AN AMERICAN RACE TRILOGY

(This is explicit in many ways, and uses racially charged language, in context. You have been informed)

ONE: CRASHING ON THE ROCKS OF RACE REALITY


Remember one random 2013 night sitting in a no-name tavern, shore’s edge Lake Michigan, East Rogers Park, Chicago. I was having a beer with Maputo, my next door neighbor. Of African extraction, obviously. Hung out with this studying-something student for a while before finding out he was upper middle class, living in the same shitty building I was down by Lake Michigan to save on trust funds and finances. He expertly walked the two-lives line that wealthier black Americans learn to negotiate right from the word go.

Never put his hand in his pocket.
The rich don’t get rich that way.
But he was a sound enough guy.
For a while.

Hooked him up with a white woman from a local bar I occasionally visited, and did a William S Burroughs film screening at.

“Homegirl’s crazy, all she wants to do is eat and fuck!” he said in oversexed legspreader wonderment.

Sounded fine to me.

Those black guys love their big-booty cuties.

So anyway, there we were at the bar and he was yacking intently away to some Asian woman sitting to his right, when the white barman leaned over to me and said casually, quietly, confidentially, vicious-smilingly, nodding in Maputo's direction:

“Wouldn’t you like to own one of those?”

It was a sharkfin suddenly appearing through previously-safe, quiet night waters.

Never forget it, I was genuinely shocked. The thought had obviously never crossed my mind.

But then again, I don’t live in the 19^th firestorm century like America loves to, the good old dear dead days of black and white and wrong is right, sneer and stab, shooting off at the mouth across the divide and conquer years, the ghost rattling of the chains of the transatlantic enslaved suddenly disturbing the confused air.

I don’t remember what I said, but the answer certainly wasn’t fucking yes.

Another barmaid there who saw me with Maputo said to me in almost-innocent racial wonderment a night or three later:

“You sure have some funny friends.”

I didn’t get it, but I suppose spending a few years in apartheid-era South Africa as a kid had ironically pre-prepared me for hanging around with anybody anyskin anytime. Or, maybe, frankly I didn't give a damn about anybody's skin color just in general decent human principle.

Stopped talking to Maputo right after he told me “You’re just like a white nigger, man!”  And it wasn’t entirely a compliment, or an insult, and he didn’t quite say it right, and I told him where to stick it. But when black or Chicano people told me I wasn’t white, or talked about white people dismissively to me with no malice – like say a Chicano neighbor sharing a beer I gave him - and they didn’t mean me, I didn’t take it as an insult. It was straight truth. I was nothing like the white American middle class at all, and never would or will be.

It's a right cross life.

TWO: A BLACK EDUCATION FROM THE LAST CHANCE SALOON


I just blew back into the Windy City. The Windy City is mighty purty – in some North Shore places with a certain color of faces.

Which reminded me of X in the Last Chance Saloon during the last year I was in America.

His dad was a Black Panther, and big bald bastard X was an Intellect. Same age as me pretty much, a guerrilla, a shit-stomper, a painter, a pure artist regaling me with tall-stature tales of his life, his city, his country, his art.

Man, we had some dense fascinating post-midnight conversations in that bar. Intimate lifelong dead presidents revelations of racism, madness, revolutionary purity, Robert Johnson’s ghost song-cackling from his crossroads-lantern grave, a soul-selling blues brother in arms forever in bittersweet home Chicago.

I got a different take on American existence there altogether as I sat at the bar, reading books on black history, drawing comparisons with the White Panthers, John Sinclair, MC5, rock the burn down the block party:

“KICK OUT THE JAMS. MOTHERFUCKER!”

