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November 1963

It feels a lot, tonight, like November 1963, and I have liver and onions and mashed potatoes sitting on my plate. I wasn’t eating any of that, and my father wasn’t letting me up from the table until I did, and the liver was stone cold. I learned the meaning of the word ‘stand-off’ in that little kitchen, in the little stone house by the muddy, weed-filled pond. It wasn’t a lake, dad; it was a goddamn mud-hole. We should settle that once and for all.

I’d sit there all night; I wasn’t touching that dinner, and my father wasn’t budging; he had the radio and his newspaper. He was in it for the duration. He called me ‘bullheaded,’ and I reminded him I was his son. We’d sit there, on these occasions, until maybe 8 pm, and we’d declare a draw, and I’d go to bed, better hungry than poisoned by cold mashed potatoes and liver.

My dad didn’t like Kennedy, but he didn’t want him dead either. He understood there was a line that couldn’t be crossed, and there were rules that had to be adhered to, like eating the food put before you, no matter how disgusting.

That day the slug blew off the back of Kennedy’s brain, I saw fear in my father for the first time. I was six, and the world turned dark and suddenly cold and frighteningly small that November Friday. I’m quite sure it was the first moment I felt his fear.

Cronkite cried, and Huntley and Brinkley reported on the tiny black and white TV.

I was born just before Sputnik went into space, but the spectacle of spacemen and heroic deeds of Gagarin and Glenn were lost on this day; I asked my dad if the Russians were coming again to kill us. I was six, dad, fucking six-years-old, and I remembered the missiles in Cuba, in 1962, we saw them on that same little TV, and I was scared then too, but this was a different scared. Besides, we’d been saved from the Soviets by Lieutenant Kennedy, and now half his skull was blown off and laying on the trunk lid of some big Lincoln Continental in Dallas. The teachers cried, and the principal cried, and on the way home, I saw a cop crying, and I was scared.

It was Saturday the next day, and I remember the fear in my sister’s eyes when she realized American Bandstand wasn’t going to be the little black and white TV that day, just talk of Soviets and Cubans and dead presidents.

Then the next day, Sunday, we went to church, and later that day, some guy named Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the guy who everyone said was a Russian and who killed Lieutenant Kennedy. I was more confused than ever because all the Russians I’d ever heard of were named Khrushchev and Gagarin and Boris and Vladimir, not Lee Harvey Oswald, and I was still pretty scared about missiles from Cuba. I was scared because my sister was scared that American Bandstand might never be on again.

A couple of days later, Grandma came to our house, and we ate some turkey, and I was pretty sure, within days, there’d be a big picture of JFK up on the wall, above her piano, next to FDR and Jesus.

Later I went outside with my dad, and we put up some of those huge fire-hazard Christmas light bulbs purchased at a Woolworth’s somewhere in the late 1950s. Even though each of the three strands of bulbs my dad proudly owned had a big “UL” label—Underwriters Laboratory—that was supposed to convince me those big, hot bulbs wouldn’t burn the house down. It didn’t.

Dougie Hulseapple came by later that day, and we formed a plan to avenge the death of Lieutenant Kennedy because we both were scared of Soviets and bombs and Cubans and men named Ruby. It was getting dark way too early because it was November, so if there was any avenging to be done, we’d better get it done before dark when our moms with call us home.

It was like that in 1963 and feels a lot like I’m having liver and onions and mashed potatoes for dinner tonight too, and dad, it’s scary like that, and it still feels like the Russians are coming, and I think it’s going to be a long night.

American Taliban

Business across the country are boarded up, people have actually asked me if I think it’s safe to “be out” this week.

A quarter million of us are dead from an invisible killer, we wear masks and we are afraid to shake hands.

Marauding bands of self described Patriots, many heavily armed, are blocking traffic on roads all over the nation and intimidating voters.

The same elements that allowed the Christian Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Cromwell’s brutality toward Ireland, slavery, apartheid, the rise of the Nazi party in 1930s Germany, the Taliban; all are still present in us.

When I see busses forced off the hi-way, and bridges blocked by pickups waving flags, their owners heavily armed, I realize not much has changed in the human psyche in 10,000 years.

We’ve not evolved, we’ve not learned a goddamn thing.

I’m fucking sick, to the point of wanting to puke, of all this winning…

#AmericanTaliban

What’s My Name?

I use two moral compasses, my grandmother Cora and Muhammad Ali. When I say Mr. Ali influenced my life I don’t mean he was a boxer I admired. He was, and still is, a larger than life role model for me. Not quite a deity, but probably as close to a Jesus figure as will ever exist for me. When the good church folks ask, “What would Jesus do?” I ask myself, “What would Ali do?”

