Two weeks ago, while taking my coffee break, I was perusing the bulletin board at work, I noticed a missing person ad for a young paleface in his late teens or early twenties. The ad had a photo which was a photocopied version of a selfie that this fellow had taken while sitting in the front seat of his car. This fellow had last been seen leaving White Marsh Mall on a weekend night. It was now Monday. I didn't have good feelings about how this would turn out, but decided to use this posting as a chance to help the young fellow who runs the register at night, who just then had no customers. The single customer in the store had just passed me on his way in as I stretched out my hamstrings on the parcel pick up bumper guard. This man's name is Mr. MacClean. He is my age, 5' 10", and a very strong 240 lbs, with a broad, shaven head. When he saw me stretching, he betrayed his college football roots when he said, "Half-time, stretching it out, Huh, Brother?" I groaned the groan of the gimp and he entered, chuckling softly.

Having given up the stretch and following him in, I was now attempting to de-sissify our nighttime cashier, Dennis. Dennis is 6' 4", 340 lbs, and at 19 years of age, is tainted with very little of the toxic obscenity of our media culture. I have met his parents, who are good, hard-working people and they have somehow protected him from our vast sleaze matrix, he is utterly clueless when it comes to aggression. I struck upon this notice of the boy his age who had gone missing as a point of departure into things dark. I waved him over to the bulletin board, pointed to the ad and said, "You're going to be driving as soon as you get enough money for a car, and White Marsh is the place to go; it's also the place where these black dudes come up out of the city to hunt white guys. It's not just guys like me who live in the city who need to worry about this. These guys carjack a hacker somewhere in west Baltimore, and then they use that car to go hunting. I'm not saying that's what happened to this guy, but guys are getting taken down about one a day in White Marsh, and half of them are guys who drive. They even took one guy's clothes at the gas station at 2:30 in the afternoon, a quarter mile from the police barracks. At that moment, we both perceived that Mr. MacClean was at register six, about 15 feet behind us, to which Dennis winced, for I had just implicated people of Mr. MacClean's race for hunting people of his race.

Mr. MacClean to the rescue.

Instantly aware that I was educating Dennis and that Dennis was suddenly afraid that I had insulted Mr. MacClean by implicating members of his race of actually attacking white folks, Mr. MacClean set the record straight. First winking at Dennis, Mr. MacClean says to me, "You tell it like it is, Brother. Out here, it's getting like it was for us down in the city." Dennis conducts the transaction, and Mr. MacClean, on his way to work, wishes us a good day. Dennis looked at me quizzically, and I told him, "Last year, when those riots were going on down in the city, the hunt was on out here, too. When Mr. MacClean was coming to work, he saw three young black dudes chasing a white girl down the street, three blocks from here. He pulled over, got her in his car, and brought her in here, then headed to work. Her name was Crystal. We called the cops for her. They never came, so she stayed until daylight and then headed out. So he knows what he's talking about."

Within three days, the young man's friends, not the police, who had conducted their own search for him, found him dead in his vehicle, having driven or been driven off the road into a stand of trees.