Yesterday afternoon, Saturday, 1/25/14, I went shopping at Fort Hoodrat. I acquired my food, an unusual haul of $33.87 worth of discounted chow that should last me two weeks. This failure to resist a good deal or ten resulted in my breaking one of the cardinal rules of urban awareness I have preached on this site and in numerous books: people on foot who are ‘burdened’ with packages, or anything that occupies their attention and/or both of their hands, have their risk of attack increased geometrically.

There I was, walking through my favorite 2.5 foot wide alley from an ice-covered back lot to the main drag, when I thought to myself, ‘Wow, if only I were drunk, or at least buzzed, I would be the perfect crime victim!’

Inspired, I emerged onto the main drag next to the bar which, in 2013, beneficently supplied a half dozen mugging victims to the kids that get their hair cut at the barber shop next door, and instead of turning left for home, turned right and entered the bar. Fortunately for my experiment, and my thin wallet, my alcohol tolerance is low.

Two hours and four cheap drafts later, as darkness fell, I checked my pen, my razor, my keys, and tied off the bags of groceries in case I needed to use them as flails, and walked out into a young, icy-cold night.

The traffic was more sparse than summer, spring or Autumn. There was almost no one on foot. As I am rarely approached even during prime hunting season I had slim hopes of being attacked and writing my ‘I rumbled in the hood over ten cans of corned beef hash’ masterpiece. Never-the-less I forged on up the road toward the ATM where so many were tailed from to the point of their mugging last year.

As I neared the ATM and the hipster babe that was using it, a tall, thin, sallow-faced whitetrashian with coal black hair approached me, “Hey man, do you know where the AA meeting is?”

I stepped off and glared at him.

He said, “Please man, I live in the halfway house next to the crackhouse [50 yards off] and was supposed to go with my roommates and they left me. I need to make that meeting man.”

I stepped forward and kept eye-contact, my packages still in my hands. I don’t talk to people on the street unless it is a woman, an elder, or a handicapped person. The guy was beginning to tear up, “Please man, where’s the church with the AA meeting.”

I did not know, did not care, and would not have told him if I did know.

I began to walk off and the babe from the ATM machine, with a disgusted glance at me, stepped up and said, “It’s right in the basement of the church almost to Northern Parkway.”

He said, “Thank you miss,” and hurried up the road.

She glared at me, “You heartless bastard!”

I walked on and crossed the street to the Pakaistani gas station where the crackheads buy their crack, the crack-hos buy their condoms, and I buy my weekly dark Milkyway bar. As I checked my bags outside the door before continuing home, a mixed-raced teenager who appeared to be mentally handicapped, stepped up to me, with his hands in his hooded coat and began to mumble, with wide tear-filled eyes, “Red-tee, doubleyou cap, red-tee—got you red-tee.”

I looked at him in disbelief, “What?”

He blinked that kind of wide-eyed blink that someone uses to get sand out of their eyes, “I got you red-cap, doubleyou cap—can get some yellow-cap.”

I just shook my head, now realizing that I was the subject of a drug marketing campaign that used retarded children to make sales like used car dealerships used former high school athletes.

I then grinned and he asked innocently, as if I had landed from some alien planet where white people did not get stoned, “You don’t get high?!?”

I shook my dead ‘no’.

He continued, “You don’t do dope?”

I shook my head ‘no’.

He made a last ditch attempt, “Do you wanna try?”

Not having quite the cruel streak necessary to abuse the retarded, I just walked off, and this kid followed me, his hands still in his pockets. I looked over my shoulder, noticing that he was shorter and stronger than I, and that we walked on an icy sidewalk that contrasted in a glistening manner to the salt-bleached asphalt beyond.

I stepped aside and let him pass. I gave him a one block lead assuming he was headed up the street to the stoner bar to unload his goods. Then he turned up my street. It is so rare for anyone to walk a distance that, if I am ever being followed by a person who turns down the same side street as I do, I give it a half block, or until the first cover, and then turn on them. I once did this with a guy I was convinced was going to hit me for Baltimore Area Skin Heads. When I could tell by the look in his eyes that he had no idea why I was trying to stab him in the neck with a nail I had just plucked out of the gutter, I backed off.

I am so glad I let this kid pass, because, not only did he not mean to do me harm, but he is a neighbor. I live within 100 yards of a group home [criminals on probation], a halfway house [drunks & dopefiends on the court-mandated mend], and a flop house. This kid apparently lives in and/or works out of, the flop house, two doors up from where I sit typing. He entered the apartment occupied by Binky, the only resident of that atrocious excuse for bad 1920s architecture who owns a car, a real nice car.

Welcome to the neighborhood kid.