BLACKS

187 Pages·02.283 MB·English

by  Linh Dinh

BLACKS
Linh Dinh
I

Postcards from the End of
America
North Philly

The corner of Broad and Erie is the Times Square of North Philly, but
instead of flashy signs pushing Kodak, Samsung, Canon or Virgin
Airlines, you have stark billboards urging you to “ELIMINATE YOUR
DEBT” and “REBUILD YOUR CREDIT.” On utility poles, styrofoam signs
promise, “JOBS! $400-$600 PER WEEK. CALL TODAY, START
TOMORROW.” Is it legit? Ring to get sucked in, or you can stock your
fridge, finally, by ditching your junk wheels for “$400,” according to
one flyer, or “$250-$400,” per another. The biggest billboard touts
“RAND SPEAR 1-800-90-LEGAL. He Eats Insurance Companies for
BREAKFAST!” Are you aching all over, your skeleton permanently
askew from that bus accident you weren’t even involved in? Are you
emotionally spavined from having to dodge that abruptly swinging
door? Now you know who to call!
With such signage, you know this is one broke neighborhood. The
only high-rise is a long kaput National Bank of North Philadelphia. Its
art deco grandeur gone to seeds, it’s now a 14-story eyesore, with all
its windows broken or spray painted. On its sides are huge graffiti,
FOREVER BONER. In fact, it’s known colloquially as the Forever Boner
building. Here, there is no Planet Hollywood, Forever 21 or Disney
Store, only a 99¢ DEAL outfit, with items for 59 and 79¢ also, though
their sign also claims, “EVERYTHING 99¢ OR MORE.” With that logic,
they can also flog a Lamborghini, though of course, in this hood, such
whips only appear in rhymes. Hunched over on a beat up folding
chair, a gypsy cabbie asks passersby, “Taxi? Taxi?” The Coke sign is
broken. Crossing the street, a lanky man wears a “MY PRESIDENT IS
BLACK” T-shirt, and here comes a middle-aged woman with
consonants crowding her print blouse,
SSSDDDMMMLLLRRRGGGFFF… She’s going into Black and Nobel, an
urban literature purveyor with titles like Curse by Darkness, Ghetto
Girl Games, If My Pussy Could Talk, Ride or Die Chick, Preacherman
Blues (by Jihad) and Ghetto Ballerina by Philly’s own Tenia Jamilla.
It’s about this valedictorian chick turned stripper, then whore. She
has two main snuggly buddies, one loaded yet shady, one square. On
the side, she also muff dives. Will our grasping heroine choose to be
wined and dined until her facade fades, sags and crumbles, just like
the Forever Boner edifice, or will she lock herself inside some
dumbass room night after night to study for a degree at Howard
University? While deciding, she continues to muff dive. Soon, though,
one of her live dildoes will be wetted, for real, straight up. Buy book
to find out more. “WE SHIP TO PRISON,” states Black and Nobel sign.

Curious about Jamilla, I NSAed her twitter page to find this tagline,
“Too Sexy and Too freaking smart…” I then clicked on a video to
marvel at her bumptious assets seriously quaking to Wacka Flocka’s
“We Don’t Fuck Wit Dat.” Jamilla sang along, “I don’t fuck with fake
jewelry. I don’t fuck with fake clothes…” Atlanta verses are itee, I
guess, but if you prefer more homegrown stuff, North Philly has
plenty, as in Dark Lo’s “I fuck your girl once or twice, I don’t keep her
/ Naggin’ stalkin’ ass bitch, I don’t need her / Pussy has a funny smell,
I don’t eat her.” Or the currently jump suited AR-AB, “My aim nice
when I’m tossin’ lead / Eyes closed I’d shoot a fly off your head.”
And, “I’m hard as hell and I got hard for sale / Trash day I’m throwing
bodies in the garbage pail.” Just before he got draped in prison garb,
AR-AB briefly swept a playground and visited elementary school
classrooms to prove that he was “more of an asset outside than
inside.” Some people even signed a petition. It’s not clear who, since
by AR-AB’s own admission, he “ain’t got no friends ‘cause they all
been shot.”

It’s hard to get kids to care about poetry, you know, so you’ve got to
bring in a rhymer like AR-AB, someone they can relate to, being just
down the block, and I don’t mean just cell. As a daddy of four, he also
knows how to communicate with children. “Techs blast, chest splash,
that’s a mess right there!”

All of these images of butchery is making me damn hungry, dog, so
let’s eat. Well, we can have cheap chicken at Church’s or Crown, or
really, really cheap chicken at Checker’s, and if you want to go
upscale, a platter of short ribs at Dwight’s, with two sides and corn
bread, will set you back 17 bucks, but that’s way out of my range, so
you’ll have to eat there alone, OK? We can also duck into the Clock
Bar and get “COLOSSAL BUTTERFLY SHRIMPS. NOTHING LARGER,”
but its concussive rap will knock out our few remaining brain cells.
Drooling ketchup, we’ll collapse into an irreversible coma. Instead,
let’s just drink ourselves full at the Broad Street Tavern.

