SoMa Literary Review - Oranges in Niggertown

Oranges in Niggertown

By Dustin Wells

I’m walking home from the gym when I see three kids breaking into this broken-down truck that immigrants use to sell whatever. Oranges mostly. This one black kid looks right at me, I mean, he looks right at me, and then slips between the slats of this old cattle truck. As I’m standing there, this little thief hands out ten-pound bags of oranges to the two other thieves. As I’m standing five feet away. They look right at me and giggle as if my witness to their crime is laughable.

I can’t believe it. I head inside. I watch them through the wire mesh glass of my first-story window as they start an orange fight right there. Oranges arc through the air, bounce off cars, and set off car alarms. These kids high-five like they're playing basketball. I expect people to come out of their houses and yell at them, but no one does. I don’t care. My place is sound proof. The car alarms will stop. My Jeep is safely tucked in the garage.

I’m glad I didn’t buy a regular house. I looked at a few “investment” houses. No garages. Threat of termites. Not retro-fitted for earthquakes. Neighbors blasting Mariachi music from dawn till pre-dawn. I didn’t want that. Nor did I want to pay a house-payment size rent for a shitty studio. When my former landlord sold the old Victorian I shared with three other programmers and the new owners evicted us, I invested in a loft. Yeah, a loft. An evil, wreck-the-culture, bland, banal loft. Whatever. I think they’re nice. It’s not in the greatest area of town, but it has a garage. I need a garage, because when Delicom moved into the rundown neighborhood of empty warehouses filled with homeless people shooting drugs, all the save-the-world anarchists vandalized my Jeep. They sliced my tires. As if they aren’t white too. As if not making a lot of money and living in an industrial area and having fucking neon purple hair and deciding to be an “artist” and experimenting with drugs and gender-whatever gives them the right to fuck my shit up. Having the anarchy symbol keyed into the side of my Jeep really pissed me off. I can’t even explain it to you. It’s not like I’m a fascist. I’m a Democrat. I went to Cal. I listen to Bob Dylan. I like nature. I have a “Keep Tahoe Blue” sticker and some asshole keyed KEEP TAHOE PUNK into my door. Great, mountains with mohawks. My old place was a mile from a transit stop, and I drive to work sometimes. So I’m the fucking devil? What kind of math is that? The day after they keyed YUPPIE SCUM onto the hood of my Jeep as if my vehicle was a chalkboard, I checked out the brand new lofts with the underground garages. My days of parking on the street were over. Screw buying a trendy fixer-upper house. I got a loft.

I’m feeling pretty good about this decision, because I’m drinking a smoothie on my balcony and watching kids whip stolen oranges at each other. Fruit bounces off parked cars. It’s actually pretty entertaining. The joke here is: they must be training for the ghetto Olympics. Ha-ha. The skinny kid in blue has a good arm. Look at those oranges fly.

A block away, I see one of my loft neighbors walking with her dog. The kids take aim. An orange flies. And it’s weird, it’s like she pretends to ignore this. Another orange sails by. She doesn’t react. She just keeps walking towards them as if her belief in the right to walk down the street without being pelted by oranges will save her. It’s like that joke this black guy at my job told. He said, he was walking down the street in his neighborhood, Hunter's Point or something, and gunshots start ringing out. Everybody who’s black and Latino drops. But this one white guy walking down the street stands on his tippy toes and looks around to see what’s going on because he can’t believe anyone in the world would be shooting at him. My neighbor is like this. She walks directly towards the kids throwing oranges at her. Instead of sensing her overwhelming belief in the rigors of a society in which we do not throw oranges each other, these three kids challenge that basic notion. It’s kind of like a Supreme Court case being acted out.

It’s not like they’re rebellious teenagers. They’re kid kids. Maybe twelve years-old, maybe. Skinny black kids from the projects about half-a-mile away. I watch one ropy kid skip forward and whip an orange at my neighbor. I hear the thump it makes when it hits her lime green windbreaker. The kids laugh. The other two kids chuck oranges too. Her dog gets hit and yelps a pathetic squeak. When she bends down to cover the dog from more fruit attacks, another orange smacks her in the back. That’s when I intervene. I yell, “Knock it off right now!” The kids look up. I expect them to run. But they dance like they scored a touchdown. I take off down the stairs.

