Panhandling begins in our society with the venerable lunch money shakedown of old, an extortion racket that is probably as old as American public education itself. Before we get into panhandler attempts at upward mobility [I’ve been paying attention Peter Joseph. Note the egalitarian spin already applied to this ghetto foray.] let us profile a former victim of the lunch money extortion racket, who has climbed the ladder of corporate success, despite having begun life as a skinny little Jewish kid running from gangs of black kids in West Baltimore…

KayJay is a handsome thirty-something man with Leave it to Beaver black hair, who recklessly drives a ridiculously fast sports car, with a collection of speeding ticket stubs in the glove box. I noticed early on in our work relationship that KayJay was very athletic in a stiff way, with a perfect BMI. His stiffness was related to a stutter that was brought on by some sort of anxiety attack.

We were all thrilled one day to find out that our new assistant manager was the fastest retail food manager on Planet Earth! Big Bob and KayJay were wrestling some slimy crack-head in the vestibule who was trying to make off with crab meat. When that thief wormed his way loose and popped up and ran. Bob was like, ‘No way are we catching that crack-head’. But KayJay took off and ran down that bag of chemically baked humanity like a falcon taking a pigeon on the wing. KayJay’s running form was somewhat unconventional and spastic, and could be described as half-way between Forest Gump on steroids and Woody Allen on crack.

Sometime later KayJay drove me home at blinding speed in his coveted sports car. It occurred to me then that this man was addicted to speed. While I got my bearings in front of the LaFond Mancave—being afraid of cars to begin with—I asked him about it and he rattled off his racing resume, “I was the only Jewish kid in a black neighborhood. So I was supposed to give up my lunch money on the way to catch the school bus. Fighting a mob was useless, besides I was a little guy. So I ran. I’m faster than nine out of ten bush bunnies so it became a thing, a big event for everyone, like this sacred catch and release ritual; ‘catch that Jew! Damn dat Jew boy can run!’

“Every once and a while I would get caught; like when they brought in a specialist. You had to be special to catch me.

“Even the bus driver got in on it. He wouldn’t stop for my stop, because he didn’t want all of those kids piling on behind me. He would slow down a little and just keep cruising with the door open, a crowd of black kids chasing me, and all of the other kids on the bus—you know they were all black—yelling, ‘Catch dat white-boy, catch dat-white-boy’; and I’d leap on without breaking stride. And some crack-head thinks he’s going to outrun me, the fastest Jew in Baltimore! Bring it!”

I really liked KayJay. Please say a prayer for KayJay, because ‘The Fastest Jew in Baltimore' has been transferred to the Washington D.C. ghetto, a place feared by even West Baltimore’s hardiest hood rats.

Now let’s look in on another variety of interracial rundown…

The name Crumb is a diminution of the African-American slang term ‘Cracker’, itself a dismissive term for labeling ‘inconsequential white folks’. Crumb was low on the Harm City Social Register indeed!

Crumb was a small slinky looking longhaired white-trashian, a stay-behind dope-fiend in the recently ebonicized Northeast Baltimore ghetto. He was just a grungy panhandler that I ejected from the storefront with some regularity. Now, retail food establishments who cater to a black clientele have their busiest rush right after church lets out early Sunday afternoon.

One fine spring Sunday I was just arriving to work when I noticed my assistant, a former cop, waving goodbye to a police cruiser. He told me that Crumb had tried upgrading to purse-snatcher. He grabbed the purse of an elderly lady who was wearing her Sunday dress and meema hat right behind register #4. Not only did Crumb kick off this audition for the Darwin Award in front of my armed assistant, but in the midst of over 50 church-going folks and their sons. In fact, her son, a large suited man in his thirties who used to play football, took great offense to Crumb scooting off at a negligible pace in his filthy attire with his mother’s purse, and heroically gave chase.

