ON WHITE VERSUS BLACK:
Walking down 8th Avenue under a light rain I ignore the passers-by other than to side aside for old women and children. The rest of the people on the sidewalks have had their humanity stolen from their souls by the TV, ads, schools, churches, and work.
A pocketbook smashes into me, as I enter a Chelsea bookstore to escape the afternoon drizzle. The glass door shuts and then opens with a man shouting, “Hey, white boy, don’t you know when to say you’re sorry.”
A small black man is standing before a taller white woman, obviously embarrassed by her beau’s outburst. He can’t leave the imagined slight alone and gives me the finger. I shrug and all five-foot on him strides aggressively down the aisle three inches taller in his red platform shoes. The top of his panama hat reached my eyes and I wonder if I’m going to have to duke it out with a midget. His lady shadows him, a lime green valise-sized pocketbook over her shoulder. He points his left hand in my face.
“Who you think you are white boy to not have to say you’re sorry?
“I didn’t bump into your friend. She swung her purse into me. I didn’t think nothing of it.”
I know you didn’t. You said nothing and went your way.” His right hand slowly slid toward his back. He could have a knife or a gun. The first was bad. The second option was worst.
I wasn’t taking any chances and pushed away his wagging finger.
Get your finger out of my face.”
“Come outside.” The short man spun on his heels, but his girlfriend grabbed his arm
I’m not fighting anyone right now, especially in the rain.”
“So what you gonna do, call 911. I’ll beat your ass and be gone before they come.”
“Why you so uptight? Someone steal your Barbie Doll?” I say this knowing the Barbie remark will light a fuse adn that a fight will ruin both out days.
“Barbie Doll?
“Or is it Ken?” I have never fought a black man. Scores of whites yes. I don’t want to fight this man, but I’m not scare of him. I not scared of anything other than lawnmovers.
“You sayin’ I love white people?”
“You’re with a white girl.”
“Donna’s different from white people like you. She grew up with us. You never did.”
“You got that right. There were no black people in my part of Maine and my next hometown is the Selma of the North.”
“Boston.”
“You got that right. I played inner-city street ball. I taught at South Boston High School. I went to see Sly Stone at Franklin Park. One of the three white boys in the crowd, but that don’t make me black.”
“Not at all. Fuck you. You lucky today. C’mon Donna, let’s go.”
The small black man hustle stepped from the bookstore.
I have never fought a black, but damn I have fought whites. From Childhood to now.
“I ain’t black, but there’s sometimes I don’t want to be white.” Frank Zappa.
There are over 25 million people of African descent in America. Black are outnumbered by white ten to one, except in the urban communities such as Harlem or Roxbury. Any attempt to rebel against the repression has been met with armed force by federal government. Bullets flying will bring any insurrection to ground. Movies like THE SPOOK WHO WAITS BY THE DOOR and SIEGE OF HARLEM are fiction, because the White Race has drugged, drunkenized, impoverished, and exploited an entire race much as the English have done to the Irish for centuries.
The Black Panthers tried to raise consciousness through the cities and country, but the FBI and local police cold-bloodedly assassinated the revolutionaries to the relief of the Silent Majority. There is no standing up against the Pigs and some Black Panthers have fled to Cuba or Algeria. Eldridge Cleaver has sent missives fro Algiers, proclaiming BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL, but support of the cause has cost blacks economically and physically. Now is the time for a fight, but it is a fight Newark, Harlem, or Watts can win against the KKK and Nazis of White America, who have resurrected themselves under the guise of ‘new ideals and intelligence’ and David Duke, Grand Klan Dragon, has admitted, “We have all made mistakes.”
White Supremacy was written into the Constitution with the inclusion of the Electoral College and no mention of voting rights other than the rich. My main philosophy comes from the Declaration.
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
All men are created equal sounds good as long as it applies only to wealthy landowners.
Murder, prison, and addiction decimate the black male population of America.
I hate the upper classes for their attempted genocide and the apathetic masses accepting the death penalty for African-Americans. The Civil War was fought to free the slaves.
Not for every Union soldiers, but more than enough to burn Dixie down.
I avoided a war in Vietnam.
Like Muhammad Ali proclaimed, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong”
I didn’t either. The only reason I wanted to be a Marine was to get out of my town.
