Write At The Park With Purple Mark ---Carla's Go Go Boot

 

Splitting My Sympathy

        I should say right up front that I’m a racist, just so you know. My companions and I watched the white guy beg, insistently and aggressively, asking everyone for a dollar or some change, in between talking on his cell phone. He was styling in clean low-slung hip-hop jeans, a pristine white T-shirt with a black band logo on it and some jewelry: a heavy chain necklace and two bracelets. His running shoes were white, and looked very expensive. He sported a close-cut beard, the kind that needs constant grooming to keep just the right length.

        We were at Dick’s Drive-In, standing at the outdoor counter eating the best $4.62 fast-food burger and fries in the city. The guy was nearly in our face. There is a law against aggressive panhandling in this city but why kick someone when they're down?

        As a racist, however, I would have been happy to see this handsome, intelligent-looking white male taken to jail.

        "There also may be anatomical correlates with splitting." The comment came off two men walking down the street, leaving me to forever wonder what they meant.

        Out of my bias and racism, I blurted to my companions in burger bliss, the two strangers across the counter, that “I didn’t have much sympathy for white males.”

        A young woman who had just told her mother by cell that she’d gotten back to the States from Zagreb last night; or some such Balkan sounding country or city or whatever, informed me “that she had sympathy for everyone.”

        "Oh, really," I shouted, "just wait til that same young man makes twenty grand more than you for doing the same damn job just because he has a penis and you don’t.

        At least, I shouted that in my mind, hoping the Saint of Dick’s Drive-In would quickly experience someone she, in fact, didn’t have sympathy for and her soul would burn with coals of fire for her holier-than-thou comment. I just smiled, put my trash in the approved receptacle and walked on, in my cheap black shoes, no expensive running shoes and cell phones for me. I was an old white woman with a good job, but those were luxuries, too steep for my budget.

 

By Carla Blaschka, 9/24/11, Experienced the day before...:)

 

Prompts utilized:

Shoes (PurpleMark brought some white go-go boots made in Bosnia)

Quote: "There also may be anatomical correlates with splitting," (Sometimes I Act Crazy: Jerold J. Kreisman M.D. & Hal Straus, pg 47)

Trashy Treats (from a card of Things to Do When I”m Blue)

Composed at Cal Anderson Park alongside Priya, PurpleMark, Philip, Shannon, Zoe, and Bill on the phone.

 
 
 

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