My guide in Gotham, a white nationalist stalwart, was not ever by my side during this shock emersion in the greatest of civilized cities. This past Wednesday night my man was absent, in conclave with his dissident kind I suppose, dropping me off in a sissy zone of Brooklyn, a place much like gentrified enclaves in Baltimore, but expansive. This neighborhood of Park Slope was so much more, with smaller neighborhoods within, and even had its own newspaper. After stopping at the ATM I picked up a copy of the Park Slope Courier, headed by an article concerning bicyclists getting a 10 second head start at traffic lights, and a feature about a hipster TV drama, funded, written and starring hipster women shown playing tug-of-war with a shopping cart.

On I walked, block after bucolic block, away from the insane foot traffic of Manhattan. Park Slope was like East Baltimore if Fate had failed to weave its doom on her loom. The men were universally sissies, the women either polite traditional Asians or Eastern Europeans or smoking hot hipster bitches. The dearth of dindus was glaringly apparent.

As dusk fell dainties with valuables walked along unafraid. Bared windows and doors paid homage to the thousands of Reparations Recovery Agents who once prowled these streets in the 70s and 80s, who have since been priced or driven out to hatch their broods in hellholes like Atlanta and a dozen smaller towns in between. However, according to a cop I spoke with, dindus and Puerto Ricans still hunt the margins of these communities, primarily preying upon witless hipster women and tiny Asian people. There are still regular rapes and gang rapes of Caucasian joggers by ebony marauders, and comically, the hipster women not only refuse to take police advice not to jog alone at nights in rape districts and not to let recently released ex-cons sleep on their couches as homeless charity cases, even accusing such police of being racists for suggesting that any oppressed man was in any way capable of defiling his liberal goddess!

Latinas and Asian women, however, are much more practical.

As I walked down a broad avenue, keeping a certain rough looking young man who was following me over my left shoulder, a little Latina in middle years was asking directions of a Russian woman who shook her head and said that she was “new to this place.” The woman, seemingly in a panic that night was falling in this strange place, asked me. So I stepped aside and nodded to the young man behind me, who turned out to be a thirty-something reincarnation of some long-haired hippy of the godless generation that preceded me into this world.

He then got as precise a description of her destination from the lady as possible and gave her simple directions to walk down to Flushing and make a right and head up hill. Some time passed as the young fella and I spoke of the changing crime scene. He regaled me with tales of “metalheads and skinheads” brawling in the early 90s, of the times when packs of negroes hunted freely in the streets, and brought me up-to-date on the current crime trends, which was strong-arm robberies of Asians by Ricans, Dindus and the occasional white crackheads, nearly extinct in these parts.

His name is Eddie.

We preceded to a bar where I bought him a few drinks and he became aware that he was being interviewed by the Jane Goodall of postmodern Meat-Puppet-Kind. Informing me that he had an errand to attend to and that I might accompany him, he called ahead to his charges and even sent them my bio picture from the website so that they would not be afraid of me. You see, the elderly couple he cared for, as a purely charitable act, were afraid of men who looked like me, as having moved to Brooklyn in 1956 to work as wait staff down in Chinatown, their baby daughter [a woman now my age] had been held hostage by a Caucasian street criminal until Mister Deng handed over his wallet. This was too good a story to pass up.

On the way there Eddie explained to me much of what I outlined above and gave me a chronology of the blighting and gentrification of Park Slope from his high school graduation in 1996 [curiously the year I began my Baltimore violence survey] to the current rarified state of near peak gentrification.

Upon reaching the Deng’s house, I noticed that Eddie had a weight of keys that a night watchman might have, by my count, about 50 keys. He explained to me that he carried the keys for each household he watched over. He did not work a job and was not compensated for this, and was somehow independently moneyed. I asked no questions, suspecting he was a drug dealer based on his cagey but non-aggressive demeanor. There was also a Korean family and two elderly Caucasian families, whose household chores and security he took care of, taking out the trash, for instance, being a dangerous thing for the elderly and alone in a city which remained home to many of the lowest level criminals, simple burglars and strong-arm robbers.

Then, passing through a veritable gnome garden of a yard, we entered, as he said, “Mamma, mamma.” Within a long, high hallway of polished hard wood a beautiful china doll of a nearly ancient women of sweet aspect stepped into the hallway and held her hand to her mouth in a posture of shock as she looked at me. Eddie said, “Don’t be scared, Mamma, this is the man I sent you a picture of.”

To this she said with a pained smile of empathy, “But he’s grown so old! Is he well?”

We had a hearty laugh as she told me I didn’t have to take my boots off due to my advanced state of decrepitude, but I unlaced them, petted their mop-like dog and visited with Mister Deng, a man of perhaps 80 pounds, of deep, quiet dignity who stood proudly by as his wife swerved us dinner. Eddie and I declined the meal at first, but these elders insisted, as Eddie had recently brought a large bag of dog food for their pet and had previously taken the dog to the vet, and as I waited in audience with Mister Deng, stood guard at the front door as Mrs. Deng took out the dog. Returning, he told me as they prepared our meal, “You can’t take any chances with those dirty fucking Dominicans downstairs.”

We had a three course meal: sweet rice cakes, duck and rice and then navel oranges with diet ginger ale.

I spoke with Mister Deng about his journey to the United Stated in 1956, by plane, via Seattle and on to New York, where he waited tables for decades, put his daughter through school and now lives serenely in his dotage, his guest room a shrine to his family, with pictures dating back to World War II, his wife as a young women one of the most delicately beautiful people I have ever seen, which made me smile as she looked at me with the pained empathy of a quiet beauty having just witnessed a handsome man’s face melt in the mirror.

This was quite a compliment to me, that a still pretty Chinese beauty queen almost twice my age thought that I had once been a handsome man and now pitied my fallen features.

Two hours later, after a few beers at the Park Slope Ale House, Eddie the good Samaritan Hippie out of Time and I parted ways, he dutifully off into the night on some other errand and me walking the streets of an alien landscape, looking for the matt black SUV that had dropped me off in this city at the center of the world.

One thing I know after my dinner with the Dengs and their strange protector is that all humanity needs is men being men and doing the timeless duties of our kind to keep Civilization from erasing us forever.