Passenger (6 page)

EIGHT

Lost, hopeless, I wander the city streets until I find myself on a bench somewhere near Northeast Baltimore.  The sky is overcast and threatening rain.  I am overcome by a general malaise, a sort of chronic dampness of the soul.  I anticipate giant hands reaching down from the heavens, grabbing me like a dishtowel, wringing me out.  My stomach growls as I cast a wary glance at the clouds overhead and drop down onto a bench.  baltimore, it reads, stenciled on the wooden slats of the bench,
the greatest city in the world!  Wholly ironic, directly across the street stands a row of dilapidated homes, pressed together like rotting teeth, looking like a strong breeze could take them all down like dominoes.  The sidewalks are laden with trash, the street signs bent at right angles and spray-painted with gang symbols—fat chicks rock
and
shorty took the veal.  Someone somewhere is barbecuing; the scent of flame-broiled meat makes me salivate.

A group of people, mostly black, have gathered at one intersection.  Their talk is raucous, determined.  There are a lot of fingers jabbing the air and many heads tip back on necks, hollering into the sky.  Some carry signs, picket signs, and many of them are wearing bright yellow T-shirts with indecipherable writing across the front.  Electric bass saturates the air, pumping from an invisible stereo.  After a time, a slender black man with wet, hound-dog eyes approaches me and does a little jig at my feet, smiling.

“Where’s your sign?” asks the black man.

“Don’t have one.”

“An’ your shirt?”

“Sorry.”

The black man claps his hands.  Then extends one for me to shake. His fingers look preternaturally long.  “Name’s Clarence Wilcox.”

“Hi.”  I shake Clarence Wilcox’s hand.

“Ain’t got no name?”

“One woman calls me Mozart,” I offer.

“Right on,” says Clarence, beaming.  His long, gray fingers tickle an invisible keyboard.  “Piano guy, right?”

“Right.”

“You waitin’ for someone?”

“No.”

“Looks like you waitin’ for someone.”

“No.”

“Looks like you hungry.”  Clarence rubs his chin with those gray fingers, tugs at a wiry scruff of beard.  There is an aloofness about him, like maybe his skull is full of used Kleenex and ball bearings and the discarded pull tabs from soda cans.  “Want some burgers?”

“God, yes.”

Clarence laughs.  His mouth is impossibly large, with countless rows of teeth.  Shark-like.  I imagine him trolling the ocean for prey.  Again, he slaps his hands together.  “Let’s shake it then, Mozart.”

I follow Clarence across the street.  The house on the corner—arguably the most run-down—has some people sitting on the front porch drinking beer.  Out back, a robust fellow with a cheesecloth complexion tends to a charcoal barbecue.  The sight of the meats on the grille makes me want to break into a sprint toward it.

“This is Mozart,” Clarence tells the cook.

“Hey,” says the cook.

“Hey,” I respond.

“Listen,” says Clarence to the cook, “let’s load him up, yeah?”

And they do: they give me two hotdogs with ketchup and mustard, a plate of baked beans as thick and spicy as chili, a grilled chicken breast, and several cans of Budweiser.  There is cake, too, and it appears it is someone’s birthday, as they all sing before cutting and distributing the gooey, chocolate slices.  Ravenous, I eat the cake as I have eaten everything before it.  I feel the large bites go all the way down and settle into my stomach.  I am still hungry.

“Didn’t catch your name,” the cook says to me at one point.

“Call him Mozart,” Clarence interjects.  He seems to appear from nowhere.

“What’s your
real
name?”  The cook sounds suspicious.

“I don’t know,” I admit.  “I can’t remember.”

“Oh, yeah?” says the cook.

“I don’t know who I am.”

“That’s something,” says the cook.

“You got the amnesia?” says Clarence.

“I guess so.”

“How’d you get it?”

“Can’t remember.  Don’t know.”

“I guess that makes sense,” says the cook.

“Maybe you was some governmental experiment,” says Clarence.  “Like maybe a spy or something.  Maybe they had you doing all sorts of sick shit over in the Middle East or someplace and now you’ve come back, they erased all your memory.”

“So’s he can’t tell people what he seen,” adds the cook.

“So he don’t go to the newspapers and make some deal out of all the secret governmental shit,” says Clarence.  “Yeah.  Maybe that’s how you got that scar at the back of your head, too.”

