Ha Ha Ha In Your Town

Lemay, Missouri is what you might call — what many people do call — a hoosier suburb of St. Louis. In most of the world, hoosier means someone from Indiana. In St. Louis, it means a certain kind of shiftless, belligerent urban/suburban white person that a lot of people mistake for a redneck. Hoosiers are not the same as rednecks, but the differences are subtle and hard to spot without a lot of practice.

Because of this, I generally avoid Lemay: but they have a Steak n Shake restaurant there that hasn’t been molested by the company’s bad ideas about renovation, and so tonight Nicole and I went there for dinner. It’s still got the flashing lights all around the roof, though about 80% of those bulbs are now burnt out.

Lemay Sns1

(This and other pictures of this Steak n Shake available here.)

Anyway, as I said before, Lemay is a pretty low-class place. How low-class is it? It’s so low-class that while we were in there, some jackass broke the window of my car and stole my camera.

I was sitting next to the window, just behind the rightmost bollard in this photo:

Lemay Sns2

The car was about 20 feet or so further behind where the photographer was standing. I’m pretty sure I saw the little cocksuckers who did it, too. At about 8:20 p.m. — at which time it was still very bright outside — two guys walked diagonally through the parking lot. One of them was a rangy-looking black guy who looked to be in his early 20s, wearing a do-rag with a really odd giant polka-dotted baseball cap over it. I remember him not only because of the ridiculous hat, but because he spent a lot of time glaring at the Steak n Shake as he was walking through the lot. I’m sure you’ve seen the look; you get it from hoosiers and hillbillies too, but the Young Black Male has really perfected it — a look of pure malevolence, hatred, and menace, a look that probably does more to foster and reinforce white racism in the U.S. than O.J. Simpson ever did. I call it the ‘Kill My Landlord’ look, after an Eddie Murphy SNL sketch from the 1980s.

This is a close approximation of the Kill-My-Landlord Glare, from the cover of the Washington Post magazine in 2004:

Wp-Killmylandlord-0001

This is a picture of Ralph Chambliss, a.k.a. ‘Blyss’, who is allegedly the “King of D.C. Rap”. When he was photographed by the Washington Post, he chose to look at the camera like this. To judge from his demeanor, it’s not good to be the king. What the fuck? I mean: what the fuck? I know that young black men have a hard time of it, but part of that hard time might be the result of looking at people like this. The rap world loves conspicuous consumption, and maybe this is just another example of that. After all, if you can manage to go around looking at people like this not get your head kicked in, you’ve got to be one tough motherfucker.

Anyway, as a white guy I’m pretty used to being glared at by a certain type of young black guy, so I didn’t think much of it.

Hat-and-K.M.L.-Glare Boy’s companion — who only registered on my consciousness as being there, I didn’t really get a good look at him — split off from him as they walked through the lot. Hat Boy walked behind the four or five cars parked there, more or less across the field of view of the photo above. Didn’t-get-a-look-at-him Boy walked between the right side of my car and the car next to it. When we came out 30 minutes or so later, the window was broken. My camera, which had been sitting on the console between the front seats, was gone. A few other things had been tossed around in the front seat, but as the camera was the only thing in the car worth more than about $10, that’s all they took. The camera was worth about $300, the memory card in it about $100, and replacing the window is about $300 more. And this assumes that I won’t be repairing the gouge in the doorframe where they stuck a screwdriver in to break the window. This would likely be ridiculously expensive, so it’ll just stay there as a reminder to me to be less trusting.

So I’m out about $700, and these little jackasses will get about $50 by pawning my camera. And the next time I see young black men glaring at me, I’ll be a little more likely to assume actual menace, instead of just idiot teenage posturing.