The bloodred Chicago-cops-murdered ghost of Fred Hampton watched over us with knowing angry eyes, a million better black futures dying with him. And we sat there laughing, singing, me drinking, us shoveling, wrecking, planning, building, breaking, rebuilding, Carl Sandburg style, laughing at white middle class advertising fantasy concertos on the shitspiller no-sound telly sets, playing Die Antwoord and The Pogues and Tina Turner on the hydrogen jukebox, big wheels kept on turning, broaching racial divides, debating Huey Newton blowing it by hanging out with the junkies and criminals he met in prison when he got out, awe-inspired by the  amazing feverscream artwork of Emory Douglas, his hog butcher for the world overtures, his black power drawing symphonies:

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE.
JUST WAIT UNTIL
I GET A LITTLE BIGGER
SO THAT I CAN WEAR MY DADDY’S HAT
AND SHOOT MY DADDY’S GUN.
IT TAKES A NATION.
WHAT IS A PIG?
FREE ELDRIDGE.
WE WANT AN END
TO THE ROBBERY
BY THE CAPITALISTS
OF OUR BLACK COMMUNITY.
SEIZE THE TIME
FREEDOM!
FREEdom!
Free…dom?

A fake William Wallace joycry dying unheard in feds-betrayed throats.

It was the eternal oppressed Scottish underdog mentality meeting and recoiling at horrifying American racism. And the black guys in there appreciated the fact I appreciated their history, their stance, their struggle, their suffering; always got a decent welcome and it was never false.

Chicago, a city designed along blacknwhite divisive lines and lies, that will always bear that raw ugly Cesarean birth scar.

Nobody in the Last Chance Saloon was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.

I vividly remember X’s amazing firefueled portrait of a vintage-prime Jimi Hendrix, sparks cracking from lazy hardly-try fingers. Through the people I hung out with in America, the dispossessed I could relate to somewhat, me a strange-accented immigrant learning from other outcasts or marginalized narrow-eyed blue collar worldviewers, the blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, gays, lesbians, punks, guitarists, drummers, vocalists, poets, writers, drinking thinkers, underground preachers, filmmakers, video store owners, barmen, those knowledgeable about the Chicago-connection outsider art velocities of Henry Darger and Wesley Willis and Vivian Maier and Edward Gorey and Iceberg Slim and GG Allin, far from greedy corporate scum eyes, I gained an alternate people’s history of the Disunited States. It was one I had heard of in my teen punk records mags books films, but had never quite paid full attention to before moving over there.

Or maybe I never would have.

Of course, there were a lot of way in which I could not relate, having grown up in a completely different environment, and not having been subjected to vile American anti-white racism. The lives my non-white friends would have been infinitely harder in some ways. I was lost in a big country and the bitter bloody education never stopped coming like multiple broken glass orgasms.

But it was not always bad.

One day outside the Last Chance Saloon there were three or four black kids of around ten. One of them had a damn-it puncture in his bike wheel, gleeful childhood adventure excitement cruelly sadly extinguished for the day.

“He looks like my own son,” X said empathetically and ran outside to take a look at the sad-face bicycle damage, giving the kid some money to happily get his flat repaired.

Remember another time three disgusting middle class white women breezed in and played bitch-this bitch-that nigga-this nigga-that music on the jukebox. They’ve got those minstrel shows, purty ladies in the big chapeaus, to sit and cluck and preen and pose.

X went over to bring their drinks to their squawking entitled shit-rabble table, and one of them unconsciously reached for her nothing-worth-stealing handbag. I saw it and after they left we laughed incredulously about it. But it was a stark revelation to me of a certain kind of illogical mindset. Why the fuck would your barman leave his job, co-workers, tips,  tricks of the liquor-slinger trade, just to snatch a bag and bolt?

Beyond belief. And totally true.

Then there were deep dark conversations about sex, pussy, longed-for female nevergonnabe partners, stillborn dreams, intimate agonies, baby mamma drama, cruel leaving, pain of child separation, father death at the same time as mine, all dad memories now becoming retro.

Chicago, the city of the narrow racial shoulders. The Windy City, not mighty purty, never see any morning glories in the unfriendly confines of the food and sanity desert areas without even a fucking Walmart.

