Maybe I should start from before the beginning. My...

Maybe I should start from before the beginning. My friends in the Bay Area I’ve known for a while, some ten plus years in certain cases. Let’s call this one friend Mike. Mike got married two years ago. His wife is awesome. He used to be a really good friend. He got involved with a motorcycle gang, some admittedly alright guys who I didn’t have much of a problem with. Mike had been drifting as a friend for a little while before he got married, always making excuses as to why he couldn’t hang out, grab a beer, play pool, or what have you. When I was living in Chicago and then Los Angeles I’d be back every couple of months and his flakiness essentially meant that I wouldn’t see him save ever six months or so.

He was always the kind of guy that seemed like a card looking for a pack to fit in to. He gravitated towards shadier people in the time that I knew him and that’s fine, people are people, everyone is different, and I’m not one to talk about the occasional shady friend as variety is the spice of life and all that jazz. It happens. I’m not mad, which is more than I can say for a few other friends who failed to see at all what Mike was getting out of hanging out with these guys. But it happens, I told them. It’s all good until it isn’t.

Mike got married two years ago to a wonderful and charming woman. At the wedding were the motorcycle gang. There wasn’t any bad blood or anything. Honestly, they were nice guys. For the last two years Mike hung out with them almost exlusively - we barely saw him. At a friend’s recent show - his only show in the Bay Area in the last four years - Mike failed to show up because he was doing ‘laundry’. Mike ceased to be a friend, as friends go. But again: these things happen, life goes on, and nobody should be mad as it’s simply human, y’know?

Last night Mike had a party. I have nothing bad to say about the people who threw the party. To be honest, I had a fine time up until the last twenty minutes. It was then that I realized just how far gone Mike was from us, and just how bizarre some of these guys’ minds were.

One of the bigger guys in the gang had been perfectly civil up until that point. “Hey, you guys wanna hear a joke?” he said, and the five or so of us had had enough beers in the backyard to go “SUUURE”, so the circle closes in a little and the big guy starts to speak.
“How many ni-“
I nearly spit out my beer. Come again? Old school racism? I mean, half of the creepiness was in the delivery. The big guy had gone from speaking like a gruff bear to an almost light hearted Bob Hope delivery.
“Why does a ni-“
And so on.

A couple of the guys laugh the way one might laugh if you had never, ever in your life had laughed before and had only read about it - that slow, creeping huh - huh - - - - huh of a laugh spilling slowly like uncomfortable molasses. A couple of the other guys thought these seriously racist jokes were hilarious. And they were pretty hardcore racist jokes. Not exactly ‘fun’ hearing about decapitation, etc.

“Hoo-wee!” says Mike.
And then Mike throws in a couple. The group laughs, and one of the guys steps away. “I gotta grab a beer”, he says, and goes inside and talks to the girls. I don’t know why I stayed. I wasn’t laughing. It seemed so foreign that I thought I might, in a weird way, learn something from being so close to it.
The big guy laughs at Mike’s last joke and says
“A couple of the _________’s at work… I told ‘em the one about…” and he proceeds to go into another, somewhat longer variation of a pretty long racist joke as it was. He acts out his co-workers reactions this way:
“They look at me, like, are you serious? And then they started laughing! See? Even ______’s have a sense of humor!”.

Are you serious?

“I think we’re offending the Princess”, says Mike, motioning his beer over towards me.
“You OK, Princess?” mocks the big guy.
“I’m fine,” I say “But I mean, do you guys really think that? I mean, seriously?”
“It’s bad enough we’ve got a ______ as a fucking President”, says the Big Guy.
“He’s not MY President!”, says one of the other guys.
They all cheers. I don’t.
“But Obama?”, I say. “Really? It’s not one guy’s fault. It’s like fifty peoples fault, at least, you can’t blame it one guy”

The Big Guy directs himself at me and squares his shoulders back, easily a foot taller than me and that much more intimidating to look up at. He looks down his nose at me.

“I’d suggest you don’t talk politics in this house, boy”, he says “Unless you’re going to agree with us about that _______ that singlehandedly ruined our country”.

“He’s taking our guns, too”, said one of the other guys. A tad cliché.
“I heard they’re gonna hang him on the National Mall”, said another, insanely calm considering the words he’d just let forth. I’m pretty sure my mouth was hanging open by now in total fucking amazement at how quickly the evening had gone from talking about the Giants in the playoffs to talking about hanging the President because he was black.

I looked at Mike. Mike was one of the guys that had come over after Dad died a while back and had sat and played video games with me and been a good friend; let me talk. He’d loaned me $40 when I’d needed it one time when I was dead broke and couldn’t afford gas when it was nearly five bucks a gallon. Mike had been a good friend, and I was having a hard time coming to terms with the fact he was one of the guys out here talking about this. It was strange. It was evil. It was vile. It was despicable. It was strange to look back on all the times we’d hung out and had to paint it over those memories with a coat of racist paint, so to speak, obscuring even the best memories we’d had. This was the guy who had practiced proposing to his now-wife to me, drunk, at 1am, and had gotten down on one knee and proposed to me coincidentally the very second his now-wife had come out side for a cigarette, which had been a hilarious moment for everyone, one of those ones that solidifies the group. I’d know the guy for eight, ten years now? We’d dated the same girl in high school, for fucks sake. You’d think I would’ve known. So I looked at Mike for a little guidance, a little assurance that this was all a big laugh and just drunk guys being vulgar assholes after a lot of beers.

But it wasn’t. Mike gave me a look, a quick one, that said ‘I know what you’re thinking, and yes this is real’. Mike took a drag of his cigarette and ashed it before turning back to the big guy.
“Did you hear the one about the ni-“, said Mike.

And that was all I really needed to hear.

I didn’t so much excuse myself as just felt myself walking away. I’d driven here. It seemed apt that I could leave whenever, too, y’know? My friend I’d given a ride to was inside drinking, talking to a girl. I made my way in there and looked at the spread of food. “You ready to go?”, I said to my friend, as my eyes went from the mac-‘n’-cheese, to the chicken, to the chips and salsa, to the rice, and back again, not really looking at anything, just looking really, just trying not to think, and as my friend answered “give me five minutes” as I just stared at the big bowl of mac-‘n’-cheese half empty like it had an answer for me.

The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for. But ignorance is the biggest goddam cancer of our time.