The Married CAC JUCO Slut
I was sitting on a bed in a hotel room in Sweden when my cousin asked me if I still believed in people.
You mean, that they exist? He paused for a long moment and I could hear him sorting through his thoughts on the other end, searching for what he actually meant. "Nah, nah... I guess I mean do you still have faith in motherfukkers?"
We were both on vacation then, in different ways, and encountering things foreign to our lives up to that point. It was late evening where I was, late afternoon where he was back in America. I don't remember where my girlfriend was at the time, but we'd had a long, weird 48 hours: flew into Finland, immediately hopped on a big ass boat to Sweden for 16 hours, dropped our bags at the hotel, explored the city of Stockholm. It was the first vacation I ever took, first time I'd been out of my own country.
My cousin had just left home - Brooklyn - for the first time 9 months before that. He was playing baseball at a JUCO. He was in the deep south, and his team was full of white dudes. The common term that comes to mind is culture shock. He was homesick, culturally disoriented, all that jazz. No one spoke the way he spoke, no one listened to the music he listened to, and the landscape was so alien to him it might as well had been another planet. He hung out with the basketball team because they were all black and at least seemed familiar if only in a superficial way.
I called him that night because I was bugging out off Sweden and wanted to tell him about it. One of the first things you realize when you finally leave America is that our country is young as shyt, and our culture is relatively immature. Everywhere I went in Scandanavia - shyt, most of Europe - felt like it had a depth and authenticity that only comes with a long and rich history. And it was pleasant as fukk - the streets were clean, the people didn't stare at me and make me feel weird (which happened to me all the time in different American cities), there was hardly a noticeable police presence, no homeless people on the streets, and the fukking subway was completely clean and ran on time. I can't stress enough how that last detail blew my mind: there was a little clock on the platform that told you the train was going to arrive in 3 minutes, and in 3 minutes the train came. For a nikka who grew up taking the 4,6, C, and E on a daily basis, that shyt was revolutionary.
I had called my cousin because he was my nikka, he had grown up like I had in fukked up circumstances with limited means, without exposure to culture and diversity of experience, and the world can start to seem small and terrible and claustrophobic when you grow up that way. I wanted to tell that nikka to keep grinding, remember that he was an ill dude with a unique personality and that the world was a big place and he owed it to himself to expand his horizons and really engage that shyt. I wanted to remind him of the time our uncle Kenyon, out of his mind from his crack addiction, tried to sell us a half-drunk snapple on a street corner, unaware of who we were. (I flashed back to that recently, and tried to imagine how it can be that a person can come so unglued from the world. He took to selling his own mothers' possessions at one point - bedding, dishes, photographs of her children and grandchildren. I'm as bemused now as I was back then, trying to imagine the thought process of the person who purchased the photo of my then 11-year-old cousin swinging a baseball bat). I wanted to tell him that yeah, the world was a horrible, horrible place but there's much more to it than we grew up experiencing and it's a beautiful place too, and you only find that out by getting out of your comfort zone.
But when he picked up the phone I got weirdly choked up and felt awkward about being emotional with my nikka, so I just stammered
Yo... son... the train out here comes on time.
That's when he asked me if I believed in people. A week earlier he had been chilling in the apartment complex where the JUCO housed the basketball team, when one cat knocked on the apartment he was in and was like, hurry up, come to Lonnie's room, Leann is back! The cat my cousin was chilling with got excited and was like, come on nikka,
let's go. The two dudes rushed out of the apartment and down a little ways to another joint in the complex, my cousin following behind. When he got into the apartment there was a dirty, bare mattress on the floor with an older white broad spread out, getting dikked down by one nikka while sucking another nikka off, and 7 other dudes stood on the periphery watching, waiting for their turn. My cuzzo was not that type of dude at all. He had his own code, some class. He was mad disgusted - partially because the older white broad was busted, partially because all these nikkas were standing around watching each other fukk her out on a dirty, bare mattress in the living room of a little apartment, partially because of the weird racial dynamic to the situation, and partially because everyone was going raw and dropping nut in her. He walked out.
Later on he talked to one of the cats on the team about it, and found out Leann had been swinging by the apartment complex for like 5 years, every 3-6 months - it was like some kind of team tradition, passed on year after year to the new nikkas. She was in her mid-30s. She really liked fukking basketball nikkas. She liked getting banged out by several at a time. She liked it when they nutted in and on her. Then she would take a shower, get her clothes on, and break out.
That was fukked up enough, but the shyt that really threw my cuzzo's shyt off was that the day before I called him he was in Kmart looking for a new box fan and saw Leann walking in one of the aisles, holding hands with her husband while their two little kids walked beside them.
This funky bytch was married and had kids!
So after he told me all that shyt, and asked me if I still had faith in people, I flashed back to some shyt that this black professor had said to me once: "Our culture is sex-obsessed but it hates love; our culture is obsessed with the concept of youth but doesn't care about children." I told my cousin that my answer was complicated, and some days the answer was simultaneously yes and no.
We got off the phone and I thought about our uncle Kenyon some more. He lost his struggle with addiction and eventually died of AIDS. I remember my aunt Pearl sitting by his hospital bed for hours, bathing her little brother when even the nurses didn’t want to come near him. This was back in the day when AIDS was still some wild, mysterious shyt that people didn't quite understand the risks and details of.
I play that moment back in my mind all the time, and I always wonder if I have the capacity for that sort of kindness, that sort of love. If I could go back to that conversation with my cuzzo I would remind him of Pearl making sure her baby brother maintained some semblance of dignity, even at his lowest moments. I would tell the nikka that the capacity to love keeps us human. And that as foul and repellent as individuals seem, sometimes staying human in the face of it all is a legitimate triumph.
I would tell my nikka that no matter what you do and no matter where you go, the ugliness of the world always finds you. That the contradictions within the human heart that make so many people do vile things don't make me lose faith, it sustains my faith in the complexity of the human condition. I would remind him that there are places where the trains come on time, and women who genuinely love their husbands, and sex that doesn't serve as punishment, degradation, racist fetishism. And I would ask him: was that ass fat, and were them titties big? Because I never did ask him that.
You bytch ass nikka, over here trying to fake like this thread is really more than what it really is? fukk OUTTA HERE 
"
"Shaq Daddy"
funny shyt b 
. And no, I haven't been anywhere close to those type of situations....but I see you wont' stop reaching...Anyone with a brain understands what I meant, but I know you flunked advanced remedial reading comprehension 4 times.... 
bruhs and the rest of the world..... 
just living 15 mins from one my whole life was enough to perceive where that one was going
