Round Trip To Gretna

The following is just a long rant against certain, but certainly not all, African Americans, but certainly all bums...

A trip to the plasma place in Gretna has historically been an ordeal.

I have blogged a few times about how Gretna seems to be ruled by evil spirits  and/or built on a sacred burial ground.

There is a palpable anti-white bias there, where it seems that over ninety percent of the citizens are non white.

I am starting to think that black people know what annoys white people and they act up and "pour it on" when in the presence of Caucasians, just to bother them.

I noticed myself becoming progressively more angry as I neared the place.

This began before I even left New Orleans.
Family Dollar Skeezer
There was a young black girl by the Family Dollar when I came out, after spending all my cash, except for the $1.25 for the bus fare, on cat food, who begged me, like a child asking for candy, for a cigarette.

I told her that I only had 3 left, as a way to test her.

She then asked if she could "pleeese have one," as if it would mean the world to her.
"I only have three left, to last me all night," I reiterated.

She failed the test.

"Could I please, please pleeese have one?"

"I only have 3 left and you want one of them?!?"

She was doing the exact same thing that my neighbor two doors down from me did when she first moved in and had knocked on my door begging me for a pan to cook her "pattetti" in. That one was holding her stomach and telling me that she was starving, and saying "pleeese" the same way, in the same tone of voice; like a child asking for candy.

They must compare notes, these skeezers.
Sacred Heart Skeezer
Then, I was asked for one by an older black guy who lives in our building whom I have seen before a few times.

We have never had a conversation and I don't believe he even knows my name, but he saw the one I had stopped to take a few puffs off of and, as if by knee-jerk reaction asked: "Could I get one of those?"

Then he followed the script used by his ilk by thanking me and telling me "'preciate it..." before I even had a chance to answer him. I guess that type of skeezer thinks that someone who is on the verge of saying "no" will change his mind after hearing how polite and "appreciative" he is. They all follow the same script and use the same tone of voice. It's eerie.
The All Black Bus
I wound up on the bus that would deliver me to Gretna with minutes to spare before the plasma place closed at 7 PM.

I was able to get my bike on the one remaining rack and to get a seat because I had ridden to the stop which is one stop before the one where a herd of black people normally wait to rush the door when it opens.

Everything that bothers me about a lot of African Americans became amplified.

Any one of them who wound up bitching about there not being any empty seats could have averted that catastrophe by walking about 750 yards to the stop where I got on, but it seems like they haven't figured this out yet.

Or, I thought, they are such pack animals that they all wait in a mass because none of them are able to think autonomously nor able to count the number of people at the stop and then subtract that from the number of seats likely to be available on a bus.

Plus, a lot of them were wearing shower shoes, flip-flops or slippers, which would make it "impractical" to walk the 750 yards to a better stop.

I guess they are making the fashion statement of "I don' work, I lounge around in my slippers all day."

So, they stand there together, taking whatever life dishes out to them. Ain't that some shit; every seat taken...a damned shame....

The bus filled up.

I will usually offer my seat to any lady that boards and has to stand up. But I had actually disqualified the females that I saw from being ladies. None of the black men were getting up to offer their own fair sex an opportunity to unburden themselves, so why should I? My experience has been that the "lady" will plop herself down as if entitled to the seat without a word of thanks to me.

My bitterness towards them fomented. It's something that I'll have to work on, through the self help dialogues, and the Eckhart Tolle books. I looked around and saw at least 3 obese women with pudgy babies in their laps. "Oh, look at all the welfare babies!," I wanted to say out loud. That might have gotten me a shower shoe up my ass, though.
One Crazy White Guy
But, it was an older, scraggly looking white guy -the only one besides me on the bus- who was annoying me directly. He had sat down on the step that separates the rearmost part of the bus from the front, and so he was immediately to my right. And he started to talk to nobody in particular. I ignored him, and got the impression that he was upset because I didn't seem to think it was interesting that he was crazy.

When we got to the stop where I was going to get off, the guy asked "You're getting off, right?" -he had seen me pull the cord.

"Yeah," I said, and then stood up. There were people crowding the area of the back door, so, even though I was standing, I had to wait for them to get off and be out of my way before I could budge.

