I soap myself and wonder what this attraction to the man in the next stall means. I go into some philosophical skydiving in my head about it being a celebration of the human form in an environment fixated on the deterioration of the body and spirit. But that’s bullshit. It’s square business that if the dude spots me looking at him he’ll take it one of two ways: I’m either an asshole bandit or looking to be held up by one.

I try not to draw attention to myself by averting my eyes whenever they rest on him longer than a glance.

“Hey, blood,” he says, “why you jerking your head like that for? I know you ain’t no Elgin Baylor.” We both have a good laugh. I shouldn’t have been so uptight about where my eyes wandered. Nobody is paying me any mind. They’re too busy indulging in a favorite shower-room pastime: comparing the size of each other’s Swanson Johnson. According to penis mythology, black dudes are supposed to have long banana clip johnsons, while white dudes sport drawed-up pee shooters.

“It’s them big dicks that get you black guys in trouble,” a white dude says. “I bet when you file your income tax you got to claim it as a dependent.”

“Don’t worry about it,” a black counters. “Time has just about run out on you whiteys. When Martin Luther King said, ‘How long, not long,’ he wasn’t just talking about your futures!”

It goes on in that vein and then shifts with black and white screaming on each other for failing to live up to their images. Steam rages in the shower room, and the talk is of the final comedown in the test of manhood between black and white being determined by the one who can get his rizz-od as hizz-ard as a rizz-ock at a mizz-oments nizz-otice.

The water turned cold and I shivered out of my reflections. As I dried off I felt dazed in a time lag, trying to play catch-up with my change in status, but unable to extricate myself from being a prison issue.

On the dresser in my sister’s room was a photograph of her taken about ten years before when she was eighteen. Debra had left home around that time and in rapid succession was married and divorced. She had been shacking up with a man for the past few years and my folks didn’t dig it. Straightened black hair surrounded her face like a partially drawn curtain. A frown tugged at the left corner of her mouth. She was tilted back on her heels, her left hand cocked on her hip with the elbow out, shotgun style. That defiant stance had gotten the drop on many caught half-stepping with her affections. Compared to Debra’s, the poses struck by the ladies of liberty and justice don’t convince me that they mean what they stand for. But one look at Debra leaves no doubt in my mind that she is definitely about the business of due process.