"The judge is off her meds again....", the voice behind me whispers.  No shit.  She's been cussing out the DA since this clown show got started.  Now she's throwing pencils at him.  Her honor is around 60, white, with sharp features, and black rim glasses.  Typical  grandma style hair-do.  She's arguing with the prosecutor about a plea deal for a young black caught selling crack on 5th Ave.  

"I don't care WHAT deal you made!  I'M the judge and I didn't make ANY deal!  I'm giving him the MAX!"  

  The kid didn't have too many points.  He'll go to the R-units at Shelton, and be home before he knows it. What a dumbfuck.   The poor and oppressed of Seattle used to sell crack all up and down 5th Ave in the 90's, across the street from the county jail.  Right in front of police headquarters.  Maybe they still do.  I don't know.  I never could understand it.  Every other dollar was a marked bill.  

I learned how to deal with blacks by spending 2 years living with 'em in correctional institutions.  I saw countless blacks getting enormous sentences, ten to twelve years sometimes, for less than 20$ worth of crack.  Not that I gave a shit.

  I don't like the idea of going up in front of an angry judge, though. 

  When my case is called, I approach the bench and zip my lip.  I honestly can't remember now why I was even there.  I got a rap sheet a mile long.

   I do remember that this was one of the only times I was in court wearing street clothes, and not a red jumpsuit.  I must have somehow got PR'd prior to this.  I've never asked anyone to bail me out of jail.   

  

  As I walked out of court that day, I spot a pair of familiar faces.  Tony Tuxedo and Buckwheat.  Buckwheat was almost 30, a large and aggressive skinhead, raised in  Los Angeles.  Not like boots and braces and ska, more like crystal meth and Slayer and shotguns.  Tony Tux was an accomplished brawler, and seasoned convict by the age of 25.  These were two of the scariest men I've ever met.  I was 19 and looked up to these guys.  Both were career criminals. 

  "Tony!  Your'e still free bro!  You need a ride back up north?" asked Mr. Tuxedo.  

"Yeah. Let's get outta here."

We walk down past Yesler, and Buckwheat starts bragging on his new jacket, "Check it out, man.  Genuine pleather.  I'm a sharp dressed motherfucker, right!?!"  His intense tweaker eyes made most folks nervous.   Where others saw malice and danger, I saw humor.  I knew him too well.  

  

At last, our group arrived at an old, beat up, brown Camaro.  

  "You guys couldn't find anywhere closer than this to park?" I badger.  

  "Fuck no, dude. Parking meters are expensive." claims Buckwheat, as he flips the collar up on his pleather jacket.  

  The three of us get into the old Chevy and head north.  Before long, we're in the parking garage at the University of Washington medical center, circling around.  Tony T. backs into a spot and gets out.  He walks over to a green Ford Explorer, and, with a look of determination on his face, stiff arms a screw driver into the window.  The safety glass shatters.  He's got it started in no time, and the next thing I know, me and Buckwheat are behind  him, following in the Camaro.  

  We park on the shore of Lake Union, and everyone piles into the Explorer.  

  "Forgot to tell you we had to get a new car." Buck tells me. Whatever.  I'm having fun. 

  

Down the road a ways, we park in an alley and Tony starts chopping up lines of crank.  Buckwheat does a rail, then calls his mama on a cell phone and tells her all about how he's staying out of trouble and got himself a good job.  It's obvious he hasn't talked to her in quite some time.  Tony tries to hand me a 20$ bill and asks where I want dropped off.  I tell him that I don't really have anywhere I need to go.  I can just get out here if he wants.  

"No, fuck that.  You're with us."  

  

The next three weeks I hung around with these guys and saw how much life they were really living.   Every couple days was another car. "Rollin' Stolen".  They stole mail when they were bored.  A debit card stolen from a mailbox could be activated by a savvy thief.  The next step was finding a junkie or bottle bum to open a checking account at the same bank.  These guys could transfer 10,000$ from the compromised checking account into the new account of the accomplice.  Bam.  Give that fool half.  The stranger knew he'd go down someday, but right now is what matters.   The banks didn't care.  They stuck the debt on their own depositor, hell, they even got to charge him interest for the bank's own negligence.   

  

  Buck and Tux also stole personal checks and put them into coolers filled with nail polish remover.   Only the ballpoint pen would wash off, leaving a blank check.  These motherfuckers had laptops with templates for making driver's licenses, way back in 1996.  They had a source for getting the gold embossed state laminate covers.   They even showed me how to use Easy-Off oven cleaner to make counterfeit money. 

  

  I respected them then, and I respect them now.

They weren't beholden to anyone.  They did what they wanted, when they wanted to.  You call them thieves. I call them men.  They didn't ask permission.  They didn't pay taxes.  They lived.  

Tony Tux took a nap in a stolen car one day.   A lady cop tried to wake him up so she could arrest him, and he ran her over and got away with it.  Apparently, you're not responsible for anything you do during the first few seconds you're awake.  I don't know what ultimately became of him.  

Buckwheat was my cousin, by marriage, not blood.  He got into a high speed pursuit with the Seattle pigs one night about 10 years ago.  He was on I-5, downtown by the express lanes.    Cops finally threw out the stop strip and he stopped.  He was totally surrounded, and told them he'd come out peacefully if they just let him finish his beer.  He drank his last beer, and then shot himself.  

The poor white trash of my generation have been almost totally annihilated.  Out of everyone I grew up with, I'm the success story.  A truck driver.  One other guy is in the laborer's union, and lives his life to run marathons.  Everyone else is dead, in prison, or living on the streets with a needle in their arm.   And the way I see it, the whites of this generation who grew up in relative wealth with a rich mommy and daddy are even worse off.  They seem to suffer an infirmity of the spirit,  a soft pale weakness that infects their minds and turns the men into women and the women into men.  I think it's rooted in their upbringing, their thinking that they will always have a safety net, someone will always be there to save them.  Life isn't real to them, there's never any consequences.  It's all part of the disconnect that's evident in modern progressive thought.  May they all rot in hell.