Professor Yeti

When I was a boy, my parents wouldn’t let me play fighting video games, and refused to purchase cable. They were professors of psychology and literacy at Milwaukee universities, and I had a good deal of problems with them back when they were young. Let me not be misunderstood — I thought they were perfect parents up through the age of ten, and when I left for college I re-adopted that belief, which I carry with me to this day. But there was a definite in-between period when all this matchless parenting was just so much pure water under the bridge — a bridge strewn with stern realities such as that I had to go to my neighbor Angelo’s house to play Contra and Double Dragon III, and had no way to watch MTV. In retrospect, though, oh Mother, you should have let me have that MTV. I suppose not having it added significantly to the store of glittering illusions I had about life, and I’m thankful for that. You sheltered me into believing that the world was so strewn with splendor and sadness that my pulse sped up at the first glimpse of Matt Pinfield. All the kids who had MTV were overdosing on it and learning its shortcomings. Some became prematurely blasé and discovered The Pixies, while others continued on with a more realistic relationship to MTV — and who wants a realistic relationship with MTV? My relationship was forbidden and romanticized, a conduit to grunge-inspired fever dreams where I found myself in a cabin in the middle of pine woods sitting on a black leather couch talking to a girl with dyed hair, and “Heart Shaped Box” is playing on the television. Wood smoke is swirling through the air. This was my picture of darkly romantic bliss, circa 1993. It was only much later that I learned that this is just how life is in Tacoma.

Instead of MTV, mother, I had The Box, which I watched so covertly that you might not have ever known about it. The Box was a low-budget form of pay-per-view MTV which was broadcast publicly by various weak-signal stations through America’s urban centers in the early 1990s. I don’t know how many cities had a TV station running The Box, but Milwaukee had it, so that’s saying something. The slogan of The Box was “Music Television You Control,” and the gist of The Box was that it was public MTV for the urban grid. For something like $3.99, or 3 for $9.99, you could call a 1-900 number and make a request from The Box’s video library via credit card. Periodically you would see country or grunge on The Box, but their playlist was not slanted towards this. Since the stations running The Box had signals too weak to travel very far beyond the city, the station generally played the videos of what was then called “urban radio.” In less politically-correct terms, it was 95% hip hop, r&b, gangsta rap, and anything that had a skin video.

The Box’s signal was so weak in Milwaukee that in the suburbs, we only got it in the summer. I spent the better part of my lazy 7th and 8th grade summer vacations watching fuzzy hours on the Box whenever my parents weren’t home, and hoping against hope that they would play Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” so I could tape it. By the time they finally did, I had two hours of “Rump Shaker,” “Put ‘Em On the Glass,” and “Hand of the Dead Body” on VHS, and some very powerful ideas of what urban culture was about.

Here are three rap contradictions that my 13-year-old mind couldn’t resolve:

1) Why does Eazy-E invite Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg to suck on his dick if he’s so homophobic?

In “Real Compton City G’s” — better known as “Real Muthaphuckkin G’s,” but I only knew the comparatively clean, radio-edited version — Eazy raps:

I never met a O.G., who never did nothin’ wrong.
You tried to diss the Eazy-E, so now nigga it’s on.
You and your Doggy Dogg, think that y’all hoggin’ shit.
Both of you bitches, can come and suck my doggy dick.

Though Eazy makes a good point here about the paradox of the lawful gangsta, his fellatio invitation badly confused me. Leaving aside secondary concerns like how could “hoggin’ shit” mean a good thing, and why would Eazy describe his dick as “doggy,” the paramount question here was: Was Eazy secretly gay? Given his public stance as a major gay basher, wouldn’t he keep this more private? Did he just rap himself out of the closet and somehow not notice? Wouldn’t his label or posse point this out to him before he put it in a video? Was his latent homosexuality why his most famous sex song, though clearly about sex with women, was actually called “Gimme that Nutt?” What is the nutt he’s referring to? He’s the only one in the bedroom with nuts, isn’t he? Is he asking the girl to give him his nuts, or is the nutt a separate entity from his own nuts?

If you think I didn’t seriously ponder each of the above questions amidst the insect hum of long, humid afternoons, then you don’t know me by now. But no matter how much thinking I did, I could never work it out. There’s just no way to lift yourself up by your logical bootstraps and figure out: “Aha! Getting another man to suck on your penis is a display of dominance over him, even and especially in homophobic cultures.” And even now, I’m not entirely sure what Eazy is asking for when he requests that nutt. Most likely he’s commanding the girl to make him cum. But maybe he just wants her head? Which head? Other than having a reasonable assurance that he is not actually asking to be given a testicle, really, who knows?

2) The second contradiction that puzzled me was more general: If other rappers’ mothers are so ugly, fat, and mannish, then why do rappers always try to have sex with them, and then brag about it? From what I understood of their lives from videos on The Box, rappers were pretty much always surrounded by fine women with artificial fingernails, whose booties could shake at very high frequency, like cans of paint being separated. Whether in their white mansions at poolside, at the parking lot carwash, or down at the run-down playground, attractive women were never far from the eyes of rappers. (Only while rolling down the boulevard were the ladies absent — that stuff was only for the fellas. I guess you couldn’t put a pneumatic girl in a hydraulic car. Somebody’s rump might come off. It was like mixing an acid and a base.)

