Flippant Flipping

I think it was Joe Rogan who said “it’s not racist to be racial.”  Absolutely right. So, with that, know that I’m going to be racial here. I’m going to put forth stereotypes, but we do know in the backs of our minds that, often, stereotypes become such for good reason.

Here’s one to start: Philadelphia is a very well chocolate city. It may be covering some Dutch shortbread cookies, but it’s cocoa and mocha and all sorts of shades of brown. It’s cheap chocolate, too; there are lots of poor motherfuckers running around this city, like they’re running around a lot of cities…and I honestly love it. Not for the culturally-sensitive reasons you might surmise, but rather for a ton of really racial shit.

Because I happen to live in a working-class, primarily black-but-sadly-gentrifying neighborhood, there are lots of produce trucks and quality, inexpensive food markets. I love fried chicken, and I can get it cheap. In fact, the chances are better here than most anywhere in the city that I’m going to get some bad-ass southern cooking, really fuckin’ good fried catfish and hush puppies that are worth a God damn.

I can also get cheap bootleg DVDs, guys pass out business cards to make really good R&B mixdiscs for me, and when a black guy asks me for a dollar in town, he usually has a good story, a great lie, some kind of skill he’s marketing (killer musician that rakes in a couple hundred bucks a day working on the streets in Center City) or, at the very least, looks genuinely happy that I gave him a couple of bucks for a 24oz. Day’s Cola and a couple of Lucies.

Or crack. I don’t give a shit, because it’s his or her life. I’m not my brother or sister’s keeper, no matter what bullshit one wants to feed me, and these are grown-ass men and women who might not be brilliant scholars, but are still accountable for their actions. Simple as fucking that. And to a degree, I think they understand that. They might not like their lives, but they understand that the day-to-day is about what they do: working harder, hustling, two jobs, three jobs.

Contrast this sharply with the white beggar. Largely, they’re hipsters, transients who don’t give a shit about the dollar you just gave them, ’cause they’re white and someone’s going to give them another dollar in a minute. Unless they’re insane, or often if they’re disenfranchised or truly afflicted war vets, they’re often just fully capable youth who are simply not using their bodies or minds to do anything but feed off of the rich whites that they view with disdain as Matrix-style binary code copies of their shitty parents. It’s a temper tantrum that I’m expected to subsidize, and I truly fucking hate it.

So, I said all of that to say that, when I almost got into a fist-fight this afternoon with a black guy who said stereotypical things like “muthafucka” and “you flipped the bird at me, white boy,” I didn’t want to throw on the guy because he was black. He was an asshole, pure and simple.

The scene is set: I’m going down to 31st and Walnut, to drop my girlfriend off to get her bike fixed. I make a turn down the road, and a black Chevy Suburban is blocking the path. I veer over as much as I can, and this piece of shit starts playing chicken with me. I turn, he turned. 3 times with this shit, and then as he passed me, he gave me a kind-hearted one-finger salute as a gesture of his goodwill.

Philly is a city of maniacs, racists, thugs, monsters, criminals, corporate scum, generationally-wealthy inbred suburbanites who come into town to slum it, hipster douchebags, college kids, people who reclaim building lots in town to create green spaces that smell like shit, a lot of really hard-working, decent people and some awesome murals. And we all have pretty well come to the understanding that the middle finger is a bit of a gritty, urban, “have a nice day!”

This, I suppose, means I shouldn’t have been surprised when this guy took a U-Turn in the middle of rush hour traffic to come back down a blocked street and use his Suburban to as a blockade. There was a woman behind me trying to get out of this mess herself, and this guy took the opportunity to argue with me over a middle finger.

“Muthafucka, you flip the bird at me, white boy?”

“Oh yeah. You did it, so I gave you one back.”

“I didn’t shoot no bird.”

“Yeah, the fuck you didn’t.” This guy started giving me a really hard look after this, like he was Bokeem Woodbine and I was a RealDoll of George W. Bush.

So, here comes stupid Chris, with “listen asshole, you’re blocking three people from getting the fuck off this street. Are you gonna move your ass or not?” He seemed confused.

He stared at me like he wanted a fight. And I did, too. He was about the same size as I am, same weight, but I’m almost remarkably quick for my size, and he just looked like he was going to need 10 seconds to get out of the Suburban. In that time, I was going to slam the door on his body, reach in and beat the living shit out of him. And he probably thought the same thing of what he was going to do to me.

