At 4:11 a.m. this Sunday morning, In Harm City, on White Avenue, sleeping on the floor under my open window, I was awakened by the loud call, “I need ta suck off The White Man!”
“Oh My God,” I thought, “has Satan sent his army of hos to dash my misogynistic resolve? Is this karmic punishment for writing Your Trojan Whorse?”
My eyes wide open, the same voice responds to the first, as if speaking to another person, “I need ta smoke ma crack.”
“Oh,” I thought, “I need to transcribe this hood rat deposition!”
Leaping heroically from the worn out futon mattress on the floor to this portal of enlightenment, the Violence Guy was on the case!
I had apparently been awakened mid way through her trimeter verse.
Her voice was strong and loud.
She looked to the gods above as she stutter-strutted down the center line of the two lane secondary street.
Her diction—without an ‘s’ randomly slapped on the end of every word, as is often the case with her ilk—was very good, and the rhythm of her song was so:
“I need ta smoke ma crack.”
“I need ta suck off The White Man!”
“Are their po-lease up in here?”
That was her song, the song of the Siren of White Avenue, a song, the second line of which—exactly where it should be imbedded—proclaims that The White Man is still a figure endowed with awe, and that he pays a ho well, rather than just kicking her to the curb.
This mythic creature pirouetted in the street outside of the Old Plantation House from 4:11 to 4:24 in the morning, and was eventually silenced—not by the whoop of a police siren—but by the low drumbeat of plastic trashcans rumbling and scraping in the ghetto night. After having had a mere few hours sleep over the course of two days, this soothing denouement put me to serene rest, like Burton under a Diaphanous Arabian sky.
