The Fountain Of Highlandtown

BASILIO

I learned to live in the dark this year when I quit my job, sold everything I owned, and moved in with my grandfather.

This new life makes the simplest things complicated, even for a guy who decides one day to quit his job, sell everything he owns and go live in the dark.

But that's my problem.

Grandpop would tell you that.

It's a fine summer night in Baltimore and I am walking from Grandpop's house to meet Katherine, who is young and beautiful and smart and almost completely unknown to me.

I haven't told her much about myself, hardly anything except that my grandmother died in the hospital where she works, that my grandfather stopped sleeping in their bed the day she passed away and that it would be better if I met her where she lives than the other way around.

I said all this last week when I found her standing in line at the Broadway market. I was buying fresh fruit for Grandpop and she was picking up scallops and shrimp and pints of shucked oysters for a dinner party at her apartment.

Okay, she said, maybe we can do something, and borrowed a pencil to scratch her number across my bag of peaches.

And so I am walking from the little Highlandtown rowhouse where my father was born and raised, passing bakeries and record stores and coffee shops, on my way to Katherine's apartment a few miles away, up around Johns Hopkins Hospital.

It's early (I had to get out of the house) and there's still a pink wash of early evening light across the sky as I walk down Macon Street to Eastern Avenue.

The street jumps with kids on skates, Saturday shoppers coming home with carts and bundles, and heavy women squirting down the gutters.

On the Avenue, middle-aged sports with slick hair and brown shoes with white socks wait on the word; Greek men who haven't shaved for two days stand on the corners, telling lies; packs of heavy-metal kids graze for drugs and kicks and young girls walk by, dressed up for each other.

My eye swims through the center of the composition but the margins are crowded with thoughts of Katherine.

What will she wear?

What does she smell like?

What hangs on her walls?

I think: How will our time pass?

And, if things go well, will we find our way back to Macon Street?

Fat chance.

My world is ruled by Grandpop and he is driving me crazy.

Right up the wall.

I am afraid that it won't last long enough for me to get everything done.

Every morning at breakfast he says the same thing: "Why are you here?"

Like he forgets that I am living with him between the time we go to bed and the time we wake up.

All night, Grandpop tosses and turns on the sofa bed downstairs, like he's being chased, until the break of day when he asks: "Why are you here?"

And then: "It's morning, turn off that light. You think I'm a millionaire? How were you raised?"

Grandpop was so poor growing up in Spain that one summer he carved an entire bicycle out of wood, wheels and all, so he would have something to ride besides an ox-drawn plow.

It doesn't matter that he's had it good in this country for 60 years, that, in his own words, he "eats like a king" and can lock the front door to a warm home he has owned for twice as long as I've been alive.

It does not matter that he's got a good pension from the shipyard and Social Security and more money in forgotten bank accounts than I have made in 28 years on Earth.

None of that means shit if you are foolish enough to leave a light on in a room you have left or care to read or draw or scratch your ass by electric lamp before the sky outside has turned to pitch.

And there is no reason to use lights at night because at night you sleep.

Electricity, says Grandpop, is money. And a poor man can not afford to waste either of them.

Bent over and angry, pointing to an offending 15-watt bulb, he says: "You think I'm a millionaire?"

When I try to tell him not to worry, that I'll help pay for it and it's only pennies anyway - when I smile and say, "Hey Grandpop, we got it pretty good in this country" - he says I can go live with somebody else if I want to waste money.

He asks: "Why are you here?"

But he doesn't charge me a dime to sleep in his bed and eat his food and he doesn't say a word when I do what I need to do to get my work done.

Just as long as I don't turn on any lights.

God Bless America.

God Bless Grandpop.

I cross Eastern Avenue and dart between traffic into Patterson Park, where Grandpop used to play soccer way back when with other expatriates from around the world.

It's hard for me to imagine his legs strong enough to kick a ball the length of the park; he's barely able to climb the steps in the middle of the night to make sure I'm not reading under the covers with a flashlight. But up on dusty shelves near the sofa where he lays at night and talks in his sleep like he's trying to make someone understand, there are trophies to prove it.

"Grandpop," I say. "Tell me about playing soccer in the land of baseball."

