I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (6 page)

Justin braked hard on a narrow bridge that spanned a parched creek. There was a backup of cars looking for open campground. Not more than twenty-four inches in front of us sat twin girls on the rear bumper of a white minivan. They couldn’t have been a day over fourteen or a biscuit under 225. They wore bikini tops, and the way they slouched—breasts resting on paunches, navels razed to line segments—turned their trunks into parodies of their sullen faces.

The air here was dry and piquant. Cigarette and pot smoke convected, chasing out oxygen. One of the girls called out to Sandy, “You’re really pretty,” emphasizing the “You’re” as though being pretty were suspect. Juggalos swarmed the bridge, and when the traffic stopped, they closed in, hawking whatever they had. Hands shot into the cart, holding cones of weed for fifteen dollars, glass pipes for ten dollars, bouquets of mushrooms for I don’t know how much, Keystone Lights for a dollar, single menthols for a dollar. A clutched breast was pushed through the fray and jiggled; a disembodied voice demanded a dollar.

Then somebody screamed, “WHOOP, WHOOP!”

Understanding how this sounds is important, as it forms a refrain to the entire Gathering. A single “WHOOP, WHOOP!” is like a plaintive, low-pitched train whistle Dopplering from afar. The
O
s are long, and there’s a hinge between the first “WHOOP” and the second. You sort of swing from one syllable to the next.

The crowd fortified the call, returning it deeper and rounder. “WHOOP, WHOOOOOOOOP!” Sandy overturned her handbag, found oversize sunglasses, and put them on. “Just say it. Just do it,” she said. Thinking myself a funny guy, I did a kind of Three Stooges “Whoop whoop whoop!”

Which I know now was wrong. “WHOOP, WHOOP!” is juggalo echolocation. Its not pinging back means trouble.

The twins screamed, “Show us your titties, bitch!” at Sandy. A tall guy with a massive water gun screamed, “Man, fuck your ride!” and sprayed us with a stream of orange drink the pressure and circumference of which made me think of racehorses. A “FUCK YOUR RIDE!” chant went up and around the crowd, and garbage was thrown. I would describe what kind of garbage, and how it felt to be the object of such ire—but I had so much garbage thrown at me at the Gathering of the Juggalos that showers of refuse became commonplace, a minor annoyance, and describing one would be like describing what it’s like to get a little wet on a winter’s day in Seattle. Justin, bless his heart, floored it, parting the crowd with the derring-do one is capable of when one’s father is running shit.

“Shit,” Sandy said. “Shitbagging shit.”

Justin grinned. “That was your first Faygo shower, dude.”

They dropped me off in an empty field. I never saw them again. Thenceforward I returned every “WHOOP, WHOOP!” with gusto.

Blender
named ICP the worst artists in music history. I’m sure you won’t find many music fans or journalists who disagree. And yet, according to Billboard’s independent album charts—and ICP has been independent since they left Island Records in 2001—their album
Forgotten Freshness Vol. 3
peaked at #10,
The Wraith: Shangri-La
at #1,
Hell’s Pit
at #1,
The Calm
at #1,
Forgotten Freshness Vol. 4
at #4,
The Wraith: Remix Albums
at #9,
The Tempest
at #2, and 2009’s
Bang! Pow! Boom!
at #1. Twiztid has had one #1 independent album, two at #2, and one at #3. Dark Lotus, the quasi-mystical supergroup made up of ICP, Twiztid, and Blaze Ya Dead Homie, has charted at #3, #4, and #6.

As of this writing, ICP alone has two more #1 indie albums than both Arcade Fire and Elliott Smith; three more than Arctic Monkeys and the National; and four more than the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the White Stripes. I understand that may be hard to believe. You likely can’t name a song by any Psychopathic Records artist (except for maybe ICP’s Internet-famous “Miracles”). They don’t have singles that play on the radio, or in hip bars, or on the stirring trailer for
Where the Wild Things Are.
Only Insane Clown Posse has made it onto the Billboard Hot 100—in 1997, when they spent five weeks on the charts, peaking at #67, with “Santa’s a Fat Bitch.”

Psychopathic Records peddles horrorcore, a hip-hop genre spawned two decades ago that narratively and figuratively incorporates all kinds of horror-film tropes: hyperviolence, grue, moralism, Rube Goldberg–style faces of death—and all of it set to samples from, say,
Creepshow
or
Zombi 2.
According to Jamie Madrox of Twiztid: “Think of it as if there was a
Halloween
or
Friday the 13th
on wax, and Jason and Michael Myers could actually rap. This is what their vibe would sound like.”

