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(This piece was written in early 2006. One amusing fact that never made it into the piece was that, in the course of my research, I was actually escorted out of one of the Power Plant dance clubs by a bouncer after a manager saw my notebook. The bouncer let me finish my beer and, on the way out, told me “you seem like a nice guy, I don’t know why they’re kicking you out.” He told me he was just doing his job. I decided to forego the obvious Cool Hand Luke quote.)

*****
When you’re alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go downtown.
– Petula Clark

There is this one block of Market Street in Baltimore where I’ve been spending a lot of time lately, mostly on the weekend, mostly late at night, just standing or walking around, watching.

Over the course of about ten hours, on four different nights, I’ve seen: a group of women in matching feather boas carrying an enormous, inflatable penis; two drunks complimenting a bouncer for his skill in subduing a friend of theirs (who, they concede, “never should have swung that bottle”); one drunk making fun of a deaf-mute; hundreds if not thousands of men wearing untucked, button-up shirts with loud, vertical stripes; hundreds if not thousands of acres of exposed female flesh, on nights when a coat and hat were not enough to keep me warm; four different pairs of young women on four different occasions, pretending variously either to make out with each other or to grind their crotches against one another’s thighs or both, to the loud encouragement of their male companions as well as male strangers who happened to be passing by; about a dozen drunken piggyback rides (all of which consisted of females riding males except for one in which a very large male leapt – apparently unexpectedly – onto the back of another male and which resulted in torn pants and a skinned knee); a young man holding a piece of bloody gauze to his head and answering a police officer’s questions; more than four dozen extra-stretched limousines, of which about two dozen were designed to resemble various models of sport utility vehicles, of which, in turn, about a dozen were based on GM Hummer H2s; the driver of a Hummer limo voicing loud, ugly theories concerning the immigration status of an African cab driver whose broken-down cab was blocking traffic; and – in a scene I don’t want to read too much into, but still – two young white men handing money to a middle-aged black man before being allowed to put their arms around two young black women and then climb with these young women into a decidedly un-ritzy limousine that quickly departed the scene.

I could go on, but perhaps you get the point.

*****
“Noting credible evidence that two bars at Power Plant Live served alcohol to underage college students, the city liquor board fined the developer who controls the entertainment venue $800 yesterday for violating state liquor law and vowed to forge ahead with legislation that would make it illegal for anyone under the age of 21 to enter a bar in the city.”
– Baltimore Sun, March 3, 2006
*****

Over breakfast one morning I learned of “kids getting sick… boys carrying intoxicated girls… [y]oung women sprinting toward musty corners… to urinate…” The newspaper article made me wonder what I was missing. I had found it possible to live in Baltimore for more than six years without once feeling the slightest inclination to visit the downtown dance-club complex known as Power Plant Live [FN 1], and yet here were all of these thousands of people making a veritable pilgrimage there every weekend, “some from as far away as… Delaware,” according to the Sun.

Power Plant Live, I realized, is the face of the city for a great many people – probably the only thing some of them know about Baltimore, this city whose future concerns me, this city suffering from apathy and neglect, this city that, each year, loses more residents than it gains.

I began to wonder what message this ambassador was carrying to these people.

*****
“Far from constituting a kind of backdrop that we can ignore at will…[our surroundings] affect not only physical health and mental grasp and agility but our sense of humanity’s pressing problems and unfinished business.”
– Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place
*****

Power Plant Live lies at the dead-end of Market Street, one block north of Lombard Street, two blocks north of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. On a Sunday afternoon in winter, the area is deserted and almost appealing. A wide brick sidewalk runs alongside Market, and then – as Market curves to the left around a traffic circle to join Water Street – the sidewalk opens into a plaza, also brick, about the size of a football field. A large, square fountain sits at the front of the plaza, just off the traffic circle, and on the other side of the fountain a wrought-iron fence encloses a courtyard – elliptical on side and bordered by rowhouse-style restaurants on the other – that takes up most of the plaza. The area inside the fence is Power Plant Live.

Though the fence is clearly visible, it is softened by a row of small evergreens in bulky concrete planters; the trees also happen to obscure whatever is at ground level inside the fence. Rising above the courtyard, two and three stories up, are the neon signs advertising the dozen or so bars, restaurants and clubs located within.

