This friend of mine became a junkie and told me if I had any appliances from a job he could pay me and he took me down there and introduced me to Yusef. Even if it didn’t work, he’d give you a few dollars more than the scrap yard would and fix it and turn around and sell it to the people in the City.

He was located at North and Gay, right by the Robin’s Nest—a few blocks east of it. It was an old brick structure on that wedge-shaped corner and he was right in there, the #15 goes right past there. You can tell there’s been businesses in there for probably a hundred years. He’s take his hand truck in the morning and set his appliances out on the sidewalk. He does the neighborhood a service. But he’s got to shew the junkies away, hanging out there from the methadone clinic and selling their pills and crack and throwing the cigarettes around. He was pissed off, he’d have to shew them away like fuckin’ cats. That’s the turning point clinic, really big, you can probably see it from outer space. You gotta be crystal clear with junkies. He said it was literally hundreds upon hundreds of people in and out of that place every day. It’s in a good place, right there at the Baltimore Cemetery. A lot of these white rabbits don’t understand what a part of day to day life drug addicts are in the city. You can’t walk a block without running into one of these fuckers. Every time you turn around you see one of these fuckin people.

Yusef was a Black Muslim, a really good guy, a good man. We’d talk about whatever was goin’ on in the news, never heavy into politics, buy it lot of complaining about the junkies. He’d put a dryer out there and they’d sit on it. The man’s trying to make a living and these government sponsored by bums will sit on his merchandise. We did agree that the black and white junkies there made both our races look bad. You have to watch yourself but judge the man for what he is not a black guy or a ոigger. The liberals don’t get that, they try and put everybody in their little compartment. How many people are in Asia, so how can you put them all together when they are at war with each other. The Latinos, how can you put them all under one label when they have these intense national hatreds.