Looking for Loosies

“Anybody got a loose one?!”

On the subway platform, waiting for the train at Mondawmin, his tortured voice cuts through the typical murmurs that bleed over the mechanical silence.

“Loose ones! Looking for loose ones. Anybody got a loose one?”

The call is just short of desperate. Granted, he’s still high enough to not sound desperate, yet.

One murmur becomes clearly audible. “Damn, they out late tonight.”

There is no they, just one lone addict coming off his fix & looking to feed a different craving: tobacco. They is a pejorative here. The addict is relegated to subhuman standards, not worthy of being an individual. Everyone knows what he wants. No one offers.

If you live close enough to Lexington Market, near downtown Baltimore, close enough to find yourself there often, you learn the lingo. If you wait for a bus on the corner of Howard & Saratoga enough times, you will inevitably be asked if you want to buy a loosie or have one to sell.

You may be confused, at first, but when you finally see someone pop a cigarette out of a pack & exchange it for a few coins, it all becomes clear. Microeconomics. The soft sell of a sole cigarette.

“Anybody got a looose one?!”

Now he was becoming more desperate. He had already made a lap of the platform, and with no luck, his call had transformed into a chant, an uncomfortable one with such energy, I could sense everyone one on the platform recoil, gather tighter, try to shield themselves from the discordance.

“Loose ones! Looking for loose ones! Anybody got a looose one?”

I’m no better. As he approaches me, I try to avert his gaze. I’m not trying to interact. I have my earbuds on, playing nothing—my shield against the world. But I also know better than to be completely unguarded. I observe him peripherally, notice the staggering cadence of his walk, his gray, unkempt crop. He looks old, but addicts can be deceiving. You never really know if one is old, or just prematurely aged from constantly poisoning himself. He looks old, but mostly, he just looks hollow, like his soul has been eaten away, leaving nothing but a drying husk.

Shit! He’s looking at me. Betrayed by my curiosity, I’ve inadvertently made eye contact. I don’t know if I can handle this energy, now. I’ve just spent the past couple of hours consulting an old friend, being the ear she needed, offering a shoulder and a bit of hope. I’ve had my fill of desperation for the day. Any more could be wounding, leave me so raw that I’ll spend the next few days in self-induced solitary, hiding from the world in a bed I’ll be unable to sleep in, just toss, pretending sleep will come, eventually.

“Loose one?” he asks. Even his eyes are hollow, his gaze dying, not dead, not yet.

I take a deep breath to steel myself. Before I can let it out, I hear someone say, “Hey brother, how’s it going?” in a soothing baritone. An officer had made his way to the platform, had reached the man. There’s no acrimony. There’s no aggression. Just brother, from an MTA police officer whose build was as daunting as his voice.

“Hello, officer. I obey the law, officer. I respect the law. I’m just looking for a loose one.”

“That’s fine,” the officer says, “but I don’t think you’re going to find one here. You might have better luck somewhere else.”

By this point, they’re both past me, the officer is herding the man towards the up escalator, his broad shoulders dwarfing the small, broken man. They continue in now inaudible conversation. The rest of the platform finally loosens up as the desperate energy dissipates, like lungs after a fit of coughing. Everyone is free from having to face their reflections in the eyes of a hollowed one. We all have hollows & hate to be reminded how close we are to becoming completely, tragically empty, looking for our own loosies in a world that has none to offer.

Bus Stop

..some micro-fiction I originally wrote in 1994 or so... semi-autobiographical... edited a few times ... appeared in "Smile Hon, You're in Baltimore" and heard on "The Signal"

So there I am, sitting near the back of the number 13, working out the national debt in my head on my way to Fells Point, when I notice this woman getting on with a little boy who I figure is her son.

   As soon as I see her, I know she’s junked. Her hands look painfully swollen and puffy. Her cheeks, gaunt and sunken in, like someone had dug them out with a soup spoon. Dried spit, caked white, crusts on each corner of her mouth. Her half-lidded eyes are glazed over and unfocused, as if she can only see things within a foot of her—not that she’s trying to see anything.

   She saunters towards the back, led by the boy, and sits almost directly across from me. The boy can’t be more than four years old, but is as alert as his mother is high. She spends her time nodding off, in & out of the heroin induced nirvana in her mind, while he maneuvers from seat to seat, alternating between looking out the window and catching his mother before she falls out of her seat and onto the floor of the bus.

  He begins to get more agitated as we round North Avenue and start heading south on Wolfe Street. Every few blocks he tries to wake his mother up, each time with a little more desperation. At best she offers him nothing more than a quarter-lidded nod with a bit of a snort for good measure. At worst, she doesn’t even acknowledge his existence.

   Finally, as we near Johns Hopkins Hospital, he stands up on his seat and rings the bell himself, his cute little fingers barely able to reach the yellow stripe. As the driver slows to their stop, he hops down and starts tugging at his mother’s arm. “Momma! Momma!!” he squeals, “We gotta get off he’e!” …just loud enough to snap her out of her state of euphoria and bring her back to the city of Baltimore—at least long enough to let him guide her off the bus.

   Listening to the little boy’s voice, ingraining itself into my brain, takes me back to when I was his age… guiding my mother through the maze that is the New York subway system… making sure we got on the right PATH lest we end up at the Port Authority rather than Hoboken.

I wonder if he sits like I used to, in front of the television watching reruns of Batman and Gilligan’s Island, chomping on a box of Lucky Charms, hoping that Batgirl would show up in her skintight jumper, or that the Professor would finally get them off that fucking island. All the while, my mom would be slouching in a chair in the next room with lines of drool making etch-a-sketch patterns on her chest while she mumbled about how much she missed her friend Janis…   Joplin, it turned out to be. I would just pray that she could work off her fix in time to cook something for dinner before I went to bed.

