Before Katrina New Orleans was where the action was if you were a cop or in my line of work. But after Katrina, when all those fuckers who were supposed to die spread like a plague in America’s bloodstream—making places like Memphis uninhabitable—the toxicity of that specific septic tank has abated somewhat.

New Orleans was just one big racket—probably still is. Now, I hate me a cop, especially a piss policeman. I went to Mardi Gras a couple years before Katrina and they are pouring beer by the bucket. And what do they have for waste facilities, four—four brother—four single-seat mobile latrines. Each latrine has a piss line a hundred deep. So I go into an alley and do what I’m designed to do and as soon as I get my hands on my fly I’ve got two fucking pigs on me and get leveed with a five-hundred-dollar fine!

They were also hitting women with the same fine for exposing their breasts. The place was just a racket operated by the fucking police. But when you get outside of shitholes like New Orleans, Birmingham and Memphis, the fall of civilization brought about by taking our boot heels off the necks of the Niցցer is not so evident.

I was outside of Nashville, passing Murfeesburo, where they make the Barret fifty-cal, at a gas station looking for some non-ethanol gas when this god ole boy giant of a cop—I mean his hands were like catcher’s mitts and his head was a bowling ball, six-seven at the least and shoulders wider than a doorway, with a buzz-cut—and he just wants to help me out, actually says, “Folla me, I’ll show you the station got what you need,” and he was good for it.

But for the most part, everything and everybody is better in the South and the west, the further you can get away from the East Coast the better.

Now in Maryland, and Baltimore in particular—I gather you are not too familiar with criminality—you can get hit with a real toxic charge for taking an illegal leak. They used to just write you a citation and fine you one or two beans for pissing in a dark alley. But now they will—if you are violent and white and they want to keep the lockdown on you—hit you with an indecency charge that will follow you like a case of legal leprosy. You get caught pissing while white against the side of a vacant building in Baltimore by night and look out, you will end up on the same registry as sick fucks who rape grannies, molest children and other shit that we as men could scarcely even fathom, let alone consider doing.

Maryland and will do everything it can to keep you in the system.

Big Ron's Baltimore: A Working Man's View of Urban Blight