Stereotyped

I was at Sparky’s waiting for the cashier to run my card, and this guy, this lanky dude, he comes up next to me and pulls a dollar bill from the tip jar. THE TIP JAR.

I'm incredulous, and I look at him, incredulously, and I say, "Did you just take a dollar from the tip jar?"

Now he looks incredulous and he says to me, "Naw, man, I wouldn't take nothin'. Why you fuckin' with me, motherfucker, accusin' me of taking a dollar, I ain't take no dollar from no fuckin' tip jar, man."

So, I turn to the cashier, Lauren, whose back had been turned at the time of the alleged theft, and I say, "He just stole a dollar from your tip jar." I mean it was plain as day, and he even feigned interest in some advertisement they had on the counter with his other hand, the red herring.

The cashier says to him, "Why don't you just leave?" and he says, "I didn't take no motherfuckin' dollar," and I say, "You got to be smoother than that, bro."

But I don't really consider him my bro. In fact, on the inside, I want him to escalate the whole thing so that we can hit each other. There's this part of me, this latent part, that really just wants to hit him, or to get hit, or both, just for the simple fact that I've lived my whole life as a chameleon working a survival game to avoid getting hit, and because it's just immoral and stupid to take A DOLLAR BILL from a tip jar.

Maybe it's also immoral and stupid to call someone out for taking A DOLLAR BILL from the tip jar, but I really couldn't help myself. You'll recall, I was incredulous. And I know the employees of Sparky’s. At one time I may have considered some of them my friends. Certainly good acquaintances, ones you don’t mind saying hi to.

So, I'm waiting for my iced whatever-I-ordered, and the lanky guy is sulking in the back of the shop, and when I look up at him, with morbid curiosity, not heroism, he flips me the bird, begins to mutter something and stands to come over.

It seems worthwhile, if not irrelevant, to note that at the time I'm trying out some hand-me-down shorts that my friend, Betsy, whose apartment I'm sitting at the moment, got from her Brit ex-boyfriend, so they're not long skater shorts from House of Tired West Coast Trends. No, these are shorts that say one or more of three things: (1) I'm gay, (2) I'm not from here or anywhere in America, or (3) I’m just in from or heading to the links for a nice, leisurely nine with three other paunchy mid-lifers.

So he comes over and I meet his glare and he says, "I'm gonna fuck you up so bad your mamma won't even recognize you" and "you better watch it if you want your life to stay the way it is" and maybe other stuff.

And I say, and here it is, the climax, "Are you threatening me?" which is a lame line for a climax and kind of a stock movie phrase from some Eighties Charles Bronson flick. But the intention to stand up is there, however reflexive and unpremeditated, and also that latent desire to hit, to be hit, to fight, to make the usurpers and freeloaders of the world pay not only for all the people they flippantly use but also for all the times I ROLLED OVER AND SHUT MY EYES.

Now you're wondering how the story ends, aren't you? And you’re waiting for me to state the racial element outright.

Well it just ends, and the clash of white and black plays more into the subtext of the event, so that only afterward when I’m writing it all up I start to hedge about stating race and to think a little like Baldwin’s nameless main character in “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” who wonders whether white customs workers at NYC immigration are laughing at him or if it’s just his imagination.

So the only way, then or now, I can approach the race issue is with irony, as a fictional character ignorant by some margin of the reality of the reader and the author, able to process facts with only the crudest of measures, to apply a rough stencil to events that happened too fast to admit use of original dialogue, to realize that I'm the idiot who taught him a lesson only an educated upper-middle class white boy coulda taught.

So, the cashier comes out from behind the counter and she asks dude to leave, and he begins to protest that he's with someone and he points at this homegrown, southern belle type standing in line, and again I am incredulous. Interesting couple, I think. Not only black and white but hood and small-town parade queen. She seems perturbed but doesn’t look around, as if she were embarrassed about the whole thing or upset that I foiled their plans. So Clyde left and Bonnie, as it turns out, didn’t even order a drink. She just got change for A DOLLAR BILL.