Yesterday afternoon I went down onto the main drag to watch the police in action. A group of black teens and a mixed race trio we are calling ‘Vanilla Fudge’ after the type of Oreo cookie that has fudge filling and two white crackers, have been terrorizing the local businesses. In fact, even though there were cops out in force, these guys were still jacking the merchants, right under their noses.

For the third time this week one electronics merchant was robbed by Vanilla Fudge. The local business owners are looking into gun permits. The word has come down from a local politician for the cops to ‘make a show of force’ in this partially re-gentrified neighborhood. The crime has gotten so bad that the non-violent criminals are helping. A vigilante sentiment is rising as the crime is beginning to look like a guerilla war waged by a handful of young men and boys against the entire neighborhood. Below is a chronology of how the depredations of Vanilla Fudge and the ‘punk-ass stickup boys’ effected the evening’s festivities.

5/31/14, 5 to 10 pm

1. A crack ho knocks back vodka and Mountain Dew on the sidewalk as she rattles off a description to a cop. The cop ignores the open container violation.

2. A heroin addict who was just robbed by a teenage punk tells her brothers and they beat him badly. This is going on in a back lot while the cops are working the street on the other side of the brownstone business strip. The cops decline to investigate their vigilante actions.

3. When Vanilla Fudge rob a drug wholesaler’s front business—again—a young ‘customer’ of his volunteers to ride along with the cops and point out Vanilla Small. Within a half hour Vanilla Small is cuffed on the curb awaiting the paddy wagon.

4. The entire neighborhood is now on the lookout for Vanilla Big and Fudge.

5. I begin drinking cheap beer in a dive bar and two young ladies, worried about being robbed and claiming to admire my arms and tactfully declining to mention my equally well-developed gut, ask me to walk them home. I agree to walk them home to a loft apartment at the top of what was once a suburban mansion in a different age. They leave to go buy the food they plan on cooking for me, and I stay behind to drink one more beer, feeling like Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man.

6. Way, the local upscale drug dealer, who conducts business at the bar on his smart phone, comes in with a date. The last time I spoke to Way he asked me what I was writing. At the time I was writing ‘The Pussy Trap’, a chapter in Taboo You. He looked up at me and said most sagely, with a self-defeated tone, “Oh that is a deep trap!” Now I see just how deep Way’s pussy trap is, as he walks in with a babe that could be a cover girl for King Magazine, draped in silk, bangled in gold, and possessed of more curves than a Formula One course. He gives her money to play pool so he can ‘conduct bidness’ while every other man in the bar gawks open-mouthed at her bending over the table. Then two cops walk in! Way looks up in disbelief, looking as if he just saw some sewage at the base of his Corona, “Five-O Yo? Is you serious Yo? Oh, this shit has gone too far! A dude cain’t even take care a his bidness ‘cause a punk-ass stick-up boys!” the cops hang out and drink water, talking to the patrons amicably as Way groans and rolls his eyes, phone now in his pocket.

7. I finish my beer and meet the ladies at the market to escort them home. I discover that they have a six-pack of beer for me and begin to think that maybe I am the unforeseen beneficiary of the Vanilla Fudge rampage. I get the ladies safely home and sit out above the weird Baltimore skyline that seems like a West Virginia townscape from this vantage. I’m getting really drunk while they cook indoors, and decide that I need to make my escape before beer six, or I might not get home with my discretion intact.

8. Two hours later, having been fed a meal that could have nourished a third world village for a week, so drunk that I can count my heartbeats in my ears, and armed with a very ergonomic bottle of cheap merlot, I make my way home through the back alleys, back lots, and across the largely forsaken catholic church grounds of Hamilton Baltimore, wondering if my keyboard will respect me in the morning.

Thanks Vanilla Fudge. Oh, a heads up, steer clear of Way en his ‘fo real nigga’. Your entrepreneurial efforts remain woefully underappreciated.