Slouching Towards Catonsville

 by

h nicole anderson

College Writing 130

Professor Larkin

April 11, 2014

This a fictional piece based on an actual event.
Baltimore 1968

Unlike many of my girlfriends, I hadn’t dated Black guys.

 William was a tall, athletic, handsome young African-American—chestnut brown skin with a short ‘fro—he wore a white V-neck cashmere sweater, khakis with loafers and no socks and really cool Foster Grant sunglasses and I didn’t think giving him a ride downtown in my Firebird convertible on a sunny Sunday would be a problem.

Not even with the top down.

Not even in racist sixties Baltimore.

The jaunt was uneventful until we reached East Baltimore Street— downtown just east of the Civic Center—where I had seen Sly and the Family Stone just weeks prior when some of the departing crowd had taken to breaking windows and looting. Occasional urban unrest was becoming normal in Charm City.

“It sure is pretty out, Will,”

“It’s William.” He said a bit tersely.

“Oh, sorry,” I said—remembering that many African-Americans did not cotton to diminutives. “I wonder where everybody is.”

Downtown was deserted.

“Don’t know. Hey hon, got any smokes?”

“I just bought a carton at Read’s… I think they’re in the trunk.”

With no traffic, I didn’t see any problem stopping in the left lane of the four-lane one-way street, even though it was a “No Stopping or Standing Anytime” zone.

All of the sudden, this middle-aged white guy in a Chevy Cavalier pulls right up to my bumper and starts honking his horn. “Move it!” I looked at William, like what the fuck? We just sat there laughing.

“Move it lady! Move it now!”

William gave him the finger.

The guy— short, with a beer-belly and wearing a polo shirt with a badge that read Daniel Davis, DeMolay, Cincinnati, Ohio on it— got out of his car but wasn’t quite stupid enough to approach us. He just stood there by his car yelling. “If you don’t move it now, I’m gonna—”

“You’re gonna what?” William laughed, got out and stood by the passenger-side car door

“I’m gonna—look, just move the damn car, n****r-lover!”

William started back toward DeMolay Guy.

Up until then, we were having fun pissing off this ofay from Cincinnati but now things were getting ugly. I snapped out of my seat, ran over and grabbed William by the hand.

“William, come on, get back in the car.” Just then, I heard sirens. In a matter of a minute, we were surrounded by a phalanx of Baltimore Police in full riot gear.  

“Man, where did all these cops come from?”  William said, back in the car.

There must have been over a hundred of them, helmets, billy clubs, the whole nine yards.

It didn’t take long for the police to figure out that a race riot was not about to break out so the Riot Squad began to disperse and a police sergeant –a tall, middle-aged light-skinned African-American  man with a shock of gray hair—came over to speak with me. I explained to him that I had merely pulled over to get something out of the trunk and the real issue was that this white guy had a problem with me having a black guy in the car.

“And to top it all off, he called me a blankety-blank lover.”

“Miss, I am awfully sorry that happened to you. Now you be on your way. I’ll take care of the little fuck ofay.”

I wanted to say, “Did you just call DeMolay Guy a little fuck ofay?”  But  just said, “Okay but I’m going to grab those smokes.”

As I opened the trunk, little fuck ofay looked like he was going to wet his Fruit-of-the-Looms as the officer lectured him, and then asked to see his driver’s license. I went on my way thinking that I ruled the world—that portion of it that rested within the friendly confines of Baltimore City at least. 

On the way home, I treated William to a plate of crabs at Bo Brooks. Life was good.

When I arrived home, I started thinking about how my attitude about race had changed and wondered what my Aunt Jo would have thought had she been a fly resting on my rear-view mirror.

  “Good morning, Aunt Jo.”

Aunt Jo would often come over to help out around the house when my mom would need to rest up after one of her nervous spells.

“What would you like for breakfast, dear?  Got some nice scrapple—”

“I don’t know, scrapple sounds good but—”

Back then, scrapple did sound good and a perfectly normal thing to consume but being a messy conglomeration of congealed corn mush, pig snouts, pig lips, pig feet and Lord knows what else, it’s not something that I would dream of eating today but I ate it then and it was good.

