I used to work in an all night Harm City supermarket with Israel and The Mac Daddy, two big bruthas who, with studied unaffection, referred to each other as ‘Silvaback’ and ‘Big Boy’.
Silvaback was old school and up from Georgia, and preferred ‘big-boned womenz with a good bit a thigh’. He maintained a stable of honeys forty years his junior as he was a prosperous slumlord, and worked a good-paying fulltime job. Permit me to give you an idea of his taste in women…
We were breaking down a pallet of juice and noticed that we were both looking at Liz, bending over in front of us, working register lane candy from a tote box. This surprised me as he had repeatedly decried the bony nature of ‘white girlz’ and gave The Mac Daddy, who had a taste for the pale ladies, a hard way to go for not ‘stayin’ wit ‘is own’. But I suppose there is an exception to every rule under heaven. I decided to bust him for crossing the line, at least in his mind. “So you like that man?”
Keep in mind, that while naturally blonde, of sweet disposition, and very pretty, Liz had a huge butt that you could set a beer can on. She hated her butt, and did everything she could to hide it, and would no doubt have been horrified that we had caught this wide angle view quite by chance. Silvaback stood straight, grinned wide, and said, “Yeah, I likes me that fine lille butt!”
I was in shock. As a nominally white man who likes big butts, I thought I was extreme. But as wide as Ray Lewis’ shoulders is not ‘lille’ by any scale I’m versed in.
Now The Mac Daddy, of the hip hop generation, liked fit white women. Always cognizant of potential sexual harassment charges I did everything I could to avoid working with him while the upscale SOBO babes were doing their after nightclub shopping. But The Mac Daddy followed me like a hound, as he noticed that my ‘real white boy’ longhaired temporary appeal to upscale women who were drunk and pissed off at the lawyer they had shacked up with, might possibly generate ‘a lonely friend of her’s’ for him to ‘pickoff’.
I might be in the aisle explaining the difference between young tender peas and Grade A Fancy peas to some six-figure bitch-on-wheels who was really interested in me disrespecting her for an hour a week while her old man raided a mutual fund, and he would come up to me, put his hand on my shoulder like he was my gay pimp, and say something like, “Jim here my white Mandingo Baby. Cain’t go wrong with my man—you got a sista Baby?” Or he might declare that we were “tag-team partners in the art of luv”, “ebony en ivory fo variety” etc. I could not count how many times I literally ran from this guy while in the presence of one of these high-strutting snob-babes.
This type of thing was really humiliating. I had three different regular customers, all single feminist home owners, come up to me in the aisle when I was alone with a check list and pen, interviewing me for their open houseboy or boy toy slot. I suppose this is done online now. I was 35 and these chicks were 45. The entire aspect of bussed in manual laborers [male and female, Liz had at least 30 suitors] being selected and pursued as sex workers for the local rich was unappealing to my militantly antisocial mindset. The Mac Daddy worked it though, milked it for what it was worth. Silvaback, he did not concur. He could not understand why “Some Big Boy would want ta layup with some lady who back might break, unda ‘is dumb black ass—den he up for assault!”
I actually had to employ a local stay-behind white trash wench to scare off one of these prissy suitors. On another occasion I had a criminal friend talk another stalker out of following me around town after I got off work
There was one drunk lady, a tall fifty-year-old tanned blonde, who must have been quite a beauty in her youth, who actually put her hand on my chest one July 4th and French kissed me in front of the Green’s ice cream case. She then asked me if we had any vanilla ice cream without the vanilla specks because it was going to be licked off of her body by her husband. I got her the ice cream while she leaned on me and purred. Then she told me that her husband and her had sailed their yacht up from Florida and asked if I would clock out and come down to the pier with her, that they would pay me double what I would make on the night. I declined—in my mind imagining her husband’s Bosnian Merc bodyguards dumping my snuffed body out at sea—and she gave me another kiss and left. A female coworker saw this, and then when she questioned me and I told her, she tore off her apron and ran for the front door, “Why’d you let her go asshole. For four hundred I’ll do her and her old man!”
Now, at 2 to 3 in the morning it got to be fun when the upscale strippers would come in to shop with their bodyguards. These were girls we could identify with who had no agenda where we were concerned.
It was not only heterosexual advances that were targeted at us overnight clerks. There was this tall hairy auto-mechanic who worked in overalls at the local garage by day, and came in by night wearing a wig, an open blouse to reveal his masculine chest, and a woman’s tube top as a skirt with no underwear. I once had two gay guys ask me if we had any Edy’s mint chocolate chip ice cream in the case. I knew there was some there. But the case was messed up. I kept digging until I found it. When I turned—still on my knees as someone had buried the last of this flavor in the back of the bottom shelf—I looked up behind me to see three flaming gay guys admiring my backside and grinning like Freddie Mercury's clones.
Such are the humiliations heaped upon the youthful store clerk. Now, past mating age, I turn such situations into excuses for humor. Recently, a young lady came up to me while I was stocking the yogurt section—quite expertly I might add—and asked me, “Sir, do you work here?”
I turned, sporting my newly grown white beard, and said with the utmost gravity, “Miss, I don’t normally work in supermarkets, but when I do, I work at Mister John’s Food Mart.”
So, last Friday night, as I broke down freight in the stockroom, I was interrupted by two drunk women in their late teens, both about six feet tall, one about 200 pounds and cute in shorts and a loose blouse. The other was about 140 pounds, very pretty, and dressed like a rap video dancer. This woman and her bodyguard were obviously looking for companionship that was old enough to buy them more alcohol. The hot one approached me—in this dark dingy stockroom with a blackened-from-filth concrete floor—with that ‘I know you like what you see and I’m going to use it against you until I milk you to a grayed husk and cast you aside for a fresh meal ticket’ gleam in her baby blue eyes. I rudely ignored this slut as I loaded U-Boats of freight. They went away.
They came back in a couple times that night, making their rounds, trying to determine which of the passably fit guys they could make their mark on before they sobered up disastrously. At 2:30, terribly close to sober, and not willing to have sex for booze behind the dumpster with the homeless guys out back, but looking for someone to take back to their apartment who they could stomach having breakfast with, the two ladies, the wallet-crusher and her support element, homed in like sorrow-seeking drones on Bubba.
I was seated reading on my break ten feet from where Bubba operates the register. Bubba is almost seven feet tall and these very tall ladies truly liked him, unlike the callous offer ‘to use and be used’ earlier directed at me. Bubba is 19 and is a virgin, which is shocking in this day and age. If I was single and south of forty, I would have been hooking up with these girls. At Bubba’s age I would have been silly putty in their manicured hands.
They actually bought something they did not need to talk to him, tried to have a real conversation, and even asked for his phone number. He blew them off and they walked off, waiving and winking at me. I said, “Hey Bubba, at your age I would have given them my number. What don’t you like about them? The big girl has a decent personality, and the slut is gorgeous. If you put them both together you could have a decent date.”
He said, “I’m not interested. They’re just mud sharks.”
“What? What is a mud shark?”
“Look at them; one is fat, and the other one dresses like a whore. They obviously go for black guys—mud sharks!”
I laughed for hours. For an amateur anthropologist like me, the finding of a new term, particularly one that is a joint gender/race slur, was quite a find.
