world hunger

BROADWAY EAST (EAST BROADWAY)

By John Crawford

See my friend Moe was hid from Johnny Law for beating down a campus police officer with a plastic snow shovel during the Hopkins encampment. He was squatting in a run-down on B——— Street and every Sunday I made over and talked to Casey-on-the-Lookout and he let me deliver groceries and vitamin water and crossword books and loperamide. I walked in there and smelled all sorts of foul things and saw my buddy’s poop in a bucket and every week he gave me teeth and said what this city needs is just a little love.
I’ve always been skeptical and/or unconvinced that love by itself can save the late-great Charm City, because of the many and well-documented problems and stuff. One day he was chewing some tinned fish atop his laundry pile and he was saying same-old and I bit and I said let me ask you something.
I said two months ago I met this community health worker named Jackie doing this same delivery thing for an undocumented woman down the street, and she was delivering the groceries and the crosswords and loperamide and also these little pamphlets I couldn’t read because I am illiterate. She was very nice. One day I asked her what she was doing all this for anyway. My tone might have been exasperated. By then I was reaching the end of my rope for all sorts of unrelated reasons. She said she was trying to save the city. We had very loud and aggressive sex in my aunt’s basement and then we fell in love.
Between tending to our personal lovethings she brought me to meet her friends, like the shrinks and general care physicians and special educators and harm-reduction counsellors and AA crocodiles, all of whom were interested in me to varying degrees. And we made love very often, which of course had drastic physical and social ramifications. Look at me now. I’m clean and I got a hamster named Funk.
Jackie took me around to see places like Jugg Street where they filled in the doors and windows with cement to stop the unhoused from housing. We watched some construction guys put up the sign over the B——— Street pharmacy that just read DRUGS. She’d say stuff like look at what they’re doing to people like you and I would say huh. Then she’d drive me back to my auntie’s house and we’d fuck the miraculous.
It was around then that you (Moe) stuffed yourself into this little place here and I started bringing you stuff because I wanted to show her that I could get on that mutual aid thing too. For her birthday I got in my junk clothes and I went into the dark damp places like the hollowed-outs on East L——— Street to convince a host of my former compadres to emerge from their similarly dark damp lives and follow my lead. I let them chill with Funk and I shared all my secrets in exchange for their leftover skag. I told them you’ve tried sex with a hooker, but have you tried sex with a community health worker.
I wanted to be a preacher when I grew up, and I stood on my head and yelled power to the people and told them the things every junkie wants to hear, and after they beat me up they cleared in twenty minutes and left behind spoons and needles and pairs of flip-flops and somethings playing raunchy on iPads. While they were gone marching up-block toward the community center (looking for love), I got Jackie in there and took off her blindfold and said ta-da and then we tried to scrape the inch-thick layers of black mold off the walls with Ace Hardware paint-scrapers. She kissed me on the mouth and told me we really are saving Baltimore. I was trying to artfully conceal a boner.
So anyway I told Moe (I said) what I’m asking is like is that the kind of love you’re talking about or are you referring to a more broad intersectional abolitionist kind of love. He hollered what from the other room because he was pooping in his bucket. I said never mind.

John “Jack Crawford” Crawford sucks condensation off lampposts near 33rd Street in Baltimore. His work appears in Bruiser and Don’t Submit! and BULL and other places. See him on the internet @onthejuggstreet.