A HALF GLOBE OF AN UPSIDE-DOWN MOON IS SINKING AS WE HEAD NORTH AT MIDNIGHT, THIS TIME FOR BALTIMORE AND A DAY OFF. I’VE GOT THIS ROCK-AND-ROLL ROUTINE DOWN NOW: INTO THE BUS AFTER THE SHOW AND ON THE ROAD BY midnight. A couple of mouthfuls of pizza, a down or two of football on the telly, and I retire to my chamber where I bash out a few e-mails on the old laptop before crashing. I wake up around four as we slip into the new city. Today, if it’s Monday, it must be Baltimore. I stumble past the bleary-eyed bellman as he looks with alarm at the size of our two huge buses. Today a junior suite in a corner tower, on the twenty-second floor, a bit of mindless television and I fall asleep around five, waking again about ten.
It’s another glorious Indian summer day, with temperatures in the high seventies, and as soon as I dispatch my journalistic duties I head for the streets. My entire knowledge of Baltimore is garnered from two sources: the movies of Barry Levinson and The Wire. I first met Barry back in the seventies in London when he was a writer for The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine. I love his movies. He is a very funny man and has what I now think of as a Baltimorean cheerfulness. (Everyone seems very cheery here. Maybe it’s because the sun is shining.) The Wire was my favorite TV series of the last two years. Impeccably acted, written, and directed, it has for two years been absolutely gripping television at its finest (HBO, of course). How can I reconcile these two Baltimores? The middle-class neighborhoods of the fifties and the crack ’hoods of today?
I think it ’ s interesting that women never went to the Moon. I think it ’s because the Moon controls their periods, and if they were on the Moon they’d have a period all the time.
A cheerful Haitian taxi driver gives me a preliminary tour, up Charles Street to the George Washington monument, then down again to Camden Yards, the home of the Baltimore Orioles. We cruise past Little Italy, and he drops me in Fell’s Point, whose tiny cobbled streets, old buildings, and place names (Thames Street, Shakespeare Street, Lancaster Street) remind me of Olde England. I pick up a water taxi and cruise the bay. It’s like Venice. Except for the view. Sunlight dances on the water in points of brilliant light, and the fresh air blows in my face, ruining my hairdo as we bounce from Captain James Landing to Tide Point. I’m reminded of other cities I have toured by water: Sydney, Dubrovnik, London; this is just as pleasant. Except for the view. So what about the view? Well, frankly, it’s butt ugly. Brutal rotting wharves, ancient peeling warehouses, and broken-backed iron structures tumbling toward the waterline. Venice it ain’t, but it is, well, almost beautiful in its seedy magnificence, in the same way that the ruined dockyards of the Thames can appear almost beautiful. It has a Dickensian beauty. The rot, the decay, the smell—especially the smell, which turns to sweet sickly molasses as we approach the Domino sugar plant. I decide that’s enough of the water-taxi experience. Maybe next time I should take a water limo.
I join the tourist throngs hanging around the sailing ship the U.S.S. Constellation in Harborplace and grab a bite at City Lights Seafood. Two Peruvians are playing amplified Gypsy Kings music to a small crowd. This is the brave new world of the tourist, listening to ethnic music from another continent while a newly constructed shopping mall sells plastic souvenirs imported from China. But I like tourism. Better tourism than armies. We are all essentially tourists on this planet, aren’t we? [Oh God, here he goes. The Planetary Tourist again. Where’s the delete button?—Ed.] (1,541 words later) So that is why I think we must all look after the planet.
I live in California. I have a stretch Prius. I send all my garbage to Ed Begley. And now we have the Governator: the man who popularized the sport of waitress lifting.
I dine at the Don Shula Restaurant. The menu is on a football. I don’t point out to the wide-shouldered manager that the football is the wrong shape for a limey. It should be round. Football, what I call football, is my addiction. I love it and have done all my life. Now, sadly, I have to call it “soccer” here.
I head out to the Charles Street Theatre to see a movie. The streets are deserted. A large brother spots me, crosses the street, and heads straight toward me. I brace myself. Do not give in to white panic. He probably just wants some cash. Wrong. He is a huge Python fan. Himself a comedian, Tom tells me he is going to make it big doing stand-up in L.A. and can he be my bodyguard tomorrow night? He needs it for his résumé. I tell him to put down he guarded my body tonight instead, and he goes off happily.
I watch some people catching up on their smoking in the Voodoo Bar. Smoking seems to be popular here still, the man in the hotel room next to mine has been kindly sharing clouds of it with me for twelve hours now. Ironically a sign tells me that this is a no-smoking room. Virginia was the place for smokers. That figures, I guess. It did introduce the foul practice to Europe. In Portsmouth at the restaurant where I brunched, people would hardly pause long enough in their coughing to suck in more tobacco. My cabdriver lit up the moment I got in. Thanks for sharing. It’s a puzzling habit. An addiction without reward. It kills you off without getting you off. I hope it dies out before we do. At George’s funeral I had the bad taste to thank Marlboro, “without whom we wouldn’t be here today.”
I got e-mail from Liv the other day saying she thought George performing “The Pirate Song” on Rutland Weekend Television was the bravest thing he ever did and that she wanted to be a pirate, too. Well, his dark sweet lady was the love of his life, and I know how much he loved her; a braver, finer, lovelier companion no man could ever find, and it breaks my heart to think of these last two years.
The Pirate Song
I want to be a pirate
A pirate’s life for me
All my friends are pirates
And they sail the BBC
I’ve got a jolly roger
It’s big and black and vast
So get out of your skull and crossbones
And I’ll run it up your mast
With a yo ho ho
And a yee hee hee
And a yo ho ho ho hum
With a yo ho ho
And a yee hee hee
And a yum yum yum yum yum
I’ve got a jolly roger
It’s big and black and vast
So get out of your skull and crossbones
And I’ll run it up your mast!