The two bridges were impressive.

The bridges that I was told were not bridges, were also impressive.

The lights were so bright, that even in the night I had to wear sunglasses to prevent the many beams of white, yellow, green and red from blinding me.

After much jockeying across highway lanes and waiting for traffic, the muscular, tattooed driver, Mescaline Franklin, informed me that we were on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. This dark, obnoxiously lit cavern bustled with rushing cars, SUVs, buses, trash trucks and tractor trailers, weaving in and out of traffic aggressively. Every driver was hyper-aggressive, like cartoon characters of stilted angst either hunched or slouched behind the wheel.

Except for her, the Insane Octoroon. She sat high in the seat of her large sports car her skin as light as mine, with pulled-back ringlet hair above four-inch hooped earrings. She cracked her gum, and wiggled her unseen—but no doubt prodigious—butt to the music at the numerous stops as she darted and rushed and gunned the engine and rocked the car with her dancing, seated flesh to the beat of the Latin tunes blaring from her stereo. Like her, my driver risked life and limb every third second to gain a foot on some other vehicle jockeying for position in the hurried night.

Noticing me viewing the motorized slut with interest, Mescaline says, “You would hit that?!”

I respond, “If she has a small waist and there are no knives in sight.”

With a grunt of disgust he guns the engine and we are back in the race.

On such a night, back in Baltimore, one can count on an a daring driver risking a pileup to be the first to arrive at the next red light, just like this crazed salsa queen ever managed to end up stuck at the same light as my speeding transporter. But in New York, every single driver is obsessed with the race into nothing across this hideous nowhere world of concrete, asphalt and blaring light.

In a half hour, I must have seen thirty subway cars, boxy, dirty white and well-lit, circling the concrete horizons as they split and converge.

Mescaline points to Mike Tyson’s old neighborhood of Brownsville as if it were the doorway to Hell. He then takes me down the road and declares we are taking a lightly-travelled shortcut to Queens, where he has arranged for me to share the flat of a Chinese opera singer who is travelling with a choir just now.

I am soon being whisked at 70 miles per hour through a concrete chute of a highway in which all motorists weave in and out of traffic in a death dance. If one of these New Yorkers miscalculates, ten of us are dead and maimed in three seconds. Bumpers and fenders less than three feet away, the insane school of mechanical fish dart through the tunnel-like underpasses, around blind turns, my driver taking one hand from the wheel to point out a girlfriend’s house, a graveyard, a herd of grazing deer 15 feet from the vehicular storm. He brakes, weaves, darts and rides the bumper of another who does the same. Then some hundreds of yards from a tunnel, where traffic will be bunched up, a roar ignites. A man in a chromed Hummer leaps ahead of traffic with a roar, doing at least 110 miles per hour and my driver cheers him on, “Get it, son, get it—go, go!”

This is more frightening than driving across the top of the Bear Tooth Mountains above a guard rail just high enough to flip the pickup truck over immediately… I say a prayer to Odin that I will not die like this, but meet my end stabbing and eviscerating Dindus on some shady Baltimore lane.

The roar of traffic, the rushing of lights, the vibrating of the vehicle after a piece of steel road litter almost blows the tire under my feet, this all serves to calm me, the utter insanity failing to achieve the menace of something I can comprehend like heights.

Then, suddenly, I am in a garden-like paradise called Queens—which I am assured is a “Chinese ghetto,” but which appears to comprise, in this small northeast corner of that sector of the insane city, all of the best areas of Baltimore City, arranged in one giant gnome garden, grimly defaced with iron bars on the sides and faces of 7 out of 10 houses, but tranquil and unhunted. As we park, the foot traffic is as light and unhurried as the speedway we just survived was crowded and frantic.

After 8 hours in the car, barely able to limp, I am treated to an hour-long, bucolic nighttime stroll around this pastoral ghetto, not a Dindu in sight. Little did I know then, that I would spend almost three days in New York and only see three people wearing the ebony skin of the soulless Baltimore Beast.