James LaFond is a modern day shaman. He is a writer, fighter, coach, master-grocer, traveler, and a keen student of the human condition who until recently lived in the part of town in Baltimore where people hope they don’t break down. In addition to spending his adult life fighting in countless boxing matches, brawls, street altercations, stick-fights, and machete duels, he’s written over a hundred books ranging from literary and social criticism, to novels, to boxing manuals, to charting his hometown’s violent descent into the Third-World. He has lived in the belly of the monster and seen the ugly reality of its corruption first hand, as well as the occasional heroic attempt by some of its people to retain their dignity in defiance of it.

Lynn Lockhart is a woman who turned her back on the Striver-Corporate World to raise a family as a stay-at-home-mother with her husband. A few years back she joined forces with James to lend her services in support of his work, and has been a sister and aunt figure to many in online circles. 

This unlikely duo has become a powerful partnership and I’m proud to call them my friends. They kindly agreed to let me ask them some questions for this MAN’S WORLD exclusive, and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

 

James, your work is largely rooted in Baltimore. What was it that made you stay there? What kept you hanging on for all those years? 

JAMES: Well, I was the last person in my family not to be driven out of Baltimore from 1968 to…I don’t know, 2011, when I started writing about violence in Baltimore as a regular daily thing. A lot of my readers would chastise me for not moving out and seeking safety in the suburbs. I just did it because I was stubborn and I could.

 

How did you two meet? How does an urban shaman who has made a life studying violence and a stay-at-home mom in California join forces?

LYNN: It was 2015, around this time, April or May, because it was the Freddy Gray Riots. In those days I would read MPCdot.com and they had a thread called “Chimpouts” or something and it was a thread for riots. At that time the key chimpout was the Freddy Gray Riots in Baltimore, and some poster was like, “Well, if you want to know what’s going on, you have to read James LaFond,” and he put this excerpt from “Boomy the Cab Driver” about how Boomy was going around rescuing White women in the middle of these riots, and I just got sucked into the LaFond world. And then I realized…James gets criticism from both people who think that he’s despicably racist and then also people who think he’s despicably not racist enough. So I thought I would help him out by sending him some genetic studies and HBD information.

I think the big step was Kevin Michael Grace. Somebody said, “Hey James, Kevin Michael Grace knows who you are” and I said, “Well, let me see if I can get you on their podcast, The Two Kevins. So, I sent Kevin Michael Grace an email, and he said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” We had to rehearse how to use Skype…and The Crackpot Podcast was born.

 

SAM: I feel like I’m watching the great Buddy-Cop movie that never happened.

 

LYNN: Yeah, a weird story. But I learned how to publish books by helping James out. Another one of the complaints was “Why are his books full of typos?” I thought, “Well, if you’re the sort of person who gets hung up on typos, then maybe you just don’t deserve to read this stuff. Maybe you can just go read the New York Times or whatever and continue in that world.” But then I thought “No, we should do a better job with these books,” so I told James he wasn’t allowed to publish books anymore. And so that’s how Crackpot Industries began.

 

How was it that you got into fighting, James? (Or as Regular Ron from twitter asked, “When did you first understand the need to fight?”)

JAMES: I think that was when I was five years old; the first time I first got beat up. And then I thoroughly understood it by when I was six years old and I was getting beat up by three kids in front of the Immaculate Heart of Mary School. And then on a regular basis, beatings from more numerous older children and young men, it just reinforced it. By the time I was eleven, I already knew that my whole life was being beaten up and picked on, and I didn’t want it to happen anymore.

And all of a sudden, I started to smell, and I started to get ugly, and my skin broke out, and I started growing hair, and I started getting strong, and I said, “Wow. Now I can start beating up people too. Maybe while I’m beating them up, they won’t beat me up.” That was about it. It wasn’t even much of an evolution.

 

SAM: “He did not care if he lived or died! Life and death? The same!”

 

JAMES: Somebody wants me to write my autobiography, which I’m not gonna do, but I am gonna write a memoir of my childhood. It ends when I’m eleven years old and I’m standing in the bathroom of my parents’ house, looking in a mirror…and I have a stone, and I’m hitting myself in the face with the stone, just deciding I’m never going to cry again, and getting hit again isn’t going to hurt, and I was going to start doing terrible things to people. And that was it.

 

James, you’ve participated in hundreds of machete duels and in your writing you favor a shorter blade rather than a longer two-handed one. What is it about the arm-length sword that you like? 

