Letter from the bus.
It was the strangest thing today. I ride public transit due to vision issues and medical conditions, and a former neighbor got on the bus because he quit diving three years ago. Well, he told me a story about being approached by two black muggers that sounded like a chapter out of White Girl Bleed A Lot.
He was waiting for the bus outside the supermarket where I used to buy my groceries in the old neighborhood when he was approached by the two men and was moving his bags off of the bench so that they could sit down when he then saw the gun.
At this point one of them used this really demanding tone “Give me the money!” as if Ted had something of his and actually owed it to him. Well, on this particular day Ted was tired and in a foul mood because he works in a call center which is poorly paid and stressful.
So Ted got pissed off and started yelling at the two young men that if they are going to rob someone to pick someone in a car and not someone who had to wait for the bus who had to buy his groceries with a food stamp card. Ted said that he was just too pissed to care. So the young men just laughed at him but didn’t bother trying to get cash from someone they decided was just an old, fat, white guy with no money.
Well, here is the clincher: Ted said that one of the guys had his cell phone out and was recording the attempted robbery the whole time because he wanted to put it up on You Tube. i told him that that sounded like a story straight out of White Girl Bleed A Lot,. He had never heard of the book and kept saying “White Girl Breathe A Lot?” to take down the information about the book. Yeah, he was saying “BREATHE A Lot” so I knew that he was not likely to be making up the story that he had just told me.
This was not his last bad experience with a black person in connection with public transit so I told him about the chapter dedicated to gay men (which Ted is one of) and the black people who prey on them in “White Girl Bleed A Lot” and about the chapter on public transit. I can tell you the other story that Ted told me because it is incredible, but I would prefer to do it in the morning because it is coming up on midnight now,
