Reflections from the Greatest City

I just spent a few day in the Greatest City. Dazzling … blah blah blah. Beautiful … blah blah blah. Wonderful … blah blah blah. I’ll spare you the details.

I did make a few interesting observations while I was up there:

a) One very entertaining game to play on your way up I-95 and the Jersey Turnpike, is to try to make chatty conversation with the workers at the toll booths and observe how the reactions change as you drive further north. We did this as sort of a social experiment. In Maryland, Delaware and Southern Jersey they reacted with “Happy holidays” and “have a safe trip.” The deeper we drove into New Jersey, the reactions became progressively more hostile. By the time we got to the Lincoln Tunnel, I swear the booth operator was about to spit on us. On the trip out, we played the game again. And there was an adverse correlation.

b) The “Can I ax you a question” guys are far fewer in number in New York, but the ones working the streets are far more hostile and antagonistic. In Baltimore, I’ll be politely axed a question roughly five times a day, and it is not until I tell them I can’t help them that they either sarcastically say “God bless you” or tell me to fuck off. In NY, I was only axed one question, and this guy was telling me to fuck off and calling me a racist before he even finished asking me for money.

c) After having two or three scotches, having to leave your drink at the bar and walk outside to smoke a cigarette really really sucks. From a smoker’s perspective, it completely ruins the bar experience. Each night, my friends and I would eventually give up and return to the hotel room, scotch and cigarettes in hand, where we could destroy our lungs, hearts and livers in unison.

By and large the trip made me feel overwhelmingly dazzled in that “This place is incredible and I live in a dump” sort of way. After taking in half a dozen incredible art exhibits and stumbling around half-cocked in places like the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, I began asking myself why I was bothering dealing with the lethargic hell that is Baltimore.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the city, but I hope my love does not blind me from the truth. I hope I’ve never been on of those people who try to convince others that this city isn’t really all that bad after all, it’s terrible. To try to convince people that this Baltimore is something that it isn’t is an exercise roughly equivalent to topping a turd with whipped cream, hot fudge and a cherry and telling them that they’re eating a sundae. I’ve been to many of the larger cities in the country, and from what I’ve seen it’s probably the worst city in the country (Admittedly, I’ve never been to Detroit, but at least great music comes out of Detroit.).

I’m not just speaking of statistics, but also of the psychological effect city has on you. Every negativism of a city is twelve fold here, and the positives of urban living either sit on a low boil or simply don’t exist here. The sense of fatalism here is overwhelming and infects everything. Creative works that come out of Baltimore that can actually be categorized as art are the ones that examine our own wretched condition. Our most successful industry is a hospital that exploits our poor as guinea pigs for the benefit of the outside world. On more than one occasion, from completely unrelated Bosnian refugees, I’ve been told that Sarajavo is a much nicer place to live than Baltimore.

Granted, I make a conscious effort to stay as close to the underbelly as I can stomach, so my view may be biased. But it is in the underbelly that our city’s distinctiveness really shines. It is where we excel.

Nevertheless, Baltimore has a way of making you love her despite all her weaknesses. When I was little, long before I moved here, my father told me his first impressions of Baltimore when he arrived in the early sixties to attend grad school. At first he was appalled and depressed, later accepting, eventually amused and eventually enamored (This is a reaction to the city that I’ve sense heard reiterated countless times from many people). In the end, he hated leaving the city to take employment in a far more cosmopolitan city. For the rest of his life, he would dazzle me with horror stories from his time in Baltimore, nostalgically reminiscing his muggings or the time he was drinking in a German beer garden; and, while looking for a bathroom, mistakenly stumbled into a Nazi meeting hall, complete with blown up pictures of Hitler and Swastikas embossed on red banners, before rushing back to his confused friends and begging that they leave immediately (Poetically, the Myerhoff Symphony Hall was built on the ruins of The Deutsches Haus … and the existence of “hall” was confirmed to me by an old member of the Baltimore German community).

As horrible as this city may be, it is also complex, confusing, and beguiling. Nobody ever becomes an expert or fully understands how this city works, there are too many contradictions. I’ll never understand it. At best, in time I may come to understand the city a little better. All I know is that as I was returning through East Baltimore yesterday, driving past block after block of abandoned boarded up rowhouses, crack dealers standing on every corner, the stoops riddled with sleeping half comatose bodies in the freezing cold, it actually felt good to be home; and I was looking forward to that night when I would step into a bar, light a cigarette, order a drink and exchange fucked up stories about this city with my friends.