The Right Privilege in America

They were a cross between rednecks and hippies. It was an unusual dichotomy, how they listened to The Grateful Dead and smoked weed yet also liked NASCAR and shooting things. How they were into both Jesus and casual sex.

One of them preached that sodomy is righteous and cool with Jesus because it prevents abortions.

The pair had good drugs. The kindest buds, sometimes LSD, shrooms, and coke. But mostly they just drank and smoked weed.

They were my neighbors, lived across the street, on the upper floor of a subdivided house.

Whenever you walked by their apartment, you’d smell the pungent aroma, the fragrance of funky weed. And you’d almost instantly catch a contact high whenever you’d walk inside their place. Their place fucking plastered in trippy psychedelic posters and Dead memorabilia.

There’d always be plenty of perpetually stoned stoners on the twin couches, in their living room; stoners burning joints, ripping bong hits, while video games or videos of 60s concerts or Cheech & Chong flicks played on the big screen TV.

Weed was illegal, sure, but almost everyone in that neighborhood smoked, even another one of our neighbors- who was a cop.

That neighbor, the cop, was musclebound, had lots of tattoos and a porn-stache, and he’d come by to smoke weed with us, sometimes knocking on the door, yelling “police” jokingly, and sometimes bringing a couple of other cops, in uniform, over to burn.

So, yeah, seeing as we smoked weed with some of the local cops, we didn’t worry too much about getting busted.

Shit, we’d hardly ever even get pulled over. You’d have to be driving really badly, like a total fucktard, to get pulled over. And even then, the cops would just take your keys, give you a ride home. Unless you were an asshole to them, talked shit. Then they’d definitely arrest your fucked up, drunk ass. Make you spend the night in the slammer.

But usually, the cops left us alone. Or were plain nice, smiled and chatted with folks at the diner. I guess the cops had greater issues on the other side of town. That’s where the violent crime was. But strangely, though most of the murders and shootings were there, and cops patrolled the area a lot, still, I heard from a classmate who lived there that if you called the cops, they might not show up for an hour.

In our neighborhood, though, if you called the cops, even for stuff like a snake in the grass or a housecat stuck up in a tree, the cops would be there in a heartbeat…

I grew up nearby, and there was one time when I was a snotnose kid, riding my bike, and I saw a grown man crawling in through the first-floor window of a neighbor’s house. He didn’t look like Santa Claus, and I freaked out, furiously peddled home, ran inside, called 911. After reporting the crime, the lady who answered 911 asked me if the man was Caucasian, and I didn’t know what that was. “Was he white?” she asked, sounding annoyed. I wasn’t sure why she’d cared to know that, but I remembered he was.

He was a fat white guy, a hairy gorilla looking fuck, and his ass crack was hanging from his pants, like a plumber, as he shimmied in through that window… I didn’t say he was a gorilla or tell her about the ass crack, though…

Mere minutes later, I remember several squad cars came reeeeaaah-reeeeeee-aah reeing in, and a helicopter hovered in from the heavens and sounded warbled police things… Turns out the hairy window guy was a dude who’d been renting the house. He’d just been locked out… Dude must have been shitting bricks when the coppers roared in like that. Bet the motherfucker called a locksmith next time…

Back to what I was talking about before… We didn’t venture into that other neighborhood much, except a couple of times to buy drugs. Other than that, there wasn’t much reason to go there. And if you did go over there, sometimes you’d be stopped on the street by one of the locals, usually an older man, usually an older man with lots of facial hair and bushy eyebrows and a concerned gaze, and he’d kindly but firmly let you know that you were “in the wrong part of town.”

Besides looking for drugs, more people from my neighborhood started going over there, though, when a nightclub opened in that part of town.

My neighbors’ cousin’s boyfriend was a part-owner of the club, and he said over bong hits that they had gotten a lease on the land for a bargain. He’d kindly invited us over some time, gifted us free VIP passes.

He said the land had formerly been public housing, which had been torn down to pave the way for an entertainment center, featuring nightclubs. The development developed in hopes of attracting more affluent visitors to the area…

I’d seen a report about it on the local news. The development being criticized by locals. One of them was this tall round-shouldered deacon with big puffy white hair hanging like a snowball atop his head. He had on this shiny black suit that looked made of plastic and these eyes that appeared glazed, and the deacon was animated as he was saying, in a raspy hiss, something about this being the beginning of a gentrification drive…

My neighbors’ cousin’s boyfriend’s club spun mostly electronic music. Next door was another club that played hip-hop.

I was surprised that my neighbors liked electronic music, because they usually listened to The Grateful Dead and other 60s music, but they said they wanted to have a look at the club, dance and party there.

I was game. I liked all types of music. And still do. And I liked getting fucked up and partying. And still do, sometimes.

The night we were to visit the club, we warmed up before we left, and sank a few shots of tequila, ripped a series of bong hits of some super strong sticky-icky stinky skunk Sativa. We were all pretty fried when we set out to drive over to the club.

As we began our journey, the weather, which had been its normal fall crisp and cool, transformed, like instantaneously. The night grew even darker and then erupted into an angry fit of hail, rat-a-tat-tatting on my neighbor’s station wagon’s windshield as we pulled onto the highway.