I glanced up from the Sun headline: “Yankees Purchase Negro Star Catcher from Toronto.” Although I had barely graduated kindergarten, I read the Baltimore Sun every day. 

“I dunno, Aunt Jo,” reflecting that the Orioles who finished dead last their first year here could only improve if they added a black player. 

 “Maybe just some milk toast.”

I usually read the comics first; Lil Abner, Maggie and Jiggs, and Nancy by Ernie Bushmiller.  Then I would read the sports. Uncle Shorty had already instilled in me a love for the Orioles and hatred for the Yankees. 

Unlike Uncle Shorty—who was my maternal grandmother’s boyfriend—Aunt Jo really was related but I never knew the exact relationship except that she was on my mother’s side. She was a widow, maybe in her late 50s then with naturally curly gray hair and a face which was said to be “the map of Ireland.” I use that description because I can’t quite remember exactly how her face looked and that’s about as good a description as any. Aunt Jo was a devout Catholic, not real smart unlike most of the other women on my mother’s side and somewhat provincial in her thinking.

“Aunt Jo, why weren’t we born black?”

“Because we’re Catholic, dear.”

 My young mind thought this made sense because only white—or nearly white—people went to Mass at St. Matthew’s, the Catholic church that served the spanking-brand-new tract of red brick row houses known as Foxcroft.

Not all the people at Mass were normal like us though. There were some who were a little darker even in the wintertime. Some of the boys who were not yet teenagers had mustaches already and their hair was greasy even without Vaseline Hair Tonic.  There were also two hunchbacks, one was an older usher and there was another young hunchback who came to High Mass.  Neither one of them lived very long.

Once, I heard Uncle Asa—my Dad’s younger brother —refer to one of the darker ones as a guinea greaseball—not nice but nothing compared to the way people talked about blacks in Baltimore.  Darkies, spooks, spades, coons— and the worst word of all.

”Why can’t we say n*****r, Aunt Jo?”

“Oh, hon!” Aunt Jo always called me hon or dear as if she didn’t know what my name was.

“You can’t never use that word. Don’t you know that’s how your cousin Mike lost his front tooth saying that?”

No, I didn’t. I wondered how saying a word—even a really bad one like that— could make you lose a tooth.  I thought maybe it was a punishment from God.

“Aunt Jo, did God punish Mike by making his tooth fall out?”

“No, hon,” she snickered as she took the pan of milk off the stove and scraped the burnt off my toast.

“Mike called one of the coloreds” —the way she said it, it sounded like kellereds—“ the bad word in front of Read’s—”

Auntie placed my milk toast on the table.

“—and the kellered knocked Mike’s tooth out.”

I remembered thinking as the warm buttery milky bread lingered on my tongue and slid down my throat without even chewing that I would never utter that word. Little did I know then that years later, I would be called a n*****r-lover.

As I fiddled with my milk toast, the doorbell rang.

 I still had more questions but had to wait for Aunt Jo to fend off a gaggle of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“I just wish those people would leave us—”

 “How come there are no bad words for us, Aunt Joe? Is it because we’re normal?”

We were, after all, normal. We had normal faces, normal hair, normal noses, talked normal and we even had normal names like Henderson, Smith, Collins, Jones and Johnson but, then again, I wondered why blacks had those names too. Some of our cousins had names that were not so normal like McGillicutty or O’Hara.

On my mother’s side were the Riders. A very normal name, except I learned many years later that it was really Reuter. Not so normal. Of course, it was a perfectly normal German name being that my great-great-great grandfather who came over from Hesse in 1850 was the one who had it.

“Well yes, we are normal but still there must be some bad names for us?” I asked as I poked at the last piece of soggy toast.

“Well— maybe.” 

“What are they, Aunt Jo?”

“Look, I really don’t know maybe you should ask your mother.”

Mom would not tell me either.

Later I found out the main bad word for us was Mick, which really didn’t seem so bad since one of the most beloved icons of the day was Mickey Mouse and the most famous child actor was Mickey Rooney and later the great rock star Mick Jagger would become a hero to us all.

 I also found out that we could be called Krauts for the German side which was never talked about for some reason. I thought that maybe it was because there was no German St. Paddy’s Day when people could wear T-shirts that said, “Kiss me, I’m a Kraut.”

