It was a Saturday night in late September of 2010. I had been cashiering on the evening shift in the county and had been enjoying the view of Jupiter high and bright in the sky on my nocturnal trips home. Of course Jupiter is just the phony Roman version of the Greek Zeus. So, there I stood night after night, having just finished writing three books on the boxers and other ancient fighters who had fought bloody sacrificial fights before the altar of Zeus [Thunder-chief].
There were a lot of legends about Zeus, most notably the many tales of his seduction of mortal women. The story was he drove mortal women crazy. He was the original nomadic sky-god transplanted through ages of conquest to the rocky shores of the Middle Sea, and when that sea foam washed up on shore it was said to be his semen. So, I should not have been shocked when he rose high in the night sky and the gender-bending female combatants of Harm City began to go nuts...
It had been a summer of female violence, and it was going out the way it had come in back in late June, when my coworker Little Joe watched, "five big-boned females stomp out dis bus driva' on the number Ten. This dude was fit, in middle-age, but they was all at least two hundred pounds, in their mid twenties, and they held onto them bars while they kicked and stomped him...all because he asked them to turn down their music. I got off the back—I only weigh one-ten—and waited for the next bus. They whooped 'is ass fer ten minutes until the MTA cops came and cuffed them all—took them away in a wagon."
I interviewed another bus driver five days later and discovered that the victim of this 'rhino-attack' as Little Joe had put it was still out of work with a broken collarbone, but had suffered no brain damage.
As I prepared to get off work at 10:30 I contemplated my bus ride into the ghetto, wondering what it might bring. I was concerned primarily with getting home within two hours, so I could catch most of the reruns on History International. On Saturday nights my usual cross-county bus had already stopped running by 10:30, so I was headed into Gomorrah. Little did I know that Jupiter had a live history lesson in the works.
At about 9:00 PM three large young women began fighting with a group of men in the vestibule at work, and the men fled; obviously none of them being Zeus-in-mortal-form. In fact, these chicks were so tough I think that Zeus would have had to impregnate them while in his secondary woman-seducing form, as a wild bull.
Two hours later, I was deep in Harm City, three blocks northwest of the Inner Harbor on Charles Street, across from a hotel/comedy club for which the City Police were providing dubious security. Forget people getting stomped and robbed and pack-attacked when you can walk rich model-quality chicks down to the parking garage.
After a half hour waiting for the bus I became the nexus—an anonymous meeting post if you will—for a group of 10 to 15 youths. The group was predominantly female, and had split along incomprehensible click lines. The ring leader of the female demi-gang was a very pretty light-skinned girl with a natural afro, long legs, and an hourglass figure, dressed in a clingy silk dress. For some reason she decided to hold her war council less than a foot from me. This was putting some strain on my eyes as I attempted to read her tattoos through the translucent pink dress under the street light.
There I was, in the pursuit of science, adjusting my glasses in a scholarly attempt to read the calligraphy script inked across Gang Girl's body [A true man of science never rests!] when she was approached by her enraged hitter; a short ugly chunk of pregnant oppression with a foul mouth, aggressively jutting chin, and bulging eyes, dressed in sweat pants and a wife-beater. She had come to complain to her leader about the infringement of her mating rights by a non-yet-pregnant 'ho' who then had her arms wrapped around the hitter's not-very-monogamous baby's daddy.
As I removed my now useless glasses in disgust—as the girls were actually leaning up against me as if I were a light pole, completely fouling my view—and placed them in my bag, I was treated to a wonderful exposition of modern motherhood and the reduction of urban male youths to the status of subservient sex objects. All-the-while this beige Rachel Welch knockoff was rubbing her soft shoulder up against my chest as if I were the wall, while the short brute had her hard shoulder jammed into my gut as she gestures angrily:
Pregnant Hitter, "Yo I gonna kill dat bitch, mackin' ma man en shit!"
Gang Girl, "Look she is just trying to get under your skin."
Pregnant Hitter, "Exacly why I'm gonna kill dat bitch!"
Gang Girl, "Listen, you are six months pregnant—at least—and you are not fighting. I got this."
Pregnant Hitter, "Fuck dis baby, I a fighta Yo!"
Gang Girl, "Stay here."
At this point the elegant looking Gang Girl sashayed over to the dude-macking 'ho' to negotiate a truce. At the same time the enraged bipedal incubator stepped out into the street amid the swirling trash that was being picked up from the gutter by the impending thunder storm, and began screaming obscenities at the 'ho'.
The air was becoming ionized by the approaching weather event and I was being entertained. I leaned back against the light pole and looked up at Jupiter as he wreaked havoc on some cop's evening as a high end security guard for the rich chicks across the street.
The salient anthropological point here is that no one judged the baby's daddy, who was behaving in the most callous possible way toward the mother—gruesome though she might be—of his child. I was truly among a society of amazons and their mating drones. The males were completely docile. The other really shocking thing to me was that I was treated as a safe quiet corner to gather and conspire. The fact that I was an older independent male set me so completely out of their social bounds that I was granted complete observation privileges. I could not imagine females of my generation being this open verbally as they literally leaned up against a strange man, who was blatantly checking out their leader.
An Asian-American cop across the street began walking toward the little beast-mother and telling her to be quiet and demanding the agitated crowd disperse. The little pregnant fighter stepped out into the street in front of a Sikh cabbie, who barely managed to swerve around her, and waived the cop off, "Yo fuck off popo. Dis is our street. We own dis joint. Ged yo ass back ova dare Yo!"
The cop meekly backed across the street and began pretending that the group was no longer a problem!
The little beast-woman then charged into the group of rival females who her leader was negotiating with and the males scattered, running for cover as a sidewalk brawl erupted. I specifically remember Gang Girl posting a pretty good series of jabs and fading to the right before she uncorked a straight right into the eye of the only other good looking girl there. The ugly pregnant chick was shooting for a double-leg takedown when she was stood up by a well-timed sprawl executed by her tall lanky rival, who then deliberately punched the combat incubator in the fetus!
The pregnant hitter then began acting like a pregnant woman and started to wail and cry. This spurred Gang Girl into more frenzied action. She was now fighting with the left sleeve of her silk dress hanging beneath her beige lace bra, as she chased the tall lanky girl around me and the light pole, and then bolted down the street after her fleeing enemy. A very pretty male then comforted the suddenly pregnant beast-woman while a rotund friend wearing a suede dress that must have weighed 20 pounds went across the street and threatened the cowardly cop until he came over and called an ambulance.
What followed was the return of the sweating Gang Girl, who gathered her friends around me as if I were a vertical conference table. Soon the girls were threatening to sue the cops for not protecting the pregnant girl and hassling the EMTs who could not manage to get the crazed woman on the gurney as she now wanted to go fight again. Eventually a female cop showed up and began laying down the law.
It began to rain, so I said "Goodnight miss" to Gang Girl and stepped out into the street and hailed a Pakistani cabby. Gang Girl just looked at me like I had suddenly materialized and gave me a confused smile, before turning around to give orders to some complaisant drones.
When I got in the cabby said, "I wondered how many times I would have to circle the block before you waived me over."
I said, "Man, this is going to cost more than I made tonight, but it's time to get out of here."
I had suddenly grown sick of the zoo that was Charles Street.
What did it all mean?
I don't know. But it gets scarier the more I think about it. That's why I write, to get this stuff out of my head.
