Had a run in with some kids in the park. High school kids. One of them looked like he wanted to beat my ass. Talked like it too. They were getting hammered on the hill, it’s Easter break, and a couple of them were holding up their buddy who couldn’t walk. Just look at the path homie. Just look at the floor. The big guy, the oldest guy, glared at me and was like hey, what’s up homie. Something something nosy people get it too. What the fuck was he talking about. I wanted to understand and say the right thing so I could look “cool” to these hardass EXP gangsta teens. But, all I could say was, what?
Something something, you gonna piss people off, staring like that. Oh Jesus. I don’t give a fuck how drunk he is, I’m sure he could kick my ass, and there are fifteen of him all wearing the same color.
Oh, dude, I was just ah, your friend seems a little fucked up.
Whatchoo readin’?
I was reading Charles Bukowski. A collection called Septuagenarian Stew. In the future, everyone give your books simple fucking names. Give your sons simple fucking names, so I can say “Darkness by John Jones.” Septuagenarian Stew by motherfucking Charles Bukowski. Thank God I wasn’t listening to a Fiona Apple record.
One of the girls got between us and was like, hey, I’m peaceful. I’m the only one of them who’s peaceful. Good to know. My cat was with me, the rest of the girls started congregating around the cat. Be cool, cat. Don’t get my ass beat. The girls were sweet; they kept their men in check. They made peace. They’ll get pregnant by some hardass, soon, maybe they already were. But, thank you, for not letting me get my ass beat. I remember when I wandered into the Hill district in Pittsburgh and dudes started screaming Johnny Gammage, motherfucker! and throwing bottles. Johnny Gammage was a black guy killed by the cops. Or, a guy killed by the cops and I’ll let you check off the race box. The girls held the dudes back from stomping me. These ghetto girls, trying to keep their men out of trouble, trying to keep pussies like me from getting stomped– you never see that shit in Denny’s fight videos, World Star Hip Hop videos, but I see it every time some gangbanger is about to kick the shit out of me. Their girl stops it. They must recognize that my beautiful face should stay pristine.
Charles what?
It’s a… like, it’s a collection of short stories and shit.
Short stories? Like some Shadow Games shit?
I don’t know what the fuck Shadow Games is, but, say yes. Yes.
That’s some Gypsy shit right there. That’s some Jedi mind control shit.
Now he thought I was a Jedi. What the fuck were these kids on? That’s not some shit you say from drinking. You don’t assume a random book someone is reading is about gypsy mind control. Was he on PCP? Whateverthefuck it was, they left. Staggered away slowly. Just drunk kids. They’ll be hard someday but not yet. Out there living lives where shit actually happens while I look for new ways to jerk off.
There were a few kids left up on the hillside yelling Hey! Yo! EYYYO!!!, maybe at me, but, I didn’t want to talk to them. They hadn’t heard I was a mind control wizard. They’d just kick my teeth in when I told ’em I wasn’t the droids they were looking for.
delicioustacos 
Def pussy
Johnny Gammage, huh?
I think every city has a Johnny Gammage that some people like to cling on to. In Philly we have that asshole Mumia Abu-Jamal. You’ve probably heard of him since he’s become somewhat of a celebrity and counter-culture “hero” since his conviction; a symbol of institutionalized racism and white privilege and racial injustice and whatever other bullshit ivory tower intellectual term you want to slap on him. If you’re not familiar with his story here’s a quick rundown: Mumia is driving a cab in Center City. His brother gets pulled over right across the street from where he’s parked. He gets out to see what’s going on. What happened next is considered “highly controversial”, but long story short, a shootout erupts and when the smoke clears and back-up arrives, the cop, Danny Faulkner, is dead. Mumia is wounded by the cop’s handgun, he’s got a fucking shoulder holster on under his shirt and a revolver with five spent casings in it laying next to him. So what do these fucking racist-ass cracka cops do? They arrest him and charge him with first degree murder. He turns the trial into a fucking sideshow: first he represents himself(which is retarded), then he hires some lawyers, then he fires his lawyers, he’s yelling and preaching in court, just generally acting like a fucking idiot, which is not something you want to do when you’re on trial for first degree murder of a police officer. Three witnesses testify against him. His brother hangs him out to dry. Refuses to testify, says I didn’t see nothing; I don’t know who shot who. He gets convicted and given the death penalty.
