I recently sought out and interviewed a famous teenage hood-rat from the far Eastside of town; the neighborhood of Saint Helena in Dundalk Maryland, about two hundred yards from the Baltimore City line. Steevo is a stocky, tattooed fellow with a mild-mannered disposition, sporting painful-looking art on his neck. The last time I ran into him I let him know that his interrogation was imminent. So, when he saw me walking toward him the other night with a pen and pad he grinned widely, “So what’s up dude?”
“For how long were you a hoodlum?”
“I stopped getting in trouble by seventeen or eighteen, though I was still doing stupid shit like selling weed when I was twenty-one. Shit started up when I was thirteen; selling weed in bars by the time I was fourteen.
“Why did you stop?”
“I realized that I could go to Big Boy Jail, that it wouldn’t just be calling Mom to pick your ass up from the precinct anymore.”
“I heard you ran from the cops on occasion.”
"Hell yeah! Us little bastards ran from the cops all the time. We would even do it to fuck with them. You see a cop, and you all just split up and run like you did something and they have to chase you. Of course we would get in trouble too. We’d start some shit in the County and then hop over the line into the City and act like we didn’t do shit.”
“For the up and coming hoodlums out there, do you have any general advice on running from the cops?”
“They’re faster than you think! Had me fooled a couple of times! Just run and pray to God they give up. We didn’t hide or nothin’. We knew the ins and outs of the entire neighborhood; knew where we were goin’ to run before we turned the corner; knew what was around the corner. One-way streets are important. There were some one-way streets where people double parked and the cops wouldn’t even bother driving down there. There was this one spot we called the Grass Alley. We’d make them chase us down there because they had to get out and run. Of course then you have a pissed off cop!
“Sometimes we would get tired of runin’ and just go sit in the McDonalds and let it blow over. Not once did they ever check in the McDonalds. I guess they thought we were just stupid kids.
“All of that shit is a lot harder to get away with now. I wish it was as easy as it was back then. The money came in so quick it was ridiculous. Never once did any of us get busted on the drug shit. We just got caught up in stupid shit, just running to fuck with the cops; bullshit stuff. The business end was easy…thirteen, fourteen years-old sitting in the bar getting drunk and selling weed. We didn’t really have to worry about getting caught doing it in bars with a bar on every block on back streets.
“And you would get a heads up. We had this one dude on Baltimore Avenue who’s dad was friends with a cop. One day we’re sittin’ in ‘is yard on lawn chairs smokin’ weed and this fuckin’ cop pulls up and walks up into the yard, and I about shit. We’re hiding our shit and the dad’s kid says, ‘What the fuck are you doin’?'
“I said, ‘Dude, did you not just see that fuckin’ cop walkin’ up in your old man’s fuckin’ yard?’
“He’s like, ‘Its cool, he’s friends with my old man.’
“So it was like that. The cop would come out to where we sold the shit and tell us which houses were goin’ to get busted, and when the raid was comin’.
“Well that’s one way not to have to run. You basically stay out of trouble by knowing when shit is coming down and not being there. You could say that a lot of the runin’ was for spite, and to fuck with certain cops, like Officer Horse—what a dick he was!”
Steevo and I were interrupted in our sublime quest to define the Hood-rat Holy Grail. He did promise that the next time we meet the true tale of dealing with, and running from, Officer Horse, legendary bane of Dundalk street kids, will be told.