Inside the courtyard, low ornamental fences in front of the restaurants demarcate open-air seating areas. The center of the courtyard is open, uncluttered. A pavilion stands ready for conversion to an outdoor bar, and, when I lean my elbow on its counter and squint at the awkward two-story structure in the center of the courtyard, I can almost imagine that I’m somewhere I’d like to be: the English Gardens in Munich, perhaps, in the beer garden at the foot of the pagoda.

I open my eyes and read the first sign I see: Tiki Bob’s Cantina.

According to Google, Tiki Bob’s Cantina is home to “the number one beach party” in, variously, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Seattle, Dallas, Detroit and – where am I, again?

The illusion shattered, I drive to Fells Point for lunch.

*****
The building of cities is one of man’s greatest achievements.
-Edmund Bacon, The Design of Cities
*****

Maybe I’m being too hard on Power Plant Live. What’s the harm in a bunch of chain bars and clubs, anyway? Doesn’t the city benefit from having successful, tax-paying enterprises in a spot that sent two previous clubs into bankruptcy? [FN 2]

And it’s not that I have a problem with out-of-towners. I wasn’t born here, after all. At least because of Power Plant Live, people who might not otherwise visit Baltimore are exposed to the city. Perhaps today’s Power Plant Live patrons are tomorrow’s Fells Point pub-crawlers, and the next day’s Mount Vernon brunch eaters. Maybe, the week after next, they’ll be plastering “Live Baltimore!” bumper stickers on their cars. [FN 3]

Stranger things have happened.

*****
Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?
Don’t you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?
– Pussycat Dolls [FN 4]
*****

It is after 11 p.m. and the parking garage feels even colder than the street – which is to say extremely cold – on this mid-March Friday. The air looks greasy under pale yellow lights. A pair of women in brief denim skirts and spaghetti-strapped tanktops hurry on tall high heels toward the elevators. Four shadows drink from red plastic cups behind the tinted windows of a parked SUV. Tires bark and squeal toward the last open parking spaces. Loud shouts and taunts spill out of car doors and echo against the dingy concrete walls. Doors thud closed. A bottle smashes. Applause. Cheers.

On the sidewalk outside the garage a lanky boy with a firefighter mustache is passing a dollar to a panhandler. “Use it for…good use,” the benefactor drawls, his tongue thick with cold or drink or both. A group of girls pushes past, bare arms hugged to chests. “Oh my god I have to pee.” Four lanes of traffic rush down Lombard and all the lights are off in the office building across the street.

Around the corner, Market Street is choked with cars. Crowds – mostly white, mostly young – flood the sidewalk. Couples on dates, tight bunches of women walking fast, big ambling men in studiedly loose packs. “What the fuck, motherfucker, all I said was she has a sexy walk.” No one walks alone except for the panhandlers. A black man cuts back and forth through across the sidewalk, waving a card that shows the sign language alphabet. It only costs a dollar but no one is buying. Another black man in stained white pants blurts and sputters: “Hey, you got 35 cents? Hey, you got 55 cents?” Hunched figures sit wrapped in blankets in front of the McDonald’s but the sidewalk widens just there so you can keep your distance if you want to and everyone does. Ahead the sky is bright with gaudy neon. Three police officers and a bouncer in sunglasses stand at the opening in the fence, checking IDs, a thudding bass line calling low and sweet under everything.

In the blank bored windows of the clubs I see only my own blurry reflection, a man lamely dressed for the cold, the people rushing past me, some from as far away as Delaware.

I listen to Power Plant Live, and, save the bass, I hear only one thing. Why would you want to be out there when you could be in here?

I walk back to the garage and drive home to Baltimore.

*****
Footnotes
FN 1: Just so you know, the official name ends with an exclamation point, thus: Power Plant Live!

FN 2: Of course, one of these was named the Fish Market. It closed in 1989. There used to be a fish market there, of course, but still, respect for history aside, I just think it should have been obvious from the start that this wasn’t a good name for a dance club.

FN 3: This is just shorthand for “maybe they’ll move here.” Personally, I hate those “Live Baltimore!” stickers.

FN 4: Yes, I know that this song was originally (as in, last year) recorded by Tori Alamaze, and that her record label took it away from her and gave it to the essentially inflatable, poseable Pussycat Dolls. But, unfortunately for Alamaze, it wasn’t her version that got the bodies moving at Power Plant Live’s Have a Nice Day Café this St. Patrick’s Day. I have to go where the story takes me.

A can of turkey and gravy.

