11:04 P.M., 10/12/16

I am in a foul mood.

No hunters came for me in the City, but the driver would not stop until I made him swerve to avoid hitting me.

The bus is half-full, the way it used to be, because the last two buses did not come, and these people are left over from the 8:30 and 9:30 runs.

At Middle River I notice that the #4 is behind schedule, and something else has gone wrong, for the African medical orderly, who now hates me for declining to be her white knight of the night, has company at the brightly lit stop. No one uses the stop I off load at, across the street, as it is darkened.

These people will not occupy the open-faced kill box that is the nighted bus shelter. The African woman stands off 15 feet. A young paleface squats on a curb, 50 feet off, his back to a fence.

A young black woman hides behind the hedges. A white woman hides behind the shelter.

Most County police resources are being focused in Towson by night, with two reports of multiple officer responses to violence calls at the other end of this bus line.

As the bus pulls off, the other character, a man who I do not know by name, but has often befriended me, his mind to addled to recall our history, limps away from the African lady who he seems to have been protecting. Making his way over to me he says, “Good evening, sir. Would you happen to have a smoke you could spare?”

I said, looking away from him to scan for thugs, “I don’t smoke.”

He is 5’8” and 130 pounds, sixty to sixty-five years old, with gray hair cut short on a narrow head and his face covered with a week’s growth. He wears flannel shirt and jeans over worn sneakers, his two front teeth missing on top and bottom. I might have been feeling like a gimp, with this hip, but my anger must have given another impression, so much so, that he recommends himself as a worthy sidekick—something he has done with me in the past.

He stands next to me, and then walks by my side as I cross slowly, every one seeming to wonder if I am going to stop and wait with them or not. For the past 18 months, people have wanted company on bus stops even as they shun it on sidewalks. During our crossing he makes his case,

“Sir, I could do good for a man like you. The lady there, I’ve been a comfort to. That young fella, he was about ta get clipped settin’ on that curb and I called that cab to a halt. I hold the bus for people when they strugglin’ to the stop. That the way I do. Everybody can use company these days, sir—you have a blessed night,” he finished, as I continued to ignore him and walked out into the darkened lot by the park to minimize my time on Old Eastern Avenue.

Before taking the road, I stopped and looked, and no one had followed. I made the road, stopped and looked, and noticed to my pleasure that the fog stream was flowing above the one that has been encased in concrete pipe below as it makes its last run down to the river. The gazebo in the park is darkly luminescent in the fog, with the police station lights glowing behind it in the distance.

By the time I reach the 7-11 a good-sized, ebony queen is leaving the store. She tries to outpace me into the mini-park. But, having been stalked through this place by shady characters before, I try to hit the sidewalk first. She beats me there, but is uncomfortable with me behind her, just as I am nervous about walking slowly through this Dindu mugger’s bottleneck. I am not rude enough to pass a woman in the dark, for I know she will be in fear, so I allow my pace to match hers. She is uncomfortable with this, stops, steps off to the side, pretending to be checking the cuffs of her golden, boot-topped slippers, from which her thick legs sprout, covered in black spandex, as is her top.

Having paid attention during the next to the last scene in The Dogs of War, I keep an eye on her over my shoulder in case there is a razor in that boot top. She walks around behind the bushes, keeping an eye on me and widening our gap.

A sense of uneasy courtesy, pregnant with hostility, has pervaded the night, an uncommonly good night by my reckoning, except that I was so rude to the semi-homeless old man. If there is any justice in life, and I live as long as him, I’ll end up in his wretched shoes.