by Roman McClay
Non-whites covered for each other, and placed racial and tribal loyalty above the factory, or work ethic, or common decency or chain of command. Lyndon would, in later years, admire it. He would say, they had it right, they should have been loyal to each other; and whites should be loyal to whites. Fuck all this objectivity and liberal standards of principle, that game can only be played when everyone plays it the same fucking way. The Lion plays the lion, the sheep plays the sheep; it’s when a lion tries to produce wool and the sheep attempts to roar that the whole clockworks crashes and mangles it all.
The problem was whites played the meritocracy game and didn’t favor whites over anyone else; and the blacks, like Reggie, and the browns like Juan and Javier and Alejandro and 25 other Mexicans that worked there, played the racial game. It was like playing checkers while your opponent plays chess. And Lyndon transformed from a man of principle and American idealism into a realist real quick. It’s all well and good in the academy to eschew white identity politics, but the white working class in on the front lines, and the generals back at command have no idea how the actual fight is going. Here it’s hand to hand, and nice guys don’t just finish last, they never finish at all , he thought.
His friend, Marcelo, who was Argentine , and as white as he was, agreed. He hated Mexicans , as Argentines are known for. Che Guevara was Argentine , and he was as racist as any member of the klan. And for good reason, Che had been to Africa, he had mingled with the Mexica and mestizos of Latin America, and the darker one was the dumber, and lazier; Che wrote. These are facts -it bears repeating- that well-fed university liberals do not understand because they do not do actual work, with the proles, on the line, in the trenches, for 14 bucks an hour , Lyndon thought as the buzzers rang in the back end of the factory.
Liberals, he thought, who insist that white people cannot descend into identity politics like the niggers and spics -because it’s a losing game- are detached from reality on the ground and think in abstract ways . Life is not abstract, it’s real, and when a black worker that is under the command of the front-end lead, Lyndon on second-shift for example, always leaves his post, and is always late back from lunch and slow and malingering, and Lyndon has to say, hey come on man, I need you to work, not screw around , then racial politics -not reason- obtains. When that black bastard goes and grabs Reggie, the back-end lead, of equal rank as Lyndon and that brand new guy, that greenhorn, when he tells Reggie that the white boy -with the tattoos and shirts that are too tight - is riding him too hard, this is when real life appears. This is real life , he thought. Race is always there .
Reggie who has known this new black worker all of three days, and has known Lyndon for two fucking years, takes the nigger’s side -of course- because now, Lyndon is a racist for asking a black man to actually do his goddamn job , Lyndon thought with vex as the alarm reset and the line moved on in the racks. He saw metal wherever he looked; men only here and there.
“I’m still not a racist, but I’m mulling it over as an option now,” Lyndon had said to Marcelo one day a few weeks later. Marcelo had laughed and repeated how much he hated niggers for the 99th time.
But to Reggie and this black greenhorn -in this impromptu meeting that day- Lyndon nods and says, ok, maybe I am riding him too hard, maybe I have unconscious bias, fair enough , and he naïvely agrees to ease up. The liberal Lyndon admits he could have it wrong and lets the black guy laugh at him behind his back as he takes his check from that week and goes on a bender, calling in and telling HR his son had died, and that he couldn’t come in to work on Monday.
Whites give up a tactical advantage by being honest and thoughtful when called a racist by grifters and race hustlers -as all blacks are- and they need to knock it off now. This is a war, and blacks will never be fair again. So, whites better wise the fuck up , Lyndon would think -and later say- as moments like this piled up on him like the stacks of shingles themselves.
Marcelo said, he killed his son , in that Argentine accent, the next week, to Lyndon under the T-Shingles line. It was an almost quiet and inert spot; a refuge where men could talk as the 3-Tab line ran in clacking and humming at 600 feet per minute.
“He killed his son, what?” Lyndon asked not understanding Latin logic, where the mystical meets the profane. Lyndon had thought Marcelo was saying the greenhorn, the black father had literally murdered the son, when Lyndon was dubious the son was even dead.
