Free I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son by Kent Russell

has improved.” Juggalos challenged artists to chugging competitions, and beat them. Glass pipes of innumerable colors and fungal shapes were passed from the audience to the stage. Someone fired Roman candles into the tent’s folds, an exceptionally bad idea. In front of me among the crowd at the back of the tent, two men explained toa third how they had just hitchhiked their way back from the Hardin County jail. A range-finding water balloon popped in the dirt a few feet behind me. Violent J of ICP summed up my predicament: “You could have a camera crew, or documentary people running around; you could take pictures, interview ninjas; but you can’t possibly know what it’s really like to be part of this family unless you’re a part of this. That’s like … that’s like … hearing about love, and actually being in love. Those are two different ma’fucking things, right? Well this is love, right here. This is real love amongst each other in this bitch.” As he spoke this, some juggalos with a trebuchet on a distant hillside pegged me right in my face with a Faygo-filled balloon.
    I had hoped to find Adam at the campsite around lunchtime. Maybe have a few brats, laughs. No sign of Adam. Ate a few chocolate Luna bars, soft and fecal-looking in the heat. Immediately regretted it.
    There was one ATM on the premises. It might’ve been the only ATM in Cave-In-Rock. It was the plastic, stand-alone kind you get flaccid bills out of at bodegas and strip clubs. I saw no one else use it. It was its own little island in a glade that included the Psychopathic Records merch tent. The usage fee was five dollars.
    For twelve hours every day, the merch tent thronged with juggalos. I watched them buy T-shirts and CDs, but also caps, cowboy hats, ski masks, hoodies, basketball, football, baseball, and hockey jerseys, tongue studs, comics, posters, wallets, belt buckles, fingerless gloves, flip-flops, shorts, and dresses, all in every conceivable size and color. Except for PROPERTY OF PSYCHOPATHIC RECORDS onesies; those were available in black only.
    I wondered, How is the merch tent doing such a brisk business without anyone having to use the ATM?
    The answer is that the Gathering of the Juggalos is a free market in every sense. Aside from Drug Bridge—which even the security guards called Drug Bridge—juggalo wares were on sale anyplace you looked. RVs doubled as tattoo parlors and greasy spoons. Cardboard signs affixed to tents advertised kush, chronic, and ’dro. I still don’t know what ketamine is, but I said it out loud once and was pitched to lickety-split. Reese’s Cups, fan fiction, electronic cigarettes, oil paintings. I saw gasoline bartered for acid tabs. The juggalos I spoke with believed that making money this way was preferable to having a real job, was the
American dream,
basically, despite the fact that they lived demonstrably worse lives than people with real jobs. Still, one juggalo told me, “Dog, I came here broke and hustled a thousand dollars.”
    The second evening, I locked myself out of my rental car. I asked the first person I saw if he had a slim jim. He did, and fifteen seconds and thirty-five dollars later, I was back to getting waters out of my trunk. As I headed to see Warren G, a guy driving roughshod in a golf cart spotted me and pulled a U-ey. His handpainted sign read TAXI RIDES $2 . “Hey, my man!” the guy said, pointing to my VIP pass. “Where’d you get that?” I explained that I e-mailed ahead of time and made arrangements with Sandy, the disappeared PR agent, and that actually the VIP pass entitled one only to free golf-cart rides on the first day of the Gathering. “Yeah, I don’t care about all that,” he said. “I’m riding in this golf cart, you know what I’m saying? Which I stole, you know what I’m saying? And they see that shit around my neck? Dog, I could get in anywhere!” Off in the distance, Warren G was launching into “I Want It All.” “Dog, I’ll