A Rainy Day in the Hell
Not far from the statue of native son Frank Zappa, an excitable man named Frankie Frangos stood at a grill behind a plate glass window near the corner of Eastern and Eaton, working a spatula over hot dogs, sliced potatoes, onions and eggs on a hot sheet of metal.
His father had worked the grill before him and his father before that. And since then, more than 90 years, a lot had changed in Baltimore.
“Fucking junkies,” he muttered in Greek, staring out to the sidewalk. “Gamiménes pórnes.”
Frangos sliced a tomato for a BLT while his wife ran upstairs to a city cop working surveillance. The detective sat on a milk crate with a camera and cold coffee at a window looking down on an alley of food scraps and rotting vegetables in leaking dumpsters, tanks of putrid vegetable oil black from French fries and chicken wings, weeds the size of small trees, trash blowing in from the street and winos who pissed their pants twice before noon.
Ninety short years, from then ’til now. A half mile away on Macon Street, the remnants of La Familia Boullosa were already well into the day.
Basilio was in his studio, a hole cut in the roof to channel the brilliance of the sun. It would not stay sunny for long – summer thunderstorms roared across the waterfront just about every day – and he’d woken up early to make use of what there was.
He worked on three projects at once, hustling to make his mark and earn his keep: an oil portrait of a cousin from the Old Country who’d shown up at Grandpop’s door without notice; a charcoal sketch of the Great Bolewicki Depression Clock –it’s not too late to get into a whole mess of trouble, it’s only … – and a sign for a Latino grocery.
He used leftover housepaint from the last time Grandpop brightened the walls (it would be the last) on a scavenged piece of wood. For this he’d be paid $30 and a sandwich every now and then.
Grandpop woke up every day wondering why his namesake grandson, a grown man without any obvious responsibilities, was living with him.
The old Spaniard was emptying his chamber pot in concrete stationary tubs in the basement, rinsing it out with Boraxo while calculating how many more shaves he could get out of his razor. He marked each one inside the door of his medicine cabinet with a grease pencil from the shipyard, back when he and half of the neighborhood worked on Liberty Ships that helped win the war.
Nieves was the cousin, born restless, just 23. With Basilio upstairs (trying to capture the way she stood at the stove, steak and potatoes and garlic in the skillet with pimientos de padron) and Grandpop making his ablutions downstairs she slipped through the kitchen door and down the alley, unnoticed in cut-off jeans, a yellow t-shirt with a red-ringed collar and ten bucks in each of her canvas shoes.
“Take a left at the mailbox, the one where the old guys hang,” said the punk (not a punk rocker, not a sissy boy working the corner, just an old-school street punk) at the liquor store, his intel purchased with a half-pint of Mister Boston to mix with his methadone. Nieves bought herself three candy bars.
“Pass that spic joint,” he said, “you’ll smell it, go under the underpass…
[“Underpass” – she’d never learned that one in English class back in Galicia.]
“…go past the bottle cap factory and keep goin’ til you see Butchie.”
“Boo-chee?”
“Fat fuck with WHITE POWER tattooed across his fat-fuck ass, he’ll be begging near the Walgreens.”
Nieves nodded, wondering what kind of smell she was supposed to smell before she hit the “oonder-pazz.”
“When you see Butchie, you’re pretty much there. He’ll show you.”
Nieves picked up her step while trying to go slow, believing she was still deciding if she still wanted the only thing she’d wanted from Spain to Tangier to the States. What she’d need long after she didn’t want it anymore.
At the corner of Eastern and Eaton – gleaning from the crowd the way to go without having to ask – she ducked behind the Frankie’s Frankfurters and fell into step with a drill known around the world as getting served.
How could she have known there was more heroin in Baltimore than Morocco?
Mrs. Frangos put the sandwich in front of the cop and tapped him on the arm. “That’s the guy,” she said as Nieves approached a gorgeous teenager circling the fiends on a skateboard. “Out there every day.”
“Who’s the girl?” asked the cop; lust and mayo on his chin as he chewed and clicked: rats and bleeding-from-the-rectum drunks on the periphery; a pot-holed ribbon of supine mutants who made Butchie look like a ballet dancer. And Nieves near the front of the line.
She handed the dealer a few bills and, as he dipped into a cinder block against the wall, balanced herself on his skateboard, flipping the board and kicking it back as he handed her the vials.
“Very nice,” he said. “Whatcha doin’ later?”
Nieves smiled and slipped the dope into her pocket, snug against a teaspoon from Grandpop’s forks-and-knives drawer, one that his wife used to stir her coffee.