So, I thought yes being Catholic and Irish and maybe even the not-much-talked-about German was normal and everyone else, especially the blacks, were not normal. Otherwise, why would all the dogs bark when the black Arabbers would come up the alley way selling topsoil and stuff?

“Why do all of the dogs bark when colored people come around, Aunt Jo?”

“Because they are trying to protect us from them, dear.”

I was afraid to ask from what, so remembering what the Baltimore Catechism said about God loving everyone, I asked.

“Does God love the coloreds, Aunt Jo?”

“Yes, He does, hon.”

“Then we should love the coloreds too?”

“Yes, you should dear but you should feel sorry for them.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not their fault they were born black.”

“Oh.”

All these things I pondered as I sat in Sister Claudia’s seventh grade class where she took it upon herself to pontificate on Freedom Riders being arrested in Mississippi.  I thought about how stupid I was then and how much I missed Aunt Jo—she had died of cancer a few months prior— and her silly, offbeat  but charming view of the world.  And I wondered what she would have thought about Mississippi.  Then Sister Claudia’s sharp staccato jolted me back to the stuffiness of the St. Mathew’s classroom.

“We have enough problems up here to worry about. They have no business going down there and stirring up trouble. They deserve to be arrested—I hope they rot in jail. “

Most of the boys, nattily attired with starched white button-down shirts but not-so-natty green knit ties with S.M.S. emblazoned upon them, and most of the girls in our green jumpers and beanies did not seem to care that much or understand the significance of Sister Claudia’s bigotry.

Remembering what Aunt Jo said, I thought that going down to Mississippi to help blacks get their freedom was the correct thing to do but Sister Claudia was right too. We did have problems in our own backyard as Jim Crow was not confined to Mississippi. He was still alive—albeit a little less virulently— in Baltimore but no one seemed to want to do much about until I got to high school.

___________________________________________________________________________

I had just gotten home from Mercy High and was in the living room studying algebra when I heard them all coming up the steps.

“But it’s really not right that they can’t even go to see a movie—” I heard my mom say as she opened the front door.

“Yeah, but do you really want to go swimming with them?”

“They say they don’t have to let them in at Beaver Dam because it’s considered a private club.”

Mom, Grandma Rider and Uncle Shorty had just returned from the Northwood Shopping Center where a group of students from Morgan State College were picketing the movie theater and the barber shop.

 “Oh, I was wondering about that. I guess that’s how they keep the Jews out.” Grandma said revealing her anti-Semitic bent.

“And how do they expect the white barbers to cut that steel wool?” Shorty wondered.

“It’s not steel wool.” Mom replied.

“Oh, what are you gonna do, soon they’ll be taking over everything.” Shorty said, “I guess we just have to live with it.”

“Live with them? So far, they haven’t even made it up much past North Avenue.”

“Yeah, I guess it’ll be a while before they try to move to Foxcroft.”

The nuns at Mercy High were not quite as severe as the School Sisters of Notre Dame had been at St. Matthews. This is not to say they were not strict, however. We weren’t allowed to wear any makeup and, like the nuns at St. Matthews, they referred to the girls who went to public school as the “dirty skirts.” The Mercy uniforms were nicer than the ugly green jumpsuits we wore in grade school. A plain white blouse and a beige skirt that fell just below the knees. And no ugly beanie.  And while  I did not particularly care for the bobby sox they made us wear,  I liked being in class without boys.

And I did well that first year, almost all A’s.

__________________________________________________________________________

In August of the following summer,  I was getting ready for another school year when I heard from one of my friends  at  Calvert Hall, the boy’s Catholic high school, that some of the inner-city churches were organizing bus trips for this massive rally that was to happen in Washington DC in a couple weeks.

“Mom, Jimmy Clark has invited me to go on a bus trip to Washington DC.”

“That’s nice, hon — what for?” She kept ironing.

“They’re gonna have a rally for Civil Rights and I heard Joan Baez is singing.”

“That sounds nice, dear.”

“I need $5 for the bus fare and a box lunch.” 

“Who else is going to be there?”

“Oh, that guy Martin Luther King is going to speak. Can I get the $5?”

