The Liquor store between the Beauty Supply Superstore, the Gas Station, the Dutch Village Hoodrat hive and the mixed-race borderland of single family homes on Moore—the short cut through from the City side of Parkville and the County side—is a predation choke point. I have been threatened, stalked, followed and packed up on a total of four times in the past two years n this very stretch.

The ailing suburb ahead and the dying city behind are saturated with a steady, pattering rain.

Mescaline Franklin drives me across the county line as we spot three young thugs—with, one supposes, their knives and nines holstered in their diapers—standing, flexing in the rain, swiveling for prey by this plexi-glassed liquor store frequented by senior citizens of their own race, mostly buying lottery tickets, in a constant bid to gamble like the cavalier masters of their forefathers.

The slight hunters search the never again bustling traffic with hungry, feral eyes and we are gone, past them in an instant.

Up ahead a neighborhood man walks toward the ambush point, having purchased his bottle of malt liquor up the way in the county, a half mile off. I started to chuckle at the act I have seen often, of the local, black pedestrians in middle age, walking off up into the County to buy their carryout at Pappas, along a narrows secondary street with no sidewalk, that winds up a hill, and Mescaline narrates the elder Negro’s peril-laced plight with a blurted, “Naw, son, you better turn around. They’re waiting for you!”

And that fleeting scene, that parody of animal predation that is the hunting of the elders by the young in this cannibal complex of a city, is gone, rain-soaked and unseen, fleeting into the trivial shadows of the immediately dead past.

Fighting Smart: Boxing, Agonistics & Survival