Better Half, take 2

I don't look twice at message tees. This guy brought his to attention after I moved off of his stoop so he could pass on by. Hello, here's my tee shirt. You know he almost got into it with some guy down on the Embarcadero over it. Walking along, "minding my own business with a friend of mine", he was approached by some other guy who asks him what he means by that shirt. Shirt guy says nothing. He doesn't mean a damn thing by it. It's just a shirt. But what do you mean by it? Are you trying to insult me? The man doing the asking was black and referring to the ugly and archaic insult relating black people to monkeys. Shirt guy's friend stepped in and cooled the situation down and everyone went on their own way.

Shirt guy was still frustrated and even a little bit angry about the whole mess, though.
"My wife is darker than that man was. I married an African-American woman ten years ago. Best thing to ever happen to me. Best thing. Too bad I didn't meet her sooner, when I was twenty."
"Maybe you wouldn't have been ready for her when you were twenty."
"I was in Vietnam when I was twenty. But you don't know what that was like."
"I'm glad I don't know what that was like."
"It's better you don't know what that was like."

We said those last two things at almost the same time.

The bottom of his mustache was yellow, from the smoking I'm guessing. I thought that was kind of cool. Not the smoking, just the record of it. Dandruff all over the shoulders of his brown beautiful monkey tee shirt. He kept telling me I'd break my camera taking a picture of him. Then we said goodbye and me and my friend got called in for a table for brunch and I forgot to order the beignets which is the only reason I wanted to go there in the first place.