   I realize that the bus is almost empty. We’re almost at my stop—the last stop. I use my sleeve to wipe the tears off my face and the drippings from my nose, wondering how long I’ve been crying… was I wailing… who had noticed… who cared?

   I send my heart out to the little man one last time, wondering if he would have the same chances I’d had, the same luck. I wonder if he too would grow up too early because of the premature responsibilities, missing out on a childhood you only try to relive once it’s too late. I shake my head. More than likely, he’ll just be another casualty, found lying in the street, in his teens, with a few bullet holes—Baltimore Birthmarks—in his body. Which fate was better?

   I finish composing myself as I walk towards the front of the bus, wiping my sleeve on my jeans so the snot won’t stain, trying to shake that boys voice from my head. It’s times like these when think I can feel the pain of the whole world, but I’m powerless to ease it. I think about dinner as the bus doors slide shut behind me.

Flag House

“Okay, we’re recording now.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Everything you say from this point forward will be on record.”

“Right. I understand.”

“Great! Why don’t we start with letting us know who you are? Your name, and your position.”

“Sure. My name is Alex Ortiz. I’m a Secretary Director in the Office of Family Assistance, a part of Administration for Children and Families, a division of the United States Department of Health and Human Services.”

“I think we have that cleared up. Now, let’s move on to why you asked me here. How can I help?”

“I’m resigning. I’ve had enough. I’m leaving.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Ortiz, people leave their government jobs everyday. Unless you’re a cabinet secretary, quitting your job isn’t a big deal. I mean, unless there’s some juicy scandal involved. Did you get caught embezzling, Mr. Ortiz? Did you sleep with someone you shouldn’t have?”

“No! Nothing like that.”

“Well then, why should I care? Why should anyone care?”

“Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Nobody does care, do they? I mean, some care. For a minute. If it makes it into the news cycle. Don’t get me wrong. There are a few, like me, who care plenty. Care too much. Maybe that’s because we hope that we can care enough for the rest of you, but that’s not true. There’s not enough of us for that.”

“Care about what?”

“About what’s tearing up the very fabric of this country, the cancer that eats us from within.”

“I’m sorry. Don’t you think you’re being a bit cryptic and hyperbolic?”

“Sure! Sure. Let’s be real. We can’t cure a disease we don’t understand, can we?

“So, let’s take a look at what’s happening out here. Poor or low income families make up half of our country. More than a quarter of all blacks live in poverty, nearly as many Hispanics. A third of the families on welfare are black, but Hispanics and whites each make up nearly just as much. But it’s the African American community that bears the brunt of the blame for the need for social programs. When anybody says welfare, the image of the unmarried, black mother who’s too lazy to work, but can’t stop doing drugs and having children we have to pay for is the first one that comes to mind for a lot of people. For some, it’s the only image.”

“So you’re quitting because poverty has an image problem?”

“It does. 37% of people on SNAP, or what we used to call food stamps, are white compared to only 22% of all recipients made up of African Americans. Of course, that might be different if we had a living wage and didn’t have to supplement incomes for so many working families. You know, about 60% of people on food stamps work but just don’t earn enough to cover their bills and eat. But the myths persist, and they create enough resistance for anything to truly change. But, no, that’s not why.”

“So, why then?”

“Because nothing changes. Nothing seems to ever change, not where the change is really needed.”

“And where is that?”

“In the very communities we want to blame for the problem. If they’re not killing each other, the people we pay to protect us are killing them or locking them up, and for some reason, that’s just fine with plenty of people. One less thug on the streets is an improvement.

“But they’re wrong. I may work in Washington, but I still live in Baltimore. I grew up in Baltimore, and I’ve had a front row seat to the devastation that systemic poverty has wreaked in large pockets of that city.”

“So this is about Freddie Gray?”

“No, man! Freddie Gray is about this. Do you want to know why I got into this line of work?”

“Only if it’s relevant.”

“I could point to a number of things—being raised on welfare by a single mother who struggled with drugs and alcohol, never really knowing my father or even having had a strong male role model in my life; but to be perfectly honest, my childhood wasn’t as bad as it was for some.

“I was dating a girl named Sol when I was still at Temple. Her father named her that because when she smiled, it was like the sun suddenly appeared in the sky. Sol had two young daughters, and a deadbeat of an ex-husband. She was living in Flag House at the time, one of the high rise housing projects we finally began tearing down in 1990s. It was notorious as the type of housing that would be taken over by drug dealers, like you’d see in Homicide or The Wire. She would usually meet me at the room I rented during summer breaks from school. But we were eating in Little Italy, one time, and it didn’t make sense to go across town to my place when we were already right in the shadow of the towers.

“Flag House was so close to the Inner Harbor, I’d walked past them plenty of times, but walking up to them, at night, under the gloom of street lamps? It was intimidating, even to a kid with my background. This is what my mother was always hustling to keep us out of. The gauntlet of angry, young black men all staring you down as you walk past didn’t make it any easier.

“Sol had warned to keep my arm around her, and to keep my eyes straight ahead, or towards her until we made it into the building. Inside, there was just one working elevator. The other one had been disabled by the dealers to have more control over who went anywhere, and to make it easier to evade police.

“When the elevator finally arrived—maybe it was just the anxiety of so many violent eyes on me, but it felt like we were waiting for an eternity for it—the doors opened, and I had to steel myself so I didn’t gag at that rancid ammonia smell left from old urine. Fortunately, she lived on the eighth floor. I don’t know that I could have taken it if she had lived any higher.

“We stopped to check in on her daughter, first. The family across the hall was watching her. Sol introduced me to three women. The oldest was in her mid 40s. She lived there with her daughter, approaching 30, and her daughter, a pregnant teen who already had an infant daughter. Four generations of women, all living in the only home they’d ever known.