Mom stopped ironing. “Absolutely not. You’ll not get involved with all those hooligans.”

“But mom —”

“No! I said no. Your father would have a heart attack.”

I went anyway. I didn’t see or hear Joan Baez. In fact, way back in the mall, I could barely see Lincoln. But I heard King—something about having a dream—and then Marian Anderson led thousands of us in song.

“We shall live in peace, we shall live in peace,                                                                                                                

We shall live in peace someday,

Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,

We shall live in peace someday”

I knew then that I had to do something to help blacks get their rights so we wouldn’t have to feel sorry for them anymore.

My father did not have a heart attack. In fact, I don’t even remember if I got punished.

____________________________________________________________________________

A scant three months later, I was in chemistry class when suddenly a lecture on the periodic table was interrupted by the sound of a radio newscast coming over the intercom. We all giggled thinking it was a mistake. It wasn’t.  “The president  is being transported to Parkland Memorial and should be arriving there momentarily, Keith—“ Everyone looked at each other quizzically trying to sort out what was happening then it became all too clear.

“To recap, the president was shot in Dallas shortly after noon today while riding with his wife and Texas Governor Connolly—” 

After November 1963, my sophomore year, my grades began to fall. Not that I am blaming Lee Harvey Oswald, mind you, but something inside me died that November day.

A sense of hope for the future. That we could change things.

That I could do anything meaningful to change things.

Going into my junior year, I began thinking seriously about a career. My grades in math and science did not improve but I was getting A’s and B’s in all the humanities and teachers continued to praise my writing skills. Maybe I could become a lawyer. Maybe even run for some public office.  I was also trying to play the guitar and sing but I had no real ambition to become the next Joan Baez but, then again, I did feel like I could contribute to the movement if I could learn how to play “We Shall Overcome” and “Blowing in the Wind”. 

I was becoming your quintessential armchair activist. 

________________________________________________________________________

“It’s in F, don’t know you know how to play in F?” Greg said— a really cute but somewhat arrogant guy—he made it point to let everyone in the Songwriter’s Circle know who he was.

“Greg Keane? No Kihn, K-I-H-N.”

He was the only one in the Songwriter’s Circle who had actually written what you could call a real song, something about love being in jeopardy as I recall.

“No I only know three chords G, C and D but I have a capo.”

Yes he was a bit arrogant but he took the time to show me how to play “Banks of the Ohio.”

“What about “We Shall Overcome?”

“No, you need minor chords for that, hon.”

He showed me A minor and E minor .

“They go with the key of G and sometimes you need B minor too and you should learn A. Learn those chords and you will be able to play almost any song.”

So, I think I really began to learn to play the guitar that day but that was not all I learned.

“Hey hon, wanna get high?” This other guy asked?

“Get high?”

“Yeah, I got some pot?”

“Why not?”

So we went outside and I smoked my first joint. I felt really mellow and grown up. I was becoming the real me, I thought. 

We only had the room at the Emmanuel Lutheran until five so when we got back in, everybody was packing up. One of Greg’s friends invited everyone to a party. So we went to his house where there was more pot and Boone’s Farm and someone had some Yago Sangria which I loved.  We ran out of papers so someone made a pipe out of a cucumber. That’s about the last thing I remember except some guy trying to put his hand under my skirt after he gave me a lift home. 

During that summer, we moved to a new home in Towson and, with the house payments, my dad could no longer afford to send me to Catholic school. So, I transferred to co-ed Towson High.

With the distraction of having boys in class and a different (boring) curriculum, my grades started to suffer even more and my dream of winning a college scholarship like my older brother soon faded.  On top of that, the family seemed to be falling apart. My mom’s mental condition worsened with Aunt Jo not around to help and Grandma Rider, her mother, being diagnosed and later hospitalized with terminal colon cancer. 

So even if I got accepted into a decent college, my parents couldn’t help.  In fact, I found myself having to work my way through high school. During the summer before my senior year, I had gotten the job selling newspaper subscriptions door-to-door for the Baltimore Sun, the only female hired in that position. I became a top salesperson and I continued to work on Saturdays throughout the school year.

