“Well, you have a good time,” she said as she shut her eyes. “Have a few laughs with your girlfriend. Tell her what an old fool your mom is, asshole.”
Weeks pulled his wrist out of her grasp and made his way out of her apartment. When he got outside it was snowing and he stood there for a minute, letting the flakes come down on him, hoping somehow they might make him feel light and white and clean. Like when he was a kid.
But the snow-magic didn’t work anymore. All he felt was soggy, middle-aged, and cold.
When he’d been a student at Calvert College, Tom rented an apartment on Thames Street, right across from the pier on which he’d once been in Sea Scouts. Back then, he thought, as he parked his car on Aliceanna Street, Fell’s Point had symbolized freedom, sex, drugs (black hashish right off the ship and carried in a seaman’s trunk right into his apartment), and an endless party. Even the names of the bars had seemed so quaint and cool. Besides Bertha’s, there was The Horse You Came in On, and The Admiral’s Cup, and The Brass Monkey… The cobblestone streets, the arty girls from Maryland Institute, the student filmmakers, the folksingers, the occasional Goucher Girl in rebellion against her rich parents… God, it had been great back then… a place where every day seemed to have an unlimited possibility for surprise and romance.
Now, however, as Weeks walked the few blocks toward the bar, he was stunned by how small and seedy everything appeared. The ramshackle little bars with their neon lights looked tawdry and trashy. Dead End Ville. Drunken students wandered from bar to bar looking for girls and drugs, just as Weeks himself had years ago-but now, to his jaundiced eye, they seemed hapless and lame.
He walked by a man sitting in the gutter with a torn shirt and a bloody nose. Behind him a woman screamed, “If you weren’t such a pussy you’d go back in ’ere and kick his ass, Terry!” The beat man looked up wearily and said, “Fuck you, babe. Don’t try and promote that Who Struck John shit wif me.” Weeks looked down at the guy and realized he only in his early twenties. He felt that he could already see the downward trajectory of the boy’s life… a few years of stumbling about in Fell’s Point, perhaps pretending to be some kind of artist, then either jail, addiction, or worse.
That’s what had happened to most of his old pals. So many of them gone the way of drugs, like Mike who died from a hot shot in The Bottom, and Brad who had been killed by a head-on collision while driving on pills down to Ocean City.
It had been a mistake to come back here, Weeks thought. What could he possibly find but sadness? The old story of the middle-aged man who tries in vain to find the lost spirit of his youth in a place that’s forever changed. It was pathetic, ridiculous. What he should do is just turn around now, go back to his car, and forget this absurd quest. Head back out the 95 and dive into the safety of his king-sized bed at the Quality Inn. That’s exactly what he should do.
And yet, he found himself opening the thick wooden door at Bertha’s and going inside, looking for something he knew he could never find, but drawn on in spite of that. Or perhaps because of it. Weeks had always had a weakness for lost causes.
Ty sat at the bar drinking Wild Turkey and a pint of amber beer back. He wore a white scarf and a camel’s hair coat. He looked, Tommy thought, a little like Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death.
As Weeks sat down, Ty put his bony arm around his shoulders and smiled. “I’m glad you made it, Tommy. I thought you might blow me off.”
“No way,” Weeks said. “But I can’t stay too long. Gotta fly out tomorrow.”
“Whoa,” Ty said. “Got a big meeting in Hollyweird?”
“No, nothing like that. But I do have a couple of dead-lines.”
“Good old Tommy,” Ty said. “You always were an ace student. First kid in the class with his hand up.”
Weeks wanted to protest that this wasn’t so. He hated being thought of as a good little academic. After all, he was as much a hipster as any of them, wasn’t he? But perhaps it wasn’t true. Perhaps he’d only given the appearance of being a rebel, while being careful not to burn too many bridges. The thought that he was playacting a badass used to torture him as a kid. He suddenly hated Ty for reminding him of his youthful cowardice, but his old friend was smiling at him with what seemed like real affection.
“What are you drinking?” Ty asked.
“Jack Daniel’s,” Tommy said. In Los Angeles these days he mostly drank juices or fizzy water. But here in Charm City a man still had to drink hard whiskey.
“Jack it is,” Ty said. “You look good for your age, Tommy. California must agree with you.”
“It’s all right. I’ve been doing fine.”
“Oh, come on,” Ty said. “I’ve read all about you in the Sun, and I’ve seen your movies. You specialize in action stuff. Tough guys.”
Tom felt his face redden. “Yeah, well… that’s how I got pigeonholed. Just The Business.”
“Sure,” Ty said. “I understand. But some of the old crowd might not get that. I’ve talked to guys who… actually think you’re representing yourself as a tough guy.”
Tommy winced. This was getting to be a drag. “Not me. I’m just a humble scribe doing a job of work.” He took his shot of Jack from the barmaid and downed it. It burned his throat and he had to repress a cough.
“Yeah, well that’s what I told them,” Ty said, looking at his watch. “Funny thing, out there you’re pigeonholed as a tough guy, and back here as an academic kind of dude. The many lives of Tommy Weeks.”
Tom signaled to order a second drink. “Who’s been saying that kind of lame shit about me?”
“Just some jerks,” Ty said. “Mouse Wiskowski and Bobby Hamm.”
Tom felt a sudden rush of sadness. Though he hadn’t seen either of them in twenty years, he hated the fact that they thought him a phony. In a weird way it mattered more to him what they thought about him than anyone he’d met in Los Angeles.
Now Ty reached over and massaged his stiff neck muscles. “You’re getting all tense back there,” he said. “I should never have mentioned it. Those guys don’t matter at all. I can tell you one person who’s said nothing but nice things about you. Ruth Anne. Those guys start in with their ‘He’s gone Hollywood’ crap, Ruth Anne takes up for you every time.”
“Is that right?” Tom said, taking another hit of the Jack Daniel’s. He tried to keep his voice level, as if this information was of no more interest than an Orioles score, but his breathlessness betrayed him.
As as kid, Ruth Anne had lived around the corner from him on Craig Avenue. Black-haired and green-eyed, she’d been the neighborhood darling before she became the homecoming queen at the University of Maryland. Every boy who ever met her fell madly in love with her, and Tom was no exception. But he had never gotten beyond “friend” status before. Now, even after all these years, the thought that she might actually think of him at all, much less argue among the old timers that he was still a true blue Baltimore guy (even if it wasn’t really true), cheered him up immeasurably.
“You still see her?” he asked now, not even trying to keep the surprise out of his voice.
“Sure I do,” Ty said. “She just recently came back to the old neighborhood. Lives only a few blocks away from me over on Chateau Avenue.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I am not,” Ty said. “Been through a lot of tough stuff, kiddo. Got divorced and ended up limping back to town. But she still looks great.”
“She does?” He knew that he sounded like the hopelessly smitten teenager he’d once been, but after his third Jack Daniel’s he didn’t care.
Ty smiled and rubbed his shoulders again.
“I promised you a surprise, old buddy, and that’s it. Ruth Anne’s having a party tonight and she absolutely insisted you come.”