[I was touched enough by this email to use most of it for a dialogue, in which I shall take the back seat and merely insert some comments. I want to preserve this is a species of field note for the current status section of the ongoing book Enemy of All Mankind.]

A little about me: I was born in New York City, in lower Manhattan, where I lived for most of my childhood. I did spend a couple years as a toddler in Baltimore where my family lived on Patterson Park, but I barely remember it…

[Family information redacted. Dad and Mom moved around the nation for work as a result of dad not kissing ass on the PC job front. Our man seems to be a GenX latch-key kid, the single most abandoned generation of men we have had during my smear as a human stain.]

Then I went to Columbia University for undergrad….

…where I started shooting heroin. Which began about fifteen years of ping-ponging around America, working various menial jobs, occasionally getting into trouble with the law. I lived in a halfway house in Minnesota in 1998, back to NYC in 99 to work in insurance, 00 I was in Eugene Oregon because of a woman, 02 I moved to Austin Texas because it sounded cool, 04 back to NYC to try college again (I lasted one semester before I got strung out and thrown in jail for grand larceny and possession), 06 out to Orange County California (where I got arrested 14 times; the cops there don’t fuck around with degenerates like me), 12 up to Olympia Washington for a girl, 13 to Portland Oregon with the girl, and finally 14 to Gainesville Florida with a cat after the girl hated my guts.

[Across my life, across races and cities, the residency of men from my father’s generation down to those currently in their teens and 20s, seems entirely dependent upon women. Almost all lone men have been unable to buy a house or rent in a good area, in that those who succeed, attract a woman, who use the government to swindle the man into homelessness or marginal rentals.]

My family are good urban liberal progressives, so they never thought much of me moving around for no reason, never marrying or starting a family, etc though they disliked the drugs, tattoos and heavy metal, and they wished I had a career of some sort. I never really saw the point in much of anything.

In one of your books, you said “This process at the core of the toxic notion of democracy, causes rampant, criminality, as individual agency and masculine, merit, associations, and true interpersonal loyalty can only take place outside the state structure.”

In a warped and often stupid way, a life of drugs, violence, street living, and the like seemed to offer some way out of the totally meaningless and empty mode of life I was told I should lead.  I did finally go to a technical school and have a decent job now, though this was a purely pragmatic “if you can’t beat em join em” decision. I’m sure the people I work with would be shocked if I told them about my life. I did stop shooting dope over ten years ago after…

[It has been my observation that criminals have an ability to see through social delusions imposed by Modernity that escapes law abiding folk, most of whom simply blame the drug or the character of the person for his criminality. There must be a devil (Morpheus) or a sinner [the crook] at fault, seems to be our long term social default. When the system is implicated by a law abiding person it is cited as merely flawed due to a mistake or well-meaning folly. The possibility that the system itself was begun for, or has evolved into an evil macro-organism is beyond normalized modern conception.]

[Redacted personal information.]

...a lengthy stay in the psych ward. I gave up all drugs and drinking, which fucking sucks and is boring, but my life had become such a disaster, and I was so scared that I would continue to not die and just languish in county jail/some shitty rehab/a rented room working some awful job, I saw no other choice. 

The problem, besides the brutalizing nature of drug addiction that is anything but freeing, is that you inevitably wind up being taken in and totally crushed by the system - by cops and social workers and psychiatrists and COs and POs and the rest.

[This, I see as the purpose for the Drug War waged by some facets of the same government that brings in drugs, supports the activities of drug gangs by declining to use the RICO statute against them. For, from a system perspective, the medical and legal binding of a man who has not been successfully “housebound” by a woman, who is a born slave to civic rule, is a total social good.] 

I’m not married, have no kids, basically a loner who keeps to myself, though I do have friends. A lot are dead, a lot are broken. I’ve always loved women, though I have never been able to work shit out with one, and I’ve grown admittedly bitter and curmudgeonly. 

[These are all desired system effects. Such a system NEVER wants a native population with ties to the land it operates on, and will do what it can to limit native population and import client population. This is imperialism 101. The Inca and Assyrians did it.]

I can’t remember how it all started, what caused me to go down the mental road to people like you, Myth of the Twentieth Century, and that whole strange sphere of people and podcasts and ideas. I was a typical liberal, something like a Bernie Bro. But it stopped making sense.

[As a writer, I was dragged down this rabbit warren by young men simply seeking advice on combat and urban survival. I never had any ambition to write social commentary, urban blight journalism, travel journalism, crime reporting, or American history, and especially not this history of conspiracy your email has become an anecdote for.]

I still feel adrift in a sea of bullshit, and it drives me insane how the typical Caucasoid just imbibes the toxic bullshit around them (as long as they have enough cars, Netflix, DoorDash, etc.). My mother was sexually assaulted in the street by a black man, my father was robbed at gunpoint by one, I have been robbed and mugged and beaten by them. But when my grandma said “those niցցers sure dance funny,” all hell broke loose because we would rather be raped, beaten and robbed than be offensive. There is something sinisterly toxic about all that.

[That paragraph above is a perfect distillation of Civilization, its means, its progress and its goal, which is MORAL FEAR OF NOT BEING PASSIVE.]

 At one time my family in Baltimore (all Pollacks of course) lived in the city in ethnic neighborhoods with large families and local churches, bars, clubs. I’m sure they were fucked up in their own ways, but in the old black and white photos they look healthy beyond a standard that is even possible now.

[When at my mother’s I see these pictures. When at Megan and Georgia’s place in East Baltimore, I see the pictures of their large polish families—blown to the four winds. Both of our entire families, except for Georgia who cannot afford to move, having lost her husband, are gone from “the place of our nativity.”]

Now everyone is scattered all over the country, no one has kids, half of my cousins are gay, everyone secretly hates each other, but they all keep doing, thinking, believing the same thing. Same thing with most people I grew up with, besides the ones that are dead from drugs or suicide. I remind myself I once was them, and by all appearances still am. Who the fuck am I. 

You may be unique in that most men I’ve heard dislike the current version we have of civilization, but would prefer another (either a past one or an idealized possible version). However you view the passivity, hypocrisy, weakness, and dysfunction as essentially part and parcel of settled societies. This is an unsettling thought, though I think you are correct. 

[Unsettling is the perfect word for it, and also for our current settlement model, which is to force us to move every decade of our lives, and is therefore a perfect model of social hypocrisy. Whatever we may say about the evil that rules us, it has achieved perfection in open, even brazen, deception.]

Anyway, I apparently needed another man to speak/write to. Not sure if you found any of this interesting. I’m justifying the verbal vomit by saying to myself that you are a writer and would therefore enjoy such a rant.

[This was not enjoyable at all, but an excavation of some shared pain, that is useful in my current, unpleasant inquiry.]

On that note, take care, good Sir James of Balmer. 

[Thank you!]

By Friday 22nd I was shaken with migratory nerves. I do not travel well, have never had wanderlust, never thought to leave the evil place that hatched this twisted mind, until it drove me out in June 2018, the very day that The Brickmouse and Guilo Girl invited me to stay with them on any return to Baltimore. But there I was in the cozy Brickmouse House where I have been so welcome. I was already homesick for it and was having bad brain fog trying to pack bags. I was losing things, washing clothes and forgetting where they were.

Monday Night the 24th into the early midnight hours of Tuesday, I trained The Operator, sparring in a street light lit basement alley. He paid me with a bag of big mac burgers and fries. Back at the Brickmouse House, with an introductory letter in hand to one of his colleagues, I cut up the fries, tossed out the buns, put meat around the fries, covered all with left over cheese, and nuked it for 2 minutes—a feast.

The blackout curtains admitted just enough light to warn me awake. My last week in a longtime location, I am unable to sleep past dawn. I answered emails, checked the back end of the site, and packed, unable to write.

At 11:00 AM, The Man in the Hat picked me up to meet his son, Brett, at the Valley View Inn, an old roadhouse bar and eatery in Baltimore County. When I was his age I walked past this six mornings a week headed home from the night shift at the supermarket that has changed hands a few times since. The young fellow looks great, showed us the pic of his gorgeous girl in Southern Maryland and paid for our meal and beer. He then said, “James, you look so much better then when I took you to Doc last year. Can you spar?”

“Sure, the Brickmouse has extra gear you can use.”

“Oh, I have my sticks and gear in the truck.”

“What kind of psycho drives around for four years with gear in his truck?”

The Man in the Hat answered, as the stud grinned, “The one that just fattened you up for the kill! James, here, you better have one more beer to kill the pain.”

As he went to get me a fourth beer, Brett smiled, “Dad’s an animal. He still plays hockey. I remember when his teeth got knocked out and he skated over to us and handed them to me and went back to play.”

Brett took me to buy the Christmas booze for my son’s Thanksgiving dinner, the well rum, well tequila and cheap whiskey. Home to the Brickmouse abode we went. As we gloved up in the yard he said, “James, the Brickmouse will be home soon—he can spar too, I’ll take it easy.”

“Bro, he won’t go anywhere near you with a stick.”

An hour of moderate stick sparring in the yard, was bisected by the Brickmouse walking by in route to some after work errand, chuckling as I was stiff armed into the turf like some secondary punk trying to slow James Brown. We moved to the patio and gloved up for boxing for a ten minute round. I noted Big Ron was now sitting on the picnic table drinking a Budweiser. At a certain point I ate ten straight punches and decided it was time to stop assaulting Brett’s glove with my face. I do think my mouth piece and saber mask should file a class action lawsuit against me for willful neglect.

Big Ron grinned, “You were doing pretty good while your foot was on the outside of his—but he figured it out.”

Brett then gave me a $20, “Here James, for the training.”

“Bro, you bought lunch and drove me around.”

“James, you trained me for free for ten years when I was a kid with no money.”

$20 bucks for the honor of making him work me over, two bruised hands, two bruised forearms, a bruised sternum, a bruised bicep and other warmly retained sensations five days later that tell me I am still alive.

That’s a deal.

We repaired inside for drinks and were joined by Charles, his bride, Guilo Girl and the returning Brickmouse. Brett does not drink. He did eat canned corned beef with me, as the others drank espresso. I am so lucky to be blessed with such fine young friends.

At 9:30 it was time for Brett, the last pirate on board the goodbye ship, to head home. I had dispensed all of the area training contact phone numbers in my phone in hopes that these fellows will train together in my absence. That would make this feel worthwhile in the cracked rear view mirror.

Jason’s place is on the way. The manager of the Esoteric Cafe has lost a lady and is stuck between books, overthinking his next two writing projects. Brett dropped me off three miles north out in Baltimore County, wished me well, and pulled off.

I had only drunk 10 Miller Lite beers over 9.5 hours. With me was 2 shots of over proofed rum, 3 beers, and 6 shots of Bird Dog salted whiskey. Jason does not drink such garbage. As befits a man with four languages under his hat band, he drinks wine. He had just finished fabricating and welding door pins for an antique sports car he is working on out back. He drove us in his beater to the liquor store and bought two bottles of dark wine. On the way home there was what appeared to be a fatal three-car collision at Joppa and Perring.

Finally back in his eccentric mansion, an old dentist office house, with the entire first floor strewn with books, stalked by his attention-hungry, hypoallergenic, teacup creature demanding a seat at the table, Jason heated up slices of spinach pie. We sat, spoke, drank, discussed writing, drank, spoke of the wrong turns in or life, then came upon the subject of writing once again. Jason read passages from his most recent book, and I had to honestly inform him that his prose is better than mine. He does understand how languages are built. The beer, rum and whiskey were gone, the rum grinning up at me with a wry twist of grin. Jason was halfway through the second bottle of wine He looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was 3 AM.

“James, thank you so much for this inspirational conversation, for this book [Can]. I think I have drunk too much and am fading, night creature that I am. How can you still be up and lucid?”

“I worked night crew for 38 years. It’s almost quitting time.”

“Please, finish the wine and take a couch.”

I downed the half bottle of wine—against Rick’s rules—and said, “The Brickmouse will be up and about in one hour. I’d like to see him off to work. The rum bottle can be used to discipline my errant chattel.”

The stagger down Harford Road, for a few miles, took me up and down three good hills. I had miles, over an hour, utterly alone except for blinking lights, buzzing light poles, a rat scampering crookedly across the street. I did not feel too drunk—indeed was able to get the key in the door on the FIRST try. When I entered, my young friend was making breakfast. We sat and he regaled me about some world military news—a high speed missile I think.

At last, dawn was tinting the sky as he locked himself out.

I nodded pleasantly in the decommissioned gamer chair they save for my back.

“James, James,” spoke rose-fingered Dawn, some fresh goddess voice prodding me awake.

I looked right and saw Guilo Girl, “James, time to go to bed.”

Embarrassed that I only lasted 23 hours, I slunk off to bed for my last turn there, to wake three hours later, realizing that I stumbled home along the same road that stretches endlessly in my rebooted nightmares of being late for work from missing the bus, afraid I’d get soaked in the rain.

As I finish writing Banjo: Timejack, I have traversed the very places in which the story is set, places I have frequented due to work, to include coaching, and for habitation. I have noted some changes.

Homeless Crackers

Baltimore has long been too dangerous for homeless people of any race to live outside of dense camps: Morrel Park, where they had to battle the hoodrat packs by night, and on the porch of the post office under I-83 at City Center. The homeless generally had to live in wooded areas in the county. The dynamic here was that when hood rats attacked and failed they called the cops and the cops prevailed. People do not realize that the Knockout Game was not just a way of KOing unsuspecting white hipsters, but of getting low down crackers arrested for fighting back. Now, one sees lone crackers camping in the shelter of city eves, bothering no one. Our traditional enemies no longer bother calling the PIGz in, as the defund the police ended that.

