Book + Cover + Judge = Wrong

DATE: Thursday, October 20
PLACES: Dorsett Inn, CFM convenience store, 1988 Nissan Sentra passenger seat
POISON OF CHOICE: Bud Light pitchers
CAST OF CHARACTERS: Me, Roxana, Lonnie, Bubble Jacket


I've been in a mecca of cracker suburbia for the past two hours with my friend Roxana. We closed together at work, walked up to a vast but nondescript hoosier bar called Dorsett Inn and drank Bud Light draft from green vinyl semicircle chairs at a low-top table. Spat lively one-liners and armchair existentialism back and forth while listening to the surprisingly good classic rock band, whose drummer used to tour with Jethro Tull. Or Uriah Heep. Or Thin Lizzy. The drummer told me all about it one night a couple weeks ago when I was drunker. I remember none of it now. Those particular detail-draining brain cells all bit the dust before my head hit the pillow that night.

The guitarist - a lanky blond gentleman in his early forties - sat down with me and Roxana during his break. He somehow turned an anonymous, half-drunk shout of praise from our table into a fifteen-minute conversation. I asked if his band could play any late-years Beatles album tracks, from the White Album or Let It Be, ideally. This is what caused him to take a seat with us. Turns out this dude also moonlights as the bass player in an all-eras-encompassing Fab Four tribute band called Ticket to the Beatles. He's the Paul. Or the John. Those detail-containing brain cells also have already gasped their last, it appears.

Roxana likes the Beatles alright, but her tastes in '60s rock run more toward the Mamas and Papas, Roy Orbison and - inexplicably - Lesley Gore. She also introduced me to one of my now-favorite Temptations songs, "I Wish It Would Rain." But Roxana isn't much for back-and-forth stoner-rock chit-chat, so she fell silent while the Paul/John guitarist and I rattled back and forth about his band, other Beatles tribute bands and end-of-run Fab Four classics like "Dig a Pony," "For You Blue" and "I've Got a Feeling." Apparently, the Ticket to the Beatles repertoire includes all three gems and dozens of others, and will be playing PJ's Martini Bar on December 9. Those detail-containing brain cells will soon gasp their last, too, I imagine.

Anyway, that was my first music conversation of the night with an aspiring artist. I'm currently involved in my second - hip-hop talk with two rookie rappers at the counter of a CFM convenience store three blocks up the street from Dorsett Inn.

--

I was directed to the CFM by the DI bartender upon asking her the location of the nearest place to purchase beer. The plan was to get beer, walk the just-over-a-mile trip home and drink it outside. It's a nice night, I'm hanging out by/with myself (Roxana had her boyfriend waiting to pick her up in the parking lot, and I wanted to stay until my jukebox music ran out), and I normally don't mind walking 20- to 30-minute jaunts to or from home. But by the time I hit CFM just now, I got to feeling lazy and didn't want to walk anymore. Figured I'd just call a cab and swallow the six bucks or whatever.

Walked into the CFM, held the door open for a couple Standard White Males in their mid-thirties and headed to the beer coolers. Had myself an idea: If these guys are just going to get a six-pack or whatever, I should offer to trade them beer for a ride up the road. I mean, what the hell, I'm intelligent, well-spoken, clean-cut, reasonably sober and lily white in the county. Totally low-risk in their eyes. I'm even wearing what is obviously a service-industry uniform while carrying around an apron bearing the name of my workplace. I'm completely traceable back to this immediate community, and I'm offering to buy their post-bar beer if they'll take me four minutes out of their way. Sounds reasonable.

And I approached these guys:

ONE OF THEM (overheard): How much do you want to get?
THE OTHER (overheard): I dunno, I gotta get up in the morning. I'm only good for like two or three.
ME: Hey, if you guys are just gonna get a six-pack here, let me make you a quick proposal.
ONE: Yeah?
ME: I will pay for your beer if you give me a ride a mile up the road. I'm coming home from work and I don't feel like walking.
THE OTHER: Hmmmm.

[Neither appears willing to look me in the eye. Five seconds go by.]

ME: Well guys, what do you say? Do I call a cab and pay the driver, or do you get free beer for five minutes of driving time?
ONE: No, I'm not comfortable with that. I'm sorry.
ME: I can understand where you're coming from, but shit. I'm a peaceful guy. I've lived and worked around here for five years. I don't carry weapons. I don't mug.
THE OTHER: Man, nothing personal, but we're from Chicago. We don't trust anybody.

