Chapter 4

“Colt”

Dude! I love that our house was bought by Jack Thee Jackal! I sent him a DM, congratulating him on buying the house, offering to show him around, party with him, but he didn’t reply. No probs! He either didn’t read it or didn’t believe it. He gets thousands of DMs, I’m sure.

I tried making a YouTube channel like Jack’s. I’d grab my bros and we’d go out, do stupid shit, copycat Jackass stuff. We did one where we dressed up in girls’ lingerie and played golf in a graveyard.

And we made another series, where we preyed on victims at school, or around the mall, or the neighborhood. Our goal: to find them, and fart on them. We’d stalk, hunt, hide, and then jump out of bushes, burst out from behind closed doors, or jump up from the backseat of a car or leap down from a tree or fire escape, either naked, wearing only a pair of assless chaps, or in just a pair of briefs, and then we’d unleash ass, point and fire unfiltered farts at friends and classmates.

Sometimes a classmate might open a door to a classroom and find one of us, pants pooled around our ankles, bent over in their direction, ready to launch a stinky ass attack.

Possibly the worst of the videos was the “Fart Alarm Clock,” where a buddhi bandit would patrol the library, sneak up on a sleeping classmate, drop trou, bend over, lean his ass in, and just let out a booming burrito fart, ass mere inches from the sleeper’s face...

“Bare booty fart ATTACKS! The most vicious, NO FILTRATION!” was the title and theme. But no one watched. Except a couple people, who told us that we suck. That we “suck RAW!” I think those were the exact words.

Then I tried making music, rapping. I wasn’t good at that either. I got even worse feedback on that when I uploaded my tunes to the interwebs. In my mind, though, I sounded dope. I sounded like Eminem. I was going to BE the next Eminem. But then I saw the comments I was getting. In fact, one song went sort of viral- but for the wrong reasons. Thousands of people watched my video, cracked jokes about it, called me all sorts of shit, a “wigger,” mostly, “wack AF” and I even received death threats and a couple guys challenging me to fistfights.

All over a free video, a basement rap I slapped together on my computer. A song about smoking weed in my school’s handicapped bathroom!

(Handicapped people were the most pissed about it. One even asked, “Dude, where am I supposed to smoke weed?” Looking back on it, he had a point. It was pretty fucking wack... )

Posting stuff online, I guess it’s pretty easy to discover your limitations when you get that amount of instant feedback. Man, reading hundreds of people telling me that I sucked, I can’t say it was good for my psyche.

Oh ... Well ... Fuck them! I was still living in a house big enough to have its own zip code. I was always aware of that. Particularly since my earliest memories, from when I was a tiny kid, were of being in a cramped apartment, with my parents, back when my dad had first started playing pro football. But once he signed that big contract, ah man, life was pretty easy.

My life has always been easy. Maybe too easy ... I’ve spent countless hours just watching and rewatching gangsta rap videos, smoking weed ... I’ve never been too motivated ... My sister, a few years younger than me, was always a nerd. She was always hitting the books...

Not me, though. I’ve never found a calling. I never took to football, like my old man. I got more of my mom’s DNA. I’m not that tall, only 5’11, and am thin, like her. I’m not super coordinated, either. I’m just not great at sports, which kinda always made me feel like I was a disappointment to my father.

Not that I didn’t try. When I was little, I joined Pop Warner. Dad didn’t force me into it or anything. But I thought he’d want me to be a jock like him. When I sucked at football and quit, however, he never mentioned anything about it. I didn’t know quite what to make of that then. I still don’t.

He was always a bit distant, my Pops, off in his football world. But I respected him, I must say. I looked up to him. He was big and powerful. He gave us a great life. He was gone most of the time, and was aloof, but that’s just his temperament. He’s a quiet man. He lets his deeds do the talking. And I respect that. My dad is cool. He was good to us. I mean, like sure, he’d spaz out, break stuff around the house and scream after games. It’d scare the shit out of me and my sis, but it was never directed at us and he never got violent. He was never abusive.

Him, nor my mom, never really disciplined us, ever, that I can recall. There were a few babysitters and maids who’d get in our faces, from time to time. Usually they’d be on my case for my shitty grades and a couple Jackass stunts the school got upset about.

But other than that, I never got in too much trouble. As a kid, I was pretty mellow. I still am. I think I’ve been in one or two fistfights in my entire life. I’m just laidback. So much so that people might think I’m on Xanax or something. But nah, I don’t take drugs too often these days, aside from an occasional bump or two of the nose candy and, of course, smoking weed, but that’s a plant, not a drug, in my opinion...

Nah, man, my biggest problem has been, and continues to be, my lack of direction.

I mean, like, at first I’d wanted to be on Jackass. Then I’d wanted to be Eminem. But since none of that transpired, I don’t know what to do. I didn’t have a Plan B or C.

Lately I’ve been working odd jobs. My degree sucks. Like, I went to a party college, got drunk, and copied all my papers from the internet, paid nerds to do homework for me. Even with cheating, though, I still barely graduated college. I failed English. WTF? I speak English! How the hell did I fail English? Damn...

I guess part of the problem was that I was never interested in learning the stuff they taught in school. In math class, I’d be thinking about learning to fix my engine, buying parts for my car. In English classes, I hated Shakespeare, but I liked reading other stuff, like Tucker Max, and thrillers. I love thrillers! My friend in high school got me into Bukowski. His poetry kicks ass. Reading it, I couldn’t believe anyone would actually write shit like that. It’s the only poetry I could ever enjoy.

But the stuff they assigned me to read in class was terrible. It was always so fucking boring. The only assigned reading I ever liked from English class was Mark Twain. That dude was fucking cool. Emily Dickinson? Beowulf? Nah, not for me. Jane Austin? Yuck. Fuck off!

To me, that’s the problem with school. You’re forced to learn this or that. It’s something about being forced into it that turns me off. If I’m into something, if I want to learn it, I can’t pry myself away from it. I’ll spend hours on Wikipedia sometimes. I’ll dive down intellectual rabbit holes, reading all sorts of shit. I fuck with knowledge; it’s not that I don’t enjoy learning.