I spent the day after Thanksgiving helping to drag a dead animal out of the woods. I guess that probably sounds unremarkable to long-time Montana residents, but back in Baltimore the only animal carcasses you ever see are road-killed rats, so this was a new one for me. Out east we don’t know a lot about hunting, like who does it and why, and even if we do know someone who does it they are generally considered a little oddball or eccentric, to be discussed in hushed tones with Significant Glances. Did you know Bob is a hunter?

Sometimes I would come across mention of hunting in the Baltimore Sun, like when Maryland would issue a few black-bear permits out in the western part of the state, where there does seem to be some of what you might call chafing as we humans sprawl deeper and deeper into bear territory. Some people were outraged by these hunts, and some were indifferent to them, but no matter what your feelings were, it was strange to come across pictures of, say, a brown-eyed eight-year-old girl posing with the first dead bear of the season, and then just finish your coffee and head off to work in a city where the only gunshots you ever hear are generally followed with sirens. So while I technically knew that, if I wanted to, I could get in the car, drive two hours west, and “harvest” some animals, really these newspaper articles had the feel of dispatches from a strange and far-off place, and hunting was always something Someone Else did.

That all changed, of course, when we moved to Montana. We arrived in August, so our first months here coincided with the run-up to and opening of various game seasons, and after a while I started to get used to pickup trucks with rifles hanging in their back windows and the big full-color supplements in the Sunday paper advertising guns, ammunition, camo clothing, “game saws,” and the like. I even got to know a few hunters, and, in talking to them, I started to understand some of the historical, cultural, and economic dimensions of the sport that had eluded me before.

The economic rationale in particular was a new one on me, since any hunters I knew back east generally traveled pretty far to do it, making it more of an expensive and rare vacation indulgence than a lifestyle. Here, of course, someone can drive fifteen minutes out of town and be back with an elk by lunch time, a year’s worth of meat for the cost of a license and some gas and bullets. This is the sort of thing that can get a guy thinking, especially as he tries to adjust to a cut from east-coast to western wages. I’m not saying I’m champing at the bit to go kill something myself – there’s the little matter of gutting and butchering, which I’m frankly not sure I could handle, and besides, I don’t even walk to my mailbox without my bear spray, so the idea of purposely entering the territory of hyperphagic grizzlies would take some working up to – but let’s just say I’m curious.

So I was sitting around in my bathrobe the day after Thanksgiving, trying to decide if it had been long enough since I’d had any turkey that I could reasonably have a little more, when Law Dog, a new friend of ours, called and asked if I wanted to come get this dead deer with him. He’d shot two of the things on Thanksgiving but had only brought one of them out. Law Dog has been one of my main informants thus far on Montana hunting culture, and he had told me only a few days earlier that there is an unwritten rule in these parts to the effect that, when someone asks you to help him carry out some meat, you just do it, so of course I said yes.

A half-hour later, we were in Law Dog’s 4-Runner headed out of town. His friend, The Professor, was riding shotgun (although in fact it was a rifle he had along). I can’t of course tell you where Law Dog’s secret hunting spot is, but I will say that it’s close to town, which accords with his overall philosophy when it comes to hunting, i.e., that hunters should be good stewards of the environment, up to and including trying not to burn $150 worth of gas on a hunting trip. (This is a guy who says he won’t take you hunting until you read Posewitz’s Beyond Fair Chase, a book on “ethical hunting.”)

“I can’t say that I like the killing part, but I do think this is a good way for humans to get their protein,” Law Dog said, as we bounced along a snow-covered Forest Service road. “It reproduces itself, and it’s not all full of steroids and antibiotics.”

The Professor, who is in his forties but only started hunting three years ago, agreed. “I actually came to it out of an interest in eating healthier. My wife and I were already into organic foods, and it seemed like a natural next step to take responsibility for actually getting the food onto our table.”

The Professor wanted to try for his own deer, so after we’d checked to see that Law Dog’s kill was still where he’d left it, we set off for a couple of hours’ walk through the rolling, snow-blanketed hills. We didn’t follow a trail, of course, instead striking out through thick brush and struggling to keep our footing as we clambered up the steep slopes. The snow was deep and so dry and powdery that the occasional wind gusts threw it around like flour or fine sand.

The Professor never did get a clear shot at a deer, and, as the sun started to sink out of sight, we decided to turn back, descending from the ridge line down a precipitous hillside and into a densely forested bottom land. The firs closed in around us, their coats of snow glowing magically in the last of the light. I could see no more than twenty feet in any direction and felt enfolded in the forest – really in the forest – in a way I never normally do on a run-of-the-mill hike. It had something to do with being out here for a reason, combined with the way our earlier quiet stalking had tuned my senses and sharpened me to the slightest sounds and movements. We were fifteen minutes from downtown Missoula but in one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen.

