This past Saturday morning at the suburban supermarket location where I toil twice or thrice weekly for my bread—depending on whether day-old white or fresh pumpernickel is on the menu—I was stocking the frozen French fries when a local family eased their way down the aisle shopping for vegetables and waffles. The father was 50, a large fit light brown skinned black man of about 6’ 4” tall and 250 pounds. The mother was a 45 year old redheaded white woman, of 5’ 6” and perhaps 180 pounds, just into that size range that most white men find unattractive. Their son was a ‘redbone’ tone youth of perhaps 19.
I must stress how strange it is to see a family shop in a supermarket. This is partially because so few nuclear families remain in this community. Usually it is a lone man, or a woman and her children, or a couple, with pairs of homos and dykes being common. What is even more unusual is these regular customers are a working family, with a male head of household. Typically, the only time we see an intact family in a supermarket is when a welfare mother and her brood are accompanied by her drug dealer babies’ daddy who stands back peeling bills off of his knot-roll of twenties to pay for cigarettes while she swipes her independence card for the groceries.
On seeing this mixed-race, intact, working, nuclear family, with a male head of household! I was struck with the realization that I have not seen this—an actual human family in a supermarket—since the early 1990s. And, what struck the harder was this was not a white family. I am used to seeing the female and child only fractured families of blacks. But, this brought home the realization that seeing a white man and woman together with their children is perhaps the rarest occurrence in my grocer’s life. This makes some sense down in the ghetto where I live and have worked for about half of my life. But this is a 70% white community—and I never see a family doing what my family did when we were kids, rolling out to the supermarket. Much of this has to do with the fact that mother and father are both working at least one fulltime job to keep the remaining nuclear families viable, and therefore cannot go shopping together with the kids. But even that is a sign that the American family is really against the ropes.
Of course, my white nationalist friends will say this is because this white woman married a black man; that it is because whites are abandoning each other. I hear the same cases made by blacks about being abandoned by race-mixing traitors who go for a white mate.
Just as this debate begins rocking in my mind the answer to this woman’s choice came rolling up the aisle behind them, complaining that I was in his way, that they were in his way, that my boxes were in his way, that he could not find his rice meal, and that he needed help.
Dweeble [as us staff have so named him] used to stand six feet and two inches. He no longer stands, but slouches in the supermarket’s power chair. He has long hair, a scraggly beard, and drooping layers of pasty white fat rolling out over his jeans with biker wallet and case knife. He goes about 400 pounds, and his every breath is a complaint, a whining dirge as to his entitlements for being ‘disabled’. Even in the protesting power chair he is slovenly rude, his knees sway out two feet on either side of the cart.
My boxes are in the aisle, three large people loom ahead, and this reprobate embarrassment to my race cruises down the aisle toward them demanding that they make way. They have already turned to head in this direction.
The father suggests that Dweeble back up.
Dweeble claims that he is too handicapped to backup the power chair.
The father asks him to at least move to the side.
Dweeble insists that it hurts for him to pull his knees in.
The father motions for his wife to walk past, and for his son to stand behind. His wife passes Dweeble, after which he picks up the shopping cart and hefts it over Dweeble and continues on his way. The copper skinned son then high fives Dweeble and says over and over again, “That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout. Stick in it to The Man. Put it there brutha!”
Timeout
That punk kid turned so many American cultural conventions on their ear with that jive act before the vegetarian burger door I do not even want to start enumerating them. Do feel free to tally them for yourself.
The Plight of Dweeble
Dweeble seems horrified by this notion of slacker solidarity against the tyrannical patriarchy of Dad—offended that he was embraced by the teen who seemed so eager to be a gangster rapper despite his parents’ obvious straight-laced ways.
He rises painfully from his chair and says, "I can stand, just not for long.”
The youth then gives him the gangster half-hug and says with a twinkle of laughter as he walks away, “Ma Main Man! In the way, all day! Keep the faith brutha!”
The heckler son gone, Dweeble backs the cart up to me and asks me where the French fries are, and I nod to the bag in my hand. Taking his five pound sack of frozen carbs he says to me, “Did you see how rude those blacks were? Can you believe how these people think the world owes them?”
“How might I help you sir?”
“Rice, do you have rice meals—ready to heat?”
“Yessir, next aisle, right next to the frozen pizzas.”
Dweeble wheels off to the next aisle as Big Chev is stopping by before work for his frozen burrito breakfast. I hear muffled words in a whining tone, and the snort of the big Polish-American hard case, “Get lost pal, find it yourself.”
Big Chev on Race and Masculinity
Big Chev then stalks over to me and glares down at my toiling form and gruffly proclaims, without lowering the tone of his deep voice “Can you believe that piece-of-shit in the hoverround thinks I’m some lowlife that would work in one of these places?”
I grin up at him, “Your big hands and block head argue against it, but you’d look cute in an apron.”
