Davon felt the vibrations of his bitch-ass scream for Caucasian intervention course through his body and vibrate on the not-so polished floorboards of White Boy Wayne’s house. And for good measure he added, “I’m serious Yo!” and darted down the hall into the maze-like guts of this urban survivalist’s bunker house.
People thought Davon was crazy for renting a room from the only white dude in Sand Town, possibly the worst black neighborhood in West Baltimore, which was possibly the worst black ghetto in the world. And when he told them the rent was free, they definitely said, ‘Oh hell no!’ But when you are a pretty boy nigga who can’t fight his way out of a box of condoms, who has been picked on his entire life, and who even lost a fight against a bunch of sand ոiggers while driving a Stryker for The Man himself over in Iraq, then you need you some White Boy Wayne!
Davon had been just back from the military, with his duffle bag, standing in a deaf-ass funk at the bus stop, when these three niggas had started taking his shit, jacking him up, sitting him down, and going through his wallet. Then, off of the bus steps this big, crazy-eyed hair-ball of a white man, as old as dirt and as hard as concrete. He looked at the hoodrats who were working Davon over and growled, “I’m havin’ me some niglet stew for dinner!”
With that the three youths panicked, starting screaming about ‘sasquatch’ and ran off down the way. That’s when White Boy Wayne took him in. He did not even charge Davon rent, just insisted that Davon give him the addresses of vacant houses. White Boy Wayne cleaned out vacant houses and melted the copper and coins down in his big oven in the basement. Davon was not allowed in the basement.
When Davon spoke to his sister, whenever she could pull herself away from her white college boyfriend, she complained to him that she would not visit him so long as he lived with such a scary old dude, said that when she had come over ‘that old creep’ had looked right through her.
When he visited Mom at the rehab clinic or the halfway house, she just cried, “My Baby is marrying a white boy and my baby boy is living white!” and would began sobbing hysterically. Mom had been a crazy dope fiend since the police had took away Dad, who was a leader in Black October, a militant old school gang.
When Davon had moved in with Wayne, and got settled, and then went to visit Dad in Supermax, where he was doing life for multiple murders, he found out that he was living with a ghetto legend. “Son, is he about my age, big wide unblinking eyes, and his neck pop loudly when he turn his head like a gorilla?”
“Yes sir,” Davon had answered.
His Dad then pressed his forehead and hand against the table, and then looked up into Davon with pain-filled eyes. “Well Son, then this karma coming back on me. We fought that boy back in nineteen-eighty-two, fought him on the roof of the old five and ten where we caught him sleepin’—was young en dumb en full of cum and wantin’ to run the last white boy outa Sand Town. His freak ass was indestructible, layin’ niggas out this way and that, so I capped him, shot him twice in the chest, and as he staggered back, kicked him off into the alley. Thought he was dead. Then, we get down there to view the body and he gone. Big white gorilla dragged Daryl off da fifteen da next week en beat his ass to a coma. Den came Jamal—both legs broke behind the wall of the Municipal Cemetery. They found Twinkie up unda the Jones Falls stuffed in a shopping cart! I eventually made peace with the man, called a truce. He lived up in there ever since, neck poppin’ from the fall off the roof.”
That was how Davon had discovered that he lived with the white urban legend that had peopled black ghetto nightmares going on 30 years. He had taken comfort in being the roommate of White Boy Wayne ever since, had even once told big fat Tyrell when he was shaking him down at the New York Fried Chicken stand that he was friends with White Boy Wayne, causing Tyrell to shake like jello and turn as white as Michael Jackson.
And just now, as this insane milk dud bitch was running him down with a steak knife intent on cutting his junk off, he was certain that White Boy Wayne—who should be cooking breakfast just past that next stack of autoparts, and around the pile of sandbags, and past the four fifty gallon drums of whatever that occupied what had once been White Boy Wayne’s Mamma’s dining room, in the kitchen that was still a kitchen—would have an answer to this crazy bitch in those icy eyes of his.
“This bitch will never mess with White Boy Wayne—and I will be hiding behind his big ass!” Davon thought, triumphantly, as he ran around the greasy auto-parts and sandbags and past the fifty gallon drums, and through the gray army surplus blanket that hung over the doorway to the kitchen.
And there he was, standing over a steaming pot cutting up pork necks with a butcher knife, standing like some big retarded Moses on meth, who had turned in his tablets with the Ten Commandments on them in return for the invisible tattoo written in telepathic ebonics on his wrinkled and weather beaten forehead that said, “Don’t fuck with this white dude.”
“Mornin’ Davon,” mouthed the big man with the cartoon like exaggeration of his lips, surrounded by all that greasy matted hair, as was his way of trying to communicate with his deaf roommate. Davon answered with a bitch-ass squeal as he darted past him and turned with his back to the kitchen window, for Liza Spaz was right on his heels.