“What scar?”  And my hand goes immediately to the back of my head, feeling around.  I only feel the undulations of my cranium.

“Big nasty scar,” says Clarence.  “How’d you get it?”

“Don’t know.”

“Yeah, right—see?  That’s the government at work, drilling right into your head.  Zap.  Take all your memory out.  Can’t tell no secret stories without no memory.”

“Hell, yeah,” says the cook, eyeing me ruefully.  His distrust is mounting.  “Zap, all right.”

My fingers finally fall into a vague groove at the base of my skull.  I trace it up along the rear of my head toward the top.  I think, too, of the scar on my leg.

“You got no memory of being in the Middle East, Mozart?” Clarence continues.

“No.”

“Maybe over in Russia,” says the cook.  “We still got spies in Russia, you think?”

Clarence shrugs.  “Don’t know.  We still got spies in Russia, Mozart?”

“I have no idea.”

“Yeah,” says Clarence, suddenly certain of himself, “you some governmental spy got fucked with.”

“Zap,” says the cook.

They ply me with more beer and a second helping of the baked beans.  Clarence regards me with ambivalence, but I am soon under the suspicion that the cook, ever distrustful, is filling me with beer in hopes that it will loosen my tongue.  Who am I?  Why am I here?  Anyway, it doesn’t matter.  It takes a while, but soon I am full, and it is a fantastic feeling.

“Here, now,” says Clarence at one point, thrusting a bright yellow T-shirt at me.  “Slip this on.  We almost ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“To march,” says Clarence.

The T-shirt says
won’t do 72! and looks two sizes too small.  Still, grateful for their hospitality, I pull it on over my shirt.  It constricts my movements and I wonder if it had previously been a child’s shirt.  Clarence eyes me approvingly and claps me on one shoulder.

“You a handsome, handsome white boy.”

An enormous woman with breasts the size of truck tires has gathered behind a bullhorn.  She stands on the curb and begins chanting the T-shirt slogan into the device.  Soon, the crowd chimes in.  They begin migrating from the yard to the street and, with the large-breasted woman leading the pack, move down the center of the street.

Clarence is right beside me, grinning like he’s got a coat hanger jammed into his mouth.  He’s got two cigarettes tucked behind one ear, too, and as we walk and chant, he plucks one out, sniffs it, then sticks it into his mouth.  Somehow, he is still able to smile and chant while smoking.

“You watch,” Clarence tells me at one point.  “The television news be here soon.”

Clarence is right: vans with television logos appear at one point and film the march.  While I have no idea what any of this is about, I am content to be part of something.  I am nudged by Clarence, who is now clapping while he chants, so I begin clapping and chanting, too.  I have no idea what we’re saying or what any of it means.  Still, it feels good to be part of something, to be human.

“What is seventy-two?” I ask just as they reach the end of the street.  The crowd has dispersed and there are a lot of children running about, blocking traffic.  Police mill about the intersection, engrossed in idle conversation while leaning against sawhorses.  “And why won’t we do it?”

“The hike,” says Clarence.

“What hike?”

“Gas hike.  Seventy-two percent.”  Yet he pronounces it
sem’nee-two.
“Started it this past July. Baltimore been sweatin’ all goddamn summer and now Baltimore goan freeze all winter.”  He pronounces it
Ball-dee-moe.  
I hang on every word.  “But this hike, man, is like killing me.  Killing everyone.  Like Grandma Evergreen—died of heat exhaustion in her apartment back in August.  Couldn’t afford air conditioning.  Died like a rat in a tin can left out in the summer sun.”

“Sorry about your grandmother.”

“Ain’t my grandmother.  Was everyone’s grandmother.  All the world.  Aw, shit, man—it’s the same all around, yeah?  Where they think I got the money for this, huh?”  Clarence shakes his wooly head.  “You know what I do for a living, Mozart?  I haul junk.  Got my own company hauling junk.  Junk as in crap as in junk.  You lookin’ at the president and CEO and every employee down the chain right here.  All you do is call me and leave your junk out, I’ll come on by and scoop it up m’self, haul it away.  Sometimes if it’s good junk—if it’s salvageable—I’ll sell it.  There’s a million places you can sell junk.  This city, man, it’s built on junk, selling junk.  The whole place revolves around junk being moved from one shitty location to another.  Relocation, that’s the game.  It’s all the same no matter how you cut it—whether you be moving someone’s junk from the curb to a junk shop, whether you be a taxicab moving junk-head peoples from one part of the city to another, or whether you been taking junk straight from a needle and burying it right in your arm.  That’s Baltimore, and that’s what makes the city move—the transporting of junk.  We built on it.”

