The street is nearly deserted. The library across the street is boarded up, the windows kicked in again, but still in business. We are on the sidewalk where Peter G. Angelos’ proud building has just been smashed into, looted of whatever remains, and burned by the Mary Avenue Set, who name themselves according to four letters, two of which are either Zs or Ss. I cannot decipher their tag.

These boys have been busy establishing their reign through random acts of terror these past six months. I ran into three of them fifty yards from this spot last Monday morning at 4 a.m. They have taken half of the territory that belonged to the Liberty Parkway Boyz who raped and killed a girl last year and got busted. A half mile out Harford, at the bottom of the ridge, is a professional gang of teens who are openly tolerated by the police and who cut multiple kilos of dope up on a basement table beneath the hair salon they hang out in front of. I have witnessed narc cops taking down suspected white customers, but they leave the Valentino Crew alone. We stand in a zone between set ranges, savoring the smell of this vacant building, its shell rescued by the fire department—fenced now, no longer providing shelter for Mister Africa or Lice Man on a rainy day.

We run into Reba and Tom, two Oxy pill poppers, with their three-year-old boy, who still does not talk and never has a toy to play with, and is fed candy by Reba. Reba asks Megan for some money for food for the baby and Megan glares at Tom, “Not while you’re with that piece of shit.”

Tom, a tall, handsome, athletic guy in his mid-twenties, whined, “That’s not fair, Miss Megan. I’m working.”

“Yeah, and how much money have you spent on food for the baby?”

Silence as the junky head drops.

The baby is standing next to his former stroller, which now packs mom’s purse, looking dumbly about. Megan smiles at him, gives the baby hand wave and says to Tom, “Have you bought him a toy yet, anything? Or is he still playing with the wipe box container?”

“Come on Miss Megan, work is hard on me. I have a bad back.”

“Yeah,” she snarls, and you’ll be on it in a week, living off of Reba. If you were my son in law, I’d stuff a sock in your mouth so you never woke up and paint a sign on your pretty face, ‘here lies the vagina of the house!'”

Reba then led her boy and her drone away as Megan shook her head and said, “Buy him some grapes at least—instead of Skittles!”

I walked Megan to the 7-11, and we stopped to let a redneck in a giant pickup make his turn. He would have normally shook his head at me, a white man on foot, gone Dindu, but he waved, as Megan smiled at him and waved him on around the corner.

As Megan went into the 7-11 I walked across to the Ibis, West Indian bar to get a half pint of whiskey. One drunken white man sat drooling and twitching at the bar. A Jamaican girl and another West Indian—a man—were discussing something and ignored me as a I stood at the bar for five minutes, so I left.

The Shamrock, the stoner bar, had one white man tittering dazedly outside, trying to light his cigarette. Inside, with no patrons, the owner slept on the bar top—big, Neanderthal-Аrуаn and heavy browed, snoring away.

I crossed the street to greet Megan as she emerged from the 7-11, angry over the rude African man who did not want to wait on her.

On we went, to the dollar store.