For a long time, Hank had a sign on his back that said, “mug me” and
people did.
This being the bad old days of the 1960s when underprivileged kids from
the Christopher Columbus project needed to make up for 400 years of slavery,
the kids that beat him up were mostly black.
Hank used to walk down from his home in blue color mostly white Haledon
-- the home of the 1913 labor movement that helped destroy Paterson silk mills
-- to Broadway, passing along the east side of the projects where the gangs
laid in wait for him.
They knew he had at least enough money for a movie or even a meal which
they took, they forced him to take off his shoes and socks when they realized
he started hiding his money there.
Taking the number 14 or 21 bus down West Broadway to Paterson did not
help since the Spanish kids -- taking reparations for whites stealing
California or Texas or even the Spanish-American War -- would mug him on the
bus and leave him without a cent for bus fare home.
This meant Hank would have to walk past the projects with a black gang waited
and beat him up because they thought he tried to evade them by taking the bus. They
took all his clothing save for his underwear convinced he still had change, or
something hid somewhere even though he said he did not.
It was lucky for him no Native
American Indian tribes lived in Paterson anymore or they might have scalped him
to make up for the Trail of Tears or the crimes against humanity General Sherman
inflicted on them after he finished raping and pillaging the South.
There also were too few Japanese in the old neighborhood to punish Hank
for the internment camps their families lived in during World War II.
Hank of course thought he might escape these acts of Justice by moving
to the Lower East Side of Manhattan -- carefully avoiding Chinatown where he
was sure the Chinese gangs would make him pay for the abuses, they'd suffered
building the railroads out west.
Yet it was not Chinese or Indians that waited for him in the East
Village, but rather junkies, determined to make him pay retribution for all the
bad things they had suffered growing up and which had turned them to a life of
drugs. This was a diverse group that came in all colors and ethnic varieties,
so they had no particular historic reason for robbing him.
The gays -- pumped up by the stonewall riot -- came close to beating
him up after he left his socks at the alternate University on the west side and
went back to get them while they were holding Gung Fu lessons. Hank, who was there taking lessons on how to
be a radical, could not afford to buy the socks twice. The gays seemed to see the sign on his back
and felt sorry for Hank, they seem to understand that like he like them was a
victim of circumstances beyond his control.
Hank got mugged as much in Manhattan as he ever did in Paterson. He couldn't walk around his block to see me
on East 6th Street without some social victim sticking him up. He once got mugged in his own doorway because
he refused to share the remains of this Friday paycheck with an unfortunate
with a habit and who also happened to have a knife.
When the 1970s came around, nobody dared go near Central Park where
these victims of social injustice waited for unsuspecting people from whom to
collect reparations, sometimes even raping men and women to make up for how
their ancestors were raped.
The one-time Hank actually went into Central Park he was high on LSD
and had just seen Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore and stripped off his clothes to
run through the park naked in the dead of winter.
Naturally the muggers all thought he was crazy and avoided him.
Hank is long gone, and the many muggers got sent off to jail, making
the city safe for the kids of liberal parents to return without fear of having
to pay retributions the way Hank and his white ancestors had.
Although there may be a time in the future when these new liberal
urbanites – heavy with guilt over what whites did to these poor people in the
past – may again get their chance to pay retributions, too, as they let all these
poor unfortunate victims out jail and back onto the streets.
After all, justice is justice.