Lynn texted me that Sam Finlay was doing a skype interview for an article to post in a man’s magazine. That was quite flattering. I had an hour and 15 minutes to talk, having a meeting with Big Ron at The Shamrock Pub. Sam had a well-considered set of questions, some for both of us, but most in rotation, his, then hers. Lynn’s girls were romping in the background, waving to the old Santa turned pirate, or frowning searchingly into the screen, wondering what this was all about—Mom had lunch to make!

Numerous humbling questions jibed at my deflating ego:

-Why did I learn how to fight?

Because, at age 11, I had been beaten up in 100% of the many attacks I was targeted with since age 5 and was simply too filled with hate for myself to continue existing in a soft fleshy prison designed to torment my soul. It is embarrassing that just because I have written more on how to fight and surviving violence than any three people alive or dead, that people mistake me for a badass—when I am a rumpsteak.

-Why have I stayed in Baltimore?

I have not. I think that this talk was had while I was in Baltimore obscured the fact that I am a coward who fled Baltimore ahead of packs and pairs of low-IQ Bantu predators who hounded me and my entire family from the place we called home for 100 to 300 years depending on the Branch of the family. I did stay for two decades after the rest of my family fled out of the stubborn resolve to fight to the end. Or so I liked to have thought? Might I have lingered in these ancestral haunts because I could not afford to relocate?

Then, my resolve was tested when numerous helping hands reached into the pit of despair that was the plight of the stubborn fool, and offered me a place to stay across the nation, from coast to coast: prettier women, wiser friends, better whiskey?

With hope I was no longer even a tenacious little stain upon the armpit of Capetown, Maryland—but a jack rabbit. Once given a back door out of Baltimore, I took it.

This has put me in mind of how weak I am now. Just yesterday an Ebony Gawd tried to raise a lynch mob against me on the bus and I quietly decided to butcher him and then the nearest, weakest non-offender, ready to stab an innocent fellow to use as a meat post. That was just mean and rotten, an old bitterness inside that wants to take more company to hell with me than the situation merits. It was an instinct to make myself seem more dangerous than I am, the dude that disembowels two instead of one, an extra scalp to take into Eternity as if I’d be rewarded for it.

Then I limped to the coffee shop, my groin catching in the damp cold, and humiliation reared, a 50-year-old man, thinking me 70, waited in the rain and held the door for me, asking if I was well, “Oh, thank you, sir,” I passed, naming him master, my only pride left being my refusal to take debased metal change at coffee counters.

Sam asked me one question that made me smile. Having spoken with Andrew Edwards, author of King of Dogs, Andrew and Sam had decided that the world would be a better place if I had a boxing gym to train folks at. That is a very kind sentiment. Sam continued, “If we passed the hat, what would it take for you to settle down at a gym as a resident coach,” is my paraphrase of his genteel query.

It took no time to answer, as I have fielded this question before, from a Tennessean and a subcontinental in New Jersey: “A squaw—I’m gettin’ old, at night I get cold. The specs are on my recent post Fat Ass Strippers, where I advertised for a slave girl.”

Well, the Lady and the Gent both laughed along with the old hoodrat who even failed at that. That is something, helping people laugh. In my 59th year, I am utterly content to stay inside and write, occasionally getting up to exercise, and let the world that is so much stronger than me again, like when I was a boy, pass me carelessly by.

Thanks, both of you, the College Lady and the Army Man for finding something worthwhile about the mess I made of a life.