The Pagoda sits on the highest hill in the park, a surreal stack of Oriental octagons in the middle of a wide, rolling lawn; a weird obelisk of Confucius bordered all around by narrow brick rowhouses, the first in Baltimore with indoor bathrooms.

When you stand atop the Pagoda you can see all of the Holy Land, all the way past Fort McHenry to freighters in the harbor and the Francis Scott Key Bridge in the mist.

I would like to take Katherine up there and present her with the view, but it's only open on Sunday mornings when the Friends of the Park are around to let you in and keep an eye on things.

Grandmom and Grandpop used to walk me up here when I was a kid and you could go up to the top and see the whole city. They would stay down on the ground and wave up to me and I can see them now like it was yesterday, smiling through their broken English: "Doan breaka you neck."

After awhile Grandmom couldn't make the walk anymore and as I got older other things became important and I didn't care to visit Macon Street so much.

The city let the Pagoda rot while punks and drunks and whores and glue-heads got up inside of it, doing things that made the paint peel. The city tried to tear it down a few years ago when some goof on dope fell off and killed himself but the good citizens saved it and now you can only go up on Sunday mornings.

I tried to paint the Pagoda for three years before I moved in with Grandpop and I never got it right.

I stare up at it and fix its scale in my head.

I wonder: Does Katherine know any of this stuff? Does she care? Will she want to know once she knows how much I care?

What I know about Katherine you could pour into a thimble with room to spare. She is young and beautiful and smart and puts on dinner parties with scallop and shrimp.

I don't even know if she's from Baltimore.

I leave the Pagoda and walk out of the park onto Pratt Street, passing families of Lumbees and Guatemalans and black folks as the neighborhood change the closer I get to downtown.

I hit Broadway and turn north on a wide stretch of asphalt that rises up beyond the statue of Latrobe and the derelict housing projects named in his honor; up from the harbor a good mile or two where Broadway meets Hopkins, where my grandmother died 20 years ago, leaving Grandpop all that time and how much more to lie in the dark, conserving kilowatts to save pennies he doesn't count anymore.

Katherine's apartment is in the shadow of the hospital's great dome.

The neighborhood used to be called Swampoodle before Hopkins started gobbling it up, back when Bohemians lived there, in the days when Grandpop played soccer in Patterson Park and Grandmom

sat on a bench with her girlfriends and watched.

I tried to paint the Hopkins dome too, in the last days before I moved in with Grandpop, but all I could think about was what we lost there.

I smeared the canvas with vinegar and vowed that I would not paint pictures of buildings anymore.

KATHERINE

I didn't know what to expect with this guy.

I haven't dated much lately because they've all been the same, but I said yes to this guy right in the market. I knew it would be different, but I didn't know how.

I certainly didn't expect to be picked up for our first date on foot.

He knocks on the door, comes in with a polite hello, and looks around.

Next thing out of his mouth: "I walked over because I sold my car when I moved in with my grandfather."

But he doesn't say what one has to do with the other.

He tells me that my dress reminds him of the sunflowers his grandmother used to grow in her backyard until the summer she passed away "right there," and he points through the window to the hospital.

"That exact same color," he says, staring just a little too long before telling me "it's gorgeous outside," and would I like to talk a walk?

He's cute, in a funny way, like a kid; younger than me and a nice change from the clever men with tasseled loafers and Jaguars, so suave and witty until they find out I'm a doctor and then they really start acting like kids.

I don't mind walking and out we go, strolling south on Broadway toward the water.

I'd bet you a lobster that we're headed for the bars in Fells Point, where every man I've dated in this town goes sooner or later, like its the only place in Baltimore that sells beer.

But he doesn't mention Fells Point or any special restaurant or destination; he just keeps up a pleasant chatter about things you can't imagine - wooden bicycles and chestnut trees and the Rock of Gibralter (I've seen it, he hasn't) - and now we're cutting across the side streets and through the alleys, moving east to the neighborhoods where my patients live and die.

He doesn't say what he does for a living and I wonder if it's anything at all, if maybe the good doctor is out for an evening with the unemployed. He must do something because his shoes and pants are speckled with little smudges of paint.