Marcelo had explained that to lie like that, to invent a story in which one’s own son was killed, was tantamount to invoking a curse, it was to kill one’s son.
“Ah,” Lyndon nodded now, his rational atheist self, understood it was some backward voodoo shit. But, he agreed, that to lie about such a thing was crass and gross and low-borne. He didn’t say it, because he was not a racist yet, but he thought it: only a black guy would lie so brazenly and think people would buy it.
When the greenhorn returned in two days, this black ‘worker’ was acting happy and bouncy and oddly. A man who just lost his son, would not be so high in affect and positive emotion , Lyndon -and everyone else- thought. But to a black guy, he thought, that was how you did it: you missed work with a bulletproof excuse then acted so nice and positive upon return you’d be lauded for a great attitude. It was the logic of the psychopath . And that incident burned itself into Lyndon’s soul like almost nothing else. It was a moment in time the cosmos could not retrieve; it was ballistic and thus it must have wanted the result that it got.
The worker, the black man was lazy, cried about racism as soon as he could, enlisted the help of another black person -a stranger to him 72 hours earlier- and called in sick on a lie that involved a fraud of his own son’s death; and then the guy acted inappropriately jovial upon his return. And his work ethic did not improve. Noted, Lyndon would think; noted , he would repeat more than one time. This was stored away for future use; it was kept warm and like gunpowder it was kept dry.
Another black, Darnell, the brother of Nephus , a half-black half-Indian, who -unlike Darnell- was actually a very good worker, was also under Lyndon’s charge. Darnell was the same type of nigger, lazy and always crying racism when asked to work , Lyndon ruminated. Darnell had refused to work more than once and Lyndon sent him home for insubordination -as was within his rights as a Lead- and Darnell had told the bosses that Lyndon was not only racist but drug addled. And remember, this is before I was racist , Lyndon would say -and believe- when retelling the tale, this was when I was super liberal and anti-racist, counting Nephus, his brother, as my good friend .
But Darnell had said that Lyndon was eating psychedelic mushrooms and ecstasy on his days off and as Darnell was being fired for insubordination, he placed a hex on Lyndon. Darnell had called himself an entreprenigga, and he would need to show it now, as he was jobless , Lyndon said as he laughed to himself.
The bosses told him about this florid accusation, and Lyndon had relied, “well, I’ve passed every drug test you’ve administered, so I don’t even feel like responding. I’ll take another one today if you like.”
The HR person, Jenny, wanted to fuck him something severe, but she -like women do when they want a man but can’t have him- instead set him up with the peripatetic Corporate blonde who had asked, whose black chopper? when she was in the parking lot one autumn day. She came in from Ohio, Owens Corning’s corporate HQ and so Lyndon’s hotrod motorcycle had stood out like a shadow in the glare of other men’s chrome and red nonsense machines. Jenny had told him after the Darnell incident that she thought it was funny that he had not denied the drug use, only asserting that he had passed all drug tests.
Lyndon had smirked at the implication, and agreed he was obviously using drugs but only those not tested for. And like HST had promised when running for sheriff, he was only eating mescaline on his days off.
The blonde had been some alpha chick who liked bad boys and all that cliché shit. That Lyndon was deeper than that had made her feel uneasy; she liked the idea of the man more than the man him
self. He spoke of anarchy and existentialism and the exploitation of the worker and read from passages of Hunter Thompson and Rimbaud . He had fucked her -of course- and rode her on the back of his aggro-chop motorcycle all over Denver with flames shooting blue from the short pipes, themselves black with ceramic coating. That bike had no chrome and looked like something Darth Vader would have built when Batman had asked for a weapon on wheels. His machines were working-class by design; he left nothing -he could- to chance or to women. He shaped his world and his effects with hammer and tong.
Lyndon had built it himself and had a hot rod shop that was building three bikes a year at that time; at that rate, he made no money at it, which is why he kept his factory job.
