Gift Basket

(Some credit goes to the comedian Gabriel Iglesias for the idea)

Last year, there was nothing but open houses. Pretty much every weekend was some kind of party, mostly in the days graduation party, at nights...well, graduation after party. It was free food every weekend, and my family could tell how popular I was just by the sheer mass of invites I received. They had no idea I had so many friends.

There were many games of volleyball played. I got really good at that game by the end of the summer. A crude bean bag toss game where there's a slanted board (probably about fourteen inches to sixteen inches long, eight to ten wide and tilted at about a twenty five degree angle) and the point is to throw a bean bag onto it and get it to stay or even better to go into a hole towards the top part of it. I got pretty decent at that game. Made so many buckets you might as well have called me Charlie! (Charlie Bucket, the kid from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory...yeah, a very esoteric joke I suppose)

There were a couple parties that really stood out in my mind, but there was one thing that surpassed everything. That thing was the racist gift basket.

I have a black friend, he's my only black friend. Now, this isn't due to a racist or prejudice reason, I mean, hell, I am a person of tanliness, but around here, the general populace happens to be that of white like snow. Unless they tan a lot. Then in that case they're just cooked.

So just because I liked foolin' around with this guy, I decided to do a bit of shopping. I had an extra twenty dollars and I decided to make it stretch. I'm very glad everything was on sale. The list flowed as follows:

BBQ Potato Chips - 6 Pack
Funions - 2 Pack
Fried Chicken - Whole Chicken (never seen a whole fried chicken before this day)
Grape Kool-Aid - 6 Pack
Grape Soda - 12 Can Pack & 2 Liter
Watermelon Bubbleyum
The biggest watermelon I could find
Black Gentleman Quarterly - A magazine

The only thing that was missing was 40oz., but I'm not 21 so I couldn't buy it. That was all the money I had anyway and I decided it was adequate enough as was. I decided to wrap it up, everything but the watermelon, and put it in a gift bag.

I know that some of you live in other countries, but to sum up, here in America, these are the things that a stereotypical black man likes. I'm too poor to afford obnoxiously big rims/spinners for his car, can't buy fat white women, and he doesn't like hip-hop so I wasn't going to buy a CD he wasn't going to listen to, even as a joke, so that was what I was going to give him.

I finally arrived at his party, and I inconspicuously left it on the gift table; the bag in front of the watermelon. I quickly sauntered off and joined the rest of the party and started to have a fun time swimming and doing things, eating, hydrating myself, the norm. The moment soon approached when I was filling my plate with more food (I eat a lot, read back through this blog to anyone that's new and you'll see) I heard a roar of laughter. Believing I missed a joke or something, I shoved a piece of chicken in my mouth, threw some fruit on my plate and jettisoned out. I saw everyone around the table and my friend have this smile on his face. One of those smiles where he wants to laugh, but at the same time he doesn't.

I see he has just begun to go through the bag and is pulling out things one after the other. He pulls out everything, the chips, drinks, chicken, and after every time he appears speechless. Everyone snickers or laughs at what seems to be an endless bag of racist foods until he pulls out the magazine with a big black guy staring very threateningly at the camera in his picture and everyone loses it. I have the biggest smile when he looks over at me.

"I...was....", he sighs again, "Was this really all your doing? Did you buy all this?"

"Yeah, it ran me a good twenty bucks", I said after swallowing some grapes.

"A part of me doesn't want me to like this as much as I do...but I know, I know...that all of this is going to be gone by the end of the night", and he pulled me forward for a man hug.

Best 20 dollars I had ever spent.