And they paid for six low-carb Mick Ultras and left. I plopped a twelve of Bud Light on the counter and asked the cashier, Lonnie - a twentyish brother with more gold teeth than white ones - if he had a phone book back there. He said yeah, sure, he knew there was a Yellow Pages around somewhere. And I explained my situation, that I needed a ride to a place that was barely up the street and had just been turned down by the Chicagoans.

"I can't stand folks from Chicago," Lonnie said, plopping a dog-eared phone directory on the counter. "All uptight, acting like there be danger everywhere. Gimme a St. Louisan any day."

"I figure it was me that got asked that, I'd take the deal in a second - a six-pack to give someone a quick ride," I said kind of absently, thinking whether I should flip to "C" for "Cabs" or "T" for "Taxi." "I mean anyway, I'd rather throw a few bucks toward an average person for a favor than pay a company to do the same thing."

"Hold on a second." Lonnie headed at medium-high speed around the end of the counter and out the aisle past me and toward the door. "Lemme see if he still out there."

Lonnie pushed open the door and headed outside while I browsed CFM's behind-counter display of flavored blunts - Swisher Sweets offers their sweet, sweet tobacco in Peach and White Cranberry now, it seems. Lonnie was back a half-minute later, flanked by a 6'4", 300-pound dude in cornrows and a huge black bubble jacket that seemed to suggest it was 20 degrees outside instead of 55.

"Tell him what you want him to do again," Lonnie said. I told the dude. The dude said hell yeah, no problem. And we've all basically been hanging around the front counter, talking about music ever since.

--

Lonnie and Bubble Dreads are debating the merits of up-and-coming MC's, original beats vs. samples, lyrical strengths and weaknesses, how present rappers stack up to past greats, etc. I mainly lean back and take it all in - they know a hell of a lot more about the topic than I do. And I crack the fuck up when they trade off listing the most piss-poor amateur rapper names they've come across. Twice Bubble Dreads and I have to move out of the way for Lonnie to ring up the beer and cigarettes of random customers.

I'm entertained and engaged by this pair of strangers, and in a flash I think about how I wouldn't be in this situation if I gone with my first instinct and gotten a ride from the white Chicagoans. Who I just kind of automatically assumed were safe because they were white and clean-scrubbed, and who I just kind of assumed would accept my offer because I'm white and clean-scrubbed.

I would have definitely shrugged off the notion of asking the huge black guy in the bubble jacket who was bumping the Three Six Mafia from his 1988 Nissan Sentra. But the white folks looked down their noses at me and told me to fuck off, and the black folks helped me out immediately. Warmed up to me and quickly revealed themselves to be individuals who belong in the like-minded personal collective I refer to My Kinda People. Cue the line about how judging a book on its cover = bad.

It's interesting how our society conditions us to only trust and stick with our own. We're divided and subdivided along preexisting lines of race, religion, physical appearance, sexual orientation, etc. And, whether we realize it or not - and often even if we know we know better - humans are innately suspicious and fearful of people who aren't like them on a surface level.

I mention all this to Lonnie and Bubble Jacket when the aspiring-MC conversation wanes. They echo the sentiment - good and bad people come in all stripes. Jacket heads out to warm up his Sentra, while Lonnie says something I'll think about later: "The difference in a situation like this with a stranger is, most white folks will start to think too much and worry and back off. Black people just feel and do. They empathize, they know what it is to want and need help, and they know what it is to actually help. So they help."

--

Bubble Jacket moves some papers and trash from his front passenger seat to the rear. The entire back seat is eaten up by custom speakers in carpeted wooden boxes, and the shit booms when he turns the key.

Before the car's gear shift even goes to drive, Jacket reduces the volume on the music to whisper mode. I ask him to turn it back up - I've always been enamored of rich, full-bodied bass in any kind of music, and Jacket's Sentra has got the goods.

"Aw man, I would turn it up, trust me, but not in Maryland Heights. Not at two in the morning," Bubble Jacket says.

Maryland Heights has probably the most overpatrolled, underoccupied police department in St. Louis. MHPD is funded from all kinds of property and business tax - major casino, concert ampitheater, three business districts, solid service economy, etc. - to patrol a community with no serious violent, life-threatening crime. House calls in Maryland Heights are mainly domestic disputes, with the occasional break-in. That leaves plenty of time to hand out traffic tickets and DWIs (which bring them further funding) and pull over the occasional colored person who dares enter the neighborhood.

I used to think the racial profiling allegations were exaggerated, until the stories from my black friends and coworkers started to stack up. The most recent example - two mornings ago, at work, I watched two Maryland Heights cruisers and the Supervisor SUV settle in around my kitchen-brother colleague Derek. He had come up to ask about his schedule and made the mistake of loitering at the gas station next door and goofing off with another off-duty kitchen brother.

