3. heroes

Aaron, Darlene, and Dale

When some community-minded Baltimore Police officers (the few good apples, as I like to call them) got together along with local pastors, M.O.M.S. (Mothers of Murdered Sons/Daughters), and some funeral directors in August of last year and drove the length of Baltimore's North Avenue for the “Stop the Killing” drive, not everybody was feeling it.

“This is pseudo,” Aaron of Sandtown-Winchester shouted at the funeral directors' shiny hearses rolling by.

A few minutes later, waiting at the bus stop, I asked him to elaborate: “It's pseudo. This is a pseudo event. This is total disrespect right here. You're gonna bring a whole thing of hearses around here? This is psychological warfare. You're psychologically trying to interrupt my life. I don't like that. This is pseudo as hell.”

Darlene Cain, whose son Dale Graham was killed by Baltimore Police in 2008, was also part of the drive, and she is a bit more diplomatic than Aaron. She held a sign that said, “We Can End Gun Violence” so she was on-message with the event, but she also sported a series of anti-police brutality buttons which rubbed some in attendance the wrong way—and that was kind of the point.

“I got a couple looks,” she said of the buttons. Mostly though, she's here for unity. She's just “learning to be humble and keep it real.”

Thelonious and Thelonious

Thelonious Monk was 28 years old when he was shot in the chest around 8:45 p.m. on August 19, 2015 and died soon after he arrived at a hospital and I never met him, but I spent parts of 2015 worrying about this dead Baltimorean named after a jazz great. Later in 2015, The Baltimore Sun's Adam Marton posted a touching note on Facebook about Thelonious:

“Thelonious Monk, 28, was one of Baltimore's 344 homicide victims in 2015. Thelonious stole my car about a decade ago and while he was never charged with the crime, case search shows he was arrested dozens of times in his short life and spent time in a juvenile detention center. He fished my keys out of the night drop at Mr. Tire one summer night. It was barely an inconvenience, such is my life. Insurance covered a loaner and Brooke and I went on vacation, as planned. When I got my car back a few weeks later, Thelonious has installed a baby seat and a subwoofer and the car was strewn with job applications. It was and remains one of the most heartbreaking scenes of my life. Our lives crossed, however oddly and briefly, and I can't help but think that Thelonious probably never had a chance. A chance to escape, a chance to succeed. The opportunities I have always enjoyed. I feel like maybe he was trying to use my car to make a break for it. I wish he had made it. Rest in peace, young man, I will never forget you.”

The details Marton mentions are heartbreaking and they complicate the image of a car thief as “bad guy.” A baby seat and job applications evidence somebody trying to fulfill responsibilities and do “right,” while that subwoofer evidences an equally important impulse—to have some fucking fun and ride out to music and to adjust your car to better capture all that bass in the music you love. That Monk stole this car by non-violent means is also worth highlighting.

I don't want to make too much of this Thelonious Monk (there are a few other Thelonious Monks in Maryland, by the way), but it's a weird thing, being named after Monk, one of the most wild and improvisational and unfettered musicians (and I think it should be noted, not a snitch as a famous incident involving the arrest of Bud Powell suggests). It makes so much sense for a troubled, trying-hard guy like this 28-year-old to be named after Thelonious Monk: Jazz, especially Monk's jazz, is so often about trying to find a way to get free in the face of stupid fucking restrictions—especially when, say, Monk covers a standard and makes something new out of something pretty played out. When he improvises, it's the sound of Monk trying his hardest to break out and be somebody and create music that can't be replicated.

After I read Marton's Facebook post, for reasons that are obvious and oblique, I put on my favorite Monk recording: 1964's “It's Monk's Time.” The first track, 'Lulu's Back In Town,' begins with a few minutes of playful, occasionally discordant piano plinking and pounding. Then a little after the three-minute mark, all that gets bumped out of the way for a jaunty shuffle provided by Charlie Rouse's tenor sax, Ben Riley's drumming, and Butch Warren's bass accompanying Monk's piano. It really soars. 'Lulu's Back In Town' could soundtrack Marton's vision of Monk making a heroic break for it with the car—chaotic impulse hammered into something briefly beautiful and worth escaping into.

It'd probably sound pretty great oozing out of a subwoofer as well.

Kester, Jennifer, Kevin, and Rev. Ronald

Seven-year-old Kester Browne and his mom, 31-year-old Jennifer Jeffrey-Browne, were both shot in the head in their West Baltimore home in May 2015.