The crazy white guy started to try to wedge himself past me into the seat, as if he couldn't wait a few more seconds to sit, even though he had already been sitting. Then, he started to cuss at me..."Jesus Christ, can I get in the seat?!?" seemingly totally ignorant of the fact that I was blocked by the people who had rushed the back door, as if determined to get off before the white guy had a chance to.

The crazy guy, I figured was so adamant about getting the seat because he was afraid one of the blacks would try to barge his way into it.

After I got off, I went to the front, where I put my leather jacket down on the sidewalk, to free my hands for taking the bike off the rack. A black lady who had gotten off after me, stared at it, and then waited until I was finished with the bike, as if to see if it was mine or had been left on the sidewalk.

The plasma place was as it usually is. There was one other guy there with light skin, but his speech was littered with the word "nigger," as he conversed with a few people around him.

The Patriots/Bills game came on at 7:15, when I had just about filled my plasma bottle to the half-way point. I almost wished that I could have slowed down the flow of it, so as to see more of the game.

"Oh, the Patriots are on!," exclaimed the light skinned guy who might have had enough dark blood in him to allow him to say "nigger" in every other sentence.

He then said that he had been a Patriots fan since a young age, "those are my niggers!"
"You don't remember 1995, you're too young," he said in reference to something about the Patriots.

"Hell, I watched the Patriots play in Shaefer Stadium when I was a kid," I said, in a rare attempt to make conversation at that place.

The light skinned guy started to say something to me, but then seemed to catch himself, and returned to the program of "don't even acknowledge a white guy," that seems to be the norm at the plasma place. A look of distaste came over his face, and he didn't say anything back.

"I saw O.J. Simpson play," I then added, just to annoy him and the rest of them, for I knew that that topic was taboo and, if they were going to annoy me, I was going to "O.J." them.

My donation made, I had to leave, for there is no hanging around the place once you're done. I stepped outside to see the light skinned, somewhat heavy-set guy who had had nothing to say to me, standing in the parking lot talking into his phone as if calling for his ride.

I got on my bike and rode down the sidewalk a ways to where I could watch the game a bit more through a window.

I still needed to get some "cash back" off my plasma card, just to have the money for the bus home, but figured that there would be enough time for me to do that at the Family Dollar and still make the 8:19 PM one home.

I would wind up on the 10:14 PM one, though.

I lit a cigarette while catching a few more plays of the game in front of the window down the sidewalk. And, along came the heavyset light-skinned guy, who had begun to saunter my way as soon as I had lit it.

"You got an extra one of those?" he asked.

"Dude, you didn't have anything to say to me inside, when I started to talk to you about the Patriots; what makes you think I would have an extra cigarette?!?" I snapped as I rode off. I could hear him cussing me out as I rode away. Fuck that "nigger."

I got to the Family Dollar, where I realized that the "no cash back" sign must be a permanent fixture there.

The guy who works there, a light skinned tall young black guy, had bent the rule for me on past occasions after I had shown up with the ace bandage around my arm, telling him that I needed cash or I would be stuck on that side of the river for the night.

I could kind of sense that he was going to deny me this time, as if I was in a movie that I had seen before. He did.

I rode off, able to quell any anger I might have had towards him, to deny him any satisfaction he might have gotten from seeing it, and because I knew there was another Family Dollar near another bus stop, closer to Howard's house.

I got there and saw that, they too, had a similar "no cash back" sign.
Gretna is ninety nine percent black, of course they wouldn't want to keep any cash within sight, I thought, cynically.

I started to ride towards Howard's house, thinking that I would have to hit him up for $.1.25 for the bus, but decided to ride down a certain street where I knew that there were businesses.

I stopped at a Shell Station and was annoyed be seeing an obese black lady at the counter, wearing slippers and in the middle of asking "What dat eeis?" of one of the cashiers, about something. They didn't give cash back, the machine was "down." Of course the machine was down.

There was a Dollar General store in a mall. I rode toward it.

A black man was walking across the parking lot. "He's gonna want something for free," I thought, as I sped up enough so our paths wouldn't cross.

