When I was living on Belmont Avenue, I worked forty hours a week, painting. Saturday mornings were a restful ritual. I would wake, bake, and listen to rap. It was usually Check your Head by the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy’s Nation of Millions.

(By the way, I’m White.) Driving home from work one day, I heard on the radio that Public Enemy was performing at the Richmond coliseum that evening. It was the Apocalypse 91 tour. Walking toward the entrance, some black guys waved me over. One of them sold me a ticket for $10. It turned out to be legitimate.

I walked around the coliseum casually, oblivious to the fact that I was the only white person there. Well…there was a pocket of white people huddled together in a nook. I knew some of them from the dormitory days. I stopped to chat, then I went back to walking around. I entered the auditorium and found a seat.

The concert was pretty good. There were a ton of opening acts. I remember Naughty by Nature, Geto Boys, and Queen Latifah. Public Enemy only performed for about 45 minutes. At the end, they hanged a Klansman in effigy. When the show was over, I was walking toward the entrance and someone behind me said, “Get a rope.”

Fast forward to Thanksgiving 1999. I was living in Nashville, things were tough. I visited family in New York City. Money was tight, but I’m glad I got to experience the city as much as I did. It was a non-smoking apartment on the upper East Side of Manhattan. My sleep schedule was erratic. Sometimes I would need a cigarette at one in the morning. I would walk along the riverside, having a smoke at one in the morning.

One evening, I got lost walking around. Luckily, I found a pay telephone that only needed one quarter. I was a terrible fool. I wanted to go downtown by myself. I got on a subway, thinking it was heading that way. After two stops, I figured out that I was going the wrong direction. It was a long walk through Spanish Harlem.