“This makes no sense,” Reverend Ronald C. Williams told the 200 or so people at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church attending their funeral. His sermon circled around how “crazy” the world is, its madness, and how without the Lord, we'd really all be “stark-raving mad,” including the reverend himself, he was not too afraid to admit. Around 30 people, the overflow, watched the service on a TV screen in the church's basement, which didn't mitigate their emotions upon viewing open caskets of a mother and her son dead, next to each other.

Rev. Williams quoted from Ecclesiastes, an extended dose of real talk from the Old Testament: “There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless.”

There was a citywide compulsion to turn Kester Browne into a symbol of how out of control violence in Baltimore was and how cruel and cowardly criminals are, and those things are probably true. This funeral then turns into the tipping point for May, a deadly month right after the uprising, due to an alleged police slowdown, opportunistic criminals, a much-ballyhooed myth that there are “enough narcotics on the streets of Baltimore to keep it high for a year,” and a mayor who seems disinterested in taking this violence seriously. You get the sense that the people in charge think it'll sort itself out, so second-graders are just part of the collateral. Maybe they hadn't thought that part through.

Before the service, in front of the church, life went on around grieving and occasionally wailing family and friends. It was a regular Saturday morning on South Loudon Avenue. A few men sat on their porches and talked, another man blathered on his cell phone. Residents walked, waddled, and strutted down the street, depending on their 9:30 a.m. mood. Some were curious and glanced over, others averted their eyes out of respect or possibly because it was too much to handle.

“It doesn't come into reality yet . . .” I overheard a man outside the church say, confiding in his friends, stopping and stumbling on every word. A little Incredible Hulk toy sat in the grass, probably dropped by one of the many children in attendance. Somehow that felt like too much. Let's hope the kid who dropped that toy got it back. And let's hope everyone there for the Browne funeral found something they needed to get through this.

But the Browne funeral is not the end of anything. The family is burdened with grief and bills for burying two family members. According to his obituary read at the funeral, Kester had been handpicked to go to China this summer. He was “fluent in Mandarin,” school founder Madame Kona-Facia Nepay told me. She knew Kester. She's not someone who read about him in the papers and projected. We're always finding ways to value certain bodies over other bodies—maybe just because there's only so much care we can give, so we pick and choose which dead people to project things onto. There is a sense that Kester was somehow very special, which he was—he seemed primed to become a diplomat or something—but we're all special once we get to know each other.

Baltimore International Academy Principal John Enkiri spoke at the funeral. He mentioned playfully pulling on Kester's braids and slapping him high-five in the morning—his office was near Kester's classroom. It's an image that's much more vivid because there right in front of us, was Kester's body, embalmed, his braids tight but not too tight. As the church's choir sang, Jennifer-Jeffrey Browne's brother, Kevin Wilder, a deacon at Pleasant Grove, rocked and grooved to the music, which was doing what music does—taking you out of things temporarily and putting you in another place. He was feeling it. It seemed like all he had in that moment. His leg shook the whole time.

Kevin Wilder, by the way, prevented rioters from busting windows at Fulton Baptist Church near North and Penn on that infamous Monday night in April 2015. He saw the windows about to get busted and convinced those with bricks-in-hand to move on. The Fulton Baptist Church donated money to the Browne's funeral as a result. So did Kester's school—$500, via the GoFundMe Jennifer Jeffrey-Browne's sister created.

Funerals are expensive, Wilder told me the day before the funeral. Funerals cost even more when it's “a double situation,” he added, trying to find some way to delicately acknowledge the situation. “We never think we need insurance on young people.”

Wilder said it costs around $7,000 each to do “a proper burial.” As a deacon at Pleasant Grove, he said, he's involved in four or five funerals each month, so his “mind went to planning the funeral” almost immediately. He muttered something about not wanting papier-mâché caskets.

“Baltimore Police have been a big help,” Wilder said. They “directed [the family] to different funds” specifically for victims of crime. Ideally, the fund will reimburse the family for elements of the funeral in six to eight weeks. The family will see if it all works out. For now, “you got to give these people a check.”

At one point during the service, Rev. Williams curiously quoted filmmaker Jane Campion, who had lost her first child after just 12 days. Rev. Williams was subtly political and existentially Christian. All of us will, at one point, no matter how smart we are, be confronted with something we don't understand and can't understand. This is one of those points. For this murder and all of these murders, you can't blame the police, you can't blame “those they call thugs,” you've just got to pray, he said.