A month ago, Big Ron saw a scrawny cracker beating the piss out of some black man a Hamilton and Harford, in front of the bar where I was refused service for failure to tan last year. In the past, before 2008, blacks would have piled on and kept coming until they won, whites doing nothing. Since 2008, the cops would have been called to arrest the cracker for failure to recognize his Kang. Since 2022 cops have left us scum to our own devices, ghosts versus shadows.

Bus Passengers

These were 95%+ shadow my entire life. Now, crackers, low down folk to be sure, with crappy jobs, and sometimes none, are taking the buses again. There are dot heads, Squatamalens, some sissy light skinned kangs, black women with good medical jobs and Africans. There are a couple white bus drivers! They were extinct as the buffalo once was and have been brought back with the expansion of the bus service, which has been routed to serve the newly constructed condos now packed with African refugees. The Africans are well dressed, have smart phones, are polite, travel in pairs and don’t know how buses work. The female Afro-American bus drivers are constantly yelling at the Africans. Where once about a third of black bus drivers would decline to stop if there were not a black with me at the stop, now they must stop according to the semi-automated routing system. The men are mostly cool and half of them wave me on, declining my cash payment, indicating my white beard with a nod. Yesterday an Africa was holding onto the stop bell cord like it was a handle and the queanly driver was screaming at him.

The day before yesterday a young black fellow dropped his smart phone under my seat and I returned it. He said, “Thank you, sir,” very polite, unusual from a man of his demographic before 2020. Most of the people taking the buses are headed to work, and do not know the way well and ask for directions from this old crumb.

The Rap Battle

Behind me, on the back deck of the bus, a couple weeks ago a fellow voiced about 20 was rapping into his phone, recording. A fellow with a voice of about 30 began speaking with him. They were both rappers with social media followings “on all platforms.” They then engaged in a rap battle, the younger man being much better to the point that the veteran of rap battles submitted and declared him a “prodigy.” When they got off, I noted the young fellow was a pale-ass cracker with red hair and beard, like an Irish silverware thief. The older fellow, crest fallen, actually looked like a 1990s gangster in his black attire, but minus the menace.

How far some have fallen

Last Thursday Night

After boxing with Leo, a 12-year-old karate student, for 50 minutes straight, I toweled off and crossed the street to the The Raven Inn. At the jukebox was a woman about my age, a pretty woman with a good figure, who, back in the day would have never given me the time, being the best of her crop. She said, “Hello,” as I walked past and said nothing, so surprised I was.

At the bar, Sean served me a draft, so I could hydrate before drinking alcohol. I drank that and noted that there were more women then men here, including the looker with her two sisters, obviously of the same brood. She looked at me and asked them for their support in placing a slave collar upon my bearded neck. I drank and she asked across the bar if I and the sloppy drunk next to me liked her music selection. It was country, so I gave her a thumbs up. She smiled. I would have, should have, stayed to get to know her and write for her a sorrowful country song. But Jason was waiting for me to help clean up his cafe and speak about writing in return for him driving me home—my host the Brickmouse and The Operator both insisting that I not walk back into the city from this worse county hood at night. The drunk was telling her he did not like country music and wished she would play some metal, as I cashed out with my pint of whiskey and left, to Sean’s, “Be safe, Brother.”

This was the scene of our two Fight Brain dinners. On Friday night they have kareoke, mostly attended by women and their children!

I walked out back, up the alley, where a funeral cross has been placed where the stray cat used to live in the house made by bar patrons, West on Joppa, and north on Orchard. I passed the American Boxing Academy, which was packed, finding a supply of sparring partners for my local guys. Jason and I stayed up until 2:00, four hours past closing, discussing books and writing. He had been so exited to sit down and crack a book that he had forgotten to lock the front door. In walked a 6’ 6” 320 pound Gro, demanding food, water, shelter, not threatening yet. Jason spoke with him in the doorway, trying to convince him that the cafe was not open. I walked up behind him with my hand on the hilt of the sheath Kabar claw knife Big Ron gave me. The big fella looked at me over Jason’s head, raised his brows, his eyes swimming in worry beneath, turned on his heels, and shambled off into the night.

Yesterday

As I waited for the bus from Essex down into Colgate, a pair of shady crackers slouched on by. These guys are about 21. The big man stands 6’ 2” and 220 pounds, a smug face under blond hair, wearing faded jeans and a wife beater in the warm November sun, smoking a cig. His partner, has dark hair, a narrow face and beaked nose, and stands about 4’ 10” in jeans and sneakers.

They walked past us south, than back north, then east, with the attitude of patrol. Oh, yes, big boy was holding an aluminum T-ball bat with leather wrapped handle, and his runt partner, a gulf club, a putting iron. Not a pig was in sight to permit the feral foes that drove my entire extended family out of our home town between 1968 and 2022, to turn day into night.

My stay here in Baltimore is more than half over. I spend every second weekend here with her while in town. Megan is pretending that she’s not just going to have me here twice more. All day and half the night the train whistles in the back ground by day and haunts the fore ground by night. Rats are the big issue.

The dirty Mexicans to the left with seven kids and a cat, have a garden, which feeds the rats, who do not want to live with the cat.

The clean Mexican to the right is cementing his yard to keep the rats away. Georgia and Megan are caught in the middle, four rat holes burrowed just under the concrete pad of her porch. Three holes are within ten feet of the cherry tomatoes clinging to the fence, facing towards the feed.

The good Mexican comes over with a bowl of concrete and fills in the whole he can see, talking to me. He is the older, shorter brother of the other two that lived here, who called me Poppy. The middle brother had talked to me and ran off a buck gro I was concerned with a couple years back.

Clean Mex gets down low and looks at the wholes and says, “The concrete is only four inches thick, those wholes go up.”

“Then I’ll gas them, I say,” looking at Georgia up over the railing, “You have extra bleach and ammonia, that makes deadly gas. I’ll pour in the mix then plug the holes with beer bottles broken on the inside.”

“Okay,” she says, “on a mission I see. I called the County and the man said that I was fighting a losing battle and was on my own. He said if they are in your yard they are your pets! I’m calling the congressman!”

Once I did this and went inside, a half hour later, between the center and left hole, the rats within had dug two air holes. Another beer bottle was broken into the holes and 8 ounces each of bleach and ammonia poured in. I went out back in the alley and got chunks of concrete the right size to back up the bottles and jammed the tombs shut, hoping the little rodents die from the gas.

Here I sit, between checks, about ready to get the hammer and return to my post…

…More broken bricks and concrete chunks and a cinder block corner from the alley are hammered into the gap between soil and concrete. Well, the little bastards will have to work.

Last night, Missy, the wife next door of four children had walked the girls and the boy home from school. The youngest girl is so cute as she stands on the other side of the lattice railing, hanging onto the stays, asking me urgently, “Jjojjo? Jjojjo!”

Megan, Jojo being her local nickname, comes outside and says, “Hey, Baby!” and the little girl hops up and down triumphantly, “Jjojjjo!”

Megan, lights a cigarette and smiles and says, “Your mommy does your hair so nice, you are so well dressed—you are beautiful!”

The mother thanks her, telling Megan that she gave Georgia some chicken and rice dinners from her food bank box. The husband has made himself scarce. We hear him out back shopvaccing his car.

I ask Megan, “He finally talked to me today, was very nice and filled in that rat hole. What happened to his brother. I got on well with the big one.”

Megan takes a long drag from her cig as the BPD police chopper drones off overhead into the city, “That motherfucker hates me. They had this domestic thing, he hit her. I can’t kick his ass, so I told her to call the cops. The stupid cop has got them both on the porch and is asking her stupid fucking questions. So the Polish bitch in me comes to the roof and I say, “Hey, officer, what is a matter with you asking her questions in front of him? She will never answer you under his nose. Take her out in the street and question her.”

“The dumb fucking cop, a light goes off in his eyes, he was like twenty-five and he does as I say. The hitting stopped. Then she comes to me and tells me that the baby sitter told her that the oldest daughter told her that one of the brothers touched her, probably the skinny spic that got bossed around by the big one and fat daddy here. He says it couldn’t be, and she has me standing right here and tells him it is her and the girls or his brother. Well, I guess that pussy is still good, because he put his brothers out. Now we can park and don’t have to put up with spic polka every Friday night. If I had heard someone touched my granddaughter, I’d a been waiting in the bushes with a hammer and knife, that scalping knife you gave me.”

I look at her and say, “Now it makes sense that he has warmed up to me. He probably figures I disappear for long stretches after you have the cops work me over!”

“Shit, you’d never hit a woman,” she says, “look at me, cussing like all of my thirty year old coworkers. I have to stop that. This was my brother Bruce’s house. Once, a pig was up the street on the corner there yelling at Heather, his daughter, calling her a ‘punk.’ A man in uniform calling a twelve year old girl punk for playing hopscotch on the corner.

“Bruce went up there, six four, broad, back in his negro whooping days. I remember once when I was 8 and Bruce was the man of the house after Dad passed, some man in a big car and mustache pulled up to the stoop and said, “Tell your brother so and so is looking for him.” I just looked down. Well, Bruce found his ass and told me, ‘That motherfucker will never bother you again!’ and he was good for it.

That was how Bruce lit out after that cop, walked up there, thumped his finger in that pig’s chest and said, ‘Who are you calling a punk?!’

The pig was alone and about shit himself, couldn’t answer. Bruce answered for him, ‘She has a name, and it’s Heather. She has a mother and a father, so is not a punk. You have a problem with her, you come knock on my door—got it!”

The itty bitty little prick pig just stammered, ‘Yayayeyes sir,’ and that piece of shit is supposed to protect me? Sorry, Pumpkin, I just get carried away sometime. It so nice to have you around. A broke bitch likes her company. You’re getting skinny—I’m feeding you again, and if you know what’s good for you you’ll eat.”

The core context of this unlikely nonfiction story, is the same as I noted in my real time coverage of The Purge of Baltimore City in April 2015. My book War Drums and the rest of the 2015 Harm City books, chronicle the FACT that the Purge, downgraded in the false media mirror over two years to riots, then unrest and then rising, used racial/law enforcement unrest as cover for the Creep State steerage cults to release the first massive dosses of pharmaceutical opiates into the criminal underground and thence to every corner of the nation.

This was the final turning point of the phony Drug War, which was just a way to get public compliance in militarizing police. The looted pharmacy dope was an interim measure between Afghan heroin and Chinese/Mexican fentanyl, the ultimate enemy of USG, greatest macro parasite in recorded history, being its 350 million person host.

It is a fact that 35 pharmacies and some two dozen criminal stash houses of Jimmy Masters 25 year old drug fiefdom were knocked over on the last Monday and Tuesday of April 2015. This was done under cover of the Freddie Gray Riots and Mondawmin Purge by the students of Frederick Douglas High. I knew people on the inside in real time. I took the bus with the youths detailed as scouts and overheard their conversations as logistics were rerouted. This job was coordinated by the DOJ, BGF [gang], Crip 52 [gang], and a certain central mind agency. Military contractors were involved in keeping people locked down to facilitate the mission of looting the pharmacies. The resulting product glut was known locally as The Mother Load. This is not mentioned in the book.

The case that this award winning author makes is this:

That the entire city-wide caper that involved hundreds of violent actors was masterminded, created from whole cloth, on the fly, in two weeks, by two “honor roll students,” high school kids from the worst school district in America. They are touted as computer geniuses who invent and implement an uncrackable, encrypted national dark web drug network in only two weeks, from SCRATCH. They were also physically involved in looting and murder at the same time, not only writing better code than google keyboard jockeys and federal MENSA hires, but imposing their will for a few months on the most enduring African American criminal gang in the U.S., the gang that killed John Gotti, the gang that the FBI have been unable to take down on the RICO statute.

Does that pass the smell test?

Let’s look at assertions made and details overlooked.

Sniff #1

Q: Two weeks to conceptualize, invent and implement the most advanced dark web crime enterprise from an abandoned row home overrun with rats and roaches?

A: The author admits that he hardly met the two and that almost all of his communications with them were through encrypted emails. This tells me that these two boys, were mere front puppets for the Steerage Cult that has back door access to every online platform based in the U.S.

Sniff #2

Q: A black hero cop, the main law enforcement source, claims that white cops harassed him for having an Afro. This was presented as a symptom of massive white on black cop intimidation within the department.

A: I have worked with hundreds of men on mixed race crews and in boxing sessions, and have noted that job place teasing like that is always same race. White guys make fun of whites, and blacks of blacks. Additionally, most BPD cops were, and are, black.

Sniff #3

Q: The author focuses 2 of every 3 pages on the fact that everything in America favors whites over blacks and that there are no rehab resources for blacks and plenty for whites. The assertion is made through black advocates, with the author parroting long obsolete progressive talking points.

A: Yet, in the Baltimore job market, since 2002, black hires have been aggressively recruited in all levels of private and public employment.

As a bus user on the ground, I can see that rehab centers have tended to be placed just outside of high crime zones on major bus lines, as the danger of trying to get people off drugs right next door to the gun totting black drug dealers is a non starter. As I read this book, 24 drug addicts of both races offloaded from the #54 bus at an intersection with 5 rehab centers. These are the new government sanctioned drug dispensaries.

Also, later in the book, buried in the middle, the author writing in 2017, notes that addiction rates are the same across race with the only difference the rate of legal to illegal drugs consumed by race. Here, on page 67, the author demolishes his oppression model.

In 2016 white kids from rural and suburban areas began moving into Baltimore and pimping out their girlfriends for access to the new discount crime drugs. Despite the authors assertion throughout the book, the main theme of which was white over black oppression, in the context of all black on black violence, I, on the ground, never saw any racial component to the drug trade other than black violence.