JAMES: Oh, well, if you’re big enough and strong enough to use a longer sword with one hand, that’s fine. But when you put two hands on a weapon that isn’t a polearm, then you bring your heart, your left lung, and your spleen all on line. You actually shorten your reach and you broaden your profile. It’s just for movies. This was Miyamoto Musashi’s main point: “If you put two hands on a sword, I’m gonna kill you.”

We did a couple of fights where it was light stick against bat, and the guy with a bat’s gotta be strong enough to use it one hand just like it’s a stick. If he’s gonna put two hands on it, his hands are broken right out of the gate because he’s gonna put his hands right out in front of him. Either that or lift it over his head and stick his elbows out there and you just shatter his elbows. So it’s not really the length, it’s what can you wield. If you need to put two hands on it, then it needs to be a polearm like a staff weapon and that favors a bigger guy…something as small as even a longsword, doesn’t transfer all your strength.

 

What was your hardest fight? What were the worst beatings you received or gave?

JAMES: The three times I fought a guy named Rico and the thirty-five times I fought a guy named Aaron. I never beat Aaron. And I never beat Rico.

 

SAM: It’s like one beating with like thirty episodes to it.

 

JAMES: Yeah…I mean, Aaron hit you so hard it would feel like your blood turned to battery acid. I think probably him hitting me in the kidney with a stick was probably the worst pain that I could experience without passing out. The worst pain getting hit was Rico hitting me in the shoulder and bending the stick into a “U” over my shoulder. It hurt so bad it didn’t hurt. It just, like melted my nervous system, and he knocked me out. He did that to me two different times. That was the one time that Chinese medicine guy at the Karate tournament used me as a cadaver after the fight.

 

LYNN: This is something I feel I never got you talk about enough, James; the differences between different knock-outs. You just described getting knocked out by blow to your shoulder, so it’s not like a head or a concussion, right? It’s different. We have to talk about it for bareknuckle and body-shots and stuff like that for The Broken Dance.

 

JAMES: When non-boxing people talk about knock-outs, they think “going unconscious.” When guys that actually fight talk about knock-outs, the definition is “you are incapable of defending yourself; you’re done, you’re out.”

Of the twenty-one boxing matches I had, I only won seven, and the four I lost by knock-out were all body-shots. I never got the “Erase Button” hit getting punched. I have had about twenty-five concussions, and got knocked out in two stick-fights, but won them because I was unconscious when I won. I was just fighting on automatic pilot. I actually woke up with the referee picking me up and throwing me, okay. I didn’t wake up until then. I got knocked out in one stick-fight where I got kicked into the third row. If I would have been good enough to box professionally I would have gotten knocked unconscious numerous times, but at the amateur level I just wasn’t getting hit with the quality of punches that would have sent my one-quarter Irish brain into orbit and rendered me unconscious. I fight pretty good unconscious.

Lynn, you’re originally from South America. If I recall correctly, you were around for the various bouts of economic instability. Can you tell us a little about that time and what it was like? Do you see any similarities between then and the present-day U.S., and if so, do you have any advice?

LYNN: I didn’t see it firsthand, but I do have family in that part of the world. The only interesting thing I can tell you – that I really believe – again, because some of these circles here are big believers in human biodiversity, which I too believe; what human beings go through in that type of economic crisis has a lasting effect on the culture. So when you experience hyperinflation and when you experience asset seizure, it really wrecks people’s time-preference, and it wrecks time-preference across generations.

So when you look at poverty in South America, you can’t always look straight to the genetic explanations. I think there are cultural explanations, and we have to be vigilant, because we are experiencing that right now. With the inflation that we’re feeling right now, I know that it’s affecting people’s time-preference in America, and it will continue to do so.

I do not embrace Accelerationism because I know that life can really suck, and it can keep sucking for a long time…you had people who had their life savings wiped out, people having property that was in the family for generations wiped out either by debt or various government shenanigans, and it’s weird. It definitely could come here.

 

SAM: My brothers and I have been noticing shortages and stuff and remembering what it was like growing up in the Eighties, and it seems like for all our technological innovations, there’s clearly a decline that’s going on.

 

LYNN: Oh yeah. To me, I’m in the school of: things will get worse and worse little by little and they won’t really get better. One example I gave back during our podcasting days, is I believe probably in my kids’ lifetime we won’t have commercial flights anymore, or they’ll be a much lower scale than what we came up with, and I still believe that. You can see little trickles of it like with the Boeing thing and airlines really aggressively pushing hiring quotas and things like that. Competence will just go down.