By the time I get down to the street, the kids are racing away on their bikes. Sacks of oranges dangle off the sides of their handlebars causing their bikes to wobble in traffic. I yell for them to stop. I yell not because I’m pissed at them for pelting my neighbor, but because they’re going to die if they don’t use a little common sense. They don’t look like thieves from this angle. They look like twelve year-old boys pushing their luck.

A car slams on the brakes to avoid plowing into one kid. “Stop!” I scream, but this kid won’t give up. He leans across the hood of this car and laughs at me. When I move around the car to pull him out of traffic, this kid gives me the finger as he wobbles back into traffic. Dodging cars myself, I sprint after him.

Strangely, my perceptions of things slow down for me as I try to save these kids from being killed. Or maybe my thoughts speed up with the adrenaline. I don’t know. My neighbor strangely ignores me. It’s not like I expected her to cheer me on or anything, but she could at least look at me. Instead she looks straight ahead as she hurries home with her dog in her arms. One side of her face is bright red. If I could script this moment, I would have her appreciate my concern. I’d have her yell, Bud, don’t chase them! Then I’d realize the stupidity of chasing ghetto kids on bikes. Then I have this fantasy that I walk my neighbor back to her loft, where she’d invite me in for a beer or something. Strangely, I fantasize that we eat takeout food on the sofa while watching TV. But in reality she doesn’t even acknowledge my presence. I want her to look at me, because I’m dressed a bit like Superman. I’m still wearing my gym clothes. But she ignores me. Maybe she’s in shock.

I trot past the truck the kids robbed. In the morning, Mexicans hold up plastic bags of oranges and people in cars give them a few bucks. In the afternoon the guys drink beer and sit in the shade. Seven days a week, they’re out there. But they only try to sell in the morning. By noon, it’s cerveza time.

I run by the camping trailer some Mexicans converted into a rolling taco stand. I started calling it El Roach Coach. That’s not derogatory. The Roach Coach part comes from my childhood. There was this rolling hotdog stand that used to drive up to our little league baseball games. We’d run towards it yelling, Roach Coach! Roach Coach! After we ate, we’d all roll on the ground and pretend to have food poisoning. To me, all rolling food vendors are Roach Coaches. The El in El Roach Coach just means they serve taqueria food. El Roach Coach used to park under the awning of our lofts until I complained. They nodded meekly at me, not understanding English. Mariachi music squawking all day from a scratchy radio was one thing, and their customers’ cars parked in the lofts’ driveway was another. In all honesty, not that I want to sound prissy, I just couldn’t deal with the garbage. When I watched El Roach Coach’s patrons from my balcony, I wanted to go down there and say, Put your trash in that garbage can instead of throwing it on the sidewalk. When I moved in, the sidewalk was carpeted with greasy paper plates. I kept wanting to go out to them and say, Let’s keep America Beautiful, you know, like those old billboards from our childhood with that Indian who had a tear rolling down his face. That’s how I felt. So I complained to my councilman by email, and El Roach Coach moved a block down. And now they have two garbage cans. Go me. I’m Superman.

Pounding the pavement feels good. I only lifted my upper body today, so my legs need a little workout. Besides, this is my neighborhood. I pay for it by being scalped by property taxes. My running shoes pound this out. My place. My street. My city. I will not have ghetto kids stealing shit off my street. I will not have little thieves-in-training throwing stolen oranges at my neighbors. If that's what gentrification is, so what, deal with it.

One kid looks over his shoulder and sees me putting on the speed right behind them. He yells, “Faster!” The other two pedal harder and dart into traffic against the red light. Again, cars honk and swerve. I stop. It’s not worth risking my life. The kids laugh at me from across the flow of traffic. Their bikes zigzag by the Mexican produce market as if they’ve achieved some victory.

