Screamales: A Hazy Retrospective

Hello all. I've decided to try something new within the established Kittens in Ties format. The goal is to write reviews on things ... all sorts of things ... in the form of flash fiction based on my memories of said thing. This week's review is of a concert I recently experienced: Screaming Females at Queen City Hall. We'll see how this goes ... 

Power chords ran through his veins like demented gerbils psyched out on pharmaceuticals running through an infinite loop of tunnels encased in a glass cage. He could feel the dissonance of the guitar solo inching up his spine, and it was only 7:30, several hours before the show would even start. These were feelings drawn by expectations, already bobbing his head up and down amidst the rhythmless soundtrack of street noise. It would do for now. He knew the songs well enough that he didn't need musical accompaniment to get amped up. Instead, he needed only silence ... his mind would provide the rest.

Of course, now was not the time for premature headbanging. Now was a time for action.

The Heavenly Affairs of Tyler Patton

  Tyler Patton was black, or African-American, or a nigger, or what have you. He did not know when he ceased to be black, but when they spoke of him now, they used the past tense and not only in regards to his ethnicity. Yes, he was black, but he also was an honor student, he was on the track and field team, he was a bassist, he was alive. Supposedly, all of those aspects of his character ceased to be. He was no longer black; he simply was.

            Of course, he never considered himself black anyway—not in the sense that society considered one black. For one, he had never set foot in a ghetto, and all black men, all black men of merit, hailed from the ghetto. Eazy E, the man he had idealized since he had been capable of such a fixation, came from the ghetto. Died there, too. But Tyler's mother begat her son in a Presbyterian hospital, in close proximity to at least two coffee shops where seldom an NWA track was heard. 
            Tell them where you’re from, Tyler:
            “Straight out of Plano.”
            A suburb of Dallas … doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?   He possessed no gold teeth though he had had a couple of fillings, he did not drive a Cadillac, he did not own rims for his non-existent Cadillac, he did not play nor did he enjoy watching basketball, he had no aspirations to rise from rags to riches, he believed most fried chicken was too greasy, and he had never met a watermelon he enjoyed. Now, he did not simplify those qualities into a prototypical black man. He would not even consider that portrayal a stereotypical black man, but somewhere in his sub-conscious, he figured he should have been that person, should have crafted a more suave and seventies-soul-brother persona. In his thoughts he sounded smooth, hearing the voice of a middle aged Barry White rather than the scrawny teenager who actually spoke and earnestly believing that smoothness to accurately speak on behalf of his character, but that man--that negro Casanova--existed only in his father. He was not his father, a man as black as society defined black, and now, and not only because of the condition of his deadness, he would never be his father. With surgery, he could have been his mother, and without it, he still possessed the nerdy suburban mentality she held. However, as much love as he had for his mother, he did not want to be that person. He wanted the “Black Power,” television negro, character—the black men who made records, made money, impressed women.
         Yet he was no better or worse for not being that person. And now, he was nothing at all. He simply was.