Healthcare is the same. I have real reservations about seeking healthcare. I’ll give you an example. My grandfather, he had one hypodermic needle; he kept it, and it was his, and if he ever needed medical care, he’d tell the doctor, “You use this one.” And he’d take it home, wash it, and sterilize it. Now, every needle is disposable. Just try to picture a world where high-tech medical care exists, but you don’t know what you’re getting.

When we were podcasting, groceries were always a topic. So for a while during The Pandemic there was this thing where there wasn’t this certain kind of snack chip that people wanted. You go to the store and there’s forty kinds of Cheetos and tortilla chips and potato chips, and the one that I like isn’t there. Or it’s the one that I like, but the right size of container that I want isn’t there…and I think, “This is how an American famine starts.” And please, God, I’m not predicting famine, but according to American levels of prosperity, a famine is when you cannot get the exact Flaming Cheetos that you want at the gas station.

 

You mentioned groceries, and we’ve got “The Ghetto Grocer,” so I’m curious; James, you were talking with the boys at Myth of the Twentieth Century around the time of Covid. Has your assessment of things changed any since then? How do all these shortages look through your eyes?

JAMES: There’s massive amounts of stuff that’s edible that you can sell to people. I don’t see people starving in this country. I see famines being engineered in other countries so that you can bring those people here so you can make sure we can’t get jobs in our country, that’s what I think will happen there.

If you look at shrink in supermarkets, the way shrink is being managed is changing…but you still throw almost everything out –

 

SAM: What’s “Shrink?”

 

JAMES: “Shrink” was everything you can’t sell by the Use-By/Sell-By/Best-By date, or that gets damaged to the point it’s unsaleable. Like if you run over a case of hot dogs with a forklift and they all get smashed or whatever.

In a typical small supermarket that does about $330,000 to $400,000’s worth of gross-business a week and maybe employs fifty people, that supermarket is going to fill up about three dumpsters during the course of that week with perfectly edible food. You can’t even give it away to homeless people because when you start giving stale croissants or day-old bread to a homeless shelter, somebody’s going to sue you and say they got Botulism from it. So there’s still massive quantities of food being thrown out of supermarkets.

 

LYNN: It’s important to note here that in the Great Depression in the United States they were burning crops to try to boost food prices to help farmers or whatever. So we have to remember that most famines in history are largely political.

 

JAMES: I can tell you, with a bakery, if you’ve got a scratch-bakery, any place where they make their own donuts, they make their own cakes, bake pies and things like that…that bakery will throw out three times as much food as it sells. Okay, so if they’re selling a donut, they’re throwing three out. It’s a loss-leader department. It’s very hard to make money on a bakery, but it’s not the only department that’s like that. The deli’s like that, the produce is like that, the meat room is like that…now recently, meat departments have been starting to mark down meat that no longer meets the standard and is starting to get a little brown. That’s just the fluorescent lights in the store changing the color of that meat on the outside. With that one very expensive item, supermarkets are now actually trying to get into the business of selling food rather than selling packaging.

There was a friend of mine that drives for a major supermarket chain. They ordered a hundred pallets of Kraft cheese. They could only get five pallets of Kraft cheese; not because Kraft doesn’t have cheese, but because the wrappers are made in China and they’re still sitting on a container ship somewhere. So in America, selling food is still just selling packaging. If you look at how much box cereal – which is not selling food, it’s selling packaging – sells compared to sacks of flour, it’s ridiculous.

We’re still not even talking about selling food in America. We’re selling convenience at a restaurant instead of food. In a supermarket, you’re selling branding. You’re selling identity. So we’re not even scratching the surface of selling food to a population to keep it alive. We’re nowhere near that.

 

Given your backgrounds; James, you as a fighter and trainer, and Lynn, you as a mother; do you both have any tips for people either in getting started or improving in those areas? 

LYNN: You want to go first, James?

 

JAMES: I don’t have any tips on how to be a better mom.

 

SAM: Well, I know you mentioned that guy who does Precision Striking. He’s got a YouTube channel.

 

JAMES: Yeah, Jason Van Veldhuysen. I wrote for his boxing manual.

 

SAM: Do you still have up the Lancaster Agonistics channel?

 

JAMES: That’s the guy…he’s in Tennessee…

 

LYNN: He changed the name of it. It’s now The Sevier Knox Combat Club. There’s a lot of James’s videos on there.

 

JAMES: The best place to learn a fighting art without getting ripped off or inducted into a cult would be a wrestling team. If you could access wrestling at a rec center, that would be one way. Another thing is homeschoolers are now permitted in a lot of places to participate in school team sports because school teams are so short on school athletes. So the first place would be just learn how to wrestle.