The chase progressed down the sidewalk of the busy thoroughfare, with Crumb loosing pace and Mee-ma’s son getting winded, but keeping up the chase. Crumb had given his pursuer an edge though. You see, the neighborhood east of the store was predominantly populated by white stoners like him and elderly folks who couldn’t catch a cold let alone a junky. The neighborhood to the west of the store was predominantly black and was, and still is, roamed by gangs of black boys—some of them purse-snatchers themselves.

Yes, Crumb ran west!

As Meema’s son chugged along, loosening his tie as he tried to keep pace with Crumb, he signaled a group of boys ahead. And, well, my assistant described the ensuing retrieval of Meema’s purse as reminding him of the movie ‘Zulu Dawn’.

The cops eventually extracted the remnants of Crumb from the ‘feeding frenzy’ and whisked him away to Central Booking, where he could be properly worked over by some heavy-handed brothers in lockup. My assistant had no doubt that other detainees would find out about the nature of Crumb’s heinous offense.

I love a good vigilante story, and I am not done.

Millatime was a small scrawny white stoner who scrounged in black Southwest Baltimore but lived in white South Baltimore. These guys tend to be tolerated by the locals because they infuse the economy with drug buys. They just have to make certain that they limit their activity in the host neighborhood to ground scrounging, panhandling and pimping out their girlfriend. If they start stealing they are rewarded with a free ride to the ER.

Millatime earned his unfortunate sobriquet when he was ground scrounging for unfinished beer up by Wilkens and Monroe [Above where Sleepy was stabbed by the white boys from Pig Town in The Logic of Steel]. Now, this activity would have predictably earned him a despicable moniker like ‘backwash’ if he had not done the Harm City Street-naming Committee one better. He—whatever his name used to be—found a bottle of Miller High Life beer, ‘a 24-ouncer bottle with the twist-back-on-cap’ that was nearly full with the fine yellowish pilsner. It was kind of warm since it had been sitting out on the median, and was a little flat. But it was beer—or perhaps it just used to be beer…

In any case, the low down was, that this prank by a Southwestern alcoholic drove Millatime to raise his game. In a desperate attempt to claw his way up out of the gutter, he used a relative’s house as his criminal launch pad.

Houses in some parts of South Baltimore are divided every half a block by a deep dark alley a mere two to three feet wide. A friend of mine used to sneak from his mother’s bedroom window into the bedroom window of the married woman who lived next door while the ‘old man was still finishing his coffee in the kitchen downstairs’. Of course, my friend had the help of the housewife who opened her window for him when her husband went downstairs to head out to work.

Millatime had to break into ‘the Three Bears’ House’, and they were always home. He decided, with a stroke of genius that would be quite beyond the ability of Crumb up in the Northeast, that he would not only use the cover of darkness, but break in on the third level—that is two levels up from the main floor—while the family of large pro wrestling fans were watching and cheering to a program known as ‘Raw’, aired on a weekday evening around 10 PM.

As Millatime worked the third story window of the Three Bears’ House, they drank beer and snacked below, while Mom sat in her chair. [There is no indication that she was a fan, and this may have been his undoing.] Unfortunately for our upwardly mobile panhandler hero, he landed not so catlike on the ancient poorly maintained floorboards above as a loll in the action and Mom’s keen house-honed ears conspired to alert the three very large pro wrestling fans; Dad, and two well-fed adult sons.

Mom called 911 to report an intruder while Dad and sons stormed upstairs to repel the enemy. It was ten or fifteen minutes before the police got there to rescue Millatime from the attentions of the wrestling fans. When asked what the men were doing to poor Millatime the officer I interviewed—who was not one of the responding officers—said, “I heard they were doing pile-drivers and something called ‘The Peoples’ Elbow’. What-the-hell is ‘The Peoples’ Elbow?’”

You know, sometimes the world I see around me gets me down a little. But today, after a trip down memory lane with KayJay, Crumb and Millatime, Harm City is looking okay to me.