A Halloween primer on scaring bad guys
The worst racists don't just talk about it
The author, at his scariest. Makeup helps.
I was peacefully at breakfast when Jerry came bounding in. He snatched one of my slices of toast and took a bite. Then he put it back.
“You shoulda been in the bar last night,” he bellowed, his voice hacking through The Gold Coin’s Muzak like a rusty knife. “Man, it was amazing. Where were you? You said you were coming.” I shrugged.
“You shoulda been there,” he repeated. “A couple of sand niggers came in and got uppity when they couldn’t get a drink. Man, we fixed them.”
“Sand niggers” is a pejorative term that rang shockingly racist even then, deep in the previous century. I’m sorry to use it, but the story makes less sense without it.
“Sand -- what? What does that even mean?” I asked, though the light was dawning. I personally never “threw n’s” and avoided people who did, so it’s not surprising I had never heard this particular variation on the theme.
“A-rabs,” Jerry explained. “How do you not know?
“We chased them out of there and down the street,” he went on, and proceeded to describe in detail, without encouragement, a foot pursuit of more than a mile.
“They ran into the Granville L and thought they were safe,” Jerry went on. “But we stayed right behind them as they went over the turnstiles, and all the way up to the platform.
“We cornered them, and they were screaming and crying and begging. It was great. We threw them over the railing.”
My eggs and coffee had turned cold and my blood had run cold, too. “Threw them over? What do you mean, threw them over? Were they badly hurt?
“Jerry -- did you kill them?”
Jerry was quiet all of a sudden, but I assumed, correctly, that his victims had survived, since he hadn’t made much of an effort to hold his voice down.
“What did you guys think you were doing? They hadn’t done anything wrong. You’re just a bunch of brown shirts.”
He was surprised I wasn’t thrilled by his night’s exploits. “You can’t call me a Nazi,” he said.
“If the jackboot fits, wear it,” I said. “And I’m gonna find out if these two are hurt badly, and if they reported it, I’m going to rat you out.”
Jerry seemed deflated. He slunk out of the diner.
It occurred to me then that I had known him five years but this was the first time I told him that I thought racism and xenophobia were bad ideas.
I had heard him say nasty things, but I hadn’t made a big deal of it. If I debated everybody with whom I disagreed in those days, I wouldn’t have time for eating and sleeping, I’d thought.
Around the same time, I was at a taxi association meeting where a big shot named Anderson said that he planned a new rule excluding Muslims. “They’re nothing but trouble, and always will be,” he said.
I jumped to my feet so fast that I accidentally jarred the table, propelling coffee cups and papers over the edges. It added to the drama of the moment.
“You try that and I’m going to the newspapers,” I hissed. I also said something pithy about human rights that I don’t remember.
I never mentioned that incident to him again. In those days, you made your point and moved on. You didn’t rub it in.
I had many associates with racist tendencies then, but all I really did about it was try to prevent them from acting on them on my watch.
I’m not that way anymore. I express my bombastic opinions here, and on social media, too.
Maybe if social media had existed back in the day, things would have been different. Maybe if Jerry and the others on Granville Avenue had read my fustian rants about equality on Facebook or Twitter before they chased those Middle Easterners, they wouldn’t have. Maybe that incident at the business meeting would have been unnecessary, too.
Probably not, of course. Most people protect their own welfare first, and personal growth comes a distant second. If that.
In both situations, I had threatened people when I knew for sure they were wrong. My threats were what made them think twice, not my wisdom.
Threats are a little different today. We’ve set up mechanisms that we can use at long distance to subdue people for various sins, committed recently and in the shadowy past, too. Hundreds of thousands of angry tweets can rain down on an offender.
Jerry wouldn’t fear being in the center of a tweetstorm. He’s a bad guy who was incarcerated at least twice.
People who sin with their voices are those who worry most about social media murder. Truly bad people are more concerned about being murdered in prison.
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