If you don’t get the titles reference it means that basically herbivores are loud fuckers, especially compared to those that think they’re nomable. On another note, I’ve been wanting to switch this blog over to stories of more subtle racism, so that last post is probably going to be the last of a dieing breed of posts here on Coloring outside the lines.

So I used to know this white guy who was about 15 years older than me. I was 14 when I met him and we got along fine, mostly because I used him to get out of walking while spic, and he was one of those white boys that wanted to look “thug”. Not the best arrangement, but it worked for us at the time. We’ll call him Ben.

At the time I was working as a server at a Vietnamese restaurant in the Little Saigon area of our city, Usually afterwords I would hang out with my actual friends, however a few times I would go out with Ben because everyone else had plans, and for other reasons that aren’t really important to this post. He lived up in the rich part of the city on Whitey McCracker street. Okay not really, but it was the very rich very white part of town and we always went to his part of town if we were hanging out on our own.

Because he was rich he also liked showing it off and would often take me shopping for no reason, though luckily he didn’t really try to buy me anything after the first time where I tossed all the frivolous shit he gave me. If it can’t be practical it gets tossed away, or it satisfies my pyromaniac tendencies and need for bright shiny fires. However that didn’t stop him from shopping for himself and picking up useful things for me.

Usually he didn’t shop in places that were cheap enough for non-whites to shop in, however every rich neighborhood has at least two token non-whites, usually an Asian and a Black. One time he had taken me to some rather trendy and expensive store, claiming he needed a new pair of shoes. Really it was just an excuse for him to get a $200 pair of Nikes to go with the insanly expensive jeans he had that made him look like he had something sagging them down. I still don’t understand how those pants have been in style for almost 15 years now, they’re not useful and they look ugly as sin, but whatever.

On that day there was a Hispanic kid in the store who obviously wasn’t rich, but he wasn’t poor either. He’d probably had to save for a few months, but he could afford to get the shoes legally and there was no doubt about that. Ben picked up the shoes he wanted after about 30 minutes of of staring at the exact same designs just with different brands and price tags. When we went up to the register the Hispanic kid had just pulled out his credit card. it wasn’t signed on the back though and the cashier refused to accept it without an I.D. The kid was obviously embarrassed and mumbled an apology as he went about searching for his I.D.

The whole spectacle was only about a minute in total, and when the kid left the cashier barely told him to have a good day, not something I could get away with at my job. When Ben came up though the cashier apologized for the inconvenience and took his unsigned card without any problems. He wasn’t even asked to sign for it like the Hispanic kid was.

Ben was dressed in “better” clothes than the kid, however Ben also had a very obviously poor tag-along that looked like they could be his male prostitute from Rentboy or some shit like that. Over all Ben looked like one of the guys I often served who I knew wouldn’t tip because they were rich and had hired a girl so as to have the girlfriend experience with, so they felt entitled to not have to pay attention to others or common decency. If it wasn’t for it being too low brow for his type, Ben would be more likely to steal from the store. But the cashier asked the kid instead of Ben, and than we left the store and didn’t say anything about it, because Ben didn’t think it was odd at all and I was just so horribly uncomfortable with what had happened, especially since everyone else seemed to be fine with it and I wasn’t.

And people wonder why I’m paranoid about being caught in the rich part of town.