Sniff #4

Q: The white on black Baltimore crime scape and massive social injustice is the main assertion of this book, the life blood of it.

A: 14% of Baltimoreans are white males, with zero serving as cops, all white cops living out of town. Yet 90%+ of homeless in Baltimore are white males! The most damming evidence is given in the middle of the book, buried by the author in newspaper fashion, on page 129. He describes two addicts in rehab, who are a married black couple with children, who both have excellent State of Maryland jobs, with the best medical benefits, and snort illegal drugs at work! These addicts held the type of jobs that people like me were not permitted to acquire since 1990, with 99.9% of bus drivers, that being the best government job available to high school graduates, are black in a city that is only 65% black, and 10% Latino, with not a single Latino bus driver. The author demonstrates no clue as to racial dynamics in Baltimore, nearly his every source giving him a distorted image. STEERAGE.

Sniff #5

Q: What are the crime details, the central focus of which should be how pharmacies were knocked over?

A: Although CVS and Rite Aid chains had much video evidence and made public complaints that the BPD REFUSED to investigate these crimes, and I personally saw how these places were broken into, the author only looks into the one atypical pharmacy looting, in which the business was burned down, the two masterminds, one with a distinctive sunken chest and pot belly, are caught masked on video. This level of laziness does not fit the author and suggests that he was ferried around by law enforcement charged with channeling his focus.

There is no mention of the 5 man crews, outfitted specifically to drive residence indoors, that took over the streets when the cops abandoned their posts. No mention of the 1 woman and 2 man crews that hit each chain pharmacy in a very thought out way, pharmacies that had the best inventories. There is no mention of the military contractors that pushed me and my friend off the street after dark and who somehow had no contact with the B&E crews?

There is no mention of the heroin shipments brought in, only those seized by the BGF from the Masters cartel.

Overall investigation of criminal acquisition methods are absent.

Sniff #6

Q: How authentic is the texture?

A: The author writes nothing but stereo types, gangster using 1990s movie firearms, rather than the 9MM and .45 APC that Baltimore shooters prefer. They wear only Nike sneakers and Timberland boots. They stand over their gunned down enemies and chant and boast and cuss like rappers and TV actors, rather than “move the fuck off” like they actually do to avoid the massive amount of cameras that the author admits are all over Baltimore, on some streets on every light pole. The two upscale, black urban nerds that the writer met once or twice, who then communicate with him exclusively by encrypted email, joke about rats and roaches being fitting office companions for them as they work on their massive array of computer hardware, to include private SERVERS delivered mysteriously to an abandoned row home, which would have had to be powered by an extension cord plugged in up to a block away! Look, black dudes, even thugs, are more freaked out by rats and roaches then poor white trash, by far. Across the board, in Baltimore, as a reaction to filthy public conditions, black men have higher personal hygiene standards than white guys.

What comes through here is that the book was textured to appeal to suburban, white, misconceptions about urban blacks, along lines seen on TV and in movies. The most galling oversight, is that two 17 year old skinnies are shown wielding power through the magic of computer wizardry over the U.S. Army Iraq veteran thugs and criminal psychopaths, that know that the one kid was raped by his step father. Black men who find out that you have been ass raped do not respect you. This was a story line lifted from the Wire HBO series.

Sniff #7

Q: How does the story end?

A: It ends just like The Wire and every TV show and movie glorifying the criminal that gets away back to the civilian life he reluctantly left for the necessity of crime. In The Wire it was the kid who went to work in a shoe store. In Pill City, the raped kid goes nuts and starts playing gangster, even executing women. He is killed by a gangster. This all probably happened, with law enforcement-based forensics and times and places of death, placing this actual meat person as a puppet for the Agency nerds who were actually encrypting emails to the author. This kid was supposedly a Bloomberg News junkie and stock market jockey, who went SO GANGSTER that the professionals cringed! This is lifted from the TV show Breaking Bad. Indeed, the story line is Breaking Bad placed in the setting of The Wire.

The good kid, who didn’t kill people and became increasingly estranged from his buddy, Brick, who was his same sex soul mate, which does not track, enjoys the opposite fate. He moves to Bay Area, California by himself, lands a job at Google, as their very first black programer, and his racist white coworkers harass him! This totally does not track, with Bay Area whites worshiping blacks as if they are all Morgan Freeman.

Seven for seven, Pill City takes an investigative reporter on a toddling Odyssey of Steerage Cult handling of a man who seems to be as honest in his investigation as his editor permits, and only as curious as the law enforcement and gang front men for his handlers admit. What he hangs his hat on is a fact, the fact denied by Baltimore Government, that the Purge and Riots were a ruse to take lethal drug addiction to a new high. He is either guided to or avoids the obvious evidence that the gangs and cops were a mob of USG puppets and dupes, some rewarded for playing along and other punished for hesitating one contact too long.

Pill City is a 26 page truth wrapped in a 260 page Hollywood spoof.

Charles was driving me across town, because he didn’t want me on the bus. He did ask me if it was getting better or worse in Baltimore.

By Baltimore, we mean the state-created urban blight population replacement zone where unwanted working class murkans have been hunted since 1965 by gawdly folks of a lustrous hue, in a bid to clear out the saltines to make way for the Ritz. The government does not want their cities to remain violent hunt zones, but want the hunters to drive the enemy of the State, the terrible saltine, far away into the suburbs, then to be driven further into the hills, his victorious hunters occupying the suburbs as Ritz kind are placed in the inner city. What we and our ancestors have lived is not results, but process.

On paper the only law enforcement records that can be trusted is the homicide rate. The cops, the creep state and the crooks, only seem to be able to disappear about 5% to 10% of us who they kill.

The pile of bodies are lied about: who, what, why and when. But they remain. Murder rates do go up and down as a visible symptom of the main threads of aggression, the bankings, muggings, pack attacks, rapes, robberies, assaults, beat downs and home invasions. Rapes, robberies and home invasions are often, usually and always reclassified as assaults, thefts and destruction of property or burglary, respectively. The government always lies to us about the activities of its client mob imported to attack us. That human stain that we Baltimoreans refer to as Baltimore, encompasses the entire City, about 12 by 12 miles and square on two sides and half of the east side.

In addition are a wagon wheel spoke of Xvasion routs, from west to east: Frederick Road, Edmonson Avenue, US Route 40, Liberty Heights, Riesterstown Road, York Road, Loch Raven Boulevard, Harford Road, Belair Road [US 1], Philadelphia Road [US 7], Pulaski Highway [US 40 on the east side], Eastern Avenue, and out the ass east end of town, Hanover Street and Washington Boulevard. These crime fingers extrude as blight spears into suburbia, some even in to the rural highlands, where the invasion halts or stops for lack of affordably constructed mass transit.

When I lived in Baltimore, rather than visiting, my writing was dominated by ongoing research. I no longer do that and simply lead a personal life while visiting Baltimore, writing little more about it than to cite activities in my writing journal. So, the only metric I have is me. Unfortunately, I have changed a lot, ranging 44 years of residency and 100 pounds of weight. What has not changed is that I travel mostly by bus and foot. I will note to what extent the danger of a given year to me had to do with appearance or condition.

…

The Top 7 Shit Years of One Crumbled Cracker’s Life

The titles reflect articles or books or quotes from the same.

As I count the years in proofing this on 1/10/25, i come to the conclusion, that this half-baked potato negro cannot count.

-JL

#1 Thru 5

The Violence Project

1995-99:

Using a gun against 5 home invaders, running from the pigs after using a knife on two glorious kangs, this was life as a long haired, spry white trash grunt during the peake of the Drug War. Dealing with coked up joy stomping rednecks in pickups, predatory cops, sets of professional thugs, packs of teenage man-hunters, inspired the genre known as Harm City. That term derived from a Khaos Krew tag on the back of the wheel well seat of the #15 bus at Overlea station in 1999.

This is the world that was depicted in HBO’s The Wire. This life I hated gave rise to The Violence Project conducted from 1996 thru 2000. The events rise in my mind episodically now and are arranged chronologically as a violence memoir in the book 40,000 Years From Home. I was collateral damage in the War on Drugs, a pale pedestrian hated by dollar-chasing blacks and pension-chasing blues for my very existence outside the norm, as I simply tried to get back and fourth to low paying night stocking jobs at grocery stores.

#6

‘Psycho Santa Clause’

2017:

Attacked 20 times in one year, twice by pit bulls, partially because Baltimore had been hunted clear of pedestrians, and the final pedestrian was me, an old, fat gimp with a cane. Autumn in a Dying City [once banned by Amazon], Winter in a Dying City, White in the Savage Night, Harm City 2 Chicongo are books from that year, I think.

…

#7

When You’re Food

2011

Stalked and harassed by cops, a pair of red necks threatening me at night, and hood rats hunting me in my neighborhood, compelled me to finally finish writing When You’re Food, which had been discarded in 2001.

…

#8 & 9

‘Missah Jimmy’

2009 thru 2010

Being a grocery store manager saw me threatened and struck by employees, shop lifters and threatened with death and incarceration by police officers for not letting them come into the store after ours and loot. The occupational hazard of foiling mobs of flash looters and crackhead panhandlers on the parking lot came with a lot of occupational danger.

…

#10

‘Can You Dance for Me Brutha!’

2023

As an agonized cripple, a skinny old man hanging between two crutches, 6 young black men and one old negro tried to beat or mug me. But one, seeing me admiring the eye level breasts of his towering lady in a dollar tree in Pittsburgh, danced with me in the pork rind section. My redemption came when I chased a buck gro up the alley behind the Brickmouse House on crutches! Next to facing down Pave Man Jones and Company this is my proudest moment.

…

#11

2022

Pave Man Jones vs Cave Man Bones

My fitness and arrogance had me actually looking for trouble on a few occasions, to include my rain check duel with Pave Man Jones at 54th and Eastern, on August 4th, I think, in the wake of a tornado that gave the badge groes something to do other than prevent or punish me for the crime of saltine defense against sacred chocolate offense.

…

#12

‘What Up Wit Da Hat?!’

2020

As the myth that crackers breathed death made 2020 an easy time on the street for me with my traditional foes, cops began threatening me, a cracker crackhead hunted me in an alley by night, and the emptying of prisons had me dealing with prison thugs put on the street to drive me off of it. This was a very anxious year, with having to arm up for thugs at the same time that the cops were directed away from them and at us.

Since that time, I have felt more at ease as I walk armed between those who have been sent to drive me to extinction and those on station to punish any successful defense in the name of their great and evil god: USG.

The other 32 years had all of them threatening lows and highs, but do not stand out in my mind as any more miserable a pointless gutters of existence as the next year.

MURKHA!

Below are recent recollections of people close to my writing heart. We are getting old and at times forget. Often a friend of mine will be cued by conversation to tell me a tale, pause, and say, “Please, if I told you this before, tell me to stop.” I never do so. For the retelling helps me remember things I have not yet forgotten through writing and also helps me develop character cadence, tone and diction for novels. I want to hear the story again. The first of these below was told to me only once, the rest repeated to me recently, on its tail. Two of the stories were related by myself to two of these folks in response.

Jimmy Frederick

“It’s amazing that you coached at this school [we were driving past] for a decade and we never met until after you went on the road. Jimmy Frederick had a presence in this neighborhood. Once I saw him in his karate uniform, in his bare feet, holding up traffic with one hand and walking an old lady across the street [Loch Raven Boulevard] with the other hand. That is not the kind of thing you forget.”

-Jason, driving by midnight from the Esoteric Cafe

“I have enough on my plate. I sparred with Vince [1980s WBA Welterweight Titlist] down at Mister Max’s Gym. What do you think I used to drop those two jerks at the [Towson] Diner—left hook, to an overhand right. But I’m not a boxing coach. I teach Kenpo. People who want boxing, you coach and I take the fees. Your people train for free in the back. You teach weapons and help with kickboxing for my black belts. Any knuckleheads or idiots come in with that old karate challenge, that’s you and yours, got it. I’ll make sure you earn your keep.”

-James, recalling directions from Jimmy Frederick, as he stood behind his desk in his black gi

…

Mister Dee

[In a Northeast Baltimore grocery store.]

“James, you’re wearing a tie?”

[Yes sir, I’m managing this place]

“You’re fat!”

[Well, ah…]

“I saw you fight at Grosscup’s [tournament]. You looked great, welterweight! Now you’re fat!”

[Well, ah…]

“I want you to come train at the school. We need knife up there.”

[I work 7 days, evenings.]

“I have the keys. What time do you get off.”

[Ten, sir.]

“I’ll be here at 9:50. Be ready.”

-James, recalls as the ghetto grocer

…

“You were in the back, sparring with some giant guy and Mister Dee said to me, “Blake, you need to train knife with that man. He’s a professional.”

No offense, but you were kind of chunky at the time, should I say stout, and I said to myself, because I wouldn’t disrespect Mister Dee, ‘I will stab the shit out of that fat fuck!’ And here I am, still trying to stab you, even while you’re limping around on a bum leg. Mister Lee was—is, I hope to God still among us—a good man. I miss him so much. Him and Jimmy were such good men. In a way, I still come here to keep company with their ghosts.”

-Mister Blake

…

Mark [Duz, from the Harm City books]

“Mark was such a good man, cool as could be. I had a rough life at the time with a teenage girl to raise on my own. Of course, I’d close one night then drink too much to get to sleep because I opened the next day and that didn’t always workout. Mark, was always there seven minutes early, like a machine. I’d call and say, ‘Mark, I overslept…’ and he’d cut me off and say, ‘As long as you get in here, we are good. I need you. As long as you stay over to make up the work and I don’t have to, we’re good.’

