I ain’t gone nowhere . . . where you been, bunky?

I own a dozen or so copies of Gatsby and re-read it every summer, a tomato sandwich on white toast with me on the glider in the back yard – yet can’t resist bringing home orphan editions from yard sales and used book stores. This one I grabbed from the High Grounds coffee shop across from the Patterson Theater at Eastern and East Avenues.

After all these years, I can still find two or three sentences on every page worth transcribing just to weigh their beauty against a blank page: “The modesty of the demand . . .”

Pitch perfect . .

Of course the goof was late.

His tardiness – what the great Thomas Wolfe termed “the unerring punctuality of chance” - allowed me time to read past the scene where Nick Carraway is given pause by a set of cufflinks made of human molars and consider that the guy who wrote the book once lived just a mile or so away in Bolton Hill.

A park in Bolton Hill is dedicated to Fitzgerald

While Scott’s wife Zelda was getting her head shrunk over at the Phipps Clinic in the mid-1930s, the author was polishing a final draft of Tender is the Night – perhaps the most compelling story Z provided – at 1307 Park Avenue.

People in Baltimore have been howling all summer long that Joseph Borofsky ought to soak his head for what he has foisted on the Land of Pleasant Living.

At 51-feet tall, the hollow aluminum “Man/Woman” sculpture looms over the entrance to Penn Station like some kind of Earth Day recycling project gone wild, inspired, reportedly, by Timmy Burton-esque nightmares Borofsky had as a kid.

Every day, it seems, there is a letter to the editor in the Baltimore Sun from someone who detests it as a dumb and expensive – to the tune of $750,000 – joke.

But I kind of like it. It is just stupidly weird enough for Baltimore and somehow looks space-age and ancient at the same time.

Especially at night when the mammoth “thumb tack” that holds the man fast to the woman – through the heart, it would seem - glows Noxema bottle blue through the humidity.

It was there I sat, moving between Gatsby and the scrap heap Bubba Ho-Tep towering above when Mr. B finally posted in a ’62 Plymouth Valiant without plates and a cutie pie at the wheel.

“You’re late,” I said, getting in.

“Yeah,” said Mr. B with a wink. “Aren’t we though?”

Beautiful.

And she was.

Mr. Baltimore had scored himself a summer snowball: Skylite with a dollop of marshmallow and in the time I was away he’d taken her to some of the best shaved ice stands from Anneslie to Arbutus.

Their favorite: the little shack on the parking lot of the Super Fresh parking lot on Harford Road just before you hit Parkville.

Hear no dumb art, speak no dumb art, SEE no dumb art ...

She was a North Baltimore prep school kid, her name not important, not to me anyway, but for the sake of clarity, let’s call her Lucy.

Lucy had graduated high school sometime during the Clinton Administration, was born early in a previous southerner’s administration – back when Jimmy was trying not to lie or lust - and it was as clear as the blood orange O’s cap on Senor Bawlmer’s head that they were in love.

As Fred Sanford used to condescend to Lamont: “LOVE?”

Yes, Pop.

Love.

[Hard to blame the guy; Lucy is young and beautiful and Mr. B hasn’t been off the deep end since his one-sided crush on Aunt Mary Dobkin back when he was a no-field, no hit second basemen for the Red Shield Boys Club in Highlandtown.]

Spying “Gatsby” under my arm, she starts in on the trivia – “He used to live at 1307 Park,” she said – and some Lost Generation gossip about Gertrude Stein and the house she had on Reservoir Hill before Paris.

“Where to?” asked Mr. B when I’d settled into the back seat.

“Home.”

“No way,” said Lucy, pulling away from the train station. “Let’s get a bite somewhere.”

You gonna get pulled over in that wild thing, girlfriend . . .

Did we hit the Club Charles?

Sofi’s for an avacado and bacon crepe just a block away next to the Charles Theater?

No and no and no as well to my next guess, the One World Café near the Homewood campus of Hopkins for what I assumed a chick like this would subsist on between biographies of Colette: tempeh ‘cheese steak” subs or fresh tuna with wasabi mayonnaise.

[Not even for the charade of summer love could I conjure Mr. B’more Kielbasa a vegan and on this score my knowledge held.]

This Francophile in braids was taking us uptown.

