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I’m working on my memoire, or autobiography. Which one has not yet been decided.

Why the urge to dissect and examine my life?

I’m not famous. I just happen to have been lucky enough to work for a few famous people, yet those times are incidental to all the other times of my life. 

I feel like, with the exception of Michelle, no one really knows me. I’ve lived four lifetimes in this one. They don’t intersect.

If just one person reads it, once it’s finished and self-published, I’ll be happy.

As we all do our best to navigate the zeitgeist in which we currently find ourselves, many of us are sharing our opinions, whether requested or not.

As you know, I certainly have mine.

This is turning out to be an essay on racism. And irony. I keep using the word because I haven’t found an exchangeable word in the thesaurus. 

The biggest irony to me personally is the story of David Howard, the aide to DC mayor, Anthony Williams.

That particular David Howard dared to use the word “niggardly,” meaning “stingy,” which have ZERO etymological relation.

There was quite a kerfuffle, Howard defended himself, lost his job, and was eventually hired back in another capacity, but he certainly made a name for himself.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. I’m reminding myself that perhaps I should keep this to myself, as well.

Yet, this essay has been in my mind for many years and this morning was the time my muse struck.

Okay, sports fans. Here we go:

I grew up in Appalachia around my own kind.

White (what an innacurate word), of English descent (just west of the Cumberland Gap, those bloodlines were either kept pure or inbred, take your pick), Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution (one of my great greats, Samuel, stood within earshot when Cornwalis handed his sword to Washington), Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy (I have no knowledge of ancestors in that war) and good, hard-working, church-going people.

Thank God for my mother. She raised me right. She taught me we were all people. She let me go alone to the little colored market down the street to get pop and candy. I’d asked the plump black barefoot women why the palms of their hands and the soles of their bare feet were white. All I remember is their warmth and loud laughter.

There was an old black man named Alvin. At least he seemed old to me. Of course, I loved the Chipmunks at that age so that made it easy to love him, too. I don’t know what he did or where he came from, but he could peel an apple with his pocket knife and do it in one long piece. He always had an apple.

But Dad. Dammit, Dad.

Dad was a Kentucky State Trooper. The KSP were exposed some years back for showing training slides with Nazi quotes. Go figure.

One day we were coming home from an ophthalmologist appointment in Lexington, and we stopped in Manchester where Dad had grown up. I was about four.

He saw someone he knew and was having a conversation by the car after we’d had lunch at the diner next to the newspaper he’d edited as a young man.

Dad said, “You ever been poling n***ers?”

My empathic tendencies were already in place at that age. I could tell the man was uncomfortable. Or maybe I was the one who was uncomfortable.

Dad continued, “You get you a 2×4 about 8 feet long. You get a buddy to drive and you sit in back and stick that 2×4 out the window. You see one walking on the sidewalk and you take their legs right out from under them. Boy, it’s some fun.”

I’ve carried this memory with me now for almost sixty years. I think of it often.

How could Dad be nice to Alvin, but want to hurt black people he didn’t know? I didn’t understand then, or now.

We left Kentucky for West Virginia when I was in first grade. Dad left the Kentucky State Police and joined the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. His primary job was to find, bust up and arrest those running moonshine stills. More irony because his father had made corn liquor and used the barrel of a 16-guage shotgun for a condenser. My brother still has that gun.

After a brief stop in Beckley, WV where I started first grade remembering only one classmate who was black, we settled in Romney, WV.

Romney was dripping in Civil War history. Minnie ball holes could still be found in some of the houses. In the trenches above town and the river you could still find cannonballs.I loved that place. I’m in Humboldt County, CA because it reminds me of West Virginia, on steroids, by the ocean.

Our elementary school was adjacent to the oldest confederate monument to those kllled in the war. Ironically, the monument and the graves are in Indian Mound Cemetery, a preserved archeological treasure.

We had lots of dialogue about brothers fighting brothers, families torn apart, right and wrong, reasons pro and con why the South declared cessation and more. 

The town had one black family. In my first through fifth grade classes I had a classmate named Patty. Cute, carrying baby fat, hair in braids. I don’t ever remember her being teased, picked on or being excluded. 

Until the day the teacher asked her to take a note to the principal’s office for her. 

Patty left. And the teacher said, “I know all of you didn’t stay up to watch Johnny Carson last night. He had Muhammed Ali and George Frazier as guests. The stood on each side of him and picked him up and Johnny said ‘I feel like the filling of an Orea cookie.’”

We attended the Methodist church, pastored by my classmate, Jay Brooks, father. Pastor Brooks also pastored the tiny black church, I don’t even remember where it was. I just knew that it was.

Dad came home one day demanding my mother not add to the collection plate at church. I don’t remember him telling her not to go to the church. His concern and consternation was the the Methodist church’s money supported the black church and that money could wind up in the hands of the Black Panthers and be used to purchase bullets to kill policeman.

Also puzzling that Dad rarely, like once, went to church. He professed his belief of a more Spinozian God, finding God in nature, which was his church.

Yet Dad pitched in when the Methodist church got new pews. He bird hunted with the Presbyterian pastor, even going as far to have a trusty at the local WV State Police post paint an oil painting oif a particularly amusing scene that occurred when they had to cross a stream much higher than in first appeared.

The last memory of Romney I’ll share here now is attending my first, only only, Ku Klux Klan rally. It was held in the county park just outside of town. Dad told me empty beer cartons looking like trash were actually markers to lead men to the site, as the address or rally itself was not disclosed.

I played on the swing, saw no other children and don’t remember the rhetoric. This was before portable sound systems.

Mom assured me that Dad was there undercover as an ATF agent. Given my father’s passion for George Wallace, I’m not convinced.

