I had a big booty and a cute face, but I guess that wasn’t enough.

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Solomon loved to be called Daddy. He had dozens of women and hundreds of children. He liked to call me into the bathroom when he was sitting in the tub, naked as a beached whale and nearly as big.

“Bettye,” he said, “I still haven’t gotten you in my church.”

Solomon was a preacher with a mail-order divinity degree. In church, he sat on a throne and wore a crown on his head.
“And you won’t be getting me in that church anytime soon,” I said.
“You don’t think it’s good to praise and worship God?”
“If this God of yours is so perfect, I’m wondering why he needs all this praise and worship. Is he that insecure?”
“He’s not insecure. We are. We need the security we get when we tell him he’s worthy.”
“So that’s the deal—kiss God’s ass and God makes you feel okay.”
“You twisting it around.”
“You’re the one who’s twisting to make sense out of something that’s plain nonsense.”
“How can you live without faith?”
“You need faith, I agree. But faith in what? Faith in the fairy tales you read about in the Bible? I don’t think so, Solomon. Faith in other people, faith in yourself. Oh, Lord, save me from this preacher man!”
Solomon laughed and got out of the tub. I liked our conversation, not because I was about to convert to whatever form of Christianity he was peddling, but because he was a genuinely nice guy.
“How you make love to someone that big?” my cousin Margaret asked me.
“Simple,” I said. “You sit on him.”

Crazy about titty ‘cause I sucked my mother’s titties so long

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Over the past ten years I’ve been doing home improvements, laying rugs, building furniture. I like to go down to Atlantic City, have a good time and come back. Who cares … I’m a cook at the Blarney Rock restaurant, that’s 267 Madison Avenue. We got corned beef, roast beef, daily specials … I was workin’ at the pop factory – Old Dutch pop factory that was on Homan and 13th somewhere around the ABC club … I had a good job at Ford motor factory – at that time I was bringing home $377 every two weeks. I was on one of the hardest jobs in the plant … Being good in this business doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to make it. That’s life …

"I'm not going to let another damned white police come in my house."

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The executions of such diverse youths as if they were all black militants, which none of them was, or snipers, which none of them was, or pimps, which none of them was.

"He tried to say he shot Auburey because Auburey tried to kill him. So how could Auburey have been trying to kill him when he didn't even have a gun or knife. The man was beating him so that he tore off his face and half his eye was hanging out his head, and when he tore up his face like that, and he was still hollering, he shot half his arm off. He said he was a white-woman lover. They walked in there and called them nigger lovers, and they took their gun and cut the clothes off of them and beat their heads and called them nigger lovers and stripped them bucknaked before all them peoples up there. And then the police say, 'I only killed him cause he was trying to kill me.' Wasn't no way in the world somebody going to try to kill you, they ain't got nothing in their arms and you got a machine gun and rifle and beating his brains out. 
"Honest to God, they was laughing in the courtroom about them getting set free. If they turn him loose, they ought to turn every damn body in jail loose. And that ugly lawyer sitting up there with his puny face there, he was lying like a dog, and I told him. I want justice done so bad I can taste it. Just because he was wearing a damned uniform, he can be put out free! Let's turn them all loose! Turn them loose, that's the way I feel about it. I don't see how the son of a bitch can walk the goddam streets. Something ought to be on his conscience. Something ought to be on his god dam conscience. To think that they shot that eighteen-year-old boy's groins out before they killed him - the Cooper boy. Don't you think his mother's a hurt mother? She's hurt! These things don't wear off of us. Write the book! Write it! Tell them how they killed them just because they seen them two white girls in there in the room. I'm going to tell that, too, in court. I'm going to tell it if I have to drop dead and I have to pay a fine. I'm going to see how they're going to cut me off. I want the world to know."

"Dogface, Jet Pilot of Jive, Fatman Smith, Rockin' Lucky ..."

 

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Above all other subjects there is in blues a preponderance of lyrics about sexual love, or merely sex. A complex language of metaphors, often domestic or culinary, camouflaged a multitude of sexual references. ‘I want my biscuits in the daytime and my jelly at night,' declares one singer. 'My stove's in good condition, this is the stove to brown your bread,' his woman replies. A swaggering list of the singer's physical attributes was common, with women no less than with men. 'I'm a big fat woman with meat shakin' on the bone, and every time I shake it a skinny woman leaves her home.' Sexual virtuosity is the subject of scores of blues and the singer played a game with the censor when he sang The Dirty Dozen or Shave 'Em Dry.

They were weird and different and didn't play songs like everybody else

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Lester Bangs: Rolling Stone had flown me up to San Francisco to check me out, since I had been writing for them for about six months. I guess they wanted to see if I was executive timber. I guess I wasn't, because not only did I get moved from Greil Marcus's to Langdon Winner's house after about two days, but I thought it was as curious that they sat around, not even smoking pot, but listening to Mother Earth and Creedence with absolute seriousness, as they were bewildered by my penchant for guzzling whiskey all day while blasting 'Sister Ray' at top volume ... to make a dismal story mercifully short, I discovered a magazine in Detroit called Creem, whose staff was so crazy they even put the Stooges on the cover. Of every issue! So I left my job and school and girlfriend and beer-drinking buddies and moved to Detroit, where my brand of degenerate drool would be not only tolerated but outright condoned, and over the five years I worked at Creem we used our basic love for it to exploit the punk aesthetic and stance in just about every way humanly possible.

long-haired dope-smoking street-fucking rock-and-roll maniacs

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An editorial in the Detroit Free Press thundered against the love-in: “It was not the love which got out of hand on Belle Isle Sunday. It was the hate. The outcasts of a decent society, the organized motorcycle gangs like the Outlaws, revel in harm and destruction. …The love-in was invaded by the greasy-haired, filthily dressed hoodlums who would probably come unglued in a bathtub. Instead of soda pop, pretzels and garlands of dandelions, they brought beer, wine, motorcycles and an itch for a rumble.” Yet again there were calls to get tough on crime. Letters to the papers encouraged the police to be less lenient on the city’s youth and their belligerent subcultures and for the hippies to join the real world. Many commentators dismissed the love-in as part of a wider malaise of a society that had no respect for authority. Earlier in the month, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey had traveled to West Berlin, where his visit was disrupted by hippies carrying what appeared to be a bomb. On inspection, the incendiary device was nothing more than a pie. The European new left understood that stunts, pranks, and spectacles generated disproportionate amounts of free publicity. In Germany the left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof wrote in the underground magazine Konkret, “It is thought rude to throw custard pies at politicians, but not to welcome politicians who have villages wiped out and cities bombed. …Napalm yes, custard no.” The slogan Custard Yes, Naplam No became one of many used to demonstrate against chemical warfare in Vietnam.