Cora would have me turn the other cheek, Cora would tell me to pray for this man I hate. I’d fight her on this, I’d walk away in anger, because that is not my true self, not my nature. But, her words would echo in my head and fill me with self-doubt and make me feel less than the good, less than the self-righteous. I heard a lot of Cora in my head yesterday as I wished the worst for this man i loathe in my heart.

A post, from a dear friend, a better man than me, half read, half-understood, re-enforced this, Cora’s words. I heard Michelle Obama saying “When they go low, we go high.”

But that was then 2016 and her words don’t echo for me today. Michelle’s words or Cora’s words, ring hollow as a bell to me today, early October 2020.

No, yesterday, my true self was seeing the great Ali and Ernie Terrell.

One of Ali’s best public moments was the David Frost interview where he laughed at the sad and cynical America that made him a hero in Rome—the pinnacle of American pride—but home Louisville, a week later, he couldn’t buy a hot dog at a luncheonette because it was white only. Ali laughed, Ali smiled, but his smile betrayed embers of rage.

Ernie Terrell chose to disrespect Mr. Ali, and call him Cassius Clay, what Ali referred to as the name given to him by those who enslaved his ancestors.

Ali whupped his ass—big time—and screamed as Terrell laid out on the canvass, “What’s my name!”

That’s my true nature and who I am. I can’t wish Trump well as he’s callously stood by, spreading lies and false and dangerous hope, doing little to nothing as he watched—as of today—210,000 die, as he actively works to take away access to health care from people in the middle of this pandemic.

I can’t pray for a man who wants to rape and pillage the social safety net that literally means survival for millions and millions of older Americans, money that is theirs, not trumps, not the government’s money.

I can’t send well wishes to the leader of the Proud Boys and a man who every time he was given a chance to denounce racial hate and terrorism chose to fuel the fire. I can’t pray for a man who cages babies in a political stunt and has ruined the lives of those babies families.

No, I hope he recovers enough to come back to the White House, and diminished, lives there until January 20th, to be ripped from that place by the National Gaurd and the FBI, and sent to rot in prison and end his miserable, pathetic life.

And the American people need to collectivity stand up and yell, “What’s my name!”

Ronny Gray

I met Ronny Gray in 1972. The young boy spoke of things I’d never heard of, and could not imagine. The cotton gin, and the great migration north of his family coming out of Mississippi. He spoke of his grandma who lived and worked the cotton plantation all her life, a daughter born into a time when slavery was a recent memory and an all too near horror. She was of the Jim Crow south. Memories of her father and mother, Ronny’s great-grandparents, defined her life and darkened her waking and sleeping moments. Her family were sharecroppers, a step up from being the property of the slavers, and a step into a life of extreme poverty, simply another form of servitude.

Ronny spoke of how his grandma never adapted to the poverty of Newburgh, New York’s, Ann Street, after the moving north, preferring and missing the poverty of Abbeville, Mississippi.

Ronnie was a boy, fourteen year old, but old beyond those years. We were friends, but we never talked much about race until that morning in May 1972, when we were discussing the shooting of George Wallace in history class.

The teacher was Mr. Agocha, a very proper and mild mannered, but stern, man from Nigeria. He liked to bring up subjects outside the curriculum and openly discuss them. It was interesting and fascinating to discuss American History with a man from his background. He stayed with the class plan, but he always encouraged us to look a little deeper into what we were being sold, on any subject. I owe a lot of my scepticism to Mr. Agocha.

Middletown, New York, was a diverse working class town. Italian kids, and Celtic kids and African kids and Hispanic kids, and Middle-Eastern kids and Asian kids, and some Eastern European and Russian kids, and kids of different religions were thrown into one big pot. We we given a choice by the politics and placement of the universe at that time, we could kill each other, or figure out how to get along. There were a lot of fights, I was involved in my share. Fighting seemed to be as much as part of boyhood as mud and dogs and hating school. Fighting wasn’t something to be liked or disliked, it was just a part of the process. In the end we, for the most part, figured out how to get along with each other.

As Mr. Agocha discussed the assassination attempt of Governor Wallace of Alabama, the previous day. I said, out loud, “Too bad he didn’t kill the motherfucker!”

Immediately, without even looking up, I was directed by Mr. Agocha, simply by looking down at the floor, pinching the bridge of his nose with his free hand, and pointing toward the door with his arm, extended through the gray sleeve of his fine suit jacket and his long, black index finger; off to the vice-principal’s office for me, once again.

Mr. Agocha had an authority about him I didn’t understand, I rarely respected any authority, but I somehow respected his. A big man, the top of his head didn’t clear the top of the doorway by much. We both worked hard to understand each other. I’d stay after school somedays—intentionally—and talk to him about Nigeria and America and the world. He called me Beeelee in a voice that sounded like the echo from a barrel.

