“Jim! Jim! Come back here! Where are you going?”
No idea. But I had to go. I didn’t want to, but I’d already chosen my inebriated path and I had to stick with it.
“Please — please — catch up with me!” I thought as I walked away from my brother Leonard in the Fell’s Point bar district in Baltimore. I was about 21 years old, visiting Leonard one summer.
He lived in the northwest part of the city, an area called Mount Washington. On this night, we went to the touristy Fell’s Point area downtown to have a few drinks.
Or so I thought. When we got down there, Leonard said he wasn’t drinking. (Who goes to a bar district and doesn’t drink? What was he, the designated driver or something?)
Enraged, I bolted when we got to an intersection as we were on our way to another bar. I wanted more than anything for Leonard to catch me. I think I even slowed down to give him a chance to catch up.
But I was on my own.
I went to a few more bars; then I got sleepy. It was suddenly very dark. I decided to make my way back to Mount Washington, or as I called it when I asked people for directions, “Washington Mountain.”
I wandered around, getting further away from the tourist area. I came across a church and I thought, “Ahh, I’ll just sleep here,” so I curled up on the cement step.
“You can’t sleep here, man,” said the guy who awakened me some time later. He was with his girlfriend, and he said if I stayed there the police would arrest me. I thanked him, and the search for Washington Mountain resumed.
As I got further from Fell’s Point, the streets got sketchier. I looked at what I was wearing: Sandals, flowery shorts, and a loose, short-sleeved dress shirt. Drunk, lost tourist: Come and get it! I took most of the $100 US cash I had in my wallet and shoved it down the front of my pants, in case I got mugged.
Eventually, I came across a 40-ish African American man with an impressive moustache, having a cigarette while sitting on a bench next to a park. I asked where I was, and he told me Patterson Park.
“Where are you from?” he asked me.
“Nova Scotia.”
“WHOA!”
We talked for a few minutes, and when I said I was going to try to get a taxi, he told me to keep my hand open when I hailed it, so the cabbie wouldn’t think I had a knife.
I did manage to hail a cab. When I went to get in the backseat, the driver told me roughly to get in the front.
“Can you take me to Washington Mountain?”
“Where’s that?”
I handed a piece of paper with Leonard’s address to the driver, but he still had no idea where it was. So he got on the radio with the dispatcher, who guided him to the destination.
The driver and I got on great. He was a wiry African American guy in his 50s, with a wiry moustache. He seemed equally enraged when I told him how my brother brought me downtown, refused to drink, and then deserted me.
“When I get there, I’m gonna hit him,” I told the driver repeatedly on the way back.
After he dropped me off in front of Leonard’s apartment complex, I gave the driver a big tip.
“Hey!” he said, leaning across the seat as I stood outside the car. He raised his right fist and shook it.
“Give him a good one for me, too.”
Here’s where I’d like to say I went right up to Leonard’s apartment, apologized, and went to sleep. But …
Still angry, I decided to make him sweat it. So I spent the rest of the night on a bench in front of his apartment. Early in the morning, I watched my stressed-out looking brother leave his apartment, get in his car, and I watched him drive past me as I sat on the bench.
When he returned later, more stressed-out looking than before, I waved to him from in front of his apartment.
I didn’t hit him, after all. I think I’m pretty lucky he didn’t hit me.
Reynoworld 
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