LATER
The rain has stopped on 6th Avenue. I drank two glasses a vino blanco at McBells. I searched all morning for a job. Mark Amitin is producing ALBEE DIRECTS ALBEE. Mark is crazy and only after sex. I have lots of faggot friends; Taylor, Albee, James Spicer, Holt, Lynde, and reed along with the boys from Serendipity Three and CBGBs. We know who we are and we are safe in the West Village, Chelsea, and East 53rd Street. I fight any gay-bashers. My friends call me ‘rough trade’. I wish I had a leather jacket. Andy Reese says I’d be so hot in one.
LATER
If the world ends there are groups of saveables.
Actually only one.
Children, especially the three Latino kids across the street. Dez, Marika, and Yvonne.
LATER
Grant comes over and admits, “You were right about Joe Breeze.”
“He’s an asshole’s asshole.”
Ugly as a acne-scarred bulldog too.
I left the suburbs in 1975 to live in Boston, the northernmost of the East Coast’s racist hotbeds. My black friends belonged to JUMP STREET, in which Andy Kornstein played, so the Roxbury band could get white gigs.
On July 7, 1974 AK and I drove from Brookline to Franklin Park to see the Hues corporation, Donald Byrd and the Blackbirds, and Richard Pryor, who introduced Sly and the Family Stone by saying, “Sly will be here as soon as he robs all the drug dealers on Blue Hills Ave. like Lil Joe and Jamaal Hookah.”
Several groups in the audience laughed loyally at the comedian’s shout-out to their dealers. Pryor was no angel. Nobody said nothing about my skin. We had a good time.
Now live in Clinton Hill.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard dominated the East River from 1801 to 1966. Its closing stranded 10,000 industrial workers without jobs and coupled with the construction of housing project created the perfect atmosphere for getting a ghetto. In the 70s I lived on the Lower East Side; junkies, burned-out buildings, and thieves abounded in that wrecked ‘hood, but we never came over to Brooklyn. It was too dangerous.
Coming from Boston I had fought more than often against gangs from Southie, Fields, Corner, Quincy, Savin Hill, and my own hometown. Anyone with Irish blood likes a fight. I liked them fine. I never fought a black man. This short guy was protecting his girl. I might have been able to knock him out, then again he might have been a boxer or a gunman. I could eat a little crow to be safe.
Last year young people marched in the streets after the murder of George Floyd. I haven’t been to a protest in months almost all the youth evolved to another cerebral stage without telling the Old Man.
Prior to my hospital stay I had been proclaiming that I was going to outlive my great-grand-aunt, who passed in 1961 at the age of 103.
Bertha Hamblin Boyce wrote this in her 96th Year.
“Maria, it is almost time for my ship to sail. Are you going with me this time?”
That was my father, Capt. John C. Hamblin, speaking to my mother. She had been with him on two voyages, and he hoped she was going with him this time. My sister Alice was born in Australia, and my brother Harry was born in Norfolk Island, in the South Seas.
“Like her and my grand-aunt Marion I have circumnavigated the globe.
About ten times from East to West and West-to-East.
Nothing serious, because I see trouble I obey my mother’s precautionary adage, “If you see trouble, go the other way.”
Sadly I have not walked away enough and no one wins all his fights.
Up in Hudson, New York I attended a boxing session by the river. My lungs were good for 69 and my fist impact had some bite, but my back foot wandered out of balance robbing my stance. Not that I’m looking for fights and my violent behavior hails back to repressed memories of being a juvenile bully victim. 69 and still haunted by Joe Scanlon and Mark Tully. My younger sister wants me to see a shrink.
“”Since I can’t drink or do drugs anymore, these ghosts are the only high I have and I get rid of them I’ll have no soul.”
Since when did you start believing in a soul.”
“I believe in a soul. Just not God.” I have sworn an oath to never plead for his help. Not when faced by ten street thugs. Not when I’ve been sick. Not even when my daughter stopped breathing. Maybe a little about money, but they are vague request for financial help without putting a number of what I might receive, but nothing has come in years, so there isn’t any God for me, although I do believe in Frosty the Snowman, which isn’t easy when the North Pole is melting into the Arctic Ocean.
