8:00 the rain slackened to a drizzle as lightning backlit the western, northern and eastern skies and the southern sky was littered with trailing thunderhead tails.
I walked to 54th and Eastern, confident that no cops will be present as alarms and sirens have gone off in the distance, traffic is at near zero and power lines are now doubt down in many places.
[Deliberate change from past to present tense—sorry.]
As I cross the deserted street, the first person to leave the cover of a roof, five Negroes huddle under the bus shelter on the east side of Eastern. Their leader, a stocky man of 40, with a steel umbrella steps out from cover and yells at me, “Come ‘ere cracka! We got bidness!” Fo emphasis he stabs the street with his umbrella and it rings like steel with a tinny rattle.
I eye fuck him, then turn to my task, not slowing my gait.
In the Paki liquor store are two Negro customers, buying what I’m buying, a 25 ounce can, before I get Megan’s vodka at the counter. I stand patiently ten paces back, hands behind my back, where the war club and scalping knife may be drawn in tandem. The surly leader, muscular man of 35, stands back up with his Colt 45, looks at me, nods respectfully, and steps away.
At the counter the same ritual is observed. We all know that the PIGZ, snarfing down their pearls cast before them by our evil Mother Quean, will not interfere. When I step to the counter, they go to the door, stop, turn, look at me, as I slowly and openly pull my wallet money out, count it in plain sight, making sure that they understand that they will be fighting over about fifty bucks and a fifth of Smirnoff, and then walk off.
The Paki Patriarch gives me a discount, nodding to the departing savages with the “Enemy of my enemy” wink in his shifty eyes.
I leave, stop. Look to my left, and they stand there, one bent and scowling, one keen and erect, aloof even, having waited for me abiding some instinct to be sure who is predator and prey. I look at them openly, grin, drop my hand to the right hip for the war club and they slouch off like chimps driven from some sweet spring watering hole by an existential threat.
Pumped, I march back to the bus stop, where my challenger, Paveman Jones, so named forever in my addled rogues gallery brain, awaits.
I stop, look south uphill to Him and His and the five of them emerge, slouching like caricatures out of a 1920s Mississippi comic watermelon commercial.
I begin crossing to the Dunkin Doughnuts as the chimp song rises, his jabbering acolytes thirsting for the clash of Caveman and Paveman.
He walks diagonally towards me, to cut me off and joining battle at the narrow concrete median strip, in the middle of a deserted boulevard. He stabs the asphalt of Eastern Avenue with his steely umbrella and shouts, “We sortin’ dis shit out!”
I grinned and changed direction to meet him, reaching for the war club, figuring on looping the liquor bag over his weapon with a backhand redondo as the opener and…
...He halts, looks back at his followers, who halt and stop their circling of me, and, with a salute of his umbrella not unlike the salute given by the Zulu Impi Commander to the garrison at Rourkes Drift, declared, “Rain check!” and changed directions for the Dunkin Doughnuts, careful to grant my passage first with a slight apish bow.
As I passed down 54th between the Dunkin’ and the convenience store, where the first Latino family to emerge were entering to shop, a tall, Latino man in green shirt who was following them, saw me, stopped, looked at me again, and crossed the street towards me, changed directions again and followed me back the way he had come. I stopped, set down the liquor bag, looked at him, and placed my hands on war club and scalping knife…
...And, he stopped, did his third 180 degree change in direction and purpose in 20 God-given seconds, and headed to where Paveman Jones hopefully awaited to do some weird combat. Megan and I got good and drunk and I walked her to work at 7:45 A.M.
The next morning, I got off the bus at Northern and Harford and saw the ruinous passage of the tornado that touched down where I boarded this bus the day before. Ten trees, big oaks, maple, birch and elm, had shattered or been uprooted. I walked the neighborhood to get to a zone with power a mile north, to get money from an ATM and a bottle of whiskey to pay The Man in the Hat for driving me to York, Pennsylvania, and a case of beer for the Brickmouse and his Bride. The black folk all about, who were buying homes, were seeming to emerge in the middle of a bombed out war zone and were very polite and helpful, even asking if my people were okay and wishing me a blessed, day. A tattooed gang banger directing traffic on a side street and helping out a redneck arriving to clear brush in a pickup truck, stopped, nodded and said to me, “Hope its good with you today, Sir.”
The world is such a fine place for the Caveman when the police are elsewhere and their criminal Paveman allies are left to challenge the verdict of Creation—preordained to fail with a comedic ode to their Master Apparent...and the better sorts of folk of all kinds are freed, for a moment in Time, from the civic heel of the vilest whore, Civilization.
…
End Note
Ironically, I sit with a sprained ankle right now, because we had to box in the grassy backyard yesterday instead of the front driveway, because some white people called the Allegheny County cops on we three cavemen, white cops, who sat and observed the house in a blocking position, until we went inside and Rick closed all the doors and blinds. For there is no greater crime then being a paleface pedestrian in the Matriarchy of Cuckmenistan, patrolled by its blue-suited goons.
