Passenger(18)

“Okay.”

“Junk never disappears, never really goes nowhere. It just gets relocated. You move it from here to there, there to here. But it never leaves. It’s always here.” Clarence’s eyes narrow. “What you do for a living, Mozart?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I was offered a job playing piano at a bar, but I don’t think I can go back there.”

“No?”

“It’s a long story.”

Clarence laughs. His molars look like silver ball bearings. “Shit, man,” he says. “I hear you loud.”

Jostled by the crowd, I find myself at one point face-to-face with an attractive young reporter who jabs a microphone at me. Behind her stares the Cyclops eye of a television camera.

“What does this hike mean for the people of Northeast Baltimore this winter?” the attractive young reporter wants to know. She is white, pretty, well-groomed, smelling strongly of expensive perfume. She looks at me like someone watching a wild animal through the bars of a cage.

“Zap,” is all I say before being whisked away by the crowd.





*





The day moves into evening and concludes in the water damaged basement of an apartment complex on Saratoga Street. It is Clarence’s place, this basement, although it is unclear if he actually lives here or lives in one of the apartments which allow him access to this basement. Or if he has just broken the lock on the door and let himself in. Yet he shows it off proudly, his only complaint being the arguments of the couple in the apartment directly above his. But it is home, he says, grinning his toothy grin.

The basement room is a cornucopia of skin magazines, bottled beer, and a scattered assortment of tennis shoes. The walls are barren sheetrock, water damaged and soggy in places, erected without the benefit of insulation directly against cinderblock walls. The randomly placed furniture coughs up clouds of dust when you sit on it. Only the stereo system—an impressive network of wireless, wall-mounted speakers and digital hardware, all blinking, beeping, and gleaming—seems worth anything. Music comes on, heavy and bass-thumping, and Clarence quickly fits my hand with a bottle of Rolling Rock. Throughout the evening, a number of Clarence’s friends filter in and out of the place, each more colorful and boisterous than the last. I sit by myself on a worn couch with birds etched into the fabric, nursing a room temperature Rolling Rock, wondering how the hell I got here, and watch the party unfold. There are high-fives and fists thrust into the air. They clap each other on the back and are proud of the day’s efforts. The large-breasted woman with the bullhorn from the march is in attendance, and she is sucking down beer like it’s her job. I catch her accidentally spill some on Clarence’s CD collection before she slinks away, thinking no one has noticed.

An attractive black woman sits beside me on the couch at one point during the evening. At least, I believe she is attractive judging by the admiration of her peers, though I have no personal knowledge of what I find attractive. She has a nice figure which is accentuated by her low-cut, tight-fitting, animal-print clothes, and her eyes are large and brown and thickly-lashed. The lobes of her ears are stretched to twice their normal length by the weight of pendulous earrings and her short, styled hair is practically shellacked to her scalp.

“Hey,” she says. “I’m Tabitha.” She extends a long-fingered hand capped with two-inch nails painted a startling pink. “Hi, baby.”

I shake her hand. “Hi.”

“You’re the spy with no name,” says Tabitha, making it sound like the lyric from an America song. She has the dreamy, pouting face of someone on dope. “Clarence, he told me all about you.”

“Yeah?”

“Said I’m a spy, too. Sent me over to get some information from you. Said I can use all the torture I want.”

“That’s good of him.”

“What you doing hanging out with Clarence, anyway? Don’t you know he’s a deadbeat?”

“Seems okay to me.”

“Well,” says Tabitha, admonishing me with her acrylic nails, “he’s a deadbeat son of a bitch. Owes my sister like three hundred bills. Me, too, but not as much. We used to go together, too. You know that?”

I shake my head.

“It’s true,” she tells me. “Think I’d learn a lesson, huh? Think I’d put this brain to work. No such luck. I been foolish since the day I was born. That’s what my momma says, anyway. What do you do?”

“I play piano and own an apartment. Apparently.”

“You rich?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, yeah, you don’t look rich.”

“If I am, I have no idea where my money is.”

“Me, too,” Tabitha says. She leans closer to me now, nearly resting her chin on my shoulder. She smells warm and domestic, like a wife. “I used to be rich.”

“What happened?”

“Was robbed. By every goddamn man I ever met. Clarence Wilcox included. I tell you he’s a son of a bitch?”

“Yes,” I say. “A deadbeat son of a bitch.”

Tabitha smiles and looks instantly tired. “You’re funny. What’d you say your name was?”