Ralphie’s Summer Vacation: A Bushel and a Peck of Tall Tales, Part 3

"Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown," by Rafael Alvarez (Macon Street Books)

Four Weeks, Nine Cities & 3,000 Miles

“Packed up the Dylan and the Man Ray and the Joyce, I left a note that said…” —Walter Becker, 1950 to 2017

My 2017 summer vacation/do-it-yourself book tour began the morning of July 11 at the grave of Edgar Allan Poe, Fayette and Greene streets in downtown Baltimore. It was close to 95 degrees by 10 a.m., humidity enveloping the Westminster churchyard like a bowl of cream of crab gone bad.

Poe's Grave
Walnut cake and hometown colors, Poe’s Grave (Macon Street Books)

I was waiting on a friend for a quick hand-off: A copy of a new biography of Dorothy Day (signed by the author, Day’s granddaughter Kate Hennessy), in exchange for two loaves of black walnut cake.

The plan was to give slices to strangers I met along the route, trading confection for confession from Baltimore to D.C. to Chapel Hill, N.C. to Pawleys Island, S.C., to Atlanta to Nashville to Memphis to Chicago to Ithaca to Ventnor City, N.J., to Philadelphia and back to Baltimore.

If I had held onto those homemade goodies instead of giving them away (one to Mom and Dad over fried rockfish sandwiches before they dropped me at the train station, the other to former Slickee Boy Mark Noone in D.C., I might have spared a hungry young man on a Greyhound bus some embarrassment.

Riding “the Dirty Dog” between distant American cities is a cheap ticket to cultural immersion, just $35 for the 250-mile journey from Atlanta to Nashville. It often includes a recently released convict or two given a bus ticket upon their release.

Sitting behind me was a kicked-around looking white guy in his 30s with a shaved head and neck tattoos, blaring some kind of hillbilly rap music on his phone while talking to his seatmate about a mutual friend.

“The black John Wayne? He done a whole lot of bad things to a whole lot of people, been to prison four or five times.”

About himself, Junior told his buddy: “I was lookin’ like a sick dog when they got me for all them pills. Put my pot up in a tree and went to prison. No, wait, it was the county jail.”

A younger man of similar circumstance was also on the bus between Atlanta, where I’d made a just-before-closing visit to the Carter Presidential Library, and Nashville, where I read from Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highandtown at an event sponsored by a writers’ collective called The Porch.

In lieu of catching a rabbit in the wild and roasting it over a fire sparked with friction, we will call this American moment Tom Joad at the Gas Station Mini-Mart.

Somewhere near Chattanooga, the bus stopped at a Shell station so we could stretch our legs and pee. I was chomping a hot dog with mustard and relish from one of those hypnotic “roller grills” when the store manager beckoned the bus driver, “I wanna show you something.”

Video security footage showed a passenger – another young white male — slipping a couple of candy bars into his jacket. Soon, the manager and the suspected thief were face-to-face in the parking lot, the bus driver alongside of them and passengers in a surrounding circle like a schoolyard fight. Junior seemed especially eager to see some drama go down.

The manager was given permission by the young man to go into his pockets and – Viola! – a couple of Reese’s peanut butter cups and a Snickers bar. Candy in hand, the gas station man was livid, yelling: “WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME YOU WERE HUNGRY? ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS TELL ME!”

No cops, no violence, no handcuffs, just public humiliation and – perhaps — shame, the kind that’s worse than a punch in the face. Show over, we all got back on the bus. But before we started rolling, the driver began walking toward the back of the bus with cupped hands, asking, “Where’s my man, where’s my man?”

In those hands: a sandwich, a soda pop and a bag of chips for the 20-something hungry enough to steal.

One question stayed with me the rest of the trip: Was the food a gift from the gas station manager or did the bus driver pay for it himself?

Even if I had schlepped the walnut cakes from town-to-town (and they didn’t dissolve into crumbs from all the banging around) I might not have had the opportunity to offer a few slices to the hungry man before his conscience gave way to his stomach.

Why? Because the seat alongside of him was taken by yet another young man of questionable character holding a stuffed pony as big as an extremely large dog.

“It’s for my daughter,” he said. “I’ve been away for a while.”

The highlight of the trip, besides sharing the peculiarities of Baltimore with folks who think they know what we’re about because they’ve seen all of John Waters’ films?

It was the moment an older African-American woman at the Atlanta gig (sponsored by the SAG-AFTRA local) raised her hand to say that she too had experienced one of my stories while growing up in Mobile, Ala.

