My favorite premonition of a sudden death is on the city streets, getting caught in a crossfire between rival gangs. That has dramatic possibilities a la Denzel. Memorable last words (“What you shooting at, bitch?”) and no worries about in-hospital costs. You may say, wow, that’s really depressing and fucked-up, to even consider shit like that. But in the age of pandemic we need to re-define what constitutes fucked up.
My Negritude has made me aware of some of the myriad possibilities of fucking with the police. There’s not a whole lot that pigs can do other than kill you, right, and they're trying to do that anyway. That’s what my hoodlum muse tells me. It’s kind of refreshing and also frees my scope of action as a liberated black man in the People’s Republic of Austin, so-called World Capital of Live Music. It's meant throwing off the unseen chain that has bound African Americans since Emancipation—fear of the police.
For me it's become a new game, "Fucking with the Po-Po”—more colloquially—Pin the Tail on the Pig. The object is to bring a cop just to the point where he wants to shoot you. But no further. Do not try this at home. Do it out on the street where there are witnesses. If you miscalculate, at least your family gets a settlement.
My grandfather killed a Texas Ranger, btw, not to brag or anything. Or so we were told. It’s a heartwarming African American family tradition—involving a white woman and Grandfather’s escape to California in an open car, in the early 1920s, the kind of family lore that you are unlikely to see at Christmastime on the Hallmark Channel.
The tale of the Ranger’s demise was passed down to my siblings and me, back in the day, in order to teach black children the role that the police and white women play in black lives.
My own ambitions have never been bloody—not wanting to see a dead pig, no. But a humbled one, oh yeah, big time. And there are a few ways it seems to me to do that. Speaking as someone who knows pigs—domestic and international varieties—with tusks and without, again not to brag or anything.
The point is that a police stop itself is not necessarily bad. Like a lot of other shit in life, it is what you make of it. Those were the modest beginning of my new game, Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Pig.Knowing police as an institution. My adult experience includes being beaten and robbed by Romanian railroad cops on the Bulgarian border, how many non-Romanians can say that? This was during my young black manhood, post my perilous black childhood, the interesting part is being able to remember most of the details except what brought me to Romania in the first place and what was in Bulgaria for me. The Romanian pigs searched me down to my underwear and took half my money—it was the best professional pat-down in my long experience, and was better, actually, than a stop at the airport in Hong Kong when a cop put a gloved finger up my ass in a search for drugs. My experience as an African American male is particularly rich in police encounters, not to brag.
So, like, this is absolutely true—the coolest police stop of my life. Stepping off the Trans-Siberian with a friend, in 1991, at the station in Beijing. To await a train to the southern city of Guangzhou. When suddenly the People’s Armed Police arrived to do a sweep through the train station and expel Western hippies who were camping out.
So, like, Beijing was just beginning to appear on the ambitious backpacker’s bucket list of the time and some Western young people were trying to get a desert nomad kind of thing going on in the Beijing station, sleeping on the floor and all that, and the Party was having none of it.
And me explaining to the People’s Armed Police, who were getting frisky and were ready to kick me and my friend out of the station too—explaining in what was pretty serviceable Mandarin at the time—that we just got off one train and were waiting for another. We had tickets and that, subliminally, we were not a danger to the state. Which we were not.
Because Chinese cops are not American cops and, to paraphrase Muhammad Ali when he refused service in the Vietnam War, no Chinese cop ever called me nigger. In other words there was no obvious reason to disrespect the People’s Armed Police, me and my friend being guests in the country and all, unlike in the U.S.A. where disrespect is my point of departure during interactions with pigs. The takeaway on the Beijing P.D. for someone like me who studies po-po? Many Americans think the Chinese are all diminutive but some of those northern Han guys, like from Heilongjiang—up there, bordering Russia—the kind of guys who seemed to be common among the ranks of Beijing P.D.—are the size of damn refrigerators.
Just like cornfed East Texas cracker deputy sheriffs who you can’t believe that human beings grow that big?
Based upon wide experience with puercos, it’s my thesis that the changes that we’ve seen recently in public attitudes toward the police did not begin with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis or even the murder of Eric Garner in New York before that. The first cellphone videos were already coming out before those cases, as technology developed, making clear that the police version of events is doubtful. Something that black people already knew, historically, but white people have needed to learn repeatedly. In my own experience closer to home, in the World Capital of Live Music, there have been two police encounters, one with a high-ranking officer and one with a killer cop that have led—you could say—to the refinement of my game, playing Pin the Tail.
