Dead Sea Read Free

house in the middle of Druid Hill Park. Place was a fucking dump. We had rags stuffed in the cracks in the walls and plastic over the windows in the wintertime to keep out the cold. My childhood pets were all cockroaches. The neighborhood was filthy-garbage on the sidewalks and dead grass and broken glass covering the vacant lots. I saw my friends get gunned down in the streets. Saw their dried blood on the sidewalks. Saw the cops and the preachers shrug in resigned consignation. They didn't care. Neither did anybody else. Only time people gave a fuck was during an election year-or if somebody white and wealthy got killed. I spent my childhood in shit. 1 stepped on crack vials every time I went outside to play. Drugs were all around me. So was crime. It was a way of life. But I didn't buy into that shit. 1 lived my life differently. Stayed in school. Worked a job. Never did drugs. Never boozed. Never robbed anybody. Like I said, until the stick-up at the dealership, I'd never held a gun in my life. And I ain't proud of that incident. But shove your stereotypes up your ass. I'm educated. No college, but I graduated high school. Not that GED shit, either. I actually went to class and got my diploma the old-fashioned way. I read a lot and watched Discovery Channel. I didn't talk like a thug. Didn't feel the need to emulate a rapper. Ground my teeth every time some well-meaning white acquaintance deferred to me at a party when the conversation turned to basketball or slave reparations or Colin Powell's run for president or hip-hop. I didn't flash the bling. I respected women. Didn't view them as ho’s. Didn't hang out in front of the liquor store. Thought P Diddy was a douche bag. Vote or die? Fuck you, you stupid, conceited, fronting motherfucker. I felt the same way about Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, too. They were supposed to identify with what I'd been through? Please. None of them spoke for me. I didn't feel the need to respect them just because we shared the same skin color. Didn't drape myself in gold jewelry. Didn't let my pants sag around my fucking ankles. I refused to let a media-inspired culture influence how I dressed, talked, walked, thought, or behaved.
        Don't talk to me about equal rights. I got it from both sides. The quiet, almost apologetic racism from white America, and the more flagrant disapproval from my own race, simply because I refused to live up to what they'd been conditioned to think an African-American should be. My peers thought there was something wrong with me simply because I refused to act like a thug.
        And even on good days, when I'd faced down each and every one of the stereotypes that comes with being a black man-even then I'd be met with a whole bunch more prejudice because of my sexual orientation.
        Think that it's hard being black? Try being a gay black male sometime.
        Hamelin's Revenge not withstanding…
        The biggest stereotype of all was my steady employment. People either expected me to deal drugs, live off welfare, or be a fucking limp-wrist hairdresser. I don't know why. There's nothing about me that's either gangsta or feminine. Maybe they'd watched too much New Jack City or Will & Grace. I had a good job on the assembly line at the Ford plant in White Marsh, and I kept it. Thing was, it didn't keep me. That's what led me to the Ford dealership with a gun stuffed in my waistband. And I was living with the guilt of what I'd done there up until Hamelin's Revenge came along.
        I was thinking about that very thing when Alan and I looted the Safeway.
        We showed up at the Safeway's parking lot in the middle of the night and found a dozen other well-armed people with the same plan. We grabbed two shopping carts and joined in before the shelves were picked clean. The cops weren't around, and neither were the zombies. The other looters ignored us, busy making due for themselves. Four of them stuck together in a group. The others