Guest Post by David Simmon. Order his novel from Broken River Books. I’m reading it right now and I love it. Wild and ugly and, surprisingly, you’ll learn a lot about the history of red-lining and Baltimore. Follow him on twitter or check out his linktree.
If you’d like to submit your own writing for a future Guest Post, please see the post here.
I have always been infatuated with the city of Baltimore. There is just something special about this place. John Waters said this:
My favorite characters are people who think they’re normal but they’re not. I live in Baltimore, and it’s full of people like that. I’ve also lived in New York, which is full of people who think they’re crazy, but they’re completely normal.
This is perfect because it is true.
This is one of the reasons I write about Baltimore. It is a city full of characters. Stories. 602,274 of them as of 2020 and rapidly decreasing every year.
You can see it in the architecture. The crumbling vacants. Looking at data collected in July 2019, there were 293,889 housing units in the city, however, the number of households with an average of 2.45 individuals per house is cited as only 239,116. You do the math. That means almost 20% of Baltimore’s homes are unoccupied. I really wish people would stop leaving. It’s a great place.
But in the meantime, I’ll collect their stories and bring them your way. While they’re still here.
One time I heard somebody say this:
“It’s a damn good thing motherfuckers are leaving the city. The faster the poor motherfuckers can escape this city and be absorbed into the counties the better. That'll leave the city open for redevelopment, like what Warhorse is doing with Harbor East. There's no way to fix the city if you let the folks that’s here, stay here. There's cultural structures in those communities, toxic shit built into the framework OK? That shit is deep in it. Generations of folks living in the same blighted communities. And those communities need to be fractured, broken the fuck up, because that’s how you make way for healthier communities with new cultural structures to be built in their place. You overstand me?”
But the person who said that to me was a Baltimore City homicide detective and I don’t fuck with the police so I only remembered what he said so I could share it with you and let you draw your own conclusions from that shit.
My mother would take my sister and I to the Maryland Science Center when we were kids. The science center is located on the west side of the harbor next to the Davis Planetarium and used to have a cool exhibit where you could build a structure out of wooden blocks and then test the strength of what you built by pressing a button and setting off an earthquake simulation. The button would make the platform vibrate and you could increase the level on the Richter scale from 1 to 8.9. But that was not my favorite part about those days out with my mother.
In the shopping area of the Inner Harbor was a hologram artist. I’m not talking about what they did at Coachella with Tupac. I’m talking about framed, holographic images of what was popular at the time. The iconic Terminator face with the shiny chrome endoskeleton skull and the eyes that follow you wherever you go because it’s one of those types of holograms. There were Xenomorphs from Alien and Predator faces that followed you with their eyes too. Pamela Anderson from Baywatch. Shit like that. I loved that shit.
There used to be more vendors at Harborplace. Most of them were local. Then they kicked out the local vendors and replaced them with ESPN Zone, Planet Hollywood and Hardrock Cafe.
A terrible idea. All of those joints failed. Changing of the times I guess. Now all that's left are the Rita’s, H+M1, Johnny Rocket’s, Uno and The Cheesecake Factory that emerged from the corpses of the themed restaurants like carrion beetle larvae.
Sometimes a person or place gives you a feeling that you can’t put words to. As a writer, this becomes problematic because it is part of the job. I can give you something that might help me explain.
Here’s an anecdotal example.
My nephew spent the weekend with us. We were watching some movie that had a scene that glorified drug use so I was like, “Hey nephew, don’t touch none of that shit, right? Alcohol especially. It's all poison. All of it. It’ll poison your money and poison your body.”
And tell me why my nephew says, “Oh I know. I would never touch drugs or alcohol. My grandfather drank till he gave himself a stroke and now all he can say is CEECEE FOOFOO.”
I’ve never used all caps in writing before but I had to so that y’all could understand how my nephew said CEECEE FOOFOO. It was in a deep voice and sounded like something a big foot or a Sasquatch might say, you feel me? He put so much bass into it, but I digress.
My nephew is a fantastic kid and he is also from Baltimore.
I want to tell you in words why Baltimore is special to me but it’s a feeling so if I try, it’s just not going to work. I know, I know deep inside, but I just can’t put words to it. Like my nephew’s grandfather who might wish to comment on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis but can only say CEECEE FOOFOO.
I would like to tell you that my wife being from Baltimore and my daughter being born at Johns Hopkins has a big part in it. Obviously I would have love for the city my wife is from, right? Her family, our family, my friends, all the people I love. My daughter was delivered at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
But it isn’t that. I love my wife because of who she is, not because of where she is from. And I love my daughter because she’s the greatest thing that ever happened to me, not because the hospital she was born in gives me some sort of nostalgic feeling about the city it’s in. That is a thing though. People feel that sort of way about things sometimes.
Back to what John Waters said about Baltimore being full of people who think they are normal but are far from it. The other day, in East Baltimore in an eye doctor’s office on Harford Road, a complete stranger said the following to me:
“Sometimes, people who live near the Mojave desert develop an interest in searching for the wreckage of airplane crashes. When the scattered remains of pile ups on the interstate don’t do the trick, they jack mountaineering goggles and checkered shemaghs and trek through the gypsum dunes on ATV’s, looking for glints of metal. Usually it’s just a sliver of reflective Mylar or other shiny material like candy wrappers, aluminum and such. As in, trash. Ultimately, it's all trash. Just trash.”
These were words that were said to me from a real live human. And then he kinda snickered after he said them, in a condescending way. If you wonder how I can remember his dialogue so exactly, it’s because it has stuck with me since he said it. Something so absurd, said by somebody in such a normal tone.
I asked him if he was from the Mojave desert or near there and he said, “No.”
He told me he had never left Baltimore. That is something I love about this place. So many characters.
I just dropped a book via Broken River called Ghosts of East Baltimore. You can get that joint here.
At the time of this essay being published, H+M has now been closed.