If this was so, then why would a rapper go after another rapper’s ugly mother? Was that all he could get? Were these girls who were standing around in bikinis only there to hear about a rapper’s sexual prowess, but not to partake in it? What a sad charade, in that case — the eye candy was all an illusion, and behind the scenes the rapper was being turned down left and right when he was asking all his tantalizing female guests to get on his dick. Imagine the sordid emptiness, in the mind of Biggy Smalls, as the girl turns away in scorn, her cleavage still wet with the champagne he poured on her, her body so eager before the camera’s false eye. (Maybe he should try to take her on dates first, gradually, instead of just straight-up asking her to give him that nutt? This might help.)

Something about this seemed unlikely, however. The rapper is surrounded by hookers and hos, and he has plenty of money, yet no one will get on his dick but the mothers of his rivals? That just made no sense. Maybe the rappers all had, instead of a sweet tooth, a sort of fat-and-ugly tooth? They put conventionally attractive women in their videos, but in their beds they preferred more seasoned and knowledgeable sex partners? Other rappers’ mothers were always being portrayed in the ‘Grandmama’ style — they looked like Larry Johnson in those Converse ads where he put on a dress and a wig before dunking and doing basketball moves. But maybe rappers secretly liked that, as a sort of hidden pleasure of urban life, acknowledged and even celebrated on the sly, while still remaining a half-buried private affair for gangsters and those who followed the thug life. If rappers considered it a powerful, cathartic experience to have sex with the mothers of their rivals, who were so fat that when they wore Malcolm X shirts, helicopters landed on them — well, I liked average-looking but intelligent Jennifer Fischer, even though I pretended to like middle school hottie Leah Riemer for cover. I guess some of this stuff is universal.

3) Why Does Ice Cube’s Dick Run So Deep That The Woman Falls Asleep?

No video I saw on The Box seemed to reveal realistic urban life as well as Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day.” The song seems to detail a day in the life of O’Shea Jackson — Ice Cube’s given name — as he wakes up in L.A., gets a pork-free breakfast cooked by his mother, plays basketball, watches “Yo MTV Raps,” wins money at craps, drinks and smokes weed, has high-grade intercourse with a girl he knew in high school, and drives home again. All day long he’s watching for trouble — from carjackers, police, and gangs — but on this halcyon day, it never comes. There isn’t even any smog. But the end of the video has a twist that’s not referenced in the song’s lyrics: Cube gets home and there’s a police helicopter hovering over his house. The peaceful vision is shattered in its final moments. Something similar happens in the song, where Cube suddenly pulls up short, tells his producer to stop the beat, and exclaims: “What the fuck I’m thinkin’ ’bout?”

I had this video on tape, and I pondered it a lot. First I wanted to know if Ice Cube really still lived with his mother. This guy was in NWA and he doesn’t have his own place? Same with Snoop Dogg. In “Gin and Juice,” it’s two in the morning and his party’s still jumping because his mama ain’t home. It did not seem in character for Tha Doggfather to be having his parties broken up by his mother, nor for Amerikkka’s Most Wanted to be living out of his childhood bedroom, putting his Dodgers cap down between his stuffed panda bears and sleeping beneath an Eric Dickerson poster. Were these guys giving us raps out of their past? Or did their credibility rest on still sleeping and partying at their mom’s house at least a couple days a week, even when they had that white mansion sitting ready out in Rancho Palos Verdes?

I also wanted to know if Ice Cube’s life had ever been like it was portrayed in the video. Does he really dislike pork, and rejoice when his momma cooks a breakfast with no hog? Does he like to get his grub on, but have to restrain himself from pigging out? Did he really grow up in a cramped three-bedroom with a chain-link fence? I thought both his parents worked for UCLA? I don’t mean to question his cred, but can Cube really put up a triple-double? I can see that — he’s probably one of those chubby guys who likes to play the point despite being slow. He probably passes better than you’d think, gets a lot of offensive boards, and backs people down like Mark Jackson used to.

The paramount question of “It Was a Good Day,” though, was: why does Ice Cube’s dick run so deep that the woman falls asleep? I didn’t know very much about sex in middle school, but it was my impression that if a girl started to saw logs while she was giving you that nutt, you didn’t tell your friends. Nowhere in my parents’ forgotten copy of the illustrated “Joy of Sex” was a woman shown gradually being diddled to sleep. Still, if Cube said diddling a girl to sleep was a sign of sexual prowess, then it had to be a sign of sexual prowess. Was he making her drowsy…with pleasure? Maybe the first stage of female pleasure was moaning uninhibitedly, the second was orgasm, and the third was K.O.? If Ice Cube straight-up knocked her out with his dick, in the bottom of the twelfth round, and a bell unexpectedly clanged three times while his homeys rushed the ring, I guess I didn’t need a hippie sex book to tell me that was cool.