“Okay.”

“Junk never disappears, never really goes nowhere.  It just gets relocated.  You move it from here to there, there to here.  But it never leaves.  It’s always here.”  Clarence’s eyes narrow.  “What you do for a living, Mozart?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I was offered a job playing piano at a bar, but I don’t think I can go back there.”

“No?”

“It’s a long story.”

Clarence laughs.  His molars look like silver ball bearings.  “Shit, man,” he says.  “I hear you loud.”

Jostled by the crowd, I find myself at one point face-to-face with an attractive young reporter who jabs a microphone at me.  Behind her stares the Cyclops eye of a television camera.

“What does this hike mean for the people of Northeast Baltimore this winter?” the attractive young reporter wants to know.  She is white, pretty, well-groomed, smelling strongly of expensive perfume.  She looks at me like someone watching a wild animal through the bars of a cage.

“Zap,” is all I say before being whisked away by the crowd.

*     *     *

The day moves into evening and concludes in the water damaged basement of an apartment complex on Saratoga Street.  It is Clarence’s place, this basement, although it is unclear if he actually lives here or lives in one of the apartments which allow him access to this basement.  Or if he has just broken the lock on the door and let himself in.  Yet he shows it off proudly, his only complaint being the arguments of the couple in the apartment directly above his.  But it is home, he says, grinning his toothy grin.

The basement room is a cornucopia of skin magazines, bottled beer, and a scattered assortment of tennis shoes.  The walls are barren sheetrock, water damaged and soggy in places, erected without the benefit of insulation directly against cinderblock walls.  The randomly placed furniture coughs up clouds of dust when you sit on it.  Only the stereo system—an impressive network of wireless, wall-mounted speakers and digital hardware, all blinking, beeping, and gleaming—seems worth anything.  Music comes on, heavy and bass-thumping, and Clarence quickly fits my hand with a bottle of Rolling Rock. Throughout the evening, a number of Clarence’s friends filter in and out of the place, each more colorful and boisterous than the last.  I sit by myself on a worn couch with birds etched into the fabric, nursing a room temperature Rolling Rock, wondering how the hell I got here, and watch the party unfold.  There are high-fives and fists thrust into the air.  They clap each other on the back and are proud of the day’s efforts.  The large-breasted woman with the bullhorn from the march is in attendance, and she is sucking down beer like it’s her job.  I catch her accidentally spill some on Clarence’s CD collection before she slinks away, thinking no one has noticed.

An attractive black woman sits beside me on the couch at one point during the evening.  At least, I believe she is attractive judging by the admiration of her peers, though I have no personal knowledge of what I find attractive.  She has a nice figure which is accentuated by her low-cut, tight-fitting, animal-print clothes, and her eyes are large and brown and thickly-lashed. The lobes of her ears are stretched to twice their normal length by the weight of pendulous earrings and her short, styled hair is practically shellacked to her scalp.

“Hey,” she says.  “I’m Tabitha.”  She extends a long-fingered hand capped with two-inch nails painted a startling pink.  “Hi, baby.”

I shake her hand.  “Hi.”

“You’re the spy with no name,” says Tabitha, making it sound like the lyric from an America song.  She has the dreamy, pouting face of someone on dope.  “Clarence, he told me all about you.”

“Yeah?”

“Said I’m a spy, too.  Sent me over to get some information from you.  Said I can use all the torture I want.”

“That’s good of him.”

“What you doing hanging out with Clarence, anyway?  Don’t you know he’s a deadbeat?”

“Seems okay to me.”

“Well,” says Tabitha, admonishing me with her acrylic nails, “he’s a deadbeat son of a bitch.  Owes my sister like three hundred bills.  Me, too, but not as much.  We used to go together, too.  You know that?”

I shake my head.

“It’s true,” she tells me.  “Think I’d learn a lesson, huh?  Think I’d put this brain to work.  No such luck.  I been foolish since the day I was born.  That’s what my momma says, anyway.  What do you do?”

“I play piano and own an apartment.  Apparently.”

“You rich?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, yeah, you don’t look rich.”

“If I am, I have no idea where my money is.”