We were both fearful, but both strangely brave, angrily calm. Honestly, this wasn’t going to get resolved without a fight or a concession. So I pulled the one of the classier moves I could have mustered at the moment, saying “I’m sorry” and staring a hole in him like his face was made of cheesecloth and there were the best breasts ever on the other side.

He had a look of fear in his eyes all of a sudden, which I don’t fully understand. I think he might have realized that, whether I actually am or not, I’m fucking crazy. And here’s another black stereotype: black people are scared to death of crazy fucking white people. Whether he was or not, I don’t know, but a minute later I was dropping my girlfriend off and getting on with the rest of my day.

The rest of the day was absolutely brilliant, getting my first drive in of the season along the banks of the Delaware River, on New Jersey’s and Pennsylvania’s side. It calms me like nothing else, and while I needed that, I can’t help but nurse this nagging thought in the back of my mind that I wanted to still be angry.

I still wanted that fight, to beat the shit out this guy and then get off on self-defense because the simple act of blocking my car with any sort of malicious intent is immediately attempted assault and stalking, along with whatever else they’d throw at him, because a number of the police here in The City of No Homo But Some Homo Bro Love are pretty racist, too.

And I felt more than a little guilty. My girlfriend was there, and she could have been dragged into something serious. I made the best of a bad situation, but the way I said “I’m sorry” was with such vicious spite that I might as well have dropped an N-Bomb right on his face. I didn’t mean that, but all of the anger was there.

I’m not like that. I expect everyone to better themselves constantly, and it pisses me off that people are so unwilling to take that challenge and beat the shit out of it. It’s not a black thing, but it can be directed at black people. Just like a white person, or a Latino or Indian or Pakistani or any other race under the sun. Or religion. Or sexual preference. Do what you want, be who you are, but better yourself. I’m not a racist, but just having an altercation with a black guy, one where that dreaded word of words wasn’t even spoken, I feel racist.

I shouldn’t. It’s misplaced guilt. It’s bullshit. The only things I should do are seriously consider taking up a martial art as an aggression release and exercise, do my damnedest to control my occasionally wild temper, and maybe stop letting the Eagle fly as often.

But until I do, I’ve found out in two events over the past year (one briefly mentioned in the 3rd paragraph of this blog from last year , and this one from this very day) that I think I might be getting addicted to anger. I might be starting to fully feel this rush of either fighting or getting right up to that point, because I was buzzing off a natural high for hours after words. I never sang Megadeth, Journey, Cee-Lo Green and Pin-Up Went Down so loud, so well, so powerfully truck-shaking in my whole little life.

And on top of that, these two points in the past year of my life mark two of the strongest ticks on the seismograph of my existence that register the highest in making me feel like a full-blown man. I feel strong, capable, smarter, bolder and just plain better than I have in what turned out to be a pretty good 2010, but a total shit 2011.

I’ve had ulcers that I was told could actually be stomach cancer, and threw down over $3,000 I didn’t have to have the tests done. One of my best friends almost died. My mom almost died, and has since turned into someone I’m having trouble liking all that much. She was a hero before January, and now I have trouble even respecting her duplicitous nature. It kills me, and makes me feel like a weak, unable child. And that was just January and February. So punching that old man in the face after he swung on me last year, and having my own personal Cuban Missile Crisis with a racist piece of shit today are truly hallmarks of my life as a man.

I have vices. Pills, drinks, food, caffeine. I don’t smoke cigarettes, I don’t gamble regularly and never gamble much, I don’t fuck irresponsibly and I love everyone in my life. Fighting will not be on that side of the fence, though. Fighting, loving the idea of kicking an ass or getting my ass handed to me is a vice that can kill me as much as all the others, and easily more. In one shot. This is a dangerous mood, an interesting time. But a guy needs to feel like a man to truly be a man, to be things that people need from a capable, adult human being.

People fight all day, for all sorts of things. They say “choose your battles wisely,” but I think I’m going to go with “pick your fights hastily and prepare to lose, but know that you tried a lot, and that you made progress.”

Fights for careers, for respect, for acceptance of my work, for my life, my honor, my loves in this world and the beliefs I hold essential to who I am are fights worth picking over and over again. I’m ready to stop letting stuff slide…unless it’s stupid and frivolous. I’m going bold, not going dumb. And to quote some dumb, fun-to-me stuff I’ve been saying like a pull-string catchphrase on the back of a baby doll, “this is when the shit gets real.”

Finally.