“Nothing upset that man. Even when the two nigs in the Buick ran him over on the lot to get the Tuesday bank pickup, he just got up, brushed his pants off, and looked at them while they ran off like idiots.

“He would never speak to a female employee alone. No one ever had to worry about Mark putting his hands on you. He was a gentleman. Once, he calls me in the office because Takiesha brought up her till [1] before her shift was over. This was right after she came back in the building after her lunch break. She tells Mark, ‘I have to go. I can’t stay here.’

“Mark looks at her and says, ‘Whatever you need, Takiesha. May I ask why?’

‘I just shot my husband. I don’t want to get arrested on the job—juz be too embarrassin’

“He was unflappable, ‘In that case, thank you for not just walking away from your till, and good luck to you. We’ll count you out. You probably have things to do.’

“They shake hands, and the crazy bitch is out the door never to be seen again. Anybody else having a crazy bitch telling him she had just shot somebody, looking at him over a pile of money, might have blinked. Not Mark. The sisters loved him.”

-Megan

…

Notes

-1. A till is the money counting tray in the drawer underneath the cash register that the cashier uses to take payments and make change. The term till, an agricultural word for plowing up soil for planting, makes one wonder.

Last night I accompanied the Eskimo Wife to the Dive Bar where I was informed that I was no longer welcome in Portland after this visit expired. She did say, “You don’t have to get a motel. You can stay until its time to go.”

I nodded, finished my diet coke, as she wove drunkenly, over-served by her so-called best friend again. I asked, “Are you okay?”

She snarled and it was on.

Driving home, at night, sitting in the passenger seat of a 4-door sedan as a little Eskimo, so drunk she can barely stand, pilots a car like a dog sled down the nighted streets of Portland is something that has often made me cringe, and sometimes smile. She made it into the driveway without clipping the gear head’s car across the street again. [1] I left her sleeping in the car as I went around back, said “Hey, Big Boy,” to Crazy Dog [2] and then refilled his water bowl, which had gone dry. He and his boss dog, Rileigh, an immensely fat Ausie Shepherd, then cornered me in the kitchen as I opened a pack of Trader Joe’s Guoda cheese that went out of date last December, and started sharing it out between we dogs.

As I stood there, where I had cooked for The Chief’s Widow scores of times as she smoked cigarettes and told me of her former life, It struck me that I will miss Portland and its environs, that I understand Kelly’s “In These Parts,” at a short-lived level.

Everything is milder, even the recent heat wave, then back east. Even divorce is easier. On March 24, I thought I had left for the final time. I had, however, offered to finish the house and yard tasks that The Chief and I did not complete as he sunk into sickness. The soul has been ripped from this family. Again, this brought me to recall Kelly, being raised by a wife who had been abandoned by her husband with seven children on her hands.

Leaving is easy when the world is so big and empty, the mountains taller, the road to the next town longer. But, there is something strange and icky that hangs over all of the Pacific Northwest like a pal: government. There is even a town called Government Camp. There is a lot of signage. There might be more laws on the books back east. But that, “there should be a law,” impulse that is so basic to the American mind, waxes strong in these parts, a collective slave impulse Kelly and his friends laughed at.

That makes it more interesting to see private signage here. Earlier in Kelly’s story, he was driving across 82nd, which is a main avenue for everything local in the Southeast, including crime. It is like U.S. #40 in Baltimore, or in Denver: diners, motels, pawn shops, massage parlors. At that time, a young man, less then half his 70 years, wanted to fight him over a traffic incident marked by a mere driving point, not by a collision.

While I accompanied Wife to the bank on 82nd to get money for Gary, who is replacing a beam under the house here, I noted an armed military contractor patrolling the front of the bank. Earlier in the week, there were two of these army guys in a supermarket, with a store detective and a security guard. The day after that two military contractors patrolled Home Depot as I gathered materials for the patio extension.

Vacant homes and store fronts still yawn even as big bugman hives are being built blocks away. The busses are so empty they have to stop and park to keep from running ahead. Yet TRIMET is hiring and offering a $7500 bonus for drivers. This message blinks on every bus!

Who is coming?

What is coming?

Kelly doesn’t want to know, just wants to go down to the coast and fish, crab, clam and relax.

It has been an honor to have this man, and many others, offer to show me their homeland. This is a halting experience, to have men of a kind that are not permitted to be a native of any land, eager to show me the ruins of their transmogrified homeland in hopes that they will be able to reveal some of the beauty that was once there.

Entering the 82nd Bar and Grill, which had the ugliest and meanest [all in the same bitch] bar maid west of Baltimore, I noted a sign that prohibited Masks. Below this was also a standard sign prohibiting backpacks and hoods. I recall some 7 ears ago a bus driver refusing to continue to the end of the line with a masked passenger. He pulled over and told us that he would not continue until the likely robber took off his mask. The government that had long mandated no masks, hats, sunglasses in its facilitates, run by banks that have never permitted facial obscuring wear in its sacred precincts, in 2020, mandated criminal attire. This was done at the same time that FEDS and NGOs transported armies of looters from city to city.

Something is coming.

I walked into the Shamrock—I suppose such a bar exists in every Murkhan city—on 82nd, across the street from the other even less imaginatively named bar, and noted the same NO MASK sign. The bar keep, a nice, tattooed and pierced symbol of the city, and the cook, a middle aged man just learning his trade, were very nice. The prices were low. The place is huge, by eastern standards, 4 pool tables, 2 dart boards, a punching bag game, no gay gaming stuff.

As I went towards the everysex bathroom, I noted a sign:

“God invented liquor to keep the Irish from conquering the world.”

As I nodded agreement. I noted a hand written sign:

“Do not enter the restrooms with a backpack or bag. Store it behind the bar.”

Below this was security print still on copy paper taped to the wall. It was of a tall, blond, whigger in gray hoody, wearing a paper social distance mask, and reaching into a string bag style back pack dangling under and in front of his left arm as he drew a pistol with his right hand, as he approached the restroom from the very spot where the picture was posted.

This recalled that yesterday, at Ross discount store, 4 security men ejected 2 teenage looters of blond, skateboard demi-viking kind from that store while I stood to be “metered” for entry.

When the army of whoever these bug hives are being built for and the barely used mass transit is being expanded for, arrives, I think their might be an indigenous criminal army waiting to do barbaric battle over the crumbling civic safe space of this land that Kelly once worked, hunted, boxed, arm wrestled and misadventured in.

What a pleasant, big-hearted man.

I will miss Kelly, and these parts that have been my winter home since 2019. Here I never expect to venture again after crutching to the bus stop down to the train station this coming Sunday morning.

-James, Thursday, July 11, 2024, 105th Avenue, Southeast Portland

…

Notes

-1. She leaves notes apologizing on the windshield.

-2. A hundred pound lab/pit with telepathic powers who has asked me to stay and be his new owner since The Chief died.

Up until two yeas ago, I was still called “boy” by the ascendant members of the master race—small case, don’t you know.

Last night Bob and Deb and I viewed The Long Game, an uplifting and wholesome movie about a Mexican-American high school golf team in 1956. There is a key scene when the Mexicans are refused service at a diner. The movie was based on a true story and the fates of the characters where related in text at the end. But, this scene seemed lifted from a Rock Hudson/James Dean movie filmed in the 1950s, Giant, I think. And with a James Dean mention in the film, we wondered.

Bob said, “James, I’ve never seen such a thing. But then again we rarely had money to eat out in those times. The Mexicans and the Indians never got treated any different then the rest of us, Tongans either. Of course the first time I met a black person I was spit on.”

I said, “I have been refused food at three locations in Baltimore,” and then began to brood, and hence this article, which I should place in Work, the most desultory memoir ever written.

This should include all refusal of service, and it will. [0]

Between 1992 and 2017 I took the bus to work, multiple buses a night and by day, numbering from 2 to 6 busses boarded per 24 hour period. However, due to being hunted by PIGz and Yoz, I walked a lot rather than waited. There was another reason I walked a lot, sometimes passing numerous bus stops and even walking to the next bus line—because, about once a month until 2006, a black bus driver with a handful of black riders would look at me and keep going. They never did this on those rare occasions when a white was on board. Some times they glared, sometimes smiled, sometimes shook their head, ‘No, whiteboy, walk’ and rolled by. I would then walk to a bus stop that was busier, at a big intersection, and when the bus, sometimes driven by the same driver an hour later, would stop for the master race, this lille Whiteboy would get on.

This did also happen from 2007 to 2015, with less frequency, about once a year, as I took far fewer busses, and walked more. From 2015 to 2017 I was never refused service by bus drivers as the blacks riding the bus were hunted out by the blacks in cars. This almost got me fired for tardiness numerous times. If not for me doing the work of two men, I would have been fired over this.

1992-2005: estimated 140, rounded down to 100, halved for misunderstanding, to 50.

The rest I shall forgive except for the day I spent 3 hours standing in wet boots in Middle River, waiting for the only bus to come. After the third time the same black bus driver pulled up, he took pity on me and let me board, not even making me pay—let’s just forgive that.

Bus service refused by blacks for the crime of being born white = 50

Cab drivers would not pick me up until I got fat in 2016. Dozens of times forgiven as they refused to pick up blacks too. I was moving up in the world.

2001, Dundalk Village, Baltimore County

Chinese restaurant owner refused me service, because I ate to much and he had seen me wolf down food at his buffet for three weeks running. I waited 1 hour for a bus transfer at this spot, and since my wife did not cook and was about to kick me out in 2002, I ate with relish, until he shut the door in my face, with good cause and no racial animus. Leaving the house at 8 PM, working from 11 at night until 7 in the morning, then training at Riverside Park with Chuck until 9 AM, walking to the Inner Harbor and boarding the #10, I had quite the appetite while awaiting the #4 bus.

2013: Rosedale Library, Baltimore County

After being invited to attend a writing group in person by the organizer, I sent in a link to my site and a copy of Buzz Bunny. I was promptly dis-invited, although I would have been the only member of the group to have been published in print. I suppose that this rejection was due to the content of my character.

2014: Highlandtown, Baltimore, Eastern Avenue

Mescaline Franklin and I were granted service by a Honduran waitress, who did not charge us for our drinks, because the Salvadoran woman cook refused to cook our meal outright. We tipped the cutie and walked after an hour.

2014: Ibis Bar, Harford Road, Baltimore City

After the pretty black barmaid eagerly served me beer, knowing that she would finally earn a tip at the all black bar, the black Jamaican man who owned it refused to cook my goat curry lunch and told her, and me, with his glaring eyes alone, to stop serving me. 1 beer and out.

2019: Epic Pharmacy, Joppa Road, Baltimore County, Liberal White owner [who it seems had read my website] gave me my medicine, refused to accept payment after 2 years of doing business there, and told me not to return.

“You’re good! Go!”

2023, June 7, 5 PM, Brennens Pub, Harford Road, Baltimore

After being cursed by ageless black Haitian midget, Juju Quartermaine at the corner of Harford and Hamilton, which did happen as I bought water from him and double paid him, thus angering the hoodoomaan, I entered Brennens’s bar. The GQ Mugging Inquest had been written at this bar! Of Lions and Men had been researched at this bar, which was essentially my living room while renting a room from Sensie Steve from 2010 thru 2017. Both black barmaids looked at me like the bus drivers of the 1990s and refused me service with a silent glare, twice, each. I count this as a single business decision.

2024, April, Safeway Pharmacy, Joppa Road and Satyr Hill at North Plaza Mall, Baltimore County.

The young gay man taking orders pretended to type in the information for the gabapentin transfer, gave it back to me, told me it would take days [when all other Safeway clerks do it the same or next day], barely suppressed a gate keeping grin, and did not enter the order or call in the transfer. Figuring he had off the next day, since that had been Wednesday, I returned, and the lovely black girl tech and the Chinese pharmacist worked together, giggling, so happy they had a visitor from Portland, to make the transfer and refill happen in ten minutes! The Pharmacy clerk at the Portland Safeway is an angel, and recalls your name on sight.

Like the black barmaids and the bus drivers, the gay man let me know I was being denied service with his eyes, voice tone and body language, something that most Americans do not believe is actual communication, when it means more than words in most violent survival and gate keeper situations.

So, how man times, over what span and for what reason has this low down cracker whiteboy been denied for:

Transportation X-50, based on race

Social gathering X-1, based on writing

Medication X-2, based on writing [1]

Food X-1, based on eating too much the previous weeks

Food/Drink X-3, based on race

It never occurred to me to complain to them or their bosses—that’s what they do.

…

Notes

-0. In the case of the writing group, it had been promoted to me, by the organizer, as a networking service, to improve chances of publisher acceptance, book sales, etc. I had been approached based on my use of the Iuniverse self publishing service to evaluate my fiction anthology Darkly.

-1. Both of these gay, white pharmacy men, one an actual pharmacist the younger a tech, had access to all of my information and had previously been effusively helpful. I think the knowledge that I traveled, indicated by strange pharmacy transfer locations, made them curious and they searched my name and discovered that the shadow of deepest evil had passed their counter top.

-2. The narrative of Work will be posted on substack, the sidebars like this at jameslafond.com.

“Her master had revealed no hint of such unwelcome knowledge.”

-7, Death in the Dark, page 114

…

A Joe Story

So we were at a party in a town called Manhattan, a lot of farms and rural areas. I think it was after high school, a graduation party for someone. We were in the upper loft of the barn and it had the big open doors for hay bales and a mast with a hoist and a rope attached to it. Joe was standing at the edge pissing off the edge and my friend Mike comes up and boots him right in the ass while he’s pissing. Joe grabs a hold of the rope with both hands and was swinging around and yelled and everyone turned around to look at him and he was swinging around holding onto the rope with his dick out.

Mike?