It’s a mellow trough for old heads, with more R&B than rap, and even
has Steely Dan in the jukebox. I know, I know, it’s weird, but get over
it. The music is rarely so loud, you can’t talk. Often, there’s no
canned music at all, which is best. On the wall, a Miller Lite poster,
“We Celebrate Black History Everyday! IT’S Miller TIME,” so to down
pissy beer is to honor Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X and Martin
Luther King? I discovered X my last year in high school, read all I
could and wrote an essay, then composed another on him during my
first year in college. Meet Chili Willie from North Philly. He comes
here around 1:30PM each day. Sixty-nine-years-old, Chili served four
years in Korea, one in Vietnam, where he fought in Khe Sanh, then
Hue, during the Tet Offensive, “I had buddies die in my arms.” Tour
over, he missed his flight out of Saigon, “Cause I was getting some
pussy.” In Korea, Chili fell in love with a Korean whore, “She was my
woman. I gave her money for everything. Took care of her. We nearly
got married.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I told my sister about this, and she said, ‘You should marry your own
kind’.”

“And you listened to her? You were your own man, man! You should
have done what you wanted to do.”

It’s not exactly wise to wed a whore, though the Vietnamese have a
saying, “Better to turn a whore into your wife, than your wife into a
whore.” Chilli continued, “But I listened to my family. After I was sent
to Vietnam, my girlfriend thought I had died. Someone told her I had
died. But I saw her after that. She was pregnant, you know, with my
child.”

“You sure it was your kid?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever see this kid?”

“No. She got married to another GI, and moved to Hawaii.”

“So your kid’s in Hawaii, with a stepfather?”

“I think so.”

In Vietnam, Chili made extra cash by funneling American cigarettes
and liquor to the black market. He even sold gas and diesel pilfered
from the American base, “I was a businessman, a hustler. I’ve always
known how to make money.”

“But you could have gotten into some serious shit!”

“But I didn’t.”

Chili served 22 years, one month and 5 days altogether. With his
pension set, he could relax a bit back in North Philly, where he lived
with his ma. Until five years ago, he drained half a gallon of vodka a
day, “and I could get two-dollar pussies up and down Erie Avenue.”

“Two dollar pussies?! How much does it cost today?”

“I don’t know, cause I ain’t buying no more.”

I asked Chili if it was weird to land in Vietnam, “I mean, Vietnam is
nothing like North Philly. Did you freak out when you first saw it. I
was born and raised in Vietnam, and it still weirded me out when I
returned there as an adult.”

“No, it didn’t freak me out, because I had a job to do.”

Chili did what he had to do, without flinching, at least not in this
retelling. Now, America has a fully professional Army of sentient
drones willing to be sent anywhere. In Africa, we have troops in 35
countries, and it’s a safe bet most of these guys and gals had never
heard of Djibouti, Mauritania, Burkina Faso or Seychelles, etc., until
they got their marching orders. In Cheyenne, I chatted with a woman
who thought her daughter was stationed in North Korea. In Philly, I
saw a war veteran panhandling with a sign stating he had been in
“Sigon.” Another had served in the “Gulph War.” We sure don’t need
to know where we are to start shooting. Behind the anti-terror
smoke screen, we have created a nation of paranoiacs and psychos.
As we kill and rape, many of us rap about raping and killing.
Leading me towards the back, Chili showed me a framed funeral
program for one of his buddies, Ronald Joe French, with the
deceased photographed in his Army dress uniform. Sunrise, 1942.
Sunset, 2008. There is a long, uncredited poem, “Last Request,” with
these lines: “Please don’t say that I gave up, / just say that I gave in. /
Don’t say that I lost the battle, / for it was God’s war to lose or win. /
Please don’t say how good I was, / but say I did my best. / Just say I
tried to do what’s right, / to give the most I could, not less […] ”
While it’s certainly no great literature, you can’t argue against its
sweet, reverent and humble sentiments, for they reflect positively on
the dead man’s family, and on all those who mourned him that day.
What we hear and read reflect who we are. We are what we choose
to hear and read.