I don’t really have any concern for self-defense for women. They should just like, marry the right guy who’s gonna protect them and avenge them.

For the other stuff, it’s a complete snake-pit, that’s why I wrote a dozen books on it. If you can find a wrestling team where the coach is not a homo and the upperclassmen are not homo-rapists okay, then you’re good to go. And that’s most wrestling teams. There are wrestling teams that are like homo-rape squads, but they’re like one in a hundred. It’s not like football teams where you’ve got a handful of sadistic rapists on every football team. It’s not like that. Wrestling is much better as far as the culture goes.

But as far as MMA, Karate, boxing, all that…most of these people are scumbags and grifters at best; at worst they don’t even know how to fight or how to train people. So that’s a snake-pit and that’s why I’ve written a lot of books on it.

 

SAM: Which of your books would you recommend to someone to start out with, as far as Boxing?

 

JAMES: I’ve got like three boxing manuals, but that’s no good to you unless you’ve actually been trained to a certain degree. I would just pick up Thriving in Bad Places because it’s just a brief overview of options and there’s some condensed information in there on what you’re looking for.

One thing you could do, and in most states and counties there’s not a good boxing gym anyhow, and a lot of the MMA places will get you hurt, and none of them really have good striking, hardly any of them do. So what you could do is utilize information from somebody like Jason Van Veldhuysen on his site and just get together with a couple of your buddies and just start boxing. The guys I’m staying with here, that’s what they do. I just show up a couple months out of the year and spar with these guys on Sunday and I coach them. Or they’ll send me a video of them sparring and ask me to critique what they need to stop doing and what they need to start doing. Things like that.

It’s tougher and tougher to find a consistent coaching option because half of all places you could learn how to fight went out of business during The Shamdemic, and a lot of those places were already bad. Just get together with some other knuckleheads and start punching each other. Watch fight videos. Learn how to coach each other. Check out Jason’s channel.

 

LYNN: There’s a book that’s free on James’s website about halfway down called Modern Agonistics. It’s a PDF download. It describes the evolution of all those innovations you guys came up with in just trying it out and seeing what would happen. I really admired the arts and crafts aspect of it. They’d put extra wire around the face masks…there’s a great video I’d linked to where James made a double-ended bag out of a paper towel roll. Premium paper towel…it’s a fun little video where you show how to make this training tool. I think that’s a fun aspect of it.

 

JAMES: That one was specifically for the weapons stuff, which is actually more important. What it comes down to…fighting, boxing, MMA, wrestling…this is all preparation for voluntary stupidity. Sam and I are going to get into a disagreement and we’re gonna decide to break the law and we’re gonna send each other to the hospital and the winner gets to go to jail or prison. That’s what that is.

When it comes to actual real self-defense in a world where you really can’t fist-fight against a dozen Bantu warriors that are descending upon you with their short spears…and you’re not allowed to defend with a gun, and you can’t realistically defend against a mob with your fists…well, that’s what knife-fighting and stick-fighting is all about. And that’s even easier to learn without knowing what you’re doing than something like boxing or wrestling that requires more specific leverage and anything. You just get some hockey pads, masks, and sticks, and start hitting each other. You’ll be twice as good tomorrow as you are today.

 

SAM: That line you just said about “voluntary stupidity,” that gives me flashbacks. I think I told you, back in college there was this buddy of mine who had just gotten out of the Rangers after the first Gulf War, and he was kind of a mentor to me, and we were both interested in swords and that kind of stuff. We went and bought some Kendo shinai and we got some MMA gloves, and once a week we’d just beat the hell out of each other. We didn’t have any masks or anything.

It was wild in that you’d get butterflies. Or at least I would. I’d get real nervous, because this was a big guy; he used to be an Airborne Ranger and everything. I’d get real nervous, but you’d have to confront that and fight through that. You’d put a mark on him and it felt good. He’d beat the hell out of you and you’d learn to kinda have to get used to that. And afterwards we’d drink beer. There was something kinda primal in that; of going against somebody and being afraid and just goin’ through it.

 

JAMES: That’s great! And you know what? You learned that…it’s called time and measure. And you also learned rhythm. These are the things that were the most important to your Renaissance weapon-masters. Basically the guys that reinvented boxing around 1700 when they fought with swords and sticks. Time and measure was more important than your specific technique, okay. In martial arts, all you learn with weapons is techniques and it’s devoid of contact, therefore time and measure and rhythm, and it’s completely useless. So really, just get some rattan sticks and fencing masks and gloves and start hitting each other.

