But let’s not confuse ambition with creativity. In a sense, my friends in Baltimore are more purely creative than the professionals I know in New York; theirs is art without an agenda. We used to gather in the back room of a pub every other Sunday afternoon to play originals like “All I’m Gettin’ Tonight Is Drunk.” Some friends of mine who recently mounted a rock opera about the War of 1812 told me none of the cast ever mentioned getting paid, or brought them a receipt for a costume or prop.

Image Credit... Victor Kerlow

For most people I knew there, having a good time was a perfectly respectable priority in life, and it still seems to me one of the more harmless and decent ones anyone can choose to embrace. Recovering alcoholics tend to look back on their “drinking buddies” as friendships of convenience whose only real bond was their common addiction, but my Baltimore friendships always felt like the reverse: The drinking was fun in itself but it was also, more importantly, an excuse to spend eight hours hanging out together. Our hidden agenda was that we liked one another.

Baltimore could also become a motivational sinkhole. You can find the same people sitting on the same barstools you last saw them on years ago. A friend of mine once proposed a city slogan: “Baltimore: Your Ex-Boyfriend Still Lives Here.”

I remember a couple of guys who announced with much ado that they were leaving Baltimore to begin a new life in Florida. They broke their lease, sold off their stuff, had several going-away parties, and left. Within 48 hours they were back in the Irish Pub. It was scarcely time enough for them to have made the drive down and back. They were evasive about what had happened. “It didn’t work out,” was all they said. They had failed to achieve escape velocity. The gravitational pull of Baltimore had sucked them back in.

For years I liked to tell people, “I’m famous in Baltimore.” I was a minor celebrity among the cognoscenti there, a demographic that numbered in the hundreds. As a cartoonist, I was a fixture in the local alternative weekly; strangers in bars, where I would often work, recognized my drawing style; I even had groupies. (Well, one. But still!) For me, admitting that I had any greater ambition was like coming out of the closet.

Ambition had always seemed like such an unattractive trait to me, a pathology that afflicted people in Washington and New York. But, as with sexual orientation, it turns out not to be something you get to choose, and no matter how inconvenient or embarrassing it is, you eventually have to accept it or resign yourself to feeling stifled and miserable for life. And, like most closeted people, I doubt I was fooling anyone. I was working too hard at my art, and was too surly and resentful when no one paid attention to it. Eventually I moved to New York, there to assume my true flamboyant colors.