August 10, 1998

I just found out this morning that I'm not a racist and I feel great about it!

When black kids in New York scream like Nicole Brown Simpson on the subway, I want to beat the shit out of them. When they play their Walkmans so fucking loudly on the bus, I start looking for my M-16. Goddamnit I get so mad that I think I'm going to have a stroke. My heart starts pounding, my palms moisten, my temples throb, and the racial slurs flow through my mind like water shooting out of a tap. I never used to be like that, but then again, I've never been immersed in such a multi-cultural environment like this before.

My growing animosity towards those of a different skin color troubled me deeply. Can one now add the word bigot to "homophobic" (of "homoangry" and I call it) on the growing list of adjectives used to describe Broadway Jim? I hope not, because that is not the kind of person I want to be.

Then this morning, as if he were a messenger from god, a white-as-flour, pony-tailed, red-haired, fat boy sat down next to me, blaring Metallica on his Walkman. So enraged was I by the rudeness of his loud music, that I actually started feeling homicidal. I mean, I absolutely hated this punk, fire-crotch, fuck-face, asshole so much that I wanted to murder him. As I sat and stared at this doughboy sonofabitch, I had visions of jamming a long knife through his left eyeball.

And then it hit me--like I was shot by a diamond, a diamond bullet right through my forehead. My feelings of hate toward the pony-tailed doughboy matched exactly the feelings I get when some corn-rowed kid named Ginandtonica is screaming obscenities to her friends Dentyne and Duracell on the E train. It has nothing to do with the color of someone's skin. Absolutely nothing. It is the behavior that enrages me.

This morning's bus ride was a watershed moment; the kind that only happens once or twice in a man's life. I realized, with absolute certainty and clarity, that I am not a racist. I am not a classist either. I am a Mannerist.

Rude behavior is rooted in ill-breeding. If parents, white or black, don't teach their kids to have manners, then they'll grow up to be disdained by polite society. (And ridiculed by Broadway Jim)

On my walk to work from Port Authority this morning, I was once irritated by noise--this time the culprits were some screaming white girls (calling out to their stupidly-named white girl friends, Summer, Maya, Zoe, and Sloane). I hated this screaming white trash as much as I did the guy on the bus, as much as I did the loud children of a darker hue of whom I've already spoken.

Being a Mannerist also would explain my homoangry feelings of which I have written extensively in past reports. I've become aware that it is not the quiet, suit-and-tie homosexuals that disturb me. It is the loud, angry, in-your-face fags that stir the embers of rage in my mind.

It is so nice to have compartmentalized my hate. There is an egalitarian quality about it. Martin Luther King, Jr. asked us to not judge a person by the color of their skin, but by "the content of their character." Good manners are a reflection of a good character. Anyone, regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation can learn good manners. To dislike only those with bad manners means I can dislike those of every race, religion, and sexual orientation equally. A polite, gay, Hindu, black man can always be my friend; a rude, straight, Baptist, white guy cannot.

Perhaps someday I will even be friends with the screaming kids on the train or the Metallica-loving doughboy on the bus. For, you see, courtesy is contagious, and it's never too late to start being polite. If we all spoke a few octaves lower and remembered to say sir, ma'am, excuse me, please, and thank you, this city (and this entire country) would be a much more pleasant place to live.

 

Thank You For Your Time,

Broadway Jim Jenkins