KEEP PLANNING – John Crawford

Already it is the time when the dingy places are opening one-by-one and the amtrak boys are locking up and leaving work and the bums are quitting the pans putting on their coats and the stevedores are coming in on the link tram and walking in any number of clumps to the bowling alley first and then the dingiest spots down the Sandhill which have names like skitzermann and rappsput and then like an exploding bomb the downturn of the Hill opens all at once and they come onto the street to see it and just there down the whole strip you can see the vigils or memorials (amen) for five dollars or else the yard runners playing at the cribbage and riding now their amp cart down the steep Hill first loading the cart at slim’s and then running it down the sidewalk and finally now hanging on for dear life the yard runners and keeping johnny marble’s peavy from flying off reanalgesizing on the long way down telling eachother halfway-flapping in the wind now this night must be different because of you-know-what they’re saying and now the dingy places are all open the flyers say all of them at the same time on the same night for one night only out of respect for the dead so they say and you can see them all there the freaks jitterbugging in the alley with coffees and the one guy who thinks he’s babe ruth’s son offering batting lessons for a sandwich and the boys swinging the bebop charles down above and of course the wrinklers sitting on benches and see them smile and whistle and reminisce about the good times before everything was depressing and before everybody got broke and how at one time you used to come down-Hill in sandtown-winchester and see good punk rock and see good jazz and most importantly see baltimore's second greatest swimmer michael phelps bowl a half-perfect 150 at the bowling alley when he was still just our bright boy and feel the great crick of charm city unknot like bad fish loosening with the fall of those beautiful maple pins the memory of which nested and steeped and passed down for many years while things got worse and everyone got broke and everything got tired until the bottom fell out and the news suddenly came that our bright boy had been mowed down ran over bad and killed dead by some lunatic in a car-bound to leave the city fast for good killed dead just last week hence the memorials and vigils tonight and amid the destitute depressing run-down broke you would never guess that at one time this place in sandtown really used to be a place of serious bustle where you could walk down fulton avenue and stop in and buy a coffee from someone nice in one place and walk up the Hill for something else like to meet a sweet girl and come back down with her and know that somewhere there was something for you like a good riff or a good donna lee or a michael phelps half-perfect back before everything became different and depressing and worse for years barring hope that one day our bright boy would come back after the olympic medals had all dried up and that he’d come home retired and take to the same Hill as before and make the same Hill as before and of course his death was a quiet revelation to us that he’d been back in charm city for months maybe even years but not here obviously rather somewhere else far from the Hill far from sandtown living the retired olympian life sans-bowling while we were stuck here in the grey hanging thick sock over young kid and geezer alike but the fact is he is dead and we are in mourning and that something has been lost forever never to return but they say it had been gone good anyway for longer than we can remember and that this changes nothing and that we’re still as much ourselves as we’ve always been and so tonight the dingiest places are opening one by one in memorium but the boys themselves are lingering around just the same like normal waiting for the yard runners to ride down the hill on their amp cart or waiting around for good old leonard kranz to come through leonard kranz who is just a few blocks down away by the tracks approaching fast and is on a mission clearly leonard kranz who can pay no attention to whether he’s broke or depressing and instead just is and in this one meddling joyous and everybody knows these depressing times are always declaiming these interesting characters who are miserable and have miserable lives in miserable ways but anyone leonard comes across portends some big episode nobody but him can sway head to and in this one he had come across richard king and lady day and had bummed his way into living in their small apartment with his jacket and special pillow for his poor back under the corner-desk in that small cramped depressing apartment with laundry piles and the wet black bulge above the kitchen table and lady day who was inconsolable because richard king had become too depressing and he wouldn’t give the smooch anymore and wouldn’t do nothing but sit in front of the television and watch the olympic ping-pong reruns and grunt along and eat microwave kidney beans and sit there in the gross green recliner and lady day told leonard she said he just won’t give me the smooch anymore and this is unbearable and leonard said don’t worry missus i’ll help you out and set off to romance them back together and shoplifted candles and flowers and played the music on the stereo and set the mood to no avail and read richard king love letters from lady day to no avail and even tried deftly to remove the vhs tape while richard was fast asleeping to a fit of sudden impassioned screaming and crying but regardless played every trick he had in