The little naked vixen form of Liza Spaz, holding her bent steak knife, came through the blanket-draped doorway and looked at Wayne, then looked past him and began to stalk toward Davon with her bent knife pointed at his groin, mechanically repeating her wacked out mantra. Wayne reached out and grabbed Liza by her little afro head, palming her little skull in his big hand like it was a softball.
Liza turned and stabbed the big man right in the groin. Her hand pulled back leaving the knife sticking out of the zipper area of his baggy jeans. She seemed momentarily stunned by the loss of her knife, then White Boy Wayne stabbed her through the neck and pinned her twitching and shaking to the kitchen wall with his butcher knife.
White Boy Wayne, eyes wider than they had ever been, then turned toward Davon, and mouthed in his comic way, “I ought to put her in the pot.”
As Liza Spaz died wide eyed and shaking with her neck pinned to the wall and her hands spazing as much as her mouth ever had, White Boy Wayne grabbed a canister of Old Bay seasoning and began shaking the spice all over her body. He then turned comically, and mouthed to Davon, “I ought to put her in the pot.”
He then grabbed two more butcher knives, and turned toward Liza, who was now spitting up blood, gurgling, and working her feet like she was trying to run from the big monster though her neck remained pinned to the wall.
“No!” Davon screamed.
Then, turning slowly from last night’s dying date, Davon’s monster man roommate rotated his big hairy head on his loudly popping neck, to beam darkly narrowed eyes on him. He worked his knives to together like scissors, and said, “No!” as he took one ominous step forward.
Davon had seen enough; had seen those eyes turned on others; had seen the insane light in the eyes of Wayne develop immediately as Liza Spaz had stopped her chant. Davon had woke to a world gone mad and the biggest baddest maddest hatter of the bunch was bearing down on him, which left a no-fighting pretty boy but one option, and a painful one at that, dressed as he was only in a jock strap.
“This so sucks!” Davon whined, in his most heroic tone, as he hurled himself back into the narrow 100 year old window.
The old wooden window moldings gave more easily than he would have thought as the glass ripped him on the shoulders and hips and he fell face first onto the rubble pile in the alley below.
Davon was too afraid to look around, and had eyes only for the yellow brick which was the one underneath of which he kept his spare key. He felt secure in his lead in that White Boy Wayne was too big to fit through the small kitchen window of the old house. He scrambled for the brick, lifted it, and found the key to his XT-500 under the brick. He had no house keys, because Wayne did not lock his house as he wanted unwanted visitors to take down in the basement, the one place in the house Davon was not allowed to go—not that he had any wish to end up down there with those stupid crack heads who had decided to break into White Boy Wayne’s place.
Seizing the key to the XT with a feeling of triumph, Davon was frozen with dread even as he got to his feet, for he could feel Wayne grunting, and the window frame creak and the brick wall break apart as White Boy Wayne forced his hardened bulk through the collapsing and groaning window!
“Oh hell no!” Davon screamed as he ran for the XT-500, the 1977 Japanese Yamaha motocross bike that White Boy Wayne had ridden as a young dude, and that he had given to Davon; the crazy man’s generosity now Davon’s salvation from his strange rage. Never gaining the courage to look behind—as he sensed a man knock apart the side of a building to get at him, and then leap onto the rubble pile he had just quit—Davon ran with bare feet over the jagged brick-waste of the alley like Jesse Owens himself, hopped onto the bike, inserted the key, kicked that big bitch over, and pulled off doing a wheel stand as the big monster man who had once saved him charged bearlike after him, a not yet bloody butcher knife in each hand.
Davon could not hear the buzz saw whine and cough of the badass dirt bike that was half his height and twice his weight, but he could feel her deep treaded tires gripping the alley and propelling him to freedom.
He whooped with triumph as he spun out into the street, White Boy Wayne still in bear-like pursuit, and sped out toward North Avenue through a world gone mad: Dave the Mail Man was humping Mrs. Jackson’s poodle on her stairs while a cop was tazing Mrs. Jackson repeatedly; Old man Matheson was hugging and kissing cross-dressing Jerry Pane...
Out on North Avenue was pandemonium, with two brothers standing over a Korean grocer emptying their nine millimeter’s into his ass—and just his ass—as they chanted some mantra. A lady driving a dump truck was smashing a Mercedes occupied by a screaming man and woman, against the jersey wall. Davon saw but one answer to this mess, to drive out of town, so he headed for Greenmount Avenue, which he knew led out to Towson and the horse country beyond, and hopefully a world where not everyone was crazily chanting as they killed their neighbor.
“Good Lord, this bitch-ass nigga is religious now—and I need a hand!”
As he hit Greenmount and went all Evil Ko-Nevil on the crazy world, he felt somewhat better, like maybe someone up there was looking out for I.E.D. Davon after all.
Was that wind blowing the tears away from his cheek the breath of God?
Davon sure hoped so.