A strained ratatatat tapdance of South Side rat-trap shooting galleries, with Pooh Bear Gang the local Rogers Park death performers. Every dead young black guy was an aspiring rapper, an endless murder-glutted movable feast for the hearty moneyraker undertaker. Scandal-torn Burr Oak Cemetery was empty and eagerly ready for more bodies of the self-victimised kill-willing cannon fodder.

But eventually enough was just way too much, I’m heavy loaded baby, I’m booked, I gotta go, kiss Cook County Jail fuck-you bye for me, cryin’, baby, honey, pack up your two Achille Lauro suitcases and one backpack and smile smile smile, don’t wanna go back to Scotland, sweet home Falkirk, but have no choice in the matter. The last night I was in the bar and had some friends over saying goodbye, X and a black guy who sold oils in there marveled about being able to finally leave and get away from the land of their birth, leaving that garbage racial baggage at the airport of freed dreams forever.

And I will always remember and bring to mind that the last person to hug me on the short sharp shocked day I left my slaughtered American Nightmare behind forever was X, who randomly saw me across the street from the Lost Chance Saloon and came across to say hi and bye. I learned more about real life in America from him than from nearly everybody I met, and I salute that man to this day.

And in closing, I would have to say that I ain’t ever a-swappin’ half of Kilmarnock for the whole of the slowly dying noise of Illinois.

THREE: THE SUNNYSIDE OF THE RACIAL STREET

Down by Lake Michigan, 1145 W Morse Ave, apartment 103, 2011-2015. I can hesitantly unpleasantly recall the smell of glorified fast food from J.B. Alberto’s pizza-by-numbers, the self-overrated eaterie next door. Only place I could get a small imported bottle of Tennent’s Lager to drink, and that shows you how homesick I occasionally got over there, to drink that putrid pish.

But the near-lakeside building also held my black bald early-sixties neighbor, John. He was a real character, gay as today, friendly smiling happy, laughing with white teeth:

“I ain’t got nobody but my niece and her son.”

Chuckling talking about next-door Maputo, how he was a taker and how loud he talked on the phone; we could hear every word clearly  from behind his rattling door:

“Boy, you ain’t on the plains of Africa!”

I used to give John a lift up to CVS on N Clark to get his heart meds and whatever. I would occasionally bump into him down by the beach watching the sweat-glistening young black guys doing their sunny day workouts, adoringly admiring them dick to dorsal. He would comment on how much money he would have to pay to fuck them, sniffily dismissing to me one bars-swinging young topless black buck as costing maybe a couple of hundred dollars, too much for too little...and maybe too much stress on a young-cock-yearning old damaged heart.

And he could be funny too, once telling me of his surefire foolproof way of getting rid of hasslesome young black beggars accosting him round the Morse El entrance just up the avenue:

“Yeah, I’ll give you the money…if you let me grind on that ass.” 

And all of a sudden, as if by magic, youthful financial needs would just dry up and blow away!

John used to talk wistfully about a good-rep complex for the older tenant just up W Morse on the opposite roadside, other side of the crossroads, other side of the tracks.

He cooed and sighed about how good it would be.

I heard he got in there, was happy for him. And in a pleasing coincidence, the very last time I ever saw him I was walking by his coveted building, on the opposite suntanned side of the street. I saw him standing waving smiling from a window a couple of floors up, and I smiled and I waved back and moved on into my suddenly fuck-yes spring-step day,
hoping he had all the ass he wanted
to grind against, finding ecstatically
that sometimes against whatever
luckless no-bucks no-chance odds
they may finally find themselves
forever fighting, that the
better-life-yearning
good guys
really do win
sometimes.

THE END


PS: After what I wrote above, do I claim to have any special magic insights into race relations in America or, increasingly, here in Scotland, where we are now sadly and disturbingly importing deeply divisive American race relations? Nope. Just writing about some things that happened to me, take it or leave it. And that's that.

http://www.athinsliceofanxiety.com/2022/12/poetry-today-by-graham-rae.html