Mike was the guy who influenced me to take the automated systems technology at the Junior College. We went to the gym together a lot and his older brother, Rick worked out at the same gym. The big gym in town closed and my Taekwondo guy bought the gym and put the weight equipment in the basement. Some of the equipment was homemade. His right hand man would weld pieces for the gym, which was really cool. I started going to the gym and put the Taekwondo aside and was going to the gym and trying to put on some muscle. I worked with Mike at Brown’s Chicken. There’s this beach, a private beach in this town called Ottawa. It was much nicer than Lake Michigan—no Negroid troubles. We would go with everyone from the gym and play football, and volleyball and cookout; a very cool group of people. I was the youngest dude by far, because I knew Mike and Rick. I was always jealous of Mike because he had naturally huge arms.

Joe’s Trajectory

He always had trouble holding a job. He was a Brown’s Chicken guy. Brown’s Chicken is where I met my wife. I don’t remember the circumstances of him leaving. He left and got a full time job painting. He would have trouble getting the paint off that infiltrated the suit and googles that they wore. He was an ambulance driver for a while and he ran over a fireman’s leg and lost that job. He was driving a gravel truck for a while for road construction. He did that for quite a while. I ran into him when I was well into my career as an electrician. We were on a job, and he came walking in, working for an office delivery company. That was before the rape.

[Dan refuses to comment any further. The writer gets the impression that Joe was not raped, but that an associate of his was. This four-letter event and the resulting infamy did cut down on Joe’s social contacts.]

The last contact I had, I was talking to his mom and she said he was working in a warehouse distribution center somewhere.

Joe had had a reputation as a fighter based on a fight. He was at a party and a feared high school wrestler, who may or may not have been a state champion, was there. Him and Joe were getting into a fight. Joe just knew he was going to shoot on him. So Joe was ready and kneed him in the face and knocked him out cold. Joe was a year older than me. The word got around. A lot of people knew about that, people there at the party telling other people what happened.

I liked the younger Joe. I don’t really know what happened to the older Joe.

Joe’s Brother

Bernie was his name. He was probably six years older than us. He practiced Aikido. It was amazing how easily he could lock you up or throw you and not hurt you. He joined the Marines out of high school. After the Marines he was accepted and got into the Secret Service. I don’t know how long that lasted or if he completed the training. He did not stick around. From there he went to ESI the Executive Security International bodyguard school in Arizona. It was pretty famous in martial arts magazines.

From there he went to Las Vegas and worked as a limo driver for clients that wanted protection, not just driven around. During that time period he went to California for something and got into a gang fight, by, himself. I think they were four people, I think Hispanic, and one guy was swinging around a chain. When he swung the chain at Bernie he threw up his left arm and blocked it and it broke his wrist. Then, he proceeded to beat up four guys. I know the cops and ambulances were called. It went to court and Bernie was ordered to pay the medical expenses of the quote “victims.” He said, fuck that and skipped town and said he would never go back to California.

He was probably 5’ 8” and maybe 165 pounds and medium build. You wouldn’t think of him as a tough guy. He had a mustache and tattoos. I went with him and some guys that were getting tattoos and the tattoo artist said, “Uh oh, here comes Robocop,” and this guy comes walking in with a neck halo for a broken neck and the guy comes in and sees me laughing and he comes over and starts yelling at me, wanting to fight and he’s saying, “You think this is funny!”

Yes, I did think it was funny. He was starting with me and yelling at me and all I could think of was I was going to grab that head cage with both hands and start shaking it.

I would have never thought of that [without describing Bernie’s appearance.]

His mom told me he was working for some company that traveled oversees, in China, doing what I have no idea.

There are 12 more chapters to write in Electric Dan’s memoir. Further posting will resume in 2025 after another visit, Uncle Sham willing.

-Selek, Washington, June 26 2024

Demetrios “Mechee”

He was this Kung Fu kid, a black kid, shorter and skinnier than me. Every kid in our high school that was into martial arts we were all friends and knew each other. We used to go out to the baseball diamond after school and have sparring sessions. In left field, probably, in the grass. Most of the time I got the better of Demetrios. I remember one time he had this tan jacket on and he had a big muddy footprint from me across the middle of his jacket and it reminded me of Game of Death where Bruce Lee had the big foot print on his jump suit from Kareem. One time, I wasn’t really practicing my Taekwondo so much and Demetrios wanted to spar and I didn’t think anything of it and he came after me pretty hard and he got the better of me that day. We were sparring, not fighting, but I got kicked in the nose and the mouth and I had a white polo shirt on with some blood on it. That exact day is when my girlfriend and her mother at the time were picking me up from school to do something and they were freaking out because I had blood on the collar of my shirt and I looked a bit worse for wear. I spent some time trying to convince them that it was no big deal.

In later years I would run into him periodically. He worked sweeping at the mall. I remember one time in particular, because I was wearing 80s style gym shorts and people would remark all the time that there was something the matter with my legs. He said, he could tell from my legs that I was lifting a lot and would ask me about my workouts. He was lifting and could only get up t about 160 pounds. I saw him a couple times when I was workings security at the grocery store and we would talk.

Dwayne’s Blazer

It was summer night and there was a Taste of Joliet festival going on and we were on the street just down the road and the windows were down. It was a hot summer night. This might have been just out of high school. This guy asks for a ride, an adult dude, brown hair, T-shirt and jeans on, not a homeless guy or anything, just drunk. He asked for a ride and Dwayne told him no. We were at a stop light and he was talking to us through the passenger side where I was.

The light turns green and he grabs on to the right mirror and steps onto the running boards and with his other hand he’s got his hand inside the door and hangs onto the Blazer as Dwayne’s driving. We were driving by an area where there was a cemetery and all grass on that side. I looked at Dwayne, like, ‘Can you believe this?’—and, just like that, like a bad dream breaking up, the guy is gone—must have been real drunk or something. I looked in the mirror and he was tumbling in the grass, didn’t roll out into the road or anything, so we figured he was good and kept going. I thought in after times, if I had not been sitting there, that maybe this guy would have just got in and caused some trouble. Just being together, with a friend, especially when he is doing something distracting, like driving, that is probably the best form of protection.

Donnie’s Invitation to a Party

My friend went to a technical college and would invite us to go with him to parties with his other friends he met in college. We went to a local party, three of us, Donnie and Jimmy and I. Donnie had a small car at the time, a two-seater with a back seat like a Chevy Chevette. We met these two girls at this party at my friend Steve’s house. It was kind of lame, so Don suggested we go to his other friend’s party and these two girls came with us.

We go to the party and the girl that was kind of hanging on me, she was drunk, drinking something in the car, was kind of wobbly and wasn’t walking straight. We go walking through the living room and she grabs this guys hat who was sitting down. I grab the hat from her and give it to him and say, “She doesn’t know what she doing.”

He gets up and says, with hat in hand, “This is death to you and your girl.” He’s pointing at me with his right hand, pointing down, because this fucker was like six-foot-seven. We’re right by the sliding glass door to go outside and Jim is out there making out with the one chick we came with. I go outside and set the girl on the picnic table next to Jim. This guy and two of his friends come out to get me and I recall it was fall, we had jean jackets and stuff on. His two buddies were in front of him and he was closer to the house yelling at me. His two friends are real close and smiling, like this is really entertaining to them and laughing how I’m going to get beat up.

Jimmy is still making out with the girl.

I grab the dude closest to me with this shit eating grin on his face. I grabbed him by his jacket with both hands and took a step and threw him down to the left. Then I grabbed the guy on the right and kind of ragged him down, both hands on the left side of the jacket, stuffed him down to the ground. The big fucker turns around and runs back in the house. I turn around and look at Jimmy and say, “Thanks a lot. Did you even see what was going on here?”

He says, “There was only three of them, so I knew you could take them.”

That guy left and everyone else at the party was bringing me beers. The one guy asked me if I wanted to use his bedroom with the girl I was with. But she was too drunk. I wasn’t about to go that route. The best part about it was Jimmy’s line. That situation was burned into my head.

Jim and the Squirrely Stoner Dudes

Jim’s girlfriend used to go out with one of the guys and there were these three guys that always hung out together who he called “the Squirrely Stoner Dudes.” I was at home with a girlfriend watching movies, and Jim kept calling and wanting me to come meet him at this party. Old land line calling, touch phone by then. I kept telling him no. Later on I found out it was because those guys were there and he wanted me to fight them.

Jimmy had a mouth on him and he was six-four, had a big frame, a baseball player, like a first baseman. We were at this party and he went over and changed the music to Metallica and this girl came up and got in his face and was yelling and her boyfriend came up and was standing next to her and Jimmy says, “Nice mustache, bitch.”

He turns to the dude, “Do you shave her before you kiss her?”

Right then I’m ready to go, jump up and go right there, because you can’t let that be said to your girl and not punch the guy. But the dude didn’t do shit, just walked away, totally pussed out.

At that same party there was a dart board with the old regular steel darts and this kid was sitting beneath it and it was above his head and I grab the darts and I was like, “Hey, do you want to move,” and he says, “No,” and I whip the dart right over his head and it sticks in the wood post. Then he got out of the way., and we proceeded to play darts.

That was a girlfriend of mine, her girlfriends house, and she was so mad at me because my friends and I came and ran roughshod over everyone. I could be kind of a bully at times, like a young testosterone, hierarchical, ritual.

Jim & Donnie?

Jim became an air traffic controller, making a ton of money, real successful.

Donnie went on to run his own tech company and makes like five hundred thousand a year.

I see them every once and a while around town, but we don’t hang out. When Dwayne visits periodically from Florida, then we all get together.

[This morning, discussing bee bee gun use and technology, Dan admitted to an extremely cool form of juvenile delinquency… Dan took me to this location and took the photo of his punkhood island which serves now as my phone’s wallpaper.]

This probably started in eighth grade. We would go down to the DuPage River and there were woods around it, pretty substantial wooded area, wasn’t a forest preserve or anything. We hardly ever ran into people unless they were on the river canoeing or snowmobiling. There, down a little ways from where houses were, there was an island where the river split and went around it on both sides. It was pretty big, you couldn’t just see across it. It would take a few minutes to walk across it and it was heavily wooded.

We walked right across the water in the summer. At the deepest it was only like thirty inches. There was a current. In the summer we would wade. In the fall we would take, Dwayne’s two-man inflatable boat with paddles. When it froze over we would walk across the ice and sometimes you could hear the ice cracking and we were like, ‘Oh shit,” and run across.

We set about building a fort and brought whatever hand tools from home: mainly a bow saw and a hand ax for notching wood like Lincoln logs. We didn’t want to cut down trees anywhere near the fort and we didn’t want people to see it. So we would cut down trees near the water and bundled them together and towed them down the river to the spot where we put the fort up. It was probably eight-by-eight. Maybe four feet high—we never put a roof on it. We spent hours and hours building that thing.

In the winter we used to grab whatever food we could, like hot dogs and baloney, and have a fire and cook hot dogs on a stick and have a whole day there until it got dark. We shot a lot of birds just for target practice. It didn’t matter what kind of birds, whatever was around. One time we went out there and all of our fuckin’ logs were lying there in a pile—someone had taken our fort apart. When we put it together, each thing we did custom and the logs were different, it was like putting a puzzle back together and we had to figure out the exact combination. That kind of sucked.

Jimmy helped us build it two—those were the only three people that were ever out there. We never brought anyone else out there. They built houses all around there, all the woods that were around there is all houses now. We can drive by there—there’s a frontage road. We used to play a game we’d call Rambo, and one of us would hide with a spear and the other two would go and try to find him and you would ambush your friend. One time I walked right into a fuckin’ buck, and I ended up face—to-face with this fucking buck, and I was like, ‘Holy shit’ and it just took off. I was surprised at how big it was. I didn’t see it as I was being quiet and trying to sneak into the heavier brush with my spear. When we did Rambo, we all had spears. We didn’t sharpen the points or anything stupid like that.

We had been reading Conan, I had seen Conan, the greatest movie ever made, to this day, unsurpassed, unarguably, when it is clearly something subjective. All three of us would read those books. And Rambo was big.

[We watched Conan the barbarian last night and reconnected with the inner barbarian.]

By Dwayne’s house they had built a new subdivision and all the dirt from excavating the basements was piled up in mounds and the roads were in for future houses. We had been to Missouri with Dwayne’s parents and bought a bunch of fireworks and took them home with us. We were by the dirt mounds shooting off fire works and our bee bee guns and two squad cars pull up. I took off running and made it to the treeline, just down from where our fort was, knew those woods at the back of my hand and knew they wouldn’t find me. But I looked back at the treeline and Dwayne stood there and I didn’t want him to have to be interrogated as to my identity, so I just walked back.

The cops said that somebody called and we were shooting automatic weapons, which we both laughed at, the rediculousness of it. There were two cops, Shorewood Police. [They were thick as flees as we drove there before writing this.] We showed them that we had some left over fire works from the 4th of July and we were just shooting our bee bee guns and the guy was a total dick and said that any type of toy gun was illegal in Shorewood. I had this very cool, fully automatic bee bee gun that looked like a Mach 10, that I ordered out of the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine that ran on a can of compressed air. [a Christmas present fo the PIG’s son no doubt.] It would shoot a shitload of bee bees, but they only really had anything on them for like fifty feet. Didn’t get any birds with it—just shot my friends with it in our bee bee gun wars.

So when the cop grabbed it from me I tried to show him how to unscrew the compressed air can so it wouldn’t fire and he’s looking at it like its and extremely deadly weapon and the can of compressed air with ACE Hardware on it should clue you in that it’s pretty harmless. A cop should have some basic firearms knowledge. He said that I could get a lawyer and try to get it back after ninety days and I laughed and said, “I’ll just order another one for forty bucks.”

