Gary’s Bistro
I’ve heard this one 100 times:
My father Richard, 26 years old,
fists balled, knuckles barnacle-white,
beelining for a bistro in Carytown,
Richmond, gentrifying shopping district,
circa 1972, a decade before I was born.
The owner, a real piece of shit
it has been confirmed, left a greasy
handprint on an employee’s backside
and that employee was my mother.
Mom said, I’m used to it. I already quit.
Don’t make a scene. But not my pops!
Not his wife. He wouldn’t stand for it.
But between him and his chauvinistic
destiny a small black kid, 9 or 10 years
of age, clutching his head, bleeding into
his eyes and through his fingers,
stumbling as callous white folks
divert attention to shop windows.
He was hit with a brick, three older kids
escaping around the corner, and now
my father, public school teacher (such
a noble profession), has a new emergency.
He guides the cussing boy to
the sub shop stoop. The kid’s a leaky faucet,
tears now in the mixture, pooling at
his sneakers, and guess who, that’s right,
the villain of this fable, misogynist,
ass-slapper extraordinaire comes out
to say get that kid (did he use another
word?) the fuck outta here. And this
the moment, the climax when everything
clicks into place-an alignment of dad’s
and the dinner party guest’s moral universe:
Good Man, Protector of Woman’s Virtue,
White Savior, threatens to press
the sexual assaulter’s face against
the griddle if he doesn’t call an ambulance,
bring a towel. The asshole does as he’s told.
He doesn’t want his cheek seared
or he considers how his first instinct
will be received by patrons. It’s not a case
of his word against my mother’s anymore.
The wound is cared for and the kid
taken to the hospital.
The end.
Dad, forgive my frustration that
the kid arriving safely in his mother’s
arms is not the end of the story,
my annoyance with your use of
a black boy as prop and that I am damned
to do it again. Excuse my sarcasm,
my skepticism, my use of “woke” terms
to question your intentions. You should be
allowed your self-aggrandizements and
omissions at 75 years of age. You were
a helluva man. Still are. Never a shithead
like Gary. Mom always wanted a bumper sticker:
“Too many dicks, not enough Richards.”
I’ll shut up and put my angst in
the poem I may never show you. You’re from
a different time, as they say, and this city is
the failed capital of the Confederacy.