“I was worried you’d left or something.”
“Sorry. My phone died.”
“I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“But wait. What happened?” I asked. She looked confused again. “With Gone Girl. What happened?”
“Oh! She went back to live with Ben Affleck. They were kind of stuck together.” Thankfully, she’d already read the book.
A Few of My Greatest Fears, in No Particular Order
Getting stabbed in the face; specifically, the eye.
Desperately needing to get to a bathroom on one of those days when the subway just stops indefinitely for no apparent reason.
Footage of the all-white production of Once on This Island that my high school put on making it online.
Getting my wedding ring caught on something and having it almost rip my hand off, like happened to Jimmy Fallon. (Don’t Google it.)
Anyone who respects me finding out that I thought paisley was a color until I was like twenty-seven.
Something bad happening to my wife or parents while I am traveling for work.
Turning into one of those old guys who’s like, “I don’t get why things are different from when I was a kid! Everything should stay the same, starting at the point when I became comfortable with it!”
America continuing its horrifying trend of race- and gender-based income inequality, leading to even more wealth and opportunity being concentrated in the hands of an even smaller group, leaving everyone else unprepared for the consequences of climate change, automation, and other accelerating global challenges.
Being kicked by a horse.
1-800-GOOD-PORN
As my friends and I gained small measures of independence, we also gained smaller measures of disposable income, and our recreation became increasingly rooted in practical jokes. So even though I had no aptitude or stomach for pranks, as a teenager I couldn’t avoid getting caught up in them.
My parents’ house was the closest to our middle school of all my friends’ homes, so most days a small crew of miscreants tumbled through our front door to play video games (Mario Kart 64 and GoldenEye 007, to be specific and dated) and talk about boobs (and other things, too), before dispersing to their own residences to do or ignore their homework depending on what they wanted out of life.
One day, in the middle school cafeteria, a friendly acquaintance named Garren revealed that through some unspecified mechanism he had discovered that if you dialed the number 1-800-GOOD-PORN, you would reach the desk of a man named Al Weaver at a company called Weaverson and Associates (or perhaps Weaver, Son, and Associates . . . it was hard to tell over the phone). And if you asked Al Weaver if you could purchase or simply hear more details about the GOOD PORN promised by his office’s phone number, he would go absolutely ballistic.
Well, this all sounded pretty great to me and my friends, who had ample free time in the afternoon and no ability to drive or convince girls to make out with us, our two loftiest aspirations at the time. Fortunately, anything that moved the hands of the clock from three until six p.m. that didn’t improve our brains, bodies, or spirits was fair game, and pissing off a white-collar worker in a random city fit the bill of an afternoon’s entertainment.
That afternoon, a bunch of us gathered in my parents’ kitchen, forming a tight semicircle around the phone bolted to the wall at eye level. A bolder teen than I carefully dialed *67 to block my parents’ number from being recognized by Al Weaver’s caller ID (assuming Weaverson and Associates was equipped with the service in the first place). He then punched in 1-800-GOOD-PORN, amid much giggling and many muffled shut up shut up shut ups.
The phone rang. It rang again.
“Al Weaver, Weaverson and Associates.”
“Hi, I was wondering if you could [giggling fit] shut up shut up shut up. I was wondering if you could tell me more about your [giggling fit] shut UP . . . good porn. [Giant eruption of laughter.] Shut up!”
“Sorry, that’s not something I can do.”
“Are you sure you can’t tell me more about your good porn?” [Sustained giggles.]
“I’m quite sure. Goodbye, now. Have a good day.”
[Asphyxiating fit of laughter.]
And so it went, every weekday, for what must have been a month. We’d stop at my house after school and call Al Weaver as routinely as you might call a loved one after a flight to tell her that your plane landed safely. It was reflexive, and soon he came to expect us. When you receive a phone call once a day for four straight weeks inquiring about your good porn, those moments, I imagine, tend to stand out.
