Rock Island
By Bill Etem
Copyright 2015 Bill Etem
Cover art by Dora Gonzales
Rock Island
There are now 19 people in the audience at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Rock Island, IL, the place is really starting to fill up.
Me – Bill Etem - ‘I suppose we should begin. I don’t see why we shouldn’t begin. I mean, it’s not as if we’re waiting for some hotshot VIP to show up. And what’s wrong with you people that are here right now? Yeah, I’d like some big-time celebrities to show up, but you can’t always get what you want, and I think it would be pretty damn rude of me to say or imply that you people are people of no importance. Yeah, it would be nice to see, in the audience, Ivanka or Solange or Beyoncé - it would be nice to see someone in the audience here who is so famous and glamorous they only needed one name for the whole world to recognize them - a Messi, a Madonna, a Prince, an Iggy, a Gaga, an MJ, a Shaq, a Lebron etc…OK, listen up, audience participation is encouraged here. If you got something on your mind then just shout it out. No need for that raising your hand rigmarole. So, the Rock Island Symposium is to investigate and diagnose any big huge important problems that may exist with Protestantism. The Moderator is motioning to me that he’s ready to introduce our next speaker.’
Moderator - `Ok, next up is Maurice. He’s a Protestant from Chicago. Maurice says the sign of the cross is sacred to God. I don’t know what else he will tell us. Welcome Maurice!’
There’s polite applause for Maurice from the now 27 or 28 people sitting on folding chairs in the audience at the Symposium, which is held in a large conference room at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Rock Island, IL. You can rent the space for $250 for 3 hours, $100 for each additional hour, and I thought that was reasonable, so I reserved the room and got my speakers lined up and ready to go. I should have given away a lot more free T-shirts, and a lot more free chicken wings, and a lot more free diet cokes, because the room is pretty big and there are lots of empty chairs in it. Live and learn, as they say.
Maurice - ‘Check this out. I knew a ho named Magenta Ivory Slaughtersfield-Potts from South Philly - she is baptized in Jesus but sometimes she forgets she is - and she is real aloof see when she isn’t drinkin’ but when she gets a little tight guys would just move in on her, sayin sh*t like they were short of cash and sayin they would pay her tomorrow if she gave them some love that night, so she would be like yeah yeah OK but you damn well better get your ass to the bank so you can pay me tomorrow, and of course the dudes never had any money for her the next day, or the next day, or the next, so she would get all nasty and sober for a few weeks, but then she’d get drunk again a month later, and then she would be with dudes for free again. She knew this white boy who was an even bigger sh*t-head than she was, I mean he would make huge-ass wagers on fighters and ballers and he didn’t even have any sort of shrewd strategy to his game plan. If you got it on good authority that a fighter is going take a dive in Round 5, and if you hear from some most reputable sources that a hitman is goin’ grease the mother if he don’t take that dive, ok then lay down some cash, but you got to be a big-ass chump to bet on fighters or any sort of game of chance when you ain’t got no inside angle. I mean if you know, from guys on the inside, the balls are gonna be deflated for Brady, well then you lay down a little wager on the big game, cause you know Brady can thread the needle and move the chains all day long on that overrated Seattle D, especially when he got charmin-soft balls to toss around. When Brady can sling those cupcakes to his wideouts and his slot man and to the dudes comin’ out of the backfield, to tuck away and then run like my man O.J. done did back in the day, you just know it’s gonna be a bad day for all them latté drinkers in Seattle. Like I was saying or at least implicating to you gentlemens and ladies earlier, it’s just stupid to not have no sound strategy. I suppose I could invent some story about a small-town white chick who meets a bad-ass brother at a bus station in Peoria who promises he can get her a great job, but then he makes a sex-slave out of her – don’t get into the cars of strangers you clueless white girls…’
Bill Etem, aka Me, – ‘Can’t argue with that.’
Maurice - ‘That’s OK, you can interrupt me once or twice. Now I’m a Protestant who loves the cross and what you is sayin’ is that because I’m not wise to these damned Protestant cults under the sign of the cross, I’m like some dumb-ass white chick from the sticks who gets into the car of some bad-ass dude, thinking he’s a nice guy, until he puts a knife to her throat and forces her to become a ho, and then he takes most of the money she makes as a ho. What you is saying is that I’m like some brainless sh*t-head slave of the Devil, that’s what you is sayin.’
Me – ‘Now you’ve got it! I mean, a person really has his head in the clouds if he can’t see that these sects under the sign of the cross have all fallen away from the True Faith, and therefore they drag people to perdition, and therefore they are, essentially, satanic.’