping out loud with his headset on. Confident that I would not be the target of any mugger lurking in these shadows with his bouncing along like Mary Poppins, I enjoyed the solitude and walked out to the Broadway Diner. I might as well enjoy the night I thought.
I entered the bustling diner at 1:08 and was greeted by the cousin of the Greek owner—who my oldest son, a refrigeration tech, assured me stirs his soup with a smoldering cigarette, complete with half-inch ash, hanging from his mouth—and ushered to a seat.
I ordered the Lumberjack: a meal that could feed a dozen starving people, and enjoyed the coffee. There were plenty of people to watch, and I had an Arthur C. Clarke book to read. This was very enjoyable. Then the meal came, and I went to work as a novelist, imagining what my two lead protagonists would make of this meal: one a cannibal the other a vegetarian with a protein allergy. I ate the pancakes while I meditated about the establishment and meal from the viewpoint of a 16th Century Native American time-traveler. I checked out the waitress when she refilled the coffee and decided that the cannibalistic warlord would—well he is not a character of my advanced taste and cultured refinement…
At 2:05 I was walking out Eastern Avenue, an hour and a half from my destination, when a #23 cruised by: darkened and posted as ‘out of service’. I congratulated myself on a good call and began to enjoy the solitude, noticing how many cats were out on this cold night; that there was not a single pedestrian; and that the interstate that I walked over looked like a deep, dried-up river of night wandering out of sight. It is at times like this that it is easiest for me to attempt to contemplate things from the perspective of a primitive character transplanted into the 21st Century.
The salient observation for me this night—and I had noticed this even down in the inner city—was that you could hear the train horns and chug of the giant steel wheels rolling over the iron tracks for miles. It was as if some giant invisible beast wormed it’s way along unseen gullies; near, and far, and then near again, echoing through the night. With the bustle of automobile traffic during business hours and the evening, I realize this audio subtext, the noise of this pretty ancient mechanized system, went largely unnoticed. But to the lone pedestrian at night it was positively haunting and unavoidable, like listening to the surf on a nighted beach.
After 20 minutes of listening and walking I heard it rumbling up behind me, a bus, but I was 200 yards from the next stop. I turned and saw it was the #23, ‘in service’, and waived. The driver did not stop short of the stop but did bank over up a head. As long as you run, they will usually wait for you. The bus patrons and drivers enjoy watching people run for the bus, and usually cheer them on. He had a big grin when I leaped onto his platform, having made it far faster than he thought some old homeless white dude should have been able. He waived me on without a fare, me having earned the lift in his eyes by my effort I suppose. Fifteen minutes later I was offloading and setting out for the last mile on foot as the driver reminded me to ‘be careful’.
It does not seem like much to get from a five-hour commute. But that odd and fairly serene experience, had by chance, netted me the substance of a chapter in the book Seven Moons Deep; just an interlude piece about two misfits looking to get lost for a night while they neglect to plan the next half-considered move in their bizarre time-war.