Here’s the problem with pranks, though: the joke lands only if the person whose expense it is at actually feels bad. If the prankee takes his pranking in stride, there’s nothing to laugh at. I don’t even really like surprise parties, which are just pranks with cake at the end. You have to lie to someone you love just to trick them into attending a birthday party that you could have told them about in the first place. A birthday party isn’t better if you don’t know about it. It’s exciting for a few seconds, and then you realize you’re dressed all wrong because you thought you were going to the movies or out for barbecue.
Fortunately/unfortunately, Al Weaver was a perfect prank call victim. He bore our torment with responses that were by turns exhausted, inconvenienced, and irate. But he had no choice. Because we were calling from a blocked number, we could have been legitimate clients. But we never were. It was always a group of four to eight middle school students, with the same request. In some respects, I’m not sure why he got quite so upset. Our calls took up, at most, thirty seconds of his day. We rarely tried again if he hung up early.
On the other hand (though it took me years to realize this), he probably had no idea why we were calling and asking for “good porn.” It had nothing to do with his name, his job, or his company. Garren had stumbled on 1-800-GOOD-PORN by dialing phone numbers he thought were funny. Al Weaver could have thought of his phone number as 1-800-GOOF-RORO or 1-800-HOOD-SOSO or simply 1-800-4663-7676.1 He could not possibly have intuited the game we were playing.
So it continued. I was a little nervous about getting caught when my parents got the next phone bill, but I couldn’t stop what we’d started. The momentum was too great. I was too scared to place the calls myself, but each afternoon, I let my friends into the house, ushered them into the kitchen, and took part in our daily ritual.
Until one day, we got sloppy.
At first, everything seemed to go according to plan. We called Al Weaver. We asked him for porn. We laughed at him. He hung up in a huff. We hung up and laughed more. But something was different on this day.
As soon as we put the receiver down, my parents’ phone started to ring. We stopped laughing. We stared. I didn’t have to pick up to know the truth: it was Al Weaver.
“Hello?” I said, as I put the phone to my ear. I did not have to remind my friends to stay quiet. An electric silence filled the room.
“Hello?” replied Al Weaver’s reedy voice from his office in (we assumed, for some reason) Kansas. “Is this the man of the house?”
I cleared my throat and made my voice as deep as it could go, which was not very deep. “Uhh, yes. Yes it is.”
“Well, sir. Please tell your son and his friends to stop bothering me at work. Can you do that for me?” he snapped.
“Yes. Certainly I can tell my son that,” I replied, in my best imitation of how one adult talks to another adult, man to man, when they want to resolve a problem. (I was probably imitating how Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor talked to his neighbor Wilson through the fence on Home Improvement.)
“Well, good,” he asserted.
“Yes, good,” I confirmed, like a grown-up.
I hung up the phone. Someone must have forgotten to dial *67, and because of that we could never call 1-800-GOOD-PORN again. In part the calls ended because Al Weaver had my phone number. Even if we wanted to prank him from a blocked number somewhere else, he’d still think it was comin
g from my house. He could call back at any time and talk to my actual dad instead of me doing my best generic dad impression. But perhaps the bigger issue was, the power balance had shifted. Al Weaver had gone on the offensive. He was no longer afraid of us and our bizarre demands for adult entertainment. The spell of the prank was broken.
A Technicality
About half a mile from school was a convenience store whose regular clerk’s give-a-shit meter was calibrated such that he wouldn’t sell us Playboys, but he’d overlook the store’s eighteen-plus policy on cigarette lighters.
Once we realized this, we all bought lighters of our own. A couple of guys started smoking. I’m pretty sure that if you can grow a goatee in eighth grade you are legally obligated to start smoking. The rest of us just enjoyed setting things on fire. We set flame to anything flammable: Plastic bottles that dissolved in the heat like they’d looked directly at the Ark of the Covenant. Pools of lighter fluid. Plastic bottles filled partway with lighter fluid. I’m pretty sure there’s a hole in the ozone layer directly above the parking lot behind our local shopping center.
Once, my parents found a small Bic lighter in a pair of my jeans. My dad asked me what it was for.
“It’s not for smoking,” I explained. “Sometimes we set things on fire.”
“Well, don’t do that,” he said.
