Black Nerd Problems

by William Evans

  You have two choices when that happens. You can recognize that although this game claims to be rated G and family friendly, you should stop playing, because it’s all a disguise for the abyss that consumes you with a level of intense competition that slowly brings out the ruthless parts in your soul that you didn’t realize existed… or you can stare into the abyss and, when it stares back, blow kisses at it. Take a selfie with it. Invite it to brunch for bottomless mimosas because you wanna get comfortable and buddy-buddy with the abyss. You want the abyss to have the spare key to your place because you’re ready to take this relationship to the next level, because in Mario Kart, it’s merk or get merked.

  I knew this shit from day one on Mario Kart… and I embraced it. I go out of my way to be a dick to everyone on the sticks in Mario Kart. I let you know off the bat, I am not your fucking friend in this game. Once that power switch goes on and PSE&G starts charging us by the minute, I’m on the fucking clock. I’m the muhfucka throwing hands all over the track, and when I say “throwing hands,” I don’t mean I’m fighting everyone—a group of bananas is called a hand.

  Therefore, I’m the asshole literally laying rows of bananas across the track methodically like they’re C-4 explosives. THAT’S ME. I’m saving this lightning bolt for when you’re in the middle of a jump over a gap. Yeah, THAT’S ME. When that blue shell creeps up on you and takes you out of first place yet again? That wasn’t me. I don’t get blue shells because I’m the guy already advancing on yo spot up in first place like it’s your house and the Slomin’s Shield stopped working. That’s my SHIT. Words can’t describe how good it feels to have a muhfucking green shell in your hand and a racer in front of you unguarded, unaware, just staring at the finish line in front of them. They’re thinking it’s all good. That they got this. That they’re home free. And then they see you Tokyo Drift around the fucking corner bend with the Koopa Troopa choppa loaded up on ’em. They start feelin’ like Ricky in Boyz n the Hood and they book for that finish line, but we both know how this plays out. We both know how this is going to end. They’re yelling out, “No! Not again! Not this time!” and I’m Death’s scythe tending the cemetery lawn at 4:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, quiet, not even giving you the satisfaction of condolences with the sound of my voice as I let the choppa rang out on you…

  And I don’t give a fuck who you are to me. Brother, sister, nephew, uncle, grandpa, significant other, soul mate, love of my life, dude that does my taxes at H&R Block, boss, mailman, landlord, my best friend, Phil, from childhood that I haven’t physically seen since the death of my mother back in 2011, and we both laughed and cried on sight of each other together in the street at her funeral… Everybody can get it!

  *deep exhales* And you might be reading this chapter thinking, “All right, I get how Mario Kart can change you as a person, but surely when you have a family of your own and you’re playing with your kids, you’ll take it easy on them.” No. I won’t. I’ll be damn sure to pass this savageness down to my children. If my children aren’t more ruthless than my wife and I when they play Mario Kart, then I have failed as a parent.

  ME: What are you doing, why are you holding on to that blue shell?

  SON: I—I can’t knock Mom out of first place.

  WIFE: Don’t you put that softness on me, boy. Shoot it!

  DAUGHTER: DO IT!

  FAMILY DOG: Woooof! [Translation: “DO IT or pass the sticks!”]

  ME: KILL THE FANBOY SO THE FANDOM CAN LIVE!

  SON: AHHHHHHH! *shoots blue shell* I see now. I understand everything.

  Lemme put you on fandom real quick and say this: fuck ball. Mario Kart is life. If you want to know the true measure of someone, play them in Mario Kart. If they act all proper and apologetic when they hit you with an item, don’t trust ’em! You can do better. They aren’t the one for you. If there isn’t some small part of them that feels satisfaction at watching a racer in front of them fall, take a hit, or get knocked out of first place, THEY’RE WEAK! Their whole bloodline is weak and they won’t survive the winter.

  You know how they say if a person doesn’t have books in their place, don’t fuck them? Well, if a person can’t stay on the track on Rainbow Road in Mario Kart, don’t fuck them. You’ll thank yourself the next morning as you brush your teeth and mockingly quote them in the bathroom mirror saying, “Ugh, do we have to do Rainbow Road again?” The answer is yes, you do. Life is Rainbow Road, homie, you gotta decide how you ’bout to live yours. Because me? I said a fanboy like me? Sheeeeeeeeeit, I live my life 150cc at a time.