Think of it like Russian Roulette but someone else is holding the gun.
Art Acevedo is a CNN commentator on all things porcine but he is also former police chief of Austin, Houston and very briefly, Miami—where he fell afoul of intense politics in the Cuban-American community.
He was longest here in River City, almost a decade. Acevedo is my second favorite Austin police chief in River City, btw, after Frank Dyson who was in office back in the Seventies and Eighties, a white guy and pure Texas cracker who was chief in Dallas before being chased out by the police association, that called him anti-cop. To set the scene.
In Austin the troops called him “Days-Off Dyson” because of his proclivity for meeting complaints against officers with suspensions. Which was music to my ears, actually, back in the day, Days-Off Dyson was originally from Rotan, Texas—wherever the fuck that is—and he was the first chief to put female officers in patrol cars in Dallas, back, back in the day, and even though he was a cracker down to his very DNA.
Chief Dyson realized—even back in the day—that there are problems with policing in this country. As does Chief Acevedo. My favorite easy listening, btw—soul or R&B—is not the Temps or Beyonce but a recording from late in Acevedo’s tenure in Austin, apparently at police show-up, in the proverbial pig pen, down the street from my crib. In the recording he is reaming a group of officers, basically calling them thugs, music to my ears, actually. It was recorded surreptitiously and leaked with the thought that it would get Acevedo fired, but what it really did was make him a hero to black people.
So, like, one afternoon here in our bucolic River City, me and Chief Acevedo just chilling, up in his office in the pig pen, not to repeat myself, because in California Chief Acevedo knew my sister, back back back in the day, while Acevedo was Highway Patrol internal affairs. To set the scene again. My question to him—person of color to person of color—black man to—well, jefe de los puercos. What would you call it? My query was what to do if one feels in danger in an encounter with a cop? Acevedo who is a thoughtful guy—for a cochino—said, and this may sound like common sense but is common sense that has not been heeded often enough, “Ask to speak to a supervisor.” Which was something that had not actually occurred to me up until that point, a decade or so ago, despite my extensive experience with pigs.
Ask to speak to a supervisor sooner rather that later, yeah, that would be my advice. If you're already doing the chicken because the pig has you by the windpipe, or you're bleeding out, you may as well forget the request to talk to a sergeant entirely and save as much breath as you can until the ambulance arrives. Although Chief Acevedo didn’t say any of that either. What he did say, apparently as an afterthought, lest he get me killed, obey all lawful orders. Which is where me and the chief parted ways, as a black man liking the ask-for-a-supervisor part but not liking the obey-all-orders part because that’s the whole fucking issue, bro'.
In a nutshell, isn't it, for the noble black man? Do you allow the illegal search or the rough handling—or the profiling that the whole stop is based upon—because it’s a “lawful” command by a pig? What the order really is—is an illegal act, intended to demean one's black manhood—if one looks through a revolutionary lens. It's a crime committed, by white cops, under color of authority. You may be asking yourself, is he crazy, words to that effect. Because non-Negroes still don’t understand that a black man (black women less so, sisters are more practical, like, someone has to be alive and have a job and pay rent.) An African American warrior will die for some principles. With the single caveat, mentioned above—that we take one or two crackers with us.
So, like, it seemed to me leaving Chief Acevedo’s office that there has to be a better way than following lawful orders by cracker cops. Because not everything that comes out of a pig’s mouth is legitimate, you know? This was the genesis actually of Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Pig. It only takes two to play. And my first game was won by the team in black and was played with a killer-cop.
So, like, downtown Austin is my neighborhood.
Roughly north from the Colorado River to the far side of the University of Texas campus, that is my 'hood, from my actual crib on Lavaca Street east to Interstate 35 and west to the MoPac expressway. More or less. To set the scene.
The far side of MoPac is the serious-money and politically influential West Austin, where the white people who run the city mostly live, unless they're farther west, out on the lake. Or out on the ranch. To set the scene. That’s all the geography you need to know.
So, like, my crib is right in the center of that rectangle, on Lavaca, up near campus. Which happens to be the most patrolled sector of River City! You dig? You name the infraction, in my neighborhood we have multiple law enforcement agencies ready to arrest you for it. We got APD, UTPD, and state troopers, pigs up the yin-yang, because Governor Abbott and the members of the Legislature are my very close neighbors, too close if you ask me. They attract so much damn heat.