The germ of horrorcore can be traced to the Geto Boys (influential beyond their appearance on the
Office Space
sound track), several of whose lesser-known songs first integrated the
aforementioned stuff. But it was Esham, a Geto Boys contemporary from Detroit, who was the first MC to build his persona exclusively around the horrific. He inspired the Insane Clown Posse, who in turn inspired the Psychopathic family.

Horrorcore had its big national moment in the mid-’90s, when the Flatlinerz and Gravediggaz were charting and ICP’s
The Great Milenko
went platinum. Yet the sound still defines Metro Detroit and much of the Rust Belt. There’s Esham and the Clowns, of course, but there’s also King Gordy, Prozak, Twiztid, Marz, Blaze Ya Dead Homie, J Reno, Rev. Fang Gory, Freddy Grimes, Troubled Mindz, Defekt—even Eminem can be considered horrorcore-influenced, on account of Slim Shady’s onomatopoeic chainsaw revs and gore-focused gaze.
*

Since ICP, many if not most horrorcore acts have been white. As has been their audience. All but one of the artists on Psychopathic, which is based in bourgie Farmington Hills, come from Michigan. All are white or Native American. Psychopathic pulls in ten million dollars a year and has its own wrestling federation, energy drink, and film division.

Wending my way to the park entrance from where Sandy and Justin dropped me off took three hours. The golf cart had created a compact and navigable illusion. The campsite was shaped
like a bone-in top loin, its paths marbling it as randomly as fat. I realized I hadn’t packed any water, or bedding.

I had imagined, what with the Gathering being a music festival, that I’d be able to slink around anonymously. I was immediately disabused of this notion. I was the only person not wearing black or red. I was the only person who did not have Psychopathic Records iconography tattooed somewhere on his body. My hair, ridiculous as it was—both fro’ed out and sopping in the humidity—marked me as exceptional. The juggalos who hadn’t shaved their heads completely had shaved everything below their crowns and braided the rest into rigid tendrils that zagged upward like the legs of a charred insect.

Everywhere I went, juggalos stopped what they were doing to track me with spotlight eyes. Their heads moved in time with my stride, the way man or beast will do when a threat is sensed. For four days I would have to fight a strong urge to break into a jog.

I decided to follow one of the dry creeks that no longer reach the Ohio River. I moved between trees on the bank, walking until I realized I was amid a dozen people facing the creek in a staggered formation of lawn chairs. Somehow I hadn’t noticed what they were watching: one man breaking tube after fluorescent glass tube over the back of another man who lay prone in the creekbed. When the tubes popped and tinkled, they released jinnish poofs of talc. I thought maybe the other guy was drunk. Then the assailant moseyed to the back of a rusted panel van that canted down the bank. He pulled out a T-ball bat vined with razor wire. I actually said, “Oh, no!” He knelt over the other guy, pulled his head up by the hair, and started gouging his forehead with the bat. Someone in the chairs spoke up, said, “Pin his ass, Darryl.” I moved on.

I walked by a pavilion whose purpose I couldn’t immediately discern. Women danced naked in cages, and there was a stage fronted by picnic tables. Both stage and picnic tables were being
stood on by a lot of people. A master of ceremonies emerged from the onstage crowd, screaming a station identification into a microphone—WFuckOffRadio, Psychopathic’s own—and that it was time for the contest. I didn’t see any hands go up. It was just: two beer bongs were handed to two dudes who put the hoses to their mouths before two other dudes poured a plastic 750-milliliter bottle of gin into each funnel. I found myself shaking my head
no
while applauding slowly. After the bottles were emptied, the dudes were allowed fifteen seconds to recoup. The naked ladies had stopped dancing and were gripping their bars tightly. Only cicadas zapped the silence. Then began the second leg of the contest, which involved a third dude—this time chosen from a show of eager hands—jumping onstage to kick one of the gin-drinkers in the crotch, and then the other, and so on, best-of-three-falls style. The last man standing was given a goodie bag smaller than the goodie bags I’d received at the end of mediocre birthday parties. The crowd lined up to high-five both contestants, “WHOOP, WHOOP!”s all around.

