I woke Dallas up and climbed into the back of the vote truck to sleep. He climbed into the front seat to drive. That was at seven this morning. When I awoke around noon, I wasn’t on a lush island in the middle of an inland sea. Fuck no, I was in wonderful downtown Gary, Indiana, at a Clark gas station.
The gas station didn’t look like the kind of place that either had a bathroom or that I wanted to actually enter if it did not have a bathroom. You know what I’m saying. It probably sounds a little odd but it makes sense, if you think about it. Not too much, though. Then it won’t make any sense at all. So I walked right to the alley behind the place and pissed in a corner overgrown with tall weeds.
The sun burned hot. Down the alley, the kind of overgrown, pot-holed path behind buildings where garbage trucks are supposed to run, a young black woman in shorts leaned against the driver’s side door of a brown car behind which was a black who age I could not determine. They chatted away, and every once in a while the sun would glint bronze off the girl’s exposed legs.
I buttoned up my shorts and walked back to the truck. Taking off my shirt, I poured water from a gallon jug over my head, hands and chest. I rubbed it in. I took some in my mouth, noted that it was warm, swishing it around a little before spitting it out. I took in my surroundings again. Although there were several people in sight -- in the gas station itself, at a bus stop in front of the gas station, in the greasy spoon on the other side of the road, in front of a shoeshine parlor – none of them were white.
I looked again. Still, no white skin other my own or my companions was in sight,.
I turned to Clark, “Any white people around here?”
“Nope.
“I didn’t think so.”
Then I looked again at the diner across the street, Coney Island it called itself. I grabbed my camera and walked over.
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