Last Friday night I was waiting at my regular stop alone under the streetlight one door up from Tiny Dancer’s house. The Streets Have Eyes #11 Tiny’s brother plays lacrosse and is always polite and deferential to me. We do not have conversation, simply nod to one another. He was being visited by eight friends, three of them jocks, one a fat joker, the rest nondescript.

These guys wanted to take the bus. He told them to follow him down to the next stop. One of the jocks said, “Good evening sir.”

The fat kid made a joke of it and tried to tease me. I ignored him.

When I boarded the bus “Jackie Chan’ was driving, so named by the hoodrats for his stern fearless demands that all obey the rules of the MTA. The Korean bus driver regards me with unconcealed disgust—a white man poorly dressed and riding the bus rates nothing more. As I sit he stops to pick up the pack of kids, who are just playing a joke on him and have no intention to ride. The fat kid declares triumphantly, “Psyche!”

As a youth jocks were my rivals, my enemies. Now as an older man I appreciate them. They are used to adhering to adult standards and treat strange adults with more respect. Incidentally, yesterday, a black cop who coaches football told me that his players have been being singled out and attacked with knives by non-athletes who are jealous of them because they won their first champion ship in 30 years, and now the girls are coming around to socialize with the ball players instead of just getting high with the thugs.

My son and his friend went out to lunch on Saturday at a bustling pit beef stand run by a former football player who was a teammate of my Uncle Fred. He works the counter calling the numbers and handing out the orders. When one of these big beefy young people would come up to get a huge slab of ribs and a tray of fixings he would make a big fuss, “Somebody’s eatin’ good!”

I order a $2.45 cup of beans. He calls out the number with a grunt—a real effort. As I extend my hand he grouses, “You wanna bag with this too?”

“No sir.”

He slid the beans toward me without even looking at me, shaking his head. Then, as Arnay, my son’s friend, steps up to pick up his $30 slab of meat and fixings the old codger lit up with approval, but kept looking at me as he proclaimed, “Now this is a man knows how to eat. This man knows what’s good!”

We had a good laugh over that all the way into town as my son drove me by the mixed-race-sports bar to drop off the barmaid’s chocolate éclair that I had promised her—they being a delicacy at the store I work across town. He double parked a few cars down so I rushed in, dropped it off, declined to stay for drinks, and was thrilled to come outside in the rain and see that he had pulled his car up outside the bar.

I pulled open the back door and began to slide in and was confronted by the terrified ashen face and waving hands of a dark-skinned black man about 35 years old. Looking between the seats he stammered, “No nononononononono!” Then when I realized I was in the wrong car, and he realized I was not shoving a gun in his face. he breathed a sigh of relief, held his chest, and said, “Wrong car sir.”

I apologized and got out, seeing Arnay laughing in my son’s not very similar but roughly same size car—both cars were big and expensive looking! When I got in Arnay [who is the man I based the fictional character Whiff Gleason on in the novel Hurt Stoker] laugh-spoke, “Mister LaFond, that man about died of a heart attack—thought he was going to be the first black man to be carjacked by a white dude in the history of Baltimore!”

This city neighborhood is experiencing something that is not present in most other locales, the hollowing out of the ghetto. The house flippers have rented to section eight tenants and have then had to remodel the house. The tenants are chasing the Wall-Marts and new subsidized housing out of town. At the same time some of the fleeing whites are finding it impractical to move any further away and are coming back into the city. If it happens the right way you can get a foot patrol.

The three ingredients you need are:

1. The area must be 10-20 years past the initial white flight, by which time the property values would have dropped enough due to section eight vandalism to make urban homesteading appealing on a financial level.

2. There must be surviving businesses and new businesses that have formed a neighborhood business association. This is the only way you get police protection.

3. There must be a significant black middle class for the police to effectively patrol. These mid-sized city administrations have already decided that the concerns of the ordinary white citizen are unimportant. So the key is a significant number of blacks who are sympathetic to businesses and the police rather than to criminals.

Yesterday the hoodrat princes and princesses were running wild in the neighborhood. These were not poor kids. The average male attire is $500, female attire with hair and manicure is $1,000. They all have $200 phones. These kids were running around knocking over trash cans and picking fights. The beat cops called in for support and there was a wannabe-G roundup. As I turned the corner onto my street cops were cuffing gaudily dressed girls who had been harassing patients at the dialysis center.

On Monday night I was waiting for the bus at a stop I do not often use when two Mexicans showed up.

They would not enter the shelter despite the drizzle These open-faced shelters are death traps if you are small.

They would not stand within 20 feet of me.

They looked nervously behind the shelter and the tree, seeming on the lookout for some attacker.

When the bus pulled up one of them ran back over to where they worked and the other thanked him and boarded.

The Latinos are routinely hunted by blacks in Baltimore. Since we have had such an increase in the Latino population I have been threatened and attacked far less frequently. Apparently I have inherited a vast quantity of brown meat shields with Spanish labels.

The next White Wednesday addendum is up tomorrow, and is tastelessly titled ‘My Jungle Bunny Neighbors’.