Subway Restraint (Round 4)

Let's workshop this prose poem about a clash between a black man late to a job interview and "antiracist" protesters who will not let him off the subway train.

scent of the day: Vicki-Lin, by TSVGA Parfums (an ultimate bonfire fragrance with a lot of indie notes (like Choya Loban, a smoky and balsamic resin also known as Indian frankincense, and skunk cabbage, a plant known for its skunk smell)—all overshadowed by burnt-log birch tar, used-charcoal cade oil, and hickory-like guaiac that help make for a smoke bomb that is strangely gourmand: smokey barbecue ribs on top of a creamy and nutty and savory and oceanic umami likely from the Choya Nakh, a distillation of toasted sea-mollusk shells and sandalwood)

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Subway Restraint

Serve the long game. Do not jump right to throat daggering that lead cunt, shrieking as her arms spread to restrict you and the bodies behind you from exiting the split door of the subway. Breathe through the claustrophobic crush. Your first move, seductive as it no doubt is, should not be to impale the vein-flared neck of fanaticism with your “Urban Pal” pocket push dagger—its blade just over two inches, serrated for a bleed-out rip back meant to thwart repair (and cheap, for whatever it might be worth to say, on Bladehq.com). Restrain yourself. Unloading after a wait—especially a painful wait, where every nerve screams for action—is better, we all know. The time for blade gratifications, multiple climaxes unlikely to be offset by a life ruined by the gavel, might show itself if only you remain patient.

Shoves and slithering words, hold these back as well. You stand above the rabble. Let the seething fury of your stolen big day mount, like semen, as the chanting mass behind her—“No! One! Gets! Off!”—hammer-fists away any bold hand trying to pry open the panels from within. Let it foment even as her repeated spittle and repeated forehead rammings of vindictiveness, right into your heart, grow more aggressive with your futile insistence to be set free from the metal trap of the neo-witch hysteria. It can be hard (like trusting that the sea will buoy your body if only you let go of primal tension), but trust that the futility is a friend. It grows the potency of your ferocity as long as you stay rooted—rooted in that narrow space where you work yourself up for having been made a sardine and yet where you, wanting to “make it last all night” with this American girl in her slouchy beanie, conduct yourself as if on an empty beach somewhere in the breeze.

Every smartphone is a weapon of mass judgment. But neither this nor the hidden CCTV cameras can excuse slipping away into some private pocket of psychology. It is all to easy to get caught in the human-vent of fantasy: if only I were wearing one of those old-school carnations on my breast pocket—one squirting acid like the joker. If anything, let the nontruth of the counterfactual further fuel your frustration. For ultimately you must go to work. Only give your defense attorney, hands tied by whatever scraps you leave behind, at least a little to work with. Think of it that way. It will keep your will from buckling even as it serves to titillate your will with the promise of a later chance to buckle—perhaps even crumble, delivering you into painless disindividuation: oneness with the World-All.

Try to lock in eye-contact with the one creature not excited by your destruction (or at least not supposed to be): that one officer in the sea of phones raised, several of their owners screeching at you “Don’t you fucking touch her!”—a baiting formula as transparent, of course, as bed moans of “Don’t you dare cum in me!” Throw in a “Please help, officer” or two: the film never stops rolling. The officer will fail on cue to safeguard your free passage. Is this not, after all, a non-castle-doctrine place where squatters have rights over your home (such that you cannot remove them yourself without legal repercussion), a duty-to-retreat state where burglars have won settlements for injuring themselves on the job merely because you set a McCallister boobytrap to deal with a chronic problem—or even, if only on rare occasions, merely because of a broken ankle caused by your wobbly porch railing or a concussion caused by your shoddy weekend-warrior wall mount of the 8k flatscreen with too much street value for any BIPOC to be equitably expected to resist, especially when flaunted (day in, day out) through arrogant bay windows audaciously aimed curbside).

Besides, the officer is white. He is white and, even though you have the asset of being darker than chestnut, he fears that career-shattering r-word in later press. How could he not? Think about it. The press now follows campus activists in stressing the adjective “black” as a moral bludgeon (as a means to leverage the listener’s awareness of racial history and thereby heighten the manipulative force of one’s words)—as in when, to create the impression that blacks are especially precious (such that mistreating a black person is more heinous than mistreating a non-black person), the college ally barks at the professor “Did you just tell a black man where to sit?” or the black student snipes at the white professor who challenged her opinion “Are you seriously calling a black woman wrong?” (both examples invoking an emotionally and historically charged context that makes people second-guess the morality of an otherwise mundane act, cranking up the volume on race to elevate its seriousness even when race was not a factor). So no, the officer—like the countless professors, frozen (were it not for stutters and perhaps even tears)—is unlikely to do anything (even in your favor). Trapped in a narrative the man never wrote, the stakes are too high. Is not this mob, after all, anti-Nazi? It sure is, at least by the look of all their signs: “fuck nazi scum”; “fight antiblack killing”; “white vigilantism = fascism / black vigilantism = freedom.”