During spring break of my senior year, I remember sitting in the living room on Good Friday feeling like I was becoming a fallen away Catholic because I no longer did the Stations of the Cross as I had done every year while in Catholic school. Not only that but I started feeling verklempt about not carrying out my calling: helping the less fortunate. Now, it seems, I had a hard enough time just worrying about how to take care of myself. 

 The doorbell rang.

“Is the lady of the house in?”

“Sure, come on in.” I called my mother.

“The publishers of Time Magazine are running a special promotion to help young ladies like myself work their way through college—”

“How nice of them—” My mother interrupted.

The young lady explained that she the magazines made most of their money from advertising.

“Because of that, I will be able to provide you and yours with Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s, Life, Better Homes & Garden, the Saturday Evening Post and Time — all for free if only you would agree to pay for the postage.”

“The Saturday Evening Post too? Oh I love Norman Rockwell’s covers—”

“Yes ma’am. The Saturday Evening Post too and I will even throw in Boy’s Life if you have any young lads in the home.”

“Oh I do! Sign me up.”

My mother wound up buying $129 worth of free magazines.  I thought to myself that this beats selling The Sun door-to-door. I asked for the nice young lady for her card.

I graduated from Towson High with a C minus average and found myself selling magazines door-to-door a month later. I had intended to eventually try to work my way through college and later registered at Catonsville Community College but never went to classes.  Again, I became a top salesperson doubling the production of some of the guys.  Soon, the boss wanted me to try my hand at closing. The telephone solicitors—all women—would produce leads and I would simply go to the door and get them to sign the sales order and collect the down payment. Doing that, I could triple my salary but I needed a car. The boss, Mr. Tucker, let me drive an old Ford Fairlane sedan with hardly any brakes and bald-headed tires. But it got me to the customer’s houses and I started making real money.

My father— a salesman at A D Anderson’s Oldsmobile-Pontiac—had never been around the house much.  Lately though, he was around even less than usual  but he caught me leaving early one Saturday morning  in the “deathtrap” as my mother called it.

“I don’t want you driving that piece of shit. With the money you’re making I can put you in a brand-new Firebird.  You can even have a convertible if you want.”

  A week later, I was driving a brand-new 1969 canary yellow Firebird convertible. Ironically, the Firebird and not the junker would nearly become a deathtrap. 

With the full-time job and other responsibilities, I found myself working more and partying less. This is not to say that I had become a teetotaler, however. I regularly would drink and drive. I got pulled over a couple times but being white and blonde and knowing how to flirt, the cops would always let me go. The worst thing that ever happened was when the cops caught us drinking on the side of the road and confiscated a whole case of beer we had in the trunk.  I was beginning to learn that the rules did not apply to me.

___________________________________________________________________________

If you stand in the rubble of the Peabody Book Shop and Beer Stube and listen very, very hard to the first winds of autumn, you may hear echoes of a ragtime piano, or H. L. Mencken or F. Scott Fitzgerald ordering another round, or even the slither of the cards as Dantini the Magician performs his magic act for the last time.—Baltimore Sun

Or a certain young lady playing the guitar in the “gemutlichkeit atmosphere” of the Stube backroom with the fireplace, out of tune piano and stuffed moose heads where patrons would warm themselves over a hot mulled wine after passing the musty old books scattered higgledy-piggledy in the front bookstore and art gallery.  

“I’ll pay you $15. You also get two drinks. Be here at eight o’clock.”

Now I was really was somebody. I had a good job, a nice ride and nice clothes. I could get a manicure every week and my hair done regularly. And I was getting paid to sing.

The only thing missing was a love life and although I would occasionally accept a dinner and movie date with some diffident white guy from the suburbs, I had no desire to sleep with any of them. I began to realize that maybe I was attracted to women but it would be quite some time before I would act on those urges. Perhaps, that’s why I turned more and more to drugs to fill the void.

I heard from my gay hairdresser that most of the dyke bars in the city served underage women. So one night, filled with alcohol-fueled fearlessness,  I ventured into Cicero’s, a dyke motorcycle hangout on N. Gay St. The thought of hooking up with any of the women there—with their Butch haircuts and tattoos—scared me about as much as getting close to a guy but I managed to get up the nerve to talk with some of the women and even dance. That’s where I met Rose Kowalczyk .