Right behind my crib runs Guadalupe Street which leads, just a few blocks away, to the Travis Count Courthouse and jail, that means Guadalupe is traveled by the sheriff’s people and by "jurisdiction"s who are dropping off prisoners, even the FBIs keep their peoples there. Anytime you look up practically there’s a puerco driving by my crib, which makes me nervous, actually. Recently—this is so invasive—state troopers on bicycles riding through the alley behind my building. So, like, it was on Guadalupe Street behind my crib where the killer-puerco appeared. This was a year or two pre-pandemic at a time when marijuana may have played a part in my life.
The circumstances were not a drug deal but a drug delivery, which all reasonable people can agree is a different thing. To set the scene. So, like there’s a convenience store on Guadalupe at Martin Luther King, behind my building, the Peach Tree Apartments, older than dirt but a cool place to live back in the day. You’ll see the apartments if you’re in the hood and the bulldozer hasn't arrived yet. So, like, one afternoon, me leaning against a railing in the parking lot of the pizza joint next to the 7-11, minding my own black business like the Constitution says a man has a right to do. Waiting for a delivery that was not pepperoni. To set the scene again. So, like, the pizza joint manager came out and told me to leave his premises. My first thought as an often-profiled black man in America—would he be saying that to a white chick with blond hair and big tits leaning against the railing in the shitty little parking lot, instead of a proud Black Man? And the answer was clearly no. My measured, reasonable response was to tell him to go fuck himself. And he went back inside.
Unbeknownst to me, the white guy went back in his business establishment and called 911 to say that he suspected a drug deal was going down. How racist is that? What a fucking Karen with a dick! Merely because a black male was waiting in his parking lot, that he only shares with 7-11, how discriminatory is that? Let me tell you why he was wrong. This was not a drug deal, it was a drug delivery.
See the difference?
This shit had already been paid for, like a week earlier in fact. It’s my belief, call me naïve if you will, that what makes a drug deal unwholesome and dirty as in “a dirty drug deal,” that cops like to talk about, is not the weed but the money.
And by separating the herb from the payment this became merely a delivery, literally as if the herb just appeared, like from Amazon, or like manna from heaven, not to get all holy. So, like, leaving the parking lot shared by the convenience store, to return to my crib, at the aforementioned Peach Tree Apartments, out of the corner of my eye came two police cars. Two puercos got out, one Chinese guy and one white chick, and—stashing my shit in a bush at the law office next door—my feet turned back, almost by instinct, to do battle with the forces of American racism. Call me noble if you will. My reasons were actually more practical than pure. A source of good, reasonably-priced weed in this town has to be protected at all cost. No matter the sacrifice.
So, like, the female piglet got out of her car pulling on blue latex gloves and went straight at a black family in a minivan who were in the parking lot of the 7-11 next to the pizza place. How is that for profiling?
The fact of the matter is that the black family in the minivan did deliver the weed to me, but the little piglet didn’t know that, did she? And the pizza guy couldn’t have known either because the minivan was parked out of sight of his business, around the far side of the convenience store. Again, merely to set the scene in an unbiased and non-judgmental manner. Clearly this was profiling.
The piglet had heard on the radio there was a drug deal and she walked up to the closest black people, pulling on her gloves as she approached, ready to rumble. That is so inappropriate and is part of the centuries-long intimidation of the black peeps by los puercos. Would she do that in white West Austin with some fucking Caucasian soccer-mom-bitch, with coke in her yoga bag, not spirituality-cleansing weed preferred by noble black peeps, that would be my question, actually.
So, like, walking up to the Chinese cop and saying, “It’s me you’re looking for,” something noble like that, because one will go to great lengths to protect a good reasonably-priced source of weed in Austin, Texas, not to repeat myself, with all the rich fucking hipsters and high tech assholes coming to town and driving up prices. Don’t get me started on the human cost of gentrification that is not just rents and mortgages.
So, like, the pigs at the 7-Eleven kicked loose the minivan family and concentrated on me. That was the whole purpose of my noble effort, to save a good connection for weed, The little piglet went off to talk to the pizza guy while the Chinese cop stayed with me—me feeling pretty good, actually, because the shit was not on me, it was in the bushes of the law office next door, unbeknownst to los puercos. A fact which significantly widened my scope of action as a revolution-minded Black Male, ready to play Pin the Tail on the Pig in River City.