One night his headlight burned out and he rode home without any lamp at 2300hrs. He had passed a cop coming toward him and thought he was fucked, so pulled it over to wait. But the cop never turned around. Lyndon hit the throttle and road 14 miles home on highways and main roads, all lit up with street lights, and never once felt unsafe. The headlight is not needed in the city, he surmised, only for others to see you, but not for you to see . He had learned a lesson from that, not forgotten ever: just because you think you’re guilty doesn’t mean you are. You’re more innocent than you think, he often thought.
The night had been alive with unburned fuel that dripped part in blue flame, and part in wet drops of unburnt 92-octane that he got at the race fuel station down in Lakewood off Wadsworth Blvd. He had been flashed at -with headlamps- by scared drivers of cars; he had had teenagers pull up side by side to tell him they could see his gun holstered on his hip, as the t-shirt flapped up in the wind exposing his pistol. This they told him -they yelled at him in laughing awe over the noise- as his pipes shot flames down at the street and concussive barks out into the air. They thought he was the coolest guy in the world, he smirked, right up until they found someone cooler, of course. It was all temporary and titillation and chaos for them, for him it was observed training under the eyes of the vengeful gods. He felt time had stopped at noon and was still running out all at once.
He sped at unknown speeds because he built the bike with no gauges, no speedometer, no fuel gauge, no tach. He rode by his balls, viscerally, without his neo-cortex, without help from his modern brain. He wore no helmet -those things are useless after 30mph- and he never went that slow except coming to a stop or pulling out of one. He rode fast and hard and in a gear one level too low for his RPMs so he could always pull instant-torque in any situation, never lugging the motor.
That’s how he drove his cars too; at 4, 5, 6k RPMs to be -to remain- in the power band. He stayed primed with galvanic skin response revealing moisture and in the low gears of each machine; he was expecting the worst in his body and out on the roads of modernity .
There was always metaphor in all he did; he built things to accentuate his stated philosophy: no speedometer meant that he didn’t need to know his speed, he did not need to gauge his forward velocity against any norm, any laws, any calibration by man and his society; he had no fuel gauge because he needed no reminder of when to re-fuel, he needed to keep track himself, like an animal knowns when to eat, or fuck, or attack: when his body tells him to.
His chopper was like him, flat black and mean and angry and powerful and lean, with no extra weight or fat or stupid shit that didn’t help him. If it didn’t make the bike go faster or stop better, it was not on -no part of- the bike. No cupholders or back seat, or radio or ashtray or turn signals or even a key for the ignition; it had a hidden start button and thus if a competent thief found it he could ride it away. It had no windshield or ferrings or anything like that. It was pure chop: denuded, race ready, and evil as fuck.
And he rode it without hesitation. And he loved it and it loved him. He lived a life that people would not believe, he was a modern savage, a goddamn Viking on the Ragnarok path to Valhalla and he kept track of each thing that built his life; he was awake, conscious, not just mailing it in like most men these days. He thought it was all real fucking cute.
He was free but not yet looking for revenge, his life was too good for any of that. He just lept from lily pad to lily pad sucking up the nectar of life. He had more money and freedom and opportunities than he had dreamed of just three years earlier -when still at Zendik- and there was almost no malice at all in his heart.
He’d mull this stuff over more than once, extracting lessons like juice from a slab of meat one thinks is still able to cook just a little more. But Zendik had taught him to go for life, and never play it too safe; it had taught him how to be honest; it’s harder than liars think. Liars are like junkies, they say they can quit anytime, but they never do , he thought of himself and others as well. He had learned the biggest lesson in life from them: you are in charge of your life, wait for no one, go!
That Owens Corning corporate woman had agreed to go to Sturgis with Lyndon that summer, but Lyndon wanted to take this 17-year-old -Lyndon was 28- along too, and so the blonde corporate alpha female -close to 6-feet tall- had thrown a fit and threatened his job. She had no power, it was all bluff, but it was something he learned about alpha females: they are evil and violent in the only way they know how, they cannot match men physically, so they go for the source of income or call the cops , he surmised. But they are to be watched closely and never fucked again. They were to be avoided or murdered, there was no middle way with those kinds.
