E-Mail This Article to a Friend Juiced, jaded, faded (continued)

TAKE IT TO THE BRIDGE

The smoot. It is a unit of measurement, precisely five feet and seven inches long — the height of former MIT undergrad Oliver R. Smoot, ’62. When young Oliver was pledging the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity in 1958, his brothers rolled him bodily, head over heels, across the Mass Ave Bridge. (Its proper name is the Harvard Bridge. Partisans call it the MIT Bridge, but we’ll stick with what just about everyone calls it.)

They found that the bridge — nearly 2035 feet to you and me — is precisely 364.4 smoots plus one ear long, and every year Lambda Chi pledges to repaint the smoot markers along the length of the sidewalk. Anyone who says that fraternities are useless, anti-intellectual diversions that only lead college students into lives of drunken debauchery should know that Mr. Smoot took his special status as a unit of measurement seriously, becoming, in his adult life, the chairman of the American National Standards Institute and the president of the International Organization for Standardization.

The river below the bridge is dark and choppy, laced with tiny whitecaps. Joggers trundle by. The wind blows strong. Stopping in the middle of the bridge — on the 182.2-smoot mark — you can take in the city’s full panorama. Cambridgeport behind you. On the right, the Citgo sign and Fenway’s light towers. Allston, too. Back Bay, the Pru, and the Hancock are straight ahead. Panning to the left, the golden gleam of the State House dome. Downtown. East Cambridge. Beyond that, the Tobin and Zakim Bridges, with the Bunker Hill Monument in the distance. And Mass Ave stretches onward.

BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY

You know you’re in Boston. The buildings are bigger. The architecture more grand. There’s more bustle. It’s a city. There are the majestic residences of the Back Bay Brahmins. There’s the Eliot Hotel, down Comm Ave from Fenway, where Bill "Spaceman" Lee used to drink after nearly every Sox game. ("I believe in 27 ground ball outs on 27 pitches, and let’s get down to the Eliot Lounge," he said.) Across the street from Virgin Records, on a bench beneath an overhang, a man is propositioned by a prostitute.

In front of Berklee, a kid in a Motörhead T-shirt hacks a butt. Nerds with cellos talk animatedly. A hippie with greasy, stick-straight hair strums an unplugged electric guitar. Inside the main building, a saxophone sounds mellifluous jazz scales.

On the sidewalk outside the Hynes Convention Center T stop, two Scientologists sit at a card table. They’re offering a free "Stress Test." They look lonely.

Christian Science seems to have more appeal. Near Mary Baker Eddy’s Mother Church, people stroll languidly, soaking in the shady serenity, skimming their fingers in the reflecting pool.

Symphony Hall isn’t trying to attract anyone: it’s locked tight. Horticulture Hall is ornate, but its marble halls are empty.

Past the Mass Ave T stop, the street is lined with 19th-century red-brick row houses. Many of them boast gleaming, freshly varnished doors and wrought-iron railings repainted black. Many do not.

In Darcy Barber Shop, a barber in a blue smock helps an old man out of a red-leather chair. At the corner of Mass Ave and Tremont Street sit the storefronts of a check casher and a psychic. A woman in a colorful head wrap rolls her luggage behind her, singing passionately.

It’s now early evening. Inside Wally’s Café Jazz Club (est. 1947), the walls are worn and weathered. The front door is open. So is the back one, behind the stage, and the warm breeze is mellow. A piano sits, unplayed, on stage left. A sign above the bar lists the "Hops" and "Grapes" for sale. It’s all men at the bar, and nearly all of them drink hops. (All men except the bartender, that is, who looks like she could handle any one of them.)

Leaning over the jukebox, a guy boasts that he put in five dollars and was rewarded with 58 credits.

"Ain’t nothin’ wrong with a little Johnny Hathaway!" he says to no one in particular after punching in some digits. He also plays "Superfly" by Curtis Mayfield, and "Born To Lose" by Ray Charles. (He later confesses that the latter wasn’t the Ray Charles song he was looking for.)

"See, this tastes watered-down," says a man in a fedora to his friend. "That’s why I like Schweppes."

"How you doin’?" a patron asks of a guy just walking in.

"I’m all right. It’s the rest of the world that’s wrong," he replies.

Near a bus stop outside the Boston Medical Center is an expanse of concrete, spattered with pigeon droppings like a Jackson Pollock painting. Inside the hospital, people ambulate as best they can on crutches, in wheelchairs, with canes. A chapel, the sun shining through its stained glass, is empty.

WHERE IT BEGINS

As you walk toward Newmarket Square in Roxbury, parallel to I-93, there’s one of those semi-nonsensical signs you see on phone kiosks and bus stops, praising Boston’s unique and multifaceted character. THE INTERSECTION OF PROGRESSIVE AND QUAINT, it reads. Newmarket Square, alas, is neither.

Instead, it’s a low-rumbling, fairly depressing aggregation of warehouses, chop shops, scrap heaps, storage spaces, truck-rental lots, and wholesale foodstuff vendors. There’s Front Rubber Stamp Co. and Cathay Foods Corp. There’s the somewhat menacing Morgan Services, Inc. (What services, exactly?) At Lenox Junk Co. (WARNING: ATTACK DOG ON PREMISES) and Standard Electric (THIS PROPERTY IS UNDER 24 HOUR SURVEILLANCE) they don’t want you around. Outside Good Seasons Trading, Inc., a yellow sign advertises the prices of bok choy and snow peas. Behind a chain-link fence, a smiling cartoon pig hawks his own flesh: "Pork. Poultry. Beef. Provisions."

It all combines to create a vague but palpable sense of foreboding. A sense that, if you aren’t swinging shut those big barbed-wire gates or steering that semi truck into a receiving port, you really shouldn’t be here. A glance at the sidewalk doesn’t make you feel much more at home. The streets are all littered with long-ago-finished fifths of whiskey and cracked bottles of cognac. A bag of Doritos. A pair of pants.

Up the road apiece, the street opens up. Suddenly, there’s traffic again and people and homes. There, amid the noise and the exhaust, Mass Ave merges with Columbia Road. And there, just like that, is where Massachusetts Avenue ends.

Or, depending on your perspective, where it begins.

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com