I was walking to lunch with Yolanda—an intern at my office, a beautiful, classy-looking black girl with pretty light skin and conservative fashion sense—when the normal lunch spot was blocked by a scramble.
It’s mind boggling that I know what a scramble is. It’s when five or ten crackheads are crawling round looking for a rock that dropped on the sidewalk or fighting over a crack pipe or what have you. So Yolanda grabs me and pulls me along past this alley. I look up the alley and there are a group of young white girls with sores all over their faces, firing heroin—this is 12:15 noon on a Tuesday mind you—and one girl pulls up her skirt and shoots up in her groin.
I almost hurled.
These are all white girls, mostly from outside of the city: somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister and if they’re ever going to be somebody’s mother that kid is going to be a mixed race orphan. It was a vision of hell. I don’t know how many times I use that term now, a vision of hell.
So Yolanda is marching me up to Lexington Market and I’m like, “Some white dude just got shot between the eyes up there for not paying his dealer enough—the cops told me to stay away from there.”
She tells me, “We’ve gotta lose this mutherfucker that’s following us with an orange in his mouth or I’m going to prison.”
And sure enough some big black guy with a whole arrange in his mouth is following us—I just wanted a sandwich! I’m in dress heels because the partners were in for a meeting and I’m falling behind. The dude is on my heels and then Yolanda turns and pulls out her mace and says, “Back the fuck off motherfucker or I will mace your ass—you can choke on that fucking orange, niցցer!”
The ghetto is coming out in her but luckily that black dude stepped away, his eyes all big and wide.
Oh, she was a bitch in stride, walked like a stone-faced killer, went from beauty queen to mugshot in a word.
All we have to do is make it around one more corner, just halfway to the Lexington Market—which is like this black hole you don’t want to go anywhere near—and we can get a sandwich. Then this junkie comes out from that alley—it’s like crossing in front of an alley down here, even during the day is something from a zombie movie—and he asks me for money and when I don’t say anything he calls me a bitch and she’s off into the mouth of the alley like an action star, pulling this little silver-looking pistol out of her purse and pointing it in his face and snarling, “Back the fuck off or I’m erasing your ass, bitch!”
What the heck is this world coming to, alright?
If it gets any worse every white woman working down town will have to pay a Yolanda to hold their hand just to get back and forth to work. As for lunch, I’m done. I’m on the zombie apocalypse mid-day fast diet.
-Niki
Narco Night Train
Paleface Sunset: A Guide to Cultural Resistance in the Age of Felonious
Dante's Inferno and still wearing high heels? Sneakers for the commute, Manolo Blahniks in the hand-bag.
Other than a general feeling of "Good for Yolanda", I'm wondering if Yolanda couldn't do just as well with a good club (that would fit in a big purse) and some Lafond-type training in how to use it.
If she has an aggressive, I'll-handle-this mindset, her little nickel-plated Saturday Night Special is going to get her into more trouble than it will get her out of trouble, and a stick slashed or punched into the right place will take care of the kinds of things she appears to be facing there.
Drawing a gun on someone who's bad-mouthing you might get you in trouble even if you're a woman, EVEN in states like mine where a woman is assumed to be facing deadly force if assaulted by an unarmed man, and is allowed to shoot him.
We've seen Linda Hamilton "in action" on screen in a realistic scenario; can a woman with Yolanda's mindset reasonably be expected to defend herself against these threats with a good stick and the training to go with it .... ?
If I were foolish enough to advice Yolanda I would suggest a heavy hand umbrella and plenty of training hitting the bag with short sticks. I don't train women anymore—not in Baltimore.
'Landa is the Frank Frazetta pin-up girl for the LaFondiverse.
I agree—and I have actually declined meeting her on the basis of my affinity for such savage wenches. I've got 5o more books to write and don't need to be stroking out to the sounds of "Dat's it, Daddy."