John “Boogie” Brown

an american short story about social conflict, white rappers, and loving your siblings

This story was inspired by a lot of things. I’ve been writing a lot about the multi-racial and multi-cultural character of American society around the 250^th anniversary. This is another story in that vein. The main points are an old video of some guys in Rockford doing a breakdance battle, white rappers, loving your siblings even though they dumb as fuck sometimes, annoying activists realizing real life isn’t the internet, and growing up in a post industrial place. It also has to do with social conflict as all things tend to do these days. Slowly embracing that this Substack will be publishing more fiction as I don’t care to submit anymore to journals that I don’t give a fuck about.

I’m gonna tell you guys a brief story about a white rapper named John “Boogie” Brown. They called him Boogie cause he had a weird dance he’d always do. My sister Monica never called him that, so I always remembered him as John. When people were looting during the riots a couple years ago, he was the first one breaking into the Vans Store. He yelled something like “fuck the police” and started throwing boxes of size eleven Old Skools into the crowd. Before that, I used to see him downtown when I was skateboarding, he’d be the only white guy in a crowd of Black and Latino dudes. He’d be spitting some corny battle rap bars and then doing that wack-ass dance. I think John mostly dated Mexicans. My homie Jordan sees him sometime at car meets these days. He’s always posted up with some baddie, apparently. He was my sister’s age, they went to the same high school. They went to prom together as friends. He never tried to holler at my sister though cause she told him when they met in their sophomore honors english class that she “didn’t date wiggers.” I don’t think people like John really exist anymore. How many white dudes you know these days who rock a Cavs Snapback, a pair of beat up neon green Osiris shoes and some True Religion jeans? Not many. I think John’s step-dad was a sheriff or maybe just a regular cop for the city. Monica told me he used to beat John. He would sleep on the couch in my parent’s house some nights in the summer after the sheriff kicked him out. Eventually John had enough so he ended up living with his grandma, who was the last white woman that lived in the Black-ass East Side. My sister Monica went over to his crib once and punched his grandmother cause she said some racist shit. I don’t think John was even mad about it. He just shrugged and smiled as his grandma screamed. After high school, he drifted around town. He hadn’t done super well in high school, even though he was well liked. John worked a bunch of weird jobs, so I’d see him around. He was a magician, postal delivery man, DJ, weed dealer, janitor and an MC for a poetry nonprofit’s open mic nights. Either way, I think he was unemployed during the riot. That shit was crazy. My sister Monica was there. She was a part of the activist group that organized the protest. She’s about ten years older than me. My homeboy Jordan and I went there to cause some trouble. I can’t lie to you. I’m more of a Malcolm X type, you know? My sister and her friends just wanted to make speeches. But we were trying to get some free shoes and free anything, honestly. We also wanted to smack a cop. She started attacking John talking about some you putting Black youth in danger when she caught us dragging clothes out the Nike Store with him. Monica got a lot less cool when she became an activist. More respectable and less fun. I missed when we used to watch Scooby Doo, play roleplaying games, ride bikes, do graffiti, and do fun stuff like when she took me to the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises. A lot of the times we’d do stuff like that, John would be with us. I remember he dressed up as the Joker for the midnight premiere. Him and my sister loved playing Halo together and listening to Paramore’s music. But once she got back from college, all she ever wanted to do was talk about the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, and feminism. And like, I don’t mind talking about those things sometimes, but it got so bad after Monica went to college. She got so annoying. Anyway, she started shaking John while we continued to take stuff out the store. The security guard had joined in on the looting. He said something like I don’t get paid enough for this shit. John was never a big dude so he was getting flung all over by my sister. I remembered then that she used to do karate classes back in the day. She began to cry and yell about how fucked up John was for putting me and Jordan in danger, but we didn’t really feel in danger. We had just gotten some new shoes. That shit was dope. She just thought we were some dumb ass kids. To be fair, we were. Monica let go of John and kept yelling at us and telling us how we needed to go home. We didn’t listen to her. We had our skateboards and had already broke a bunch of windows. We had t-shirts across our faces. Some of the white people who were dressed like ninjas had started lighting stuff on fire. One of my Monica’s pro-Black activist friends was screaming at them to stop and he got punched. We didn’t want to leave. Monica kept screaming while we built barricades and threw broken pieces of concrete at the cops next to those weird ass white kids in all black. I bet they were from the suburbs. Eventually, we got teargassed so bad that we had to leave. Jordan got separated from us and ended up in jail, but got released cause he was a minor. Monica washed my eyes and covered for me. Told Mom and Dad that I left the protest as soon as she told me to before all the ignorant shit. So she’s still kinda cool. John ended up doing a couple of years in jail cause he punched his step-dad in the face at some point during the riot, as well as instigating the looting. Monica wrote a facebook where she blamed the riot on privileged white people, and said that all it did was damage POC owned businesses and distract from the real goals of the protest. I never really thought of John as privileged. Goofy, sure. But privileged, I dunno. His grandma never had money. People in the comments of the post tagged John. Unfortunately, the police had been watching my sister’s Facebook cause she was a well known activist in our town, so they grabbed John up at his grandma’s. Jordan saw him get pulled out of his house and into the squad car. It looked like they had beat the fuck out of him. Either way, while he was locked up, one of his girlfriends helped him record a mixtape over the prison phones. The mixtape’s name was Came From Nuthin’: The True Story of a East-Side Hustler. Most of it was bad, but there was this song called Cash Cow that kind banged. It was mostly good cause a local rapper me and Jordan liked named $weetMoneyLo was featured on it. He was also there on the streets with us throwing stuff at the police and yelling “I’m proud to be Black” every two minutes. I dunno if John is really that similar to the original John Brown. I remember from class that the original John Brown was basically a white dude that hated slavery so much that he started killing slave owners or something in Kansas. And then, Fredrick Douglass funded him to go start a slave revolt in Virginia. They were supposed to raid an armory to provide arms for the slaves. I think Harriet Tubman was somehow involved too, though she didn’t end up going. My sister’s friend John is different, though. He mostly broke into that store cause he was bored, I think. Just doing ignorant shit for it’s own sake rather than some lofty ideals like Monica’s activist friends, but none of them carried a ten year old to safety after the tear gas started flying like John did. Monica eventually moved out of our hometown. I think she felt bad for getting John arrested, but couldn’t work up the courage to say sorry to him. I don’t hear from her much these days. She told me I was toxic awhile ago, but she’ll still call me on my birthday. I miss her so much. I hope she visits soon. Anyway, a few years later, John eventually got this Puerto Rican girl pregnant and now he works at UPS as a forklift operator. Every so often though, I’ll see one of his videos on Instagram. He still doing that corny ass dance.