GOD, A COP, AND A
HEADLOCK!
by
Anthonystjoseph
So here I was, this young child who realized that there was something special going on around me. It just seemed that my life, my rainbow, glared a little brighter than others because others just did not seem to be as encumbered with the wondrous nature of life as I was. My mother always seemed to be taking me places and leaving me. I had decided that since she was a single mother the choice really wasn’t hers since we had to eat and I earned no income from a job or child support from my deadbeat dad. She even had to leave me with my deadbeat dad’s mother in Tennessee for a year, a fact that I had not remembered until a much later date. It was rough on her working and paying for babysitters all on her own.
I remember my grandmother in Tennessee,
who was the matriarch of the church my grandfather founded, always talking to
me as if she was preparing me for something.
I was a child with very strong will power, she told me later in life
that this ‘willpower’ aspect of my nature always impressed her. I am sure she discerned my willpower when she
tried to force me to eat some boiled okra!
She served this boiled okra for breakfast one morning and I had never
seen nor eaten it before. It was green,
slimy, furry and dripping with what looked like thick saliva! I can still see it in my mind to this very
day. I can also see the breakfast booth she
had me sitting in and the trees outside the window and everything. I can still see everything so clearly because
she said that I wasn’t going to get up from that seat until I ate it all, I
never did. That was in the morning… When the sun went down that night she told me
to get up and go to bed. She had some
willpower of her own, but it would have taken God’s own pliers to open my mouth
and put that saliva laden green fuzzy slop in my mouth.
I guess she was a little intrigued by my
nature so she took me to the university to have me checked out. The university took some tests and told her
that I had a high IQ and recommended a special school for gifted children. My mom told my grandmother that she couldn’t
afford the school so that was the end of that.
Eventually I had gone back to live with my mother in Los Angeles who had
become more financially stable and could afford a day care center. The day care center that was run by Jemima
that I told you about.
Now that we were in St. Paul,
Minnesota. My mom would still try to
avoid babysitting fees if she could because she still had no assistance
whatsoever from my dad but she did do a good job of giving us a seemingly good
life even without his help. At this
point, I’m around nine years old and one day I’m at the airport playing in the
video arcade while my mom is busy at work in the office of Western Airlines
where she’s a secretary for one of the executives. I go up to the change machine in the arcade to
get quarters from a dollar my mom gave me and the change machine doesn’t
work. I go to the gift shop and ask the
cashier for four quarters for the dollar.
This gift shop has the old changer machine where you can see the rows of
coins in stacks through a plate of glass facing the customers and they just
roll out based on the cashiers’ commands. The cashier, a young Caucasian girl
at the gift shop tells me, “I can’t give you change”. Now my already determined superior
intelligence tells me that I’m looking at two or three seven inch rolls of
quarters so of course she can give me change.
I ask her, as a nine-year-old boy pleading and wanting to play a video
game would, “Why can’t you give me change.”
She replies again, “I said I can’t give you change”. “I just don’t understand; why can’t you give
me four quarters for this dollar?” BLAMMM!
Everything went dark for a second and then I realized what was
happening. I had been put in a headlock
from behind and now I was being dragged through the entire St. Paul/Minneapolis
airport in a fucking headlock. A
nine-year-old black boy! That concourse
was long and my humiliation was longer.
Now I just want to say, if I was a little white boy asking for change,
and looking at what was to me, a million quarters, that I most likely would not
have been treated that way. The rent-a-cop,
which is the type of cop that worked in the airports thirty years before
September 11th, was a little gung ho. When he got me to the security office he
flung me into a chair and proceeded to turn on the bright light and get my who,
what, and where’s.
I sat there fuming while he called my
mother and still couldn’t believe the embarrassment that I had suffered amid
all the travelers watching me, mister
high IQ, being drug through the terminal like a common criminal. Didn’t they know I had a high IQ!? He treated me like my name was Jemima and I
went around pouring hot oil down kids’ ears.
What was wrong with this picture?
My mother arrived and looked at me like I was a stranger. She didn’t start yelling at the rent-a-cop at
all. She acted as if he and she were
dealing with the same problem, ME! As an
adult I understand that her job was most important, and I probably wasn’t supposed
to be there, she also didn’t want any trouble with this clearly moronic
specimen of a human being wearing a tin badge and a flashlight. She glared at me and chastised me in front of
the rent-a-cop not knowing that I had been dragged almost a mile in a
headlock. I glared back and immediately
went into my ‘defense against Jemima’ mode.
I didn’t speak to her for four weeks this time, and this time she didn’t
even hear the words ‘no’ or ‘so’!
Various incidents like ‘Jemima’ and the ‘airport rent-a-cop’ were proving to be God’s way of preparing me
for the work and path that he had chosen for me. As a child or student of life I believe God
gives you every tool you’re going to need to handle everything that he plans to
put before you. I am of the firm opinion
that we are all students and teachers of each other on this planet Earth. I myself dislike when he has you work with or
on someone so messy that they leave stains on you. He sends these messy people to you because he
feels you’re the one who can help them onto the right path. He also sends you to people who can clean
your shit up. The point of this chapter
is that although you may have some messy people come into your life for a
season or two and leave their mark for a while, you must realize that
everything happens for a reason, and like they say, learn from that ‘season’ what was the ‘reason’.
Any stain
that someone may try to leave on you, just know that you have the power to
remove that stain by learning from it and never letting it happen again.
By
Anthonystjoseph
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