Billy seems to be in his mid thirties, stands about five feet tall, and weighs maybe a buck twenty, which makes him significantly smaller than the average 14-year-old innocent unarmed black youth.
“It’s nice to meet someone who is white like me who gets it; understands what it’s like to be on foot in Baltimore. I came up in Charles Village, Waverly, Govens. It’s different now that I have a car. I’m not threatened daily and attacked weekly like before. My defense—which worked for me when taking the buses and standing at stops and walking past the blacks—was to let my hair and beard grow and wear bulky ragged clothes and trench coats—to look like I had nothing and to be able to hide weapons. I carried a sheath knife a lot, under my clothes.
“They always circle you when they are moving in for the kill, like animals would. I wish they could take a bus load of these liberal lawmakers and scatter them across Baltimore and make them interact with these fucking savages like we have to! No, they’re all cozy out in Hunt Valley, or driving heir BMW from the enclave around the corner from me, from an address the cops will actual respond to!
“Sorry. Well, when they would circle, I would start to stem and shake and mutter insane things to myself and they would generally back off. Sometimes you have to draw down on them, but you want to minimize that. When you defend yourself with a weapon you are always breaking the law in this town.
“One time, I was walking home from the Giant, past this kid’s house. His mother’s right there. I turn the corner and go a little ways and he comes running around the corner behind me with a butcher knife in his hand and says, ‘Give it up!’
“The kid was maybe twelve! I grabbed his knife hand, it was the right hand [demonstrates outward left hand grab] like so, pressed his hand down and held him off with my other hand, and then stomped on his hand. I yelled at him and told him to go home to his mother and not do it again, and then got out of there.
“I know people are moving out after the riots. I stayed out of town the entire week. For now I’m hanging in there. But one more thing and I’ll be moving out of town, wherever I can afford it. Until then I’m hanging in there, Brother.”
Without your posts I'd have no idea what Baltimore was like. To me it was some riots, a fancy university and John Waters.
The question is, are you getting out? Is there a plan? A point in your work when you'd be happy to leave?
I trust you are enjoying that cruise up the Nile, Sir. Might I recommend to you the novel, An Arabian Terror Tale by James LaFond.
This question has been asked often.
I will cover one of John Waters' night spots in a September post of The Poor Tour.
In my book When You're Food, first written in 2001, and rewritten in 2011, the action focuses on the reasons why I moved my family out of Baltimore. However, I continued to work in the city.
In 2010, on July 5, upon resigning my city supermarket management job abruptly, I decided to pursue a life of writing and coaching. My sons are adults. I am bachelor, with no mating unit to hold me hostage to a secure location, or send me scrambling for a new secure location as the old one gets overrun. Quickly doing the math, I discovered that I would only be able to afford renting a room in the ghetto! Maintaining a nice suburban rental would necessitate me working at 40-plus hours per week.
I now live in the habitat that provides the information for much of my nonfiction and the characters for much of the fiction.
Now, as far as happiness, I don't regard that as a worthy objective. I can write the fiction and history anywhere—but that does not sell. Almost all of my readership comes to this site for the work I do documenting urban disfunction. At this point I only plan as far out as September 2016 when I am scheduled to go out to the Rocky Mountains and research a book on Liver-Eating Johnson.
I plan on staying in my present rental until the price goes up, then on moving deeper into the ghetto, into an area so nasty that I could do one Harm City book a month!
Thanks for the concern, and for using the site.
Mr LaFond, thanks for your reply. There is no Egyptian connection behind the pseudonym, but I've had a good day selling that which I produce so I bought your book to try out your fiction.
I'm sure a lot of readers ask the same question when they read one of your Baltimore stories. I'll just wish you a long and productive writing life.