Fixing their bikes, helping kids grow

Mr. Fix-it: One man and his repair business become part of the fabric of an East Baltimore community.

The bike is a fine bike. Maybe too fine.

A young man wearing a Yankees cap and a nervous look wants to sell it - a brown Bianchi 10-speed, light as a feather, good enough, he says, for serious riders.

He sidles up to William Arthur Solomon, sitting on his marble stoop on a rough East Baltimore street corner. The young man casts his offer: He'll sell, for just 50 bucks.

But as with most things in his life, Solomon has his mind made up. And Solomon - a slow-walking man known as "Can" or "Trash Can" or "Pops," and sometimes as the "Bike Man of East Baltimore" - isn't biting.

"No way, man, I ain't buyin'," says Can, who is 78 and leathery and a much-loved presence in one of Baltimore's most difficult neighborhoods. "Don't gotta explain why. I know what I like and what I don't, and I don't gotta give no reason for it."

Can is a fixture here - the corner of Monument and Glover streets - where most days he operates a makeshift but successful business of fixing, selling and sometimes buying used bikes.

His work embodies the commerce of the inner city - small businesses run from sidewalks instead of storefronts. From the front of his Formstone rowhouse, he provides useful goods and services, dispenses care and wisdom to kids who need it, and stands as an example of old-fashioned values to those around him. Rock-solid and cagey as they come, Can helps provide the glue that holds his neighborhood together.

Though few in number, there are others like him. People with plenty of guts and business savvy, but not enough cash for a store. People selling clothes and snow cones, pecan pies and incense, watermelons and Christmas trees, usually at a fraction of what you pay elsewhere.

Many work on streets just like Can's, streets swimming in activity - some bad, some good.

It is a place of movement. Young teens race down Monument on off-road motorcycles, popping wheelies. A man trots down the street on a stallion, taking the horse to an a-rab stable.

Parents squire their kids to summer school, never letting them an inch out of sight.

At an unrelenting pace, money changes hands. Deals go down. Deals go bad. Deals get busted up.

In a part of town where just about anything can happen at any time - users and pushers and police and regular folks trying to survive.

"Seeing Can out here almost every day, on this street? It's just important, real important," says Tyrone Harrell, his 39-year-old occasional assistant, who calls Can the only "second-hand, used-bike, fix-it and repairman" in all of East Baltimore.

But Can - wiry and smallish, with caramel-colored skin, small brown eyes and a tattoo of a woman and what looks like a dagger on his left forearm - doesn't think he's overly important.

Ask him, and in his own words, spoken as if he has a very dry saltine in his mouth, he'll tell you. He's just a man putting in work.

The bike business began last year because he was bored with retirement. After spending decades working construction, doing foundation work and bricklaying all over Baltimore, he needed something to occupy his time.

Because he is "mechanically inclined," as he puts it, he set about fixing the bikes of children in the neighborhood. He did it because it made him feel good. But the bike-fixing boomed.

Can soon found himself operating a little side business: repairing bikes for kids still, often for free, but also, for neighborhood adults, fixing flats, changing tires, putting seats on and making brakes brake again. It is an important undertaking in a community such as East Baltimore, where many, unable to afford a car, rely on bicycles to take them where they need to go.

By last fall, Can had his operation in gear. He would get old parts from junkyards, bringing them home in his beaten red truck. Bikes would be donated or he would buy them from street peddlers - refusing, he says, to buy those that might be too pricey for his clients or that might have been dubiously procured.

Drive down Monument Street, about a half-mile east of Johns Hopkins Medical Center, and you will find Can and his bikes, 30 or 40 of them, waiting for a new owner, or for repairs. There are ready-to-run red and silver and green ones. There are five-speeds and 10-speeds and mountain bikes. Blue bikes with tires in the air and broken bikes with spokes missing and cables snapped.

They are stacked in rows of eight or so, leaning against Can's rowhouse and against a utility pole. Can leaves them chained there, even at night. Nobody messes with his bikes, partly because he hardly sleeps and because he watches them from his bedroom window.

Partly, too, because he has a loaded .38-caliber pistol. He says he doesn't care who knows, and he's not afraid to use it if someone is messing with him or his stuff.

He runs things from the stoop. Usually a few local men help - Harrell or Joseph Jones, who doesn't say much but is good at fixing brakes.

When he isn't taking off a tire, Can watches the men like a hawk, doling out orders.