“Okay, guy, you have some outrageous tales of mayhem and violence stored up in that brain of yours. So what is the funniest, the one that made you laugh the hardest?”

-Big Rob

Okay Rob, the funniest story is in The Logic of Steel, about two white men looking to buy drugs on a winter night when a small black kid tries to rob them with a steak knife. They both put a gun in his face and then rob the kid, with Manny, keeping the kid’s shoes as a trophy. Manny, one of the funniest violent people I know, also has the number two funniest Harm City violence story of all time, below.

#32-01: night, 3 seconds, first-person aggressor

“This was the fall of Ninety-eight, in Curtis Bay. I lived in the end unit of a row. The side of the house, where the kitchen was, faced an alley. People would be making drug deals in the alley. You’re trying to make a sandwich—and you hear some guy say he’s gotta take a piss, and this guy is pissing up against the side of your house. The side of the house smells like piss. It’s not an easy activity to monitor. It’s not like they all come and piss on your house at nine-fifteen p.m.

“I got a cat litter jug. I was going to use a milk jug, but you can see into it. Besides, the milk jug makes that glug-glug sound—you want a nice smooth delivery system. The cat litter jug has a wide mouth, and holds two-and-a-half gallons!

“I kept this jug in the upstairs bathroom and pissed in it. It’s really good to have a jug of piss, in case somebody takes your parking spot. Piss is good. You can do a lot of things with piss.

“It took anywhere from two weeks to a month to fill it. It’s not a regular thing. You have to open it to fill it, and that can get pretty nasty. You open a jug of this stuff and its fermented; it doesn’t even smell like piss anymore—really nasty.

“I get home late from work and I can hear these guys in the alley. This one freak is going to piss on my house. I went to the [kitchen] window and he was assuming the ‘about-to-piss-position’. Have you ever noticed that people who are pissing are helpless?

“So I went upstairs to the bathroom, got the jug—which was filled to the rim—opened the lid, swung open the window, and dumped it on this guy from two stories! Not a glug, just a nice even hiss as two-and-a-half gallons of steaming-hot, month old, festering piss washed down his back.

“The guy yells, ‘Ah fuck!’

“I soaked this guy! He runs down the alley yelling that he’s going to kill me—but I never saw him. I had something waiting for him.

“The wall-pissings stopped—like the passing of an era. That was the end of it—except I spent forty dollars in long distance calls telling people about The Great Dumping of The Jug. I no-longer keep a jug. Sometimes, though, you want to memorialize; like the black kid with the knife that tried to rob me when I was carrying a gun. After I took his shoes I kept them in the back of my car for years to show to non-believers.

The only thing that separates tragedy and humor is time and space.”

Manny has worked as a street artist and standup comedian. At the time of this interview, he was operating a tattoo parlor, where this interview was conducted, as he awaited, “an oppressed Nubian Prince, who is on his way over here to ‘hurt’ my ‘body.’

“If semantics could kill I’m sure this guy would be a terror.”

Manny went on and on about the politics of tattooing people whose dark skin prevents the optical appreciation of his effort…

Note: Curtis Bay is the southernmost neighborhood of Harm City, that has been a majority white suburban ghetto/working class enclave since I moved to Baltimore. It is near a feature called Wagner's Point that is the terminus of the #64 Bus Route. The #64 route is one of those peculiar bus lines in Baltimore that begins in the middle of a blighted city ghetto, and goes to nowhere in the outlying area, sometimes to a vacant lot. People will flee the Drug War Zone for this outlying area for a fresh start. The drug dealers will then use this bus line as a supply conduit. Coincidentally, a developer will then begin purchasing property in the central zone being vacated by the urban poor, remodel, and then rent to urban homesteaders of the gentry class.

The #64 line links with the #19, which links the Baltimore County Detention Center with Baltimore's two Central Detention Centers. These two bus lines form a drug pipeline controlled by one to three gangs, who draw their personnel from the corrections system graduates. The power players have generally staked out the all black southern Baltimore Cherry Hill neighborhood, on the bus route between Baltimore City and Curtis Bay, as their operations center.