We never became lovers. Rose and I. But we might just as well have been. She was feminine as far as appearances go. Soft raven hair, dark eyes, not a beauty queen but pretty. Her manner was not butch but just brusque enough to be attractive but not threatening.  And probably most important of all, she loved to drink.  After we met, we spent almost every weekend together, often going out of town:  D.C., The Ocean, Atlantic City. She took me to Boston to visit her friends who took us to see to the local production of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And we went to Manhattan, this time staying with my friends:  A dancer who had a bit part in Hair and an artist who drew for Al Capp They had a loft overlooking the Fillmore East on Second Avenue.

Too bad all this ended so soon.

Just when I started to fancy myself a dyed-in-the-wool-Bohemian-hippie-chick.

______________________________________________________________________________

The dusk to dawn curfew and the ban on alcohol sales will continue at least through Monday, a spokesman for the Mayor announced earlier this afternoon. A similar curfew is expected to remain effect in Baltimore County. However, a spokesman for Harford County announced that the curfew as well as the prohibition on alcohol sales will be lifted there effective 9 am Monday. Meanwhile, unrest continued throughout the city for the third consecutive night following the assassination of Martin Luther King—

I turned down the volume on the Zenith clock radio and called Rose.

“Hey, I just heard that their lifting the ban up in Harford County.”

“Yeah, I was thinking of going up and filling up the trunk. We could hang out at the park later. Maybe get some chicken.”

“No, they don’t expect me back at work either till at least Wednesday.”

“Okay, I’ll come by around ten.”

The next morning, we drove up to Bel Air. We got a couple of fifths of Canadian Club, some Seagram’s  for my mom—she had been mostly a beer drinker but, recently, since Grandma Rider passed, she had gravitated to the harder stuff—some vodka for Rose’s father, some Boone’s Farm, Yago Sangria and  three cases of beer. I dropped off some of the booze at my house, grabbed a blanket and an ice chest, started chilling the beer and the Boone’s Farm, then we drove back to Dundalk to drop off the vodka, bought some KFC and went to chill out at Patterson Park.

We stayed at the park all afternoon under the shade of a pagoda drinking sangria and eating Original Recipe. Rose brought along a little weed to smoke, so we had some reefer. I had a few Black Beauties left over that I had copped from a quack diet-doctor, so we each took a couple after we started to nod out.

We drove back to Dundalk as the sun was setting and Rose’s mother invited me in. We walked into the kitchen. There her father—a tall, gruff man who looked old enough to be her grandfather—sat at the table with his now half-empty quart of Smirnoff’s Blue, a shot glass and a smile.  He did not know much English but I understood him when he asked us to drink with him.

“We drink to peace.”

So for the next couple hours, we drank to peace and just about everything else imaginable.  I recall having to get up to try to find the second floor bathroom and barely being able to navigate up the narrow staircase but then remembering hardly anything else until I woke up in the back of a police cruiser.

On the way home, driving east on Moravia, I ran a red light at Bel Air Road and T-boned a guy driving south. The cops asked me a series of questions and all I remember saying is “I don’t know. I don’t know.” The one thing I do remember is the officer saying that if I had hit the guy a couple more feet to the center, I would have killed him and that, in fact, both of use were lucky to be alive.

 Later, I found out that he had been drinking too which was the only possible explanation I could think of as to why I wasn’t charged with DWI. Both cars were totaled.  He had a couple broken ribs and internal injuries. I was not hurt. I was charged with Reckless Driving Involving an Accident with Bodily Injury, a serious charge that could mean a license suspension but far less serious than DWI.

With no car, I couldn’t go back to work as a closer for the magazine outfit so I worked in the phone room instead. But soon the boss realized that he needed me out in the field. First, he arranged to take care of the traffic ticket for me. A conviction could have meant a license suspension. “Hon, go downtown tomorrow”, he wrote down the address on a sales order form and handed it me, “and give them $50 cash.” Next, Mr. Tucker arranged to get a new Plymouth Satellite leased that I could drive but I had to leave it parked at the office at night. This meant that I no longer had any way to get to Dundalk to visit Rose.

