This is a misty Friday and I am remembering days when my bangs would swell up and become afro-fied and I would be embarrassed lest someone see my nappy hair. Days of wine and roses. Gone now. Seems one of our friends has flipped out again or so goes the story that is making the rounds. His problem seems to stem from people’s reactions to how light he is. A lot of people don’t realize he’s black and I guess it makes him feel bad. I need to have an old-fashioned talk with him so I can advise him to tell the folks who mess with him about being light to go fuck themselves. Karen said a woman in The Lovin’ Spoonful coffee house once talked about him like a dog and asked him how he liked “coming up here to party with us.” And he would not tell her he was black. I would have said: “Bitch, kiss my black us ass.” But I know that kind of shit is hard to do. It really is. I remember the time they told me to get out of a March in D.C. They said: “Get out. We ain’t lettin’ the beast march with us.” They thought I was white and they refused to believe me when I said I wasn’t. But what can you do? They wouldn’t let Kris and Jilo into the Topographical Research Center in Chicago because they didn’t have PROOF of being black. Isn’t that a bitch? Weird folks in weird places. I feel for our friend. A.B. says he wrote a math book for six-year-olds based on the metaphysical concepts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Okay, but my mind fixes on stories of a Mississippi prison guard telling him, “If you want to eat, you gotta act like a monkey.” I can see his eyes gleaming up from that hole in the ground and not wanting to act a fool, but hungry, so hungry . . .