I was reading my usual Soldier of Fortune, as one does in eighth grade. I couldn’t order it to my parent’s house. It’s not like I could write a check for it. I mowed lawns for five bucks a pop and saved up that way. I bought a money order and had it sent to Dwayne’s house—whose parents were way cooler than mine. I never did get another one.

We had a one pump rule for our battles. I honestly don’t remember what kind of bee bee gun Dwayne had—am I honestly that self-centered that I only cared for my own losses and have no idea what kind of gun Dwayne had taken from him?

[Laughter]

I seriously don’t remember. There might have been a chance that he didn’t bring his and we were playing with the fully auto bee bee gun. You would put a “half pint” milk cartoon of bee bees at one time.

We didn’t get arrested. They just took our shit and left. Fireworks had been illegal in Illinois for along time, you had to go to Wisconsin, Indiana or Missouri.

We would shot at each other with bottle rockets by lighting the fuse burn down and throw them up in the air and we called them niցցer chasers. [1] When we were way older we had a roman candle war and Scott got shot in the chest with one and he got a burn mark in the center of his sternum. It’s kind of funny that when guys get together they are always shooting each other and throwing shit at each other.

We used to shoot at snowmobilers. We climbed up a hill on the opposite side, uphill maybe fifty feet and we made a snow blind and set up there and shot at snowmobilers going down the river. They had helmets and snow suits on so that’s how we justified it. Sometimes they stopped, knowing something had happened, but didn’t know what.

We just got older and when everyone was able to drive, and working, and partying and chasing women, we didn’t go back to playing in the woods—so probably sixteen. I went out there with my friend Robby one time to show him. He had a blowgun and I had a pump style bee bee gun and we’d turn the darts around backwards and shoot each other with the blow gun.

When paintball came out this same group, we used to go paint balling, with the single shot guns and the science class googles. Not enough of us showed up, so they put us in the general group, and there were these biker dude that were dressed in camo and had fancy guns, so we were getting destroyed and they would cheat. Bruce, the smallest guy in our group, threw his gun down and went and tackled this big fat Vietnam guy and broke his gun and there was a lot of pushing between us. We got banned and had to come up with money to pay for Bruce’s broken gun. The place was called Doc’s, in Wilmington.

Notes

-1. New York friends have told stories of hunting blacks with bottle rockets and other fireworks in NYC and calling them by the same racially ballistic term.

“… the pot of my native country is coming to the boil.”

-7, Death in the Dark, page 108

Disclaimer

[The evil biographer cannot let go of his violence obsession, and has bullied, lured and inveigled Dan into discussing some childhood and youthful heroics.]

I don’t want to toot my own horn. Most of this sounds self-agrandizing because I come off looking good in most of them. I come off bragging and none of my stories come off as anything compared to a guy like Big Ron. It wasn’t real violence persay. Back when kids were like, “Oh, let’s have a square go,” no one was going to end up dead.

[The writer informs the subject that rating the importance of violent encounters is above his pay grade.]

The First Real Schoolyard Fight, 3rd grade.

I remember this kid George was a really tall kid and we got in a playground fight towards the end of my third grade year. I recall doing well, not the specifics, but it really emboldened me as to fighting is no big deal and it was cool because the word spread around and helped my street cred as it were. Every year after that I got into multiple fights for every grade of school.

When We Moved

We moved to Shorewood. Didn’t know anybody and I was going into sixth grade. It was in the summer before school started. I got in a fight with a kid on the other block. My Sister and the neighbor that we had met, this girl Audrey, came to get me and they were both crying. They had been over on the other block and some kid was swinging a stick and hit them. I went over there and this kid was probably around the same age and grade as me and he got in my face and was posturing up like he was a tough guy. I punched him in the nose as hard as I could—didn’t say a word. He started crying and his nose was bleeding. He slunk off home crying like a little bitch. I felt great, because he was a dick and he was fucking with my sister and her friend.

[VIOLENCE IS GOOD]

My very first day of sixth grade I got a bus detention. The only kids I met in my neighborhood were in 8th grade and I was in sixth. On the way home from school they were teasing some kid and playing keep away; Greg, the paper boy, in 8th grade, and Scott, my neighbor—the only kids I knew and who I hung out with. For lack of anything to do I would ride down to his house and help him sort papers and ride his route with him on our BMX bikes.

There was a radio station that had a little credit card, a membership code and they would give out prizes on the radio based on the number of the card. It was called Fantastic Plastic. He must of had it out and one of those guys had it and was throwing it back and forth and I got involved in this triangle keep away game from this dude. The bus driver came back and wrote us up and got our names. That was the end of my first day of 6th grade.

An Eighth Grade Bully

I was in sixth grade. The kid, Scott who was my neighbor was an eighth grader and we were at the bus stop. This other eighth grade kid that was like a full adult size in eighth grade—he was big—he used to bully Scot. When I started goin’ there I wouldn’t accept it and would fight this dude. I remember on one occasion I took him down with a double leg and tried to mount him and was punching him. It just got broke up because we got on the bus and went to school. Another time he was bullying Scot, who was this really skinny kid, so I took the bully’s lunch. Next to the bus stop this guy used to back out of work and back up and I took this douchebag’s lunch and put it behind the back tire and this guy comes out and backs over his lunch.

Then, so his dad walked the kid over to my house to address the fighting problem. He was talking to my mom first and they pulled me out and said, “What is the problem between you two?”

I told the guy that the kid is constantly bullying and pushing around Scott and Scott did not defend himself and that his kid was the jerk in this situation. His dad made him walk down the block to another bus stop. They did make us shake hands and apologize to one another.

Bullshit Fights

His name was Scott also. He was best friends with this kid I became friends with and he would fuck with me. We would eat lunch together. Before school began we would go hang out in the cafeteria. We would sit together. The other kid’s name was Mark. That was his best friend and lived next to him. And Mark and I became friends and it bothered Scott. I remember one day he threw his milk cartoon at me, splashed milk on me from across the way. I went after him and it got broken up, because there was a lot of teachers in the area.

Later in that same day we passed each other in the hallway and we started going at it. We were throwing punches, almost like hockey fights and we would grab each other and start swinging, because he was a hockey player and that was his move. That got broken up. Each time we got sent to the Vice Principal’s office. Later in the day, it might have been in the hallway, for the third time that day, we get stopped by teachers and brought to the office. The Vice Principal said, “If I catch you guys fighting again I’m kicking you out of school.” We kind of cooled it after that. But we still sat together at the same table.

Just kid’s stuff.

“… but a flawed instrument is all the more dispensable should it need to be discarded after use.”

-6, The Chamber of Sphinxes, page 107

…

The year I started high school, they shut down Joliet East, and Joliet Central was crowded as it was, so they bussed all the Eastsiders to Joliet West. They [the Eastsiders] realized that the white kids were scared of them so they terrorized them. It was definitely a culture shock for me. The junior high I went to I think had two black kids. I didn’t think of them any differently than anybody else—they were fine.

The Eastsiders were loud and obnoxious for sure. The girls would get in fights in the hallway and there would be hair all over the floor from them pulling each other’s hair out. I went to a basketball game and this guy Brice I knew pointed out people that had guns on them.

A couple years into it, my best friend Dwayne, his sister and my sister were the same age and they both had blonde hair and blue eyes and they were both harassed and told that they were racist if they didn’t go out with black guys. I remember one time that someone was harassing Dawn, Dwayn’e sister, and I went running to go help out on the other side of the school. By the time I got there nothing was happening. Some guy was grabbing her and harassing her. My sister was harassed at times in a similar fashion and we went looking for the guys that did it. She didn’t point out who it was. Maybe she couldn’t tell the difference?

One time in gym class during hockey Dwayne checked this guy who was a total asshole. He was full adult size in high school, way bigger than everybody and would bully people. Dwayne got his revenge in hockey because he was a good skater and checked him and said, “Fuck you niցցer.”

We were walking before school started and that guy came up and jumped Dwayne from behind even though here were three of us walking together. I grabbed the guy from behind, and right as I did I looked to my left and there was a security guard running towards. They weren’t armed security guards, not cops.

This kid I was almost friendly with, he was a black kid, he was the only one I actually got in fights with in school. But we were friends. His name was Demetrius.

So Dwayne and a couple kids that I knew took a bus to Joliet Central for their advanced autoshop class because they didn’t have the facilities at West. They would take a bus to and from Central. Dwayne was tall, like six two and weighed about a hundred and forty five pounds. So Dwayne and another white kid were on the bus and all the other kids on the bus were black and they started fucking with them, taking their backpacks, smacking them around. These were full-on regular school buses, not like a transit bus. It was the traditional yellow school bus and our busses were disgusting because it was the jerry curl era and the black kids would lean thier heads against the windows and they would be covered with slime—it was like trying to look out of a jar of Vasilene.

Dwayne was saying that they took a book or two and he didn’t know how he was going to replace them. He told us what happened: me and some friends, Rich, was one of them. The class that Dwayne was in there were other kids from the auto shop who were allowed to drive an didn’t take the bus. The next day, a bunch of us, who didn’t even belong on that bus got on that bus and waited for the black kids to get on. They would not board the bus. They saw that we were waiting for them and they wouldn’t get on the bus and security came and brought us all to the dean’s office. Dwayne was there.

We said what happened and I don’t recall getting in trouble or anything. Dwayne went right back on that bus the next day and they [black kids] didn’t do anything after that. They did not fuck with him. I was enraged that day.

My friend Donnie had a party on the west side at his parents. We were, I think the senior year of high school, towards the end, towards the summer. All of us were hanging out before the party a couple car loads of my friends. One of my friends had afake I.D. so we went to get served and buy beer for the party. We used to drink old Style, because my friend’s dad always had old Style. Our slogan was “Oh yes, O.S.” My friend’s dad always had a case behind the seat of his truck and he said, “I don’t care if you guys take it, just leave the money so I can buy another one.”

Dwayne went straight to Don’s house. When we pulled up, Dwayne was in his truck and I thought maybe he couldn’t find a place to park. I went up to talk to him and he said, “Look,” and he showed his front tooth was out, one of them. He said, “That fuckin’ niցցer is here and he sucker punched me.”

I asked him what happened and he said that he was walking up the driveway to don’s house and the guy tapped him on the back of the shoulder and he turned around as one does and he got punched right in the face. The black guy was probably 6’ 3” and two-fifteen, two-twenty. So Dwayne is like 145—that is close to eighty pounds. I was five-ten and close to two-hundred pounds. I made up to two hundred by the end of my senior year in high school.

He said they started wrestling and Dwayne had got him rolled over and on top and Dwayne was grabbing his head and slamming it on the asphalt driveway. Then people that I thought were our friends dragged him off of the guy and the guy and his crew went in the house.

[For the legion of guilty ghosts of a political and socially scientific mind who have declared endlessly that men of West African ancestry are unbeatable physical combatants while ignoring all combat sports and military after action evidence, I recall here that it took the 2,400 strong Baltimore City Police Force to prevent myself and a handful of other crackers from defending ourselves against 200,000 hoodrats. Above, a 145 pound man is ambushed by a heavyweight who must be rescued form the defensive action by a mob. Can we stop worshiping Ye Hi Gawds yet?]

So, when I heard this, I fucking ran into the house and opened the door and there was a lot of people in the house and I yelled, “Where is that fucking niցցer?!”

They told me that he went out the back door. Then, a bunch of people got in my face and tried yelling at me about it—white people. [The N-word more of a crime than the N-sword.] I remember shoving them and telling them to fuck off and if they wanted to fight lets do it. Afterwards people told me that him and his crew, who I never saw, ran out the back while I was arguing with these people. These were all people who lived in our neighborhood. Donnie was my friend. These were people that lived around him and in my grade that thought it was smart to get in my face. They didn’t do shit, just yelling for me to calm down. I was shaking with rage.

I don’t know the story of how they went in, how they ran out. I just know I went off the handle. I never saw him [the black guy] again, not in school or anything. After that I remember riding the bus and some freshman I didn’t know came up to me and start asking me about the party, saying, “You’re the guy.” It was weird, that other people I didn’t know would ask me this.

[Can we understand now how hundreds have in the past conquered and ruled millions before the Financial Police State cloaked us all in its folded wings of night?]

Dwayne was best man at my wedding. We are still in touch. He became a diesel mechanic and moved to Florida.

“The instruments that served his will were weak and flawed, he knew…”

-6, The Chamber of Sphinxes, page 107

…

The First Time I Met My Dean

I got in trouble for heckling a black history presentation in the school auditorium. It was English Class. My buddy Robby was in the same class. They marched us to the auditorium. It was part of the class to attend this production. It was about twenty-four kids and I would say it was almost half black. Robby was my friend from Taekwondo. We were sitting in there towards the back of the auditorium, as ne’er-do-wells do. The presentation was got to the part where the black race will over come their white oppressors and make them feel like slaves. These were kids, other students, from the Black Student Union.

We were looking at each other and Robby starts with a cough and yelling, “Bullshit” under his breath. So I joined him. That turned into, “Fuck you, niցցers!” My English teacher was the same black teacher who I did the Robert E. Howard report for. All I remember was the look of horror on her face. I had never been in trouble, so I had never met my dean up until that point, and when I saw it was a black guy I was like, “Oh, fuck.”

I was thirteen, a freshman. Because of my birthday I was on the young side, sixteen at the beginning of my senior year. This was the fall of the freshman year.

[Writer’s note: and Dan said with some pride that he had never been in trouble up to this point? Not viable extra credit. He does admit to having seen the dean a lot in junior high.]