He liked small women anyway, it’s just that the amount of pussy thrown his way was massive, and at first he just took them all, not discriminating the wheat from the chaff. He was a modern outlaw, riding his chopper everywhere, or his murdered out CJ7 with 35” tires, and no doors or top, and banging women half or twice his age in parking garages, gas stations, or in the deserts of Moab or the mountains by Maroon Bells; usually a different one each week.
He had Air Force blondes in his bed, and curly headed high school juniors, who had snuck into the bar that he had rode up to and drank beers with on the street outside in lieu of going in. He had a tattoo magazine cover girl bent over his bike in a parking lot along Stout street. He got Playboy golf tournament models, back to their hotels -paid for by Playboy Inc- and brunettes with stretch pants in the bathroom of Stir on Market Street while her blonde friend licked both their faces and men came in and out to insouciantly piss and breathe heavy in the stalls .
He fired that bike up in the bar and pissed everyone off; the girls he had just fucked in the commode laughed and begged for a ride. He backed it out of the bar then peeled out on the cobble stone street, the ass-end sliding sideways as he jammed through the red light at 15th and Market.
He drank and carried a gun and rode at speed of 100mph in a zone marked 45 . On Sante Fe Street the cops got him, and he had assumed the worst. But the cop loved his bike so much, wouldn’t shut up about it actually, that he just finally asked, “ok, we got you at 74 miles an hour in a 45, and we know we got you after you saw us and were down shifting, so, let me ask you this: you been drinking?”
Lyndon had had only had three Dos Equis and a 10mg Vicodin; but he had mentioned the concealed .45 on his starboard hip. So, he said, “no, I don’t even drink .”
“We are not supposed to let anyone go ,” the cops said, but he asked how much a motorcycle like that cost, and Lyndon had said, “for you, for you, cheap. This one cost me $30,000 to build, but I owe you one, so here’s my card, call me, ” and the cop let him go with a warning pretending not to smell the beer on his breath.
Maybe that is white privilege, but when you act decent, like a white man, you get decent treatment from the cops , he thought as he sped away in a euphoric haze of drugs, alcohol and immunity. He had told the cop about the gun, shown the CCW and the cops had thanked him for advertising it. And Lyndon had not removed his hands from the handle bars at all. He understood a traffic stop: never lay your hands anywhere but on the steering wheel or on the bars. If blacks didn’t want shot, they needed to stop doing weird shit with their hands, he thought, and he
thought that counted for more than traffic stops now that it occurred to him.
He had left the traffic stop and rode until 0300 that morning high on his incessant good luck and looks that he still overestimated at times. He had been pulled over at least 50 times in his life and received no tickets, and he felt that the gods favored him, and would for as long as he was righteous and honest and handsome.
You can break the law all you want as long as you are right , he had thought. And he was not yet wrong. So, like the turkey fed each day from November 30th of one year to November 26th of the next, all evidence -all data- points to always being fed by that nice farmer.
He was not all wrong. But time marches on, and the gods find others to favor as he would see. It would sting at first, but if one is honest, they will be thankful for whatever luck one gets in life, for some get none at all. He often thought of the mountains, and hoped to escape the city, for he knew its charms would one day wear away. He knew that the city would soon feel similarly about him too.
16. Butterfly Affect
Billy in many respects was little more than a sort of upright barbarian, much such perhaps as Adam presumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into his company
Billy Budd: Sailor [The Author]
If you want brevity and the taciturn from your writers, then bend the spine on Hemingway or Bukowski; that’s what they’re for. My physical fights are that way; they last 3 to 5 seconds with ballistic actions and limb destruction and few, if any, words. In this domain I am Laconic, and I prefer too that others to be succinct in business, violence and driving directions.
