Steevo and Matty were hanging out in the street down in Saint Helena "back in the day," hands in their pockets, on their guns. Steevo had a "Glock Nine" and Matty had "a Glock forty-five—he loved that thing, loved pistol whipping people with it. Stickup boy tried to get him once and he dropped his shit on the ground and when the boy reached to pick it up he worked him over."

Saint Helena is a small enclave of small frame houses occupied by whites of Irish descent for over 300 years. The blacks they beefed with came from Turner Station, the oldest Black Community in Baltimore and O'Donnell Heights, a feral, mixed-race gutter of a housing project, from which a Puerto Rican and a black dude once tracked me for over a mile before pouncing.

The black dude that approached Matty with his head down and hands in pockets, might have been a customer as they were out retailing "coke."

"The boy then jammed his piece into Matty's side and said, 'Give it up!'

He [Matty] was being a dick, dropping his shit on the round, ready to pistol whip this prick and then I feel something in my ribs—there's another boy behind me with his gun behind mine, where I have it pocketed and he says, 'Give me you shit, yo'

"First thing I said was to Matty, 'Dude, don't.'

"I said, 'I only have a twenty and my cigarettes,' and he's like, 'I taken everything you got!

"So they take our shit, we clean our pockets out with our left hand—they don't try and get the guns—and then they're off down the street and I saw the stupidest look on Matty's face I ever saw and I was like, 'Oh well,' and I pulled out my piece too and we started shooting. That is the biggest rush—the best high—you will ever have, shooting at someone. It was so incredibly stupid—I mean people could have been out, they just weren't. It was nightfall on a summer night. It was just a matter of seconds to unload half a clip and we were gone, heading inside. We were certain they were stickup boys from O'Donnell Heights—they never came back, never had no shit from O'Donnell Heights boys again."

"That was the good old days of stupidity—the late nineties."