My favorite neighborhood liquor store is Yankoona Liquors, which shares half of a tiny commercial strip behind a gas station and across from a car wash, next to old, cheap, brick, town home rentals infested with section eight criminals migrating to greener pastures to practice their thugery on lower middle class whites. The other half of the small strip has been, over the six years I coached around the corner, alternately a convenience store, vacant, an upscale lunch spot, vacant, and then after an extensive summer renovation, for three short weeks a sub and fish fry shop catering to thug tastes. Not tasty enough, apparently, because the Latino owner closed up after a door was kicked in, his new windows were spray painted with gang tags and his banner was torn down, presumably by associates of the thugs who have beaten and pistol whipped liquor store patrons, have robbed the store at gunpoint and who have threatened, marked and followed me. If you don’t know what “marked” means, do not move to a Dindu neighborhood—you are already mugged.

Yankoona Liquors is two blocks from the Bel Loc Diner, made famous in the Barry Levinson movie, Diner. This diner is going out of business to be replaced by a Starbucks, which will hopefully fair better next door to the motel that wraps halfway around the landmark eatery as it serves as a semi-permanent residence for criminals awaiting trial over at the Towson Courthouse.

This past year the store has been under a loose siege. Wanting a six-pack and sum cheap rum, I decided to visit at peak hours, just as school lets out. The staff and owners are polite and helpful and I like to support them. The owner is a Pakistani man who employs his two sons, a big Puerto Rican and the Rican’s very hot Russian wife, who they never let work by herself.

I walk in as a gigantic black woman with two cases of wine passes me. Unlike most area blacks since the election of Trump, she does not glare at me hatefully, but with a bland resignation.

I get in line behind a short, muscular, young thug, who flexes and poses and rolls his eyes at the three men behind the counter, playing hoodrat mime. The men behind the counter are shoulder to shoulder, the youngest son to the right, who nods respectfully to me and thanks me for coming, a terrified 18-year-old black kid whose hands are shaking from the encounter and the big Rican who knows well how to play hoodrat mime and reads all of the thug signs, conducting the encounter as a moderator between the cashier and youngest son and the man who has come here to terrorize them with his right hand in his pocket and his left hand holding $10 bill.

Hoodrat mime is played like so:

The menacing hoodrat, sacred martyr of liberal America, stands with one hand in his pocket, possibly holding a weapon and the other hand holding up the bill he is spending. He will not speak.

There is no change given in hoodrat mime, for the hoodrat refuses contact with the counter person.

The goal is to terrorize the counter person into giving product valued more than the bill and also to hold up the line, establishing dominance of the ghetto space.

The counter person proposes a purchase item and the flexing thug either rolls his eyes in disdain or glares. A glare means put it up on the counter, rolled eyes means, “Yo mu’ be foolin’ nigga.”

The Rican aces this asshole and hits him with, “Barbecue sunflower seeds” a “Short of Bacardi,” and “after taxes we owe you a nickel, so take a bubble gum.”

The thug throws the bill at the terrified kid, sneers at the Rican and glares at the younger son and takes his bubble gum and the small black bag of goodies. Turning around to displace me and make me step aside, he is disappointed to find me blocking his path and pointing the butt of my liter of Roaring Forties rum at his chin and hefting the six-pack of Natty Boh to smash him in the head. He backs up, walks around the snack rack and out the door.

The men behind the counter are polite, the black kid still scared. I thank him and compliment him on his first day’s performance, and the big Rican bags my goods as the kid hands me my change. When I turn to walk out, a big black my age is standing slightly to the side eye-fucking me, making hard eye contact and I give it back, then shoulder my way through the other patrons.

As I hit the exit a big black girl is coming in, holding the door for her breeding drone. I thank her and walk into the doorway and stand until his sweet ass steps aside and then walk by him and past the two thugs chanting their menacing rap on the wide sidewalk yet swishing their narrow asses like horny high school girls.

That is a business under siege and it wasn’t even dark yet. I’m betting the father and the oldest son will be in there to increase the garrison to five before night comes down and the Dindus rise and begin their hunt in earnest.

The free weekly that covers this area has still postponed its police blotter and The Baltimore Sun only has one thing to write about crime in Baltimore County, that the police are not sensitive enough in dealing with innocent, unarmed black youth carrying guns. Everybody knows that the innocent are never armed until their bullet actually rips through you, in this sick, simpering world that fawningly abides and abets the sacred thug ethos of Dindustan.