Since the riots last year, working downtown is simply ridiculous. Getting down there is not too bad, just packs of homeless people to mob you and scream for money. Sometimes you see the police taping off the area around a bloody mess being chalked off. A policeman or sheriff stands on every corner in The Zone until five-thirty. If you are not in your car by five-thirty you’re screwed. We’ve got to make it three blocks THROUGH THE ZONE to get to our cars. They let us off work early so we can get the hell out of there. We look out the office windows and see drugged up, pretty, young white girls—maybe eighteen—being led back into alleys by gangs of black men. The cops stand right across the street from guys selling heroin, and from other guys who sell the clean needles in the medical wrap that get donated. It’s insane, like hell on earth. There are Chinese tourists all over the place, wandering out in traffic taking pictures, motorists cussing them out and throwing trash at them, homeless people tackling them and robbing them, black men beating the shit out of them on the street—and they keep coming…helllllo, its Baltimore!

What the hell!

Is this a bad movie!

Where is Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, The Rock, Mark Wahlberg?

The men I work for drive beamers, pack guns and take no shit. But I’m just a secretary. I tried walking together with Koryn—but that’s another story the Devil Woman. Back to that later.

I was driving out Harford Road one time and five dudes in black ski-masks on illegal dirt bikes surrounded my car and “escorted me” doing wheelies in front of me, kicking the car. One time I went across Cold Spring to Erdman from Eighty-Three and these people are doing a dance in the middle of the street around this Lexus, like they are headhunters burning someone at the stake. Two of these people are climbing the light poles—what the fuck!

Once, on Baltimore Street, this homeless guy has a “will work for food” sign and this businessman in a beamer and a suit hands him a granola bar and this homeless guy goes off, reaching into the car for him, screaming, “You rich motherfucker, give me some goddamned money”—of course, this is five o’clock, when the zombie hordes and vampires are rising up out of the sewers to eat us. This suit gets out and screams back at this guy and spits in his face, telling him, “You’re lucky I don’t shoot you, you piece-of-shit!”

Seriously, it’s like a horror movie. When the cops go away the monsters come out. There is this one insane, coal black, skeletal, half-naked woman with yellow eyes—the Devil Woman—and gray hair. She stands in traffic and jumps in front of cars demanding money. I saw her get hit twice by the same car. After the first hit she jumped up on the hood and started clawing the windshield, spitting on the glass, screaming, “You white motherfuckers!”

This bitch gets hit at least once a week and then attacks the cars. The cops completely ignore her—I mean who wants to touch her! She’s indestructible—made out of rubber or something.

Once Koryn and I were walking to our cars together—you now, we wear dresses and high heels—this is not a casual work environment. And Vampire Woman sees us and starts following, yelling, “Hey, white people, hey, give me money.”

I’m like, “We can’t outrun her.”

Koryn is like, “And we’d need at least two NFL players to fighter her off!”

We try to walk faster and she starts running at us, with this prancing, bizarre gait, bouncing around waving her arms—good God, why, why? So luckily, Koryn smokes and she takes out a pack of cigarettes, pulls out one and throws it at her. That was all it took—it was brill—the woman crosses her arms in the air and yelled, “God bless,” and bounces off screaming at these other poor bastards, “I need a light, you white motherfuckers—I need a fucking light!”

Baltimore is hell. The heck with the police—we need U.S. Marines!

-Yolanda