Chapter 1 

"So, you see, I go to get some quiet and buy a paper and sit in the breakfast place down the street, you know, the one the fat Korean woman owns always looking serious and scared. Well, I go in and get the breakfast and read a story about frightening people who say frightening things. Then I hear this voice, a small, beaten up looking guy with yellow teeth, laughing. "I is Custer! I is Custer!" And he's pointing and raving around in this breakfast place. Stops at one table, bends his face down into the face of the guy at the table and tells him that he's been robbed. Robbed, "even of my shoes man!" He holds up one shoeless foot, then the other. "Black boy did it- one of my own. That's right. Black boy!"

A Query: "In West Oakland?"

"That's right!"

He goes on and on, I go back reading the paper. There's a kind of tension in the air, he's acting rather crazy. He comes over and asks me for a smoke. "A Marlboro Man," he says to me. "I want a Marlboro." He bends down and sticks his face into my face and says something about me being a cowboy, leaves, goes over and yaps away, leaping this way and that in front of the counter. A guy at a table tells him to cut it out. There are words and one of the guys stands up. "Sit down white boy!" The odd fellow says. They keep calling the white man Frank. Frank is poised ready to fight this man until the owner has a phone in her hand and says she's going to call the cops if there's any fighting. It was a good breakfast. And when I left I saw the poor man on the otherside of the street gesticulating, pointing, leaping, turning in front of a few cops.

David Eide
January 24, 2014