El Hajj Amir Khalid A. Samad

In East Cleveland, far from the Republican National Convention unfolding in a sanitized and militarized downtown, El Hajj Amir Khalid A. Samad holds a summer long Peace Camp for the empowered, conscious, and aware. The class consists of 20 or so between the ages of six and 16. Each class begins with the students saying “good morning” in a different language until they've run out of languages. He has kindly let me sit in. Today's lesson is on “Ujamaa,” which Samad translates to the class as, “cooperative economics.”

Violence is bad for the community and it's bad for business, which are one in the same if we're aiming for some kind of ideal that don't need nobody from the outside, which is in part what Khalid Samad is imparting to these kids. That means among other things that not reporting or dealing with those who are doing wrong in the community shouldn't be off-limits. It shouldn't be considered “snitching.” It's “stupid,” Samad says, adding some lift in his voice. “It's suicidal,” he adds—and you're a “soft sucker” if you do it.

He teaches the kids about what “snitching” is versus what it has been turned into. Snitching is when you do dirt with somebody else and then you tell on them, one student explains. Samad says he is correct.

The larger lesson it would seem, is that there is no future in this kind of fronting. He notes when he sees a young man, looking rough with that “dead look” in their eyes, he smiles. “I smile because they want you give that dead look back,” he says. “That don't mean I don't do what I gotta do,” he adds, sticking some tough in his voice, “I'm already prepared, so I can smile.”

Then the class stands up and Samad begins a clap and dance session with each kid introducing themselves and declaring that they are “empowered, conscious, and aware.”

After his lesson, Samad takes a break as the students inside are playing music. The conversation turns to Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Cleveland boy who was shot by police on Nov. 22, 2014 within seconds of them pulling up, responding to a 911 call that there was a black male with a gun in the park.

“You saw that nonsense, man,” Samad says to me and sighs out in front of the Peace in the Hood community center, the heat pounding down around 11 a.m. “Shooting like a cowboy...”

Samad, who worked in law enforcement for nearly 20 years, went on to say that if you actually go to the location of the shooting you can spot many “tactical advantages” the officers could have taken to engage Rice before firing, including a small hill on one side of the gazebo that has a long road behind it. He said they easily could have approached Rice from that way, employed the hill as protection, and asked to see his hands. But Officer Loehmann didn't do anything like that, he just fired his gun into a 12-year-old boy.

Bird, Pontella, and Bettie

Charlie Parker was from the landlocked state of Kansas and he spent some of his worst years in sunny California (including a six-month stay in a mental institution), but Pontella Mason's 2008 mural “Bebop: Charlie Parker and Bettie Carter,” painted on one of the pylons under I-83 near the Farmers Market in Baltimore, places Parker near the beach.

He isn't on the beach mind you, he's in the water, in a suit, just his head and shoulders and some of his saxophone popping out of the water, and he's oversized—like some Ray Harryhausen creature who has come to the surface for some air. His sad or maybe just doped-up eyes stare forward—this is how Parker played the saxophone, focused to the point of being zoned-out; hardly the wailing sax man portrayed in Clint Eastwood's insincere movie “Bird.” And his face here is uncannily indifferent, a fitting look for a confident musical genius, self-absorbed prick, and somebody often full of H, which both fills you with apathy and makes you feel totally invincible.

Parker played past his audience when he performed, but his music was inviting, exploratory, and indefatigable. As Alfred Appel Jr. points out in his 2002 book “Jazz Modernism,” Parker's 'Ko-Ko' is set to a 300 beats-per-minute tempo—for some contrast, Baltimore club, often considered dance music at a breakneck pace, humps along at 130-140 BPM. Listen to Parker on 'Winter Wonderland,' in which he smashes white Christian holiday schlock into pieces with the assistance of his saxophone and Modernist mind and then rearranges the pieces—the song you've heard a hundred times is there but not like you've ever heard it before; and once you've done that, move onto 'Just Friends' from “Charlie Parker With Strings”—it is the best thing ever recorded, if you ask me.

Because of his outsider status as a black genius contrarian and because of his love of opiates, Parker made music that evidences excitement right as it hits a ceiling and jubilantly, pointlessly acts out because it's got nowhere else to go and nothing else it can do. He was always reaching his limit. Parker understood ecstasy the way an addict does—as something intensely felt but fleeting and ultimately, the start of the next clawing search for feeling good.