All over North Philly, you’ll see these “Sugar to Shit” stickers that
steer you to the Reading Sucks website. Its masthead: “Reading
SUCKS! until… A unique book—a vital tool for literacy—currently in
production.” Say what?! No novice to reading, I can barely make out
what I’ve just read, but subsequent sentences do clue me in:
“Teenagers who HATE to read will love this book—and then actually
want to read more books.” And, “Reading SUCKS! will have short
concise stories written by Hip-Hop artists, athletes, prison inmates,
soldiers, and HS students.” So this is an initiative to get teens to read,
which is good, obviously, though it’s interesting that actual writers
are considered unenticing, a turn off to reading. Tales told by
rappers, jocks and criminals are preferred to stories by trained fiction
writers, but part of the problem must be pinned on these same
writers, for too many of them have spent their entire adult lives
cloistered in universities. Since they barely associate with anyone
unlike themselves, they hardly make sense outside the academy, and
here I’m talking as much about emotional as literal sense. They can’t
grasp what’s urgent to ordinary folks.

To those who still think of American universities as hotbeds of
radicalism, please note that former boss of Homeland Security, Janet
Napolitano, is now President of the University of California system;
Condolezza Rice was recently a Provost of Stanford; Patriot Act co-
author John Yoo teaches law at Berkeley; and even a well known
“liberal” school like Bard is run by an Israel apologist, Leon Bostein.
At many colleges, professors may be disproportionately Democrats,
but that just shows the limits of American dissent. Protesting, they
voted for Clinton then Obama, two war criminals, and to prove how
really progressive they are, they’ll vote for the next Democratic mass
murderer. Yes, the university will allow you to cross dress and rage
against all the wrongs done to your subgroup, for this serves their
divide-and-rule scheme, but don’t think too hard about what’s
destroying us all.

So the ones who more or less know spelling, grammar and syntax are
out of touch, while the foot soldiers on the ground are stuck on “You
know what I’m sayin’,” “Just sayin’” and “Aye.” Of course, the entire
culture has been dumbed down to a frightening degree. According to
the Journal of American Medical Association, 46% of American adults
cannot comprehend the label on their prescription medicine, and The
National Center for Education Statistics reports that half of our adults
cannot read an 8th grade level book. Since most Americans no longer
read much of anything beyond emails, texts and tweets, we should
rejoice, I suppose, at each instance of book reading, though in a place
like North Philly, they’re not soaking up Langston Hughes, Toni
Morrison, Etheridge Knight or Sonia Sanchez, the last two Philly
products, but Demettrea, Ca$h, Jazmyne or homeboy Brian Harrison,
author of the novel Sugar to Shit (not to be confused with the
website, though everything has gone from high fructose corn syrup
to high fructose corn syrup). Here’s how Harrison defines himself,
“Having an inner-city background and a suburban education, he
combines these two forces and erupts in shear, flawless, diamond-
like quality classics. While in the lowest moments of his life,
surrounded by disaster and heartache, Brian Harrison narrowly finds
his escape and turns his experience into an explicit, mind-blowing
novel tht has never been told like this before.”

Jamilla thinks she’s “Too Sexy and Too freaking smart,” and Harrison
considers his novel a “flawless, diamond-like quality classic.” After
leaving Broad Street Tavern, I saw a man in his early 30’s wearing this
T-shirt, “I NEVER CEASE TO AMAZE MYSELF,” and he wasn’t being
goofy, “It’s true, I amaze myself every day.” Seeing that I was
interested in his shirt, he even told me where I could get one, for
only $3. How fitting that in a crumbling society that still stridently
trumpets itself as number one, you’ll run into so many insanely
narcissistic citizens with no sense of their shortcomings, though of
course life will sucker punch you, good, even maim you thoroughly,
until you learn what’s what, and in a moment of silence, alone, you
can also reflect on all the humbling, even terrifying, clues to your
smallness. Too many of us, though, would rather shoo away lurking
insights with endless noise, alcohol or drugs. Numb, we rely on the
pounding beat as our pacemaker.

Sorry, dude, to sound like some preacherman dropping Ecclesiastes. I
best shut my grill. If you want religion, though, there’s the Universal
Church just a block from here. Sometimes they have, ah, Holy Oil
from Israel and shit, and if you’ve been hexed by witchcraft, the evil
eye, envy or just plain bad luck, they can also fix you up and shit.

The first time I came to North Philly, I visited Etheridge Knight. I
brought a yellow tin of jasmine tea. He fed me pork chops. This was
in 1984, when I was dumber than dirt, naturally, though I had
somehow managed to be featured with Knight in a poetry reading.
This was at the Bacchanal, now long dead. Underaged, I had shown
up on Mondays for their open readings. Speaking English not even a
decade, I was presumptuous enough to think of myself an American
poet, but then many young people see stardom in their future. They
won’t just be good, but the best. An Oakland middle school teacher
chuckled, “All of my kids think they’ll be stars,” and she taught 151 of
them.

“A star at what?”

“They don’t know, but they’ll be stars!”

As Mike Tyson observed, “They all suck, but they all think they’re
superstars!” (That’s not an exact quotation, by the way, since I’ve