The market reminds me of this past Friday night, when I grilled some salmon on my balcony. My date wouldn’t eat the fish. Too much mercury, she said. And besides that, she confessed, she’s vegetarian. And she wouldn’t eat anything else I made because the vegetables weren’t organic. I couldn’t believe it. I was trying to do the authentic Mexican barrio thing by not shopping at the shi-shi fifty-buck-per-pound-organic-purple-fucking-potato gentrification store beside the lofts. But that’s what she wants. The fifty dollar organic blue inedible hard potatoes spiced with non-gmo indigenous muck muck spice imported from Aztec land or wherever. I thought I was doing good because I was shopping with the people, you know, supporting local Mexican-American owned stores. Anyway, instead of eating, we walked down 24th Street scouring the shelves of the skuzzy corner stores for vegetarian organic wines. I didn’t even know wines could be non-vegetarian. Apparently egg whites are used to speed up the fermentation process, she lectured. Well, well, well. After about five stops of pushing through the drug dealers and beggers who stand outside these shops, we actually found a dusty bottle of semi-decent wine which suited her dietary needs. On the way back to my place, she stopped for a burrito. A non-organic vegetarian burrito made with all kinds of hormone laden cheese and genetically-modified vegetables. I about freaked out. Back at my place, on my balcony, looking out over this neighborhood and enjoying it like we were in Ensenada or something, the whole time she was making fun of me for having a loft. Loft is a fortress this, loft ruins the neighborhood that. Lofts have too many stairs, blah, it’s like living in a Barbie Townhouse. I explained that I needed the work/live space tax break and a garage, and she called me a yuppie like it was a dirty word. I guess, anyone with a decent job and health benefits is an asshole. I should know better than to pick up a waitress at some North Beach restaurant. Even when they look normal, and don’t have like fifty piercings or sailor tattoos running up and down their arms, waitresses and store clerks up in North Beach all think they’re like super beatnik activists or something. Oooh, how bohemian, waitressing, how avant-garde. Oooh, she speaks a little Spanish she learned in an elite private school, so now she’s an honorary oppressed immigrant person. Anyway, she drank the organic wine and then left to go to some art gallery dance club a few blocks away. She asked me to go along, but I didn’t. What was the point? She probably slept with some oppressed busboy from Central America or a deadbeat anarchist with no money but politically significant hair. Whatever.

When the traffic light changes, I sprint across the street. Something has to change here. We can’t have three or four different cultures living side by side like this and not talking to each other. The Mexicans stick to themselves. White people are alienated by language. The black people seem to be confined to low income housing as if they were rounded up and put there. And, get this, the Latino population doesn’t like black people either. I was standing in line at the taqueria, and these ranchero guys in cowboy hats and boots and rope belts and those ridiculous western shirts they wear, they were calling this kid with cornrows and big UNC basketball shorts, they were calling him, nigger. Nigger. They said, “Nigger go home.” The black kid said, “Man, I’m just trying to eat some food.” And these pudgy Mexican urban gauchos, all about five feet one in their high-heel cowboy boots were staring him down, which they could because the kid was about fourteen, and saying, spanish spanish spanish nigger. I couldn’t believe it. I had no idea that minorities didn’t like each other. I always thought they just hated white people. The situation was like something right out of Birth of a Nation, that old movie about the KKK, you know. I stepped in, of course. I got between them and said, “Let the kid order his food.” The rancheros told me to get my food and go. They stood there with their arms across their bellies and stared the kid down as he ordered his carne asada and left. It was just like the deep south. I couldn’t believe it. San Francisco is just like the deep south. But the racists, the rednecks are the Mexicans. They got their big SUVs with the El Salvador flags hanging off the rearview mirror like it was the Confederate Stars and Bars. I’m still perplexed by it.

As of right now, I’m going to stop the isolation of these different cultures. I jog behind the kids on bikes. I want to talk to their parents. Maybe I can be an unofficial Big Brother or something. I tried to do the real Big Brother thing once but it was a mess of paperwork and waiting and background checks. That’s the way those non-profits are, a lot of bullshit. I’m a do-it-now kind of guy. I don’t have time for three months of training. In fact, I am doing it now. I’m breaking down walls. I’m opening up this dialogue.

The kids become shadows to me, because on this side of 24th Street there’s few street lights. They stop riding and yell, “Best get out of our neighborhood.” I start walking, but continue on. A few oranges fly at me. Fruit litters the street. I hate that. Wasted food, wasted resources. They don’t even know what they’re throwing away. “Get out, bitch,” they yell with phony deep voices. My anger surges, and I hope my neighbor presses assault charges against them. I hope that Social Services gets hold of these kids and assigns them some real Big Brothers or parole officers or something just so they can realize how much they’re screwing up their lives.

