For the past few years I have been a largely contented creature, fighting and writing my fill. This has made me more approachable than I was through most of my life and has resulted in a lot of female attention—which I no longer care for in my current state of decrepitude. More importantly—until I ripped my guts late last summer—I was confident enough in my ability to deck thugs with empty hands that I had altogether abandoned my predatory approach to the lie we call society. This resulted in me being targeted a lot as I hesitated about a return to my dark cocoon.

I had gathered many good stories as a result of becoming approachable and did not want to cut off these potential sources of information. However, two things have aligned, as I knew they would, to return me to that somewhat undead mental place I occupied through the latter half of the 1990s, when I left my house every night promising myself to die fighting rather than give up my nearly empty wallet, when I stashed weapons all over South, East and Northeast, Baltimore.

The first love of my life is dead.

That’s right, ritual combat is no longer a part of my life. I knew this would happen—because, in the past, when I gave up fighting for longer than it took to heal, I became increasingly murderous in my thoughts. After six months of not sparring hard or fighting, I used to sit across from my bosses at the bi-weekly meetings and simply envision butchering them the entire time, counting how many steps—eleven—it would take to bring me from the conference room with their heads and throw them into the cash room where their assistants worked. On the outside I was calm, soothing, being their big brother with all of the answers. On the inside, I killed them, and the security staff—both of whom were stealing from under my nose and packed guns...one of them a City Cop.

Then their grinning skulls under flimsy blonde hair and the brown coconuts of my security goons began invading my sleep. I would wake numerous times during my nightly one to three-hour nap [every other day, on the other day I didn’t sleep] as I piled the heads on Mark’s desk. Mark was my friend, my co-manager, and he used to ask me in my dream, why I hadn’t brought up a bone and fat can from the meat room to drain the blood into, because now he was going to have to page the janitor, and we all know he’s getting high behind the dumpster…

This was particularly bad because I was not able to write due to the brain drain of being the step daddy of a hundred urban savages and the step brother of two suburban rich girls. So, I began fighting again, began writing, and resolved to resign abruptly the next time they did something unethical. After that, it took about a year for me to recover my sanity, fighting, writing…

You might say I only ever had two girlfriends, fighting and writing, and the one that could make me relax, is dead, irreplaceably so.

This brings bitterness in the face of the ongoing Purge in Harm City, for I have felt my physical prowess slip away daily for nearly a year now. My conditioning and training is now devoted to the possible slaughter of those who grow bolder as I grow older. However, I still want to write and have no desire to push things to a bloody conclusion. I’ve made a devil’s pact with myself that I will do anything necessary to preserve my physical autonomy and go about armed at all times. I also stay inside at night instead of visiting friends or going to the bar. I walk long distances instead of taking hoodrat infested buses—which also helps my conditioning.

So it was, last night—an unusually cool late spring night in Baltimore. The sky was clear but the stars could only be seen away from the street lights. The falling moon was a low, amber sliver in the western sky. I put on my pack at 10:01 as I headed down the sidewalk to Northern Parkway, not a soul on the street other than a young white man returning home from work with his pack. Most hoodrats are laying low at night this year.

The bus, driven by the large, surly operator, actually stops for me. This negro is almost trained, having grown weary of me stepping out in front of the bus and daring him to run me over when he has tried to leave me stranded. It was the last bus of the night and was half full, young working fellows—not thugs—on the back deck, indicating that the 9:23 bus never came.

The public service announcements are all in Spanish—even though Latinos aren’t taking the busses outside of their East Baltimore stronghold since the Purge. The bench seat behind the bus driver is empty, so I sit there and observe the foot traffic—there is none—as the bus speeds on. There is, surprisingly, a white woman on the bus. She is 40, a red head, cute, but not pretty and in decent shape, dressed in a wait staff uniform. She makes eyes at me, craning her head, hoping I will acknowledge. She even scooted against the window and put her hand down next to her, offering me a seat.

I look into her with dead eyes. This bitch should not be out on the bus at night. I have mentally committed to an extreme survival template which makes me very picky over who I protect. I would watch her stomped by hoodrats and walk on. She is endangering my harshly preserved peace of mind. I hate her, immediately and feel younger, feel like I did in the 90s.

Going through Overlea into Rosedale, Stinky gets on. Stinky is a 60ish alcoholic, whose nappy hair, urine-stained pants and whiskey seeping from his pores lends a tangy stench to the coach as he sets behind me on the now empty front facing seat. The bus is a quarter full as the driver runs it like a giant toboggan around the bend on Kenwood Avenue and stinky—his hand bandaged, recently and professionally from fingertips to elbow—pitches onto the floor at my feet.

As I move my boot to make sure it is not fouled by his excretions, I notice the young brother and the law abiding black woman of forty, regarding me with a kind of dread. The white bitch, calls for the driver to stop, and she earns a name in my mind’s eye, “White Mommy.”

White Mommy begins comforting Stinky, asking him if he is okay, and then heroically attempts to lift him as I callously witness her efforts. A black man from further back is motivated to actually haul Stinky’s ass back onto the seat. White Mommy fawns over Stinky, asking him to lean back, to which he mumbles and leans toward her, about to pitch into the aisle again.

The driver, growls, “Sit your ass back against the window!”

Stinky complies.

White Mommy looks at me with tear dipped eyes, a possible white knight nothing but a mean old man. There seems to be some sort of indictment of me going about, all eyes on me, minding my business. Every person that looks at me, I return the gaze and they look down.

White Mommy holds up the bus as she gets off, asking Stinky if he’s going to be okay.

The big young man across from me looks at me uneasily and I return his furtive glance with a long lifeless look. A month without fighting, no fight to train for, always puts me in this evil zone, life viewed darkly, but the more peaceably.

Stinky is snoring and drooling when I offload, without a word or a glance to the livestock operating the bus, at Stemmers Run and Old Eastern Avenue, a major five-bus transfer point that used to have a dozen or so patrons at this time. A junky is nodding and stemming under the bus shelter across the street. Outside of this shelter stands a civilized African housekeeper, who I have seen numerous times before, and is in a panic that she is the only one waiting for the #4, which is late, and wants to know if I will be standing there with her, looking up into my eyes with tearfully asking brown eyes that reflect the streetlights in little points of bright white, making her look like a little Elfin vampire.

I felt right as I walked by her into the night and she whimpered about something I did not care to recall as words, but as some babble.

I was the only walker on Old Eastern Avenue, the park dark on the left, the woods rustling on the right, and the many bright street lights making a roof of light that blocked out the stars.

An ambulance roared past me, headed into Essex as I walk out into Middle River. As I passed the 7-11 and walked through the Crazy Woman’s little park, I noticed she was not there. A pickup truck full of rednecks—this has not happened to me for quite some time—swerved over to the gutter at about 50 MPH, screaming threats and obscenities at me. I silently laid a curse on them for breaking bad with an old white pedestrian while their neighborhood is being overrun by hoodrats.

As I crossed the bridge over Middle River, the moon was barely a sliver above the houses to the west. The river stretched eastward, like spreading ink under the now starry sky, with only a handful of marina lights to provide any artificial illumination.

He was there, the only being I wanted to see, fifty feet out from the bridge, standing almost feather deep in the river as the tide came in, the big khaki Egret who has eyed me spectrally for these past five years on that bridge I cross by night.