You can’t always trust yo’ multi-cultural money-making schemes to go as planned.
Fear not tho! Your wife’s street cred can lend you a hand…
“Oh, sh*t. I can’t just repost these tickets for resale on TicketMaster’s website? Dammit, what am I supposed to do with these sweet, sweet seats for the Valentine’s Day comedy show.”
Typically, my entrepreneurial side-hustle as a, shall we say, ‘small-scale ticket broker,'1Don’t you dare use the s-word–the one that rhymes with the last name of Jim from The Office–around me, or I’ll come hunt you down and perform the literal act on you. was almost dishonestly simple: sign up for alerts when tickets shows at local venues go on pre-sale, log into TicketMaster/LiveNation 15 at least minutes early, refresh constantly because they would normally let you start purchasing tickets 10 minutes earlier than the published time, snag between 2 and 5 pairs of the best seats available, immediately turn around and repost them on the same website, and just wait for that inevitable notification that they’ve sold for a handsome profit.’
Okay, so maybe describing the process was quite the mouthful, but trust me, actually doing it was simpler than writing the preceding paragraph. Usually.
“Alright, no problem…let’s just go with Plans B and C: posting them on VividSeats and/or StubHub.”
*a few moments later…*
“What the hell, VividSeats and StubHub? What kind of racist bullshit is this? How can ignore possible the biggest comedic event of the year that Black Durham will have access to? Have you not heard of these renowned African-American comedians featured in the latest Loves To Laugh tour? Such as…uh…umm…”
*checks notes*
“Well, in fairness, I don’t exactly recognize any of these names either–but then again, I’m admittedly whiter than a freshly powdered ski resort, so there’s plenty of excellent entertainment options outside my relatively narrow personal tastes,” I said, apparently addressing my computer screen, as there was no one else around to hear me.
“I mean, I figured that the reason I hadn’t heard of them was simply because Black comedy wasn’t particularly my jam–but dear Lord, have I done ----- up and bought tickets to an act that nobody knows about or cares enough to go see???” I continued my unsolicited soliloquy.
“Dammit, I should have none Karma was going to bite my lily-white ass for trying to profit off minorities…”
“Two words: Craig’s. List.”
I had been in denial for about an hour before I admitted to myself what I would need to resort to. And it’s not just that reselling tickets on Craigslist wasn’t already sketchy enough to begin with, but then you throw in the fact that I use an email address that is explicitly based on a name that I should have no legal standing to claim, and you can see how I would want to avoid dealing with the so-called ‘Craigslist Dance’.
Oh, what’s that you say, Dear Reader? Oh, right–the Craigslist Dance, in which both parties to a transaction circle each other trying to suss out whether the other is legit, much like two strange dogs sniffing each other’s butts when they first meet in attempt to discern whether the other is trustworthy. Or for whatever reason dogs snort ass–heck I don’t know, I’m not a scientist2Narrator: “He was, in fact, a scientist”.–but I do know it makes for a vivid and memorable analogy. Amiright? Right.
“Dear White Jesus, please don’t let me end up in some dark alley in Durham,3For the record, *ahem*, that ‘dark alley in Durham’ phrase was actually uttered by Black friend of mine, not me. just trying to avoid taking a loss on these ----- tickets,” I prayed, adding, “Just kidding, Jesus, I know that you were really brown or Black; please forgive me for the off-color joke–and for not being able to resist that last pun…”
“How about we meet at the gas station at the intersection of [redacted] and [redacted] road after work? That’s just down the street from job on the campus of a local university that shall not be named.”
As soon as I uttered those words to my potential customer, I became painfully aware of how my business transactions were sliding closer and closer the shadier end of the spectrum.
“But hey,” I reassured myself, “at least it’ was not ‘dark alley in Durham’ shady (yet). And at least this Kevin guy sounds legit. ‘Kevin’…now that’s an honest-sounding name.”
