the world has turned and left me here

echoes of racism

Well this Saturday Jake & I went out party seeking. We ended up at Claremont apts. at 3 am, like we've done before, just walked around until we saw something promising through a window and invited ourselves in, pretending to be looking for a dude named John or whatever it took. Finally we found a prospect. The guy gave us a hard time at the door but once we went in we found, weirdly, that it was the same place we'd gotten into last time, when Jake told some beligerent dude he liked his haircut so we could slip out the door.

Here there was a really drunk guy who attempted the worst handspring I've ever seen, and knocked a big chunk of trim off one of the doorways. Jake got into one of those long discussions about mutual acquaintances that you can only have in your hometown. Then the testosterone levels got too high for us and we left.

Ironically, as we were arriving at the next party a gang fight seemed on the verge of breaking out. The friendly (to us) guy on the porch started yelling stuff at a bunch of figures across the street, who massed and walked over all 5 of them. Jake and I wanting nothing to do with this ducked inside to tell the guy's friends. When we went back out there, it was all handshakes and joking...apparently the 5 turned out to be hispanic. The guy on the porch as we later found out was 18 and about to enter Marine bootcamp. He says later, "I'm going out there to defend good Americans like Jake and Alan here," gesturing at us, "not those kind of guys out there who don't appreciate it..." He made it abundantly clear that "those kind of guys" meant anyone black or acting black.

And yet here's the guy himself bagged out with backwards cap. "I used to try to be black," he confided in us and you could only think "used to?" It was kind of fascinating, this simultaneous hatred for and idolizing of black culture that existed in the guy, who was probably the biggest racist I've met in a long time. He almost seemed conjured up to disprove a statement I'd made earlier that evening to Jake: that with each successive generation the echo of racism gets fainter until with ours, it's almost too faint to hear, we just don't care about it anymore, it's a non-issue. Well okay I am full of crap and generalizations, always have been.

After hanging out for a while we went to Hi-way Diner, where we lit an enormous fire in our ash tray that would gobble up the sparking packets of creamer that we fed it. That was really dumb and the whole place smelled like smoke afterwards. But it was 6:30 am and we are young and live dangerously, besides.