 I went to court on the traffic ticket. The lawyer told me to show up and plead not guilty and not to worry about the rest. And sure enough, when the judge asked me what my plea was, I said “Not guilty.” He said, “Case dismissed” and slammed his gavel down. I remember thinking how rigged the system was and how capable I was capable, of all people, of rigging it. Not only were the Baltimore police on my side but the judiciary as well. Had I never ventured outside the city limits of Baltimore my life might have remained firmly within my control. 

Rose and I continued to talk and once I visited her once in April but the bus ride took four hours each way. By May, I guess we both figured it wasn’t working so we no longer even talked on the phone.

But the phone rang early one morning in June. It was Rose.

“Did you see The Sun yet?”

“No, it’s cloudy up here.”

“No, the Sunpaper, silly.”

“No, I just got up.”

“They shot Bobby. He’s dead.”

“Bobby?”

“Bobby Kennedy. Some foreign guy killed him.”

“Oh man, he was our only hope.”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, hey maybe we can get together when I take vacation and go down The Ocean. I’ll bring my guitar.”

We never did our bus trip to Ocean City. In fact, June 7, 1968 was the last time we talked.

By then, I realized that this country and the world was so fucked up, it was beyond repair and even if it could be fixed, a girl from Baltimore who everyone called hon was the last person in the world who could do much to mend it.

___________________________________________________________________________

Some might remember July 20, 1969 as the day men first walked on the moon, I remember it as the day I ate my first taco.

I had met these two women Joanie and Marilyn who lived up in Harford County. They had been Army brats and lived with their folks near the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.  They had a calming effect on me because neither one of them drank. I would spend weekends up there going to the shore or hanging around the house, barbecuing and watching TV.

“Hey sweetie,” Joanie always called me sweetie, “Have you ever had tacos?”

At the time, there were no Mexican restaurants in Baltimore. “Tacos? Those little do-dads you snack on with your sangria at a Spanish restaurant?”

“No, not tapas, these are Mexican and they’re really good.” So we went to the Super Giant and got all the ingredients.

So while Neil Armstrong enjoyed his first small step, I enjoyed my first small bite—of a taco.

It wasn’t moon landing weekend but it was some Sunday night after that leaving Joanie’s house that I spotted a country & western bar that was advertising a Sunday evening open jam.  I figured I could go in, have a drink and sing with the band. I brought the house down when I sang and everyone started buying me drinks so the one drink became over a dozen. Again, I thought if I popped a Black Beauty or two, it would help me sober up and get home. I remember leaving the bar and buying a half-pint at the package good store but then, rather inexplicably, going next door to the diner to have coffee to sober me up.

I got on I-95 and headed south— I thought. After a few minutes, now sipping on the Jack Daniel’s in the brown paper bag, I noticed a sign:  Philadelphia, 65. I was heading north.  My last recollection inside the car was looking for a place to turn around.

“Your honor, I found a half-pint of whiskey in her car. But she’s not only drunk but I think SHE IS ON DRUGS!”

I was sitting there handcuffed in a room in the private home of a Harford County magistrate.

“But you didn’t find any drugs in the car?”

“No, your honor.”

“I want to call my lawyer.”

“Shut up, bitch, you’re lucky to be alive.”

“What’s that, trooper?” the magistrate asked.

“Just before I pulled her over she almost swerved head on into the bridge abutment at Susquehanna Bend Road.”

The judge looked at me with pity and disgust,  then signed some paper.

“Ok then, thanks trooper.”

“Thank you, your honor.”

I never have figured out why I was taken to a magistrate instead of just being booked directly into jail like they do these days. I was booked for DWI and I also had some unpaid traffic tickets so I needed to come up with about $500 to get out of jail. Not being familiar with the services of bail bondsmen yet apparently, I rotted in jail for three weeks. Well, I can’t say I rotted as it was somewhat of an adventure.

“The one with the anchor tattoo. Don’t mess with her and just do what she says.”

“You mean the one they call ‘Sarge’?”

“Yeah, I think her real name is Debbie. She carries a knife she whittled out of wood.”

I had heard stories of women being raped with broomsticks at these lock-ups but usually in the city not out here in the sticks. 

