Saturday Afternoon: 4:15
After 18 hours walking, bussing, working, training and watching fight films with a sparring partner I decided to stop at the Mixed Race Sports Bar for a beer. By the time the foaming mug was adding another coat of yeasty varnish to the bar top three men came in with two cases of meet: beef and pork. The leader was fifty and wore a culinary jacket as his two apprentices headed to the back of the bar with the 160 pounds of animal flesh.
This man extolled the freshness of his product attested by the bloody aprons of his helpers, who were opening up the folding table that ghetto bars keep on hand so that our hard working black market grocers might hawk their wares. These guys brought knives, butcher paper, and generic shopping bags so I could not determine what outfit they worked for.
They were sold out in 12 minutes, and out the door.
Sunday Night: 7:10
I was walking up a back alley behind the main drag, about to cut through my favorite 2 foot wide alley to the store fronts, when I noticed a lot of activity behind the dumpster. Two men had pulled a 1981 Buick up behind the dumpster and opened the trunk and the two rear doors.
One man minded the mobile store while the other knocked on the backdoors of the eating and drinking establishments. Within the time it took me to skulk 100 feet a crowd of people were picking through the trunk full of frozen fish and shrimp and the back seat full of frozen chicken. I decided to take a short cut through the back door of the lower end bar past the pool tables and to the bar where I ordered a draft.
Just as I relaxed and the happy customers started filing in the back door with arm loads of frozen seafood and poultry, a man with a backpack and a bomber jacket walked in the front door; a tall well-built and handsome man in his early 30s. He was selling two inch thick Delmonico steaks for $5.
Tuesday at Dusk
As the rain came down I ran into a lady friend I used to work with outside of a supermarket in the county and we repaired to the drinking establishment in the same strip mall, right on the city/county line. As soon as we got settled and ordered a glass of Forget What I Do for a Living, Otis, the towering dirt-bag bar grocer who used to stand across the street from the store I managed and send crack heads in three and four at a time to overwhelm my security, walked in.
Now Otis is working the county, sending female heroin addicts into Walmart and higher end supermarkets on raids. In fact he proudly carries his T-bone steaks and fillet minion into the bar in a Walmart insulated bag. He was selling $15.99 packs of steaks for $5. One pass around the bar and another back and his bag was empty and his wallet flush. As he crossed the sidewalk he threw the Walmart bag in the trashcan and went about his parasitic business.
The one thing all of these criminal meat venders have in common is they move their product so fast it does not even get warm; their need for speed and their customers’ need to feed combining in the best interest of product freshness.
WoW! Poor people are eating better than me. Well, I'm poor too but you know what I mean!
Hey and this time you didn't mention the race of the perps or the buyers of the stolen meat. I'm always curious.
The local meat venders are in order of frequency:
1. a white couple who claim to steal only from Wal-Mart
2. two white guys working together
3. a white guy employing white junkies to steal and then reselling
4. a group of 4 black guys that work in either a supermarket or eatery preparing meet who show up in butcher attire and cut meat at the bar.
5. 2 black dudes selling meat out of the trunk of a car in the alley
The purchases I have seen have been evenly split by race, with virtually everyone ready and willing to buy stolen food, including cops.