The summer I turned 13 we moved to just outside of Indianapolis to Morgan County, Mooresville specifically.

Where Romney was rich in Civil War history, Morgan County was known for its Ku Klux Klan affiliation.

Martinsville, the county seat, was strong with Klan activity in the 1920’s. It’s strength was over my the end of the 20’s, but It remained as a sundown town. 

I’m still taken aback when I occasionally see black people there now.

When I was in high school, a family from Brazil moved to Mooresville. The father had taken an engineering job at a local factory.

They were not brown. They were black. And a cross was burned in their yard. So I heard. I was never close with them, but the daughter and son were in the high school with us.

We had a field trip to downtown Indianapolis. A group of us were on a school bus and suddenly one of my classmates was trying to go out the emergency window to fight, or hurt or kill, a black man.

A coincidence about Mooresville. While I was selling gold to conservatives, I worked with a black man named Ken Jingles. One of the finest men I’ve ever known.

Ken graduated from UCLA with a degree in film, wound up working for Warner Bros. out of Cincinnati, repping films to drive-ins and theaters. He told me a story about being run out of the county after being caught canoodling with a concession stand girl.

We really bonded over this.

I’d like to add here that my father may have changed towards what would be the end of his life. His work partner was a black man, Jim, and I believed dad loved him. 

Dad told a story about stopping at a little country store for a couple sandwiches. The proprietor said they were closed, when the store was clearly was open.

Dad, in his own words, said Jim wanted to leave, but he told the man he was going to make the damn sandwiches and make them right now. 

Service revolver or not, he could be persuasive. 

When I got to Purdue in West Lafayette, I met people of all ethnicities. I met Jewish people for the first time. Asian people, European people. It was definitely a melting pot, and I experienced myself as indoctrinated in prejudice. 

I made the jokes, Used words I shouldn’t have. I was essentially embracing the hatred I’d been around my whole life. 

I got myself in serious trouble when we were invited to critique a group project and give opinions of our classmates participation. Apparently the instructor didn’t include bigotry when she said we were free to openly share our thoughts. I was lucky not to have been suspended. 

I thought for years I could never run for political office because she would remember me and my campaign would be sunk.

These things don’t seem to derail political campaigns today, and I’ve got such a low opinion of politicians that I would never.

Fast forward to the late nineties. I’m a tour accountant. Not for rock stars as I’d sought out to do, but for rap and hiphop tours.

Imagine lil ol’ white me, sharing a bus with eleven black and Puerto Rican dancers on the Mary J. Blige tour, one of my first tours as a tour accountant. 

The blacks said the N-word. The Puerto Ricans said the N-word. I was not afforded that privilege. But I loved those kids.

One night after a show I was flush with cash and handing out the week’s per diem. The tour manager for anther artist who also had the last name of Howard, wanted to come on the bus to say hello to someone. I was passing out cash and felt vulnerable in that moment. 

I asked him to wait a moment and he insisted. Apparently my second request for a few minutes came off rudely, imagine that, and he came at me.

The sensation of 11 young men and women surrounding me, protecting me, was womb-like. I learned a lot about “respect” that night.

Mary’s cousin, Jamarco, called my “N***ger Dave,” a moniker I embraced whole-heartedly. I went to Europe twice with Mary and the time spent with her band on the ferry boats are wonderful memories.

The Hartford Civic Center was downtown, attached to a mall, where I’d been with Neil Diamond a few months earlier. 

There was a set of doors that led from backstage to the mall. I’d been through them many times before and later. But that day, they were chained and padlocked. I enquired as to why and was told in anticipation of the night’s crowd. I heard that loud and clear.

Mary’s fans never caused trouble. Even when K-Ci & JoJo, the headliners, cancelled a show in Charleston, WV the crown was disgruntled, not violent.

I literally experienced doors being open for some and closed for others.

Working for Jay-Z and DMX, we never had any problems, either. Brothers from the Nation, just like with Mary, did backstage security. Once again, because I was the money man, Count d’Monet, I ‘felt protected.“

One of the tasks I had as a tour accountant was to open up seats day of show based on actually sightlines and not maps.

I could sometimes add a few to a few hundred seats, increase revenue and justify my existence. I was good at it. And the lighting and sound guys were good at it, too.

At the Portland Rose Garden Arena, there were two sections on each side of the floor where the lower bowl adjoined. I saw dollar signs. Arena management saw a DMZ to protect the floor from being rushed.

I got into it with the arena manager. He wanted to keep the seats dead. I wanted to open them. If he had security issues that was his problem to solve, not mine, as long as he did his job and solved it. He stuck to his guns. 

I went to the agent. The agent didn’t back me up and I was pissed. The show went off well. Those seats were rushed by people from the lower bowl getting closer to the floor, but the floor itself was not breached.

When I chose to go back to school to become a rad tech, I gave over 14,000 uber and Lyft rides, keeping the family and myself afloat. It’s hard to believe, but I have receipts. If covid hadn’t kicked in, I’d have had 20K.

I learned a lot about people. I considered uber my ministry, just as I consider x-ray my ministry now . I was preaching from the pulpit of my Prius.

I saw the best of people and a fair share of ugliness. Hands down, older hispanic housekeepers, last in the evening, with minimal English skills, were the best tippers. Older white businessmen were the worst.

One man, a Silicon Valley executive, was headed to LAX from Palos Verdes, a very well to do parcel of Los Angeles. He was on the phone with someone and said, “You’d love this place. There’s no scum here.” 

He repeated himself a few times. The man on the other end of the line, just like the man my father spoke with on the sidewalk fifty years earlier, wasn’t getting it.

Finally the man said, “There’s no homeless here.”

Not many black people in PV, either, but I kept that for myself.

I couldn’t wait to get him out of my car.  He didn’t tip.