Huntington W VA

I'm so thrilled to find a Y open today, Sunday - last night the Charleston Y closed at 6pm, even tho the internet said it's open until 10...grrrr. As I was trapped by the parade, I didn't get to the y until 5:50pm so another day, not working out.

This Huntington Y is huge with two pools, several womyn's locker rooms, steam room and sauna inside the womyn's locker room! And I get to exercise upstairs, in front of a bank of windows overlooking the parking lot, while keeping an eye on my truck. Several people take pics but no one leaves a note!

When I go to leave, a big solid white man with a bald head and large beard eases around my truck and starts talking at me before I get a chance to put my gym things away. He is quite upset about the white and male war and appears to be really wanting to express his response.

He tells me I look like I’m probably 50 like he is and so we understand each other. Hmmmm – I’m 68 for the record.

He claims he’s lived thru riots, that his parents were poor and they lived in the ghetto. Doing the math quickly – he’s 53 – I tell him that would make him three and four if he’s talking about the response to the murder of MLK, which he is.

He demands that I admit Black people can be as racist as white people, which of course I challenge. He gets so angry, he’s spitting and shouting, his bald head reddening so brightly I’m worried he’ll have a heart attack. He is here to work out, I assume, but he doesn’t appear to be that healthy, more fat than solid.

I tell him I’m not going to talk with him if he can’t stop yelling at me, interrupting every time I try to speak. He calms down, apologizes, then his eyes fill with tears, voice wavering, as he curses Black people that are drug dealers, going so far as to say ‘they’ all need to be killed.

I am alarmed by his threat as I try to talk steer him in the direction of drug corporations & his lack of anger toward them. He wants me to prove that oil companies are not the richest in the world, but he has calmed down a little.

So I decide to ask him who uses more illegal drugs in this country, white or Black people. He looks at me as if I asked him did the sun come up today. He is adamant it is Black people who are drug dealers, murderers, and destroying his beautiful town of Charleston.

When I tell him the same exact percentage of Blacks and whites use illegal drugs - 13% of both populations - BUT Black people are incarcerated at 70% and whites at 13%, he demands that I prove that too. I ask him if he wants to buy my book but he doesn’t because he’s a poor truck driver who hates to read.

I tell him I love to read and spend many hours every day of my 68 years reading, researching, uncovering facts from lies.

He is not happy but at least he’s not still shouting at me. I leave him with the challenge to take his eyes off Black people and to start looking at those white people at the top who are pulling the strings and go after them. 

Scary fella...