The Chinese cop talked on the radio to his partner and then he asked me to step over to the pizza place with him, but forewarned is forearmed, you feel me?
What they were getting ready to do was serve me with a civil trespassing citation which doesn’t get you arrested now, it gets you arrested later, after you’ve been warned off the premises and told not to return by the owner. But APD’s protocol requires bringing the trespasser face to face the property owner, in this case the pizza guy, who would tell me with the pigs as witnesses, even though they're really pigs, not to come on his property again. Following the protocol would require my cooperation which would not be forthcoming, me refusing to step back on the pizza joint premises, that is. And my response to the Chinese-American puerco was, “I’m not going anywhere,” said like a proud Black Man, actually, And then my finest moment that afternoon, working up a plan to rag this Asian cop, not that there's anything wrong with that, and starting by telling him, “Get your supervisor.” And him looking down and hesitating but he had obviously been trained, which is not something that you can say of many River City Pigs, and he turned away and spoke into his radio.
Long story short, the piglet returned from the pizza joint and asked me for identification, and me telling her, “I don’t have any,” even though my i.d. was hanging on a chain from my neck in clear view.
Now it was my turn to ask for i.d. Asking for full names, the Chinese pig refused but the piglet was already looking nervous and she complied with this lawful order from the Black Man. Score one for the Black Race.
Both these puercos were already on my short list for Asshole of the Year, the chick because of the gloves thing with the black family, who drove miles out of their way to drop off my weed, without a surcharge, and the Chinese guy because of my suspicion that even though he was probably U.S.-born, his family was Taiwanese, for the simple reason that mainland Chinese don‘t come to America to join the Austin police force.
Standing there waiting for the supervisor to arrive, complaining about how long it was taking and trying to think of a way to work the phrase, “Taiwan is merely a province of mainland China” into the conversation in order to piss the guy off?
And then—hope of hopes—get the chance to call him a "capitalist running dog” like Mao used to say about the Taiwanese, the People’s Armed Police would have my back on that. In a showdown with a pig, when you're playing Pin the Tail, it’s no holds barred, you feel me, down to what the pig’s sister looks like and is an ugly ho. Whether you’ve seen her or not.
So, like, long story short, the supervisor arrived, a corporal—and the name of the corporal was “Coffey,” which pushed every button on my personal console. And, like, tact having never been one of my strong points, me blurting out: “You killed Sophia King!”
Sophia was a mentally-disturbed young black woman who was shot dead by APD, indeed by the puerco-supervisor standing in front of me right now, almost two decades earlier he capped her in the backyard of the Rosewood housing project in East Austin when East Austin was still mostly black. Sophia was holding a knife at the time, getting ready presumably to attack the white landlord, when Corporal Coffey who was then Officer Coffey hit her once with his forty cal. He said later that he attempted to shoot her in the shoulder of the hand holding the knife, but he missed and took out a ventricle of her heart instead. To set the scene.
Still standing in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, Corporal Coffey looked like it had been a rough couple of decades for him too. He was promoted to corporal right after the killing, as APD circled the wagons, but it was interesting that he was still a corporal now, although a “senior” one. The only practical effect of the Sophia King killing on Coffey’s career was that he was transferred out of black-and-Latino East Austin into the central district where my crib is located and where he had apparently been ever since trimming Sophia's sails. Sending Corporal Coffey to sort out a profiling/racism complaint like mine was like dropping napalm on a brush fire.
And you have to know something about black male culture. You can be in the middle of some kind of really dodgy or dangerous behavior and instead of common sense whispering in your ear, or what Lincoln called the better angels of our mercy, it’s your inner Bad Nigger telling you to keep going or fire off a few caps instead. The message is to keep on keeping on. That was what it was like for me too in the parking-lot of the 7-11 with these three puercos, me trying to draw out the stop and punk these bitches if possible, ragging them about racism and profiling or whatever.
It got good to me. To quote the late philosopher Richard Pryor.
Because (1) clearly they weren’t going to shoot me and (2) everybody was wholly uncomfortable after my indiscreet mention of the late Sophia King. A few minutes later we were done, they wanted to be gone, they said there were no charges and kicked me loose.
Waiting discreetly until their cars were gone, and making my way to the lawyers office’s bushes and picking up my shit. It had been a day well spent and would end with a few well-deserved tokes. You know how you feel when you’ve had a constructive time or, like in my case, done all my laundry, or gone to the gym and had a good sweat? A sense of calm and accomplishment suffuses one's being. And that’s where, if you had to name a place and a time, that’s when Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Pig was born.