Funny thing about Kevin…he was actually the third guy to contact me about the tickets, but the first guy not to be named ‘Jay’. And–fun fact–I still have those 2 guys’ contacts info in my phone to this very day, under ‘Jay Loves2Laugh’ and ‘JayAlsoLoves2Laugh’, respectively. And one of these days, one of these Jays is going to get a call from me, on account of the fact that is also the name of my closest brother (who, incidentally, only likes to laugh), and every time I try to text or call him I’m always only a mis-swipe or mis-tap of the finger on the scale of sub-millimeters away from blowing up a brother’s phone–and to be clear, I mean ‘brother’ in the colloquial sense here, not the literal one. Because, that is actually what I’m quite literally trying to do: blow up my biological brother’s phone. Well not literally blow up his phone–that part is still figurative, it’s the broth–oh, you know what? This side-quest of a paragraph is getting quite absurd, so I’ll just abruptly end this thought and move on with the story.
“So, these are clearly great seats–my girlfriend will love them–but I gotta ask: why are you selling them then?” Kevin inquired, leaning out the driver’s side window of his Ford Explorer.
This, of course, was after what I could clearly see was a case of mild shock when he saw such a melanin-deficit brother as myself stroll up to his vehicle from out of nowhere. I couldn’t help but internally chuckle to myself at that rather humorous mental picture.
For my part, it was now my turn to be caught slightly off-guard: I couldn’t tell him the mostly-honest truth of ‘I thought I could make a quick buck off of your people, but am finding that strategy to be blowing up in my face.’ But I hadn’t come up with a back story either.
“Um, well I bought them for my wife for Valentine’s Day, but it turns out she wasn’t interested in seeing any of these very, very funny entertainers. So here we are, with me giving you an opportunity to score some brownie points–wait is that racist in this context?–with your lady.”
Of course my running commentary about the brownie points out loud, a fact that indubitably contributed to him pretty much buying my completely bullshit story.
“Yeah, I’m kinda the same as your wife. I haven’t really heard of any of these guys or gals that are performing.” Kevin confessed to me in confidence. “But my girlfriend apparently has, and she has been really bugging me to take her, so…you know. how it goes bro.”
“Word.” I mumbled semi-awkwardly, wondering to myself if that was still a word in the vocabulary of anyone currently alive besides maybe pimps.
“Alright, here’s your cash–all $260 should be there. Thanks again for saving my procrastinating ass on this stupid arbitrary ‘holiday’,” he said handing me what I would later discover on the bus to be only $240–a difference, which, for the record, I chalk up to my clumsy handling of the money and/or an honest oversight, not on account of my customer’s demographics.
Honestly, though, I was just relieved I didn’t have to resort to using the proverbial ace up my sleeve: had he asked anything more about my romantic partner, I realized that I could have technically said, without lying in the least:
“Oh, yeah, yeah…my wife, she too is a woman of color. You know how it goes, bro…”
And as I would be going in for the inevitable hypothetical fist-bump that would signify the unbreakable bond that organically springs forth from having such a deep common experience, I would at least be honest with myself, and utter under my breath:
“Sure, my wife’s half-Korean, but last I checked with all my fellow woke folk, in this context ‘yellow’ still counts as a color…”
“What?!? Are you ----- crazy?” my woman-of-color wife asked me incredulously only the day before the above story took place. “No, that’s the LAST way I would want to spend my Valentine’s Day. What the hell were you thinking anyways, buying that many tickets to this show?”
“But–but–but, these are front row, dead cent–“
“I don’t want to hear about how great you think the seats are–great seats to a show I somehow have negative interest in going to are still seats to a show I have negative interest in going to, you nitwit!”
“Geez, don’t be so racist!”
…I thankfully did not say out loud. But I did think about saying that.
Anyways, the point of the story is that your ass is rightfully going to get dragged by that one group of Black friends in which you are the token white guy, when you go to regale them with this actually-quite-humorous-amongst-the-right-audience tale, but you lead with “When I would buy tickets to resale them for profit, I don’t discriminate…”
I mean, if they didn’t already know yo’ ass was Caucasian as a Chinese zodiac rooster, they sure do now…
Content created on: 26/27 April 2025 (Sat/Sun)
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