Loganthinks

Memorial.

My second experience with a gun cost me five dollars and lasted two minutes. My first experience lasted only slightly longer, in the twilight of early summer two days after my 12^th birthday. I shot twelve rounds from a .22 pistol at a group of mutilated duck decoys floating in the reservoir runoff of Enid Lake in northern Mississippi. I’d missed all twelve shots, and was quickly relegated back to being a spectator, hidden amongst the towering pines, watching the line of eager pre-teens in their hunting camos step up one by one and temporarily gain the heavy, awkward power to kill something.

Eight years later I walked out of my apartment building and crossed Charles Street at 34^th at around 1 AM on a frigid October night in northern Baltimore. There is a long, shaded hill that leads from this crossing up to the John Hopkins campus, cresting at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, which, for the legions of academically oppressed engineers and pre-meds, is open 24 hours on weekends. Along the shaded hill, beneath black limbs of black Oaks silhouetted faintly against the rosy industrial glow of the night clouds, I met four strangers. Two stood in front of me, two walked up behind me, and the heavy barrel of a gun whose hammer clicked like the loudest, darkest noise I’d ever heard pressed against the soft hollow at the back of my head. Two minutes of talking followed – no one shouted, no one cursed. In the weeks to come, in alcoholic fits of rage where tables were broken and walls were screamed at, my memories of that awful night would eventually relax and temper my violated, angry ego at the recollection of the queer idiosyncrasies that went on during those two minutes.

He’d asked for my wallet, and I’d told him honestly that both my hands were full, and that he’d have to hold my soda while I got it out.

I’d carefully taken all the money I had (five dollars) out of the wallet and given it to the man in front of me, but before he could go after whatever I might have had in the rest of my pockets, a fellow student wandered directly into the sphere of our confrontation. The muggers stopped just as the student noticed what was going on, and inexplicably they all began running at once – the student away down the hill, the muggers seemingly in all directions. There was a brief struggle at the crosswalk on Charles Street, but days later, after the all the cops and the reports, I spoke to the kid outside of the dorms after class. He had a scratch on his face where he’d fallen on the concrete, but he was all smiles. “They tried to take my backpack”, he’d said, flushed from the icy wind against his pale, Jersey cheeks; “but I tripped one of those motherfuckers and got it back.”

When I first reported being robbed, it was at the library circulation turnstile, to an overweight female security guard whose name was Diane. She abruptly ran out of the library, shouting on her walkie-talkie, leaving me to stand uncertainly in the easily-distracted gaze of the students all around. Fifteen minutes later I was handed to a Hopkins security officer, and then to a Baltimore Policeman, who took me to his cruiser and had me answer some questions. He was young, with pale skin and a prematurely wrinkled face. He spoke with the distinctive Mid-Atlantic drawl that is the hallmark of the Maryland accent – a bastard offspring of New England’s hard consonants and Elvis Presley’s lazy O’s and E’s. While we talked, he drove us around Charles Village, up through Greenmount, and back through the hills of Roland Park. When he asked me what the muggers looked like, he spoke quietly, as if we might be overheard; when I described them as black males in their twenties, he advertised that he “might have well known” by alternately shaking and nodding his head. He had plenty to say about this.

We parked in the bus stop along 33^rd street, beneath the pitch canopy of un-tended trees along the corner. The officer had eventually stopped asking me if every pedestrian looked familiar, and we sat in relative silence with all the lights off, watching the nocturnal shapes shuffle by in the bitter night chill. After a while, he spoke.

“It’s a shame, but the mayor says they’re going to tear down the Memorial Wall.”

He was talking about the huge granite tower that stood off to our right, past rows of cyclone fencing and property management billboards. It was all that remained of what was once Baltimore’s only stadium – the home of the Orioles for four decades, and of the Colts before the franchise was surreptitiously packed up into Mayflower moving trucks in the middle of the night and shipped out of state, under the city’s sleeping watch, to Indianapolis.