When I finally arrived at my rental car, panting and glazed with sweat, I threw it in reverse, feeling a most acute despair. The Hardin County sheriff stopped me at the Hogrock egress. Caprices and Grand Marquises illustrated with Psychopathic Records decals sat passengerless on the shoulder. Two deputies were ducking juggalos into a paddy wagon. The sheriff ambled up to my window, leaned in to appraise me, and waved me on. I was still full of paranoia and phantom guilt when the wind whipped my VIP badge across my neck, drawing a faint line of blood. I drove to the next town over, to buy beers, because I needed them.

A few words on horror, and why some people like it:

I’ve never seen
Citizen Kane
and don’t care to, but Kane
Hodder is the best and only Jason Voorhees in my mind. I have no idea what
Casablanca
is about, but I can give you rundowns of
Cannibal Holocaust, Cannibal Ferox, Sexo Canibal,
and
Anthropophagus.
Or if cannibals aren’t your thing,
Demoni 1
and
2
and
Demonicus.
I need to scan down to number fourteen,
Psycho,
on the American Film Institute’s list of our hundred best movies to find one I’ve actually watched.

“Serious” film strikes me as absurd. It’s bowdlerized life. Filmic drama asks me to care about loves, losses, supposed triumphs—things that together amount to the chiseled dash connecting my birth to my death on my tombstone. To me, the modern horror film has more to do with first-world existence as it is lived today. In the modern horror film, we no longer come together to defeat an existential threat, gaining knowledge of and confidence in ourselves along the way. Altruism is not rewarded. Even the most self-sacrificing character will be killed off, often for laughs. One protagonist, if any, makes it out alive by becoming more brutal than the monster. He trades debasement for survival, which is short-lived—because of course the monster comes back, for the lucrative sequels.

In horror, characters are stripped of everything they think they know and believe they are. Education and privilege mean nothing. Security is a delusion; today is the last day of the rest of your life. You, what makes you
you,
your blemishes and singular characteristics, will disappear in an instant. Stalking everything you do is death, and all that matters is how furiously you go out.

Back at the Gathering, with my quivered tent on one shoulder, my book bag packed with water and Luna bars on the other, and a suitcase of Natural Light in hand, I went looking for a spot to camp. I had picked up a map and program from the ticketing
trailer, so this time I knew where I was going. Along the way, I took note of the license plates I saw: Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska, Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, New Mexico, West Virginia, Pennsylvania. Over the course of the Gathering, I did not see any plates from Florida, nor did I meet anyone from Miami. I
did
encounter dozens of juggalos from Ohio, even one from Martin’s Ferry, my dad’s ancestral home. My mom’s people hail from New Castle, a cluster of mining concerns and fireworks factories in western Pennsylvania, which also happened to be well represented at the Gathering. I myself had never been this deep into the Midwest before. As I was driving here, thumping regularly over I-71’s asphalt panels, not quite equidistant from cultural capitals on both coasts, I imagined my rented red Kia a blood cell not driven but recalled to a heart.

One enterprising juggalo matched his stride to mine and asked if I wouldn’t like to touch his testicles for five dollars. I hastened my search. Finally I picked a spot adjacent to the parking lot in the “Lost Ninja Clan” area. (“Ninja,” I learned, is the diminutive form of “juggalo,” e.g., “What up, ninja?”) Having never camped before, I spent twenty minutes flexing tent poles and accidentally launching them like javelins. I heard a soft voice behind me ask, “Need any help?” I turned and met Adam.

Adam was from Detroit. He was shorter but more solidly built than me, and as pallid as the disinterred, with fine black hair and black eyes. He pronounced short
a
’s with the nasal/pirate accent Michiganders swear they don’t have. His red and black Blaze Ya Dead Homie basketball jersey exposed an homage to horror-movie serial killers tattooed over powerful arms. A full-color Leatherface swelled on his right bicep while he put my tent together, a Kool puckered throughout.

Adam was camping with his brother twenty feet away in a canvas lean-to. They both worked irregular shifts at an auto
plant, which was why they could come. This was Adam’s third Gathering. He was disappointed the rest of his friends couldn’t make it. “That’s okay, though,” he said. “I’ve got ten thousand friends here.”

I knew then and there that I should stick to Adam like a journalistic remora. But it was hot and I’m awkward, so I shook his hand, told him I’d catch up with him later, and crawled into my tent, happy to have a space that was mine alone.