He wasn’t perfect and made as many bad choices as I did.
He was loyal and never walked away from his family, didn’t abandon his children to the soul-eating bitch that birthed them.
When the mudshark next door got stabbed on the front lawn by her drone, he saved her and subdued him without hurting him.
When the gas can man was threatening to burn people alive in their cars, in the most aggressive form of panhandling practiced in Harm City, he took it upon himself to drive the scum and his accomplices from the parking lot.
He had a hard time dealing with this sick, degenerate world and sought some self-destructive refuges.
But when our corner of the world caught fire in April, 2015 and packs of ebony avengers, 5 to 15 strong, armed with bats, gas cans and lighters panned out as deputized Reparations Recovery Agents, acting under the sanction of the Mayor of Baltimore and the Baltimore City Police Department, this man stood watch on his street and turned the purge pack assigned to terrorize White Avenue, the street I lived on, around. He didn’t have to fire a warning shot—they knew, they always know the vigilant man when they come face-to-face with him.
With that victory followed by three years of defeat, he took his final refuge.
There’s one less man in Baltimore today.
By now they must number less than a hundred.
I’ll miss shaking his hand.
Where did he go?
He killed himself, in a harsh way, and I don't want to get anymore specific than that, as his brother and mother are both close friends of mine and I should have been closer to him than I was.
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I recognize and applaud the need for privacy, but despite a long eyeball search of the archives and a rescan of the books, I can't make a correlation between the man's "Nom de Guerre" (or "nom de LaFond" like LaMano) and the events you mention, although I'm sure I've read about them .... Is it appropriate to mention it (or Email it) so that we can re-read this part of his life in his memory?
the incident with the purge pack did not make it into War Drums because I talked to him and his family about it a month or two later. The dindu knife disarm must have been in an early Harm City book. The gas can incident is described under Martha, on pages 48-51 of Panhandler Nation. However, I did just get off the phone with his mother and she recounted something she saw him do, which I will write up tomorrow along with a snatch of our conversation I can recall.