Boot Straps
We don’t even know what we’re doing here, judge
A man’s gotta a right to try and better himself, even if he’s got to start out small.
But it seems that most people don’t want us to get up at all.
That’s the truth.
We hear all this stuff about us standing around doing nothing to help nobody, and we sort of feel bad.
You know there ain’t a lot of jobs out there for a man to do now-a-days – except maybe those so low that we might as well have reinvented slavery if that’s all the choice we got.
Better we get some poor ho pregnant and split her welfare check, than to break our backs in some fast food slave shop where we’re never going to amount to anything ever and every body knows it.
We figured I’d try and live up to the American dream.
If a man can’t start his own business then what have we got left?
We weren’t hurting nobody by washing windows.
As anybody.
Sure maybe a few tourists didn’t like us coming up to their cars like that.
But tourists don’t like people like us anywhere and would just as soon see us dead as talk to us.
But there wasn’t no call for some of them to try and run us down. We may not be clean, but we’re human
And maybe we got peeved because of that.
Sure we tried to tell the police officers.
But they being who they are and we being who we are, they didn’t bother to listen us, telling us to quit making trouble or they would run us in.
And here people have been telling us how we ought to pick ourselves up by our own boot straps, and we get kicked in the ass anyway.
Or have some overpaid patrol cop telling us we’re getting wise.
Move along, they say, refusing us to give us back our squeegees or rags – stuff we spent good money to buy so we could make a living.
Sure, I bad mouthed him on that account.
But it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t tried to take what wasn’t his.
No, we don’t know what they do with all the stuff they collect around the city. But everybody tells me the cops take their stuff.
But we figured we didn’t make enough from washing windows to have to go out and buy the stuff again, and worse we knew the cops knew it, which is why the cops took it away.
Well, you know how cops are when you start getting in their face the way we did.
And they didn’t want to hear nothing like an apology after we got to the heavy language either.
They just went berserk on us – beating and beating. I almost wound up in Belleview. My head still hurts from the headaches.
We figure after they beat on us enough, they ought to take us down to the jail and charge us proper, which is how we got here.
And it isn’t fair.
What’s a man to do if he can’t try and better himself?
When you have cops taking our stuff every time we try?
Is that justice, judge? You tell me.