Maybe he's the Cartographer of Baltimore, so well he knows these cobbled paths crowded with dogs and kids and garbage cans.

"You know what I love?" he says. "I love to walk through the alleys and look in peoples' houses. Especially at night when the lights are on and the shades are up. You can look right in and see people eating and watching TV, talking to each other, you know, just living."

He doesn't ask me what I do and it's a relief not to have to answer all the questions, a blessing not to feel the evening turn when it finally comes out.

It seems enough for him just to know that I work in a hospital.

Our walk is slow and evening falls with a warm, clean breeze from the harbor.

How odd, I think, looking into the tiny concrete yards where kids splash in wading pools, Moms watching from lawn chairs with their feet in the water, old men in their undershirts, listening to the Oriole game and drinking beer; how pleasantly odd not to talk about what you do for a living.

I will extend him the same courtesy for as long as it lasts.

At the end of an alley we stop in front of a corner bar called Miss Bonnie's and he points out the red and blue and green neon floating out from behind block glass in the windows.

He talks about colors as if they are alive and in between all the loose words he talks about his grandfather.

"Grandpop won't let me turn on any lights. He sits at the kitchen table all day circling crime stories in the paper with a red pencil. Nothing bad has ever happened to him here, but he says America is going to the dogs."

An Lumbee girl on a tricycle zips between us and he talks about the shades of red and brown in her cheeks, "like autumn leaves."

He says that American Indians are the only minority his grandfather has any sympathy for because there was no New World left for them when things went bad at home.

Now we're in the park, walking quietly until we reach the Pagoda, the sun going down behind it like a tangerine, that's what he says, "a big, fat tangerine."

He shakes the gate on the iron fence around the Pagoda but you don't have to shake it to see that it's locked.

"Grandpop forgets that I'm living with him between the time we go to bed and the time I come down for breakfast. Every day we start from scratch."

"So why do you stay?"

He turns from the Pagoda and we walk east across the park toward Eastern Avenue and the Greeks.

Just beyond the railroad bridge marking the incline that gives Highlandtown its name, he spies a wooden stand on the sidewalk and says: "Wanna a snowball?"

I get chocolate with marshmallow and he asks for grape, fishing out a couple of dollars from the pockets of his white jeans.

We pause at a bus stop and I wonder if maybe we're going to catch one to take us to God knows where.

Holding out his palm, he invites me to sit down and I think: This bench is the sidewalk cafe in Paris that the plastic surgeon wanted to take me to last month until he found out that a ticket to France would get me across the ocean and wouldn't get him anywhere.

We sit, the distance of five hands between us, and I look up to see that above our heads hangs one of the most bizarre landmarks in a city filled with them.

Up against the sky: the Great Bolewicki Depression Clock.

Bolted to the front of an appliance store called Bolewicki's, it has a human face and crystal hands filled with bubbling water - the little hand bubbling lavender and the big hand bubbling pink - and around it glow lights shaped into words that say: "It's not too late, it's only . . ."

And then you read the time.

Like right now, eating snowballs at a bus stop on a Saturday night in Baltimore, it's not too late for anything: It's only ten past seven.

"I've been to Germany and Switzerland a half-dozen times," I say, "and I've never seen a clock like this."

"It's something," he says. "I tried painting this clock for three months."

"You got hired to paint the Bolewicki clock? How many coats did it take?"

That does it!

He starts laughing and can't stop; a wild, crazy laugh from way back in his throat and I start to laugh too because he's got such a funny, genuine laugh, like some strange bird.

Tears come to his eyes and he's spewing crystals of purple ice, trying to catch his breath.

And somewhere inside of this laugh I decide that I like this man and surrender to whatever the night may bring as the No. 10 stops to let people off beneath the Great Bolewicki Depression Clock in the middle of Eastern Avenue and my date with a guy named Basilio whose tongue is the color of a ripe plum.

He gets a hold of himself and says: "I wish old man Bolewicki would let me paint his clock. It would be the first money I've made with a brush in a long time."

He looks me in the eye.

"I tried to paint a *picture* of it."

"You're an artist?"

