My Uncle Pegleg who lived down in Southwest Baltimore had a friend named Kenny. At that very corner where I got beat up by the police at the shrine, he got stabbed very badly—hit him several times. I don’t remember the exact details, but he had a big butcher knife scar under his heart. Stories like that kind of informed your view of the possibilities of life on the street.

A lot of it has to do with staying in your lane and minding your own business. When you seem to be confident and have a purpose, people are less inclined to approach you. If you look clueless you are going to draw the wrong people, the wrong attention. I have a habit with Dindus and other people; I’ll talk the talk with people—I didn’t recommend it for a lot of people—but if you are confident with them it works. Easy conversation—I don’t know if you can teach that to anybody. A lot of self defense guys never been in bad neighborhoods, so I don’t know who much you can teach in a book .I’m no expert but just growing up around this dumb shit you know how dumb people act. I’ve got a dumb hillbilly hat that has Trump on it and have Dindus ask me about Trump and I say I just wear the hat—I didn’t like him any more than anybody else. I’ve been in a bar and they ask me—Dindus—did you vote for Trump and I say yeah and they're like, yeah, okay. There was one woman when the election was on who saw the saw the hat and she looked like the KKK was standing in front of her, so I talked to her and made her at ease. It’s not her fault, it’s the media’s fault. When she looked up her eyes got terrified and I felt bad for her and joked with her. I was wearing it for a conversation piece. Nothing bad happened and I was wearing it all through Baltimore. I had a lot of black men shout out to me that they were voting for Trump.

I had a good neighbor who grow up in West Baltimore, a black karate guy, hated dindus more the. I had no threats maybe a couple of looks It was good study of human nature. You can’t go into city neighborhoods like a doormat or looking clueless. People that have been through the prison system and grew up in in these neighborhoods can smell the fear. I look at self defense online largely as entertainment. I worry about protecting my friends and family, but not for myself. I go do my thing and don’t let anybody stop me. A lot of the fights I had when I was younger I do not recommend and it was stupid. But it’s good for a man to get that out of his system. This mythical thing, the street fight, the holy grail—that’s something that you should have got out of your system when you were young, dumb and full of cum. Most of the fights I had I could have walked away. In retrospect it helped me, because there’s no guarantees. I carried that into my working life, and really got tested the most when I was sixteen, walking home.

A lot of people here in Baltimore, their mental development gets stunted at their teen years. You have 50-year-old teenagers running around Baltimore. I don’t know if it’s the drug problem, what it is, but they never achieve any type of maturity. Your going to go up against somebody with a teenage mentality and the ground is where you’re going to get hurt. In some of these areas, if you’re an outsider and get jumped—and you usually do get jumped when you are either an outsider of they have brought help and hit you alone—and if you try to go to the ground and pull a triangle or arm bar, the neighbors will come out and stomp on your head. People don’t realize how common guns and knives are and how effective some untrained people can be, because they're good at picking when they attack and mobbing up. A mob is something you’ve got to deal with now and you don’t do that from the floor. Managing aggression will go a lot further than an arm bar or a chokehold. When it comes time to throw punches you probably done fucked up somewhere, so that’s no time to get fancy, when you’re doing dindu damage control.

There are two trains of thought: keeping your mouth shut and staying in your lane or talking the talk, the problem is there’s no in between. When you go that route you gotta be legitimate about it, not fake. You can’t fake this stuff unless you’re an actor. I was sixteen or seventeen and I answered an ad for a job in a paper, just a couple-day job down on Howard street. I was hired. They took us out on a van—me and eight or nine old dindu guys. We had to dig this big ditch. These people had a lot of money and they had expensive landscaping and didn’t want any heavy equipment fucking up their flowers, so we had to dig this by hand. We meet the guy, a white guy. He has lines painted, a hundred-fifty to two-hundred feet. He handed us a four-foot stick and wanted the ditch as deep as the stick was long. These guys were a lot older than me and it was as hot as fucking balls. They handed us shovels and pickaxes and he said he’d come back and check on us.

We get to digging and some of these guys are already sweated dry—ready to keel over. There was no water and they have a lock box on the hose. One guy says he’s going to go ask and I say, “I’m white. Maybe if I ask they’ll let us have some water."

I knock on the door and the family is in there around their kitchen nook eating and they won’t answer the door—looking right through me like I’m invisible. The contractor probably said, “Don’t open the door, they’re street people." So I took the shovel over and I popped upon the lock box and pulled the hose out. It was a mansion house. The father could have at least seen what was going on. We got their hole dug for them—like being on a chain gang, but we got it done. They were probably liberals. It was minimum wage, whatever it was then.

It was a warm, summer night, I had a T-shirt on. I was walking down Hamilton towards McClean, coming home from a girl’s house, a friend’s house. It wasn’t work. It was a weekend night at about eleven o’clock. I was walking along and I heard the two dindus coming around the curb on their bikes, so I turned around and looked at them. Bike robberies are far more common than most people realize. They can spot you from a distance and ride you down. They were following me down Hamilton. They were a block off when I got eyes on them and I knew it was no good. I instantly knew it was going to be a problem. They kept coming up on me, paused for a second as they came around the corner and I turned and spotted them. By then they were up on me.

