Quinn is a 58 year old tennis coach. I was drinking with him at the bar a week ago, on a Sunday night, watching a good ball game. The ball game ended a little too late for his taste and he became nervous, watching the street for young black men patrolling for victims.

Quinn is a black man. Unlike the news media that reports only white on black violence, and the alternative online press that reports only black on white violence [which is 10 to 15 times more likely than white on black violence] Quinn and I know that most violent crime is black on black, at twice the rate as black on white.

He looks to me and confides, “I’m nursing this last beer, looking out the window, trying to time these kids. They have approached me on the bus stop before. At my age, sure, I can take down one. Then what happens they either swarm me and I go down, or they back off and I’m a criminal for attacking some mammas poor baby. This walk is starting to drain my nerves. These aren't serious hood-rats or thugs, but kids with employed parents who vote and have political clout. They're like the rich white man's hoodlum boys from back in the day—looking for a good time and a reputation at a man's expense.”

Quinn has recently discovered that I train fighters.

He turns to me and asks, “How do you deal with this. You look very unassuming—not like a fighter at all—you know the stereotype. Do people know about you, about your background?”

“I don’t really regard myself as a dangerous person, particularly not unarmed. I practice avoidance. I never engage in arguments—ask any women I’ve been with. I just walk away. I have been studying the crimescape around here:

“The mixed race trio was broken up—literally—with a mallet earlier this year. The white guy that got his hands broken was the cohesive element, the scout. The drive up muggers—the men from the West Side—they only worked us here while the heat was on the BGF last year. The three vicious white boys that moved into the neighborhood are strictly criminal on criminal types—the corners are safe because of them. The kids you are worried about actually sit next to the ATM machine waiting. Sometimes they stake it out from the church. Their older associates hang at the gas station and are pretty much just a danger to stumbling drunks, hookers, crippled guys. They get high behind the church and wave to me when I walk by. I’m the local white trash dirt bag—like a mascot. They actually call me sir. I have used the ATM openly in front of them and motioned for them to follow me into the neighborhood and they just wave.”

Quinn looked at me with a kind of eyebrow raised dread and said, “Jesus, I’ll just get a lift. Hey Mister Al, can you give me a lift brother?”

Mister Al walked by in his suit and fedora with his pimp cane, shook my hand, and patted Quinn on the back. “I understand Son.”

He then grinned at me as he guided Quinn off the stool with a fatherly hand, “This man would sell me swamp gas and call it ocean front property Jimmy. But they don’t make us like they used to and an old hand has to make sure these puppies get home safe.”

I closed the bar with a giant hillbilly and 8 young black folks who looked to me to referee their argument over what constituted ‘Eastside and Westside’. I pointed to the ancient hillbilly Nimitz Class hair carrier and said, “When you stop seeing white dudes that look like that and start seeing white guys that look like Russians [I did not want to explain what a Polish person was] or belong in a mobster movie, then you’re on the Eastside. This is the Northeast."