Back at Law Dog’s cache, there was ripe material for philosophizing about the cycle of life: not only were we there for our dinners, but an eagle had taken a magpie that had been feeding on one of the gut piles, leaving fluffy gray feathers strewn about. Law Dog and The Professor prepared the deer for dragging by tying it to a ski pole they could both use as a sort of yoke. I shouldered The Professor’s rifle, and we walked the mile or two back out to the truck through the darkening night. As we trudged along in the snow, a full moon came up over the trees, big and yellow and bright as a house on fire.

There was this lie a friend of mine would tell. I’m a D.C. native, she would say, when people asked where she was from. But her family hadn’t moved there until she was three. Well, no one’s actually from D.C., she said, when I brought this up.

Am I?

I was born there, at George Washington University Hospital, across the street from the hospital where my father was born 44 years before me. We lived in the city for only four years before my parents bought their first house and we moved away to the Virginia suburbs, so my memories of the city are glancing and fragmented. But four years was long enough for some malarial vestige of that time and place to enter my blood, where it still circulates and surprises me now and then with rusty little mirror shards in the back of my eyeballs: unnameable faces, and the dust in the corners of the rooms.

My parents were renting a small apartment above an awning shop on 18th Street, in Adams Morgan. To protect me from the shadows at the dark end of the hall outside my bedroom, my mother painted an enormous tiger on the wall, copied from a book we’d read together. This wasn’t the only feline who watched over us: one day a stray cat arrived across the rooftops, accepting our offer of milk and an indoor bed and later returning the favor by warning my father of a burglar. In the mornings, the gray carpet in the living room was spotted with the cat’s overnight cockroach kills, golden-brown and smashed flat, like raisins from the bottom of the box.

My mother brought home stacks of books from the library where she worked, and we kept them as long as we wanted. My father’s Royal typewriter was stationed on a makeshift desk, a door laid across two filing cabinets. I ranged my toys on a forest-green wooden bench that was rough at the edges where it had been sawed too quickly.

Outside the apartment were careworn streets and dirty sidewalks, blocks of old row houses and fragrant little stores where the lights were too dim and the linoleum was turning gray. I stole a birthday card from the Koreans and was made to apologize, the shopkeeper leaning down toward me, the strange face a different color and shape from my parents’, hard to sex, impossible to read.

I didn’t know what heart attack meant but I knew it was strange that a grown man was lying down on the front steps of the building across the street from ours. People stood near him, touched him, placed a folded jacket under his head. We watched until the ambulance took him away.

My first snow was a blizzard that left towering drifts, and I was too short to see out of the trenches where the sidewalks used to be. In spring and summer we climbed the long hill to the playground in Kalorama Park. Rain formed wide puddles under the swing sets and tempted me away from the swings. I slapped the water with the palm of my hand and watched the shockwaves spread, the mirror image dissolve into shimmers.

The Showboat night club burned and the firemen stretched their hoses back and forth across the streets and along the gutters, grey and fat and ponderous like elephants’ legs. Sutton’s first fire, reads the caption in the photo album, but all I remember is stepping over the hoses.

My mother was away on an overnight trip for the first time in my life and I jumped from a ladder and broke my leg, the ankle bent ninety degrees inward like a twig that is too green to snap. It didn’t hurt until I was in the car, wrapped in the scratchy afghan that had belonged to my grandmother. Flashing red lights and my father’s eyes, big in the mirror. The policeman just waved us on to the hospital once my father explained.

The cat should have been safer in our apartment than in the alleys, but he misjudged a leap from the high windowsill in the living room and pulled our television down on top of himself. I was in school when it happened, and had to have it explained to me. They put him to sleep, I repeated to my teacher the next day. They had to put him out of his misery.

Now the awning shop sells name-brand lamps and ornaments, now there is a James Bond-themed martini bar across the street. A year or two ago, I read that a social club for rich young Republican men organized a party in an Adam’s Morgan nightclub for 500 of their class, and the Bush twins were among the 800 too many who had to be turned away.

By now the apartment will have been renovated, the tiger hidden behind washes of white paint. The catacomb is sealed and I can never enter again.

The place I’m from.

But sometimes I can remember how tall the buildings looked from down there, a grownup’s hand arching upward and a kind voice telling me to look.