Almost as much fun as Monopoly but not everybody can play.
So, like, through trial and error, the cop who will shoot me has been identified, at least in terms of his law enforcement agency. He is almost guaranteed to be a state trooper. The reasons are three.
The Austin pigs do have a long history of violence as noted above. And their training has historically been poor. Austin puercos are said to be the best-educated in the state, meaning that a higher percentage of our pork has some college or a college degree than p.d. in, let’s say, Waxahatchie. But education is not the same as training and traditionally the guys and girls of our local p.d. have been my greatest fear—although the black man fears nothing. But because they are so quick on the motherfucking trigger.
That dynamic has changed in the last year or two—post George Floyd, if my interaction with the bluesuits is any guide. These guys and girls don't want any trouble. Because now that they know they’re actively disliked by the general public, if not genuinely feared and hated, and they realize that a bad shooting is not likely to lead to a promotion anymore, a la Corporal Coffey. Traditionally my belief has been that state troopers, employees of the Texas Department of Public Safety, btw, or just DPS as the agency is called in-state, were the least likely to put a bullet in me but that has changed. Historically the troopers have had much lesser educations than APD—a lot of high school graduates and a lot of good old boys and a few good old girls from Shithole, Texas, mostly filled the department’s ranks. But the training has been much better than the local pigs. If you watch the troopers do a traffic stop for example, the first thing you notice is the pig turning his or her gun side away from the driver, good form so to speak, in order to avoid having the Glock grabbed and used by a mean-spirited driver. We should be so lucky. Also, the troopers are courteous because at the Department of Public Safety being rude to the public can get a trooper suspended while with APD being rude is a requirement.
My concern ratchets up with a white officer, naturally, it ratchets down with a Latino who—call me a dreamer, but it is my belief. Latinos may not like white guys any more than black people do and the Latino guy or girl has only taken the job as a stepping stone into the middle class? Is that a fair generalization? It’s a lot to bet your life on but in my experience it’s largely true. A Latino cop will shoot a black person, it seems to me, but only because of real fear, or it’s been a really bad day, but not to enforce a system of racism or of privilege. Unless the guy that the Latino cop stops is Latino too and all bets are off, those people! Don't get me started. You have to know the pigs, you see, as only an African American male can. Like the prey knows their predator. How the jackals hunt. We know what they’re really like, because we’ve had the interaction, we've been the suspect at the stop.
So, like, for a lot of reasons it’s likely to be a state trooper who cancels my ticket.
There are so many of them, DPS guys and girls, around here these days, in my hood. The feeling is like your privacy is being invaded actually although we won’t go into that here.
Because of fear at the state level, worries by the Speaker and Governor for example that the nutjobs who took over the U.S. capitol will try the same thing in River City, there are now troopers everywhere downtown and it’s theirs to patrol because the “Capitol District,” the few blocks on all four sides on the Capitol, including my home actually, my neighborhood, shared with a lot of Republicans, is under the Governor’s control—technically—not City Hall.
The local pigs are coming and going all the time too, along with the UTPD idiots, many of whom are former APD idiots, btw. And if you’re accustomed to going into the Capitol and you see black or brown state troopers—or a lot of women troopers—let me guess the season, it’s legislative session and the Department of Public Safety creates the illusion of diversity, because the Department of Public Safety is almost exclusively an old white boys club. The Colonel orders what few minorities and women are in the ranks to Austin, the Live Music Capital of the World, to make DPS appear more diverse—to lawmakers who are writing the appropriations—that's really what is going on. But now with the surge on the border, any trooper who speaks Spanish is likely to be deployed to the banks of the mighty Rio Grande, arresting “I.A.s,” or what the rest of the world calls refugees. There’s been a kind of natural selection evolving among the state troopers stationed in Austin, they’re almost all crackers now, small-town white guys from some shithole county in East or West Texas, who are disoriented by the lights and moods of River City, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
It does raise the chances of me losing a game of Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Pig, though. Which is why you need to be very careful playing this game, especially outside the People’s Republic of Austin, because if you’re in an East Texas shithole like Navarro County, for example, home to Corsicana—and home of the Texas Klan? Where that deputy sheriff who stopped you is both poorly-educated and poorly-trained—a complete knuckle-dragging Neanderthal? You could lose the game before you’ve had any fun at all. Which is what happened to me, trying to get a pick-up game of Pin the Tail going with three state troopers a few weeks ago, just down the street from my crib.
