My son’s best friend is a large, light-skinned black nerd who he met in the collectable card business, who likes to go by the name Negrodamus. He has a good office job in the county, moved out of the city and married a beautiful chocolate bunny—a real knockout, an elegant, curvy beauty who wore dresses and looked like a model. His smart phone was plastered with pictures of his wife. He, like my son, was saving for a house, doing the two-income marriage that would hopefully land them in a gated suburban community.

Negrodamus got sick and required numerous surgeries and therapy—and his wife not only dumped him, but even stole his cat, leaving him "high and dry and totally without pussy!"

I found this out a couple of weeks ago while out house hunting with my son. I had walking pneumonia and was nodding off in the car when he announced that he was going to drop me off at home and then go pick up Negrodamus in Lower Park Heights, where he has been living in his great grandmother’s ancestral frame house, among a ghetto that has bloomed and rotted twice since the pristine little cottage came into the family in the late 1800s.

Against his protests that I was sick and needed rest I told him I was coming along. At 11 a.m. we passed a liquor store in front of which a half dozen gangbangers drank and dealt and signed. As we wound down narrow back streets with vacants, mattresses on the sidewalk where bums live, and where up to 15 men were collected in the middle of one street to roll dice, I was glad I was in the car, worth more than any house in that neighborhood.

As my son waited in his idling chariot for Negrodamus’ fat ass to hobble down out of the only habitable dwelling in the area, I stood above the open passenger side door and scanned the area, armed only with a pocket knife, sunglasses and white supremacist bald head and beard. Negrodamus hobbled over to me and gasped, “Oh thank you, Mister LaFond, I see you know where you are at.”

He then wagged his finger to my son, “Son, take a lesson from your old man, either orbit in this starship or pretend you are a secret service agent—idling this thing in this hood is asking for an approach.

[Negrodamus can only fit in the front seat, so I shut him in and take the back seat.]

As we pulled off I asked Negrodamus for a brief history of his hood and he gasped: “This is a tragedy of niggadom, Mister LaFond. Niggas will ruin anything. Son, just keep driving until we see white children playing in a yard!”

[Nods head sadly as he looks out the window at the passing ruins.]

“Shucky ducky, even the lake trout joint is closed—fat boy can’t even get his eat on when he comes back to the hood, these niggas done ruined things so thoroughly.

“When we was little we had beebee guns—all kind of beebee guns and had wars. Went up to that place where the rich white folks have their flower arrangements [Cylburn Arboretum] thinking it was just woods and a haunted house and end up getting chased by armed park police. Another time we had a battle at night in the neighborhood and the cops get us and broke all our guns and sent us on our way.”

“Eventually some of us move out and do something and the rest stay behind and move up to real guns and start dealing that mess.

“We used to go up the road to Jew Town [Upper Park Heights] and steal bikes out of yards, turn street signs around, spray graffiti and other stupid shit that constitutes pre-niggadom training. Funny thing was, I was going to the place then—for the wrong destructive reasons, to steal a bike—that I want to go to now, to buy a house, someplace where white people let their kids out in the yard so you know its nigga free! Them Jews know what’s up, know you can’t trust the niggadom not to come after you, so they got the hotline, good police response time. Shoot, down where my great grandmother house is surrounded by all that mess, you best not hold your breath for the police to come. You are on your own down there.

[Negrodamus points excitedly out the window at a handsome hipster couple, walking in the upscale community on the other side of the wooded park, behind a baby stroller.]

“Shucky ducky, that’s what I’m talking about. Breeding white people—look at that, Mister LaFond, a white woman with a white man pushing a white baby—no little borrowed Chinese baby, but a honest to goodness white child! There’s hope for the world yet. If it’s just those bitches and hos havin’ baby’s we might as well evacuate to the moon.”