This weekend Cynthia went to Manhattan for a baby shower. While I enjoy going to NYC with her -- being a tourist is so much more fun in the company of a native -- one of the primary advantages to the Y-chromosome is a lifetime exemption from any celebration with the word "shower" in the title. I exercised that masculine prerogative and stayed home for the weekend.
Friday was Halloween, my first in the neighborhood. From my time in Federal Hill I was expecting hordes of kids from other neighborhoods, recognizable chiefly by their skin tones, Baltimore being a fairly segregated city. This expectation was reinforced by a bit of racist idiocy I discovered a couple of weeks ago, when I found a flyer on our door advising that there was going to be a neighborhood trick-or-treat night on October 25, and to turn our porch light on if we were going to be handing out candy on that night. At first, I was bewildered. Why do trick-or-treating on the Saturday before Halloween? Especially when it was on a Friday night anyhow? But then it occurred to me -- the trembling whitebread douchebags didn't want their little (white) kids going around the neighborhood on a night when the little (black) kids from across Eutaw and above North Avenue were going to be going through our neighborhood, too.
For obvious reasons, I didn't participate in this little bit of update Jim Crow bullshit. Instead, on Friday night -- actual Halloween night -- I sat out on my steps and talked to my neighbors and handed out candy. To a mixture of kids from our little mostly-white neighborhood, and from the mostly-black neighborhoods on either side of us. And tried not to think about the fact that the neighbors two houses to the east, whose kids we like, went trick-or-treating the Saturday before. Nice lesson for your kids, you two. FEAR THE UNKNOWN! AVOID THE DIFFERENT!
I gave out four big bags of candy in about 90 minutes. No really outstanding costumes this year, sadly. Nothing from Harry Potter, for a change; a few Darth Vaders, a few sports figures, a lot of Spidermen, a few Batmen. No Michael Phelpses. Maybe it was too chilly to wear naught but a Speedo and a lot of medals.
(I mentioned to one neighbor that I had dated someone she used to work with. When I told her who, she laughed wryly and said knowingly "oh, then you know about her." I replied, diplomatically, "I'm sure she has her version of events." My version is that she was nuts.)
Afterwards I read a habeas file, then punched up "Casino Royale" on pay-per-view and watched it for the first time. It was the first James Bond movie I actually liked. I would say I would take Cynthia to see the sequel, but that's unlikely, given the fact that the baby will be born right around the same time the movie comes out.
Saturday I took the train into DC to feign youth.
Let me just say at the top that I have transit-envy for any city that makes it easy to get around without a car. Baltimore is emphatically NOT one of those cities. DC is -- it is one of the few cities in America outside of New York where it is possible to live without a car. Chicago, DC, and New York are, to my knowledge, in fact the ONLY truly car-optional cities in the US, and it's a stretch with DC. (Maybe San Fran? Never been there, so I don't know for sure).
However, even though the District is but 40 miles from Baltimore, transit links between the two are sorely lacking. There is commuter train service, but it only runs on weekdays at rush hour. There is Amtrak, which is more expensive, but it, too, is limited. Specifically, it is limited at night. There are no trains between Baltimore and Washington between the hours of 10 p.m. and 3:15 a.m.
This created a dilemma. The plan for Saturday was to go into the District, see part of the film noir festival at the AFI cinema in Silver Spring, then hit some Capitol Hill bars with a few friends. The trouble: how to get home? Do I zealously restrict my alcohol intake so I can drive back? Hitch a ride with friends? Split the cost of a sedan service with someone else? I took the train in, because when I was young, these things had a way of working themselves out.
So then the DC subway out to Silver Spring, where I saw Raw Deal, a 1948 Jack Alton/Anthony Mann noir gem featuring Dennis O'Keefe, Marsha Hunt, and Claire Trevor. And a very young Raymond Burr as the crime boss. It was followed by a short, "Grand Inquisitor," also starring Marsha Hunt, filmed 60 years later. (Did the Zodiac killer take trophies? A cursory googling doesn't say. It's not critical to the short film but might answer a question I had.)
Back on the subway to Union Station, then a short cab ride to a sketchy part of North East. Granville Moore's. More Belgian beer than you can shake a stick at. Bison burger. Old friends and new. We hopped to a few bars. The lightweights started nodding out. One by one they were poured into cabs or otherwise sloughed off. I kept saying "this is my last night out until 2026" (when the soon-to-be-born one will graduate from high school). They kept buying rounds. We drank a toast to the barmaid's ass. Several toasts, actually. (She was a friend of Moxie, one of my boon companions, whom I hadn't seen in far too long. So it wasn't as demeaning and sexist as it sounds. In fact, it was something Moxie and the barmaid did when the two of them went out on the town together. The barmaid is (justly) proud of her ass.) We talked about music and film and books and cooking. Moxie's brother is as genuine and personable as Moxie herself. An Army guy with biceps bigger than my thighs passed out. A DC cop was impressed that I knew what a "jump-out boy" was, but he, too, had to call it a night before the rest of us were through. We wound up back at Moxie's place around two in the morning.
On the way there we stopped at a 7-11 to rehydrate. Gatorade and diet Coke. Why could Moxie, her brother, and I drink Jameson's and beer all night and leave the others in our dust? Besides a lot of scar tissue on our livers? Because we drank water all night, too. Anyhow, at the 7-11 at 2:00 a.m. on the House side of Capitol Hill, a middle-aged guy was buying just a bottle of pancake syrup. I am trying to imagine what sequence of events would lead to that, and coming up empty.
Back at Moxie's place I chided the two still-conscious males in our party about their failure to chat up, or get the number of, the barmaid to whose ass we had toasted. I, I pointed out, was married, but none of them had that excuse.
Then back to Union Station at about 2:45 to catch the 3:15 train back to Baltimore. As I had thought, the return-trip dilemma had resolved itself. Except for one catch: the end of daylight savings time. The hour from 1 to 2 a.m. was played out twice that morning. And so when I reached the train station, I discovered that I would have to wait there an extra hour.
I finally got back to Baltimore at 4:15 am, Eastern Standard Time. I had been awake 22 hours. I climbed into bed, and got about 4 hours sleep before daylight woke me.
Four hours was enough. No hangover, astonishingly. Good hydration, that's the key.
On Sunday I spent money at Lowe's (we've finally exhausted the hong bao from her brother, which came in the form of a Lowe's card), painted the ceiling in the baby's room, and primed the walls of the stairway. While watching the Ravens upset the Browns in Cleveland. (At the same time as the football game, there was an Obama rally with 80,000 people. That means there are about 150,000 extra people crammed into the same few blocks of downtown Cleveland yesterday afternoon. Jesus Christ.)
Cynthia came home around ten that night with baby shower gifts, a shorter haircut, and some carefully wrapped bahn mi from my favorite Vietnamese sub place on the lower East Side. Her belly had somehow gotten even larger in the three days she was gone. I was glad to have her back. Feigning youth is fun, but being a grownup is much more rewarding.