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Honest and illuminating insight into the sex lives of major figures of the gangsta rap world was hard to come by at John Long Middle School. In my 6th grade entering class there were no Hispanic kids, no Asian kids, and no black kids. Our emblem of diversity was Nick Meier, who was half Jewish because of his mother. In the summer before 7th grade, however, Jason Carr’s family moved into the First Avenue Townhomes. Jason Carr was black, and he came from West Allis, but we thought he came from West Dallas. That seemed like a more black place to live than West Allis, which was just another blue-collar Milwaukee suburb. Jason Carr’s utter failure to come from the inner city was the first of many ways in which he came up short of our expectations.

It was taken for granted that Jason Carr was going to lead our basketball team back to respectability. I played basketball as a young man, and our town was so out of touch with the basketball world that when a black kid put up twenty points on the Saint Joseph’s Catholic Spartans in fifth grade, the kids next to me on the bench all said: “He’s going to the NBA for sure.” When Jason Carr entered John Long Middle School, as he was searching for the remedial classroom to which he had been assigned, he was pulled aside by Mr. Hudson, who coached the 7th grade, and informed that tryouts were coming in November.

The day the rosters were announced for 7th grade basketball was a watershed moment of middle school. I was pretty tall, and had been dominant in gym class, but my brief idea of basketball stardom was squelched by being given a reserve slot on the A team. There wasn’t much glory in being on the A team — our school was full of a bunch of runty farm kids with buzz cuts who were more given to wrestling than basketball, and it was pretty much acknowledged that, apart from Jason Carr, our season did not hold much promise. Every kid who could dribble, jog and draw iron on his free throws made the A team. Jason Carr made the B team. It was him and the fat kids and the kids whose legs kept getting in the way of dribbling. My first thought when I heard the news was: here was that racism that I had heard so much about. But in time it became clear to me that Jason Carr simply wasn’t very good at basketball. At all. He was about 5′11″, he had poor shooting form, and he wasn’t fast. Jason Carr didn’t even hustle well.

After that we became cruel to Jason. Our school had been duped by a fraud, who would now have to pay for the false hope he had given us. It didn’t matter that Jason Carr had never pretended to be good at basketball. John Long Middle School was not about to face up to its foolishness, and the shards of our broken illusions fell on the head of the one person who had never held them. If Jason Carr had been the young black man we were expecting, we would not have treated him well. In time we would have grown resentful of his strong individuality, of his skills which seemed to us such powerful gifts. If Jason Carr had been a basketball star, we would have adored him at first, but ultimately held his race against him in what I suppose is the usual way of unfriendly Midwestern towns. But Jason Carr was not the larger-than-life urban icon that we had been hopeful of. He was not good at basketball, he did not act like a gangster, he seemed to have no rapport with the ladies. And all of these things, which we would have soon grown to resent, were nonetheless things we wished for, and felt robbed of. In self-pity we sulked, and sniped at Jason Carr, for showing us that our town was so podunk, we couldn’t even get a proper black person.

One Thursday night early in the season I was asked to play a game with the B team. Three of our eight B players had left town early for deer hunting weekend, and we needed to have at least one reserve in order to field a team. While I played center and felt like Hakeem Olajuwon against my diminished competition, Jason Carr shot about 3 for 20. He was benched in the fourth quarter, and as he walked along the row of vacant metal folding chairs where our bench ought to have been, he kicked one in frustration. It collapsed against the wall of folded wooden bleachers with a tremendous crash.

After the game I saw Jason come out as I waited for my mother in front of the school, beneath the flagpole. He cut a forlorn figure, and I looked at him with a mixture of pity and curiosity. It seemed to me that surely he must have some hidden reserve of ability that we had not tapped, some great knowledge we could glean. He couldn’t just be another kid from West Allis. A sheltered life breeds romanticism, and to my eye Jason Carr had to be some fallen prince. I wanted desperately to identify his knowledge, and get the benefit of it, and to make him feel good again for giving it to me. I wanted to restore his crown. And I thought I had an idea of what it was that he knew that we all didn’t.

“Jason,” I asked. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Pff,” he said. “Yea. What?”

“Does Snoop Dogg really live with his mother in a three-bedroom house in the hood? Is Eazy E gay, and why do girls fall asleep on Ice Cube’s dick?”

Jason looked back at me over the collar of his puffy white coat.

“You stupid wiggers,” he said. “Why don’t you stop? I don’t give a care about Ice Cube. I like ‘Jeremy.’”

“You like Jeremy?”

“Yeah, you know. ‘Lemon yellow sun. Arms raised in a V? Jeremy spoke in class today?’”

He turned away in disgust, his red Jansport backpack flapping loosely off his shoulder. He spit, and kicked at the frosty ground, and descended onto the soccer fields, where the dead lay, in pools of maroon below.

Chris Leslie-Hynan once wore a puffy black Chicago Bulls jacket and white David Robinson pump shoes. (They were ugly: see HERE.) But his mom wouldn’t let him be a real wigger; it cost too much.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2005 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.