So I stopped setting things on fire. I just stood nearby while the other kids did.
You Don’t Know, Now You Know
The summer after eighth grade, my friends and I returned for our last year at Camp Shalom. It was the end of an era, if not for the camp, at least for our little clique. The core of our group of friends was composed of me, Ethan, Barry, Eric, Aaron, Matt, and Dan. By our final year, we had very little interest in summer camp, but it was the only place we could go to hang out all day under some kind of nominal supervision. Other than our general lack of spirit, we caused very little trouble. Between the seven of us, we have spent very little time in prison, and we averaged a pretty decent score on our SATs. As you might expect from the name of the camp, we were all Jewish, except Matt, who was Jewish-ish (slightly anxious and a picky eater).
Many of us had started at Shalom after our first year of elementary school. That initial summer, as a seven-year-old, I fractured my wrist playing the camp’s signature game of volleybat, which was just baseball with a volleyball. Playing shortstop, I tried to stop a screaming line drive hit by my counselor, and the force of the ball broke my bone. Clearly, supervision was lax. I’m left-handed. It’s ridiculous that I was playing shortstop in the first place. It was a testament to the friendships we formed that I came back to camp the following summer, never mind six more.
Most of us attended our final year as counselors-in-training, or CITs. Too young for real summer jobs, but too pubescent for another year as campers, we spent our days assisting counselors, and our parents paid for the experience.
Our tasks as CITs were varied: escorting campers to and from the bathroom, hauling sporting goods from equipment sheds to various fields and courts, cleaning up the messes that the camp’s single custodian didn’t have the time to attend to. For two weeks when the drama instructor just didn’t show up, I happily took her place. I guided the youngest campers through improv and imagination games. I allowed the eleven- and twelve-year-old boys, who refused to sit still, to have structured insult competitions, funneling their instinct for bullying and disrespect into a creative writing project.
My worst day on the job came when the camp director handed me and two other friends a bottle of Pine-Sol and a pair of shovels, and directed us to move several pizzas into a Dumpster from the ground directly next to the Dumpster where someone else had left them after a camp-wide party three weeks before. Any effect the cleanser had was purely psychosomatic. We’d have had better results huffing the cleaning fluid than we did splashing it on the garbage. That morning, the concept of “dry heaving” went from something I’d read about to something I could describe firsthand.
Because we weren’t getting paid, we took every opportunity to disappear to far-flung corners of the camp and ditch our responsibilities. Basically, we did whatever we wanted until a higher-up yelled at us to do our jobs. We never faced any real threat of termination because we provided the camp with both labor and revenue.
Most often, we’d sneak down to the basketball court for games of three-on-three, knockout, and ultimate footsketball (a football/basketball/Ultimate Frisbee hybrid we’d invented). But we had other, more subtle tactics for shirking our jobs, too. We would pretend to sweep the floor of the nurse’s cabin, where our friend Laura was pretending to be sick. We’d hang out in the woods, spending hours discussing camp minutiae and pop culture hypotheticals, like “Did you hear that two counselors had sex in a rowboat in the middle of the lake last week?” or “Do you think that stoner kid from the oldest boys bunk who didn’t come back this summer could have died from an overdose of pot?” and “Can you even overdose on pot?” to deeply hypothetical questions such as “Which members of our friend group would be which members of the Wu-Tang Clan?” I aspired to be GZA. Not the biggest star, but, as Method Man once said, “We form like Voltron, and GZA happen to be the head.” That could be me, I thought. The nerd brain of a fighting cartoon robot.
We’d discovered Wu-Tang the year before, in our final summer as campers. And sure, discovered is kind of a strong word, considering the group had already put out two classic albums plus half a dozen or so solo records from its individual members. It took four years for the group’s debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (nine members of the group, nine hearts, four chambers per heart, if you were wondering about the numerology) to find its way into our hands. Once it did, we practically wore a hole through the CD.
Our favorite track was “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta F’ Wit.” The chorus consisted of what sounded like every member of the group chanting in unison, “Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nuthing ta fuck with!” until they figured the listeners had gotten the point.