The rain then started falling in sheets. Like a damn hurricane. I could barely see the lines in the road. Everything was just dark and liquid, dark water, as if we were in a boat, in a jungle, in a monsoon, sloshing through a murky river at nighttime.

But my friend, the hippy, looked so serene behind the wheel. He was in the zone. Hyper-focused. With his ponytail and beard, in the silvery lighting of the car, he sorta reminded me of Jesus.

Big scary semi-trucks barreled past us at breakneck speeds, sending waves and splashes and crashes of water whooshing at our vehicle. But dammit, that Subaru didn’t budge. And with Jesus behind the wheel, we rode straight and steady, making it to our destination safely. The rainstorm petering out shortly before we reached the offramp.

However, after Mother Nature relented, Human Nature stepped up to the plate, and we found ourselves in quite the pickle.

As we neared the glittery lights of the club, we rode into the middle of what looked like a riot.

The traffic out front of the complex was backed up for about a block. And there was what appeared to be people that came from a hip-hop video hanging out of their car windows, sunroofs, the hip-hopping people with contorted, scowling and grimacing expressions, and they were gesticulating wildly, throwing up all sorts of hand and finger signs.

I’m pretty sure they weren’t deaf people, using sign language, but being as baked as I was, that’s what I first thought, like “dude, why are all these deaf people so pissed off…” Then, however, because I’d watched so many hip-hop videos, I came to believe it might have been a gang thing.

Then we saw there were people in the road, who’d left their cars, or who’d sprinted over from the parking lot of the club complex. They looked pissed off too.

The hip-hopping people in the street were yelling, posturing, doing sign language, and a few were involved in fistfights.

A group of girls strode past our car. One caught my eye. She was the prettiest of the pack, tall and thin, with swirly waves of flowing yellowy hair, heavy makeup, and sparkly silver high heels; the girl in a short black dress that appeared as if she’d chosen it carefully.

The girls were walking hurriedly towards the clubs when another girl, from another pack, ran up on them. The insurgent, in a tight-fitting tiger-print one-piece mini, was about the same age, early 20s, but was far larger, damn near the size of a sumo, and she was screaming like a banshee. Rumbling up behind the flock of pretty girls, the insurgent, the sumo, the she-beast, let loose a shriek and struck the pretty girl I’d seen, in the back of the head, with a sharp rabbit punch.

To my surprise, the pretty girl took it like a champ. She only buckled, stumbled slightly, but kept walking, and hurried her pace.

The she-beast then howled and shouted a string of invective. The she-beast’s battle cry elicited no response, though, from the pretty pack.

The cops, in several squad cars, roared in, their sirens sounding like animals.

The cops descended, some with guns drawn, some with shining flashlights, some spraying mace. The cops, screaming police things, began corralling and arresting the fighting sign language people.

Looking to my left, I saw there was a hippy, a guy from our neighborhood, who also sorta looked like Jesus, walking over to the club. One of the sign language people dashed over and accused that Jesus of “rolling his lips.”

“Why you roll your lips at me?” shouted the seething sign language man, the angry youngster in dark baggy clothing. The angry young man’s pants were hanging so low his entire ass was hanging out, his bright red boxers gleaming through the night, making him appear like a red-ass gremlin.

The hippy just shrugged, shook his head, meekly, stared at the ground and attempted to walk away. But the red-ass persisted. Inquired again, “Why you roll your lips at me?”

And after shoving the hippy, the red-ass launched a wild haymaker that connected squarely on the hippy’s left cheek, sending the hippy tumbling to the pavement. The red-ass’s nostrils flared, his neck veins popped, and he screamed epithets as he crouched and punched, rained fists at the fallen hippy, who’d curled into a ball on the ground. Then he kicked the hippy in the hippy’s hairy head before the cops came and wrangled and handcuffed the attacker, the red-ass screaming and squirming spastically as he was whisked away.

The cops were now looking into every vehicle, beaming flashlights like lasers and dragging out drivers and occupants, searching people, arresting some. No one was doing sign language at the cops, but they all looked a lot angrier upon the cops’ arrival. The cops looked angry too, and I saw a cop pepper spray a fat girl who’d been trying to flee.

The whole scene killed my buzz. I wasn’t feeling too high anymore. And being that none of us could pass a breathalyzer test, plus the three of us were holding weed, I started to worry that maybe we’d get searched. We weren’t in our neighborhood. I wasn’t sure what could happen here.

But when the cops approached, shined the searchlight on us, they saw how panicked we were, and they gave us a look, a look not unlike the older men with bushy eyebrows, the look of them knowing that we were in the wrong place, and that they knew that we knew we were in the wrong place. The pair of cops, who looked like people from my neighborhood, looked away, tacitly, and waved us past, and the road in front of us had cleared, wide open as the Red Sea.

We then drove back to our neighborhood, disappointed to not have checked out the club. But happy to have gotten out of there unscathed. We never went back to that part of town, until it was further gentrified. Well, except maybe once or twice, to buy drugs.