Robby had the same dean, because it was alphabetical. There were maybe five deans in the school. We had a Principal, Vice Principal and then the deans did the other bullshit. Robby and I went in together. I had a lot of compartments for friends. I knew Robby from Taekwondo when we were in sixth grade. We said that we shouldn’t be forced to listen to that because it wasn’t just a history presentation, that they started about how they were going to get revenge on whitey. He wanted to punish us for what we were saying but we denied it. [laughter] We didn’t get in trouble and it became optional in the following year. If you were in your English class and they had that same black history presentation, it was optional to attend or stay in your English class—which I did.

The Karate Demonstration

That was senior year. Everytime there was an assembly it would be towards the end of the day, the last period. And my friends and I would always go out the nearest exit, walk around the school, meet in the parking lot, and leave. They had security posted up around the doors. I was the only one who didn’t fucking escape!

[laughter]

So I was one of the last people into the gymnasium, where the assembly was. I had to sit right up front on the lower bleacher. My dean was in a karate gi, nd giving a presentation. He represented the local YMCA and Park District Karate program. He pointed at me and said, “Come on up and help me.” He announced that he was going to demonstrate by proper breathing, how when you got punched it didn’t hurt, that when you kiaid and tensed up you wouldn’t get hurt. He showed me how to do your classic revere punch, which I had done thousands of times from sixth grade to my senior year of high school.

I was five-ten and close to two-hundred pounds.

He was at least in his forties. He was probably around six-foot tall and maybe around two-hundred pounds.

He showed me where to punch him, right in the solar plexus. I got in my stance, like a bo stance, and I let rip the hardest fucking reverse punch I could muster. He dropped straight down, right to the floor. I don’t remember laughter or anything.

I did not help him up.

I just stood over him, looking at him.

So he got up and grabbed the microphone and asked me my height and weight and how long I had been doing karate.

I said I was in Taekwondo since I was in sixth grade.

He says something like I punched like a much larger man and it was from my training and see what that can do for you, you become dangerous or something to that effect.

The people I hung out with were not there. So I didn’t get the accolades or praise from dropping the dean or anything lie that. He put his hand on my shoulder while he was talking and I just went and sat down.

Ditching Class

I had all the credits I needed to graduate when I was a junior. But I needed my parents signature to graduate early because I wasn’t eighteen. I liked my electrical class in the morning and I usually went to that. A lot of times I would just leave. I remember I got called into the dean’s office and I told him I had all my credits to graduate and the way I saw it I would get my diploma wether I got in trouble for ditching class or not.

He told me that he was going to give me an after school detention. I said I wouldn’t go to it, and wait until it became a suspension, and it would be the same result.

I ditched six days in a row. I think he just told me to finish out the year, didn’t get in trouble for it.

Dwayne and I did not go to our graduation ceremony. It was on a Friday night. I went to work at Brown’s Chicken and my mom and dad went to graduation because they thought I wasn’t serious when I said I wasn’t going to graduation. Our reasoning was there are people who can’t read getting diplomas. That diploma wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. We weren’t about to go there and pretend it meant something to us. I was working the very next morning at Brown’s Chicken again and Dwayne came and brought me my diploma. He went to the school to get his and they just gave him mine to give to me. It may sound strange to some people, but that’s what happened.

“…the sorcerer silenced him with lifted hand and a bland, uncaring smile.”

-6, The Chamber of Sphinxes, page105

Circles of Friends

I had a group of friends growing up in Shorewood, and I knew Robby from Taekwondo class in sixth grade. Then when we got together in high school I hung out with him and his friends, so I had that group of friends. One of his buddies was this guy named Quan. He got me my job at Cub Foods doing security and at Builder’s Square. We were pretty close until he moved to Michigan. One time he got bit by a girl with AIDS working security and he had to go get tested every six months. Sean was a neighbor of Dwayne, part of the Shorewood Crew, had a reputation for being a brawler, an Irish kid.

When I started working at Brown’s Chicken, there was an eclectic group there from five different high schools. At one time or another I hung out with all of there different friends groups.

Tony was the manager, ten years older than me. He was into lifting weights. I started working out with him in his basement. His best friend, was Scott, who was eleven years older than me. We used to work out at least three days, sometimes five days a week. We’d go for a run around Tony’s subdivision afterwards and go back to Tony’s house and slug protein drinks. I went to a lot of parties and ended up hanging out with these guys. That’s who I did the vast majority of my fishing with, Tony and Scot and their friends. Mike was from Brown’s and Rick was his brother.

All of these groups intersected with the others because I would invite my other friends to various parties.

Muscleheads

From the Taekwondo basement gym and Tony’s basement, we expanded our training. A gym opened close to my house in Shorewood and I joined that and became friends with this kid Jason who won every teenage bodybuilding contest in Illinois. Then we went to college together and were in the same classes so we would go to the gym with each other around our schedule. Our schedules were pretty much the same in Junior College. He introduced me to his friends. Because he knew everybody who was anybody in body building in Illinois, I made a lot of connections. One gym we went and started training at a lot, this guy named Bill, who won the Mister America, it was twenty minutes away, we started going there and hanging out with him. It was quite a ways to drive but it was the best gym around. The atmosphere was really good.

A couple of the guys I met in that era I ended up working with, who happened to be electricians working in my own local, which was fun. Nick, I met first with Jason and I worked with him later on. He was 5’ 11” and 295 at his biggest, with no gut, when I first met him. Later on when I worked with him he was probably still 260 and lean. He had a lot of trouble with his feet because he was so big for so long the arches were shot and he had to wear orthotics. He could only handle working an eight hour day. He had to turn down over time because he couldn’t stand for that long.

Back at Kwon’s, when I was working out there with Mike, his older brother Rick and his friends were the main crew at that gym. They were really hard core. You were a pussy if you weren’t squatting. Mike and Rick had really big upper bodies. Rick could use a lot of weight squatting and leg pressing but didn’t have very big legs himself and said he kept them small so that something else looked bigger. On the back of his leather lifting belt was written “French Fries” in marker and he would say those ain’t fries those are french fries. They started me out squatting with just the bar at 135. Within a couple months I was doing my reps and sets with 315.

I wanted to be a big muscle head but I didn’t want to do the steroids. The injections I always associated with hard core drugs and it seemed too much. I knew people who spent all there money on steroids. I always wanted to bulk up and get bigger so I never wanted to diet. Besides dieting is no fun, bulking up is a lot more fun!

I got more into power lifting because I knew I was never going to be a body builder. I used to go to APF meets [American Powerlifting Federation, because they were based out of Aurora, Illinois.] I did the lift off for my friend Stan who did a 507 pounds bench press in the 242 pound drug-tested class. Every time I was consistently squatting or dead lifting 500 pounds I would fuck up my back. My best bench press was 375. I wanted to do 400 so bad because my buddy Scott could bench 405 and Stan was benching 500.

So, my shoulders are bugging me and I just kept grinding away at it. I stopped because my shoulders were sore all the time and I started regressing. I started Olympic lifting just for fun and to work out. I noticed that in my class the top ten in the nationals at the time did around a 100 kilo snatch and a 150 kilo clean and jerk. So I focused my efforts on that. I could power clean and jerk 315. But didn’t have the good form to do a squat clean, which lets you use more weight. I could snatch 185, and so 220, is a 100 kilos, so I was trying to get up to that. The 150 clean and jerk is like 330 pounds, so I had those as my goal weights. I was pushing the front squat trying to get strong in that position so I would be able to squat clean. I fucked up my back, lost a front squat forward with 275 and I couldn’t even tie my shoes after I did that. I pretty much quit trying to do a lot of weight in the Olympic lifts. I did those exercises but didn’t push it.

I never stopped, really, using weights. I would do dips because I could and it helped me keep strong. In the weight rooms at hotels, I could still do the max on the machines because of the work I did with the dips.

Sean’s Plight

[Back to the venn diagram of friends, and the enigmatic Sean.]

Sean was just a guy in the neighborhood and we were the same age and ended up in the same places, casual friends. One night we were playing darts together, I like to play cricket. He throws a dark that sticks in the back of another dart like a fucking Robin Hood! I never saw that before. The next day we were all going to meet at Dwayne’s house and help his mother move. His stepdad had passed away and it was just his mom and she was moving. I was maybe 21. Sean didn’t show up for the moving.

Sean wasn’t there, at his house, the next day and everything was quiet at his house. No one was answering the door. We found out later from his little brother that some cop that they knew called the family and warned them that they were on to Sean for the murder at the beer distributor.

Sean had gotten fired from his job and he went in to get his last check and got in an argument with the guy that fired him and he stabbed him to death. That was two weeks before we were playing darts together! He was on the run for like seven months with family, hiding out. They gave him like a life sentence.

“Upon the black iron throne brooded Thulandra…The bones of his narrow face seemed molded by a sculpture.”

-page 13

…

The Summer We Were Working Together

We became pretty close because we would talk everyday and hangout. I met a lot of his friends that would swing by when we were on a job. He would tell me about his life outside the job. We hung out a lot and playing softball and drinking a few nights a week and then on the weekends. I can’t think of much except for him talking about his dad.

Dave’s Family House

His dad was the one that taught him how to do concrete work and layout forms. His dad did have an accent so probably did come from Poland. His mom and dad both had Polish accents. He fought in WWII for the United States. When he came home he worked full time and built their house by hand while still having a full time job. There was this detached garage and his dad put in a pit so you could walk down in this walkway like five feet in the concrete and walk under there and change your oil and work on the car from a standing position without having to put the car up on a hoist or jacks. It was a two story, pretty standard, 2,000 or 2,500 square foot house with a basement. They had a good size lot.

The house was in Joliet on the East Side. The neighborhood turned to shit around them and most of their neighbors were Negroes. This was the part of town where they had bussed in people to our high school from, which led to a lot of violence. He lived there with his parents until he bought the house in Wilmington.

Shootouts with Negroes

Dave’s dog had a fenced area parallel to the gravel alley, in and the dog stayed outside with a dog house. His dog looked like a lion. He should have trimmed his hair to look like a mane. He was a chow, a big one. His dog was basically the Negro alarm.

The main thing is that people would try to break into his garage and the dog would be barking and Dave would jump up and grab his 3.57 revolver and head out the back door and confront them. Sometimes he was shot at, sometimes he shot back. This all happened when we were working together over a summer. There was also random shootings in the neighborhood and he would get his gun and go check it out.

I know he was shot at and returned fire and hit the deck in his own back yard coming out the back door to see who was breaking into his garage. I don’t know if anybody got hit on the other side. We used to go to his garage, because we stored material for his concrete business in his garage, stakes, expansion joints. Even when I was in high school it was known that his neighborhood was one of the worst around. There were no encounters when I was there when we pulled up and loaded up. I don’t know what happened to his house or parents. I didn’t get to talk with Dave’s family after he moved to Wilmington, but to our friends. He had a brother and a sister that I know of.

The Last Drink with Dave

He had bought a house in this tiny little town, Wilmington. The house cost less than his truck did. I remember he bought the house for $17,000. I went there a couple times to hang out and visit. I might have been closer to thirty, so he would have been closer to thirty-seven. He had bought the house ten years previously, and I went there a few times when I was in the neighborhood. Interestingly enough, when he moved in, there had not been a murder in Wilmington in 118 years. Then, right after he moves in, there was a double murder two houses over!

Dave’s Fate & Funeral

Dave died of kidney failure, congestive heart failure as a result of the kidneys not functioning. Since he lived by himself they put him into an assisted living place. I was saddened that I didn’t know he was sick, otherwise I would have come to visit him. We went to a little luncheon after the funeral and none of us knew that he was sick. He deserved better. He was a very good friend to everybody else, would come over and work on people’s houses all the time. That summer I did concrete for him we poured a big patio in the back of my mom and dad’s house. It is still in excellent shape. Nobody can get over that it is still in such excellent shape since 1987.

The funeral was very touching. He would have loved it. I could imagine him smiling down. It was summer and the cemetery is in the side of a hill and we had the windows down and were driving up from the service and there was a bag piper up on the hill towards the entrance. When you were pulling in you could hear the bagpipes playing, I know Amazing Grace was one. It gave me goosebumps. The bagpiper was in a kilt, full Scottish gear. Dave was never married. I don’t know that he had girlfriends. There was probably sixty people there, mostly relatives. There was a dozen of us friends who went to a lunch afterwards and reminisced.

He was a good, hard-working guy and a lot of fun to be around.

“… an alchemist seeking to transmute iron into gold or to concoct a universal panacea.”

-page 11

Sausage Fingers

The origin story for Dave as the heavy gravity planet guy was when we were working construction and I said something about his hand, like a catcher’s mitt of a hand, okay and I said something about his sausage fingers. That’s when he said someone had described him as looking like he was born on a high gravity planet. When I was in junior college I think he just worked for another concrete company.

Jobs I had during Junior College

The security job, one time we had a guy—there was two of us on the weekends—I think I had come in in the afternoon and the guy before me had just gotten this dude for shoplifting and had him in the office. He was in the back where we had a little thing set up to take his picture. We were blocking the door and he made a break for it and we get in this scuffle at the door. The cops had told him that if someone resists we are free to fight back. So the guy was trying to wrestle with us so we were pounding on him, smaller and older then us, disshevelled looking. We beat the crap out of this guy and handcuffed him to the chair. Later on, after the cops got there, we were laughing because we looked at the linoleum floor and it was crazy with scuff marks.

Another time, with that same gut, I don’t remember his name, but he was the main guy, not a manager or anything. We were working on the weekend during the day and the girl from seafood department calls us and says there were two suspicious guys looked like homeless dudes that were ordering hundreds of dollars of seafood. I went o the entrance, because a lot of times they would sneak out the entrance. The store was set up like a rightward maze. He [the main guy] went to the exit. We had radios, got in position. The manger went to the exit with him. The two guys tried coming out the entrance and I grab the cart and one guy by the wrist and the other guy takes off the other way and I radio. The guy goes running out the exit and the other security guy clotheslines him and his feet went up and his head hit the floor and busted and he was bleeding everywhere, because he split his head open. We had to call an ambulance—the cops and everybody show up. It was either really exciting or really boring, working security.