Ronny Gray was waiting for me as I was leaving the vice-principals office. The Middletown Junior High School had a catch and release system, fairly pointless from my perspective. Once I learned the vice-principal could not, in fact, beat me to death for my crimes he lost a good amount of his authority and power.

Ronny came up to me and grabbed my arm. He said, “Billy, you’ve got a big mouth. It gets you in trouble all the time, but you slide. That’s the piece you’ll never understand, you slide, so it’s fun for you.”

He looked me in the eye, “You are more dangerous than the other white boys because you don’t know what you don’t know. You act like you know, because you can, because you know you won’t get beat up. If I run my mouth like you run your mouth, I’ll get my ass beat. It may not be here, at the school, but I’ll get my ass beat. Someday, someplace the beating will find me.”

“My grandma’s daddy was called a slave—do you have any idea what that means, how demeaning that word is—slave—fuck that, ain’t no slaves, only the enslaved! Nobody ever thinks about that word, they just say it. I don’t say it. I feel the word.”

“I’ve been to your grandma’s house. She is poor as dirt, your grandma got to flush her toilet with a pan of dirty dishwater because her well is no good. Your grandma and my grandma are both poor as dirt, but yet somehow people see your grandma’s dirt as better than my grandma’s dirt. Like your grandma came from better dirt. Dirt is dirt and poor is poor. Ain’t no white dirt and black dirt, there’s just poor dirt.”

We walked together to get our lunch bags, and sat that day away from the other boys, that day we sat alone.

We opened our bags, Jif peanut butter and bologna and mustard sandwiches. The poor kids ate from paper bags, those bags always had the same smell. Jif or bologna it always smelled the same.

The rich kids had the hot meals. Nine cents, was the cost of lunch and milk. that was the division between rich kids and the poor kids. We learned the cost of that divide. The middle class kids, they had Superman and Batman lunchboxes, and if they dropped one the thermos would break and milk would spill out all around and the kid with the Batman lunch box would cry and he’d get himself a nine cent hot lunch. Me and Ronny we just had our smelly bags.

Somedays we swap sandwiches, it felt like variety. To this day I eat exactly the same thing every day for lunch, I don’t have Ronnie or the boys to swap with anymore.

Eating our sandwiches a couple of pretty girls walked by. Ronnie says, “You can look at all the pretty girls, white, black and brown, no body going

to jump you on your way home. Some brothers and uncles and father not going to beat your ass for talking to the pretty girl. Me, I go talk to that pretty white girl, or go to her house, if she likes me or not, I get my ass beat. You show up at Sandra Feliciano’s house and her grandma gives you goddamn cookies and milk. I show up and her brothers come and beat my ass.”

The old fourteen year old boy looked at me, holding his sandwich with both hands and said “It’s about less, it’s always about less. I was learning as a young boy that I was less. My grandma was less than your grandma and my sandwich was less than your white-boy sandwich. I ain’t less, I refuse to be less. These are the lessons I learn in school. Somebody will beat me for it, but I will not be less than anybody. You and me we are the same, but you still don’t know, what you don’t see. Your problem is you don’t know what you don’t know.”

We finished our lunch, a bell rang…

I talk to a lot of white people who are ‘woke,’ I wonder if they had friends like Ronny Gray and Mr. Agoscha. I learned a long time ago I’ll never understand what it’s like to be black or Hispanic in America. At best we are looking in a window at another world, we can understand, we can have empathy, we can defend, but we can never fully understand, any more than my black and brown friends understand what it is to be a Celt. Maybe If we stopped trying to be ‘woke,’ and just listened to each other and learned from each other, we could fix this stupid mess. I’m not woke, fuck that, but I’m on your side.

Wisdom of Jimmy B. Tester

“An unbroken string of days is all that brought us here. Eat some, sleep some, drink some, fuck some and fight some and here we are. An army of scoundrels, like me, like you, pulling’ and pushin’ and sellin’ each other to the highest bidder. Ain’t no allegiance.

There ain’t no plan, never was. No tremendous and awesome high-up power a savin’ ya from Hell’s fury and fire! Just all of ya in it, pushin’ fer what helps you and fuck everyone who ain’t like ya.”

“I learn’t this early on and I know’d they’s money in it. Preachin’ come easy to me boy. Ever man got his ass saddled down with guilt. A man stole some, er fucked somebody he want ‘spose to, or he finds his ass caught in a lie. Ain’t no feelin’ worst than when you know’d ya been caught in a lie, and the waitin’. The waitin’ is the worst.”

“Every man what ever put on a pair of pants got some guilt eatin’ at him. Ya just got ta dig a might ta find it, then offer a way to save his broke-down ass and he’ll foller ya like damn pup—and throw his last dime in the collection plate. Good money in salvation, boy. Damn good money. “

“That’s all we is, boy, just scoundrels fuckin’ and fightin’ and one day rolls inta the next and ya end up right smack here where ya have been all along.”