I was on the sidewalk.

One was in the street—grass, curb, gutter separating us.

One was on the sidewalk.

I was standing, keeping an eye on—something was going down.

The guy on the sidewalk is in front of me.

The guy in the street is to my right.

The one in the street, the one that ultimately had the gun, says, “What’s up, Yo.”

Somehow I got behind the guy on the sidewalk so that I was behind him, back the way I came.

He turned to face me.

The guy in the street drops his bike over the curb and is standing straddling it on the grass strip between the curb and the walk.

There are some words. The guy in the street says, “Nigger, you know what time it is.”

And he pulls his shirt up with his left, pulls the gun out with right, out from his waistband.

He’s pointing it at me in the ghetto cock [sideways], pointing it around his friend. Come to think of it, maybe that’s how they developed that handgunning style, from pointing it around their accomplices?

The friend is stupid and confused. Like the old cartoon with the bull dog and the little dog bouncing around him. He was around for the ride. Whenever you pull a caper you need a dimwit to manipulate—a rule of thumb in Baltimore.

The dimwit was skinny and dark-skinned, short hair, wearing baggy jeans and a basketball, athletic tank top, also baggy.

The mastermind had jeans, not quite as baggy—they had to hold up the gun—and a white T-shirt, a long, white T-shirt.

He tells the dumb dindu, “Well, search him.”

It’s a touch.

I’ve got three or dollars in my pocket. He pats me down, but doesn’t go in my pockets and misses the money. He tells the bossman, “He ain’t got shit.”

So Bossman tells him, ”Take that fuckin’ hat.”

I had a new Boston Red Socks hat on.

He’s coming to grab the hat, with one hand. He’s right in my grille. [face, ebonic for teeth]

I grabbed the [shirt] strap on the right side with my left hand and I grabbed the bicep of his right hand and I drove this motherfucker into the gunman and immediately let him go and went in on a two-on-one wrestling hold on his gun.

[Demonstrates double underhook, with right grabbing under the gun thumb and with left grabbing under the gun bicep as he moves to the outside of the gunsight.]

We were pulling and ended up on the ground, his gun still turned down, and the other guy is out here throwing punches at my head, and the niցցer under me is reaching around with his left hand and reaching for the gun and he’s got his finger on the trigger.

I’ve got this other niցցer throwing punches at my head and we’ve got four hands on the gun and I’m side circling the other one off of me, kicking at him [demonstrates back kick]. Trying to get him off and he’s hitting my head but not doing much.

I came down with my mouth and sunk my teeth into the back part of his right thumb.

The gun went off.

It was like being concussed—ringing, confusion, went off right next to my fuckin’ face. The bullet hit the pavement and the blow back got all in my right eye. I couldn’t see. In my right eye was the cement particles, some imbedded in my face and my eye is hurting badly

At this point my right eye and ears ain’t working I’m pretty much going by instinct. The goofball dindu throwing puches at my head takes off—on bike or running I’m not sure. At that same instant I got the gun out of his hand I got hold of the barrel with my right hand. My left hand is still on his right arm.

I start hitting him in his face with the magazine well [housing]. I hit him quite a few times in the ear, eye, side of face.

At that point I got up and ran. It was stupid, but kept the gun. I think I stuck it in my waist band running up the street. I was two and a half blocks from my house, ran through the parking lot of the corner store, across Mclean and right in the front door.

When I ran into the house I started hearing sirens.

My mother was in the kitchen. I ran into the bathroom and started rinsing my eye out.

I doubt these guys got arrested. They were probably the victims if they did pick them up.

I took it [the gun] to my bedroom, took the clip out, checked the action out. There was probably six rounds. It was a Barretta 9.mm. I went and bought rounds and before long I had it down at the end of Brunswick Street above where the Pink Bunny Man used to hunt, with my friends shooting the shit out of everything. We shot the bridge, the bottles, the garbage. My father had taught me that you do not stand like a cop when you use a handgun. You draw the gun with your right, back by your hip while you’re spacing off with your left hand and you fill his belly. Gun shit goes down at close quarters—no time to pose.

I put it under the bed, moved it to the sock drawer, changed places.

I was aware there could have been a body on that gun, but I earned that gun and played with it a lot.

I sold it to a guy at work a few years ago and he’s got it in his hunting lodge in the mountains in West Virginia.

Your purpose is to have kids, to further the species. The liberals just want you smoking pot in your basement at age 45. Then the hard drugs on top of that. Some people get through drug addiction and get forged that way. Prison is the new army. It’s no secret what it [drugs] does to you. You grow up around it. I think they go into heroin or crack or pills as a rite of passage, thinking they’ll beat it and it eats them alive. Drug addiction dominates every aspect of life in Baltimore—thousands of high-paying, early-retirement government jobs just to arrest, try, house and rehab these people. Drug addiction is the best government program going.

Fighting Smart: Boxing, Agonistics & Survival