“I know I shouldn't say this, but…”

Abstract

You don't just walk around on Curtis Avenue (Figure 1). It's a one-way road for tanker trucks that drive too fast and kick up dust as they depart this jilted place. The dust: an impossible amalgamation of things held in suspension. 1 Certainly acrolein, which gives the avenue the scent of burning fat. Formaldehyde and benzene. Probably lead. Then there are all the festering resentments that stick to the side of the road until something heavy throws them up into the haze. Thirty, forty years ago, Curtis Avenue was a bustling thoroughfare in South Baltimore-Maryland's petrochemical capital. That was back when the red dust signaled money and there were fourteen different bars to spend it in. Today, money seeps out; that's the one way traffic goes. Today, you don't just walk around on Curtis Avenue without finding yourself in the dust kicked up by someone else's good life.So I was curious when Betty took me there one sticky-hot September day. "This is where the old heads go," Betty whispered from behind the smoke of her third "last" cigarette. Then she chucked it on the avenue, still burning, and ambled into Shirley's Sunnyside Café.Betty was a sixty-something-year-old white woman who scorned most people but who liked me well enough. Perhaps because I'd been her niece's teacher before I left for graduate school, which marked me as familiar where outsiders were not easily embraced. Perhaps because I was a "harmlesslooking" thing: a reference to my size, I'm sure, but also to my gender, to my whiteness, and to my presumed oblivion about the world outside the