It was dubbed Memorial Stadium upon its completion in 1950, as a tribute then to veterans who were still the conquering heroes of the European theatre. It was constructed on a one-block plot of land in the literal epicenter of the city, flanked by a low shady hill and long rows of upper-middle class housing. No highways ran by it, no gigantic parking lots ate away at the surrounding neighborhoods (save for the lot shared with the adjacent highschool across 33^rd street). Through the following decades, and the consequent wars, invasions, and military buildups, the stadium took upon itself a mythic quality, embodied in the sharp, stalwart granite towers and imposing gothic architecture. Facing southward, looming over 33^rd street and beyond down to the inner harbor, Memorial Stadium’s trademark was a monolithic wall, on which was inscribed the following: "Dedicated as a memorial to all who so valiantly fought in the world wars with eternal gratitude to those who made the supreme sacrifice to preserve equality and freedom throughout the world - time will not dim the glory of their deeds." As we sat in the police cruiser, interrupted only by the static of the radio and the howling of the winter wind, we both were looking up, across the bulldozed mounds of earth and crumbled stone, to the flood-lit façade of that memorial wall in its final days.

Since the Orioles left the stadium in 1991 for their new home at Camden Yards, the management company had struggled to book events in order to keep the venue functional, if not profitable. The surrounding district had been disappearing since the early 1970’s, drained of capital and value by the suction of new highways and the vacuum of suburbia. Middle class two-stories and porch-front row houses went up for sale and the colors of the neighborhood slowly shifted. Businesses packed up, pawn shops moved in, and taxi cabs quit taking riders after dark unless you were calling from the other side of Calvert street. When the city launched a coup in the sports world and stole away the Cleveland Browns to become the new Baltimore Ravens, it was universally understood that the old model would not be appropriate for handling this new, ultimately important and extremely fragile football franchise. Preparations were made for a new stadium, situated away from the inner city decay on the outskirts of the harbor, plugged directly into the exiting arteries and beltways that cocoon the population within its borders.

At this site also lay the final efforts of the City’s urban planners and civil engineers, who, since the late 80’s had been laboring on a plan to revitalize and encourage re-investment in Baltimore’s decaying inner harbor district. Along with untold millions of corporate and taxpayer dollars, the city installed expensive retail and restaurant chains along the waterfront, rebuilt public works, and set up entirely new police protocols to protect this avenue of prosperity and entertainment connecting the two anchors of its tourism efforts – Camden Yards and the new Ravens Stadium. This endeavor was largely successful from an economic standpoint, and thankful for its first upturn in image in recent memory, Baltimore strode happily forward in the afterglow of its philanthropic progress, with a new center of gravity situated firmly along its concrete southern borders.

Up on 33^rd street we never caught the group that mugged me. Sitting in the dark, the policeman told me that since the old stadium was slated for demolition a year earlier, gangs were moving in and doing business in the empty halls and bleachers. He told me kids would sneak onto the field and do “psychedelic drugs”, or get themselves lost exploring the depths of the locker rooms. He said the recent demolition was a “good thing” for the neighborhood, and that because a retirement home was scheduled to be built on the site, public works would probably “re-do the whole neighborhood”.

Away would go the crackheads. Some would go further down the block to Grennmount, or even down to Mount Royal, to meet the homeless being squeezed out of Canton and the Harbor by the invasion of new money.

Away would go the grafitti-spattered boulders of concrete and steel. Most would go with the rest of the rubble to barges berthed down in Dundalk, to be shipped to the Chesapeake for building artificial reefs.

And now, away would go the Memorial Wall, with its righteous silver inscription and gotham-city magnificence. Away would go the tribute to the last great wars, and to the subsequent messy wars, the cold ones, the hot ones, and so on. Away would go the urban monument, the ironic salute whose significance was perhaps not lost on all the poor families whose children left the ghetto for the barracks because maybe they were less likely to get shot in the army. The policeman gave me some parting advice about being vigilant when walking alone at night, and dropped me off at my apartment as the sky began to wax into a pallid gray smear. I lit a cigarette, sheltered from the wind by the brick entryway to Wolman Towers, and decided then I wanted no more of this city.