I’m working right off the train, at the Thai restaurant, Tuesday through Sunday, 11 to 11 every day. I’d work all week, get drunk once and try to bang some bitch and then wake up the next morning and wash clothes and do it all again. It was a soul-grinding gig. I’d eventually do better, tending bar at high end spots, saving lot of money, but for now, I needed some normalcy. Working in that restaurant was like being in a landlocked submarine.

A friend and a customer, an old dude from Philly, told me that he was a foreman, cleaning out vacant houses that had been bought at auction and that I could work with him as an archeologist of urban decay.

You would go to an old house in these terrible neighborhoods and see the eviction notices. Then you would get inside and among the filth you would see letters from children, toys and needles all over the place. I actually got pricked by a used heroin needle but it had been there for so many years it was sterile and I was fine.

In the middle of West Baltimore, in the crawl space above a basement, we found these technical manuals in German from the 1920s. In the basement of this one house, these rats had tunneled through the foundation into the basement and had a nest and I was down there with a pipe killing them. It was really nasty work and they didn’t go easy.

The saddest thing was to find the vestiges of old time life, when white people and black people actually raised families in the city and you’d find the artifacts, the family pictures. The starkest example was this old white lady’s house which she had maintained in immaculate condition. The place was alike a museum of a former age, a museum we were paid to erase so that some hipster faɡɡots can live closer to Washington D.C. And all around her, outside of her delicately curtained and cleaned windows, it’s hell on earth, animals living next door, a trap house across the street, a shooting gallery on the other side. It was a time capsule.

That is my greatest fear that things would end like that for Cutie.

[Nero met Cutie at a bar he worked at and she went to unwind after her shift at a Baltimore hospital. Part of her story comprises the next section of this book.]

You can see for yourself that even in this small town [in Pennsylvania] most of the city is nonwhite, increasingly dangerous and eventually, if I don’t get her out of here, she’ll be that old lady in the time capsule, surrounded by nothing but bad intentions. This has become the process of my life, trying to keep her one step ahead of America as it finds us and pursues us into whatever corner of decency we’re able to carve out for ourselves.

It’s crazy, to think that I sensed this when I was thirteen-years-old and tried to renounce my U.S. citizenship.

Harm City

Survival