Fitzgerald and the city's walking dead
Fitzgerald would have been 120 years old on the 24th of this month. But as my good friend Xenos Kohilas knows, few outside the Greek island of Ikaria, where people tend to live longer and better than most, come anywhere near that mark. Scott didn't make it halfway, felled at 44 by a heart attack in Hollywood. Alcohol was his companion, but not his friend.
This summer, now a fading green light at the end of the dock, I re-read “The Great Gatsby” as is my custom. And then for the first time, I read “The Beautiful and the Damned,” the 1922 Fitzgerald novel that precedes Gatsby. It is more about the damned than the beautiful and thus my sorrow in the shadow of the taxpayer's coliseums at Russell and Hamburg.
“The Beautiful and the Damned” follows fortune's wheel as it orbits Anthony Patch, a young WASP of great privilege in an age when there was no need to put “white” before the P-word. In Anthony's America, and long afterward, there was no other kind.
(I say: Privilege for all, thus voiding privilege. And I believe that the astute social critic Fitzgerald, despite his excesses, would agree.)
For many pages, it all goes swimmingly for Mr. Patch. He wins Gloria, the great beauty of the age; ponders work, but has no need of pursuing it; and takes more than his fill of the finest food, pre-Prohibition liquor and cheap entertainment. His Manhattan parties are riotous fun. He has a butler.
All until demon alcohol gets its hands around Anthony's chronically parched throat, squeezing tighter with each highball quaffed to quench it.
Want to know how bad it got, how narrowly “White Privilege” was defined in the first two decades of the 20th century? Anthony and Gloria — his money gone, her looks dimming — WIND UP LIVING AMONG ITALIANS!
What next, clear vinyl slip-covers?
Anthony is described as being “abominably drunk,” “intolerable except under the influence” and “blind drunk.” He goes out to pawn his watch but gets drunk before he can make the transaction. He all but begs on the street and considers borrowing money from people he has forgotten are long dead.
Which brings me back to Russell and Hamburg streets and the faces of two hollow-eyed men, the beatings they had taken making them almost unrecognizably human. Privilege, if they'd ever possessed it, had not served these white men. They looked like dwellers of Dachau, right there on Maryland 295 near the place where garbage is turned to steam.
These men were not holding signs asking for money or food or a kind word. Nor did they wish anyone God's blessing. They just fluttered in the median, beyond despair. I took a long look at them at the light, thinking of the heights from which Anthony Patch fell.
And commenced a bit of make-believe I sometimes indulge when face-to-face with Third World Baltimore. I tried to imagine what these men looked like at that most magical of ages — 8. What sort of kids were they in the third grade? For in this country, at least not yet, few are born into begging.
I look because I know that half-a-click this way or that — if I'd had parents who beat me; if, like my deceased high school friend Timmy Getka, I'd been felled by schizophrenia — it could be me.
Anthony Patch began to “decay and coarsen” as he hit bottom, getting the crap beaten out of him after crashing the kind of party he'd once hosted. Then he loses his mind. But unlike the men in the median, the bewildered Mr. Patch eventually inherits a long withheld fortune. He lives out his years in sunshine, under warm, clean blankets and the care of a nurse.
If I could give anything to the men who broke my heart at Russell and Hamburg, it would not be a million dollars.
Cheers, old sport!
Happy Birthday!
PREVIOUS ARTICLE