"Yeah," he says, looking up. "This thing was so hard, Katherine. You see the water bubbling in those hands, like bubble lights at Christmas . . . did your tree have bubble lights when you were a kid? I loved those things, you don't see 'em anymore. But I couldn't get the water right, I couldn't make it look like it was really bubbling."

I watch as he loses himself in the clock, the big hand bubbling pink and the smaller one pumping lavender - "It's not too late, it's only . . ." - and he catches me looking.

"Let's go," he says.

We walk deeper into the neighborhood and he points out things I know and things I don't.

"That's a great little place," he says as we pass Garayoa's Cafe Espanol, where, he tells me, they serve squid stuffed with their own tentacles and cooked in a sauce made with the ink.

I don't tell him that I have broken bread there with an investment banker, a screen writer and a child psychiatrist.

"The ink bubbles up in a thick dark sauce that shimmers deep green just above the surface," he says. "I tried painting with it once - thought it would be perfect for a sad night sky. But it dried ugly brown."

At the next corner, Basilio passes our empty snowball cups to a short man selling produce from the trunk of a gigantic Pontiac and in return the man hands each of us a small, brown pear.

"Lefty," says Basilio, shaking the guy's hand.

"Senor," says the man with a Greek accent, looking me over and winking at Basilio. "How's your old *abuelo* my friend?"

"He's good Lefty, real good," says Basilio. "I'll tell him you said hello."

"You do that, senor," he says. "Enjoy your evening."

We move away in silence, biting the fruit as the sky turns dark and pear juice runs along my mouth. Basilio pulls a spotless white handkerchief from his back pocket and wipes my chin, cleaning his own with the back of his hand and it is all so very simple and nice . . .

Until we come upon a narrow lane paved with brick and identified by stained-glass transoms as the 600 block of South Macon Street.

Basilio points down the long row of identical rowhouses, orange brick with white marble steps before each of them.

"I live down there with Grandpop," he says, pausing like someone trying to decide if they should show up unnanounced at your door, making me feel like he's talking to himself and I am no longer here.

Over the next curve of the Avenue, beyond a cluster of blue and white Greek restaurants, I see the Ruth Tower rising up from the University of East Baltimore and since there seems to be no agenda and Basilio's verve faded at Macon Street, I point up to the tower where I had a blast as an undergraduate, a stone room - cool and round - with a bar and a view you can't get from two Pagodas set on top of one another.

"Up there," I say. "Let's go."

It is night now and we move through the dark campus toward a granite spiral tiled with all the great moments of the Babe's career.

It is the Bambino's only gift to the city of his birth.

Bolted to the base of the tower is a plaque quoting the slugger at the dedication: "Let the poor kids in free and name it after me."

We walk inside and start climbing, round and round, up to the sky.

I tell Basilio that when I first came to Baltimore - Good Lord, it seems like 9,000 dead teenagers ago - the top of the Ruth Tower was *thee* spot: strong Greek coffee, Delta blues, oval plates of feta and black olives, crusty bread, cheap beer and young people from around the world shouting at each other about what it's all about.

He says: "I was in the suburbs back then."

"Did you ever try to paint this?"

"Sure. Grandpop brought my old man here to see the Babe when Dad was a kid and Ruth was half-dead with termites."

We walk in and I head for the bar, reaching into the pockets of my dress for money, feeling Basilio behind me, looking around.

"So this is college," he says.

I hand him a draft beer and steer to a table with a window facing west, back toward downtown where Baltimore's money finds Baltimore's art in chic storefronts along Charles Street.

The docs I work with write big checks for paintings that probably aren't any better than the ones Basilio destroys, but I really don't know if he can paint or not. All I know is what didn't turn out: half the real estate in East Baltimore.

I sip my beer and think that maybe I can help this guy.

"Tell me about the paintings you're happy with."

He gulps his beer and ignores the question, shifting east to play tour guide again: Over there is the National Brewery, home of the One-Eyed Little Man; and the Esskay slaughterhouse is there, they've got some great stainless steel letters out front; and way over there, he says, beyond the rooftops, is a graveyard where four Chinese sailors who capsized in a 1917 hailstorm are buried.

He's a fraud, I think. And for a moment I am sick.

Turning his head with an angry finger, I direct his gaze toward the Hopkins dome.