  Top Five Dead or Alive: Monica Rambeau (Marvel Comics)

  OMAR HOLMON, aka Supporter and Liaison of Real Hot Girl Shit

  SOMETHING YOU SHOULD know off the riff, one of the most powerful people walking around the Marvel Universe is Monica Rambeau, a dark-skinned woman of color that’s been in the hero game for years. Recently she has become more of a household name, leading the latest incarnation of The Mighty Avengers. Those in the know know she doesn’t take any shit.

  Monica Rambeau is somewhere between being the Rihanna and the Jean Grae of Marvel. She strokes no egos, calls you on your shit, and is written with the sharpest of wit/sarcasm (and not in the sassy Black friend way, ever). She has been the leader of the Avengers, has one of the most powerful abilities around (more on that later), and has been rocking her hair natural for years (more on that later too). Monica is one of the best to ever do for women of color in comics when it comes to representation. So let’s get more acquainted with Monica Rambeau…

  What you gon’ do when I appear?

  W-w-when I premiere?

  …………

  This shit been mine, mine

  —Azealia Banks, “212”

  Son, Monica Rambeau has tax deductibles on her fux. She gives none. One of the great things about her character is how unapologetic she is about her Blackness and just who the fuck she is. This comes up in the Marvel Divas series, where we see her on her downtime with her predominately white hero friends (Firestar, Black Cat, and Hellcat). This is a testament to the way she has been written as, well, again, Monica isn’t depicted as the angry Black woman when giving her experiences. Monica is quick-witted, funny, independent, and that friend who will be by your side even when she’s annoyed with you. She’s a woman of color showing the people around her (as well as the reader) experiences that they may be unaware of—a look behind the veil of what she is going through. That isn’t to say she always got the kid gloves on, ’cause Monica doesn’t keep it 100, she keeps it 1,000+. Especially when it comes to her home in New Orleans and helping out post-Katrina: “Well, I spent a lot of time there post-K. Cleaning up the mess you white people made.” Monica is that friend in the group that tells you like it is. Monica don’t do meek, subtle, or quaint. One time when Jim Rhodes was Iron Man, he said to her, “What’s happenin’, babe?” Monica replied, “Let’s make a deal! You call me ‘Captain Marvel’ instead of ‘babe’ and I’ll call you ‘Iron Man’ instead of ‘Bozo.’ ” Needless to say that’s the last time Iron Man called her “babe.”

  Beware, ’cause I crush anything I land on

  Me here, ain’t no mistake, nigga, it was planned on

  —Eve, “Let Me Blow Ya Mind”

  Listen, Monica is able to tap into the electromagnetic spectrum and become different forms of energy from electricity to gamma rays, cosmic rays to ultraviolet light . Monica must be an anime fan, because when she gets pissed, she’ll shout out certain moves. The woman even has her own version of Goku’s Spirit Bomb attack. As we’ve seen in the Mighty Avengers comics series, when it comes to Monica and her powers, the question isn’t what else can she do, it’s what can’t she do? She can bend light to make herself look like someone else. Once, the team faced an opponent that could slow down time. Monica, who can be made of light, was able to wreck house because even slowed down the speed of light is still too dope game to handle. The woman is a fucking powerhouse. The best part is that she can assist like John Stockto
n. We’ve seen Monica become energy for Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers era) to absorb and disperse at enemies. We then saw her step it the fuck up another notch when she transformed into gamma energy to give She-Hulk a boost. Son, Wolverine and Colossus’s fastball special ain’t got shit on Monica’s legendary team-up skills.