Then they attack. They launch a barrage of oranges. One hits me. But it doesn’t hurt. It’s like being hit with a Nerf football. I catch one of the lobbed oranges and whip it back with fastball accuracy. I peg a kid’s back tire. Then I catch another orange and fire it with curveball finesse. The orange zips by a kid right in the strike zone. Planting one in the zone feels good, so just for the hell of it, I skip forward, pick up another orange, and launch it at a kid’s head. I mean to just graze him, you know, like back him off the plate a bit, like I did during my high school pitching days, but I peg him right in the face. He drops his bike like dropping a bat. He kneels in the middle of the street. The phrase he-shouldn’t-have-been-hugging-the-plate clicks to mind out of habit. Feeling kind of bad, I pick up another orange and hold it in my hand like a baseball. And suddenly I remember when I was in high school in Florida.

I loved baseball. I was left-handed so I got to play a lot, probably more often than I should have. At the tail end of my junior year, I couldn’t pitch because my elbow was swollen. My uncle was pissed because he said I started way too much, which I did, but only because I was really good. I was flattered pitching nearly every game, you know. Until my arm blew out. I stopped going to practices. I needed at least a month off and by the time my elbow healed, the season would be over. But the real kicker was the local leagues were having try outs, and I couldn’t even participate, which meant my entire summer of baseball was blown. And I needed to play too, because my dream had always been a baseball scholarship to Texas. And Texas keeps an eye on the pony leagues. I’d been wearing a white hat with those orange longhorns on it since I was nine or something.

Anyway, I was really hot for this girl named Lindsey Becker that year, because she was pretty and because she had already slept with two guys from the basketball team, and one from the football team. The basketball team guys didn’t even date her. They just screwed her, and then never, you know, had to do dates, flowers, whatever. I was a virgin then, at the end of my junior year, if you can believe it, and, well, I figured Lindsey might like to try me out. I drove over to her house one evening trying to get her to go to the marshes with me for what I thought would be a romantic walk, you know, at sunset. Her parents weren’t home, and she was with this other senior, and they were smoking crack. I couldn’t fucking believe it. Crack! I mean, these were nice girls from good homes. Even if Lindsey was a little promiscuous and the other girl wasn't very pretty or popular, I would have never even suspected they would be smoking crack. They smoked it as if it was absolutely normal. Lindsey handed me this blue glass tube and held out the lighter. The worst thing is, I took a puff. I expected the smoke to be like pot smoke, you know, kind of heavy, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t even hot. I puffed just a little bit and my mouth and lungs filled up with this super light, menthol-like ether. My mind accelerated straight into the sky like a rocket. I swear I flew straight up, looked around like God, and then plummeted back into my body again, all within one second, even before the smoke completely left my mouth. “Let’s smoke more,” I immediately said. Lindsey looked at me crazily. Her eyes were wide open, too wide, and not blinking. It was like her skin was stretched tight against her whole body. Her nipples were hard and jutting through her tank top, but not in a sexy way, more of like in accusatory way, if that makes any sense. The muscles in her arms were tense. Even the sprinkling of freckles over her shoulders seemed to be at attention. Lindsey said, “Bud, we have to go to nigger town.”

I objected to the term nigger even then. We were forbidden to say the n-word in my uncle’s house. I never used it. But I was high. And I really wanted to sleep with this girl, not when she was high like that, but when she was normal, so I thought, you know, the way young guys think, that if I did a few things Lindsey liked, like buy crack, that maybe we would do something I liked, like have sex. Yeah, it was fucked up math, but that was the math I used. In all honesty, the crack made my swollen elbow feel better, and I was supposed to be in physical therapy at that moment anyway, so we jumped into my uncle’s car and took off to buy crack.

The other girl said, “Chudville U.S.A. here we come.”

When we were all in Middle School, my bestfriend’s brother went to the University of Florida in Gainesville, and he came home with the word Chud. Chud is actually a baitfish, kind of like a saltwater minnow we use for deep sea fishing. But Chud somehow became the covert word for nigger, you know. You couldn’t say nigger in public. So everyone started saying Chud. Chudville. Look at that Chud. Super Chud. Chudlet, was a little black kid.

