I often joke that Baltimore is like that casual drug-using, verbally abusive boyfriend you can’t quite get rid of. You know it’s fatally flawed, but once you get close to it, you start making excuses and saying things like “It’ll change” and “if we can just get rid of the instigators, the problem will be solved.” But it never changes. It only gets close and breaks your heart when you realize it’s not getting any better.
Even though it never quite gets right, though– even though peg-arm, peg-leg guy has been begging for change on the corner of President and Pratt for years and will continue to do so, probably, until he expires– you still love it. Or at least I do. I know Baltimore’s not for everyone. Hell, when I started college at UMBC, I was pretty certain Baltimore wasn’t for me.
First of all, I was a farm girl. I’d never lived closer than twenty miles to the nearest Wal-Mart (which was, incidentally, the premier shopping destination). Five years ago– five short, sweet years ago– I had never heard of BCBG, thought I was chic in Pumas and ripped jeans, and saw a beauty in swimming holes that even now seems faded in comparison to my memories. Secondly, after my love of rural life, I was a DC lover. I saw that DC was bigger, more internationally recognized, offered better municipal services, and had more free attractions than Baltimore. It was a cultural center. The Philadelphia to our region’s Pittsburgh. Maybe even the New York to the region’s Allentown.
But once I was enrolled at UMBC, I started to explore Baltimore. The college fraternities would charter these buses downtown, and for a few dollars they would drop you off at 10 p.m. and take you back to campus at 2a.m.– essentially, they were designated drivers. My friend Carolyn and I would take the drunk bus down to Fells Point on Thursday nights, getting served alcohol at a ridiculously young age. We’d stroll the walkways along the water, picturesque but rancid with the smell of restaurant Dumpsters and rotten Inner Harbor backwash… party with the college set and narrowly avoid citations for underage drinking, or worse… shoot pool at a downtown hall with unimaginably high rates, each honing our skills while honing our game. And somewhere in there, I started falling for Baltimore.
Out of nowhere, I was charmed by Charm City. Everything was so fun, and comfortable– the homey feeling that all the neighborhoods offer, thanks to the fact that Baltimore isn’t a cohesive city. It’s a collection of neighborhoods. Fells Point was a different experience from Canton, which was different from Washington Village, worlds away from Mount Washington though they shared a name. The Inner Harbor quickly became passe, and I think I was even legal before I ever bothered with Federal Hill. I loved every nook and cranny I found, from yardsales up on Erdman Avenue on Sunday mornings before pool league, to self-aware ritzy dining at Pazo and the newly created HarborEast.
The summer between junior and senior year in college, I didn’t bother going home. I just stayed in Baltimore. I didn’t have a car, or a job lined up, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter– I walked to Belvedere Square, learned North Baltimore’s unintuitive roadways like the back of my hand, and picked parts for my old Jeep from Crazy Ray’s. I used to cruise that beater up and down York Road, into downtown, and across Caton Avenue and the eff-it-it’s-Wilkens Avenue that meanders into Catonsville to my best friend’s house. I had gone from convinced that my hometown was my first love to wondering whether I’d love anyplace more than Baltimore. I loved tree-lined Lake Avenue, from “the 83″ all the way to its casual terminus at our street. I loved driving into Charles Village past Loyola, only to discover there is nothing remotely interesting in Charles Village except Video Americaine and the Paper Moon Diner.
The city definitely left an indelible smudge on me. It’s gritty, and at its best hearkens back to that John Waters time, that Oriole Park opening night time, that Johnny Unitas time. A nostalgia that you revel in, even as it reveals that you’re in a solidly middle-class town with good values and gentrification and cute touristy boutiques. At the end of that summer– even though I didn’t make a particularly good living, or do much of anything besides bounce around between working for and dining at my favorite Baltimore restaurants– it only seemed natural to move off-campus and find an apartment.
I really lucked out with this apartment. I viewed several, but in this one I found a location close to UMBC, the pre-Industrial Revolution charm I’d so loved in the house I was raised in, and plenty of space to spread out and plant some roots. I came in with the trunk my great-grandmother used to ferry up and down the Chesapeake on trips to vacation on the island; everything else I used to furnish the place, I gradually accumulated from yardsales and Craigslist. (Craigslist is the other love I’ve acquired during my time here, but that’s another story for another post.)
It’s not the jobs I had here that I remember, or even the textbook education I received. Partying with Jami in ways that make me look back with equal parts cringe and fondness, I remember. Taking absolutely reckless risks and realizing that I was flying completely solo without a safety net, I remember. Being too proud to ask my mom for money, but too desperate not to, is burned into my memory as well. Remember me making so little money freelancing, I almost moved into the Copycat to lower my rent– before my mom and grandmother put me on a guilt trip about how my grandfather would lie awake in his grave, worrying? Remember going to every Catholic church in Baltimore, only to realize that I am Catholic in ethnicity but not in faith? Remember finding solace at Charm City Yoga, but not to the tune of $140 a month? I remember getting locked out of my work and going instead to the house where American Psycho could have been filmed. I remember Karate Explosion. I remember Lauren Tonikola, and Marcus Gross, and dancing to Sly & the Family Stone with the windows open, unnecessarily loud, at all hours. I remember creating extraordinarily elaborate costumes for Halloween in Fells Point. Doing the YMCA on the bar in our Village People costumes. Making oversize pots of stew and sharing containers of it with Homeless Dave, who keeps going back to jail to get a warm bed, and finally getting what Marc Steiner was complaining about.
I have older memories, too, of being here, like driving through the old Druid Hill Park neighborhood and knowing that, when it was in its glory and houses dotted the lake, my grandfather lived here. I have his memory drifting in and out of different parts of the city, stories he told me, the knowledge that a distant cousin of his still lives here. I have my first great love, and my first baffling heartbreak. And second. And third. I have me realizing that heartbreak isn’t that baffling, or that breaking. I have endless memories of rock concerts, sailing the Chesapeake after way too many beers and entirely too late after any reasonable bedtime, discovering that I… love… textiles and clothes, the feeling of the ground moving out from under me and fundamentally shifting when I finished reading Lolita, and the shock of innumerable other discoveries I’ve made over the course of my time living in Baltimore.
Somewhere along the way, I became a city girl. I don’t know when, or how in the hell, it happened… but I became a traffic-ignoring, mace-carrying, side-street-navigating city girl whose only MO was to explore, instead of to hide. Baltimore’s changed me, and the lessons of it (some of which I’m still realizing) will stay with me for years to come. Living in the DC suburbs is going to be different, that’s for sure. But I’ll still drive up and see my old City by the Bay. And visiting Baltimore will be a real pleasure, a bite to savor after a long drive to pound familiar streets. It’ll be like going home. And maybe even meeting up with your now-ex-boyfriend for coffee– you know which one. The one who never quite got it together, but for whom you will always have an impossible degree of fondness.