  Hairdresser from Milan, that’s the monster do

  —Nicki Minaj on Kanye West’s “Monster”

  Ever since her debut, Monica’s hair has been all-natural everything. We’ve seen it go from an Afro to braids to locs and so on and so on. This was a great thing for me to see going through back issues. It is just a reminder that this part of a Black woman’s life has been put on fleek in Marvel for years. It’s been great seeing different artists tackle this as well, each giving a different interpretation and style on the way she was rocking her hair for the time being. In Mighty Avengers, Monica is rocking her hair with a relaxer. This is the first time this has been seen from her character and my initial reaction was totally, “What part of the all-natural everything is this?” I then checked myself, ’cause I’m a dude and a woman’s right to change her look is her own, fictional or nonfictional, nah mean? Even as a fan, as tough as it was to see. Since her debut, Monica has always worn her hair natural, so seeing it straight really stood out as a big change. There are also women that do rock that relaxer in the hair as it’s easier to manage or just something they like. Doesn’t mean they aren’t about their natural hair or hate it. It’s style… This was addressed in Mighty Avengers as well by the writer Al Ewing, when a mother tells Monica how much her daughter idolizes her. Monica is flattered until the mom tells her that her daughter seeing Monica with a relaxer in her hair is what finally allowed the daughter to have her hair relaxed. The mom then starts saying, “I always tell her, no one is going to take you seriously with your hair looking like that [natural] and the relaxer only stings for a little bit.” As you can imagine, this is über-awkward as fuck for Monica (she can’t even hide it on her face) because one, she ain’t ever about not rocking her natural hair or shaming it, and two, to her it was just a simple style change, but for the kid it was something more. Monica is stuck in this awkward moment as her teammate Vic taunts her from afar about it. We don’t see a resolution, but the scene shows that Ewing acknowledges the concern about the hair change for Monica.

  My hormones jumpin’ like a disco

  —Missy Elliott, “Sock It 2 Me”

  When it comes to her love life, Monica is straight up No Flex Zone. We saw her and Jericho Drumm, aka Brother Voodoo (sorcerer supreme), start up a relationship back in Marvel Divas. We saw them enjoy a night together, and when Jericho invited her to stay over… Monica recounted the story saying, “Yo, I literally flew away. That shit freaked me out.” It’s hilarious to see Monica, who is so straightforward, be soooo put off by unexpected emotion. She still keeps it one hunna tho, as it isn’t a commitment complex, but as she puts it: “I know what I want. And what I want is to move at my pace and not some man’s pace.”

  Come on, man, Monica makes the rules, dude. Seeing her in a relationship with Drumm is hilarious because they are both from the Big Easy and they are both Black. Since Storm and Panther have split, this is the only Black couple I can think of at Marvel. Which kinda says a lot considering how long they’ve been in the game. The interaction between Monica and Jericho is refreshing to see as a closet peek at a Black rom-com in a Marvel book.

  Monica’s flirt game gets put on full blast when she meets Dr. Adam Brashear (the Blue Marvel). When testing her powers with Spider-Man monitoring her, she learns to bend her light form to be able to change into different people. She changes into a nude Dr. Brashear. When Adam walks in and sees that, he’s taken aback a bit. Spider-Man comments how he could now see how that’s weird for him. Meanwhile, all Monica says is “I wanted to get all the detail right.” Ya girl got no shame in the thiiiiiirst and I live!

  What about your frieeeeeeeeeeeeeeends?

  —TLC

  One of the best things about Monica is how down-to-earth she is. She is always written as the friend you want to hang out with, someone you want to have bail you out and let you know you’re fucking up. Monica is written this way when she’s with her inner circle of friends as well as when it comes to herself. We’ve seen her alternate between momma bear and partner in crime, but to me… Yo, Monica is the witty one in whatever crew she’s in. We done seen her throw shade with the best of ’em. Monica’s humor is a big part of what makes her enjoyable as a character, especially when we see that put up against other people in whatever title she is in at the time. As much as she hangs on the sarcastic side, it’s a big joy to see her just being outlandish in jest with her peoples when their lives aren’t on the line.