“I wasn’t surprised. I had just taken a course called The Sociology of Poverty, so I had read plenty about the vicious cycle that plagues many African American women. In a society where the men readily abandon their partners and children, the female parent typically exhibits resentment towards her own children, once the charm of being a parent wears off. If that child is a girl, she will seek intimacy in the arms of anyone willing to give it. Sadly, that usually ends up being one of the very black males that will disappear the very moment a new child comes into the equation.

“But that’s fine, because that girl’s going to have a child, someone she thinks will finally love her unconditionally. But then, the reality of parenting hits, and she has no one to help her, except the mother who drove her away in the first place. And sometime during the sleepless night and the endless crying, she ends up resenting her own child.

“They turn to alcohol and drugs to escape the loneliness, get addicted, turn to stealing or prostitution to feed the habit. And when they realize they need help, they have to wait for weeks before a bed becomes available in a treatment center. Weeks is too long to survive in that environment without giving in to the physical trauma of withdrawal and the desire to escape it. By the time the bed is open, the moment has passed, the desire to stop has been stifled. And on it goes.

“I understood the concept, but to see it, to meet the very women that had only existed in textbooks and research papers for me… That’s what put everything I was doing in perspective for me.”

“Okay, so I get why you do it. Why are you stopping?”

“I got up and got dressed early the next morning. I was fine in the safety of Sol’s apartment, but I was eager to be out of Flag House. Worse than taking forever, it seemed like the one working elevator wasn’t working at all. I thought, maybe the dealers disabled that one, too, once their workday was done. I decided to take the stairs.

“It was like descending a level of Hell. Most of the lights were out. The stench of urine and feces was overpowering. Once my eyes adjusted, I could just make out addicts, curled in dark corners, sleeping off their highs. I don’t think I was ever as happy to see the Sun as I was coming out of that stairwell.

“Just a couple of blocks west, there was this small field of bright yellow flowers planted on a large median just off the Jones Falls Expressway, a splash of beauty haunted by the shadow of those towers. I walked into it a bit, fell to my knees and cried. I’d walked past that very spot plenty of times, too, and never had the flowers looked so glorious. I got myself together, stood up, and turned back toward flag house. I could see someone looking down, hands gripped on the fence that wrapped around each tower like chainmail, and I wondered how the flowers looked from there. Could they even see them?”

“Like you said, they brought all those high rises down.”

“Yeah, but they just spread the problems out into surrounding counties. We eliminated the fortresses dealers used to operate a little more easily, but we also created easier access for addicts, especially white ones, migrating from Oxycontin and other overprescribed opiates. All we did is relocate their businesses to the suburbs, expanding their customer base”

“So you failed. That’s why you’re quitting?”

“We all failed. We continue to fail. We bicker about details and blame, and look for easy fixes instead of solutions. Look at the program I run, Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood. We’ve given out 150 million dollars in grants for programs to promote stable marriages and responsible fatherhood. Has any of that made a difference? We have our success stories. Most of these programs do. But you can’t force most kids who grew up in that environment, without fathers in their lives themselves, to want to be good fathers.”

“You’re leaving because you realize it’s hopeless.”

“I wouldn’t say hopeless. There are programs that have been shown to work effectively. Music and art programs that were successful in countries with similarly impoverished and violence-riddled urban populations have been imported into a few cities, here. Anything that uses up idle time and offers kids a healthy way to express themselves helps, including sports. Some school systems hire social workers to follow up on potential truants and make sure those students have everything they need to succeed in school. But that’s only happening in small pockets. It’s nearly impossible to get those programs funded with the political climate the way it is. Generally, we’re cutting arts to give these kids more time to study for standardized tests, a half-assed attempt to make up some of the ground we’ve lost to other students around the world. Not hopeless, just… not full of hope.”

“But wasn’t that what Obama was selling?”

“Sure. But he wasn't just the black president, he was the president. He can’t be seen as only partial to black people problems. Besides, Republicans have used gerrymandering and voter suppression strategies during midterm elections to entrench themselves in Congress and state houses. They opposed anything that could end up looking like a win for him. They were just coming around to the costs of mass incarceration, even if only from a fiscal perspective. 

“But even if they get out, what do they have to come out to? With few prospects, many will end up right back in a life of crime. They'll survive, whatever way they can.”

“So what happens, now?”

“Who knows. Maybe we’ll keep doing the right things. Maybe we’ll show them that we value them enough that they begin to value themselves. Only when they value their own lives will they begin to value the lives of others. Or maybe we keep dividing ourselves, keep blaming them for a situation we’re all responsible for creating. Or maybe we just keep treating them all like the dangerous criminals a few of them are. That seem to be the strategy of the new administration.

“If that happens, parts of the West Side will look more like the West Bank. Eventually, that deep seated rage they use to destroy each other will be turned outward. Black on black violence will transition to black on everything else violence. They’ll be primed for recruitment by terrorist organizations, if the gangs, themselves, don’t evolve into domestic terrorist outfits. We’ll be more scared. We’ll double down on the use of law enforcement and incarceration to try and restore order, kill guilty and innocent, alike, deepen their resentment of us, even further. And the spiral descends downward to... who knows where. But wherever that is, I don’t want to be around to see it. I can’t.”

“Where will you go, Mr. Ortiz. What will you do now?”

“I’m going home, Mr. Fitz. Puerto Rico. My family's from Ponce. I wasn’t born there, but I spent summers there. I have a profound connection to the people. They face many of the same issues, but they’re all worse off, financially, if you can believe that. They need me, and there, even small deeds can have large impacts.”

“So that’s it, then. You’re giving up.”

“Not giving up. Just giving in. This country hasn’t hit bottom, yet. Keeping everyone divided for the benefit of a few has proven to be an effective strategy. When America gets tired of shooting itself in the foot, over and over, I’ll be back. That is, if I’m not too in love with life in the tropics.”