His rumbling voice grates lower [I so love getting this guy going], “Okay, Ninja Book Boy, doesn’t this bother you even a little—look at that up there?”
Big Chev points to the register where the mixed race couple assists in the bagging of their order and the whining overflowing hulk of flab in line behind them pines for the manager to ‘get a boy’ to carry his two liter Mountain Dew and five pound sack of fries to his car, and grinds through clenched teeth, “What the fuck, Mo? You tell me, who’s the ոigger: the ոigger, the ոigger-lover, their half-ոigger spawn—or that piece-of-shit who can’t carry his own soda?”
The aging stock clerk, still on his knees shoving frozen French fries into the freezer, manages to say with a straight face, “Sir, our mulatto meters are in Aisle Seven, with the stationary—they’re Taiwanese I’m afraid. I have my own made in America Lothrop Stoddard Miscegeny Meter at home, if—”
“Fuck you, Mo! A lot of help you are riding the brown sugar train down in the ghetto. How you can socialize with Those People is beyond me. What I mean is, is where is the world going? Granted, I’m not a ոigger and will always be thankful of that. I used to be proud to be white. But a man is a man. Now look at this; that big spook is a better man by far then this flabby turd, who is my color!”
I stood up and patted my irate friend on his broad Slavic shoulder and said, “I feel your pain, brother, I really do.”
Post Script
Not ten minutes later Steevo came over to me to describe an altercation at parcel pickup. I was all ears, hoping to hear that Big Chev maybe backed up his old beater into Dweeble’s mother’s Crown Victoria. But it was not to be. Steevo has that way of giving me the eye when he is about to give me some publishable tidbit, so out came the pen and the register receipt I use for note paper.
“Dude, I was just outside smoking and this mixed couple is leaving with their kid—you know, the redbone dude. They’re nice enough. I hate to see white women with black dudes. But they’re old and married and he’s a decent dude—a working guy. I didn’t catch the first part of the statement. But the Old Man said to his boy something about being ‘light-skinned,’ and of course he is, with Dad being milk chocolate and Mom white as snow. Any ways, the kid backs up and throws out his chest and says, ‘Who you callin’ light!’
“Of course Dad is fuckin’ huge so dude backs down and gets in the car. You know, I really don’t get it. Your mom is white! What do you expect? Of course you gonna be light. And on top of that he’s got a family—a dad that sticks around. None of us have that anymore—white or black. Sure he probably gets picked on by the black dudes but they pick on everybody. Anyways, I thought he was being needlessly disrespectful.”
I’m not writing to make a point here. Make of it what you will. This was simply fifteen minutes in the life of a white man—fifteen minutes defined by race through no desire of his own.
You are absolutely full of baloney.
Obviously you like blacks better than your own people. You are so self-hating, you prefer blacks. You have shown this again and again in your writing. That's sick and sad.
Good bye and good luck.
I promise Maureen, next week I'll do a retrospective of Crazy Mark.
In parting Maureen, how is Big Chev's hatred of a handicapped white man that does not live up to his stringent standards of what a white man should be, become self-hating on my part? Indeed, how is it self-hating on Big Chev's part?
I will make a point then, you seem to be a 'disable-ist', which is one of the bad kind of ist's, falling somewhere in between the sensible moniker sexist and widely socially unacceptable racist. One would think you would be more sympathetic to the plight of Dweeble as one of your favorite fighters that you train is about 2.3 twinkies away from squeezing his distended belly behind the wheel of a scooter as he shops and breathing heavily complaining of how uncomfortable the seats are. "But reader he was not only 'disabled' but a dick and i just don't like those people!" Well sir I can still sympathize because as my... I mean your fighters' gut continues to expand at a dare I say grotesque rate, the fat has to escape to higher ground, in this case the head (it rises like heat). This makes seemingly simple tasks such as thinking, being nice, and moving my big toe especially difficult let alone maneuvering a 4 foot wide scooter into the 3 foot wide gap you left there purposely to embarrass us.. I mean those people! His fat addled brain obviously could not sort through the mess quick enough to come up with a proper response. Btw, Dweeble is an incredibly hilarious name.
That's the last straw O Hayes: put on your sweats, and your trash bag, and hit the asphalt now—8 miles today! I want you outrunning Kenyans by April. Watch out for the lions though, your USA Boxing insurance card is tell held up at that print shop in Malaysia...
You are too far gone to bother with. You are obsessed with Negroes. It happens.
I will leave you with a word to ponder.
LOYALTY.
mm
Baltimore is a majority black city and I live in it.
Why would I be loyal to a person who I do not know, who I have never met, who has not sworn the same oaths as I, with whom I am not linked by common purpose, who has done nothing to earn my loyalty? I strive to be loyal to my friends, family, coworkers, employer, customers, fighters, coaches, editors, publishers, readers, according to the nature of these various associations. To spread my loyalty further would be an act of dissipation, which is against my foremost principle.