Read Online I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son by Kent Russell - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Kent Russell
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sounding ludicrous, I never felt white, except by default. White America was very far away. It was a nation my parents expatriated from; like my Cuban friends, I figured that one day I’d get to visit my homeland. The glimpses I caught on TV or in movies were bewildering. Ski teams? Blond cheerleaders? Battles of the bands? We had a hip-hop showcase, with the final coming down to a Hot Boyz clone vs. a Dead Prez ripoff. Our school’s homepage looped Trick Daddy’s “Let’s Go.” Our senior class song was “Tipsy” by that one-hit wonder J-Kwon.
In the night I was roused by three juggalos attempting to enter my tent. I struggled to hold the zippers together, hissing “Go away!” until it became an incantation. “The fuck is up with this ninja?” said one of them. “We just want to pass out, ninja,” said another. Sometime later I woke up needing badly to pee. The tent’s zippers, broken now, wouldn’t budge. I guzzled a bottle of water and used it as a receptacle; this I did every hour on the hour for three hours. I missed Coolio’s 4:30 a.m. set but could hear it anyway. The juggalos finally came to rest at dawn. The cacophony they made—burps, coughs, hacks, pukes—sounded like a bodily orchestra tuning up. A sleepy “WHOOP, WHOOP!” followed someone’s long brown note.
After tearing a hole in and birthing myself from the tent, I went on an early-morning circuit of the grounds. The nearest port-o-potty had been blown up in the night. RVs that also served as mobile tattoo parlors were opening their doors at 7:30. The treetops in the distance made a rampart against the sky.
I stopped at the Spazmatic Energy Sauce pavilion to mix a tube of coffee crystals into a bottle of water. Juggalos in various stages of undress slumped everywhere over everything. A young mother led her son to the other end of my picnic table. He sat down to breakfast on an elephant ear and grape Faygo. His mother pulled the tab on a can of beef barley soup. She rubbed an eye with the heel of one hand and sipped from the can with the other. Hanging from her neck was a homemade advert scrawled on torn cardboard that read $2 FOR BIG ASS TITTIES , $1 IF YOUR A DOWN ASS NINJA . She lit a menthol and took a swig from her son’s Faygo.
The mother was in a bikini top and her son was shirtless, a yang of black paint smeared on one side of his face. They were probably a combined thirty years old, yet stretch marks mottledtheir bodies. Fat dangled in dermal saddlebags as empty as the calories that made them. Again, I bring this up not because I’m body-snarking, but because I’ve only ever seen these physiques in places—the Bronx; Liberty City, Florida; New Castle—where dinner comes from either Burger King or the convenience store.
The son razzed me with a tongue full of violet pulp. I smiled at him. Then he “WHOOP, WHOOP!”ed and Pollock’ed his remaining Faygo all over me.
Whether my open notebook had triggered some kind of antischolastic mania in the child, I’ll never know. But he managed to soak it so thoroughly that only days later, after several hours under a blow-dryer in a Washington, Pennsylvania, motel room, could the notebook be opened again.
The rest of this essay’s grist was scribbled in cryptic shorthand on folded paper towels in a goddamned hurry.
I went to the Boondox, Insane Clown Posse, Anybody Killa, and Blaze Ya Dead Homie seminars. “Seminar” is the official name for these sessions, but it’s maybe the wrong term. They’re more like shareholder meetings. The artists stood on a dais and explained themselves to hundreds of juggalos gathered under a tent, sweltering in hay dust and pot smoke. Boondox set the tone, saying, “We wouldn’t be shit without you.” Audience participation stretched for hours; comments ranged from “When are you coming to my town?” to “Can I have a hug?” to “You don’t even know the names of your own songs, you cock,” to “I’m proud of the way your attitude
In the night I was roused by three juggalos attempting to enter my tent. I struggled to hold the zippers together, hissing “Go away!” until it became an incantation. “The fuck is up with this ninja?” said one of them. “We just want to pass out, ninja,” said another. Sometime later I woke up needing badly to pee. The tent’s zippers, broken now, wouldn’t budge. I guzzled a bottle of water and used it as a receptacle; this I did every hour on the hour for three hours. I missed Coolio’s 4:30 a.m. set but could hear it anyway. The juggalos finally came to rest at dawn. The cacophony they made—burps, coughs, hacks, pukes—sounded like a bodily orchestra tuning up. A sleepy “WHOOP, WHOOP!” followed someone’s long brown note.
After tearing a hole in and birthing myself from the tent, I went on an early-morning circuit of the grounds. The nearest port-o-potty had been blown up in the night. RVs that also served as mobile tattoo parlors were opening their doors at 7:30. The treetops in the distance made a rampart against the sky.
I stopped at the Spazmatic Energy Sauce pavilion to mix a tube of coffee crystals into a bottle of water. Juggalos in various stages of undress slumped everywhere over everything. A young mother led her son to the other end of my picnic table. He sat down to breakfast on an elephant ear and grape Faygo. His mother pulled the tab on a can of beef barley soup. She rubbed an eye with the heel of one hand and sipped from the can with the other. Hanging from her neck was a homemade advert scrawled on torn cardboard that read $2 FOR BIG ASS TITTIES , $1 IF YOUR A DOWN ASS NINJA . She lit a menthol and took a swig from her son’s Faygo.
The mother was in a bikini top and her son was shirtless, a yang of black paint smeared on one side of his face. They were probably a combined thirty years old, yet stretch marks mottledtheir bodies. Fat dangled in dermal saddlebags as empty as the calories that made them. Again, I bring this up not because I’m body-snarking, but because I’ve only ever seen these physiques in places—the Bronx; Liberty City, Florida; New Castle—where dinner comes from either Burger King or the convenience store.
The son razzed me with a tongue full of violet pulp. I smiled at him. Then he “WHOOP, WHOOP!”ed and Pollock’ed his remaining Faygo all over me.
Whether my open notebook had triggered some kind of antischolastic mania in the child, I’ll never know. But he managed to soak it so thoroughly that only days later, after several hours under a blow-dryer in a Washington, Pennsylvania, motel room, could the notebook be opened again.
The rest of this essay’s grist was scribbled in cryptic shorthand on folded paper towels in a goddamned hurry.
I went to the Boondox, Insane Clown Posse, Anybody Killa, and Blaze Ya Dead Homie seminars. “Seminar” is the official name for these sessions, but it’s maybe the wrong term. They’re more like shareholder meetings. The artists stood on a dais and explained themselves to hundreds of juggalos gathered under a tent, sweltering in hay dust and pot smoke. Boondox set the tone, saying, “We wouldn’t be shit without you.” Audience participation stretched for hours; comments ranged from “When are you coming to my town?” to “Can I have a hug?” to “You don’t even know the names of your own songs, you cock,” to “I’m proud of the way your attitude
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