ANYTHING COULD happen here. Anything might suddenly appear. You could walk up Broadway in Fells Point on a June evening, and on one side of the street there's a TV production crew setting up for another dramatization of Baltimore's drug scene, while on your side of the street a woman with a face burned and swollen by real life looks up from her squat on the sidewalk and stares at you through old-junkie eyes.
You could be jauntily jangling quarters in your pocket while, 3 feet away, an old man fingers a slot in a newspaper box for forgotten change.
You could be walking at sunset and hear a man and a woman engage in a long and profane argument on a sidewalk outside a Highlandtown bar and, in the next instant, a flower peddler appears from nowhere to try and sell plastic-wrapped, long-stem roses.
Anything could pop up in this city of peculiar charms and vagaries. You could find yourself a guest in a Guilford mansion, and the next day you could be reading a sign on a rowhouse that warns visitors they might be attacked with a baseball bat if they don't keep away from the front door.
It's a world beautiful and broken and weird, and anything could happen, which is what we live for, however it comes to us.
A great country we have here, and some days a great city, with endless possibilities. In a matter of hours or footsteps, you could move from one to the other - from good to evil, from bright to bleak, from hip to lame, from progressive to retro.
Suddenly a handsome man with red skin and horns appears. His name is Herman Williams, brother of Montel, the television talk show host, and he has just stepped from a dressing room in the Creative Alliance in Highlandtown, which is an old storefront place with high ceilings, exposed ductwork and an appropriately bluesy, funky, bohemian atmosphere. There's a bar with an orange bubble lamp.
Williams has rented the space for the evening. He's listed as the producer, director and writer of a one-man show "15 years in the making," starring himself. It's called Satan Speaks.
The show has great possibilities - soon to be a Broadway musical, the program notes say - and an anything-could-happen quality to it. Which is what we live for, and why we go there.
On the way into the small theater, I am asked if I have a question for the Prince of Darkness. A man hands me an index card and a pencil, and I write, "So how's John Gotti doing these days?"
Williams' father has come to watch. He's the retired fire chief of Baltimore. Several other family members have come for the show. Ours is a small town.
Herman Williams, brother of Montel, steps onto the stage, which is draped in minimalist red cloth to suggest flames. Williams wears a black tank top that reveals well-toned arms and chest. He's wearing black leather pants and boots. Two little objects, looking more like fake plastic fingers than horns, appear to protrude from his shaved, Montelian head. He's red all over.
Anything could happen, and in a way it already has - Montel Williams' brother is Satan in Highlandtown.
But I can only visit hell for an hour. In what I see of it, the show never seems to rise above unpolished chit-chat about religion and evil, with a couple of profanities thrown in.
So, having had my taste of attempted avant-garde for the evening, I head across the street to a corner bar to quench my thirst. The bar is adorned with old prizefight memorabilia. There are about 10 people in the place, two of them shooting pool under a lamp.
Music from the jukebox: Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean." A 30-something woman with stringy hair starts dancing provocatively, and a guy in denim joins her. Anything could happen, and it does.
The two dancers head over to the bar to share a stool. They immediately get grabby with each other. The woman climbs on the guy's knee and romance blossoms.
A few feet away, a small, whiskered man whispers sweet somethings into a fleshy, tattooed woman in a white tube top. The bar seems to have suddenly become a petting zoo.
In between the two cozy-and-getting-cozier couples, an old woman in plaid flannel shirt and jeans sits alone on a barstool. Her legs crossed, kicking to the music from the jukebox, her eyes on the overhead television, she seems content with her Budweiser - from a can, and through a straw.