So what is to be done? Plead to the mob. Plead—if only for the lenses. Plead through your teeth and muscles clenched by the taunting yells. Plead for someone within the drumhead jury, someone within the raging pack savoring your submission, to empathize with your humanity. Let the one truth—namely, that even though you crave escalation you would not be disappointed (but, in fact, overjoyed) if someone did see your humanity and insisted “Wait, let this man go free”—and let the other truth—namely, that the chance is infinitely small for anyone to meet such a standard, even if they felt an inkling to—build the righteous pressure beneath the cork.

Take on a pitiful tone of a meek victim. The tone, no, is not out of any realistic hope to draw forth enough compassion for your release. Things have escalated past that point. It is to bait them, stoke the appetite. Crowds lust to stomp the downtrodden, polished mirrors to their cruelty. It is out of a desire, moreover, to increase your coiled energy for lashing out at what will thereby swell beyond a ramming wall against free passage to your once-in-a-lifetime interview—swell into a polished mirror of your patheticness (smash-beckoning for you as well, however much it reflects calculated performance).

Plead your urgency. Plead with hopeful expectation since you—the you in some other hemisphere, so to say—well knows that hopeful expectation is ridiculous here, which only fans the building torrent. Explain the critical nature of your interview—a self-imposed torment, since it reminds you of all that is going down the drain and, much more importantly, since you owe no explanation; since only a bitch-ass-punk would give an explanation at this time. Keep your decibel just below their cacophony—a self-imposed catalyst to tap further into the mitochondrial amphetamine harbored within each cell. Even lie and say your wife is in labor, giving the horde all the chances in the world (at the same time, of course, as you add grist to your motivational mill).

Scan the officer’s face once again. Scan back to the young zombies, mostly white and desperate for purpose in the potential virality of doing what is said to be “for your own good” as “a black male in a society that has declared total war on black bodies.” Desperate for purpose, in what? Protesting the death of a martyred lunatic whose unruliness and death threats to subway passengers landed him in the chokehold of a marine (who, for whatever it might be worth to say, received cheers from black commuters in danger but death threats from mostly-white “antiracists” in cyberspace). Scan their faces—scan, scan, scan for a flicker of reason. Try to reach any lucid eyes beyond their algorithm lenses. Even though the race card has already been pulled just looking at you, vocalize your blackness. None of it will make a difference, of course. But unblinking cameras roll for court scrutiny.

So what move do you make from here, something to give your attorney more to work with than just the black card (a trump card in typical situations), before going with a scorched-earth strike: like sticking her smug neck with a poison syringe—antifreeze, bleach, isopropanol, insulin—or even just a brutal headbutt into her nose? Perhaps pivot off your meek presentation with a surprise snatch of a phone glowing in your periphery. And then, as you dash into the train’s recesses, hypnotize yourself to think your sole life-on-the-line mission is to pulverize the phone: as many fragments as possible. Even if it does nothing to help the free flow of bodies, at least you can claim this victory. Admittedly, that is too small a victory to assuage your apoplectic blood pressure. But perhaps the owner will chase you down (into your web), which will provide a pretext for the dagger’s sting should any hands be placed on you.—No, strike that. Rewind the reel.

Start back at the door. Make sure you have a belt can of bear mace (much better than some comic-book carnation), the highest Scoville you can get (five million) and whose stream extends over thirty feet (udap.com). After the cadaverous smiles of mockery press closer, after more and more spittle flies into your mouth and eyes—peel back the safety catch. After sternum rams get harder, after the officer turns a blind eye to your pleas of due diligence—unleash the chemical inferno. What would be the valor of protest, beyond just the valor of having a view, if there were no risk of baptism by liquid fire? Direct the maelstrom right into her face—even slipping in a couple, or seven, canister punches to that mouthpiece—and then over everyone. Refuse to free the trigger as the doors finally close, leaving just enough room for you to spread every last bit of caustic fog.

Let the doors close for protection against the underground gas chamber of your creation. The dagger, scorching a blurry halo around your phoenix form, can then come into action—and righteously so (given the interview, given your own seared blindness)—if any sleeper agent tries to restrain you. Even if you cannot see, even if your main concern is clearing a path, try at least to hear the writhing of numbers on the other side of the glass.

Instead of going the mace route, you could just hold the dagger out from the headbutted spot on your chest and walk forward. Confront the slouchy beanie clone, tattooed in bought exoticness, with a stark choice. Test her resolve. Or perhaps even better, you could walk forward with a bleach-filled syringe. That is not an unreasonable option. Among those Shakespearean-era audiences who lobbed tomatoes or cabbage or fish or rotten eggs at the actors, surely at least some of them carried into the theater something from home. And so could you! The problem is, others among the swarm would no doubt swat away any such device. The bear mace strategy crystallizes, then, as a more satisfying and yet prudent course, balancing both defense and offense in the chaos of the moment.

So burst through the choking fog, blade clenched in your searing fist, heedless of appeals. You are a reasonable man in an unreasonable world. Carve a path of blistered steps through the fallout haze. Destiny awaits along the rails beyond this threshold of necessary violence. Today the cauldron of your boundless potential boils over at last.

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