Lindsey just said nigger. She was high and kind of getting off on saying it, kind of like a chant. Nigger, niggertown, nigger-dom, republic of nigger. We were beaten with political correctness in our high school, and to rebel you only had to say the word. Truly, to be super rebellious, you only had to whisper, nigger. Lindsey said, Nigglet, niggaz, nigga-roni the nigger-treat. Yeah it was wrong. But I put up with it because I wanted to screw her. You do thing like that when you’re a teenager. She pulled out the one gangsta rap CD I had in the car and blasted it. At first I was kind of embarrassed by the rappers going nigga-this nigga-that, because we were in a convertible and we were white and everyone could hear it. But then it became kind of cool. My uncle had a BMW convertible at that time, not one of the super ones, you know, but one of the cheaper ones. Lindsey shouted, “We going to Africa!”

I had only driven through the poor part of the city a few times. I wasn’t afraid of it or anything, I just had little cause to go there. I mean, I never had any friends who lived there. Not that I’m prejudiced, it’s just that the black kids, you know, didn’t hang with us. It’s not like we went to the regular high school either, we went to the Governor's Magnet School, which was for the best of the best and the smartest, you know, and not a lot of poor kids went there, because you had to take a test to get in, and well, they just didn’t measure up. There were a lot of Asian kids and a few girls from India, but not a lot of black kids.

I remember always being kind of shocked when I did drive there. I mean, if they didn’t want it called Nigger Town or Chudville then why didn’t they clean it up a little and get the piles of old furniture out of their yards and cars that don’t run off their streets. What’s the deal with rusted out, used appliances in their yards? And some of the houses even had tar-paper roofs too. I mean, if I was black, I would never live anywhere with a tar-paper roof. Wouldn’t that just remind you of slavery every day? It’s not like I was super rich either. My parents were such deadbeats that I had to live in my uncle’s house, and sometimes my grandparents’ place, which is why I was a virgin, if you want to know. My dad dropped out of college because he knocked a high school senior up, and then got married. They divorced a year later and ditched me at my grandparents and went about their merry ways. And this made my grandparents crazy strict about dating. Yeah, I come from a poor, dysfunctional family too, but you don’t see me not taking care of myself. You don’t see me out there selling drugs.

Anyway, so, me and these two girls pulled up outside The Corner Store. It’s actually called that. The Corner Store is hand-painted on the porch of this dilapidated crack house. “Are you five-oh!” this half-naked black guy screamed as he jumped in the backseat of my car, “Are you five-oh!” I shook my head. “Drive,” he yelled, “Drive!”

He told me where to turn. I was terrified, but I did what he said. He made me turn and twist down an alleyway. I had my wallet with me, my uncle’s car, and two girls, whom I felt responsible for. You hear about things like this. Rape, abduction, robbery, murder, extortion, car jacking, you name it. He told me to turn down another alley that wasn’t paved. Then he demanded money. We all threw twenties at him, and he jumped out of the car and over a fence and darted through some overgrown yard. I thought that was the end of it, that we had gotten robbed, so I started to back out before anything else bad could happen. But the two girls screamed at me to wait. Sure enough, after twenty nervous minutes, a different guy came running by and threw a baggie into the car and then disappeared into the jungle of another weedy overgrown yard. Lindsey screamed at the guy, she yelled, for the amount we paid him, it wasn’t very much crack. Lindsey said we definitely got ripped off, but I wasn’t going to argue. I flipped that car into reverse and backed out of that dirt alley so fast that I kept bumping into fences and garbage cans, but I didn’t care. I had to get the hell out of Chudville.

We went and smoked crack in the state park on the new bridge that overlooks the swamps. I thought I’d get to fool around with both girls, because I felt so virile and high from our successful mission into a dangerous area, but the girls just wanted to go to the ATM and get some more crack. So we did that, went back to the ATM, one more time, and then back to the Corner Store. We smoked more crack as the sun went down that night in the swamp. At first I just tried to wrap my arm around Lindsey, but she kind of pulled away. The other girl had big bugged-out eyes and was rambling on and on.

Suddenly I thought I had super-human strength. I grabbed both their hands and tried to pull them both to me. I envisioned a twisting mass of cracked-out super loving bodies. But they just pulled away and gave me a look like I was an asshole. I couldn’t believe it. I was like a star baseball pitcher. I couldn’t believe it.

