"WILLIE" Chapter Eight: THE ONLY PLEASURE my brothers and I had in getting even with our stepfather, Willie was when he ordered me to make him coffee. He seemed to like my way of preparing him the instant brew that he so much loved to drink. This provided me, Bunny and Virgil the opportunity to express our creativeness. We would hurry to our bedroom where we each peed small amounts of urine in the coffee mug. Since Bunny and Virgil were not circumcised, they had what seemed like an endless supply of "cottage cheese" under their foreskins to "cream" our abusive stepfather's coffee. We then spat globs of sputum in the mug and I mixed the remaining contents of instant coffee, hot water, cream and sugar. When I handed Willie his mug of coffee, he would say: "Nigger, you can't do anything right, but you sure can make a damn good cup of coffee." He never complemented me on anything else. Grinning obsequiously, I would say, "Yes sir, just let me know when you need a refill." ******** If you are under 50 years old, you probably have little knowledge who HowdyDoody was. You may have been fortunate enough to have heard your parents or grandparents mentioning the name and noticed a gleam in their eyes as they unconsciously begin singing the "HowdyDoody Show" jingle. After World War 2, the small black and white screen televisions begin to replace the radio in many of America's homes. The HowdyDoody Show was probably America's first successful children's program. Indeed, it lasted for several decades. HowdyDoody was a marionette cowboy with inconspicuous strings that children ignored-at least my brother's, and I did. The complicated life of my early childhood growing up in a poor Black Appalachian inner-city Ohio family during post World War 2 is nothing compared to the adult complexities and sufferings now in my life due to the residue of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Undeniably, however, with the help of HowdyDoody and a few other cowboys, my childhood memories still brings up warm heartfelt memories of the era growing up with family/friends. However, this Memoir's Time-Capsule Edition comes with a lot of tragedies and heart-aches due to racism, greed, lies and various war wounds. All the military warriors grew up watching HowdyDoody Show. Singing its jingle took our minds off the War. The various physical/emotional pains caused by AgentOrange's exposure, the HowdyDoody jingle becomes my meditating mantra, and I'm seven again. Large Corporations, like Monsanto, and the few wealthy individuals, who ran them, also ran world governments. This is done without the considerations of the rest of us as they made themselves wealthy from our sweat and blood, and their lies. War is a deception where the wealthy of Large Corporations and government politicians exchange laundered money for each another's lies from the blood of the warriors and the innocent. My Memoir shares a lot of my experiences, and what I've learned living inside the skin of this dark pigmentation. ******** At age12, weighting only 88 pounds, I was a member of my Junior High school's track team. One night when jogging, several police cars encircled me with their pistols aimed at me. A white woman jumped out of one of the police cars yelling that I was the nigger who beat up her husband, took his money, and stole his taxi. The whole scenario was not only scary, but silly. I never sat in a driver's seat of a car in my life. Plus, I was too little to beat up an adult. After explaining my situation, the police sergeant challenged me to run a small distance for him just to see "how fast I could run." Fortunately, another policeman told him not to do it. So I was taken me to the police station. This story is told in Chapter 10, entitled: "The Yahoos." That was the night HowdyDoodyDied. It was the same year of the Black13-year-old Emmett Till's horrible lynching took place in Mississippi. Nothing much has changed in America, has it?