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| Forget swimming pools and movie stars. Try Kool-Aid and Black People... |
IN GENERAL,
I DO NOT eat soul food. Ribs, chicken, cornbread, mac and cheese, yes…but, deep cuts, nah. I do
not like pig’s feet. Or chitterlings. Or black-eyed peas. Or collards. When black
people learn this about me they do not care that my people are from Barbados and
not Alabama. They not only demand my union card, they want me to volunteer it.
With shame. I tell them I earn it back every time I buy a house and months after
receive a letter from the state’s attorney general telling me the mortgage
companies racially profiled me, overcharged me on points and interest rate and
thus my name has been added to a class-action discrimination suit (You laugh,
but it’s happened two of the three times I’ve purchased a home. Mortgage Master,
Bank of America and Wells Fargo, all guilty).
I love the
improvisational genius of black people. The making something out of nothing
valuable _ so valuable that white people will want what they gave us back _ is
the genius of hip hop. The conditions, the environment, the danger, the utter
lack of resources – are the ghetto, and yet black people found a way to turn
those conditions, designed by the state and private industry to ensure the failure of an
entire people, into a billion-dollar sound. Nobody like us.
Taking nothing (for example the unwanted
remains of a slaughtered pig) and making an international cuisine of it, was
rooted in survival but is also an example of that improvisational genius. And let
there be no mistake: black people were never intended to make it here. We were
brought here to work. For free. We ate what was left, and now soul food
restaurants are so cool they exist in Scottsdale, Arizona, a place that as late
as the early 1960s did not allow black people within city limits after dark. Nevertheless, I
remain undeterred. You can call me inauthentic. You can demand by black card,. You can disinvite me to the cookout (I’m coming, anyway), but
chitterlings are, and forever will be, pig intestines.
And they are nasty.
My mother used to stink up our
house cooking chitlins. I would turn green and she would sneer, “You’re not
my son.” It was in this spirit of emotional scarring that I arrived at Lo Lo’s
Chicken and Waffles in Scottsdale.
Lo Lo’s has
been in Scottsdale for years. It is where black baseball people meet. Chicken
and Waffles sound alternately delicious and repulsive (two sides of the
American coin when it comes to food). In the spring of 2017, after a morning at
Giants camp, former all-star Ellis Burks and I did Lo Lo’s for lunch. Ellis
played 17 years in the big leagues _ Red Sox, White Sox, Rockies (Shoulda been MVP in 1996), Giants,
Indians, and lastly won a ring with the 2004 Red Sox _ and now works as a
special assistant with the Giants. Shawon Dunston, a Giants coach and another
former all-star, was supposed to join us, but he did not.
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| Ellis Burks: 18 years, 2,107 hits, 352 HRs, two-time All-Star, one Hall of Fame story. |
We sat at a
high top, a long table for multiple diners, but it was just the two of us. The food is enormous, colossally
unhealthy but decadently good (I had the Phat Azz Samich: catfish, cheese, bacon on a brioche bun). Fitting for America, virtually everyone both working
and dining at the restaurant would be medically classified as morbidly obese. The food smelled good. It tasted damned good, and I was getting _ as they say in Oakland _ hella mad.
Some people let their politics get
in the way of their sports. Others let politics get in the way of their sex. My
politics get in the way of my food. Pig’s feet smell awful. It’s been so long I
cannot remember having ever tasted them, but despite my admiration for our
entrepreneurial genius, my politics are insulted that I am asked to eat what
other cultures throw away. I am told to like it. I am inauthentic if I don't. I am told to disregard the
obvious health hazards to eating our cultural cuisine. I am told, even more disgustingly
than the smell of chitterlings, that rejecting eating the dregs, all that they
would let us have, is not only anti-black but a plea to be white. That is some
bullshit.
“Yeah to all that,” my cousin Chuck
once said. “But chitlins with some hot sauce taste goooooood.”
Lo Lo’s
sells Kool-Aid. Not fruit punch. Kool-Aid. For reals. Ellis and I laughed at
the stereotype in commercial action, especially as the brothers in there were
drinking it was Fiji water, the natural spring of the homeland. I look over Ellis’ shoulder and there
is San Francisco Chronicle beat writer Henry Schulman, getting down on a lunch
special while tapping on the laptop. When they served it in 32-OUNCE MASON
JARS, I started going dark again. Death by Kool-Aid and waffles. The Diabetes
Special. Killing ourselves isn’t funny.
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| "What's your favorite flavor?" "Blue." |
I love
being around the black heritage of baseball. I first interviewed Ellis Burks in
1997 at the Oakland Coliseum. Rockies-A’s interleague. He was taking batting
practice listening to Cameo’s “Candy” on the loudspeaker and singing along. Jim
Rice taught him how to tip, how to be a big leaguer. We’ve known each other 20
years. We laugh at the time back in Boston when his manager Joe Morgan (the
other one) brought him into his office, circa 1989 or 1990. He was hitting over .300. The team was playing well. Morgan was rambling. Burks was wondering why he was in the manager's office. Then Morgan dropped it on him: Somebody saw Burks with a white girl and it got back to Morgan.
"Just be careful," Morgan told his young centerfielder. "I hear you been chasing that cat a little bit too hard lately."
"That cat?"
"Yeah. That white cat. I hear you been getting after it lately."
We order.
There’s blue Kool-Aid on my table. An old white man walks by who reminds me of
Whitey Bulger. I dive into the Phat Azz samich. Ellis says matter-of-factly, “Did I
ever tell you the time I hung out with Whitey Bulger?”
Uhhhhhhhhhhhh….Whaaa?
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| Black Jeopardy answer: "Did I ever tell you the time I hung out with Whitey Bulger?" What is, "Something you never expected Ellis Burks to say?" |
"Had to be my rookie year,” he says.
“I was out one night after a game at some bar and these guys were talking and they
come over to me and a couple of friends. These were big guys surrounding one
guy. This guy was the somebody, because no one did anything unless he said to. Everybody
was afraid of him. A half-dozen people waited on him hand and foot. The whole
time I was there he was asking me about the team, so I figured he was another Red
Sox superfan. He’s asking about Boggs and Clemens, injuries. They wanted inside
stuff on guys – who was healthy, who was having marital problems. What was
going on with this guy’s slump, whatever.
“Then a couple of his guys asked me
if I wanted to come hang out at their place. I didn’t know the difference
between the South End and Southie, so I said, ‘Yeah.’ And I end up in Southie.
Seriously. Like I said, I had just gotten to Boston. I was brand new. So we go
to this place _ this unbelievable penthouse _ and it is wild: girls,
bodyguards, people hanging out. It’s crazy. The guy tells me to take whatever I
want. And he’s pointing at the girls, too. I said I had a girlfriend. He said ‘Everybody
does.’ Then they start wheeling out serving carts with cereal bowls full of
cocaine. Anything you want. It’s yours.
“Now, I see
that shit, and I’m getting scared. I can’t be around no kind of drugs. I gotta
get outta there. I tell them, ‘I gotta go. We’ve got a game tomorrow.’ I get
ready to leave and he says to me, ‘I know this town. I know how this town is.
If anyone – ANYONE – gives you any shit, for any reason, you come see me, all
right?’ All night, I had no idea who he was. End of the story. Never saw him
again. Never spoke to him again. That was it. All these years later, he gets
caught. I see it on TV and I was like, ‘OH SHIT THAT’S THE GUY!!’” - HB
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