I was standing in X/S, wrestling down a particularly fierce nascent hangover. Already forty minutes late for work, this little brat was feeding on anxiety, growing in strength and purpose. A quarter pound of sausage, on a croissant, eaten in under thirty seconds was my last best hope of crushing the bastard before he convinced me, in a slurring Klingon-ish tongue, to go home and pretend that I didn’t have a job.
At X/S, if an order takes more than ten minutes it will take at least twenty. Eight or twenty-two. Five or thirty. Stuck in limbo with no sausage patty, regretting the half-pint of whiskey I had poured for myself at 4AM, I didn’t think twice about the string of little popping noises outside on Charles Street. I turned unintentionally to face the wall-sized windows, just in time to see a battered white pick-up truck racing through slowing traffic. A man in a ski mask and fatigues, looking every bit the part of dated parody of a criminal, balanced confidently in the bed and fired an assault rifle at a target above and behind him. The truck exited window-right.
My wide eyes barely had time to carriage return when I saw whom he was shooting at: my first-ever glimpse at Baltimore’s own (second-rate, mediocre) “super” hero—The Charm City Ghost. All black and red, billowing trench coat and fitted gas mask, some sort of combat baton in one hand and a grappling device in the other, he descended, nimbly touched down on and leapt off the roof of a parked car in a single movement, fired a cable and swung a few stories back in the air.
Then silence. I looked at the vaguely Russian employee. Surprise had softened her normally severe Slavic features. She looked nice. We ran for the door and joined the small crowd heading for Mount Royal. We were in a dead sprint when the first leaves, followed by a thick round trunk, of black smoke spiraled into the air.
The truck was in pieces near the I-83 on-ramp. The body had ripped off the chassis and traveled about 20 extra yards before it came to rest. A thin wire ran from the skeletal frame across Charles and into the leg of the awful man/woman statue in front of Penn Station, held fast by a piton. Three dudes lay unconscious (or worse) in the street. Some one shouted, and we all looked up at the roof of the train station. The Ghost, three rifles pinned under his arm, summitted Penn Station and disappeared without looking back.
My freckled, withered heart was racing a cocktail of blood and leftover whiskey through my system, so I’m not sure if I actually heard the load, buckling groan of wounded metal or was suffering from sensory overload. Regardless, I did see the slow nod of the statue’s head, the collapse of one of its four legs, the ballistics-film slow motion decent of one of the most reviled public monuments in Baltimore city. It fell so slowly that the crowd was able to start cheering before it crashed down on the burning engine, sending a gust of flame into the air. We cheered again when the flames swelled enough to pop the idiotic neon heart. I was elated. The statue is dead, long fuck the statue. All glee and impulse, I leaned over to the Russian to kiss her on the mouth only to get a stiff push for my efforts. She’s not even that pretty. Needless to say, I didn’t go to work.
Footage of the Charm City Ghost on Youtube
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Tagged breakfast, heroes, publicart, sausage, vigilantes
