Last night, at Branan’s bar, I was interviewing Cory and Quinn, on the occasion of Cory’s leaving town for his homeland security Tactical Ass-raping study course. It was a full night at the bar with Milton the curmudgeon ex-cop, William AKA ‘Black Superman,” who bowed when Hawk walked through the door, and even the conductor of the mayo Sandwich inquest, whose name escapes me. Two fellows were there with their very pretty wives. This is a good sign of a pleasant environment, when the best looking women are with a man they came with.
I told White Whigger LeBron’s racist parable of the Equidistant Drowning Babies. Quinn and Hawk finally agreed on something—a cryptic basketball point of debate—although Hawk named him a sissy yet again. Johnny Cochrane-in-Drag [Hawk’s woman, so named by Quinn], asked me for boxing lessons. I was outted by the barmaid to Cory, for secretly eating pizza with a knife and fork, unbeknownst to my training partners. As Quinn was waxing misogynistic about eating pussy in the 1980s black dating scene, six big black women rolled in, three of them dykes to be sure, casting a pall of horror over his line of discussion. The ladies ended up having a lot of fun shooting pool.
The 54-year-old janitor, who I have often said hello to, but never conversed with, was shooting pool with them. On the occasion of their leaving I heard a large dog wolf. I turned, stunned, thinking a 200 pound rot was behind me, and saw the janitor.
He is six foot, 170, so dark he is almost black, bald, and has a wide smile with a few holes in it. He smiled apologetically, came over, shook my hand, and said, “Sorry Bother, I get to barkin’ sometimes—called me Cowbell back in the day."
He checked with Quinn as to whether he would be safe getting home, and with Hawk shaking his head in that sissy-accusing way, Quinn stood to leave, and said, “If those hoppers come for me tonight I’m taking one with me.”
Cowbell then saw Cory’s four-leaf-clover symbol on his hat and got excited, as if seeing a sacred symbol for the second time in his life. He insisted that we accompany him outside as he pointed ecstatically at the cloverleaf over the bar entrance and waxed, “I polished that just the other day, made me a scrubber that attaches to a painting pole and got that muvasucka clean. I love that sign. It’s the sign of this good place and the nice folks who look out for me.”
Cory. His first time at this bar, said, “This is really my favorite place now. I found it just in time before I moved.”
He then became involved in a conversation with a man his height and half his girth, a young white fellow who finds that the only good company he can find in affordable places is with old black people—who are preyed upon by the same animals that hunt him. Cowbell named this fellow “Big Trippin” and I will tell his story elsewhere.
Cowbell and I returned inside and sat for a while so that he could tell me about his good fortune, to be the janitor at the mixed-race sports bar. I did not take notes and don’t know his diction very well, so will narrate the high and low points of his life over the past year and a half.
Cowbell was cleaning up at the bar and working another cash job, barely making ends meet. He rented a room three blocks away, right across the street from Donell Weston’s Bitchegg Hotel. He worked from “paycheck to paycheck—just enough to get by,” able to have a few drinks at the bar in return for keeping it clean. One night he was walking up the street to his house when “four of those young hoppers” attacked him. One of them was armed with a crowbar, which shattered his right hand, which is still flattened and deformed across the back. He had been making his money working a job across town. With his hand smashed, his wallet gone, and having to get his hand fixed, he lost that job, which set him back to the point where he could not make rent, and was put out on the street.
While still in his cast, and heading across town to find some work, he was on the #19 bus when three “young hoppers” [This is what older black guys call the animals that white liberals call “innocent unarmed black youth.” Black dudes under 50 call them hoodrats, with most adult black men refusing to recognize fatherless black youth as human beings, but as Quinn calls them “Satan’s Spawn”] boarded the bus, refused to pay, and were not opposed by the driver. The boys then proceeded to crowd about Cowbell, grabbed his handbag, and put him in a chokehold. Cowbell grabbed his bag and “yanked free of dem hoppers” and staggered to the front of the bus, asking the bus driver for help, to call the MTA police. The bus driver was frozen in fear and refused aid, telling Cowbell that if he didn’t like it he could get off the bus. Cowbell said, “A course I don’t like bein’ mugged, and you a bitch fo lettin’ dese penniless hoppers ride fo free and mug me!”
The bus driver told Cowbell to get off the bus. Irate now, he stood on the side of the road screaming at the boys, telling them they were bitches, and to bring it to him. The boys did not pursue him and stayed on the bus, riding for free, under the protection of the complicit bus driver, free to mug some weaker victim than Cowbell.
Now homeless, Cowbell was saved by the owner, barmaids, and patrons of Branan’s, all of them white. The owner and the barmaids pay him cash for cleaning the bar and guarding them while they leave. In return for doing their landscaping at their homes in the Lancaster area of Pennsylvania, he sleeps on couches and in guest rooms for half the week. The other half of the week some of the afternoon regulars take him home with them, where he earns sleeping arrangements by doing chores. He also carries pocket ads for the bar, Ravens game schedules, and has memorized the prices and hours, so that he can promote the bar when he is “out and about lookin’ for work en a room for rent I can afford.”
Determined not to be the victim of “the nasty young hoppers dat patrol da streets lookin’ fo drunk white people and lone dudes to mug,” Cowbell has begun carrying a padlock on a chain in his pocket.
“One night, lille’ while ago, I was gettin’ off da nineteen when dese three young hoppers come up on me. I fifty-four, too old to deal wit all dat with my hands, so a cop recommended a padlock on a chain, for dat bike a mine I misplaced!”
[Laughter]
“You see this, this vein down the front a my head—that the Devil Horn—pops up when I be angry en on alert. The Devil Horn pops up when I see this hopper slidin’ ‘roun behine fo da angle, then whip! I cracked that muvasuck good behine da ear! Dat hopper done fell out en I was off, runnin’ along to my friendly place here, where all you decent people come for your beer.”
Cowbell then offered to make me a padlock like he uses so that I can “whoop young hoppers too.”
One day I hope to interview Cowbell about his childhood and adulthood prior to his present good fortune.