“Ha! Well, if you know who wins, I might be right behind you.”

“Absolutely. Come check me out. I’ll show you all the great beaches the tourists don’t know about.”

“Well, I think we have enough. I'll get this to my editor, but to be honest, there's nothing new here. You realize, none of this will likely see the light of day?”

 “Sure. I get it. The information's been out there, but the people who need it most still don't get it.” 

“And they won't. Unless you get Fox to put it out there, but you know that's not going to happen. I'm sorry. I can see how important this is to you. I wish there was more I could do. Before we wrap, is there anything you’d like to add?”

“No, I think you have the basics. Except, and I’ll leave it at this: We’ve figured out that addicts don’t have to hit rock bottom to finally decide to enter recovery. They only need a moment of lucidity powerful enough for them to realize that they are killing themselves. There's a large part of this country that’s addicted to fear. It controls the way they live, the way they vote, the way they think about, even treat the people they’ve been taught to fear. Let’s hope America has it’s own moment of lucidity, because rock bottom will come with unbridled violence and race wars. And let’s hope that when that moment of lucidity comes, there will be a bed available for us, before it all collapses.”

Candelario

Another from the hoard. This one chose me. I came across an old schedule book from 1993, the year my uncle, Andres Candelario, died. I grabbed the book, and it opened to my original, handwritten version of this poem which I composed after visiting him in the hospital during his last days, as his body gave in to AIDS complications. His last name derives from candela, the Spanish word for flame, also related to candle, chandelier & lamplighter. Uncle Andy's last days are also chronicled in my short story, The Handsome Man.

Candelario

Yea, though your candles glow dimly—
stubs to the towers I once saw—
and yea, though you walk through
the shadow of a death you deserve,
I come to your bedside,
not to blow out your puny, pungent flames,
but to watch them die
out on their own, perhaps
even stoke them a bit,
with forgiveness.

No, I don’t forget
the days we had nothing,
yet you took it all,
anyway, to sell for a few days'
euphoria. But I also remember
holding your hand through the streets
of Manhattan, your friends laughing
as you put the dice in my hand,
shouting every time I rolled sevens.

I don’t forget the tears
abuelita shed
every time you were caught
in the act, or after the fact,
not knowing which of you would survive
this incarceration. But I also remember
walking through schoolyards
with you, my friends asking,
“Is that your dad?”
the temptation, not knowing
my real father, to simply say,
“yes!”

I don’t forget the peace
you broke, showing your face,
waving your carrots
in mami’s face, pulling
her off her wagon
by her teeth. But I also remember
the tears you crying at my bedside
as I lay on the brink
of death, again—the porno
mags you gave me working
as well as any medicine.

I owe you no debt,
Candelario—
the days I basked
in your glow are equal
to the days I wished
to spit your flame out—
tears & smiles flowed
concurrently. Yet,
one last request,
since you are incapable
of making one: please
tell mami I said, “hello.”

Easter Snapshot

snapshot
Staring
at the only photograph
I have left, Easter—your head
wrapped neatly in a paisley
scarf, alabaster skin set
off by the scarlet of your top,
all 5’ nothing of you dwarfing
over the 3 of us, [how small
we were, and how as big
as the world you seemed to us
back then] holding JoJo’s fragile
little hand—JoJo, in his blue denim
overalls with a strap dangling
off his shoulder and his Buster
Brown do, free hand gripping
one link of the chain link—your other
arm held hard against KiKi’s heart—
KiKi, with her baby doll dress & her baby doll
smile & her white knee highs— and
there I am, the Little Man all grown
up at 8 or 9 or whatever, hair,
as always, waving wildly in the wind,
stylin’ in my plaid polyester belted lounge
lizard jacket, with matching bell
bottom bottom, foot propped
up, arms spread like I owned
the world like I knew I did;
all of us there, at the base
of Lady Liberty, Manhattan &
its now extinct towers barely
bursting through the fog, celebrating,
not God, not Jesus, not life, nor liberty,
nor the pursuit of happiness, but
love: the love that we could squeeze
out of this fucked up family that we
shared, that we accepted for better
of for worse, or for worse than that
because how can we forget those times?

I stare
at this, the only
photograph I have
left, & I imagine
the others, the ones
I don’t have, the ones
lost, the ones destroyed, even
the ones that never existed,
like the picture I never
took of you during one
of your dazed for days days,
lounging & lost in your
euphoria, hiding from problems
I didn’t, still don’t quite,
understand, like the picture
I never took of you bruised,
battered & beaten by
whatever flavor of the month
macho-sick monster you were
sampling, like the picture I never
took the day you cashed your
first paycheck, leaving the drugs,
the drink, the drunks & the drama
packed away neatly with your past,
or like the picture I never took
of you bloated, bleeding & bleached
on that hospital bed, your past
unpacking itself to prevent
your progress,
your present,
your presence…
your life briefed
down to vital signs & bad
mistakes you had already paid for
with interest.

Staring
as I tend to
do quite often, more
often than I like to admit,
at the only photograph
I have left, I am left
wanting more:
more than these faded
foggy fucked up fragments
that I can’t quite feel,
these pieces of memory
that float around in my head,
incomplete & inane,
that I can’t touch
or hold or strum
like a stringless guitar,
or cry on; they don’t
have the power
of this picture,
this one picture
this one last picture
where life was set
aside one Easter Sunday
just so
that we could remember
that even the fog
could not hide
the love captured
at the base
of Lady Liberty.

Gone Daddy, Gone

So, in case you haven't heard, I found out yesterday that my long lost dad, the father I haven't seen since I was seven or eight, is dead. He's been dead, since 1997. Funny thing is, I half expected it. After all, my mom died in 1991, and my uncle died a few years later—both from AIDS after years of heroin abuse. Granted, from what I've always understood, my father didn't use, but it's not like I was around him often enough to know for sure. That said, according to my sister our father died of cancer, not AIDS. I suppose that's a relief, however small.