Then, in front of the Dollar General was a black guy who had a large backpack and a milk crate with some stuff in it.

"Yo, bro, do you have a dollar?" he asked as I was locking my bike.

"Do I have a dollar?!?" I asked, as if I had no idea why he was asking.

He could have been the twin brother of one of the inveterate skeezers who lives at Sacred Heart, he even sounded like him.

"No, I don't have a dollar," I told him rudely, pretty sure that he was going to believe that I was lying.

I wasn't sure if the Dollar General even gave cash back, or if they did in the amount of ten dollars, which was about all I would have out of the fifteen dollars for the plasma, minus the amount of the cat food that I would have to purchase in order to get cash back.

Every black person in the aisles of that store looked to me like they were shoplifting. The flicked their eyes at me. They looked like the eyes of raccoons that have been startled by the beam of a flashlight as they are tearing up a garbage bag, guilty looking and ready to run.

I got to the register, where I had to wait behind a couple people before I would be able to inquire if they gave cash back. The person immediately in front of me was a skinny black lady probably in her forties. She had the rough around the edges look of a crackhead and moved with the jerky motions of one.

She put her stuff on the register and then added a bottle of soda. "I'm not sure I'm gonna have enough for the soda, but..." she said.

There she was; laying the groundwork for the skeeze. Of course she wasnt' going to have enough for the soda, and of course she was going to turn to the white guy behind her for it.

Then entered the Brian-from-building-A-look-alike who had been begging out front, who glanced over at me with an evil look (how dare I not have a dollar?) before grabbing some chips or something and taking his place behind me in the line. But not before slamming his milk crate down rather loudly upon the soda case right behind my head.

He stood about two inches behind me, bumping me at one point.
I then moved about a foot away from him in a deliberate way, intended to communicate: "I'm moving away from you," after looking down at my feet, with his almost on top of them, and then stepping mine over a couple feet.

Then, the skinny lady with the orange-ish Afro which was grey around the edges, looked at the can of cat food in my hand. "Is that for a cat?" she asked.

I couldn't keep the sarcasm out of my voice as I rotated the can a bit so that the cat on front of it was staring straight at her. "You've never seen cat food before?"

I knew that she was just trying to make conversation, softening me up for the skeeze; probably knowing darned well that she was going to be short for the soda.

"I saw that it was cat food, that's why I asked..."
(she at least could have asked: "What kind of cat do you have?" that would have been less obvious of a foray into a skeeze)

Then....she was short on the amount for the soda. Of course she was.

"Do you have twenty-six cents?" she asked me. She didn't ask the cashier, nor the black guy behind me.

"No, I only have plastic," I said.

I then asked the cashier if they gave cash back.
She told me that they did, hesitating a bit, as if considering lying just to send the white guy away disappointed.

"Can you get ten dollars back?"

"I don't know, I think it's just twenty" said the not too bright looking cashier with a name tag which read something like LaKeeshontay.

She works there and she doesn't know what the cash back amounts are? It must have been LaKeeshontay's first day.

"Well, if I pay for this cat food and I can't get ten dollars back then I won't have enough left to get ten dollars back at the next place...."

A dumb stare.

"Let me try to get ten back," I said, putting the cat food on the register.

"Just for future information, you can get ten back," I told her, after the screen popped up and I hit the "$10" button.

She probably already knew that.

While I had been deciding whether or not to try the machine for ten bucks, Brian the skeezer had bought his chips and was ready for me as soon as I walked out with the ten dollars and a can of cat food to my name.

"Did you come out alright?" he asked, concerned about me, I guess.

"Yeah, everything is good," I said, and hastily rode away, ignoring whatever he said next. After all, he knew I had just gotten ten dollars in cash, surely I could spare a couple of them. My cat will be alright with just one can of food. I'm sure Brian would "really appreciate it."

A Project

So, that is going to be a project for me; to figure out how not to be bothered by the plethora of bums out there; because they don't seem to be going anywhere soon.

Hopefully if the unemployment rate falls to a certain level, the public's patience with bums will drop along with it, making it not so worthwhile to trade one's dignity for handouts.

Fifty years from now, this generation of African Americans will have passed away along with their "entitlement" mindsets.