The guy is fucking guiltier than OJ. But because of the mishandling of some evidence, and the reputation the Philadelphia Police Department had at the time – this was in the days of Frank Rizzo, I believe, right after they literally bombed a city block that got taken over by some black extremist group – as being racist. Frank Rizzo did not fuck around. There’s a reason that the dude who made The Jerky Boys tapes called himself Frank Rizzo; the real-life Frank Rizzo talked like that to everybody.
3:43 he comes pretty close to beating this reporter’s ass
Now I’m not gonna lie, Philly is a racist town. It always has been. Racial hostilities have seriously calmed down over the past decade or so since gentrification began, a black dude ain’t gonna get stomped out just for walking through the neighborhood, but there’s still a lingering “they got their neighborhood, we got ours” mentality among the oldheads mostly, even if they’re not openly and overtly hostile towards blacks like back in the day. Let’s put it this way: my whole neighborhood might have voted for Obama, but they still wouldn’t let him cross Snyder Avenue to play basketball at 2nd and Jackson. Also, everybody is racist: the whites hate the Blacks, the Blacks hate the Asians and the Puerto Ricans, the Puerto Ricans hate the Dominicans and the Mexicans, the Asians hate the Blacks – it’s just one continuous circle of hate. If anybody from Philly ever starts a death metal band, that’s what they should call it: Circle of Hate. I grew up on the border of Irish and Italian neighborhoods, and even they didn’t always get along. You can probably still hear some little old Italian ladies referring to them as “Irish pigs.”
Anyway, every couple of years they have a rally for this jitbag Mumia somewhere in the city. I was working on a job on Market street right in Center City years ago, and one morning the Sprinkler Fitters come in with bed sheets, big long strips of carpeting like twenty feet long, and a bunch of spray paint. They start laying the sheets and the carpeting out on the floor, and we’re like, what the fuck are you guys doing? They’re marching on City Hall for Mumia, so we’re gonna make some signs up to welcome them. Now, the cop that got killed was Irish, obviously, they’re all fucking cops. A ton of the guys I worked with were Irish, and they absolutely hated Mumia and all the press and hype that surrounded him. Matter of fact they used to all have these t-shirts that said: Mumia shouldn’t be in a 8 x 10 cell, he should be 6 feet closer to hell. I had one, too, actually – all the money from the shirts went to the guy’s widow.
So they start making up these big banners, like they’re going to a fucking Eagles game or something. Fry Mumia!! Mumia must die!! Mumia loves Watermelon I don’t fucking know, I can’t remember all the slogans they were painting on them. The main one was Fry Mumia cause all the activists had signs that said Free Mumia. It was funny, I would say about 75% of the protesters were white college students, the cultural studies types you’re talking about – dirty looking white chicks with dreadlocks, etc. half of them looked like they were homeless. The other 25% were a bunch of bean pie-selling, white gown-wearing, Nation of Islam, militant black types. The kind of dudes you see on South Street screaming about the white devil through a megaphone. Mumia is like a fucking martyr for these guys.
The Sprinkler Fitters take the signs down to hang off of the loading dock, cause by this time the procession is starting to make it’s way up Market Street towards the building, and they wanted to make sure every protester got a good look at them. Now the whole job site is getting in on it – the Tin Knockers, Carpenters, Steam Fitters, Iron Workers, everybody. It was a big job, there had to be over 100 guys working on it, and everybody is taking the lift down to the loading dock to antagonize these marchers. All I I’m thinking is, this is not going to end well.