Still, as I searched for signs of my father all these years, I always clung to the hope that I would have a chance to catch up with him, to get to ask the questions that remain in my head after so many years of non-communication. Before I go on, I should make it perfectly clear that I don't blame my father for losing touch. If anything, my mother deserves a lot of the blame. It was, after all, her idea to pick us up and move us from New Jersey to Maryland in 1982 without so much as a goodbye, not just for my dad, but for all our friends—a clean break. Sometimes a clean break is very messy.

So I'm left mourning, not for a father I barely knew, but for the now-dashed hope that we would get another chance. All I have is a couple of poems (they're coming, I have to re-type them), a scant few memories, and the stories I heard from my mom so long ago that I don't remember what's true, what she made up and what I added to fill the gaps in my head. I'll share a few.

The first memory I have of my father was when I was about seven. I was hanging out with my uncle Andy, and he took me into a bar. There, he introduced me to a man he said was my dad. I recognized him because of a picture my mom kept from when she was pregnant with me—a short man (¿What else?) with a hitleresque haircut and a big, bushy mustache. He was very nice, and bought me a Coke. We chatted a bit, but I can't really recall what about. I remember that my mother invited him over for a party soon after, but her boyfriend at the time got very drunk and very jealous one night, shut off the lights, proclaiming the party to be "¡over!" My mom broke up with her boyfriend at the time, and my parents made a brief go at a relationship again, but I suppose things had changed—they had changed—too much. In the end, she got back together with John O'Connor, the man who had made an ass of himself at the party, and they married shortly thereafter.

But what happened the first time around. The story I remember, a story my mother shared frequently with her closest friends, happened in 1970. My mother met my father a couple of years after she'd had to give up my oldest brother to her mother. Apparently, after a terrible bout with heroin addiction (My older brother was born having to be detoxed.) mom had finally gotten clean, perhaps partly due to my dad's influence. They conceived me, got married, had me, and conceived my sister Kyra. All was well in the world, until the cops came bursting through the door of the apartment we all lived in.

Apparently, my mother had developed a brief, but bad history with law enforcement, and that was coming back to bite her in the ass. Although she was squeaky clean at the time, they (allegedly—but planting evidence was common in those days) planted drugs in our medicine cabinet. They had my pregnant mother in handcuffs and were about to drag her to jail, and me to foster care when my father came home. He took the rap. He claimed that the drugs were his. They took my father instead.

It should be no surprise to anyone that while my dad languished behind bars, my mother started using again. Hence, when Kyra was born, like my older brother, she had to be detoxed, too. Who knows what our lives would have been like had the police not held a personal vendetta against my mother.

But what's past is past. It's the one thing we cannot change. And there is great consolation in all this grief. Although I'm officially an orphan now, I found out I have family I never knew I had. I have three Aunts—Margie, Eva and Paula— and a slew of cousins—one of which, Marisol, I got to chat with at length. So while the much longed for reunion with dad is now gone, I do have a link to many of the stories that will help fill that gap. Even better, I have family with which I can make wonderful new memories with. If there's one thing I learned, it's more important to look forward to the fluidity of the future than to dwell on a past that's already etched in stone. RIP Papi.

The Handsome Man

Here's another one from my archives, originally written during my second semester at the University of Baltimore. Again, I've edited it to better reflect my current writing style.


I’m used to dealing with weirdos. The Pennington Hotel down in the deep south of Baltimore is full of ‘em. I call it a three-quarters house cuz although we don’t get no state funding most of the residents are stuck here on their trip from whatever halfway house they come from and the real thing. I doubt any of ‘em will ever be ready for the real thing, being able to keep a full apartment, much less a house. No, most of these weirdos will always be teetering between here and back in the same jail or crazy house they came from, except for Andy. Nothing weird about Andy, at all.

His name is actually Andres, some Porta Reekin version of Andrew, but he likes Andy just fine. He’s tall and thin—some might say lanky—with a face that looks like it’s carved from rock, like those big old heads from Easter Island. A handsome man. Not that I’m gay or nothing. He’s just so different from the freaks that usually live here that he really stands out.

The lady comes first. I worry when I see her. She’s very attractive, something you don’t see here. The few ladies that have stayed here were all kinds of butch and burly and could handle themselves with all these men. This lady looks like she had class and maybe money, so I figure she’s a whore at first. We get them too, but I can’t have no pretty, classy whores here. That would attract attention, and people living here don’t usually want attention. I’m about to suggest a different rooming house when she explains that she wants to rent a room for a friend that was coming out of prison in a few days. She gives me a few weeks rent and a security deposit. She warns me that he’s a might sickly, asks me to keep an eye out for him.

I’ve got no problem with that being as I try to keep an eye on all these fools living at The Penn. One more won’t hurt, right? With that, she leaves me her name, Maria—a pretty Spanish name for a pretty Spanish lady—and a number to call if there’s an emergency, and she’s gone as quick as she came.

Andy doesn’t show up for a few days. I’m standing outside, under the awning, watching the rain come down hard on Pennington Avenue—nothing like watching Baltimore getting drenched on a hot August day. I see a car drive up. Pennington dead-ends here at The Penn, so most folks driving all the way up are headed here. That lady, Maria, might be driving, but I can’t really tell with the rain and all. Anyway, she doesn’t get out. But I see this handsome man hop out, reach in the back seat for a couple duffels, and walk towards me as the car speeds off.

I’m taken aback as he gets closer. He’s taller than me—maybe five-ten—and dark like he’s American Indian or maybe Creole. He’s got the neatest beard I’ve ever seen, trimmed in perfect strips down along his face, across his chin and up to meet his neat little mustache—nothing like the shaggy biker beards you normally see here. “Can you take me to the manager?” he asks, snapping me out of the kinda trance I was in.