 

LYNN: I honestly think people need to hear all this kind of stuff James tells people; not just about fighting, but trying to view the world as it really is. As a woman having two daughters…I feel pretty strongly about this.

 

SAM: About that, Lynn, do you have any tips for motherhood or homeschooling or anything a girl could use?

 

LYNN: Well, if a woman comes across an issue of Man’s World in her boyfriend’s living room…

 

SAM: Yeah! He’ll be like, “Read this, woman! We gotta level up!” We’re trying to give them the tools to succeed.

 

LYNN: For being a mom, I’d say it’s mostly On-The-Job Training. Because babies are different from each other. For instance, my younger child is very different from my older child in the kind of care she needed as a baby. If that’s what you want to do you just go for it, and you hopefully have a lot of support from your husband and extended family members. The babies grow, and they become children, and then they start to need some kind of literacy, maybe, if you choose to teach them how to read…

 

SAM: Illiteracy is Trad.

 

LYNN: We chose to go down the path for literacy and other academic pursuits. I don’t know if it was the right choice. I actually started using library streaming apps and an old laptop to stream books; children’s literature, Classic mythology, and so forth as an alternative to television. But the big risk in homeschooling is it’s basically reinventing the wheel. It can be very frustrating in terms of choosing curriculum and building up a routine that works for a family. If you have a larger family, how do you cover the breadth of topics and skills that you need to cover? It’s really endless. But similar to a young fighter, if you can find someone like James to help you, that’s the best you can do; and to a young mom, try to find other moms and parents and families that feel the same way you do in general about life.

The good news is there’s tremendous resources available in terms of books, curriculum, play groups, co-ops, and things, so the big challenge is figuring out what’s right for you and sticking with it.

I also started carrying a knife. We live in a pretty decent place, but there is sometimes trouble like at the mall last Christmas. We’ve also had issues with dogs coming up to our kids at the beach. You start asking yourself, “How do I be more aware?” I wear a fanny pack with a knife and it helps. It puts me in the mode of looking for a threat. It’s a different mindset.

I’m on twitter (@LynnLock328) and I try to be available to people who are homeschooling if anyone has any questions.

 

Clark Savage, author of King of All Things, recently shared an excerpt from an article you’d written about how you think the heroes of the Iliad would have fared in our age. One commenter got all on his hind legs and objected to the notion that civilization bred emasculation and argued they would have wound up as heroes the same as any he’d seen in his local law enforcement community, and that such laments of modern decadence were a “cope.”  Why do you think a Homeric hero would do so poorly nowadays?

JAMES: Oh, they would be targeted. It’s the same reason why good cops are targeted by bad cops. I know some cops that have been forced out of policing because they’re surrounded by cowards, scumbags, they’re being supplanted by women; just like Achilles and Odysseus, who were caught working for Agamemnon who had a bureaucratic mindset…that’s what a modern police officer winds up dealing with. I’ve known cops from four different states who have gone through the exact same thing, and my estimation of law enforcement people is horrendous. It’s horrible. In places like Baltimore, most of them are active criminals. And this is the person that the guy who wants to be a hero…getting involved in law enforcement…is gonna deal with.

And the modern military, if it’s the U.S. military, you’re a part of this big vast machine, it’s more like being Aries. It’s more like being one of the gods…unless you’re one of those poor bastards that gets stranded on a mountain in Lone Survivor, you’re basically one of the gods if you’re a warfighter. But the real place you’re gonna see something like the tribal violence on a small scale like you would see in The Iliad or The Odyssey, it would be in the criminal matrix and American anti-communities. Where what you have here is you have to pretend your hereditary enemies are your brothers and your sisters.

My best story [of this] is Old Man Jimmy. He was a kickboxer. He was a pro-fighter with a winning record. He had one loss. He was Wayne Newton’s bodyguard in Las Vegas. Since he was a tall blonde guy, Nevada didn’t do him very good because he ended up with face cancer. He came back to Baltimore just to get a part-time job to support his wife while he was dying of cancer, and I hired him.

He worked with me in a small supermarket in Baltimore City, and a gang of Black kids beat him in the head with a baseball bat when he was walking to work. He survived that and even made it to work. But he was more careful next time. He didn’t let the kids get behind him, so he fought an eighteen and twenty year old man to a draw in an alley. His fists were black because of the problem with his thin skin and his age and everything like that.