There were a lot of kids on the job site. Well, we weren’t kids, but there was about 25-30 of us who were all 18, 19 year-old South Philly young adults. This one kid we worked with, I’ll call him Green Eyes since his nickname was somewhat similar, he was the type of kid who would do anything on a bet. Everybody knew this about him, and they would fuck with him for their own amusement because of it. Like if you told him to walk up to the biggest, baddest, blackest motherfucker on the street and clock him straight in the mouth, he would do it. And then he’d probably get the shit kicked out of him, but he didn’t care – he was crazy. We spotted a television crew setting up to talk to the marchers. So what does everybody do? Yo, Green Eyes, why don’t you get one of them banners and run out in front of that news crew, you’ll get on TV! Really they just wanted to see what would happen when he ran out in the middle of a crowd of thousands of pro-Mumia marchers with a sign that said, “Fry Mumia, the murdering piece of shit!!” Of course he says, fuck it, I’ll do it. By this time the procession is directly in front of the building and things are getting heated. There’s a loading dock packed with construction workers heckling them, throwing shit at them, and a lot of the protesters are screaming back. Green Eyes goes running down into the crowd with this banner stretched out in front of him like a fucking Superman cape, he’s shoving it right in people’s faces, we’re just sitting there watching him, cracking up. One of the Nation of Islam guys is talking to the news crew, and he cuts right in between him and the camera man with this banner, screaming, fry Mumia. waving this banner right in front of the camera. The black dude who was trying to do the interview gets pissed, he shoves him out of the way pretty hard. Well, my foreman saw the guy push him, so he runs down there, and now I’m thinking this REALLY isn’t gonna end well, cause everybody else in my trade starts filing down there, too, which means now I gotta go down there because if some shit pops off and I’m not there, everybody’s gonna say, where the fuck were you? and I’ll never hear the end of it. Bu this time my foreman is right up in the dude’s face, he puts both of his hands together like he’s serving a volley ball and just mushes him right in the face. Another protester comes over to get in the middle and he gets pummeled by like 2 or 3 dudes, mouth was all bloody.
The protesters had police escorts the entire time, but you could tell that they were reveling in it. The saw the whole fight brewing, but they just kind of hung back and let it happen. I mean, they were forced to protect a bunch of people rallying on behalf of a cop killer. You know they wished they could break out the billy clubs and start beating on these marchers. They grabbed my foreman and the other kid and told them to just go, just get the fuck out of there so the cops could say they didn’t see nothing.
And that was it. Coulda been a lot worse for sure.
Oh, there was an unarmed white kid that got killed by an off-duty cop here not too long ago, Billy Panas, Initially, the cop wasn’t charged with anything, he wasn’t even suspended from duty. The Police department didn’t want to investigate it, they hid behind their blue wall of silence, stonewalled the kid’s family. The family told their neighbors about the situation, then they told their neighbors, and so on and so on, until they had a whole chunk of the city holding a memorial rally for this kid, calling for the cop’s arrest and prosecution. The Cops couldn’t ignore it anymore, they fired the cop and wound up charging him with murder. Didn’t see that one on the national news.
that rizzo sounds like a stand up guy
You would’ve had a field day during the London riots, haha!
My mate was walking back home and coming the opposite direction were a load of high school kids and wannabe thugs all carrying baseball bats and shit, wearing scarves over their faces and stuff. He was carrying his shopping and one of the lad goes to him “oi, what’s in the bag?” He just replied “bread”. “Fucking bread!!! HAHAHA you pussy!” and all the dickheads started laughing and carried on.
“They hadn’t heard I was a mind control wizard.”
I laughed out loud yet it is not, for some reason, as funny as caulk.
“a black dude ain’t gonna get stomped out just for walking through the neighborhood”
Well, it looks like I spoke too soon:
I chalk it up to the summer heat.