Which brings us back to Mason's portrait of unexcited Parker on that pylon, staring out, expressionless, saying “help me” or “I don't give a shit” or “come at me, bro” depending on the mood you're in when you look at it. Near Parker's stoneface, Mason scrawled “Bird Lives!,” reflective of a dogged fan's impulse to deny Parker's end by catering to nostalgic nonsense about legacy and influence (I prefer the tragically optimistic “Bird Is Free,” the name of a postmortem 1961 live release). No matter that Parker more often wore flannel or dress shirts and suspenders, and that his suits, when he wore them, were often rumpled and dirty, Mason's Parker rocks a purple and pink suit and the beach scene has a kind of wall-of-the-La-Tolteca-in-your-hometown-quality to it. It is naive, but that's just fine and even kind of welcome because there's still Parker's presence and all the pain it drags with it.

Or maybe Parker's supposed to be drowning in “Bebop: Charlie Parker and Bettie Carter.” His saxophone is mostly underwater, so no sound you'd probably want to hear could come out of it, and Parker—a lifelong addict, notoriously selfish guy, and something of a savant, who Miles Davis describes in his noxious autobiography as once getting his dick sucked as he ate chicken in a cab—lived most of his life as if he were moments from being pulled under for good. Even a colorful suit and some white sand and palm trees and “Bird Lives!” can't counter that.

Last year, Bird got to briefly live again—or maybe his bones were just picked once more, you decide—when Verve released “Unheard Bird: The Unissued Takes,” a two-CD, 69-track compilation of mostly previously unheard Parker performances, false-starts (or as we'd call them anywhere other than jazz, “fuck ups”), and alternate takes. These compelling partial scraps recorded between 1949-1952 find Parker jumping all around with a Latin jazz orchestra, gassing up a stodgy string ensemble, twisting big band into abecedarian bop, and musically conversing with Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and others. These are recordings that for the most part didn't work so they have a specific sort of energy—mostly moments where Parker takes his horn too far out there. It is, if you really think about it, a compilation of the times Parker fell down. After he totally beefs it on the intro to 'Bloomdido,' he says, “Excuse me, I misunderstood it myself, okay, do it again.”

Sharing the pylon with Parker and some of the beach kitsch background is the portrait of exuberant improvisational vocalist Bettie Carter. Mason paints Carter as all-mouth, intensely shut eyes, and catharsis. Carter wails while Parker stares. Together, they illustrate jazz, and through that two go-to responses to a world which offers nothing but limitations: Grow stoic or scream out.

Shorty

Duane “Shorty” Davis has got his hands in a whole lot of shit.

Pretty much everybody who has ever been to a protest in Baltimore knows Shorty: He's the one who often delivers decorated toilets to officials to suggest the government is full of shit (“I use the toilet because the toilet is like, a common denominator,” he told me at the Creative Alliance a couple years ago. “It doesn't care if you're black, white, straight, or gay, it takes your shit every day.”) and in many ways, he's the backbone of the local protest movement—most activists learned how to protest from Shorty.

But when he isn't marching, demonstrating, training others on the ins and outs of organizing, working with the homeless, mocking and sometimes interrupting media outlets not up to his standards, or creating funny protest art, Shorty's grilling.

He began when he was eight years old, he told me one day in Upton as he was preparing hamburgers and hot dogs for last year's National Night Out. Shorty was the ninth of 10 kids, so cooking was a good skill to pick up, he added.

“But you know when I really got started,” he asked me with a smile. “You know Jesus with the fishes and loaves? That was my first day on the job, I've been cooking ever since.” He smiled big: “I showed [Jesus] how to cut shit and make it stretch, know what I'm saying? I was there. Last Supper? I was there. They ain't never say shit about the cook but they always talk about the meal.”

Before Shorty moved to Baltimore in 1991, he lived in Zion, Illinois, where cooking was one of many hustles. “When I used to sell dope I did this on the side,” he said as he dropped another bag of burgers onto the grill. He'd sell food along with shots of Hennessy and Crown Royal for two bucks back in Zion.

From 1997-2007, he ran Shorty's Pit Beef & Ribs, a well-regarded BBQ stand (slogan: Shorty's Meats Taste Good In Your Mouth) which moved around but began at Greenspring Station.

