“How old are you?” asks one young girl.
“I’m very old,” comes the answer in a Yiddish-accent. “You should live to be as old as me.”
Station North
West North Avenue
January 5, 2013
19. Baltimore vs. Brooklyn
“I have been here once or twice and for some reason I like Baltimore,” deadpans Matthew Zingg, a Brooklyn poet, as he steps to the stage at the Windup Space in Station North. “It sort of has a small, non-descript place in my heart.”
Outside the performance space/lounge at the corner of North Charles Street and West North Street, a group of artfully disheveled 20-and 30-somethings, mostly in knit caps, plaid shirts, jeans, and eye glasses, stand near filled bicycle racks smoking cigarettes. Inside, the tables and bar are packed for literary “competition” between poets from New York’s most populous borough and Charm City, which doesn’t mean there aren’t funny asides and wry observances about urban life in both locales.
“We’re city people,” says Allyson Paty, Brooklyn’s second reader. “We pull an invisible bubble out of our own heads and create a protective space around us.”
A copy of the New York Post, always good for a laugh, sits nearby.
Before intermission, Alicia Puglionesi of Baltimore, taking requests from the audience, reads from her “non-verbal” dictionary, a project she’s been working on for a year. She highlights the contradiction in defining actions, which are inherently non-verbal, with words. Someone requests a word from her dictionary beginning with the letter “I,” and she chooses to describe “information,” comparing the term and its movement to a person: “It comes,” Puglionesi says shyly behind her large frame, 80s style glasses, “and never says where it went.”
Later, Eric Nelson, self-deprecatingly admits he’s actually not from Brooklyn, but Queens, which he refers to as “the land of pleasant living,” which of course generates a chorus of boos from the Natty Boh-loving hometown crowd. Bearded and slight, with an open striped sweater vest over mismatched button-down shirt, Nelson recalls his last visit to Baltimore several years with a couple of friends for another poetry reading.
“It was at the Hexagon Space and we’d stayed over night,” Nelson recalls. “The next day, the morning after the reading, we’re walking down the street toward our car and a big jeep pulls up alongside us,” Nelson recalls, “and this guy leans out and says, ‘Die hipster scum.’
“We still laugh about that.”
Sparrows Point
Sparrows Point Road
January 21, 2013
20. Everything Must Go
On a cold, muddy, morning outside the former United Steelworkers Local 9477, men sip complimentary coffee in paper cups before stepping onto chartered buses for a tour of the property that once housed the world’s largest steel mill. Hilco Trading, which bought
Sparrows Point in a bankruptcy sale, is offering previews of the mill’s vast stock of heavy equipment, machinery, trucks, and tools for an online auction of “an industry,” as one visitor—a former Bethlehem Steel worker here—puts it.
At the first stop, everyone exits the bus and two Colorado reps from EVRAZ North America, which operates several smaller mills, inspect 200-ton transport trucks known as “slab haulers.” A rep from O&K American Corp, headquartered in Japan, is also aboard—along with several retired or laid-off Sparrows Point workers, coming for a last glimpse of the corrugated warehouses, tin mills, machine shops, rail cars, and loading docks.
“I came here in 1962, right out of Kenwood High School, into an apprentice program,” says Lawrence Knachel, glancing out a bus window. “We had 27 softball teams. Shipping side used to play the steel
side after work.”
Inside a drafty repair shop, a former steelworker, in the hot tin mill for 39 years, mans a security post, earning a few last, nonunion wages before the place becomes completely barren. A Midwestern manufacturing rep asks what caused the plant’s closure. The ex-steelworker gives the question some thought and shakes his head inside a yellow hard hat. “Everyone has a different reason,” he says finally.
“I’ll tell you, though, the other day I got home and my wife was crying. ‘My grandfather worked there all those years,’ she says. ‘My dad worked there all those years,’ she says. ‘You worked there all those years and now you’re [there] shutting it all down.’”
(Postscript: In 2018, Amazon opened a new 855,000-square-foot “Fulfillment Center” at Sparrows Point.)
Downtown
Water Street
February 9, 2013
21. Pinball Wizard
After 16 games on half-dozen different pinball machines, including a wooden-rail, Art-Deco beauty from 1958, the National Pinball Museum’s “old” pinball machine tournament comes down to the final ball of the last game. Gregg Giblin, a 56-year-old Baltimore plumber, jostling the machine for good caroms, and Mike McGann, 37, a Zen-like software engineer, both lead 48-year-old computer analyst Jack Hendricks by a wide margin.
Crouching, with his left foot forward, Hendricks catches the silver ball with his right flipper, holds it a second, and then sends it ripping through a spinner up the right side—racking 100 points for each rotation. He tries again and misses once, but then spins it twice in a row with deft shots from his left flipper. Next, in almost perfect succession, he cuts down three “drop targets” on the machine’s top left side with pops from his right flipper.
Eventually, the machine gives in, discharging a single, loud “knock”— indicating bonus points and a free game, and victory for Hendricks.
“Good ball,” says McGann.
“That’s it,” says Giblin. “You got it.”
Like many of the 40 registered players, Hendricks also competes in a Free State Pinball Association league, which reports tournament results to an international governing body. “I’m ranked 1,844 in the world,” he laughs, putting his career pinball earnings at $78.
“I grew up playing at the Greyhound bus terminal in Sunbury, PA, riding my bike from my grandparents’ house, while my mother workd. “I’ve got some of the same model machines I played there in my own basement now—set up in the same order that they were at the bus terminal.”
Reservoir Hill
Druid Hill Park
February 14, 2013
22. Adults Only
Inside the Maryland Zoo’s chandeliered Mansion House, schmoozing among 90 couples in suits and cocktail dresses, Jane Scheffsky shares several chuckles with a laughing kookaburra, sitting on a volunteer’s arm. With a spot-on imitation of the bird’s crazy, Woody Woodpecker laugh, Scheffsky keeps prompting the bird into faster, louder chortling. “I lived in Australia [the kookaburra’s native country] for seven years,” smiles Scheffsky, the zoo’s assistant director of group sales, explaining the natural rapport with her new friend.
Nearby, a different woman misunderstands, momentarily, that a girlfriend was not referring to her husband when she was overheard commenting on another male guest’s pungent odor. “Oh, I wasn’t talking about Todd,” the friend apologizes. “I was talking about the porcupine.”
The couples are here, however, not just to meet a few animals over hors d’ oeuvres and Chardonnay, but for the sold-out Valentine’s Day lecture, Sounds of Sex.
Lindsay Jacks, a zoo animal keeper, delivers her presentation, the Sound of Love, with accompanying videos