Anyway, I only went back to see Lindsey Decker about six more times. Then I came to my senses and started thinking about my future. When I stopped going over, Lindsey told everybody about that time I grabbed them. She said I tried to rape her. I told everyone that she was a crack whore, but everyone believed her. I spent my last year of high school ostracized, which turned out to be a good thing, because I studied hard and got my head together. Besides, the following year, Lindsey flunked out of college and went to rehab. It could have happened to me like that. That whole bad time of my life pops into my head as I follow the three kids into the low-income housing community.

I’d never even think the word chud now. All that stuff I learned in sociology at Cal comes back to me: cyclical poverty and how poverty can be a social disease, etc. When I drive by here to get on the highway, everyone I see in this housing area is black. And San Francisco doesn’t have a lot of blacks, in general, you know. So what does that tell you? I mean, it’s disproportionate. There’s definitely something else going on here besides poverty, you know. There’s a clear-cut wall around these houses that says, this is where the black people live. I feel great for even trying to tear it down.

All in all though, the rows of the prefabricated houses seem nice. They’re painted pink and yellow. In sociology, I learned that those towering sky-high projects didn’t work, and only became havens for crime, you know, so now they build projects like they're supposed to be little villages. Even though it’s night, super bright street lights make the whole place shine like it’s high noon. Tree saplings line the sidewalks, but the trees all have broken limbs. There’s a lot of garbage, mainly fast food bags, in the gutters, in the yards. I know about that too, the junk food diets of the impoverished, their high obesity rate.

I walk up to a group of guys standing under a BEWARE sign. The sign says if you’re here to buy drugs your license plate is being photographed and will be reported to the police. These guys with baseball caps pulled over cornrows and all wearing the same kind of red jersey stand under it looking like stereotypical gangbangers. But I don’t treat them as that. I treat them as people even though there are half-empty 40s at their feet and one dude is smoking a cigar stuffed with pot. I walk up to them and ask, “Did you see three kids with bags of oranges on bikes?”

They stare at me with half-opened eyes. I don’t get the stare thing. I mean, what does it mean? Does it mean they can’t give me some information? A big pause ensues. I get sick of it, so I ask again. “Three kids, bikes, bikes you pedal, oranges, you know, fruit, bags of oranges, hanging off handle bars?” Something about this makes them laugh. Probably because I was using my hands to try to communicate as if they don’t speak English. Okay, I’m not a cool guy standing on the corner selling drugs. I’m not high either. I’m the funny yuppie guy in the projects.

“You mean you want to find the kid that’s crying?” a big guy in red asks me.

I tell them about the orange fight and about how I clocked this kid with an orange. “Man,” I say sadly, shaking my head, “I was just trying to back him off the plate a little, you know, dude should know not to hug the plate, man.”

“You were playing baseball with oranges?”

“No, I was just, you know, throwing the oranges back at them, and pretending I was pitching, you know.”

“That’s Marcy’s kid,” the big guy grunts, “Tyson.”

“Yeah, Tyson,” I agree, trying to change the subject. As I’m wondering if they named their kid after a psychopath rapist on purpose, and what this says about society in general, this other guy taps me on the shoulder and leads me to a narrow stone-lined path that weaves in and out of the little houses. At this point, I’m elated. I’m going to break down walls. I’m going to talk to these kids and this one kid’s mother. Just talking helps. Being here helps. Being here and not buying drugs helps. Being here and not being afraid helps too. Not calling the police helps.

The guy who showed me here disappears. I see the three bikes crashed into the hedges. Even though the apartment door is wide open, I ring the bell, and before stepping through the open doorway. In this narrow cramped room with a low ceiling, a TV is on. The CD player is on. A computer is on, and pumping out game noises. I can barely think from all the noise coming at me. Soda cans and half-empty chip bags litter the floor. DVD cases line the floor, along with video-games, joysticks, toys, etc. A baby bounces in the middle of a narrow set of stairs in just a diaper. I can’t believe that the baby, this ten-month old baby has cornrows too. I want to explain to them that it’s a cycle. If you dress your babies like drug dealers, and they grow up seeing drug dealers, and the only men in their life are drug dealers, then they’re going to be drug dealers too. This paternal urge surges through me and I want to snatch this child and read books to it, send it to a good school, dress it in something besides baby gang colors.

