Always looks neat, and lately, especially with the black alligator skin cowboy boots, looks just like a Mexican.

“The boots are comfortable,” he says. “Besides, my mustache makes my face look longer.”

His tastes aren’t Mexican at all, though. Tastes are pure white man. Lives in Orange County. “Some minorities are fine, but live in an area that’s all minority and you’ve got problems. White people are better protected, so it’s better to live around them.”

Every Friday he does not go to pray, but instead goes to Samson’s, three blocks from his apartment, and has four beers, just enough to carry you away. Knows the bartender, Greg. It’s been four years since the first time he came in the place, since Greg asked him his name.

“Walid,” he told him.

“How ’bout I just call you Willy,” Greg the bartender said.

“I learned your language, you can learn my name,” he told him.

“Fair enough.”

But times got tough and Samson’s closed temporarily: “Dear customers, Promise to come back soon. Just need to get some more money. We’ll be back. The Management.”

For a few weeks, Walid bought four beers at 7-Eleven and drank them at home, but it just wasn’t the same. When I snuck out for a visit, he decided it was time to find a new haunt. “I don’t like to drink and drive, so it has to be close by.”

Which is how it was that five Fridays after Samson’s closed temporarily, Walid and I found ourselves at The Jack Knife. It was the first time Walid had been there. White name, white customers, white neighborhood.

Twenty minutes inside and Walid got a tap on his gold shoulder.

“Speak English!” a red face shouted in whiskey breath.

Walid looked at him hard, looked into the blue eyes lost in a sea of blood vessels.

“We speak what we please,” he told him quietly, not scared, but honest.

“Fucking Mexicans,” said a back as soft as the eyes.

“He thinks we’re Mexicans.” We laughed, and Walid knew the soft man would be watching and would be thinking we were laughing at him and would not let it go.

Though he had drunk only two beers, Walid stood up and said to me in Arabic, “It is time we leave, my dear. I do not want problems and I am in no mood to fight.” The whiskey-breath man, even if he had heard him, would not have understood and would just have thought that we were talking about him and would have gotten his friends together, which is what he did.

“Hey you fucking Mexicans. Chickenshit boy running away from us?”

“We’ve had our fill and we’re leaving,” replied Walid like he thought there was no problem, which he didn’t.