I introduce myself, and he tells me who he is, tells me there should be a room here for him. I’d prepared a room for him cuz I figured he’d show up any day, and I wanted to make sure he got one of the rooms fitted for handicapped or older folks being as he’s supposed to be sick and all. Granted, he doesn’t seem sick by the looks of him. I tell him to follow me. Inside, everybody notices him. He’s pretty cool about it, too, giving everyone there a nod.

Upstairs, I show him around. Not much to show, really—just the bed with a nightstand and the bathroom. I tell him that most of the others eat elsewhere, but that if he wants he can get a hotplate. He thanks me all cordial-like offering his hand to shake before I walk off.

He doesn’t spend much time in the rec room watching t.v. or playing on the pool table, except when Soul Train comes on. So he spends a lot of time telling stories. Like how he grew up in New York. Bragging really. Like how it takes balls to rob a bank in New York like he did. How he shot a man in the head for a few thousand dollars in broad daylight in Manhattan, and nobody noticed it was him cuz he ran off with the crowd that started panicking. He tells us how he got high with Mick Jagger and David Bowie in Studio54 in the 70s, and how he spent a lot of time in jail in Bordentown in New Jersey on account that he would always get caught in Jersey.

He got caught one time lifting a couple of cases of Yoo-hoo right off the truck while the driver was making a delivery. He got away with that scam all the time in New York, but in Jersey it was like the cops had radar for him or something.

I tell him a couple of my tales, although I don’t have many to tell. I only did one stint behind bars. Some buddies convinced me to drive the car for a liquor store robbery, one of them that cashes checks so they keep lots of cash around. Got caught. That was enough for me. I knew I wasn’t smart enough to be no career criminal. I did my six years, and went as straight as I could when I came out. Worked as a longshoreman at Dundalk Marine Terminal for years until I ruined my back. Now I collect disability and manage The Penn under the table.

It’s nice having somebody that’s sorta normal living here, somebody that I can talk to that don’t come across as half-baked, or all-baked. He treats me like I’m his friend, even though I know it’s just cuz I’m one of the only ones here for him to talk to. He don’t go out much cuz he wants to stay out of trouble, and there ain’t shit to do here if you don’t watch t.v. or play pool.

He likes cards though. He shows us how to run Three Card Monte, and one time Maria brings him some dominoes, and he shows some of us how to play. Andy may not think so, but I consider him my friend. Ten years I’ve been working here, and I never made no good friends.

Yeah, we talk a lot, but I don’t ever take Andy for being sickly. I mean, he’s real thin, gaunt even, and he has a bit of a cough, and he has those scabs on his cheeks he’s always scratching at, but he’s only forty-something and don’t hardly seem that old even. Things change fast in a year.

It’s August again when Harvey, this drunk that stays here so he can afford to spend most of his social security on liquor, comes down and tells me he smells something burning in 3C. That’s Andy’s room, and I haven’t seen him all day.

I hurry on up there and knock on the door. No answer. I can smell the burning, so I use my master key to get in the apartment. I figure he left real early for one of his walks to the harbor and forgot to unplug his hotplate. Sure enough, when I get in the hotplate is on, and Andy was nowhere around. There was a bit of something black and bubbling on the burner that was smoking bad and stinking up the place. I yank the plug and get ready to walk out when I hear some water running and some kind of scraping noise coming from the bathroom.

It gets me curious, so I open the door and peep in. There’s Andy, on his knees, in boxers and a wifebeater, bent over the edge of the tub. I’m thinking, maybe he’s puking or something. I bend over to look, and he’s cooking. I mean he’s trying to cook something. He’s got this small can sitting on the bottom of the tub, and he’s stirring it up with a spoon. He notices me there next to him. He looks up at me, and he says, “What’s up Mac? I’m heating up some SpaghettiOs. You want some.”

The water’s running, but not hard, and definitely not hot enough to heat up no SpaghettiOs. I tell him no, thank you, and reach over to turn the water off. “I think you need some rest, man,” I say, and carefully picked him up off his knees and lead him back to bed.
“I’m hungry, Mac,” he says, in this sad voice.

I don’t know what to say. “Don’t worry, Andy. I’ll go down and get you something to eat,” is what finally comes out as I close his apartment door behind me and lock it. I hurry downstairs and call 911. They send cops and an ambulance. They must think they got a real crazy on their hands, but I can’t blame them. This is The Penn after all. But still, it makes everybody here nervous.

I take the paramedics to the room and let them in. They ask him questions, but it’s all such a ruckus now, I can’t follow what’s going on. Pretty soon though, they got Andy on a stretcher, and I was following them back downstairs.

A couple of days go by, and I don’t hear nothing about Andy. I remember about that number the lady, Maria, gave me, so I call her. She’s really upset with me at first being as I waited two days to call, but I remember the name of the hospital they were taking him to.

I feel pretty bad about forgetting like that, so I decide to go check on Andy myself. I lock up and jump on the 64 to Harbor Hospital. I figure, it’s been a couple days, they probably figured out what was wrong with him. I mean, we ain’t got no air conditioning, except in the lobby and my office, so maybe it was just like a heat stroke or something like that. He should be right as rain by now.

He’s not. As a matter of fact, I have to talk my way in to see him because Andy’s in ICU and he can’t get no visitors unless they’re family. I tell them that I’m his landlord, and that I need to get word to his family about how he is because they can’t get here right away. They still don’t want to let me see him, but they don’t have no next of kin information for him. I give them Maria’s number, and they tell me that they’ll give me fifteen minutes with him, but then I gotta go.

