On Tuesday, I opened up the Baltimore Sun to an article about Michael "Screaming Mike" Sibert, who I had no idea had passed away last month, after roughly a decade of wandering around Fells Point talking to himself and screaming nonsense and obscenities to whoever was around. Baltimore, particularly FP, is full of homeless guys, many of them crazy, but everybody knew Mike. He was kind of a neighborhood institution, and while he wasn't entirely harmless (he'd been seen stealing people's mail and, on one occasion, breaking a window), he was around for so long that people got kind of used to him, to the point that he was just this oddity that only tourists were really scared of but a local folks knew and kinda loved. A lot of residents and business owners in the neighborhood did their part to take care of Mike now and then, including my dad, who has an annual ritual of distributing Christmas care packages to the homeless. Dad hadn't even heard when I told him the news yesterday. He has a ton of Mike stories, and apparently knows more about him than some of the people quoted in the article, which doesn't even mention that Mike was a Nam vet. My current apartment is a few blocks further North than Mike ever seemed to venture, so I hadn't seen him around in a few months even before he died. But that crazy motherfucker will be missed. One love, boomer.

Labels: story time

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 11, 2006 at 3:30 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.