“James, we know you are a real smartass. I appreciate the reporting tone you have adopted for the riots but miss the weird shit. Please, what was your funniest moment of the riots for you—your favorite riot week memory?”

-Ethan

On Wednesday morning at 10:00 a.m., I was taking a tour of Hamilton with Mescaline Franklin, in his muscle shirt and death metal tattoos. He was taking photographs of the surgical damage caused by the professional break in crews, and became enamored of a Celtic cross on Saint Dominic’s church. As he took a picture I watched a large, employed, car owning, black man in middle age, whip out his Johnson and piss on the side of the jewelry store where the insurance adjuster was assessing the damage.

As Mescaline and I walked on by the piss stain a deaf white panhandler stepped away from White Jesus [a homeless white guy who only wears white and has a long mane of white hair and a bushy beard of the same ghostly hue] who he was worrying for a smoke. This is one of the deaf white guys who mug women in the neighborhood, who tried to get the pizza girl last year.

When he rose to mime for a smoke from me I looked through him, as I do to all panhandlers, even if they are missing a leg and crying, and walked on. Mescaline, however, engaged him in a kung fu mime dance of bizarre aspect. The young New Jersey guy was once a Hung Gar kung fu student. I smiled as I looked ahead at the horrified look on the lady who owns Kikki’s Kuts, standing on the walk with her apron and scissors, her face saying, “Oh my God, the white people have gone crazy too!”

Glad that there were no cops patrolling, I stood and watched the deaf mugger/panhandler miming Mescaline’s tiger dance, until they shook hands and hugged each other.

I have to say that was my funniest five minutes, although Boomy, the Nigerian cab driver, mistaking me for the last officer of the Confederate States of America and insisting that my “niggers were useless and out of control” and that I needed to round them up, would have to be #2.