  When it comes to powerful women of color in Marvel—nah, fuck that, comics in general, y’all gon’ start giving my girl Monica Rambeau the respect she deserves. Storm is dope, but she ain’t the only one on the pantheon for Black girls killing it in the panel game. Monica is either straight up in your face, making fun of your kicks, or saving your life. I think of the V. Bozeman “Race Jones” lyrics when Monica comes to mind due to how Black and real rap raw she has been presented in terms of issues she faces in her personal life as well as her hero life: “Black when you stare. Black if you smile. / I was Black back when it wasn’t even in style.” That’s another big main reason I fucks with Monica. I can’t name another character that throws it all out there in her own terms where the reader ain’t got a choice but to acknowledge what she’s talking about. Again, Monica doesn’t keep it 100, she keeps it 1,000+. Every time she hints at it in jest or lays it out occupying whiteness in panels, whenever Monica steps into that limelight it’s like she’s coming out singing, “I’m Black! Matter of fact I’m Blacker than that.”

  On Hope, Escapism, and Attrition Discussed Between Black Men

  WILLIAM EVANS, aka Saruman the Black

  MY FATHER DOESN’T like Game of Thrones. Of course, I knew he wouldn’t when he stood in my home and asked to borrow the first season, but I handed him Ned Stark’s yet-to-be-severed head in Blu-ray form anyway. As alike as my father and I am, I know his tolerance for violence, gore, and all-out debauchery is a lot lower than mine. And yet, he too had heard about the phenomenon that was Thrones and thought he should at least see what the hype was. My father is an Omega-level nerd, so maybe there was some street cred to be lost if he didn’t at least try to watch it. By the time season four of Thrones had ended, coming off of arguably its best season so far, my father came back to me with season one in hand.

  ME: You want season two?

  MY POPS: Nope, I’m good.

  Apparently my father saw the future and didn’t want to be disappointed by the end of the run. Still, I spent a lot of time bolstering my Game of Thrones IQ. And that means my overall knowledge base of Thrones compares to about 30 percent of what my father knows about Lord of the Rings history. To be fair, the man has been reading, ingesting, reciting, rinse and repeating the books, lore, and movies for longer than I have been alive, so you shouldn’t feel sorry for my nerd inferiority to him. But for people my age, Lord of the Rings and Thrones share “a” universe, if not “the same” universe. The fantasy and lore, the humans trying to overcome old evil, it’s all familiar. But one of the big thematic differences is where Tolkien created a world very independent and unattached to a world we could familiarize with, Martin built his world off one of the most brutal and barbaric time periods within the last 1,500 years.

  My father was born in 1951, which means he was a teenager during one of several explosive times to be Black in America. My father never entered the military, even though his older brother went to Vietnam, but that doesn’t mean that my father doesn’t have some war stories to share. But he doesn’t enjoy sharing those. He would rather talk about The Silmarillion.

  When I was seventeen, I was hanging out with a group of friends from high school. We ended up at a house party with a lot of music, sweat, and
liquor. I don’t drink alcohol. Never did. Not much moral high ground to it, probably just too much of a control freak to give over that dominion to something else. Well, the party got busted up, maybe ten out of the forty people there were legally allowed to drink, and a lot of us spent the next hour sitting on the curb while the cops decided what to do with us. Two things stood out as I sat there in the grass bathed in the still-flashing lights of the police cruiser: How the hell did I end up being the only Black kid at the party? Why the hell had I constructed a social circle that allowed for the possibility that I ended up as the only Black person at a party? I didn’t even give much thought to the fact that I was the only person that spent any time handcuffed that night or that all the cops didn’t believe I hadn’t drunk anything and wouldn’t let me drive my mother’s car home while many of my friends did.

  My father though, he considered all of this. And he was livid. Ultimately, his lecture to me included responsibility and awareness, but it ended with “If you think you’re special out here with all these white people, you’ll be real special if you get killed out here too.” At the time, I didn’t get it and took it as some hyperbolic raving from my out-of-touch parent. But there were a lot of things I didn’t get back then.

  Another way that LOTR is different from GOT is in how one of them really is about escapism with seemingly insurmountable evil being overcome and the other is interested in looking at an alternative to our world with even more brutal mysticism. If you are a man that watched your uncles get beat in the streets even as they came home from war, your heroes assassinated, and your spot on the bus preordained by your skin color, a more brutal version of the world probably isn’t how you like to spend your leisure time.