Ruby Tire was the name of my father's business, pronounced "Rooby Tar" in Baltimorese, our native accent. Rooby Tar. Primarily retreading but also sales, normally used tires with little tread for fifty cents or a dollar. It stood on Fremont Avenue up from Baltimore Street, likely the most decrepit part of the city. A bar and package goods stood across the street. Jake the tailor was right next door across the alley. Jake sat cross-legged in his window, head down, sewing with needle and thread. Louis the Greek's, where I ate about a hundred and fifty hamburger steaks with fries soaked in gravy, was around the corner on Baltimore Street. A grocery stood on the corner where Sporty and I bought a roll, a thick slice of onion, and a thick slice of bologna for a quarter. Who was Sporty? Given name, Gainwell Haines. I don't know where he slept but he did odd jobs for my father, had a walrus moustache, walked on the heels of his feet, and carried a dream book in his back pocket. Each week we'd put a quarter on the numbers but we never won.
I worked at the place in some capacity from the time I was eleven until Ruby died, April, 1963, the evening of the first Seder. It never was any big dollar outfit yet we ate well, lived in friendly neighborhoods, went to summer camp, and dressed Joe College. The University of Ruby Tire was as much an education as any other.
Southwest Baltimore had the kind of poverty most people, most white people, never get to see. With all its crumbling buildings and narrow alleyways, it was nevertheless a neighborhood with a vibrant street life which most also never get to see. James Baldwin wrote about another country. This was it. It was a world that was a substantial part of my growing up, a world teeming with all kinds of characters living their lives, getting by. I grew up around the Black men that worked for my father. I grew up around the people on the street and in the neighborhood. Vernon Graves, an employee since I was a little boy, had a huge smile on his face to see "Little Stevie's" name and picture in the Afro-American Newspaper. I flowed back and forth between two worlds, and, while I was aware of the disparity between “us”, I also never thought of “them” as "other". It didn’t occur to me, didn’t even think about it, never crossed my mind. They were here. I was here. I am not free of bias. I’m not. You’re not. None of us are. It’s there. “No”, we say, “Not me,” but it is...Me. Deep and subtle. Cultural DNA. The point is: keep nosing in the dirt like a hog hunting truffles and root it out.
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I was at a Marine Corps Reserve drill. We were dressed in our gabardines, so it wasn't a field training session. I don't remember what it was, but I do remember a gnawing pain growing in my guts. Sick bay gave me leave to go home. My brother was shocked to see me pull into the driveway.
"How'd you find out so fast?" he wanted to know.
"Find out what?"
"Dad had a stroke.”
We sped to Sinai Hospital where my father was still in the emergency ward. I pulled the curtain aside to see him, touched his arm. He acknowledged me but he really wasn't there. I did not want to be the center of this drama so I waited until I couldn't wait anymore and finally I said I needed a doctor, too. Back then an appendectomy was a real operation followed by a three day hospital stay. Known to me but not to my father, I was given the room right next to his. Late at night the sound of a bedpan hitting the floor in my father's room woke me up. Then the announcement over the hospital PA: “Dr. Black. Dr. Black, room number...All available personnel…” It was my father's room. Next thing I knew I was standing in the hall outside his room as people in white walked out and went to where they were before. I must have pulled out my tubing. I went into his room. He was propped up in a sitting position the way he used to sit up in bed when he read. His eyes were open, but they didn’t move. It was unsettling. I felt a chill. My mother used to say, when a chill flickered through our little bodies, that a ghost walked over our grave. Is that what just happened? I don't recall feeling anything but a sense of unease as I approached my father and closed his eyes, left the room, and came apart. To this day I do not understand the depth of my grief at that moment. We were together a lot but we weren't that close. I had memories. My first t-bone steak at the White Coffee Pot restaurant after seeing The Quiet Man at the Pimlico theater. We watched Friday Night Fights sponsored by Gillette Blue Blades. I remember quips and exchanges, but I don't remember a single conversation about anything. And yet. Not before and not since have I experienced the eviscerating pain I felt when my father died. I know it may well be coming. There are people I love so much. It will hit, and it will be terrible. I hope I can withstand it.
Two months after his death Ruby Tire went on the auction block. My father's partner's in-laws goaded him into running the business into the ground so they could buy it back debt free and give it to him to start over.
The day of the auction came, a warm spring day. The auctioneer stood on the hood of a car in the alley. My Uncle Milton, my mother’s brother, was with me as were my two close friends from Morgan, George Barrett and Jean Wiley, two very smart people. The three of us always seemed to be together. They had been at the funeral and were now with me for moral support. Uncle Milton was ready to buy the business for me if I wanted. I believe he secretly wanted me to make the buy and settle in Baltimore, but that's a whole 'nother tale. The auction began. No one was bidding but those in-laws. My God, they looked a despicable bunch, Jabba the Hut in baggy suits and a dress, diamonds on fat fingers! It came down to the wire very quickly. Me or them.
"Do you want it?", Uncle Milton asked.
Did I want it? Did I want it? His hand was in his pocket. He had the cash. Did I want it? No, I did not want it, no, I did not want it, no. The in-laws nodded. The talons closed. Ruby Tire was gone.
I could feel Uncle Milton's disappointment, maybe even his annoyance. He had come to Baltimore to be with the family. It had not turned out the way he imagined it would, and now his oldest nephew had made the decision to leave for good. George and Jean knew I'd made the right decision. They knew as well as I that we three were headed elsewhere, that taking over Ruby Tire would have meant driving on four flat tires for the rest of my life. It was not an easy call until it was. Two more semesters, and I'd be gone. Jean would win a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to University of Michigan. George was drafted, and the both of them were in Selma for the march across the bridge. George and I stayed close until he died. He became a state’s attorney. We lost track of Jean who was rumored to have become radicalized and even to have had a baby with Stokely Carmichael. We looked for years but never found her.
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