On Saturday morning, May 16, 2015, I was stocking Boss John’s yogurt case when three hoodlums came into the store to buy doughnuts. At my age I suppose I look like I should be managing the place, but am not. The most outgoing hoodlum kept looking at me. Before they went up front to check out he walked over to the yogurt case, seven feet and a case cutter from me, with that look in his eye I was getting from local displaced hoodrats the Friday before the riots.

My impulse to grab the razor if attacked bothered me, so I stopped and checked the stock on my U-Boat [look it up in an equipment catalogue bro] and found the handle was loose, meaning I could pull the 30 pound five-foot, U-shaped pipe with steel cross slats, from the bed of the freight cart at will, and use it to break legs.

The wannabe thug looked at me with his three Bavarian crème doughnuts in their box clutched with the kind of care I only reserve for large willing breasts, and kicked the base plate of the yogurt case. If I had been the manager I would have tackled him right there, and let his buddies beat me to establish myself as a target while I methodically broke his fingers. However, I do not care about this yogurt case. It is not my concern. I am a grunt, and will not have someone else’s property—even if that someone else is a nice elderly man who told me how much he appreciated me three days before—to be used to bait me into a situation that could put my very freedom at risk.

Of course, when I was a manager I did not have to go there because everything in the neighborhood knew I would. Tackle one crack head on the asphalt and chase the other one a half mile in your poorly knotted tie, and the punks gain an understanding that you are not to be trifled with. But I am retired, am not being compensated for this level of headache. Since I do not believe in right and wrong, but only reciprocal honor-based relationships, I decide to let it go. And if the manager on duty comes around and gets in a scuffle, I’ll lay these hoodrats out for him, but not until they establish themselves as a threat to him, on video.

I am not a man that often looks at a violent situation and says to himself, “Yeah, I win this easy.”

I have gotten my ass kicked too many times for bravado to find much purchase in what’s left of my ego. [Try losing 160 stick fights and see how arrogant you are.] But I look at these guys and know that I break them, every one of them—and quickly.

The punk keeps kicking the case and then looking at me challengingly.

I cut in the new Chobani coconut yogurt.

Bait not taken; no disastrous social/legal hook imbedded in my mouth, he and his bitchez with dickez leave.

I have remained outside The Boned Zone.

If I had said anything I might as well have painted a bull’s eye on my back. These kids have brothers, uncles—fathers who are younger than I, mothers with jobs who vote…

I might as well have been a black janitor 60 years ago being picked on by rich white kids, or the black dishwasher 20 years ago, who was stomped to death by two white kids [who I knew and hated] in the mid 1990s on Key Highway in South Baltimore.

If you live or work in an African American Ethical Zone, and you are white, you will be baited. Don’t bite; there is nothing to be gained and much to be lost.