"And over there is where I fish bullets out of 14-year-old boys on Saturday nights just like this before I have to tell their 27-year-old mothers they didn't make it. Take me to your work or take me home."

And still this hard-head gives me words instead of pictures.

Grandpop skinning squirrels for dinner at the stationary tubs in the basement; Grandpop lecturing a little boy at those same tubs that a man really hasn't washed up if he hasn't washed his neck; and Grandpop making love to his bride on Macon Street, conceiving the man who would seed the artist.

"Those," he says. "are pretty good."

As we take the steps two at a time, he takes my hand.

At the front door to 627 South Macon Street, just before turning the key, Basilio tells me to take off my shoes and leads me in, dim light from a streetlamp falling across a small figure sleeping in the middle room.

"Grandpop," he whispers as we creep toward a staircase along the wall.

No one answers and as I move up the stairs, the old man stirs in his bed and my dress flutters around my knees.

Basilio keeps moving and I am right behind him, shoes in my left hand and my right against the small of his back as we climb together.

When we reach the top, he whispers in my ear, his "hallelujah!" warm and sweet.

He says: "I've never done this before."

Neither have I.

A door creaks open before us as Basilio turns the knob and I slip in behind him.

We stand still in the darkness, just inside the door, and my nose stings from the turpentine. As my eyes adjust I sense that this is the biggest room in the house, that there is only one room on this floor - as long and as wide as the house itself - and I am in it.

Basilio escorts me to a saloon table against the long side wall and sits me down on a stool before crossing to the other side of the room.

"Ready?" he asks, holding a cord.

"Ready," I say, and he pulls it.

A tarp whooshes to the floor, night fills the space where the roof ought to be, the light of a nearly full moon and a sky of stars floods the room and in one clear instant I see the world this man lives in.

"There's no roof!"

My head spins as I try to take in the sky, the paintings, the smile on Basilio's face and the colors everywhere.

"I told you, Grandpop won't let me turn on any lights. I cut the roof out a little bit at a time and paint with what it gives me. I never would have thought of it if I didn't have to."

I stand, dumbfounded.

"You can't turn on the lights, but you can saw the roof out of his house?"

"He's never mentioned it. As long as I don't use electricity or bring women home, he pretty much leaves me alone."

I move close to his work, the silver light from above giving each painting a glow I've never seen in any gallery in the world and on one canvas after another I read the narrative of his grandfather's life.

Grandpop as a boy, sitting on a rocky hill, carving a pair of handlebars from the limb of a chestnut tree; Grandpop shoveling coal on the deck of a rusty freighter, Gibraltar bearing down in the background; Grandpop kicking a soccer ball, his right leg stretched out in front of him as the ball sails across Patterson Park, the Pagoda perfect in the background; Grandpop strolling down Eastern Avenue, all dressed up with his wife on a Sunday afternoon, the Great Bolewicki Depression Clock bubbling pink and lavender to beat the band.

And then, running the length of a single wall, a huge canvas of a bedroom cast in moonlight and shadows.

In the bed is a young man who looks a lot like Basilio, a white sheet draped across his back, arms strong and taut as he hovers over a dark-haired beauty with stars in her eyes.

I am transfixed and wonder if there is a cot in the room.

"What do you call this one?"

"The Fountain of Highlandtown."

GRANDPOP

* Suenos. Siempre suenos. Dulces suenos y malos suenos. Suenos de amor.*

I can feel it.

Basilio must be making a *pintura* of a woman upstairs.

I can feel it in my sleep, like she is in the house.

He must be getting good.

"Grandpop," he says at my kitchen table every morning, up before me, coffee ready for his *abuelo*, this boy is a man, doesn't he have a home?

"Grandpop," he says while I'm still trying to figure out what day it is and why he is living with me.

"Grandpop, do you remember what Grandmom looked like the first time you saw her?

"What did her skin look like?"

I say: "Basilio," (he was named after me, two Basilios in one house is one Basilio too many); I say: "What are you doing, writing a book?"

"Something like that," he says.

Last week it was questions about the shipyard, before that it was Patterson Park, now it's about Mama and I don't have the patience for it.

