“Hating an entire group of people based on what you know of their actions, is not racist,” She said with maniacal sincerity, “Only blind hatred of color, without regard to knowledge of, or experience with, is racist.”
The damp, purple lids of her eyes blinked at me, empty, waiting for me to nod and mumble in agreement. She froze in disbelief at my hesitation.
“What could he possibly be thinking?” she most likely said to herself. “Does he not know how important we are? How unimportant they are?” she probably thought. Really I was thinking about the contradiction waiting patiently for her inside the dictionary sitting on the shelf behind.
“If those frigging monkeys acted like humans once in a while, maybe we all wouldn’t hate them so much.”
Swearing was beneath my Mother, she used words like “frick” and “frigging”. She had too much class for curses and slang. Maybe too much class was the problem.
“Just look at them out there,” She pointed through the dining room shutters at the interracial couple moving in across the street from us, “and of course they have children, more coloreds.” Her lips furled under her nose as her head shook.
When the spewing hatred finally settled to a trickle, I was given a chance to reflect on where this had all gone wrong. I knew where it went wrong for her, but where had it gone wrong for me? And how did it get right again?
Mother’s adventure started with blacks, African Americans, Negroids she called them—I always imagined a black C3PO from star wars when she said it. I should have the story memorized by now, but my attention span seems to dwindle with repetition. From what I can recall, the story goes that as an infant she moved with her parents, older sister, and younger brother from Louisville Kentucky to the coast of California. Her immigrant parents were struggling for money and at the behest of her uncle, they decided to go west.
Her Father’s Brother owned a television shop in San Mateo. Color television sets had just become available and sales were through the roof. With a prosperous future in sight and three kids in tow—with a fourth on the way—they settled down in what was then, a predominantly Caucasian neighborhood.
These parts I remember the best because they are part of my family’s history, and therefore, part of me. But skip forward a few years, to the part where the bubble burst, the part where her Uncle blew the budget on booze, broads, and blowjobs, leaving her Father out of a job, and her family out of a home, and it all gets a bit vague. They ended up a few cities over to the cheapest land in the bay area. That’s when color entered her world.
To understand this story fully, you need to know a little more about Mother before I continue. She is a petite, attractive, blonde, with the tenacity of a mule. It is hard to make friends with peers if they feel threatened and consequently act solely out of jealousy. Two weeks into fifth grade and her lips were wrapped around a chin-up bar with six bloodied teeth on the tanbark below.
No she didn’t slip. No there was no accident. She was pushed—slammed actually—head first into the cold steel by another little girl. A black girl. By the time her second brother was born, the first was in a daily struggle to survive the beatings on his way home from school. This was when color exited her world. When all that remained was black and white.
And here I am, twenty four years in the making, watching her eyes burn as she beams abhorrence through the shutters and across the road to our new neighbors.
People never forget. Bigotry may very well be the result of a scarred, obstinate memory. Or sheer ignorance.
To place the blame for my own discriminatory beliefs on my Mother would be easy, but not entirely deserved. I too have had negative experiences with other peoples, cultures, and colors. I too have felt demonized by my birth into the majority. I too have seen fairness become strangely unfair. But I have felt, seen, and had so much more of the contrary.
I have witnessed helping hands of all shapes and shades. I have lived, laughed, and loved with every mix on an artist’s palette. And I am proud of every minute that I let my heart be my eyes.
Of course like any proper equation, there is another piece that must be added to get the answer. My Dad.
Dad was a United States Marine at the height of the Vietnam War. He was born in an eastern European settlement on the east side of St. Louis Missouri. Abusive Mother, Father died young, half-sister more than a decade his senior. Plenty of things to hate about the world. But he didn’t really. At least not anymore. After the divorce I think he left all the hate behind.
When my parents were together, that’s when the racially biased shotgun took aim with both barrels and blew the heads off any and all liberals in sight.
“Those whinny little democrat faggots are gonna’ bitch and moan all the live long day,” Dad would say, “Right up until the next war breaks out and they duck and cover like the draft dodging fairies they are, leaving us poor bastards to fight and die so that they can keep complaining in English. I swear to god we’ll be speaking Arab within a year.”
Just one of many fanatic rants that the television took the brunt of. Dad justified most of his hatred by blaming it on the war. And, to be honest, it is hard for me to disagree. Liberals named him a murderer, Southeast Asia tried to kill him, his government abandoned him, and the cause they told him was just, turned out to be an inglorious cluster-fuck that robbed him of his innocence, his youth, and his sanity. So I adopted words like “gook” and phrases like “hippie liberal”. It didn’t matter if you were Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese, or fucking Mongolian, “They’re all gooks to me!” he’d say. And so would I.