Over the past year or so, he has resurrected his stand as a massive portable grill called Shorty's Bootleg BBQ (“so good it's illegal”), which he takes to events around town and also frequently maintains in Brooklyn on Hanover Street. And every weekend downtown he feeds the homeless, something he's been doing most weekends since he arrived in Baltimore.

Just a few days before National Night Out, Shorty was in front of the Sam's Club in Randallstown selling food to passersby to raise money for the Special Olympics. He also sometimes posts up on the side of Route 40 and elsewhere without a permit—yet another subtle form of civil disobedience and why this new endeavor is dubbed “Bootleg BBQ.” At National Night Out, as kids and adults danced, browsed piles of free books (provided by Shorty), and devoured hamburgers, Shorty's attention was on then-Democratic candidate for mayor Catherine Pugh, who had just arrived.

“Cathy! Cathy!” he yelled. “Ms. Pugh!” She came over and said hi to Shorty. They know each other well. Earlier in the year, Pugh presented Shorty with the Verizon Community Innovator Award.

By now, the batch of burgers Shorty had been flipping were good to go.

“HOT! HOT! HOT!” he shouted as he rushed a tray of burgers over to the line of people waiting for them. Then, he spun around and announced, “Now, let's cut them dogs.”

Qué

As the fire department condemned and boarded up the Bell Foundry, a noted art space in Station North, and evicted all of its residents, Qué said something I'd heard him say some variation of plenty of times before: “This place saved my life—literally.”

At 15, Qué's parents moved from Northeast Baltimore to Harford County, a profoundly alienating life adjustment.

“I moved to one of the most racist communities. I hardly had friends in Harford County. The friends I did have, I would have to find different ways to talk to them and I had horrible experiences—isolation, depression. The first year I attended North Harford High School—they have this thing called Tractor Day where people show off their tractors—horrible,” he said to me a few days after the eviction. “But I can say Harford County was like the beginning stages that made me question everything. Racism still existed there especially, fuckin' Klan meetings there.”

He eventually ended up at Fallston High School, where I also went, though years before (my dead friend Mike also went there). A grim and alienating place that similarly improved my bullshit detector, too. A few kids in my class proudly went to Klan meetings. My sister knew Qué—they were in the same grade. She said he was “super smart.” He burned her a bunch of Velvet Underground CDs, she recalled.

Qué went to Towson University and studied film and English and spent much of his free time in Baltimore, especially once he graduated in 2014, and especially at the Bell Foundry. He says then he was like a “black socialite,” showing up to events, soaking it in.

In April 2016, Qué was staring down homelessness and somebody invited him to the Bell Foundry. Over the years he attended “mostly punk and metal shows” at the Bell Foundry, which meant he was one of the few black attendees among mostly white people and embraced the space hesitantly.

“Even though I do identify as punk I still could feel like an outsider because my presence and any of my friends of color who came around made white people uncomfortable,” Qué said. “Even when I moved into Bell Foundry I still kind of felt that, the white people who had studio spaces I didn't feel comfortable talking to because I felt like they felt like I didn't belong there—but things started to change when I began to assert more dominance in the space.”

Along with his friend Jengis, he recorded an album, "White Noise Boys" under the name Melanin Free. It's a record fueled by spite—like most noise records, I imagine—and captures some of the frustration he felt at the Bell and in the white arts scene of Baltimore. A standout is 'White Excellence,' which begins with a sample of Birdman and then bounds between splatters and squirts of static and an ornate house beats and features some sticky, discordant guitar solo-ing of the Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Hazel, and Prince sort.

Qué made the space more actively inclusive and really a model for a forward-thinking DIY community. In September, Qué took over booking more shows in the Bell Foundry's basement venue, which he referred to on fliers and social media as You Know T.F. Where: “I decided I was gonna start booking shows for the venue and for reasons that people know about I didn't put the title of the place online—so I nicknamed the space 'You Know T.F. Where,' for 'you know the fuck where'—and I had this policy that we do not turn away people due to lack of funds because you know, we're all broke and depressed. I was trying to create a safer space. I wasn't going to tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and harassment, otherwise that would lead to permanent expulsion from the space. A rule I have enforced three times.”

Weekday shows were intimate while weekend shows rivaled and often topped the energy at more “legit” venues. It was also a place where well, black artists could play for black attendees with less interference—there have been ongoing conversations in the city about venues having more aggressive security when black musicians perform or DJ and sometimes, the difficulty of even being booked if you're black. Qué scraped out a solution to that at the Bell.

“But all of that got taken away,” Qué said.