I ain’t no blockhead, I live with my family because that’s where I was born and I got no paper tucked away in my mattress like a girlie mag. With so little cash flow, I’ve been on the grind since I was sixteen, but now I got some chrome, something fast, cold and glitzy, something completely off the hook with deep grooves and polished dubs, a nice little SUV to help me pick up a bustdown or a goddess or a buttaface. You got to take what’s yours, naw’mean? I ain’t trying to outshine your ass in the street like an industrial street lamp, I just wanna survive, get out of the Q sometimes. But how can I work in the city, even if I want to, when 2/3’s of Queens don’t got no subway? You can talk about equality and cultural mobility all you fucking want, but that shit’s on campus. Out here, the world is mad fierce and the streets is my lab. Since politicians ain’t coming out here to bridge the gap, we coming to their hoods on a mission, to spread the good word, to volunteer our exasperation, to muscle slippery city politics.
Now and then, I gotta jack a car, that’s the truth. I’d prefer to work as a radio DJ or break into IT, but those cats just bust out laughing at my interviews: a GED makes white dudes flinch faster than a strap. So now, instead of pushing ice, I’m a car dealer and social justice is my soundtrack. I almost take pleasure in stealing their cars. Cars are high-tech painkillers anyway, helping people to dodge suffering. The poor folk live with water bugs and soul-numbing winters, surrounded by crack gates and liquor depots. But they gotta live. That’s it. For most my life, I’ve wanted to find a 40 plus, help my momma, bring back bulging bags of groceries from fancy Upper East Side delis with little Italian names that always end in vowels. You wouldn’t understand, that’s your life, your spirit is split up inside, stuck on intelligent design and vulture market economies, coked up on greed, anesthetized by those shoot’em cowboy scenes on CNN, while every black and Arab man, shakes his head like it’s a question.
I jacked your Lexus and you should thank me. You be driving in the summer, AC blazing, listening to Bonnie Raitt, or some shit like that, not a goddamn care in the world while we is dying in the free world, forced to live in rectangular monoliths that look like microchips from the sky. This SUV let you turn us off, it’s ibuprofen with hubcaps. You’ve been making a detour around the Eastside all your life, moving out of the city, to live far away from the crisis you created, your cars have turned ghettos into invisible safaris, where men in khaki suits come and poach our asses like trapped zebras, just for sport, but without your wheels, you’re just a man, a jay walker, a mortal pedestrian, you’re part of the slow again, you can’t escape the people you stereotype, we found you, trapped in the doorways of your own slogans, and we know you don’t love yourself by the way you lock your doors, so we gonna take you back with us, make you walk through circular aguments, we gonna force you to evolve, hell, you can visit yo’kids when you get here, since they actin’ all thuggish and black anyway, you should feel right at home.
I got me some chrome so I can make something of myself, so I can be more than you let my people be, so I can bust out a new blueprint without your scaledowns, so I can run over your sound bytes that fill the airwaves with simplistic formulas and a whole lot of nothing.
When you put up your tens, to stop me, I had no choice but to crack your jaw with my 8 and 1. Yo, I’m sorry. Straight up. I hit you harder than I’ve ever hit another human being. The truth is, I ain’t gangsta like that, that shit ain’t my style at all. But this Sports-4 was never yours to begin with and you got no business fighting me for a goddamn Lexus Highwheeler when you’ve been rolling in Benjamins, puffing away like a model in Smoke magazine. To you, maybe it’s the principle of it all, it’s like, nigga, get your own, ain’t it? But see, your principles, they a luxury tax for people who have the time to play squash with morality, who can afford to twist scriptures until Jesus is squeezed out like a lemon seed. I’m just trying to live, motherfucker. I’m just trying to stay alive, so I can see baby Tre’s fourth. And since you ain’t helping us, I’m doing the shit you preaching in the papers, I’m helping myself. You say this is our problem, but last night, when I laid you down cold like a TV evangelist blessing the meek, blood racing through your nose like early morning traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, your eyes, bulging like two stranded jellyfish, thrashing on the Rockaway, your hands, trembling like the N train when it roars under the Hudson, your clean, smooth palms, placed in front of your face, like you wanted me to high-five your ass for looking a black man in the eyes, for notarizing my civil disobedience, for witnessing the flaws of your own system, last night, that wasn’t just my problem, that was your problem too, wasn’t it? For one night, the BQE ran express through every borough and every neighborhood, and you had your foot in the city again, you lived on the street for five minutes, you were racially profiled, targeted for your wealth and class, for your privilege and power, for your glib explanations of urban poverty in this class feud, and for one night, for one ingenious coincidence, for one revolutionary moment, you were niggafied, Mr. Mayor, like the rest of us, and don’t you forget it.
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Jackson Bliss calls Chicago and SoCal home, though he’s spent a great deal of time traveling through Europe and Africa, going global. Right now he’s working on his MFA thesis at Notre Dame—a novel that explores double lives, the parameters of public/private art, personal voids, biculturalism, and Hip-Hop. Jackson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bend, The Oberlin Review, The Voice, BlazeVox, Cadence, Right Hand Pointing, Syntax, 3am Magazine, and The Pittsburgh Quarterly. In his rare moments of down time, he likes to sit back and just let everything pass by.
