Crackhead Mark and Me

 (As morning sniffles and coughs out day, the May flowers tremble through the comforter of earth.  Weeds sway like feathers on a hawk, weighed down by glassy beads of water. 

The heavy, grey yawn of dawn smells a little lonely.  I feel like it is something easy to overlook in the grass-spit, fog and dog shit.  This morning looms but doesn't linger.  A sleepy greeting to everyone and for no one, a glowy stasis between yesterday and afterward, undisturbed peace without resolve because there is not yet a wrong to make right.)  

The engine in my muted silver two-door Hyundai Accent grumbles moodily (in actual hue, I prefer the more suitable moniker of gunmetal) .  I am waiting in a quaint driveway, squeezing out the last staticky bit of All Things Considered before Mark lugs himself into the passenger seat and starts talking about enough or not enough coffee, advil and sleep.  In front of me is the covered frame of an old pickup truck with a blue tarp tied by bungee cords to its top.  The end of a ladder pokes out from its rear through a tear in the plastic. It doesn't take long for Mark to exit the rancher home of his mother.  The screen door whishes and slaps shut.

Grey shirt tucked in, gut tucked out, Mark follows his belly to my car with a proud hobble.  In his younger days, his dirt-bike-on-main-highway days, he found himself being tailed by a state trooper who wanted him to pull over.  He made his great getaway by turning off I-70 and into the woods, just out of the stretched fingers of the law.  He dashed between poplar trees and oaks, over logs and through the tributaries of the Patapsco, until the blue and red lights were a distant hue of the interstate.  He did his hip in good that day, he told me, he did his hip in real good.  

What happened was this: In a determined attempt to make it to a local bar, his bout with reason came to a ceasefire when he agreed that he was far too buzzed to drive his old truck anywhere, so he took his dirt bike instead.  Fortunately for him, he could also take his dirt bike into the woods.  His escape from the cops that day was what saved him from a DUI, an obvious thorn in the side (not necessarily the hip) of anyone's driving situation, but unfortunately for him it cost him the loose movement of his right midsection.  He hit a log and slapped his body against a tree, giving him the lifetime fluidity of a broken popsicle stick.  What was hurting his driving situation these days, the reason for why he had not owned a legal driver's license since 1989, the reason for why I was waiting in his driveway so he could make it to work, were those seven other DUIs on his record.

Anyway, that's why his hip is bad.

He opens my door and hands me two orange Powerades from across the seat, and then helps himself into my little vehicle.

"I couldn't 'member if you like blue or red juice, so I brought you the orange," he says after breathlessly strapping his seatbelt.  "Fiffy nine cents apiece for them little guys at the Shoppers market there.  I went and got me myself fifteen of them bastards."

I thank him and switch to the classic rock station, turning Ted Nugent down a tad.  

"S´pose to rain today," he says rolling my window down and making his elbow comfortable.  "My ma says the news says at four o'clock.  S'pose to be a big ol' thunderstorm they say."

*****

I wiggle and weave throughout the inertia of 695, fulfilling the daily routine of an asshole calling everyone else an asshole:  'This jerk behind me is tailgating me like a jackass.  Do you hear him revving his engine?  Yeah, there he goes, right there, let him pass in that shiney, Whinnie-the-Pooh yellow.  Ugh, I just realized that I hate yellow now.  And look--fancy spoiler he's got on that, what is that, a Cobalt?  Ha, I bet he spells 'wheels' with a 'z'.'  

Mark always agrees, nodding his head and looking at his hands.  His hands look stoney and mangled, years of missing the head of the nail on rooftops, or victims to heavy-placing porcelain toilets.  They look like they would jam a sawzall.

My hands are still babylike, fresh and fleshy. 

Mark, a weathered Elmer Fudd and a raspier Foghorn Leghorn, talks with one eye.  His head never faces the listener, only that bulbous old-blue eyeball, his periscope, his ambassador for conversation, as if to move past the surface of his skull, one must first dance with his dominant eye to rightfully see his face.   Above his eyeline is the horizon of forehead that stretches far back to the center-top of his head, where a few sparse curlies tuft out like a sea anemone.  It is safe to say that had he his whole set of bottom teeth, he would have a distinct underbite, but instead his mouth slightly jowls downward like an old hound.

He precedes each sentence with an 'I tay-yah what,' and then he tells you what.  This time he tells me that he only had two beers last night, the first and the last--'the other eighteen in between don't count none.'    

*****

Traffic doesn't lighten as we approach the Francis Scott Key Bridge.  This is the city's tribute to a major figure in our history, an anthem to his Anthem--a toll bridge. It reminds me of a large, sleeping stegosaurus, resting heavily across the black Chesapeake.  Factories sprawl across the short horizon ahead, their smokestack towers blasting cumulus nimbus factory clouds like cartoon church organ pipes.  The cargo ships float inanimately, docked beneath blue brontosaurus cranes.  Abandoned warehouses and jejune jetties, old and forgotten remnants of piers, perches for black crows, are all part of the entrance of watery South Baltimore.  It's pretty in a can't-turn-back-because-this-is-what-we-are-now kind of way.  Gone are the days of golden eagles and birch canoes and happy crabs and clean marshes. This is the rustic side of Baltimore now, the industrial side.  Even Bethlehem Steele has called it quits, shutting down and bleeding into the river until lawyers come and clean it up.

Dundalk approaches and the smell of Baltimore's sewage surrounds us.  It is not malodorous, but dank and almost sweet like burning potpouri.  We pass the two sewage towers, the giant golden eggs of Dundalk, for what it's known for: the giant poop eggs.

I continue driving towards the propane yard.  The traffic is still stifled.  Mark says, 'Guy in fronta us is drivin' almost as bad as this jackass to the side of us, huh, like what, one horse power?' Bumpers push onward, starting and stopping abruptly, like two south poles too shy to ever kiss

*****

At the propane yard, our job is simple: don't inhale and don't blow up.  The radio plays until the batteries run out.  If we were to split the cost of more batteries, it would mean we should probably skip lunch.  If we don't buy batteries and don't skip lunch, it means we could probably leave a half hour earlier.  That's if it doesn't 'thunnersterm' at four.

The job is actually not simple.  It takes lots of manual labor to unscrew the brass nozzle from a steel, semi-empty propane tank.  It takes a seven foot steel pole and the force of two mens' arms to pull the nozzle off.  When the nozzle is separated, the propane comes shooting out.  It is your choice as to whether or not you inhale it, and even if you choose not to, you will still inhale it.

To pass the time, I listen to Mark's treasurable honesty.  He talks about the time he smoked a bunch of queludes before a Led Zeppelin concert.  He talked about the time a guy was bragging about having six hundred dollars and how he hit him over the head with a rock after they both left the bar, and how he went and bought himself a "big ol' blast."  He talked about hitting the tree on his dirt bike, and the time he lost eighty pounds smoking crack in Denver when he was on the run.  Or it was meth.  No it was both.  And he talked about the Marriotsville reservoir where he'd go take big ol' blasts with whichever girl he or Kenny brought.  I asked him "A big ol' blast of weed, or of crack?"

"Weed," he said.  We kept working.  "And crack."