Please forgive the first draft typos as I’m writing this at the café.

I’ve been calling myself Baldy Locks, living with the three bears as the spawn of Yeti Waters seem to be on the verge of being able to make the verifiable Harm City claim, while looking at my twerp feet, “Mister James, what you doin’ wit my shoes on your old-ass feet?”

But for now, their shoes safe on my feet, my thoughts have turned to their mythological education, what with today being the candy holiday of the Easter Bunny and a baby tooth having been lost in sparring recently with the young voices voicing suspicion that the Tooth Faerie, the Easter Bunny, Sqwanto with his goodwill package for the Pilgrims, Frosty the Snowman and his drunken boss Saint Syphilis—the entire cartoon shooting match of holiday icons—being phony boloney made up by scheming adults as scapegoats for them letting kids eat too much candy.

In my shamanic role among the these inquisitive bruisers of the Great Northwest, I do sense that I should say a thing or two about the fact that such modern myths have real origins: Sqwanto sold out his People, Frosty the Snowman was really the first transgender department store clerk who brought his ice bag to work with him to abate postsurgical swelling, that Saint Nick, patron of Whores just could not rest until Yule became a commercial whore house…

But what about those two lesser lights, the Easter Bunny—not the Brazilian babe with the German face, Asian hair and African ass you hired yesterday, Manny—and that most ethereal of childhood mythobeasts, the Tooth Faerie?

Well, boys, this is above my pay grade, so I had to call in old Stevedore from the toolshed for some fact checking…

Here it goes, back in 1975, before crack came to Baltimore, they had angel dust—get it, funny faɡɡot powder what set a geek crazy and made him greedy, rotted his teeth too. This was manly a thing on the East Side, for them crazy white boys, because on the West Side, every other brother was firing heroin. This is also where you get the conflation with Easter, it being confused with East Baltimore, Highlandtown, Fell’s Point, Little Italy, Greektown and such. But really, it was an all the time thing.

Once a young punk—and this is why we call them hoppers to this day—would do his angel dust, sprinkling it down into his mouth like snow any old time of year, because that shit was all smashed up with 20 Mule Team Borax laundry whitening powder—stole from the grocery store of course—he would tend towards a shoplifting rampage, because… watch out below for some science you didn’t know:

Now, a side effect, of this brain bleach, aside from making white boys from Highlandtown look unnaturally white even though they was mostly I’talians and Greeks, was it caused a craving for candy, sweets for the tweaks if you will.

You Western states folks fill in meth for angel dust and crack—the latter drug joining in the scourge come the early 1980s.

So, back in the day, usually on a Sunday morning—because granny’s SSI check never came in the mail until Monday and there was therefore not yet a chance to steal that shit and cash it in for angel dust—you see, the faerie and faɡɡot shit comes from that angel part—mamma would look out back into her concrete and gravel yard while her own children were fussing about brushing their teeth before church, and lo and take hold, would usually, on a good day, be able to point to some PCP [chemical language for angel dust] or crackhead [and I suppose out in these western parts, meth-heads] and say, “Look at that so-in-so hoppin dem fences. If y’all don’ brush your teeth you’ll look just like that dag-blasted hopper there with dookie teeth.”

That was supposed to be a deterrent. But what actually happened, is that children would see that that Eastside faɡɡot, like a rabbit, more likely than not, hopping them yard fences, an aproned Greek grocer chasing him down the alley, with a whole mess of candy under his arm, and they’d chase him down and try and tax his ass of candy before the old Greek grocer got there.

It is also said that the mania for raising pitbulls in the hood also came from a desire on the part of really young children to be able to take down yard hoppers and get their candy, so they’d raise pups and set them on that Eastside Faggot, who was really no faerie at all, just under the acrobatic influence of that CIA poison.

There you go.

Note: As chief fact checker at Crackpot Books, Stevedore Jackson categorically dismisses any theory assigned the origins of the Easter Holiday to some ancient Roman show trial, no-less the myth of Osiris and Issus.