in America, just dark enough to
pass for Latino, walking around jail
doing bad Mexican-gangster
dialogue from the movies. “Shit’s
about to get loco, ese.” That’s
basically what I was doing—the
South African version of that. This
was my brilliant plan to survive
incarceration. But it worked. The
guys in the cell with me, they were
there for drunk driving, for
domestic abuse, for petty theft.
They had no idea what real colored
gangsters were like. Everyone left
me alone.
We were all playing a game,
only nobody knew we were playing