 I tried calling Uncle Shorty—I knew he would help me—but his line was constantly busy. My father—who I found out later was now spending almost all his free time with a barmaid he was having an affair with— claimed he couldn’t get the money. I know he just wanted me to stay in jail to teach me a lesson but when I told him about Sarge, he bailed me out the next day. Grandma Louise came up with the money.

 Just a week after that, the phone rings, it was my dad.

“I got bad news—“

“Oh?”

“The police found Shorty dead in his apartment. He’d been dead a couple weeks. Norman was just sitting there staring into space.”

 World War I veteran Norman had been lobotomized as a treatment for “shell-shock.” 

“He was already dead when you were calling him.”

A week or so later, my dad calls again.

“You don’t have to say anything—your grandmother passed away last night—she had a heart attack.”

 Everyone from that generation was gone now except for my paternal grandfather who would live another few  years and take a great deal of pride in seeing me advance as a musician.  With ML King gone, what limited civil rights the system would allow blacks to have had already been achieved.  The Summer of Love seemed to have been just yesterday but even that was becoming ancient history. Soon, Elvis would be dead and disco would rule.  And I had little inkling that working my way through college was about to take a thirty year detour.

When my job found about the DWI, I was fired.  Now I had no way to raise any money for a DWI defense—or better yet, to pay off the judge—so I went back up to Harford County and threw myself at the mercy of the court. The judge showed little  mercy and fined me $100, sentenced me to 30 days in jail and revoked my driver’s license. 

They let me out after serving 15 days. Out of a job, I would spend the next few weeks at home reading the want-ads so I was home the night my father spilled the beans that he was having an affair with the night bartender at Love’s, a seafood restaurant just down the street from the car dealership. The revelation escalated into a violent argument culminating in my father hitting my mother in the face bruising her lip. Back then, you didn’t call the cops but when my older brother came home from college the next weekend, he had my mother file papers for a legal separation. My dad moved out of the house and in with the barmaid. 

A couple weeks later, my mother had another nervous breakdown and was admitted to Spring Grove State Mental Hospital. We lost the house. My younger sisters and baby brother moved in with dad and the barmaid, I found a $1.50 hour plus bonus job making appointments for aluminum siding salesmen and rented a $60.00 a month basement apartment on St. Paul Street downtown. But with the $25 that I was now making at The Peabody Beer Stube on Saturday nights, I had more than enough to keep a roof over my head, in Boone’s Farm, pot, acid, mescaline, hash, Stauffer’s frozen dinners, cab fares to Cicero’s. 

In November, the aluminum siding outfit was shut down for scamming customers one of their sales pitches included a spiel that everyone on their block was buying the package because it increased the value of their homes as well as the entire neighborhood and made it less likely that a black family would move in.

I hated telemarketing anyway and decided to see if I could make it as a musician. The Stube booked me for another night and I got a night at The Horse You Came in On in Fells Point which was just then becoming gentrified.

Some guy who heard me play at The Horse—I think he was a lawyer—asked me if I would play at New Year’s Eve party at his house in Dulaney Valley.

“I can pay you $100.”

“Well, yeah sure, I’d love to but I have no way to get there.”

“I can have my son pick you up.”

“It’s a deal.”

_____________________________________________________________________________

December 31, 1969

Playing for thirty or more people was not easy without a PA. I tried getting people to sing along with varying degrees of success. I took a lot of requests—Sweet Caroline, Easy to be Hard— playing some songs two or three times.

“Hey hon, can you play Those Were the Days again?”

Sure.

“Once upon a time there was a tavern
Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours
And think of all the great things we would do                                                                                         Those were the days my friend
We thought they’d never end
We’d sing and dance forever and a day
We’d live the life we choose
We’d fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.
La la la la, la la la la, those were the days, oh yes, those were the days.”

At about twenty to twelve, I played one last song as they all wanted to have Guy Lombardo usher in the New Year on TV.

I thought what could be more appropriate to exit  the sixties with than We Shall Overcome?         

I tried to get everyone to so sing but only managed to get one inebriated middle-aged woman to join in.

But I sang.

And just kept singing.

“Deep in my heart, I do believe—that we shall overcome—”

“—someday.”

Someday.

Maybe.

Just not today.