King of Her Desire

3

She was the kind of woman who just expected me to show up like I did. Kind of woman men would break a serious sweat for. You could tell.

I mean, she wasn't sitting there waiting or anything. She was actually painting this pot she'd made. I'd seen her through the screen door out front. Looking like a little blonde Buddha sitting all serene and silent on the back deck.

There wasn't much of a view from behind the houses. Just the rocky cliff face.

The village was up top, a straight drop down from these steep cliffs overlooking the beach and the water. So there was this wall of rock protecting the beach houses from the realities of local life.

But she might have just preferred facing a wall instead of the beauty on the sea side that she couldn't enjoy as much anymore.

Yeah, I'm taking it 'way too far, right? She was the poet, not me.

And she was apparently pretty serious about pottery, too. Had the whole set up. I didn't see a wheel, but there was a kiln thing—I knew that from school, too.

Our art teacher had had to beg for a couple because our school was on the wrong side of the district. The side where we barely got enough funding for books, let alone art or music or anything like that.

So she was always all nervous about letting us use them not just because they'd been so hard to get but also because we were such assholes.

I mean, it was the wrong side of the district. Full of angry bastards like me. So somebody was bound to shove something or someone into one of those things.

We were the kinda kids who stomped those little bitty frogs that came out sometimes after the rain. Some boys stuck firecrackers up the butts of toads, too.

Loved making other things feel even worse pain than we felt. And it wasn't just the Black and brown kids, either. In fact, us white ones did a lot of the really heinous shit. The meth monsters.

I think being white and poor makes you almost as mad as being BIPOC. Cause some of us don't have all the white privileges you hear tell of. My family's a prime example.

All the shit people accuse Black people of doing, taking "handouts," being "too lazy to pull themselves up," you could've turned that right back on us. And in our case, it would've been accurate.

Now, some of us come from countries where our forebears faced some awful stuff, too. Places where millions of people died of famine and disease and deliberate neglect—a million in Ireland during that potato famine, right? All on account of the fat cats who didn't even consider them human.

That sounds familiar, right? They got treated pretty bad over here, too. "No Irish need apply." Almost all the immigrants went through that shit when they first came over.

But each group started shitting on the next group as they moved up. And the groups being shat upon looked around and saw that they were in the same situation as all those Black and brown people they were supposed to be "better" than.

Our family never moved up. And that's kind of why they're so fuckin' nuts. Car goes by with a Black family in it, nice car, nice lookin' people, they throw things at it. Talkin' about they must be drug dealers or how Black people are takin' over the country and we're going extinct.

Ruby red necks, yeah. All the stereotypes apply, I don't deny it. It just drives me crazy because they double down when you point out how fucked up they are. Start yelling even crazier stuff, out of spite. It's psychotic, it really is.