I said hi to Derek while headed into the convenience store for a newspaper, and two minutes after that, a cop had run his plates and turned up a warrant. Three minutes after that, two more cops showed up and started searching his car. Led him away in cuffs about twelve minutes after that. And it all started because he'd been spotted talking and laughing in a parking lot at 11:25 on a gorgeous Tuesday.

Word spread around the restaurant almost immediately. Our angriest coworker was a spoiled-ass blonde princess from Farmington ("When's the last time you got arrested just for walking down the street?!"), while the black female assistant kitchen manager in her early forties just kind of quietly leaned through the food pickup window and told me, "Now you know how rough we have it out here, Drew."

By contrast, since I moved to Maryland Heights five years ago, I've been let go on four occasions when I could have been taken down for violations of varying seriousness. The longest I was ever stopped was when I was pulled over sober in the afternoon for not displaying a front license plate, and the guy let me go with a warning fifteen minutes later.

--

So, yeah, turning down the radio at two a.m. in Maryland Heights was a wise decision on Bubble Jacket's part. I tell him about Derek being ambushed and hauled away - okay, well, he did have stolen tags on his plates, but his skin color had made him a target in the first place.

BUBBLE JACKET: Yeah you can't be anonymous in Maryland Heights as a black man. They smell us the second we cross the county line.

ME: It pisses me off. The whole race situation in this country puts me to shame. In humanity period.

BUBBLE JACKET: You can't trip off it, you just born into it. There's a long history. It didn't start with America. What matters is how individuals treat individuals.

ME: What I really can't stand is, I don't think there's a way to change it. There's slow, cosmetic improvement, sure, but the people who established the power aren't gonna give it up. They're only gonna try to get more power. They won't share, and they won't fight fair.

During this liberal little conversation, Bubble Jacket and I pass a Maryland Heights cop - he's tucked behind an office building on the winding side road we're taking - and we spend a few seconds in silence. He looks up in the rearview mirror, and I spin my head around to see if the cop will follow. I know there's absolutely no way I can get in legal trouble in this situation, but my heart rate jumps nonetheless.

"He ain't comin'," Bubble Jacket says, and I turn my neck to face front again. The guy in the cop car is probably taking a nap.

ME: Were you worried?

BUBBLE JACKET: Nah. I got no warrants, nothing on me. I was doing 30 in a 30. I almost want those dudes to pull me over.

ME: Fuck, are you serious? Even if you don't end up with a ticket, you're gonna get that second cop car on the scene in three minutes, and you know they're gonna rip your damn car apart looking for shit.

BUBBLE JACKET: I don't care. I want them cops to meet more brothers like me. I want 'em to know some of us know how to talk to 'em. Know how to be civilized and intelligent and keep our cool. And have clean records and no drugs and no guns on us.

ME: No one black I know carries a gun, but they all get searched anyway.

BUBBLE JACKET: They think we look the part of a criminal, but they pull me over I'll talk civilized to 'em and keep my cool and not come off like a damn fool. That's the only way to change their minds, let 'em meet more smart black people. More three-dimensional black people. Might make 'em feel stupid for sweatin' us so much. Make 'em fuckin' grow up.

--

I tell my cornrowed chauffeur to turn left up ahead, then turn right the Dumpster and go to the end of the lot. Pop open his back door, grab my beer and pull out that five bucks for the ride. I offer it, he takes it, he thanks me, I thank him, and he holds his hand out for me to shake.

"What's your name anyway?" he asks.

"Andrew." We shake hands. I'm glad it's nothing complicated, because I don't have the soul or coordination to carry out a handshake of more than four steps.

"Drew, I'm Sin." I flash him a quizzical look. "Short for Sinful, my MC name. I'm working on finding a better one."

I pop a beer and sit outside with the iPod and headphones. Listen to a bunch of hip-hop and old R+B. For a late October night, it's unseasonably warm, and I'm a lucky bastard in an unjust world. Every few minutes, I see a Maryland Heights police car go by, and I start thinking again.

About how, when I keep to myself and stick to the safe world I know, I miss meeting out on My Kinda People. Like the guitarist from the tribute band. Like Lonnie, the brother with more gold teeth than white ones. And like one cornrowed, bubble-jacketed newbie MC named Sin who has every reason to hate the cops and the white establishment but still has a genuine faith in humanity. And who knows way more about rap music than I ever will.