Way up town to Roland Avenue to the first “shopping center” in the nation and the Petit Louis Bistro.

As close as you’re going to get to the City of Lights in the City that Would Read If Only It Could.

All of a sudden, I was hungry and my appetite and Lucy’s good credit crowded the table with snails in white wine and garlic; crispy eggplant, Belgian endive with walnuts – for you, Plastic, for you, my dear “croo-nair” – a sampling of cheeses and “poulet fermier roti” – roast chicken with mushrooms, leeks, shallots and mustard sauce.

[Now I could not have gotten Mr. Baltimore to eat a plate of snails if they were battered in Old Bay and beer but Lucy had done quite the number on him. As the old beards on the tugboats used to say: “I think his mind jumped time . . .”]

To the best of Mr. B’s knowledge, Johnny Kafka never put anything that even smelled French on his Polish sausage.

Lucy ordered red wine for the meal and a $48 bottle of Gewürztraminer “St. Hippolyte” from 1999 to get us started, swirling a couple of tastes in her pretty mouth while spotting someone at the bar.

“I know that girl,” she said. “We used to go to parties together in high school.”

It was Nancy Lee Mitchell, rock and roll chanteuse, high school art teacher and true-blue Bawlmer girl minding her own business in with a book of drawings by Ed Emberley.

[“My childhood hero,” she would tell us later.]

The food began to arrive – snails and eggplant soon joined by the cheeses – and Mr. B told Lucy to invite Mitchell to our table.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her we’d seen Nancy Lee fronting the psychedelic-garage-rock band The Things more than once, and that, in the lyrics to the Bo Diddley song that Mitchell roars through, we may look like a couple of farmers, but baby, we are . . .

I was keeping a low profile, just watching the Mr. B show and all the groovy people lining up for a good seat. He also kept his mouth shut while Lucy and Nancy girl-talked, most likely so his sucre du saison would not know that he and the Things guitarist - Chris Olenik – both get their hair cut at Frampton’s House of Shag.

So you want to be a rock and roll star . . .?

So B and me knew Mitchell’s rock and roll back story. To dig it in person, hit the Mojo Room in Northeast Baltimore on August 27 to see her and the band share a stage with the Spinns out of Carolina.

She was in a mood to talk about her childhood during the first wave of the Baltimore Renaissance under Willie Don Schaefer.

Born Nancy Lee Hiebel in 1974, she grew up in a house that was an abandoned building just a few years earlier; her playground the sidewalks and alleys of Ridgely’s Delight back when Camden Yards was still an industrial zone for home-grown businesses like Parks Sausages, back when what you saw at the foot of Russell Street was just beginning to turn from a slum into something better.

“I grew up in one of those “dollar houses,” said Mitchell, who now lives just over the city line – tsk, tsk - with her husband Mike, who plays bass for the Things.

“The last time I walked by the old house, the white curtains my Mom hung on either side of the front door were STILL there,” Nancy marveled. “But they re-did the sidewalk, so you can no longer see my 3-yr old footprints in the cement.”

[That’s see-ment to you tourists riding that silly amphibious duck boat down Thames Street, quacking up a storm.]

The House that Ruth wailed in as an infant – over at 216 Emory Street – was so close to Mitchell’s front door that tourists would knock thinking the Babe had been born there instead of a few rowhouses away.

Washington Boulevard before the downtown stadiums were even a gleam in Willie Don’s eye . . .

“I feel like I have some kind of ‘ownership’ of Baltimore,” said Mitchell. “I’ve never lived anywhere else in my life and probably never will . . .”

The City of Baltimore, said Mitchell with pride, gathering her things to go, “feels very much like it’s mine . . .”

“Ain’t it?” said Mr. Baltimore and it was then that I saw Lucy -expatriate used-to-be, Borges scholar schlepping coffee in Federal Hill – purse her lips in a dismissive smirk.

Cat fight at the bistro?

I’d have put money on Mitchell – you learn a thing or two when you grow up helping your parents gentrify the ‘hood – but before Lucy could return volley, Nancy Lee was gone.

“Shall we?” I said, Mr. B completely ignorant of the subtle shift that had occurred.

“We shall,” said Lucy signing the credit card slip and finally I was headed back to a warm bed on the other side of town.

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