My host in the Peach State was Sam Lukowski, union actor and grandson of my father’s best friend from the Baker-Whiteley tugboats, first mate Jerome “Romey” Lukowski.

Romey was born on Thames Street in the 1920s when it was a true seamen’s village with sweatshops making canvas sail, rowhouse brothels and good deals on anything a stevedore could pinch from a ship, the days when sailors came back from months-long runs to South America and the Far East with pockets full of cash to settle their bar tabs, exotic birds and monkeys.

“My father worked as a cook on merchant ships,” the woman said. “Growing up, we had monkeys that he brought home for pets. I’m so glad you told that story because no one ever believes me.”

And then she bought a book.

I have traveled cross-country – up and down, east to west and back again, navigating thousands of jigsaw cuts throughout the lower 48 – some three dozen times in the past 40 years.

The summer of 1978 was the first jaunt, driving to Chicago in a bottle-green Ford Granada to camp out on the shores of Lake Michigan, catch the Stones’ “Some Girls” tour at Soldier Field and interview Studs Terkel for my first byline in the Baltimore Sun.

The summer of 2017 was the first trip in which I did not drive solo and sleep in the truck at highway rest stops and supermarket parking lots.

After a half-century as a secular masmid, my eyes can’t take it anymore and my aversion to heights has deteriorated into a paralyzing phobia of crossing bridges. So, it was 3,000 miles by bus, train and hitching rides from friends who happened to be going my way, all preferable to the hassle and expense of air travel.

Eastman and Alvarez, the pride of Mt. St. Joseph (Macon Street Books)

I was driven from Pawleys Island, S.C., (where I read at a reception in a private home on the beach) to Big Maceo’s birthplace by a retired Baltimore mounted police officer named David Eastman. We had never met but knew each other on Facebook as fellow alumni of Mount St. Joseph High School.

Across the 370 miles due west from the Carolina shore, Eastman and I discussed all the things a couple of Baltimore boys stuck in cars for hundreds of miles talk about.

Such as the traditional waterfront “smokehound” (especially hardcore street drunks, the kind Romey Lukowski grew up with and certain Fells Point residents want to use private security to get rid of); the weird municipal savior that was William Donald Schaefer (Melon Head lived down the block from the Eastman family on Edgewood Street); and the saga of Johnny Paycheck, who was on the radio as we crossed the Waccamaw River and once shot a man in his Ohio hometown in a barroom argument over turtle soup.

“A real smokehound would drain the anti-freeze out of a car back when it was made out of wood alcohol,” said Eastman, MSJ class of ’63. “We’d find’em dead the next morning.”

The next morning and the next morning and eight or nine mornings after that found me in Ithaca, N.Y., after an overnight train ride from Chicago. In Ithaca, I stayed with native Baltimorean and poet Dean Bartoli Smith who had set me up with a gig at the Tompkins County Public Library.

“It’s always a guessing game when you’re a junk ball pitcher going from minor-league town to minor-league town searching for that one set of eyes that really gets what you’re trying to do,” said Smith of the writer’s game. “A tough life and a delicate art. “

[I knew I’d earned the right to call myself a true journeyman in 2000 when I gave a reading in Nashville supporting my collection of Orlo and Leini stories and no one showed up. Not a soul. I took a photo of the rows of empty folding chairs and have it taped to the wall above my workbench.]

Johnny's Gone Fishing
Johnny’s Gone Fishing coffeehouse, Carrboro, N.C. (Macon Street Books)

At Johnny’s Gone Fishing, a Carrboro, N.C., coffeehouse owned by Baltimore native Jan Halle, I read to about 20 people and sold 25 books. At the Tompkins library – a heavily promoted event with a live band, an art exhibit and a well-known local writer opening the show – more than 50 people showed up and I sold two books.

It was in Ithaca – on July 26, just two more stops and a few days left in the tour – that I learned that my Aunt Meely had died at age 82 in Baltimore. Time to pack up my notebooks and pencils and get my scribbling tuchus home.

 

Read Part 1: Ralphie’s Summer Vacation: Shabbos in Memphis!

Read: Ralphie’s Summer Vacation: Shabbos in Memphis, Part 2

Also see: A Talmudic Wrinkle in Time

Top photo: “Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown,” by Rafael Alvarez (Macon Street Books)

Rafael Alvarez is the author of “Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highandtown.” He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com.

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