What did civilization give him for his victory? Two men, both together were still only half his age, okay. He fought them to a draw. Baltimore City police came and arrested him and locked him up for a weekend with the pack animals. See, that Baltimore City police officer, that cop, that’s our idea of The Hero. Not Old Man Jimmy.

The same thing that happened to Old Man Jimmy happened to Achilles…another type of hero would be Odysseus. He has more of the criminal mindset in what he does to take back his land and everything. I found in Odysseus the person of Crazy Mark. He was a homeless man, like Odysseus. He was a big scary guy that used to work for me, and even tried to kill me when he worked for me twenty years earlier; he didn’t even realize I was the same dude. And I paid him money to beat up the local criminals, okay. So he would come into the store, right in front of my security guys – who were terrified of him – and if he had blood and snot on one of his boots, I’d give him twenty bucks. And if he just said he needed a favor, I’d give him some money. So he made the neighborhood kinda safe.

Now was he breaking the law? Technically, I was guilty of a criminal conspiracy, Mark was guilty of numerous felonies, okay. We’re villains. We’re criminals. But the two of us together were really acting like Odysseus acted in The Odyssey to protect people like Old Man Jimmy who were victims of something like The Iliad where the straight up and down, “I’m gonna mind my own business and defend myself,” you’re gonna get punished. Just like the honest cop gets screwed by the other cops.

 

The father of Esoteric Survivalism and author of King of Dogs, Andrew Edwards, and I were discussing your work and came to the conclusion the world would be a better place if you had your own boxing gym where you could just go nuts training dudes up. If we passed around a hat and got enough money raised, would you consider it?

JAMES: If you threw in a squaw. I’m getting kinda old. I need company. I get cold at night. Get me a squaw and I’ll be okay.

 

SAM: We’ll see what we can do here. We’ll start a Kickstarter so we can get James a squaw.

 

What’s next in the chute for you all? You mentioned The Broken Dance. What other projects are in the works at Crackpot Industries? 

LYNN: I just published The Last Whiteman. There’s a fragment of Robert E. Howard that’s actually pretty hard to find called The Last White Man and James sort of wrote a whole novel in the boots of Howard.

 

JAMES: The premise is that Robert E. Howard doesn’t kill himself and he goes on to become a travel writer. And when he’s in Philadelphia to meet L. Sprague de Camp, the 1968 riots kick off. So I have him decide to re-write The Last White Man. The storyline is more based on some Conan stories like Man-Eaters of Zamboulla…the character is more based on a Solomon Kane character…so I tried to write like I thought Howard might have written when he was an older man.

 

LYNN: There’s a starter-pack I made of James’s books…

 

JAMES: I’m writing Westerns right now. That’s one of the reasons I was down in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. It’s a series of four of them, and I’m on the second one right now. One of them is being serialized on the website right now. Its title is Sorcerer.

 

SAM: Lynn, you just published an art book for homeschoolers didn’t you?

 

LYNN: Yes. A Child’s History of Art by VM Hillyer. It’s a great overview of Western Civilizational art and a longtime favorite of homeschoolers that went out of print

 

JAMES: One book I would like to plug is The Filthy Few because I put Sam in there as a character that gets shot. Lynn also published your John Howard stories. You got shot in it, but you made it out better than some. I had like eight readers volunteer to get killed in it. Both of the same guys based on me got killed by a Hellfire missile en route to Highway 80.

 

SAM: And you’ve got the fight coming up in Tennessee in June?

 

JAMES: Yeah, I’ll be boxing Backfist Mick. It’ll be a full-blood Irishman against my quadroon-Irish self. I’ll try to lose that in good form. I’ll be stick-fighting with the kid I trained since age five to eighteen. He’s twenty-five now. The last time I sparred with him it was a real horror show. That’s only going to go one way.

I’ll be reffing three bareknuckle boxing matches there. I may also be fighting with a sjambok. Brett and I are going to be fighting with sjamboks.

 

SAM: What’s a “sjambok?”

 

JAMES: That’s a Zulu cattle whip.

I’ll also be wrestling an ex-cop! It’s gonna be Creep vs Cop combat. I actually wrote a novel called The Last Good Cop and it’s based on him. The first three chapters in the book are actually things that happened to him when he was a cop in the Pacific Northwest. And he wanted me to write him as a character that in order to keep his pension, for using excessive force in Seattle, he’s sent to Baltimore to finish his last six months out. It’ll probably be coming out sometime later this year.

 

SAM: Man, y’all are prolific.

 

JAMES: I just do it to keep from going insane, that’s all.