the book to get richard king out of his ping-pong funk and tried just that every day to failure after failure until the lady was rocking back and forth moaning and crying herself all the time picking at scabs and of course then she wasn’t eating and richard king was unpreturbed in his recliner watching the matches and eating his beans but was worse because then he smelled like pee and he was speaking along to the commentary of matches he’s seen two dozen times already and when faced with an episode like that even leonard kranz has to take stock and decide well this might just be too miserable for me and so he said i’ll be right back and walked right out the door and went down the hall steps and came out still mostly intact onto the street which is why leonard is out on a mission headed straight for the Hill straight for us and straight for me by the looks of it and meanwhile i’m blocks away sitting here in club blue at the bottom of the Hill in one of the dingy places having a major end-of-days crisis in my shirtsleeves yours truly bill reeves himself sitting at a round-top corner-table soggy looking now out the window at the slowly approaching leonard kranz to distract from the crisis at hand when just two minutes ago i had been perfectly fine eating and trying to make conversation and listening to the van der beek quintet up there on the stage at club blue really struggling bad through a donna lee and i was sitting there at a table with my jambalaya listening to this trumpet player really floundering and while i was eating and trying to make conversation i was getting frustrated because i haven’t played the trumpet in almost eight years and even i could probably still play a donna lee if i really wanted to and roger van der beek at the drumset was looking like he thought even he could probably play a donna lee on the trumpet if he really wanted to or at least better than this guy and i had come to club blue there in the first place for a break and for a coffee and a sandwich but had instead latched onto this jambalaya on suggestion from the waiter who was a pleasant but insistent guy who looked like his heart might shatter if i didn’t get the jambalaya which had locally-sourced andouille he said and the place was a dingy place that wasn’t overstated in its dinginess and was one of the three places at the bottom of the Hill where you could go see jazz and expect to see a halfway-decent donna lee which i just wasn’t getting at the time declaiming uneasiness compounded by this raving lunatic who was then sitting in-across me at a corner-table in club blue and who also happened to be my employer at the time and who offered to take me to dinner at this so-called really very dingy spot on the other side of the tracks which was language that bothered me for obvious geographic and semantic reasons but regardless i had played dumb and accepted his invitation and pretended he was ushering me into a totally new and foreign part of the city which of course wasn’t new or foreign at all but was instead very depressing to me and has been for quite some time and little did he know that i had been here just two nights prior with jackie and slim and lena and allen-on-34th and sam and tracy-gwen and good old man-of-the-people leonard kranz himself on a night when jay wagner was playing who i understand can turn a decent donna lee unlike whoever was playing trumpet for roger van der beek and i was listening to the shitty donna lee and i was getting stirred up and a little overwhelmed by the racket and by the droning on of this lunatic who was my employer and by this endless torrent of feelings that everything was dead and depressing and miserable and that even on this one-night-only when everything was open like it used to be in memorium or not everything was still just as depressing and dead and so on and so after two choruses into an already pretty long head portending a disasterously long solo-section i was so suddenly overcome that i stood up and exploded and flung the jambalaya all over the lunatic my employer whose clothes were kind of dry-clean only who stopped droning about quotas and performance plans and stared at me in stunned silence while i sat down and looked out the window at leonard kranz in the distance and while i look now out the window at leonard kranz who has now come fully down the Hill and is tugging at the sleeve of johnny marble and asking to borrow the amp cart and to borrow the yard runners for a minute and to otherwise drag the amp cart right back up the Hill with the yard runners in tow right back up and past slim’s place and down by the tracks because he needs to try something badly and he’s on a mission and he just needs them for maybe thirty minutes or maybe an hour to solve all of charm city’s problems once and for all and so on and suddenly leonard is making a scene and gesticulating big down here at the bottom of the Hill where the freaks are jitterbugging and babe ruth’s son is eating a sandwich and the wrinkles are still whistling and always will be whistling about how when our bright boy was still burying half-perfects in the bowling alley behind the cribbage that nothing on this earth could touch baltimore. And as the yard runners are beating the crap out of leonard kranz here in the street all i can do is sit here and sigh and think well tomorrow is my thirty-third birthday.

*** John Crawford lives in Maryland and writes there too. John "Jack" Crawford made salmon last night. John Crawford is an editor for BRUISER. John Crawford coming to an outlet store near you. See him @jcrawfordwrote. 03 December 2025