Harry looked like a frightened chimp at the bar, afraid to make eye contact with the young apes playing pool, or the great silverbacks along the back of the bar, eying the troop of adolescent apes—hooting as they did from the sidewalk across the street—nervously. This was last night.

Last week I was speaking with a fellow writer over some microbrews at the joint across the street, discussing the fact that the plague of pack attacks in August never spilled over to September. In an unrelated conversation I declared that I did not believe in Fate, that I spit in her eye.

Sorry Harry, it seems the old hag was listening in and you looked like easier meat to the band of primates she set loose on the asphalt savannah.

As it turns out last week Harry was tracked halfway home from that bar where I sat next to him last night. On Echodale Street, in the Hamilton neighborhood of Northeast Baltimore, at about midnight, he was approached by five youths, three of whom he recognized from the ghetto barber shop next to the bar. The pack consisted of two young adult white hood-rats and three teenage black hood-rats. These were not apex predators, not the big black men in vintage Buicks cruising for blitz mugging victims.

Harry is just below average size, in his early fifties, and was a little drunk. He tried to protect himself by pushing and then shelling up on his feet as the punches rained down…

He woke up some time later on the sidewalk in a puddle of his own blood. Both his eyes were black [a week later one still is] He had a bleeding shoe scuff on his forehead. His bottom two front teeth were never found. His fifty dollars in loose bills were gone.

This attack and those like it do not get into the law enforcement database. The victims inevitably decide, for many different reasons, not to report their attackers. These reasons include, from most to least often voiced:

snitches get whacked in Baltimore

the police don’t give a shit

I was drunk so it was my fault and I’m embarrassed

I [either work or take the bus] and don’t have all that time to be hassling with the legal process and

there was so many of them and it happened so fast I don’t have a good description.

Harry seems to fear retribution, a valid fear, as an entire group of violent felons—to my knowledge—has never, ever, been convicted of such an attack. The prosecutor usually either goes for the primary actor or accepts the scapegoat offered up by the predators. Either scenario leaves the bulk of the attackers free to punish the snitch.

Before I headed home, I palmed my ink pen and walked the area, looking for these guys, as they had disappeared. A half hour later I headed out swiveling my head and rocking my lower legs while I walked to get them juiced for pivoting and stomping. Two blocks up the street a local skank prostitute homed in on me and I glared at her. She veered off course like a ten-dollar-seeking missile diverted by magnetic chaff toward a drunk about my age and a little smaller. I don’t know what she said as she pawed him, wasted and pale in her black lace halter. I did hear what he said as they walked together across the street to a mixed race group of youths, who did not appear, at a distant glance, to be the same as those who banked Harry.

The angry drunk said, “No, every time I do that I’ve got twelve sets of hands reaching into my wallet.”

They joined the group. As the man began discussing something with the youths the exfoliated bleach blonde carcass in sneakers, saggy jeans and black halter hunched her weathered shoulders and scampered into a dark five-foot wide alley on the other side of the building. I have no idea what that was about. I do know that the vast population of lone aging drunks and drug addicts on these streets make for easy prey for their inheritors, the fresh wave of scum that inundates the "once great medieval city" of Baltimore.