Questions and questions and questions as he makes little pencil marks on a napkin.

"Grandpop, tell me about Galicia and the corn cribs on stilts and the baskets your father made."

"Grandpop, tell me about the ox and the cart and the *cocido* your mother stewed over the fire in the black pot."

"Grandpop, tell me about the first time you saw Gibralter."

Why does he want to live with an old man who is so mean to him? He is good company, this boy with the questions, even if he has to turn on a light to clean the kitchen in the middle of the afternoon.

"Grandpop," he says to me on his way out of the house tonight (where he was going in the shoes with the paint on them, I don't know, he should get dressed and go out with a woman before he gets old); "Grandpop," he says: "What did Grandmom's hair look like on your wedding night?"

I told him: "Turn off the light and lock the door when you go out."

This is what I didn't tell him: It was black, Basilio, black like the coal I shoveled out of ships at *la Roca*; black like a night at sea without stars and it fell down around my shoulders when she leaned over me; *que linda Francesca, que bella Francesca, que guapa Francesca para me y solamente para mi.*

He asks in the morning while we eat our bacon and eggs; eggs he makes like I made for him when he stayed with Mama and me when he was a little boy (even then he wouldn't listen); bacon fried crisp and the eggs on top, grease spooned slow over the yolk.

I say: "Basilio, what are you doing here?"

And he answers: "What did Grandmom's eyes look like when she told you she loved you?"

And after all these years, the thought of her kiss (I can feel it at night, on nights like this, Basilio you must be painting upstairs), the thought of her still makes me excited, *un caballo fuerte*, and it makes me ready, so sad and ready, and I get mad to answer this boy with skinny brushes and silly paints and goddammit, why doesn't he go and live with his father in their big house in the suburbs?

My house is small and life here is finished.

I get mad and tell him he's too much trouble, that he's wasting my money leaving the lights on.

You don't turn on lights in the daytime and a boy doesn't ask an old man so many questions.

But he doesn't get mad back at me, he just touches my arm and gets up to wash the dishes saying: "I know, Grandpop, I know."

What does he know?

By the time I was his age I spoke good English, had three kids, a new Chevrolet and seniority down the shipyard.

What does he have?

My electricity and *no trabajo*; pennies he saves for paint (where his pennies come from I don't know, maybe he finds them in the street, he takes so many walks); and a loaf of bread he puts on the table every day before supper; one loaf of bread fresh from the Avenue in the center of my table 4 o'clock every day without a word.

I should go easy on him.

He's the only one who really talks with me.

The only one who comes to see his old *abuelo*.

But when did he move in?

How did that happen?

That's the question you never asked, Basilio: "Grandpop, can I live with you?"

*Suenos. Dulces Suenos.*

He must be painting upstairs.

I can feel it.

I remember when his father was just a baby and I called her Mama for the first time and she became Mama for all of us; *Mama de la casa* and his father would wake up in the middle of the night and scream in his crib and nothing would make him stop, *nada*, and Mama would get so exhausted she would turn her back to me and cry in her pillow.

I would smooth her hair - it was black, Basilio, as black as an olive - and I would turn on the radio (electricity, Basilio, in the middle of the night), to maybe calm the baby and listen to something besides the screaming.

Mama liked the radio, Basilio, and we listened while your father cried - *cantante negra, cantante de almas azules* - and it made us feel a little better, helped us make it through.

I had to get up early to catch the street car to the shipyard, but when the crying finally stopped sometimes the sun would be ready to pop and Mama's breathing would slow down and her shoulders would move like gentle waves, sleeping but still listening, like I can hear her now on this no good bed, and Basilio - *Mira, hombre*, I will not tell you this again - if I moved very close and kissed her shoulders, she would turn to face me and we would have to be quiet Basilio, under the music, very, very quiet . . .

So this I want to know, Basilio.

This, if you want to live on Macon Street for another minute.

Can you paint an apple baked soft in the oven, an apple filled with cinnamon and raisins?

Can you paint such a woman?

Are you good enough yet with those brushes that she will step out of your pictures to turn on the radio in the middle of the night?

Will she visit an old man on his death bed?

If you can not do that, Basilio, there is no need for you to live here anymore.

- the end -

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