You be the judge.
So, like, late afternoon, me coming around a corner onto Lavaca Street at 16th, between Twins Liquor and El Mercado restaurant which just got closed and sold to be condos?
Walking north, towards my crib, which is about to be razed for condos, and across the street from me there were three black and white SUVs and three troopers. The first pig had stopped a car and him and the black motorist were on the traffic side of the street, talking, more like a lecture by the pig, that would be my guess. Another two DPS idiots were out of their cars and hanging back at a bus stop, maybe 15 yards away, apparently backup for the first idiot talking to the black driver. To set the scene.
So, like, this scene chapped my scrotum, big-time actually, on any number of levels. Living in this neighborhood you see a lot of troopers’ traffic stops because they’re all over the fucking place, the Governor’s Mansion is just down the street, the Capitol complex is around the corner, not to repeat myself, The trip to Department of Public Safety headquarters from the Capitol involves driving up Lavaca past my crib, up The Drag, actually, which we’ll consider Ground Zero for this discussion. So, like, this is my neighborhood, a block or block and a half from The Peach Tree Apartments. To repeat myself and to set the stage, for you to determine if my actions were provocative.
And what’s super-interesting is that this not a black neighborhood, in fact there are very few black people in the area, a few students coming and going from UT, families arriving from whatever Texas shithole to see their kids at college, few though they be, or drop them off, people who work at UT or whatever. Yet half of the trooper stops seen—by me—it's always a black driver. Isn’t that a coincidence?
This is absolutely true. So, like, one morning walking from my crib down to Clark-Caven field, on campus near the stadium, maybe five years ago—it was at least a couple of years pre-pandemic or P.P. And that day there was a state trooper on a motorcycle who had stopped a black family on MLK Boulevard across from the Blanton Museum on campus. You know the scene if you know River City. Did my run on campus—came back the same way and this very same moto-pig had a different black driver pulled over. Isn't that a coincidence? It's purely circumstantial—maybe it was just cracker chance. Or maybe the trooper was an East Texas peckerwood and he was doing what East Texas cracker cops know how to do, harass black people. Not to be judgmental. So, like, seeing these three puercos now, the three DPS guys, across the street from El Mercado restaurant, more or less, it didn’t start to get good to me. Instead it started bad and stayed that way, you feel me, as a black man in America? Like at the 7-Eleven with Corporal Coffey. Because the black man feels injustice so deeply, sometimes he almost loses his cool.
Walking over to fuck with these pigs but without a plan was not ideal.
The question in my mind was what verbal mayhem to perpetrate on these guys except my feeling was, instinctively, not to rag the trooper with the black driver, who looked like he was lecturing the brother, in what was obviously an overt attempt to demasculinate a black male. You didn’t want to approach a cop at a time like that because you can’t “interfere” in police business even if the business is nothing more than harassing black people. They can bust you for dat. Or cite you. Or focus their attention on you instead of the other poor unfortunate brother or sister. Because that's not ideal either.
So, like, the first pig had these two wingmen who were just standing there chatting, like they had the other guy’s back with the dangerous African American male who looked like a state officeworker, two blocks from the Capitol Complex. So, like, going up to these two idiots, the first words out of my mouth were, “Get your supervisor!” No please or thank you, actually, no kiss, no dinner, no nothing—just straight off to trying to fuck them. No "I know you have a hard job to do, Trooper, but..." And they both looked at me, like where is this coming from? And then they kind of knew. This is Austin—the People’s Republic that they had been warned about by granddaddy when he went to UT, back, back in the day.
Or the troopers themselves had heard when they got transferred here from whatever shithole is their home county, in East Texas where they like to hunt coons.
One of the troopers looked harmless but the other guy, with the name “Maier” on his uniform, the guy in the picture, looked like he was starting to get pissed off which was my goal, actually.
One’s hope is that the cochino or cochina will go through all the stages of anger before reaching for the Taser or the old reliable .40 cal. They are well-trained. The first response will stop just short of anything physical. Me walking over and preparing some shit to talk—on the fly, not really having my act together actually?
