On Wednesday, March 9 summer came to Harm City. By Thursday the temperature was at 80 degrees and hot pants, tube tops were barely covering girls and aspiring Mandingo cast members were walking around shirtless, flexing their unemployment like an honor.
Under the starlit Wednesday night sky, I headed down off the ridge to Northern Parkway at 9:03 p.m. I heard police sirens, as I had heard them all day as “Africa rose up in the blood” of melanin-rich Harm Citizens.
Not all of the locals were such hoodrats. The porch of the house where I catch the bus was a meeting place for two brothers and a friend—of about 16—as they were dropped off from working their after school jobs. They discussed their video games for a while and went on their separate ways, courteous, and not thuggish in the least, three Baltimore City black youth, who decline to take the bus, working class kids not taking the working class option, where they did this time last year.
While I am at the stop two cop cars from Northern Parkway turn up toward the ridge, screaming up the side streets toward a place where the police chopper is headed to and other sirens can be heard converging on. After three minutes the chopper is making a tight circle, about a quarter mile east of my home at Walther and White. Then the ambulance siren sounds and the chopper pulls off.
When the bus pulls up it is packed with the former number of passengers before last year’s April Purge.
Might things be back to normal, I think?
No.
There is one terrified Chinese guy, one super-fit, grungy paleface and the normal load of adults returning from work, and the security guard headed to the night shift at the hospital—another Neanderthal. The entire back deck of the bus is packed with a mob of upper middleclass black kids with $400 in phone and $500 in attire each, waxing boisterous, trying to sound ghetto, and failing. These boys are 13-15, and are headed across town to the Purge territory on an adventure. They are going on a 15 twerp raid. These twerps do not offload until the bus is safely back out in the county. These are not city boys, but upscale punks who all loaded at the head of the line at Towson Town Center. They off load, with two of them attempting to stare menacingly at me as they strut and flash hand signs and hoot like animals.
The bus was then nearly deserted for an uneventful ride, except for Old Man Mike spilling vodka down the aisle as he boarded in a sloshed condition and the driver advised, “Yo, brutha, you leakin’. Watch my coach.”
Once offloaded at Stemmers and Old Eastern, the other passengers huddled under the shelters for a transfer as one girl, who had been in phone communication with her ride, hoped hurriedly into the waiting car.
I like walking a hunting ground at night. It is invigorating, particularly on a breezy summer night in winter. As I walk through the park I can hear the train’s call out over the ditch it rumbles through a mile to the west, and can hear northbound Canada geese overhead. As I hit the tiny Middle River Park I see the homeless insane lady is back with her bags and blankets, mumbling inaudibly as she stares blankly ahead from the painted iron park bench. As I cross the bridge the three foot egret, a wary friend for five years now, looking verily archaic, keeps one eye on me as he fishes in the muddy shallows at low tide.
Seemingly a life time later, I am back on the #55 bus on Northern Parkway, headed in the other direction, pretending to sleep behind my sunglasses—which protect these old eyes from the rising sun—as the digital bus clock reads 8:13. Three, non-ghetto speaking, well-dressed, middleclass, ebon saints are standing over me, about two to three feet off, discussing in hushed tones the possibility and advisability of “Getting’ Santa Claus when he hop off.”
One answers, “Hop, shit, he got a cane.”
The third says, “Check, see if it a pointy cane. He might stick us.”
The heavyset black girl next to me on the side bench seat facing the back door is glancing at me nervously, as if worried that she is going to see something bad happen.
“What you think, Yo?” whispers the second to the first.
I then turned the head of my aluminum and steel umbrella cane—a gift from Mescaline Franklin—brought it to check, and stood straight up, to which they all three drew back from the hips up as the first speaker, the tall boy, whispered, “Pointy.”
To that I tapped him on the shoulder and headed to the front to offload there, as a fine, lithe looking wench of perhaps 22, with rich mahogany skin and a long disdainfully drawn face, reclined there against the guide bars polishing her leopard skin-painted fingernails.
Sun glasses have more than one use.
As I walked home, up to the ridge line where sits the old plantation house in which I rent a room, I wondered at the fact that these two groups of boys looking for trouble where under 16, not city residents, using a county-to-county line that only dips into the city for three miles, are obviously middleclass—probably the sons of government employees—and seemingly vey new to thugdom.
To me, the three real city hoodlums that threatened me late last year at Harford and Bayonne, and the four who tried to run me down on a nighted city street at the end of last summer, were simply practicing the oldest form of economics. But these privileged youths, going on expeditions to find old palefaces to attack—these are racists, produced by a system designed toward that ultimately sanguine end.
This is their glory season; their time to emulate their heroes who defeated a city police force in open battle on internationally broadcast video. These are the tepid princes of a new thug ethos, who, when they do attack, will have the full backing of The Media State.