Junior College

My first year was general shit because I had no idea what I wanted to do and I didn’t like it. I ended up getting chronic tonsilitus. So I didn’t finish that semester. The only classes I liked in high school was my electrical class. I had done some work with my dad on side jobs and hooking up lights for people. Mike was the same age as Dave and he was taking the electronic program and he told me not to waste my time, but to take automated systems technology, about motors and programmable controls. So I did that the next two years and finished the program. My teacher wrote the textbook, not just for the class, but later on when I got into the IBEW apprenticeship, the textbook we used was written by him. That teacher, we had a final that was pass or fail, and he would give us a conveyor built and we had to design it and put all the components together for a practical test and it was pass or fail because it either worked or it didn’t work. He had night classes for guys that worked at the Caterpillar factory. We’d go back into class after taking the test and he asked me how I thought I did and he said, “What if I told you that only one person in all of my classes got it correct.”

And I said, “It must have been me.” The he started laughing and he gave me my paper and I was the only one that got the problem right.

I did good in those classes. It was something I enjoyed. After that it was you either become a plant maintenance guy or you go on to engineering school. I didn’t want to be a plant maintenance guy, so I went to a chemical plant and worked on their line with the idea of becoming their electrician or maintenance guy—I really didn’t want to, but didn’t know what else to do. I worked there for six or seven months.

In between there for a while I got a job working as a summer helper at a beer distributor near my parents house. All the beer guys were drinking back then, even the drivers. We used to go into this biker bar that was a full on Nazi biker bar and they had pictures on the wall of black guys as targets! They had this big Hungarian dog, the dogs name was Huzar. The dog came up to me while we were wheeling beer around and he put his nose right up to my crouch and started growling. I was like holy shit how do I get out of this situation? Then the person came around the corner and called the dog.

You would go with drivers who had certain amount of volume for a helper, I was a summer helper. I went with this one driver I didn’t know to a bar, I think it was named Joey’s Place, the owner, Joyy, behind the bar and the driver and I and they were joking around and it seemed friendly and Joey motions for me to come over to him like he’s going to tell me a secret, and he reaches up and he kisses me on the cheek and I recoil, and I’m like, ‘What the fuck,”

And he’s like, “Oh, you don’t like me,” and he pulls out a gun, looks like a .45 APC, and he’s pointing the fucking gun at me and I’m ten feet away of so, and the surrealness of the situation got to me and I look at the driver and the other guy and they’re not doing or saying anything. I said, “I don’t know if this is a prank or what so I’ll wait for you in the truck,” and I walked out and got in the truck.”

I thought about going back there with a bat and breaking Joey’s legs for a while! Then I heard from other people that he was a big coke head and a lot of drugs were dealt out of that bar. The driver acted like nothing happened! It was so weird.

Drinking with Dave

We had mutual friends still. A lot of times we went to a bar named Garnseys. One time we were drunk and outside in the back of the bar one of my friends is smoking, so it was probably weed, because at that time you could still smoke in a bar. We were rough housing and Dave pushed me and I went through the fence, a six-foot wood panel fence between the posts. Then I pushed him and he went through another fence, and we figured we better stop, we had a good four sections of the fence knocked down. This was a neighborhood bar where the fence was separating it from houses.

Jim’s Farmhouse

So Jim was running a big farm house and he use to have these awesome parties because we would have bonfires and we could crank music and be as loud as we wanted to and didn’t have to worry about neighbors or cops. Jim met a local girl and got married and had a couple kids and he works as some kind of engineer at a chemical factory and his wife is a pharmacist.

Inspirational Note

At the head of each entry, this pulp biographer, thought it weird, cool and proper, to include a chapter heading and quote from the book that propelled Electric Dan and his keystone companion, Heavy-Gravity Dave, into barbaric action. All quotes are from Dan’s childhood paperback treasure, Conan the Liberator, by L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter, Bantam, 1978.

“This castled capitol crouched upon its hill like some fantastic monster out of ages past, glaring at the Outer City walls, whose great stones held it captive.”

-1, When Madness Wears a Crown, page 9

…

I met him working at Brown’s Chicken when I was sixteen. He was the day breader and I think he was like twenty-three. So like that whole place was more than just a place you worked out. Everybody hung out and went to parties outside of work. It was an instant friends group. Dave was the guy who I used to have call in sick for me at school and pretend he was my dad. I worked up front doing the register and packing up the orders when I first started. The reason I worked there was that a friend of our family ended up owning a couple of those stores. Between him and my dad they had it worked out that I would starts right when I turned sixteen.

Right after I graduated high school is when Dave started his concrete business. He worked for another company and then he went out on his own. Doing residential flat work, mainly patios and sidewalks. So I worked for him that whole summer. So, Dave was this Polish guy who was probably five seven and maybe two-sixty, he had really thick joints, and you saw the picture, he definitely has a bucket head. He could work nonstop all day. I would get out of breath and get tired and take a break from shoveling or breaking up concrete, whether it was with a shovel or a jack hammer. He would tell me to pace myself and work at a steady rate. He would go at a steady pace and just work like a machine.

He didn’t like to stop for lunch. We would just work until we got whatever the goal for the day was achieved and the we would go to one of the many neighborhood bars that he knew of and we would eat lunch and drink beer when the day was over. I never got carded even though I was only 17 because he knew everybody and I was hangin’ out with him. I worked with him every day. He had a couple of friends that would come help us out from time to time on certain projects. I worked with him five or six days a week.

One time we were working all day and it was really hot out and I was sweating buckets and we went to this Mexican place he liked and they both poured a beer out of the pitcher and it was Old Style beer. When we sat down at the table there was jalapeno peppers on the table and we started eating them. So when the beer came out they poured a beer each and I down the pitcher, and when the next beer comes out I down the pitcher, because I was thirsty as hell and my mouth was on fire, and I’m in the bathroom pissing and I’m thinking where the hell am I, I was like wasted in ten minutes.

At that same time his concrete company sponsored a softball league that was all guys his age or my age. After we played softball in our uniforms we’d go to the bars in a group. A couple other guys, like Joe and Wally, were my age and nobody would card us because they knew the whole team would leave and we’d drink and not get carded. Going to these bars at day for lunch with Dave and with the team, I could go in and get served. I thought I was pretty cool at age 17 to go into these bars and get served. I didn’t look 21. People just assumed I was because of my associations. It was just that summer, working for Dave.

We were at a party at this guy Jim’s apartment and my friend Joe was dating this girl who he ended up marrying. Not to far from the thing there was a street with the same name as his fiance, so Joe wanted to steal the street sign and put it up in her room. So Jim, who helped us with concrete and was also on our softball team, he had lost his prescription glasses and was wearing his sun glasses. You could take alleys from Jim’s apartment and the street and back and not go on a major road. In the process the whole concrete base came out and someone picked up the base and threw it in the back of the truck and the sign part was sticking out of the pickup truck. Someone must have called the cops that we were taking this sign. I’m in the back with Joe and this other kid Dave, and Jim and Dave—high gravity planet Dave—is in the passenger seat and a squad car shows up right behind us and pulls us over. He tells us to take the sign back, which was cool, and we’re driving back and Jim takes the corner kind of fast and the sign slides across the bed and slams into the side of this parked van.

When Jim pulls over again the cop comes up and says, “You hit that van.” Fortunately the van is a busted up, rusted out, piece of shit, and Jim is slurring his words, telling the cop, “You show me, where I hit the van.” The other guy Dave that was in the back with us, when the cop turns his lights on he had jumped out and ran off and the cop didn’t ask about him.

Joe, me and Dave are in the back of a squad car listening to drunken ass Jim argue with this cop. We thought we were in big trouble. Basically the cop just said, “Someone else drive and you idiots just go home.”

Jim had moved back home to live with his parents from Flordia. Jim was literally a rocket scientist who worked for NASA. He was married and while he was down their working his wife was going to college and soon after she graduated she told him that she had been fucking all kinds of other dudes and she wanted a divorce. He had paid for her college in full. So Jim started drinking to the point where he lost his job at NASA. So what do you do for a career when your degrees are in space travel and effects of satellites on geo-synchronous orbits and shit like that?

I don’t now how long he continued it. I think he ended up going to work for someone else. I worked security for Cub Foods and I was going to junior college and worked security at night from like 3 to 11 and on the weekends I’d work a day or two.

Dave to be continued in, ‘Shootouts with Negroes’: From a Heavy Gravity Planet 2.C

My Sister and I

My sister and I were adopted from different parents. I was born in Chicago, at what hospital I don’t know. They signed up, got the call, and came and got me. My sister, Dana, was born two years later in Peoria. My mother tells the story. I have no recollection of this stuff. We looked so much alike that people thought we were biological and even would not believe us when we said we were adopted from different parents. My father, from smoking and working HVAC had gotten lung cancer at an early age.

Chicago Heights

Chicago Heights—I suppose this is where it all started, my hatred, and my reading, my general disagreement with society. While my dad was sick we went to live with my Uncle Mike in Chicago Heights. This was a kind of poor, Irish section on the South Side. It’s entirely black now. There was six of us, my sister and I and four cousins. The oldest was Heather, same age as me. I was in 4th Grade.

One time, we are at this public park, on the playground, just being kids, and this big black kid came up behind me and bear hugged me [across the upper arms] lifts me and this other black kid tries to punch me in the front. I move aside and he misses and I kick him and he falls. I then do this kid-like shoulder throw and the big kid goes tumbling down in front of me and they get up and run. I was like, I didn’t do nothing, didn’t even know these kids were there, and this happens. So I get confronted with this previously unknown reality that these people are going to attack me on impulse.

Then, there is another time and the wooden play set, the jungle gym if you will, is being used as a hangout for these older hoodlums at night. We are there during the day and there is this loose board with nails sticking out of it. This large retarded kid, a white kid, is being tormented by these other [white, indicated with hand shrug] kids and he reaches out in anger, picks up that board, a two-by-four with nails sticking out, and charges for my little cousin, Kevin, four years younger than me. There was his older sister Michelle, who was two years older and the same age as my sister. There was also Muareen, also my sister’s age. That is why we hung out so much together. That is my Uncle Mike’s and Aunt Lorie’s kids. There was no reason, who was just the closest kid. I see this and tackle the retard, a football tackle to the legs from the side, climb up him, take the board away, and the kid runs off. We went home, the six of us, and they said I saved their lives, which put quite an impression on me. I didn’t take away from this some view that the world was a dangerous place, or out to get me, like I did later. But I did now know where I placed in the world, that I could protect people. I read comic books, which is probably why I lifted weights and did martial arts. [1]

Uncle Mike’s Book Den

Uncle Mike’s house was a condo, in a development, not like the kind of free standing house we grew up. It was small. There was this small room with books in it. Other than reading novels assigned in school, I had never read a book, just comics: Spiderman, Superman, the Green Lantern. What really drew me to the books were the Conan posters on the walls by Frank Frazetta, who is still my favorite artist. [2] I ask my Uncle Mike if I could read the books and he said, “Of course.” I could not get enough of the Conan book. [Passes hand over three stacks of old mass market paperbacks,] I didn’t realize at the time that it was not just Robert E. Howard that wrote these, that most of these were other authors taking up the character. [3] This was the first book I read, probably because of the naked chick on the cover. [Points to Conan the liberator by L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter.]

I think, maybe, the stuff at the playground, for which I was prepared to react through comic books and me trying to live up to that image in a kid way, combined with reading the Conan books to kind of set a weird course in life. I would get into more trouble then necessary to defend myself. My friends and I swapped these.

The Book Report

A lot of my favorites were established at a young age, established a lot of how I think. For instance, Conan the barbarian was my favorite movie and still is, has never been surpassed. [Laughs hoarsely, at self, then chuckles.]

This was the sophomore year of high school. I don’t remember her name, but it was a black lady. The English teacher, she was in charge of the Black Honor Society and the Black Student Council. She instructed us to write about an American author and she said that the black kids should write about a black author to honor their heritage and the white kids should write about a black author to expand their horizons.

So I wasn’t about to pick a black author. I knew she would never look up to see who Robert E. Howard was. And, I knew I would never be busted for plagiarism, so I just copied the biography in the back of one of his paperbacks word-for-word. I think it was three pages. I got a good, grade, must of got an A or a B, probably an A.

In 8th Grade in my home room it was study hall for the most part, my shop teacher Mister Perry, they had a spelling B coming up and he would have the winners go on to compete. So I used to spell the first word wrong so I could stay and study.. One time, my first word was dumb and I misspelled it dum and he said, “You must be dumb?”

One day I had no homework so I figured I would show that I was obviously throwing the spelling B contest so I could sit down. I won for my home room class, then we had my whole junior high and I was the last 8th grader left, and a 7th grader won the whole thing. I don’t even remember what word I didn’t get right. I remember this one girl and all the kids that thought they were smart, and I beat them.

…

Notes

-1. Dan’s childhood comic book hobby is also addressed in #11, Growing Up On a Prison Farm.

-2. In Autumn 2016, while touring the Frank Frazetta Museum in Strausburgh, Pennsylvania, the famous artist’s daughter in law, informed me that he moved his family from NYC, to extract his son and later her husband, Mike from a city where older children preyed upon him.

-3. The additional authors of these Conan paperbacks on Dan’s dining room table included, Robert Jordan, Karl Edward Wagner, Andrew J. Offiut, Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp.