Year TWENTY-THREE:

Certain Colors Not Welcome

Part 3 of: Relaxed: Not Quite a Memoir

Year TWENTY-THREE

Certain Colors Not Welcome

It was summertime in 2009. My boyfriend, myself, and a few of our friends were strolling along Main Street in Huntington Beach, intending to do a little barhopping. It has to be said that my boyfriend is white, as were two of his friends, and the third, along with his girlfriend, were Vietnamese. We stepped in line at a particular bar—I don’t remember the name but even if I did, it doesn’t deserve a mention—waiting for our turn to get in. I looked to my left and there were a speckling of police officers just hanging out.

My boyfriend’s two friends get in, his Vietnamese friend and his girlfriend get in, then, it gets to me. I’m not quickly ushered in like the rest of them. The bouncer eyes me shrewdly. Asks for the driver’s license I had ready for him. Looks back and forth from the license to my face. Seriously, he just stares at it—stares at me. Unless the license had a 45-year-old woman with red hair, a unibrow, and freckles on it, he seriously should not be mad dogging the damn ID for forty hours.

“What’s the address on here?” he asked me.

Already anxious from the amount of time he had me posted up in line with dozens of patrons behind me, I nervously repeated it to him.

He hands me back my ID. “Sorry. Can’t let you in.”

My mouth falls agape. My cheeks turn warm. I look at our friends who already made it inside. They stare at the scene before them, baffled. “What?” I said meekly.

“You can’t go in. Sorry.” He turned away with an air of new age aristocracy. No. He wasn’t sorry. He had the power, and he knew it. And he didn’t offer up an explanation because he didn’t have one. Not one that’d stand up in court anyway.

Embarrassed, I broke out of line and went up to one of the police officers nearby. I showed him my ID. He shines his flashlight on it and turns to the bouncer. “She’s fine. She can go in.”

I turned back towards the entitled bouncer, my heart racing. “Nope. Sorry.” He shook his head. “Not letting you in.”

“But he just said it was okay.”

“This isn’t his bar.”

“Is it yours?”

He smirked. “Might as well be. Keep on walking, lady.”

I stood there, in the cold, with the ocean on one side of me and this ratty ass establishment on the other. And yet, the fifty-degree body of water seemed to offer a far warmer welcome than this jackass did. I looked at my boyfriend and his friends, my stomach in knots. I’d been turned away. The only one. Turned away. But why?

The policeman said it was fine to let me in. The cop—you know, the guy with the badge and the gun? And the nightstick. Shit. Let’s not overlook that. What possible motive could the bouncer have for not only rejecting me, but seeking me out and indirectly telling me I didn’t belong there?

It was Main Street. In Huntington Beach. I was the only black person standing in that line. All my friends got in while I was turned away immediately. I don’t know. You do the math. Eleven years later, with the pandemic and the lockdown, the protests and the rallies, I learned for the first time in my life that Huntington Beach has, for quite some time now, basically been the Southern California capitol of white supremacy. Well, damn. If they had told me that back in 2009, I would’ve voted we barhop on 2nd Street in Long Beach instead.

Crystal Lancaster