The Moment I Stopped Understanding Racism

Author’s Note: This story contains some racially offensive language, but I felt I had to use it to deal with the way that the conversation happened. It’s all inserted after the page break, so if you don’t want to read it, just don’t click on the little button.

“And I tell you what, BC,” my employer paused dramatically, “that girl would rather fuck than eat.” This observation concluded my sixty-five year old employer’s graphic recounting of his first gang bang. In all, it had taken fifteen minutes to reach the climax of the story.

Due to the fact that I was trapped underneath his house trying to hang insulation, I had been forced to listen to the whole sordid tale. In short, I had spent half an hour trying to swing a hammer with six inches of clearance, spitting pieces of fiberglass out of my mouth, as my boss went into graphic detail about first splitting the price of a hooker with several of his buddies, and then splitting the hooker herself. Making the experience all the more surreal were the thirty some odd peacocks wandering the estate, three of whom had become extremely curious as to what I was doing under the house. They had cooed loudly, next to my face, as my employer went into several of the more disgusting details.

“That’s… uh….” I wondered what to say so I simply finished, “who th’ fuck ran off with that staple gun!” as I attempted in futility to anchor another nail in place using the side of the hammer. I let the frustration wash through me, hoping I could burn away the mental image of aged semen by doing so. The peacocks again tried to eat several pecks worth of the insulation I had just hung, so I threw a rock in their direction and groaned. The week previous I had had to spend several days chasing after them like an airplane to scare them away from a fresh concrete pour. The damn things loved to ruin my work.

My employer, no doubt taking a pull from his ever present coffee mug, chortled, “Ah, BC, I tell you we got so many niggers running around here, they’ve probably got half my tools and I don’t even know it.” I paused, hammer in hand, and nearly swallowed several of the nails I was holding in my mouth. I managed to spit them out at the last minute.

“Uh… I’m sorry Nate… I didn’t hear that,” I said, having heard it perfectly, yet hoping he would drop it because I had enough to worry about between the insulation, the gang bang, and the peacocks without adding racism into the mix. I was also mildly confused given that he lived in a gated community, had his own lake, and at least eight acres of land.

I heard Nate take a long pull from his coffee mug, finishing with a rattle like slurp. Strangely, I also heard hope die in his next breath. “BC, I’ve been seeing all kinds of niggers ’round here lately, and I’ve never met a single nigger that didn’t have sticky fingers and deep pockets, if you know what I mean.” I dropped my head into the muddy ground, letting it saturate my hair. I closed my eyes, and sighed, not even caring when I heard the peacocks ripping into the newly laid insulation. I spent a good five seconds contemplating the scale of the Universe, trying to crunch things back down into a manageable perspective.

Months previous to this unfortunate episode, I had been attempting to help my father fix an outlet in our downstairs rec room. When I attempted to explain to my father that he was probably not looking in the right place, he had become violently angry forcing me to leave. I had no sooner sat down and turned on my lap top then my father had gone to the electrical outlet. And although it was the wrong switch, he flipped the breaker to my bedroom outlet no less than five times trying to find the right one. The screen of the lap top had gone black, starting at the edges, then working into the center. The computer had been fried beyond repair. And because my life contains maximum irony, the warranty had expired the previous month. I had been working at Nate’s ever since to buy a replacement.*

As I silently continued with my tasks, Nate continued to give me a full history of his experience with “niggers.” The first “niggers” he ever met were in his grade school, which should have remained segregated no matter what anyone said. They used to fight with him at recess. Then he joined the army and all the “niggers” he met were on drugs. One “nigger” had even lit himself on fire when a cigarette landed on his mattress and he was too high to smother it. Nate explained that he had considered long and hard over whether or not to save that particular “nigger.” This last bit was too much.

I put my hands to my face, repressing a shout, “Jesus Christ, Nate, you can’t do that kind of shit!”

“Well, the fucker lit himself on fire,” I could see the toes of Nate’s cowboy boots where he stood several feet away from where I was laying on my back.

“Yeah, but what if you were drunk and did the same thing? Wouldn’t you want someone to put you out.” Nate had explained his alcoholism to me several times, including how it had a tendency to flip his “don’t give a shit switch.” I would later discover this switch had been flipped before all of Nate’s gang bang experiences.

Nate responded to this point by taking a long pull from his coffee mug and completely ignoring me. “Yeah, well we saved him. Had to throw his mattress outside though. There was no saving that.” I sighed in relief that my employer had not let a black man burn to death, because I still needed a lap top, and while I could tolerate intolerance, I could not have tolerated violence. Thankfully, that was where the race conversation ended.

Several hours later, as we sat in the local diner eating our meals the conversation turned to politics. Having long mastered the art of letting someone else do the talking, Nate carried the conversation. Somewhere around my second half of club sandwich, I lost track of my “uh-huhs” and “oh really’s?” and found myself faced with the dreaded question.

“So, BC, who are you gonna vote for?”

Hedging my bets on what would end the conversation quickest, I answered, “John McCain” so fast I was the vocal equivalent of gunslinger.

At this utterance, Nate gave me a look of disgust so powerful it was almost like I had told him that I had once seriously considered not extinguishing a black man who was on fire. There was an awkwardness so deep between us, it was as though I had just told him about gang banging a prostitute with several army buddies. Utterly confused, I piped up again, “Oh, you’re a Hillary guy?” Nate’s face twisted into a look of revulsion. Half of him looked like he wanted to throw up. The other half looked like it wanted to punch me in the face.

“Oh, you like Ron Paul!” I declared happily.

“Jesus fucking Christ, BC. I’m voting for Barack Obama, who the fuck else is there to vote for?” Nate looked at me long and hard, as though considering firing me for having such disgusting ideas.

And that, my friends, is the moment I officially stopped understanding racism.

*The replacement lap top being what I’m typing on right now, a handsome HP that was on sale