Sometimes, we just want to coast for free. She wanted to go to an event for a fashion magazine where they were supposedly serving complimentary fried chicken on Belgian waffles with wine, so she brought her friend Alex.  They ran into his friend Max at the lofty boutique and the three of them pretended to be friends with the highly coiffed clientele and other well-dressed moochers. It was a chilly Thursday night in Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, a neighborhood rife with histories of racial tensions and violence. There they all stood, on the periphery of a gentrified encasement acting as a sort of white people haven amid crumbling buildings and vagrants; A sort of dream world imagined outside of histories, economic disparities, or the anxieties that produce that something that moves and dismantles us. We’d often rather just cruise in our air-bagged, child security-locked SUVs.

After her fourth or fifth chicken-and-waffle hors d’oeuvre, she notices a black man in a baggy coat and low-riding jeans saunter through the door and towards the table littered with food bites and alcohol. She notices him cradling his cell phone below his waist, hunched down over it and rocking back and forth, as though bouncing to an unheard beat. She watches the event coordinator approach the man after he grabs his second food bite and tells him that he needs to leave. There are some repeated phrases, pretenses, an explanation that this was a private event, a counter that if he were dressed the right way, the black man wouldn’t be kicked out. Eyes flickered in and out of the scene between the two men, and then: “WHAT, NO NIGGAS ALLOWED?”  Bodies and eyes of the spectators turned to face the outburst, voices hushed and the surge of silence bent everyone in the room towards the scene of the crash. The chill and the discomfort were palpable, like specks of flying glass caught in the eye or the heat from a flaming engine; it was undeniable and yet unseen. Life doesn’t always let us cruise.

Once the man was finally escorted out after the coordinator reassured that it was not “about race” and everyone had finally caught their breath, conversations resumed with a tangibly different timbre. She asked Alex what the man had done to get thrown out and he said something to the extent that coordinators have to regulate how much free food and alcohol gets dished out because they lose money on that. Also, he said if the person doesn’t show any interest in buying anything, then these types of events could soon become defunct. She couldn’t shake the flecks of glass from her eyes. The chill remained long after. What did he really do wrong, after all?