In the dying days of April 2015, the student body of a City High school picked a fight with the entire Baltimore City Police department, and, as the world watched, won. In the meantime, as these kids basically tried out for membership in the three drug gangs that conspired to set the city on fire while they trucked in unprecedented weight of dope, and gangs of armed black man fanned out across north, northeast, and east Baltimore beating lone white men on sight with bats, blubs and bottles, professional break-in crews cleaned out city pharmacies, cell phone stores and jewelers.
The resulting additional federal police presence in Baltimore, has, according to the two sympathetic felons I sat next to on the bus this past Thursday morning, resulted in the largest drug bust in recent memory, in which these low level players saw their continued hopes of cheap quality product go up in smoke. I was half asleep, and the bus was too crowded for me to get out a pad and notate. However, it seems the giant pile of heroin I have theorized came into Baltimore in late April, did in fact exist, had been referred to by local low level players as “Smaug’s Shit” after the legendary hoard of the dragon that was the giant villain in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Hobbit story, and has since been plundered by “Dem muvafuckin’ PoPo Dwarf shits.”
That is all the information I have from my unknowing sources, and it was enough to make me smile as I offloaded from a bus loaded with African Americans, onto a street under construction, peopled by an entirely different race of people, none of whom spoke English, or ebonics, as they scraped the asphalt flesh of Northern Parkway down to the concrete bone, and ventured down into the sewers in their efforts to resurface a city road and refit the water system.
It was at this juncture, having heard an ebonic adaptation of a mythic medieval setting applied to the current drug war and seeing an army of short swarthy men who had journeyed for thousands of miles to find their fortune, now tunneling under my feet, that H. L. Mencken’s quote came to me again and inspired an attempt to view the city I now live in through a prism that might have been intelligible to him, some hundred years ago.
