When you have all day to be lost in little worlds of your own making, suddenly having to deal with single-minded teachers and cruel, selfish, jostling schoolmates was, for me, like being a frog dropped suddenly into boiling water.

T


he day is the coolest yet of the summer. At night the katydids chatter relentlessly because they know the party won't last long. This time of year was always very sad for me when I was a kid. When you have all day to be lost in little worlds of your own making, suddenly having to deal with single-minded teachers and cruel, selfish, jostling schoolmates was, for me, like being a frog dropped suddenly into boiling water.
I hear you can boil a frog to death without complaint if you slowly raise the water temperature from lukewarm to boiling.

I was reading about eating Turkish food on the Internet at Cocke Hall and became so desperately hungry that I almost started licking the dust off the monitor. I am human, however, and so I found my way to the Corner, and I picked up a filafil pita at the Pita Inn. It's a mostly Lebanese Restaurant, judging by the hookahs and framed photographs labeled "Liban" all over the walls.

After I ate my pita, things got interesting.

A


s I was walking past the White Spot, a couple of skinheads were let out of a car right next to me. These were not the usual rich kid skinheads I normally deal with, the kind who call me faggot while professing their racial tolerance and broad-mindedness. No, this was Noel and Eric the Huffanator Huffman. Now I don't know about Noel (whom I may have called "Joel" in a past entry), but Eric is a notorious bully in Charlottesville. Morgan Anarchy, Ray and Persad, and to a lesser extent, Theresa, were all forced from this town by altercations with him. Even Matthew Hart has done battle with him. The Huffanator holds grudges about ridiculously trivial matters for long periods of time, and his sense of personal diginity is easily offended. In short, he doesn't have what it takes for a happy life in civilized society. Still, he has a wife and a kid in addition to his dozens of scars and swastika tattoos. And there's no denying he's a nazi. He freely admits it. But he can only have so many enemies, his day is only so long. Guess who his latest enemy is?

Me.

Interestingly, instead of promising future violence (as even the scrawniest wanna-be skinheads in this town do), the Huffanator promised a lawsuit.

If you followed the link to his entry in the Glossary, you see that I jokingly referred to him as

"ironically now an Afro-American because he failed to repay Sara Poiron some money after swearing on his whiteness she had nothing to fear in loaning him some of her precious cash."

That alone is deeply offensive to someone of his peculiarly anachronistic racial beliefs. Perhaps if he repayed Sara her money, it might be possible to qualify this statement. But all that's been lost in the dust of time. A guy like him needs to loosen up and see the humour here, but he is a skinhead.

Interestingly, instead of promising future violence (as even the scrawniest wanna-be skinheads in this town do), the Huffanator promised a lawsuit. Perhaps he's maturing from the impolite days when violence was his only coping mechanism.

He also demanded that I withdraw all I'd written and post an apology. Perhaps the apology would say something like:

I was wrong in saying all the bad things I did about Eric Huffman. He's a noble man of pure Caucasian blood. He's never done wrong to anyone who didn't do wrong to him. I respect him a great deal and am full of regret for the things I wrote about him.

In truth, I have to admit that Eric has never done anything bad to me personally. He even shared some pot with me once when he picked up Jessika and me hitch hiking from Scottsville. He can be a rather charming person, as Farrell discovered during a long conversation at Big Fun. Furthermore, he has his own firm (if Medieval) standards of right and wrong. He believes in the fair fight, revenge, self-pride and valour. He has no patience for cowardice or sneakiness.

What really bothers me about him is his inability to let go. Why is he still mad at Morgan? Why did he scuffle with Matthew Hart? Why couldn't he just leave Theresa and Persad alone the night he was stabbed? Why does he have to be such a bully? Where does this hate come from?

Ironically, for all his white supremacy, the only people I ever hear of him brutalizing are white people of Christian background, most of them with Aryan features like blue eyes.

Back to the confrontation:

He went on to call me a "punk who thinks you're so cool because you can write on a computer."

Eric said he'd been talking to a lawyer who said his chance of winning in court was pretty good. All he needed to do was raise the necessary dough to pay for the legal battle. I take it, then, that the lawyer with whom he'd been talking was unwilling to take this deal on commission. But still, Eric was confident. He said he'd sue Comet as well. He went on to call me a "punk who thinks you're so cool because you can write on a computer." I asked him if he'd ever written anything. "Oh yeah, I've written something alright, S-K-I-N on your forehead!" he said, indicating four knuckles on his left hand.

He was worked up, swinging his wallet chain and figgetting. I was trembling a little from all the adrenaline. Confrontations make me crazy with jitters, just in case I need to do something fast. He said, "Why're you shaking, you look like a girl!"

There's a certain charisma to Eric. He holds himself well and his language has a certain poetry to it. And surprisingly, he has a very pleasant boyish face. But here he is, he's a nazi skinhead. He's a complex paradox. You don't find such characters in fiction.

Eric went on to say he'd be using my musings as evidence in his court case against Persad. Apparently he's decided to settle the matter of the stabbing in the legal system after all. He seemed to delight in the fact that he could use my documents to hang both me and "my friend."

He also seemed upset at implications in my musings that I might prefer him dead. I didn't think of this until later, but I don't really want him dead, I don't even know if I want him to be different. He's too rare and interesting of a character. I just don't want to have to deal with him personally. It looks like that situation has changed.

Another thing Eric said, "You don't know me; I can be your best friend or I can be your worst nightmare." To this I said, "I've heard mixed reports." He had an almost hurt tone to his voice at this point, like he expected better of me.

Noel made occasional snide or dismissive remarks in the background, for example, saying of me "he ain't even worth it."

I followed the two skinheads up the street after the initial confrontation, and it picked up again a little ways down the sidewalk. Finally they ducked into Michæl's Bistro for a beer and were gone.

---



W


ell, I have to admit that this confrontation, especially coming on the heels of yesterday's, left me unsettled and kind of queasy. Things of this world seemed suddenly less consequential. Learning you are on the Huffanator's bad side is never good news in this town. In an instant, the gloss of modernity is drawn back and I'm not living in the 20th century. The Stone Age is all I see when I look at streets and houses. Nothing is predictable or easy. There is no law, there is no justice, and most scary of all, there is no reliance on rationality. I am alone. Freedom of speech is a myth. The First Amendment is a legend. There is no constitution. There is no police.

a picture of me tonight at work

Thugs, tough guys, fascists, nazis. They think they can silence me and run their reign of terror completely unexposed. With any other person, they would have an easy job. And yet...

I want an interesting life, but I also want an easy life. I have trouble navigating between those two goalposts.

When Deya came home, we got some deep-discount Pete's Multigrain Brew and I discussed the matter with her. It was important for me to talk about this all, because otherwise it causes damage. The events of yesterday, though trivial in comparison to those of today, were bad enough, and much worse so for my keeping it to myself.

Strangely, my web presence seems to be coming to some sort of a head. I get lots of email now from strangers, and everyone I deal with in the town seems to know what I've written. I'm unnerved. I don't know what to do.

I do all this for my readers, and I wonder now if it's worth it. Tonight it just doesn't seem so.

---

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