Locust Point, South Baltimore, 1989

Shoey’s mother was getting sick now, like Dad had, and Shoey had taken over caring for his younger brother. He had also inherited his father’s responsibility as a caretaker of a utility node, which was a once a night inspection. What was most stressful was his brother had started using heroin, and eventually overdosed, dying in Shoey’s arms. Shoey had also inherited Trent’s heroin business and had recently discovered that a Baltimore City Cop, who lived in Locust Point and owned a bar in South Baltimore proper was running the “main line” in SOBO. Shoey found this out when he was across the river in Curtis Bay resupplying with his wholesaler and five uniformed cops walked in and began snorting coke off of the table where the kilos were cut.

“I had so much shit on the brain, brother, I figured I’d just go out for drinks and pick up some pussy at a bar—not some man-eating, husband-hating vagina, but a cute little neglected thing—there’s plenty of that out there!”

He was at a bar on Fort Avenue when he hooked up with a likely babe, who was complaining about being lonely. They got drunk and he walked her home—a long walk, almost to Fort McHenry. They staggered upstairs and she undressed him, hanging his clothes up somewhere in the half-dark as he tugged at her jeans and high heels. She didn’t want to make love with the lights on, so their escapade was illuminated only by the streetlights without the lace-curtained windows.

They went down the narrow hallway to the bed room and got to it. When she began snoring five minutes into their love making Shoey got a little miffed that she had wasted his time, and decided to finish anyhow and leave her with a “pearl necklace.”

Then he looked at her, snoring so cute and light, with smile on her face and he couldn’t.

“Brother, I saw that face and thought, ‘this could be the one,’ she was that sweet. I stopped choking the chicken right then and there, even thought about leaving my phone number on the bed stand, but just figured I’d let karma link us back up if it was fated to be.”

“Of course, I wasn’t sure where she had put my clothes, I was so intent on taking hers off, and I was in a hurry—didn’t want to hang around and get caught up in the two a.m. sweep when the pigs come out and give you shit for being a drunk pedestrian headed home from the bar. So I start going through the coat rack and I notice a dude’s coat and then another. So I get curious. Then I locate the dude’s closet, figuring on finding some work boots, right—SOBO boy and all.

“But no, the old man, husband—she wasn’t wearing wedding ring—is a fucking pig, a cop! Now it wasn’t my competitor. This guy had no rank, wasn’t a sergeant even, just a patrol officer.

“I couldn’t help myself. I saw that he had two pair of cop shoes under the coat rack by the front door, one polished real nice, one, you know, the shit you were every day. I don’t know how many times I’ve been running and listening to those prick shoes on the pavement behind me. I thought of how many times my brother got the toes of these shoes put to him by the pigs that worked for our competitor. At this point, I’m even thinking, maybe the pigs made him shoot up that pure. And I still had a woody! Yeah baby, spat, spat, spat—jerked off in that pig’s shoes, and hit the sidewalk running, pulling on my shirt and carrying my sneakers in my left hand!”

Shoey soon quit the heroin business and met a hooker who quit the hooker business. They settled down to live out their worn years together. As it turned out, the most decent women in Shoey’s life—other than his mother—were the two whores.