Breakfast in Fells Point with John Waters
Soft scrambled eggs with lots of bacon, hot tea and a Kool
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Around 1973, I started having breakfast with John Waters and other Dreamlanders every Sunday morning at Jimmie’s Restaurant in Fells Point, Baltimore. I met John when I worked as the sound man on his movie, FEMALE TROUBLE, and continued to help during the film’s edit at the UMBC’s film department, where I worked, and a student was helping John edit the film. I saw John nearly every day for several months, and we got to know each other well. We both grew up in opposite ends of the Baltimore suburb, Towson, Maryland. We both went to private school and college, and realized we even had several mutual Towson friends at the time. We both loved movies, and I laughed at all of his stories, so we got along. John invited me to hang out with him and his friends at Bertha’s Fells Point bar, and soon, suggested I also meet him and a few of his closest friends Sunday mornings at the little greasy spoon, Jimmy’s restaurant in Fells Point.
I still lived in Towson, which was a 45 minute drive to Fells Point, but John and the Dreamlanders and their city lives were an interesting change from Towson, so I, as a venturesome 22 year old decided to try it. Only a few Dreamlanders came, because most couldn’t afford the couple of bucks for a restaurant breakfast. Conversation was a witty round-table of snarky Baltimore commentaries and New York City gossip that John had picked up from his many subscriptions to journals like WWD, Variety, Andy Warhol’s Interview, and The Village Voice, etc. Sometimes, we’d see Baltimore’s Mayor, William Donald Shaffer, sitting by himself in a corner having breakfast, and snicker at his slumming in this low-rent lunch counter- but how Baltimore!
Sunday breakfast at Jimmie’s was my entrée into Baltimore City’s 1970s microscopic Bohemian life. Between working every weekday on FEMALE TROUBLE, then spending every Friday night at Bertha’s , and closing Zeppie’s (a Polish neighborhood bar on the edge of Fells Point) at 2AM, I became pretty close friends with John and other Dreamlanders of Fells Point. John and I started going to movies once or twice a week, usually a Russ Meyer tittie movie or a ‘70s blaxploitation flick at one of the big downtown black theaters where we were the only whites in the audience.
I finally decided to enter this new life completely, and moved from suburban Towson to a run-down 18th century Fells Point town house, which I bought for a $100 a month mortgage which Vince Peranio and Delores Deluxe helped furnish and decorate. I stayed in Fells Point maybe two years, before opportunities took me to New York City to broaden my filmmaking and cultural life. There I entered a new celebrity-spiced world, rubbing shoulders with Andy Warhol, Amos Poe, Jean-Michel Basquait, Debbie Harry, and many others I lived with my new wife in a Soho loft, and walked to a job at New Line Cinema’s Chelsea office. And it all started with breakfast at Jimmie’s.
Robert Maier is the author of Low Budget Hell: Making Underground Movies with John Waters. He now lives in Micaville, North Carolina.