Saturday, March 23, 2013

Our Kind of Ridiculous: Yous, Me and Blackness as Probable Cause


When I was twenty-four, I flew paper airplanes past the apartment of a thirty-two-year-old white boy named Kurt in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Kurt rocked a greasy brown mullet, bragged about ironing his bleached Lee's, and said the word "yous" a lot. Even with caked-up cornbread sealing the cracks of his teeth, and a raggedy mustache that looked like it was colored by a hyper six-year-old, Kurt always reminded me of somebody cute.
Kurt, whose apartment was directly above mine, lived with two women. One was his girlfriend. She could see. One was his wife. She could not.
Three little boys lived in the apartment with Kurt and his two partners. The youngest boy was Kurt's girlfriend's child. This miniature Viking loved to run his muddy hands through his blond hair and grin when he wasn't growling. The other two boys looked like they rolled around naked in a tub of melted tootsie rolls before coming outside to play.

http://gawker.com/5990859/our-kind-of-ridiculous-yous-me-and-blackness-as-probable-cause