At nine members strong, the group formed an eclectic and unwieldy hip-hop collective. Each Clan affiliate distinguished himself with a signature vocal tone and style. Ghostface Killah’s rhymes raced toward you like a fire truck, sirens blaring, barreling down an empty street. Method Man’s gritty swagger could sand a tree stump into a dinner table. Ol’ Dirty Bastard crooned and rambled as if he’d never heard music before but had heard of it. Their songs could consist of half a dozen verses and barely the hint of a chorus, committed to record with the frenzied intensity of an organized crime syndicate destroying evidence. The name Wu-Tang comes from the group’s collective obsession with kung fu movies, although to the best of my knowledge, none of the members personally claim Asian heritage.
Whenever we listened to Wu-Tang, one member of our social circle, often me, sat beside the portable stereo, quickly twiddling the volume knob to censor the myriad F-words and N-words. And, depending on how closely we were being supervised, the S-words and A-words as well. Earlier that year, Ol’ Dirty Bastard had rushed the stage at the Grammys to proclaim “Wu-Tang is for the children!” but the director of my Jewish Community Center summer camp would likely have disagreed.
At the very least, Wu-Tang was for different children, ones without the luxury of youthful naivete. Kids who had already learned that life is unfair, and it’s unfairer for some people more than others, and that bad things happen not at random but for reasons beyond their control (or their parents’, for that matter). Kids who dealt with adult problems much earlier in life, and who needed the vocabulary to express that terrible knowledge.1
Our counselor that summer was a kid named Eli. Eli was the camp’s surliest counselor, and the biggest. He stood over six feet tall, an anomaly among teenage Jews. He couldn’t have been more than six years older than the rest of us, but he felt less like a babysitter than a deadbeat dad. Eli was just as likely to wander away from our assigned activities as we were, and he happily turned a blind eye (or, more
accurately, a deaf ear) to whatever music we had blasting from our boom box.
I grew up in a homogenous suburb of Boston; MC Hammer was pretty much the first Black person I was even aware of. Ethan, my best friend in kindergarten, had the “U Can’t Touch This” cassingle. He brought it in for show-and-tell one day, and to five-year-old me, it was like hearing Jimi Hendrix play the national anthem.
I loved the song immediately. Of course I did. MC Hammer was exactly what a five-year-old would think was cool, even if he hadn’t also been the star of a cartoon show in which he wore magic shoes.2 In real life, he rapped in the very friendly way you had to, to make it past Tipper Gore. He wore shiny, billowing pants, like he lived on a pirate ship from outer space. Even his lyrics were both appropriate for and intelligible to children. As a kindergartner, “You can’t touch this!” was something I was told a lot, about everything from the stove to, fittingly, the stereo itself.
MC Hammer’s songs (okay, fine . . . song, singular) didn’t sound like what my parents listened to; the music was faster, brighter, younger. He was not (as no one can be) the voice of the Black experience in America, but he definitely represented a different point of view than I’d heard before. Hammer didn’t sing like on the Dire Straits or Bonnie Raitt tapes my mom and dad played on car trips. There were no endless, ouroboros guitar solos like on my dad’s Grateful Dead bootlegs. The music was simple and propulsive (the sample, of course, came from Rick James’s “Super Freak,” but I wasn’t aware of that at the time; I just thought MC Hammer was a goddamn funk genius), and the words were staccato and conversational.
It wasn’t good rapping, per se. The first couplet of “U Can’t Touch This” pairs “hard” and “lord,” two words that do not, in fact, rhyme. But my tiny brain, steeped since birth in classic rock, wasn’t ready for good rap music yet. Dr. Dre’s The Chronic came out less than three years after Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em (a request that may have actually been more necessary than it sounded, given the gang members that accompanied Hammer as muscle), and if I’d heard the Dre album in its entirety, it probably would have given me nightmares for the entirety of elementary school. Besides, where would I have even heard of Dr. Dre at the time? Everyone I knew was also a white person from suburban Boston, and they were all either six or forty years old, not exactly the “Fuck tha Police” demographic.
Nice Try Page 3