As I crossed the parking lot to the market, White Howard, passed me in his long hippie hair and ball cap with his groceries and said, loudly, among the crowd of low income blacks, “What it be like happenin’ like, Yo?” and continued along his erratic way.
As I walked into Fort Hoodrat, a ghetto supermarket run by whites and staffed by blacks, with classic rock playing on the overhead, I saw a 40-year-old black customer cuss at a white cashier for the credit card display being smudged and then throw the wipe she had given him to clean the credit card display on the floor, only to have her loom over him with finger pointed in his chest and snarl, “You have two seconds to pick that up!”
As she counted to one on a trembling finger, her face flushed with rage, he panicked, picked up the wipe, gave it to her, and shuffled off fearfully, like a spanked child.
Then, as I passed the last register, a thirty-year-old black man called Mitch, the large 18-year-old college student who happens to be black and was manning the register, “A big slow sissy. You sissy ass holdin’ me up from see’in da kickoff, boy!”
Mitch then came out from behind his register and yelled, “Motherfucker, let’s take it outside right now—let’s go!”
Two female cashiers—one white, one black—then threw themselves in front of Mitch and begged the man to go, who hastily fled the store with his eggnog.
After a half hour, as I stood in line with two black male cashiers taking care of the order ahead of me, a black women, who was leading around to subservient adult males like they were pets, began to threaten the other white female cashier, another tough broad it turns out, who said, “Bitch, If you can’t read your WIC voucher then me blackening both your eyes ain’t gonna help things make any more sense than they do now!”
The woman with the voucher then began trying to incite her worshippers to attack the cashier, which they were not up to in the least, as the woman dared them with hands on her hips and a snarl on her lips. One of the men dragged his goddess off by the arm as the other pushed, saying, “Come on, Rwanda, we don’t need ta get in no more trouble today.”
The white cashier flexed her big man hands and growled, “Oh, believe me, it won’t be no trouble.”
As they left, the one male cashier looked at the other with a look of disbelief and said, “Seriously, a bitch named Rwanda who looks like she was born in ninety-four? Are you kidding me?”
Whenever I feel nostalgic for my supermarket manager job, all I have to do is go on down to Fort Hoodrat and walk down that psychopathic memory lane.