Believe it or not, painting a family portrait this bleak is quite
difficult. They are good people really, great people, model people. My mother makes the best God damn chocolate bunt cake on the planet, and she will serve it to you with a wide, glowing smile, and two scoops of slow churned vanilla. Dad was at every one of my football games regardless of his high profile life in the executive world. They gave me everything I ever asked for and then some. Yet somehow they kept from spoiling me. Or at least I think they did. Mom helped with homework while Dad lit up the grill. Every holiday was celebrated in the most festive of manners. They laughed like normal parents, ate like normal parents, drank like normal parents, and hated each other like normal parents. When they remodeled our house in the late nineties I could have sworn they were only using glass.
For a large part of my thus far short life, I have felt like a fake. Like I was constructed without first laying foundation. Flimsy and fragile. Maybe because I never thought about who I was and how I was made before. I had always just assumed all the pieces to the puzzle were there without ever taking inventory. But I’m sure this is true for most people my age. Although I sure hope not, for their sake.
I grew up with one view, one take, one perception of the world and its workings. Then Dad went to southern California, Mom went through menopause, and I went to college. Well, City College. But what a wonderful decision that turned out to be.
Two year city colleges have an extremeness of diversity that four year universities will just never be able to achieve. It is the diversity of diversity that makes it so special. You aren’t forced into a simple sampling of flavors from the rainbow, but of every mixture of culture, color, language, smell, boozing, drugging, fucking, fighting, style, food, knowledge, respect, tradition, and unavoidably, awfulness.
Watching someone talk about teen alcohol poisoning on the five o’clock news isn’t the same as being passed out on the bathroom floor next to the guy who near choked to death on his own vomit because he bet you he could drink more of the gallon jug of Jack Daniels than you could. Your neighbor telling the story about how her niece was raped at a frat party last year is nowhere near the same as finding your best friend’s girlfriend bloodied, nude, and comatose at the bottom of a dumpster behind the video store. Your son in high school is addicted to marijuana is he? Try snorting so much cocaine that the only way to stop the pain in your chest is to smoke another joint. Or taking three pills of ecstasy at a time because two just wasn’t cutting it. Or dropping acid by the Cliffside with a group of friends, realizing the next morning that the one of them who went missing became the third person that year to fall to their death on the rocks below.
Parents don’t prepare you for any of that. High school doesn’t prepare you for any of that. Movies, television, music, none of it can explain to you what it’s like to feel the reaper’s love without ever knowing his touch.
I can’t say that I am a different person because of the things I have experienced. But I can say that I have changed. I learned that when times are tough, when things get cold-sweat-and-soiled-briefs scary, that people, humans tend to come together.
When I found him unconscious and slumped over the toilet I didn’t panic. I laid him on his back, wiped the froth and chunks of debris from his throat, and breathed into him.
When I think of her lying there, covered in other peoples waste, I remember the look on her boyfriend’s face being the sad part. The utter helplessness in his eyes. The sickness bubbling up to his mouth. And how He and I took off our shirts, covered her, and carried her through the night bare backed.
When I thought my heart was going to explode from an overdose, the two girls who lived upstairs came down to comfort me. They had heard the screaming. The whole night they stayed with me, walking at my elevated pace, listening to the cyclical, inane, dribble that came out of my mouth. Until I was okay again. Until I felt okay.
When they found his body at the bottom of the cliff, the whole community came to a midnight vigil that lasted until the following morning. Hundreds of burning candles, dripping eyes, and soft, muted voices, all together, mourning a fallen friend.
That was where it went right for me I guess. When I could imagine the most horrific, terrifying, ghastly things that I knew could one day happen to me and know that there would always be someone there to help. Someone there to care. Someone there that forgets about color, shape, and size and lends a hand regardless.
I may have grown up racist, but after all this, I think I may have learned how not to be.
© 2010 Robert Gerleman
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Robert Gerleman is a twenty-four year old student at Humboldt State University majoring in English and Creative Writing. An unordered list of his most prominent interests include Hockey, motorcycling, language study, and full flavored beer. Typical tastes and endeavors he’d assume. He is currently working on completing a hat-trick of yet unpublished novels between arduous heckling from his girlfriend and shallow disappointment from friends and family. Somewhere in between he has found time to produce this wretched short story. Enjoy?
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