My first idea was to tell Trooper Maier, who looked like a small-town Texan, which DPS is full of, actually, “You’re not in Potter County now, motherfucker.” Or words to that effect, something welcome-to-Austin like that. Potter County of course—county seat Amarillo, btw, up near the Panhandle, for those who are new to Texas. Mostly just to make sure that he knew that he was a cracker wherever he came from. You need to be careful about profanity because it can be against the law, if it’s really grossly inappropriate like motherfucker. Or threatening. My main concern was trying to think how to casually call the guy an “asshole” instead of a motherfucker, actually, call me Gandi-like if you will. Again, the object of the game is to make the trooper want to shoot you—but not make any overt movement in that direction. You know what happened? Out of the corner of my eye it seemed like the first idiot, who had stopped the innocent black driver, was cutting the guy loose and as this same pig walked back to his car he shouted at me, unaware of the situation with me and his colleagues, “Get out of the street.”
Which was inappropriate—me, not him.
My feet were off the sidewalk during my attempted ragging of the two backup idiots. First rule of ragging cops is take your act to the sidewalk so that they cannot cite you for blocking traffic. And that was a lawful order, we could all agree, just like Chief Acevedo said, the result being stepping up onto the sidewalk to continue to try to provoke the other two idiots. So, like, the black man’s game is tight. The object is to rag the pig, not to jaywalk, not to get killed or arrested, and not to get punked myself. Although “provoke” would be a misnomer. My preference was to call it social justice in action.
Trooper Maier said no he would not call a supervisor even after my warning to him that “the colonel”—the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety—once told me that a trooper is required to get a supervisor if a member of the public asks. Which was true, the old Director told me the same thing that Chief Acevedo did. That is what they’re taught at the DPS academy too, btw. Trooper Maier said he wasn’t calling anybody and he told me to go online to complain on the Department’s complaint portal.
Trying to formulate provocative things to say on such short notice is always a challenge. That is my only excuse for a poor performance. You always think of what you should have said after the encounter. Not having planned my rap in advance, it was especially difficult because all three idiots were already on the move back to their cars really fast. One flash of inspiration was to tell this last idiot, Trooper Meier, “Welcome to Austin, motherfucker.” Or, “You’re not in Abilene now, asswipe.” Which had alliterative appeal because It kind of rhymes. What’s he going to do, shoot me? Unless it really is against the law to curse a bitch out, but if that’s true there’s a bunch of women who need to be in jail. The last opportunity to score was as Trooper Maier and his girlfriend, the other guy, were going back to their cars. With a spring to their step, a certain alacrity even. The game suddenly was ending and it was time for football's "hail Mary" pass.
Took out my cellphone and started to film. Got one good photo of Trooper Maier, which is good for purposes of study, because the shot caught him with the look on his face when he is approaching wanting to shoot me but his training is still overruling innate cracker desire.
Which is what the game is all about, actually. And this is absolutely true, just as my camera was sweeping across these three idiots, a fourth DPS car—unmarked—appeared at the curb behind the black-and-whites. With a black pig in civilian clothes getting out, who had apparently been attracted to all the activity at the bus stop. Or he smelled the shit, like pigs do.
He was coming towards us on foot and as my camera swept out an arc that started to include him, he ducked and turned like he playing football and got back in his unmarked car and was, like, gone. He did in a car what a number of brothers are known to do on foot on the football field—just disappeared. The DPS brother was there one second and gone the next. All four puercos were gone actually within like one minute of my phone coming out of my pocket. Luckily they didn't shoot me for reaching for something, which is a pig's favorite excuse for capping a nigger. Not to brag or anything, not to claim to be the Tupac of cellphones or anything. Which is something that Chief Acevedo did not tell me, take out your phone, and is almost as good as asking to speak to a supervisor.
The only aspect of my near-death experience at the bus stop, not to be dramatic or anything, what really pissed me off was this last brother, the alleged-Negro state trooper, another running dog person of color like the Taiwanese APD idiot at the 7-Eleven? Come the black revolution, these two race traitors will be smoking last cigarettes, let me tell you that, after trial by a Revolutionary Court. But we digress. You may say, well, as a practical matter it’s easy to make an error playing pin the tail. You could go too far, you know? If that happens despite my best calculations, you have to listen to the cop’s testimony and hang him with his own damn words.
If he says, “Oh, he was reaching for something,” that is a lie. Or if he says, “I feared for my life,” that’s bullshit too.
If he says, on the other hand, “That guy had a mouth on him. That’s when I shot him,” yeah, that would be true.
