Stomped

When I was drinking, I spent a lot of time in Frank’s bar at 13^th and Pine in Philly. Since then, it’s become known as Dirty Frank’s and is probably the most noted dive bar in town.

One rainy night, I left Frank’s with half a load on and was swaying north on deserted 13^th Street when three black guys stepped out of a doorway and the lead dude asked me if I had a cigarette.

I knew I suddenly had three problems. I knew that they wanted more than a cigarette. These were hard guys and this was a mugging. I hadn’t been out of the army long, and they told you there to take out the leader and the followers might back off.

So I clocked the first guy. It was a good, clean shot that didn’t faze him one little bit. My three problems became three attackers. They punched me down and then started to give me a classic stomping. Feet coming from everywhere. I rolled into a ball and gasped, “Are you going to kill me?”

“No, man,” one of them said, and when they had stomped me into helplessness, I felt hands almost gently go through my pockets, and then take my watch and wallet.

The cops found me staggering all bloodied and half-conscious and took me to the ER where they checked me out and found nothing seriously wrong and cut me loose in the morning. I was sore for a week and my face a mess longer than that.

The thing here is that I saw all these Nazis and Klan and other proto-fascists marching with torches and rioting in Charlottesville and it came to me that there might not have been one single person among them who had ever been physically threatened or, like me, stomped by black people.

If anybody should have a beef with black people, it’s me. I don’t.  I do have a very distant beef with the guys who stomped me, but not with black people overall.

I am seething angry and totally ashamed for America about what went on in Charlottesville. If each and every white supremacist marching there had been stomped or beaten by black people somewhere along the line, I might have some very limited sympathy for them and their “causes,” whatever they think they are.

But these unscathed assholes have bought the whole package of white American supremacy and act on it every day of their stunted lives with no real reason other than that somehow this poison has leeched into their moral veins and is pumping into their very souls. They are doomed to repeat the hate and viciousness that was on international display that bloody Charlottesville Saturday.

And I know full well that, unfortunately, Donald Trump has never been beaten or stomped by anyone, yet alone a black person. Yet he has seen fit in his limitless bigotry and hatred to condone in so many words the chaos and murder in Charlottesville.

What in the name of all that is decent and truly American has ever been done to him to make him this Great Enabler of Evil? His daughter and son-in-law are both professed Orthodox Jews, yet he gives moral and verbal  support to hard-faced spewers of the most rabid and rancid anti-Semitism and then looks proudly into the camera. 

He needs a stomping – bad – and Robert Mueller has some big, relentless feet, unlike the Republican party, whose feet are terminally cold.

There’s a hard rain coming. It’s called justice.