Just then, a mammoth black woman stomps out of the kitchen with the crew of orange thieves behind her. One kid holds a frozen bag of corn on his cheek. I guess he’s the kid I pegged.

I point at the three delinquents. “They stole those oranges.” I point to the bags of oranges on the floor. “They threw them at women and dogs.”

All three kids immediately start talking. The kids lie. They say they found them. They say they were defending themselves. One kid does this whole song and dance about how the oranges are free, how the Mexicans just give them fruit, and how I chased them for no reason.

“You have no right to--,” the woman says.

“I just want to get to the bottom of this,” I explain.

The kids yell again about how I chased them, blah blah blah, and whipped oranges at them, and how it was absolutely self-defense for them.

I ask them directly. “Why’d you hit that woman and her dog?”

“I didn’t hit no woman,” one kid says.

Another says, “I was mad.”

“All right,” I answer in a calm measured voice, “what are you mad about?”

“Just mad,” he says.

“Mad at you,” another kid says.

“You hit that woman before you even saw me,” I say, kneeling down to reason with him. “Why do you think you can just take someone else’s way of making money? Why do you think you can just throw fruit at people? That’s wrong.”

"Thank you," the big woman says in this firm matronly tone, “now get out of my house.”

I say, “Would you like it if someone stole your computer, or your TV or your video games or your . . .”

The obese woman steps closer towards me. The men with cornrows and baggy red shirts file into the doorway behind me.

“Thanks for your concern,” the woman says, crossing her arms, “but I’ll handle this.”

“How would you like dealing with the police instead of me?” I ask. “Because that’s what’s going to happen, you know, you’ll--“

“I said,” the woman says, stepping forward, “I’ll handle my boys.”

I look at the kids standing behind the woman as if they were already standing behind prison bars. I give it one last chance to salvage something out of this whole situation. “I really think it will be beneficial if we all talked about this for a moment.”

“Thank you,” the woman says as if saying, fuck you.

“Great,” I reply.

“What was that?” the woman says.

“Great,” I say again, “take care of it, handle it.”

“No, your tone,” she says.

My tone? Whatever. “I just thought you’d like to know that your kids were a bunch of thieves, and I thought you’d like to try to explain to them how stealing is wrong, but I guess I was wrong about that.”

I turn to leave. But I forgot about the guys who came in the door behind me.

“You fucking beat up lil’ kids?” one guy says to me, pointing at the kid with the frozen corn on his face.

Before I can even explain, another guy says, “What’s up big man? What’s up with that?”

“Listen,” I say, “I didn’t mean--”

“Didn’t mean? Didn’t mean? I saw you throw that orange right at Tyson’s head. Didn’t mean? Didn’t mean what, mother fucker?”

I take a step back. But the woman is behind me, and I kind of brush up against her, and it’s gross to me, the way her body is all big and soft and gooey, and I naturally pull away, but something happens in which I can’t get my feet to follow the rest of my legs, and I get twisted somehow and fall down. And this big guy stands over me yelling, “Didn’t mean what, mother fucker? Didn’t mean what?”

This goes on for what seems like a long time. The kids laugh. The mother laughs. The guys in red laugh. The big guy yelling at me pretends like he’s kicking me and getting ready to punch me, but he never makes any contact. “Didn’t mean what?” he yells and flicks the top of my hair. “Didn’t mean what?” He swings and the tip of his fist barely brushes the tip of my nose. Laughter spurs him on.

I stand up and push to get through the gangbangers. No one touches me, but no one gets out of my way either. I have to wiggle through them. Everyone laughs at me. I see the baby on the stairs jumping up and down as if for joy. The big guy body checks me into the door frame as I’m walking out, and I knock my forehead pretty hard and that makes everyone laugh more.

As I’m finally getting outside, I hear the big guy say, “I took care of that!” The people in the little house cheer like he’s Superman or something.

Also by Dustin Wells on SoMa Literary Review: Loser School

Dustin Wells lives in San Francisco and is the author of the novel Cappuccino Cowboy. He teaches Advanced Non-Fiction at an MFA program in The City.