across the floor through the dirty clothes and dirty towels and miscellaneous empty boxes and dust and hairballs… to his laptop. He sat down on the floor and propped his back up against the wall… and my God, right on the home page… there he is, in the crack house. He’s spellbound by the sight of himself on that little screen… Nestor victorious!! The big brute’s hulk is lying facedown on the floor. ::::::Look at that! The brute is twice my size, but I’m the victor! I’m straddling his back… Look! I’ve got him locked in the full nelson and the figure four. My hands are interlaced behind his neck, and I’m mashing his face into the floor with all my might. My God!::::::
His muscles had already been pumped up, gorged with blood, from wrestling the brute. Now, right there on that little laptop screen, he’s marshaling every last ounce of strength he has to driving the brute’s head into the floor, mashing his face flat for him. ::::::I’m… pumped!:::::: The enormous pressure of the full nelson has bent the brute’s neck forward to the point where he, Nestor, could have broken it, if he really wanted to. You can tell that even on this little laptop screen; the brute’s face is twisted beyond recognition—from the pain! His mouth is open. He wants to scream. But he wants oxygen more. The only sound that escapes his terrified 275-pound body is “Urrrrrrrunhhh… urrrrrrruhunhhh… urrrrrrrrunhhh!” Sounds like a dying duck. Yeah! A duck croaking. Another thirty seconds of maximum pressure—that’s all it would have taken! Stone-cold dead, O black brute! Nestor is mesmerized, watching his triumph on that little screen. Awesome! Nestor hadn’t been aware of the expression on his own face when it was actually happening. ::::::My God! Did I really bare my teeth like that? Did I really put on such a hideous, malevolent grin?::::::
Positively enchanted, Nestor can’t take his eyes off himself on the screen. He watches—and hears—Nestor Camacho remonstrating uhhh uhhh uhhh. He’s out of breath himself uhhh uhhh uhhh humiliating the giant as loudly as he can: “Okay, you uhhh unhhh stu-pid uhhh uhhh uhhh pussy!” He remembers wanting the whole room to know that he had utterly crushed the brute. He watches himself lean over until he’s two or three inches from the beast’s ear and shouts directly into it, “Say what, bitch? Say what?”
With that, Nestor’s morale sinks. He wants to click the window closed… From now on it only gets worse, doesn’t it!… What has he done?… He knows what’s next… and here it comes… The epithets, his own, the Sergeant’s, start piling on top of the bone heap at a furious red-mad rate—and the heap catches fire. Into the charnel pyre Nestor throws “Say what, you filthy little bitch?”
Only then, looking at the laptop screen, does Nestor fully get it. Only then does he comprehend, in so many words, how bad this all is… this YouTube introduction of Nestor Camacho to the world!
And what does the world see in this video? Where does the YouTube story begin? The world sees a black prisoner lying facedown, inert, helpless, racked with pain, struggling just to take the next breath, moaning in a way urrrrrrrunh no human being ever moaned before, under arrest at the mercy of two Cuban cops. One of them is mounted on the prisoner’s back, flashing a cruel thirty-two-tooth grin as he delights in the prospect of breaking his prisoner’s very neck with a full nelson. The other one is crouched barely two feet from him, ready to blow his brains out with a .44-caliber revolver. Both of them are humiliating their black prisoner, mocking his manhood, calling him a subhuman moron. Is there no limit to how abusive these two Cuban cops are willing to be toward a black man who, so far as the viewer knows, has done nothing?… And that is the way the YouTube version begins… and, very likely, ends.
No indication whatsoever of the life-or-death crisis that precipitated this vile “abuse,” not so much as a hint that this put-upon black man is in fact a powerful 250-pound young crack house thug, nothing to make it at all credible that he might have touched off the whole thing by wrapping his huge hands around the Sergeant’s neck, that he was within one second of murdering him by crushing his windpipe, that his life was saved only by the immediate reaction of Officer Camacho, who threw himself onto the