Like Faulkner, and unlike Wolfe, he has found that you can go home again, and even better than that is never leaving it in the first place. The Wicked Witch of the East is an art dealer who knows which wine to serve with which dish. New York is an evil Oz, Waters maintains, because it puts quotation marks around everything. Baltimore is Kansas pure because it puts quotations around nothing. His name, or so Waters insists without irony, is drawn from his habit of pecking at his food, and to look at Furlong's utter scrawniness is to believe it.
Pecker is a photographer.
When he's not burying cold cuts in mayo on his day job, he's wandering the city with an old-fashioned camera, snapping pictures of his neighbors, his family, his life, his city. This, Pecker is saying, is working-class Baltimore, from his father's faltering bar to the gay club where his sister works to a lesbian strip bar that's moved into the neighborhood to his grandmother's religious delusions to his mother's secondhand store with its collection of shabby '50s merchandise. She sees with quotation marks. Art is irony, irony is art. Back in Baltimore, there is pain, for through his photos the world laughs at the tiny dramas of Hampden reality as lived by people who talk funny and go downy ocean every summer, hon.