From 2 years ago until 11 months ago I had a handful of phone conversations with a man who I had couched for oh, six years, I think. He’s a far better man than I, a Christian, and a better coach to boot. He does a superb job of running a corner and has a fanatic work effort and deeply internalized sense of excellence and urgency. He is a breeder, with a beautiful wife and numerous happy and active home-schooled children.

In short, this young man—not so young any more and approaching his mid-thirties—is the hope of a human species that is being aggressively slated for extinction. While he was involved in the trials I am about to relate, I had to be a solid confidant, and being close to this man and caring very much for him and his family. He has offered for me to live with them in their Appalachian hideaway, and after declining unless he threw in a squaw, I felt self-chastised. I remained simply a sounding board, took no notes and had no desire to write about his eventful family migration up out of the Mid-Atlantic into the region that figures to be the final refuge of a once great and now hated race.

Let down by Christians of other denominations in his home town, who were busy importing child rapists and criminals from war-torn third world shit-holes, he applied for a government job in a Confederate Mountain State and was accepted. His experience as a successful project manager for a branch of the U.S. Military, had prepared him for frustration as a Civil First Responder in the Mid Atlantic, as he discovered that civic servants were creatures of sloth, gossip, envy and poor quality, riding their job as uneventfully as possible to a pension.

The house was sold, the family packed up and moved to the Confederate State—and, lo and behold—it turned out that he was too pale for that First Responder Job, that he had to remain unemployed for the crime of the condition of is birth. The slot had to be filled by a person of holy hue.

Aggressive and proactive, our hero applied for the worst First Responder Job, Corrections Officer, which was the trial job for First Responders wanting to become police persons in this Confederate County.

As I had been right about what would happen among the First Responders of his home town, he called me for advice about how to protect himself from the system and its envious functionaries in this new setting.

I recall telling him: “That is the worst job in the world. It would bring out all of my worst faults and corrode my qualities. But you, I think you can remain above it. I think you can do that job with decency. The only thing I have to say is to let no one know that you are a fighter—no one.”

“Yes Boss,” he said.

Then came the call some time later as I was wintering in Portland, I think:

“Boss, I did as you said, let no one know I was a fighter. Then, during use of force training it became obvious that I know more—a lot more, basically about everything—than the instructors. So, someone steps aside, does a search for me, and they pull up the one fight where I Kayoed the guy. They said, ‘That’s it, Boone, you’re on induction!’”

“Oh, dratz,” says the diabolical heathen advisor to the young knight. “That sounds bad. What does it entail?”

“Well, Boss, basically it means I get to take all the violent drunks out of the police van and put them into the jailhouse. I have been told that I am expected to kick some butt.”

My heart sank for this man and I tried to sound as confident as I did when I told him to fight heavyweight, and said something witty, like, “Well, eat up. No sense in cutting weight to compete in the unlimited criminal division.”

He saw through to my concern under the gruff posturing and promised me three things:

-1. That he would use this as a training opportunity,

-2. That he would be seeking other employment at the first viable opportunity,

-3. That he would use positive reinforcement among the jailbirds to build understanding rather than walls between them and try always to remain on the high road of minimal force solutions.

I reminded him, that since the cat was now out of the bag where his past was concerned, that he had no choice but to use that knowledge among staff and inmates in some positive way, and that Johnny Trejo the B-movie villain was helped into responsible life in 1970s California by a prison guard who was a pro boxer and started a prison boxing program and was held in much respect by the inmates.

In the following two installments, I will leave out some personal elements of our conversations and will not bother our hero with a call to clear up combat details. I will focus on two incidents in particular and will fill out the details according to my knowledge of his subjects. For he assured me in numerous calls, that he had thought in the past that I had embellished some details in my Harm City work. However, the uncanny resemblance of his subjects’ behaviors and those I described in Baltimore moved him to declare that I was a true professor of the Negrological Sciences. For, in his year as jailhouse screw, in some thirty fights instigated by inmates, he assured me, “That only one white boy ever challenged me,” out of a population that was roughly half pale devil and half ebony angel.

So, as much for his entertainment as my practice writing him as a fiction action hero, I am going to insert actual behaviors from members of the Seven-Time Murder Bowl Middle Weight Champs, the storied Harm City Hoodrats, to fill in the gaps that time, distance, courtesy and concern have placed in the record left to my mind.

I leave it to Officer Hardass Boone to judge the ultimate accuracy of the following accounts, written from the point of view of his foes:

-Part 2 Come Devil

-Part 3 Strong Devil