Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

Why have I never had much entrepreneurial spirit, that competitive, world-defining, world-acquiring instinct, so identified with my kind? Wendy always used to find it amusing that young people in Wudeng would come to me for business tips, assuming, in those days, that as an American I would have absorbed supply-side economics in the womb. I had nothing to tell them. This silence, this anticipatory silence, gives me tremors. The future, you could say, gives me tremors. And there Martin is, reaching after it, claiming it, his muscled arms as classic as a Rodin sculpture, or a hood ornament. Pulling me, phaeton-like, with him.

Why, I wonder, why does he even need a story at all? What does he need to explain? Look at his happiness: isn’t that reason enough?

• • •

You know what the girl’s name is? Finlayson. Finlarson. I think it’s Swedish. Anyway, she comes up to me and says, Mr. Perkins, I’ve got the records you requested now, follow me. And she actually opens up the counter and lets me walk back into the stacks with her. Starts taking down boxes and showing me things. Old deeds, lien records, structural assessments, for the whole area. I wish I’d had a camera, or a backpack; I would have just started squirreling stuff away while her back was turned. And then Vonetta comes around the corner and sees me there and says, excuse me! We are not allowed to have the public back in here for any reason! And this Finlayson girl says, this is the Office of Public Records, and I’m a state auditor. Can I have your name, please?

I’m surprised Vonetta didn’t have a stroke.

She turned purple like a goddamned grape. Get the hell out of my office! she says. Nobody talks to me like that in my office! I am a city of Baltimore employee and a shop steward of AFSCME Local 522! And Finlayson says, I don’t care if you’re the mayor, I’ve been instructed to open up these records pursuant to discovery in this case, and if I have to get a marshal in here to do it, I will.

Lee, Martin says, I think you’ve shot your chances of ever getting anything out of that office ever again.

That’s exactly what Vonetta said. She gave me this burning-up look and said, don’t bother coming in here no more, Lee Perkins, and I said to Karen, looks like I’m going to have to buy you a lot more tickets on that Baltimore — Annapolis bus. And she says, don’t bother, just get me a gas card; if I drive I’ll get here quicker.

Girl got balls.

She has no idea what she’s up against.

Vonetta Harper’s going to take early retirement.

Forget that. She’s got her little minions, and they’re just trained in the fine art of playing solitaire and ignoring requests.

What I know so far: Lee Perkins, to my right, is a lawyer, an assistant district attorney, who works on property misuse and real estate fraud. Paul Delacroix, across the table, runs the ESPN office at Camden Yards. Marshall Haber, next to Martin, teaches history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. We call ourselves the Chamber of Commerce, Marshall said to me, as we were being introduced. That way we can expense the meal. We’re one another’s clients. On paper, that is. Or sources, in my case. I view this as research. Weekly research at the DAC. It’s on my calendar.

For the most part it’s as if I wasn’t there at all. I sit back from the table, pad in my lap, clicking and unclicking my pen under the table, but writing only a few words, names, and phrases. When Martin explained what I was doing, they nodded, and Paul said, Martin Wilkinson, spokesman for the Talented Tenth, which produced a mild rumble of laughter.

Kelly, Marshall says, turning to me now, what you need to know about Vonetta — I’ve tangled with her, too — is that she’s the most powerful woman in Baltimore. Hands down. God love her, she may be a tyrant, but she knows everything about everything. You can’t register a deed or file a property transfer or a zoning request without her. You know in that TV show, The Wire , they had all that stuff about drug dealers and property developers? That was all based on her office. She was pissed because they wouldn’t give her a walk-on part. Tried to revoke their filming permits.

That was her one shot at the big time, Paul says. She’s too ugly for reality TV, God knows. Else she’d go on The Apprentice and be the Bad Black Lady, like that other one, the crazy one.

Let’s change the subject, Martin says. We increase her power by talking about her, right? Everyone knows Vonetta’s all reputation. A dictatorship of one.

Baltimore, the city of fiefs.

It’s not like it’s so different other places. All politics is local, you know that saying? Anyway, people fight because the stakes are so low. If you had a proper city, you know, a working city, where landlords didn’t just walk away from whole blocks at a time, and the government wasn’t always going around declaring X property derelict and Y property uninhabitable—

You’re saying if people actually wanted to live here.

If people wanted to use the existing housing stock, and not knock everything down and build another ridiculous condo, or fill in the harbor so they can get a better view of the Domino’s sign—

If we had a taxable tax base, and not fifty percent of cash flow in the city in the underground economy—

If the government actually gave a shit, instead of just putting up Empowerment Zone this and School of Excellence that—

Well, I guess that about sums it up, Marshall says. Y’all can go home now. I’ll just sit down and make sure Kelly here gets all that down on paper. Ninety-five theses on the future of Baltimore.

That’s just boring as shit. No way The New Yorker ’sgoing to print that. Am I right?

I don’t know what they’ll print, I say. I’ll just write what I hear, and they can sort it out, one way or another.

That’s a polite answer, Marshall says, but not a very convincing one. You’re saying you don’t have a slant?

Not this early in the game.

Well, you must have pitched them something.

I wanted to write about black entrepreneurs, I say, because most people don’t know they exist. The culture doesn’t seem to allow for them.

Which culture do you mean?

Mainstream culture.

Right, but that’s a tricky concept, isn’t it? Because you’re not just talking about numbers. Believe me. The numbers are on my side. People watch sports, the local news, maybe some talk radio, Rush, Howard Stern—

Tom Joyner, Paul says.

— but that’s not what you’re talking about. Even if you’re being as broad as possible, you’re still talking about the thinking person’s news.

What you saying, Lee says, cracking a smile, black people don’t think ?

You’re talking about a minority to begin with, Paul continues, the people who think anything about black entrepreneurs , who even know for sure what the word entrepreneurs means.

Yeah, Marshall says, but it’s a powerful minority.

No doubt, Paul says. And that’s what The New Yorker is all about. Talking to the five percent of the population that makes decisions.

My dad read The New Yorker ,Lee says. Every week. Read it in the library. Then later my mom started bringing it home from one of the houses she cleaned. We had a stack of them in the bathroom. It all started with the guy who wrote about Arthur Ashe, what was his name, McPhee? My dad loved that book about Arthur Ashe. Even made me read it.

It’s the exception that proves the rule.

No, Marshall says, it’s not that simple, Paul. In a democracy, in an open society, anyone can have an intellectual life. We forget that. Yeah, it doesn’t show up in the Nielsen ratings. Those people don’t do Nielsen ratings. They’re not in the focus groups. You know, when I was a kid, when they started busing over on Greenmount, every day I was the first one at the bus stop, and this white lady bus driver — I’m talking about six-thirty in the morning — would be sitting there drinking her coffee and reading Das Kapital . I’m not kidding. I never forgot it.