“Never saw her before. Looks too nice to be down there.”
“Well,” said the cop, calling in the bust, “she won’t be there long.”
Rifling the clothes of an older woman on the nod, Nieves found a syringe, wiped the needle on her pants and felt a tingle move through her crotch, about to do what she’d done all over Europe for the first time in Estados Unidos.
Thunder boomed as she tapped the dope into the spoon, its unnerving crack riding the squeal of rubber as cops blocked the alley at both ends. Nieves had a gun in her face and the powder fell into a muddy puddle of grease popping with hard rain.
As the lock-up wagon backed into the alley, Frangos ran coffee to the officers kicking the booze hounds to get up and leave.
“Thanks Frank. You know they’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Then come back tomorrow.”
Turning from the cops to run back in the diner, Frangos squinted through the silver deluge and recognized a stoop-shouldered, middle-aged woman in black getting drenched at the bus stop across the street.
He knew her from Greek funerals; had heard stories about her since he was a kid, the kind of renown no one wants. As she stepped off the curb to cross the Avenue – head covered with newspaper, eyes down — Frangos ran toward her.
“LIGO ELENI!” he shouted. “LIGO ELENI! STOP!
But Little Leini didn’t hear him or the sergeant’s horn or the loud whisper of air brakes as she lost her footing and was hit by the No. 22 on its way to City Hospitals.
On her way to the back of the wagon, not yet handcuffed, Nieves saw the victim bounce off the bus and sail into the air. As she did, one of her earrings – a cheap bauble of brown glass and tin — flew off. As it began to fall, an angel assigned to every alley east of downtown (punitive duty) swept through the downpour and caught it.
Whereupon it became emerald and gold before landing in Nieves’ open hand a moment before she was handcuffed.
-o-
“But it struck Basilio as he painted the accident as it was described to him by a witness, an epiphany not unlike the way the bus had slapped Little Leini, that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them – and what could be understood in a place like Baltimore? – the doll dead of every Holy Land on Earth will cling to immortality…”
― Tracy Dimond, A Passage to Baltimore
-o-
On her way down to the asphalt, Little Leini watched her soul leave her body as she fell beneath the wheels of the bus.
Cops still on the scene ordered chili dogs with the works from Frangos and called for an ambulance. Mrs. Frangos phoned the pastor of the Orthodox Church to tell him that Leini, “No patera, the daughter, not the mother” had just been hit by a bus on the Avenue. “If she’s still alive I don’t know how.”
Such a funny thing, thought Little Leini as her spirit soared above the tarred rooftops and brick chimneys, how odd to be able to smell diesel fuel and bacon grease while high as a pigeon, breathing in without your mouth or nose or the rest of the bag of bones over which you once fussed like a schoolgirl.
And then the bottom fell out and she was floating through vapors of sulfur, face-to-face with George Papageorgiou, a suicide whom she’d called father until someone (not her mother) wised her up; honesty without kindness a definition of cruelty.
When Little Leini was a schoolgirl – always the outsider, eyes misaligned just enough for people to stare, just enough not to notice an 18-ton bus bearing down on her in the rain – every other kid in the country had lost their minds over four boys from Liverpool. She wasn’t one of them. But she’d never forget that giddy epoch because that was the year Papageorgiou put a gun behind his ear and pulled the trigger.
Minus an earring and the ear to which it hung, she flickered before George, a chronic alcoholic who never quenched his thirst on Earth. Allowed to drink all he pleased for all eternity as acrid sweat ran down the crack of his ass, he still could not.
“It was me Elenaki,” said George, twisting in pain with each word of a confession he’d never made on Earth. “I poisoned your mother when you were in the womb.”
She could not speak but wondered: Is that why my eyes are too close together? Too far apart?
He did not hover before a middle-aged woman with her head cracked open but a nine-year-old, her face pressed against a chain-link fence while watching the first cars pass through the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, a 1950’s marvel dredged a few blocks from her home.
The fence divided Little Leini from George, protecting her from falling into the abyss of screams. Through it she stared at George with lopsided eyes, learning what she’d always known and could never prove.
George Papageorgiou—the man to whom her mother had been married off as a teenager with less care than it takes to grill a hamburger—was not her father.
And the near-death alchemy of the earring?
Anything of value is useful in prison.
© Rafael Alvarez
The son of a Fells Point tugboat engineer, Rafael Alvarez is a fourth-generation Baltimorean and the author of a dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction, all anchored in his hometown. He is currently at work on a memoir of his experience praying the rosary, which began with a visit to Lourdes in 1990. Reach him via orlo.leini@gmail.com
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