The Exciting Adventure of FramptonMan!

(An excerpt from his amazing book, LIVING ON THE STREETS: HOW TO GO DOWN WITHOUT GOING OUT, available at www.loompanics.com. Highly recommended. The following excerpt has been edited for this publication.)

One dark and stormy night back in 1976, when I was a 19-year-old fool, I was renting a room at the flophouse, the Empress Hotel, deep in the heart of San Francisco's Tenderloin district. And what a magnificent joint it was, the Empress Hotel. I had been living on the streets, but I thought it would be "safer" to be indoors, behind lock and key. Ha ha. Don't kid yourself. Some of those inner city flophouses are death traps. And by and large it's the Black males that make them so deadly. You got a problem with me saying that? Then go and live in one of them. Hmmm?

Anyway, as I walked down the hallway to my room on the third floor one night, I passed four young Black males loitering around in the hallway.

Heaven forbid I would pay any attention to this situation. Why, to react any differently to them than I would react to, say, four elderly Chinese women, would not only be "racist," but "sexist" and "ageist" as well. Could anything be a greater crime than that under the PC Thought Control Regime that we all live under nowadays?

Anyway, before I could get inside my room they came running down the hallway after me and one of them managed to wedge his foot in my doorway before I could shut my door. They forced themselves in my room and one of them grabbed a razor-sharp knife from my bureau that I used to sharpen my pencils and pressed it up to my throat. He began ranting and screaming at me about how his girlfriend "had just been killed by a motherfuckin' White guy!!" In other words, it was payback time. One of the Black guys immediately stationed himself at the window as a lookout, while the other two guys rifled through my stuff grabbing anything of value. It was obvious they had done this routine many times before.

I don't know if you've ever been in this kind of situation, but the weird thing is, you don't feel any fear. I have this distinct memory of floating out of my head and up to the ceiling as I watched the scene unfold, like watching a movie of something happening to somebody else. Weird.

At the time, I had this dream of making it as a cartoonist. I had been laboring over a strip called FramptonMan - it was a superhero take-off featuring rock star Peter Frampton, (who was big at the time), as a superhero, fighting against the evil Mick Jagger and the heinous Stones Gang. During one scene, Mick and the boys execute Donny and Marie Osmond with heavy metal power chords, and then FramptonMan flies in to save the day. It was one of the first strips I ever drew. Really horrible stuff.

Anyway, the FramptonMan strip-in-progress happened to be sitting on top of my dresser. For some reason, I said to the Black guy terrorizing me with the knife: "Wait! I want to show you something," and I cautiously picked up the drawing pad from the dresser and held it up in front of me like a shield. "I draw cartoons," I said. "That's all I want to do, draw cartoons."

To this day, I don't know whether I struck some kind of responsive chord of humanity in him by sharing with him my meager hopes and dreams of making it as a cartoonist. Or maybe the FramptonMan cartoon was so lousy that he felt sorry for me. But, for whatever reason, he decided not to slice my head off. One of his partners said, "We got the stuff. Let's get out of here!" And, after a moment's hesitation, they all fled out the door and down the hall.

I often think how easily my life could have ended right there, before I even got started. Nineteen-years-old. In a sense, everything since that point has been gravy. Or it could just be that Life was not finished with me yet. And the moral is: Fuck you, you fat-ass White Liberal columnist spewing your mind-fucking poison. Be on guard, my friend. You might not get a second chance.

An Odd Epilogue

I had another odd scene a couple of months ago. I was walking down a dark, deserted street, when I noticed four Black guys headed towards me. Of course, I immediately tensed up a little (unlike the heroic White Liberal, of course, who, in similar circumstances, would certainly be immune to such low tendencies). It was a narrow sidewalk, and I braced myself for the old "No-you-get-out-of-MY-way-boy!" routine, or whatever other trouble might be inflicted on me.

Just as they got right up to me I realized it was Hootie and some of the guys I used to play basketball with in the park. Some of the nicest, sweetest guys you could meet. We slapped hands and reminisced about those days on the b-ball courts, some of the best days of my life. I was famous for being out there every day, for years. This was in the days before Rodney King and before O.J. Those days. It was the days of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and Chris Mullin and Manute Bol. Those days.

But after Rodney King, it was just different somehow. I stopped going to the b-ball courts and I stopped hanging out with Black guys. There was just too much racial tension and animosity - hundreds of years worth of it. And for me, normal human relationships are difficult enough, without this racial shit thrown on top of it. Those old carefree days were gone. Now it was the days of Latrell Sprewell and Black guys strangling White coaches. These days.

As I walked away from Hootie and the guys I felt sad. They had asked me why I didn't hoop anymore and I told them I was "on the disabled list." The mentally disabled list. If there's any good news on the Black Crime front, it's that, after 30 years of the crime rates getting worse and worse every year, it finally peaked around the Rodney King/O.J. period in the mid-90s. And now it's finally starting to go back down. I've heard plenty of explanations for this decline in our violent crime rate - tough-on-crime measures, three-strikes laws, more funding for police, etc. But I don't think it's a coincidence that the crime rates started going down almost exactly right after Farrakhan organized that Million Man March.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the first major Black demonstration in my lifetime that wasn't centered around the concept of Blame Whitey. Instead, the Million Man March was an appeal for Black men to reflect on their own lives and their own behavior and to seek atonement and forgiveness. My hats off to Farrakhan for organizing that thing.