They take me to a room with glass walls on three sides. “Mr. Candelario is right in there.” The curtains around his bed are closed, so I walk in and around the curtains, and I’m taken aback, again. Andy’s hooked up to all these machines, and he’s under one of them clear plastic tents from the chest up. He’s just really a skeleton now. All those parts that made him so sharp and handsome just look hard now, like they’re gonna bust through his skin. I just stand there in shock, looking at him. I can’t say nothing.

I don’t even realize I’m there so long when a nurse comes to tell me I have to go. I nod. Lord knows I don’t like seeing him like this. “Excuse me ma’am, but what’s wrong with him?” I ask the nurse ask she walks me out of the ICU. She explains that he has AIDS, and that he’s suffering from some complications, including pneumonia. I know it’s sad to say, but the first thing that comes to my mind is that I hope I didn’t get it, wonder if he’s ever been bleeding around me or something.

I tell her how I found him, acting all crazy and stuff. She says something about some toxic stuff, germs that was attacking his brain. She says something about how people with AIDS can’t even have cats around cuz the litter can make them really sick and start acting crazy. I tell her we don’t allow no pets at the Pennington. “Is he gonna come out of it?” I ask her before I leave.
She says, “Not likely.”

I get back to The Penn, and I go to his room and start stuffing his things in big black contractor bags. I want to make sure that if he does get better, his stuff is safe. If I leave it in the room, I know somebody will eventually break in and steal it. I’m careful with his clothes cuz I don’t know how he got the AIDS, but I don’t want to get pricked with no needle. I done had that happen, and waiting for those test results is downright stressful. I drag all his property up to the attic, which has a big padlock that even these folks won’t try to break.

All his property, except the trimmer. I’m going through the stuff in the bathroom, you know, soap, deodorant, cologne and stuff, and I find the trimmer in the cabinet under the sink. It’s a tiny thing, run by batteries, but it’s sharp, sharp enough to shave a spot on my cheek clean when I try it out. I decide to hang on to the trimmer for a bit. I’ll give it back when he gets out.

Andy doesn’t get out though. Maria hears that I visited, so she puts me on the list to see him. She says he don’t get any visitors but her and his mother who comes up from Puerto Rico when she hears he real sick. I guess she ain’t too mad at me. So I try to stop by everyday, but he just lays there. He’s awake sometimes, but he still just lays there, staring at the ceiling, not saying nothing, or worse, mumbling. I just sit there telling him stories about my boring life. After a while, I can’t bring myself to go anymore.

It’s September, but it’s still hot when Maria comes to ask for his things. She don’t say it, but I can tell because she’s just got these puddles on her eyes that she’s trying hard to hold in, so I don’t say it either. I have her follow me upstairs, and I tell her how I packed up his things, not because I didn’t think he wasn’t coming back, but because I didn’t want anybody breaking into his room and taking his things. You can’t trust these guys living here.

I tell her as I help her carry the last couple of bags to her car how sorry I am. I tell her how Andy and I had become good friends. How he was the only tenant I could really talk to. She just kind of nods as she puts the last bag onto her back seat. I stand there as she pulls off, stand there until her car disappears up Pennington Avenue. It’s raining. It’s been raining, but I just notice.

I don’t really talk much to the renters here anymore. Everything is just business: collecting the rent, giving them change for the pool table, fixing their heaters. But every once in a while, I’ll pull out Andy’s trimmers, and I’ll get in front of the mirror and trim myself up real nice. I’ll even splash on some of that aftershave even though the guys’ll tease me about it, calling me a fag and all that. But that’s just fine because you can’t expect them to know how much work it takes to stay a handsome man.

soular eclipse

soular eclipse

can your eyes not see the tragedy that my eyes see or are they too caught up in your tv's, your dvd's, your psp's, your facebookies & your i-phoneys that they are blind to what surrounds you, or are you just too afraid of the truth you'll see? our metropolis dreams turned necropolis screams, where the dead prowl the streets scavenging for bits of eat, blowing gravel off our half-chewed gutter discards, drinking that flat backwash contaminated splash of tepid pisswater we tossed into that trashcan, numbing their minds with that poison they buy with the few pennies we provide if only they will hide again from our sullied sights, retreat to their cardboard palaces, their city heated steam vents, their billboard park benches coated in newspaper they can't even read; where the dying left behind child runs wild on our meanest streets spying for his dope and gun slinging paper heroes, fouling out on concrete coated rock courts, holy grail blazing a path he hopes leads to our white castles that ignore his plight, not knowing that he is in a labyrinth leading only into the very walls that separate the dying from the dead he will join in his ghetto mausoleum without our hands to pull him free; where the falling fall for the freedom they sought for themselves, freedom now forced & foisted upon foreigners too afraid to fight for or find for themselves, our young falling for lies of free rides to higher education & higher living when their only guarantee is a free ride as air freight in flag-draped corpse boxes back home where they can be forever free to rot under our feet! can your eyes not see? or are you too afraid to stare at the eclipse too long, afraid that your eyes will melt in the bright white hot glowing pain shining through our soul shadows, blocking our sons, our daughters, our fathers & mothers, sisters & brothers, dead & dying as we reap & eat the fruit that grows from the slow flowing clots of their blood?

Look!
Open your eyes & see.
If you do go blind, you go blind with me.
Otherwise, ignore the plight;
& in the end
we
all
lose
sight.

What I Hope For

When discussing issues the media usually refer to the more popular ones—the meat, as they say. And sure, I get why everyone’s always talking about the economy. Things are still rough out there. I was one of the new numbers on the recently released unemployment figures. Then there’s Iraq, and National Security which, of course, is very important—something We can get back to when our Boys (& Girls!) come back from Iraq. However, you shouldn’t forget that even seemingly smaller issues can mean a lot to many of us.

