The nazi who lives behind me died a few weeks ago. I didn’t bother asking how. He was an asshole born of the kind of infectious bacteria that festers in the subcutaneous tissue of our thin American skin. He was proud of his idiocy, a wanna-be David Allan Coe who had papered the walls of his small garage with David Duke campaign posters. He was a coward who shouted at kids from his kitchen window and huffed around like a small dog on a leash when those kids eventually broke the lock off his garage and made off with a case of his precious beer. I will not miss him and neither will you.
When I was nineteen, I watched the New Orleans Police march a handcuffed man up a deserted street towards a waiting squad car. The man was black and the four cops were white, a detail that almost seems not worth the sentence. It was just hours before dawn. The man in handcuffs sassed one of the police. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I could see what he meant by the expression that he wore. I looked on from the dark as they used his body like a pinball, slamming him into cars and off of walls until he cried like a child. I watched in detached horror because, like my dead neighbor, like the cops beating a handcuffed man, like everyone fetishizing raw power from the safe glow of their touchscreen, I found no courage in the moment and so I remained concealed in the dark.
Last night I dreamed that I was shackled under the floorboards of an old, crooked house. I could hear people walking above and, as they moved about, dust fell through the cracks and filled in the space around me. I swept it away, but the crowd grew larger, louder, and the stream of settling dust flowed down faster than I could brush it away. Soon it had covered me over. Darkness gave way to a deeper darkness until my dream collapsed in on itself and I woke to the first blue light of an uncertain morning.