Take Our drug policy. I know, we don’t really have much of one. The number of impoverished crackheads and heroin addicts I see everyday on my way through Lexington Market in the heart of Baltimore hasn’t dwindled much since the beginning of The War on Drugs. (Funny how throwing the word war around has become the standard way to show Us how to solve Our problems.) But Our government has been fighting the same War for a generation now, and other than making a few small dents in the supply and warehousing a lot of people in jails that continue to overcrowd, not much has changed—at least not on the federal level.

At this point I should make it clear why this issue means so much to me—other than the fact that I live three blocks away from Lexington Market. Those of you who might have read My Letter to the Superdelegates, which I wrote when it looked as if things might come down to them, or my flash fiction Bus Stop, or many of the other things I’ve blogged already know that my family has been ravaged by drug addiction. For those of you who don’t know, I lost my mother to AIDS in 1991. Although a loving and courageous woman, a woman who helped new arrivals from Puerto Rico and other Latin American areas settle and adjust to life in Baltimore, she battled with heroin addiction most of her life.

A few years later, I lost my uncle. He was a character, in and out of jail for a lot of his life, hustling when he was out. But sometimes he was the closest thing I had around to a father. He was usually very good to me. Like my mother, he was a heroin addict and ultimately succumbed to AIDS.

My baby brother was barely 17 when my mother died. Although he became a hard worker and a loving father, he suffered greatly after the death of our mother. He also turned to drugs—crack and heroin. On the day after Christmas, 2006, Joe became the latest in my family succumb to AIDS.

The rest of my family has been more fortunate, but I see the ghosts of what my family has been through every day I step out for lunch. And it’s not just the poor. I’ve been privy to the same sad excesses within Our wealthiest families; and other than more and better recovery facilities and less law enforcement scrutiny, their stories are no less tragic than mine.

So when it comes to drug policy, perhaps it’s not as much of a priority as National Security, but certainly should be close behind when you stop to consider how drug abuse continues to destroy Our lives, Our families, Our children, Our schools and Our neighborhoods. What else has to be destroyed before drugs do become a matter of National Security? Bottom line: one of the myriad of reasons I will NEVER vote for them is because that would mean my lunch breaks will never change. The faces will, but the same problems will still haunt me, along with the memories of everything drug addiction has taken away from me.

Maybe a President Obama will not be able to fulfill my dream of a nation where addicts are getting whatever treatment they need, and where we initiate programs to eliminate illegal drug trafficking intelligently instead of with the brute force that has been so ineffective for so long. There’s a lot of work to do and to undo to get there. However, he is the only hope I see of getting Us on that path.

Bus Stop (decommissioned)

..some micro-fiction I originally wrote in 1994 or so... semi-autobiographical... edited a few times ... appeared in "Smile Hon, You're in Baltimore" and heard on "The Signal"

So there I am, sitting near the back of the number 13, working out the national debt in my head on my way to Fells Point, when I notice this woman getting on with a little boy who I figure is her son.

   As soon as I see her, I know she’s junked. Her hands look painfully swollen and puffy. Her cheeks, gaunt and sunken in, like someone had dug them out with a soup spoon. Dried spit, caked white, crusts on each corner of her mouth. Her half-lidded eyes are glazed over and unfocused, as if she can only see things within a foot of her—not that she’s trying to see anything.

   She saunters towards the back, led by the boy, and sits almost directly across from me. The boy can’t be more than four years old, but is as alert as his mother is high. She spends her time nodding off, in & out of the heroin induced nirvana in her mind, while he maneuvers from seat to seat, alternating between looking out the window and catching his mother before she falls out of her seat and onto the floor of the bus.

  He begins to get more agitated as we round North Avenue and start heading south on Wolfe Street. Every few blocks he tries to wake his mother up, each time with a little more desperation. At best she offers him nothing more than a quarter-lidded nod with a bit of a snort for good measure. At worst, she doesn’t even acknowledge his existence.

   Finally, as we near Johns Hopkins Hospital, he stands up on his seat and rings the bell himself, his cute little fingers barely able to reach the yellow stripe. As the driver slows to their stop, he hops down and starts tugging at his mother’s arm. “Momma! Momma!!” he squeals, “We gotta get off he’e!” …just loud enough to snap her out of her state of euphoria and bring her back to the city of Baltimore—at least long enough to let him guide her off the bus.

   Listening to the little boy’s voice, ingraining itself into my brain, takes me back to when I was his age… guiding my mother through the maze that is the New York subway system… making sure we got on the right PATH lest we end up at the Port Authority rather than Hoboken.

I wonder if he sits like I used to, in front of the television watching reruns of Batman and Gilligan’s Island, chomping on a box of Lucky Charms, hoping that Batgirl would show up in her skintight jumper, or that the Professor would finally get them off that fucking island. All the while, my mom would be slouching in a chair in the next room with lines of drool making etch-a-sketch patterns on her chest while she mumbled about how much she missed her friend Janis…   Joplin, it turned out to be. I would just pray that she could work off her fix in time to cook something for dinner before I went to bed.

   I realize that the bus is almost empty. We’re almost at my stop—the last stop. I use my sleeve to wipe the tears off my face and the drippings from my nose, wondering how long I’ve been crying… was I wailing… who had noticed… who cared?

   I send my heart out to the little man one last time, wondering if he would have the same chances I’d had, the same luck. I wonder if he too would grow up too early because of the premature responsibilities, missing out on a childhood you only try to relive once it’s too late. I shake my head. More than likely, he’ll just be another casualty, found lying in the street, in his teens, with a few bullet holes—Baltimore Birthmarks—in his body. Which fate was better?

   I finish composing myself as I walk towards the front of the bus, wiping my sleeve on my jeans so the snot won’t stain, trying to shake that boys voice from my head. It’s times like these when think I can feel the pain of the whole world, but I’m powerless to ease it. I think about dinner as the bus doors slide shut behind me.