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

make it worth your while. Money … or, you know, drugs.” I declined.
    When I reached the main stage, I took a water out of mybook bag. A horrifically sunburned albino limped up to me, squinting, and asked, “How much?” I didn’t know how to explain that I wasn’t selling my waters. But he was in a bad way, so I charged a dollar. The bottle was still hot from the trunk, you see.
    I took off my VIP pass once, to blend in, maybe get the juggalos to open up. Within three minutes, security guards materialized, and they threatened to take me to “juggalo jail.” Standard admission was $150, and juggalos were sneaking in, they told me. Where was my wristband, or my commemorative sheriff’s badge celebrating the release of “Big Money Rustlas,” Psychopathic’s Western homage? I stammered and jangled my VIP lanyard. Then they all bought balloons filled with nitrous oxide from a guy.
    The nights at the Gathering were black as space. If you didn’t have a flashlight to sweep trails with, you were bound to twist an ankle. On the plus side, I could plop down with the burnouts and scrawl blind notes without anyone noticing.
    That second night, a carny stabbed another carny in the stomach, and Tila Tequila was pelted with debris until she bled, but I was elsewhere, watching Tom Green perform in the seminar tent. (Prior to his set, two juggalos in the audience fist-fought for half a minute before onlookers chanted “FAM-I-LY! FAM-I-LY!” The fighters stopped and slinked away, shamed.)
    I say “perform.” Tom Green bounded onstage and got belted with a hot dog. He was then offered two separate bong hits, one of which he accepted; the chant was “TOM SMOKES GREEN!” Any joke that required a setup was interrupted. Someone shouted something about Drew Barrymore thatseemed to hurt him. A juggalette to my left started to laugh at a joke, paused to vomit, and resumed laughing. Tom tried to do a bit about technological dehumanization, with gags about text messages and porn, but he was chanted down. It was very uncomfortable in there. More things were thrown. Juggalos had power over a famous person and they knew it. Eventually, Tom Green was performing like a jester, quick to start one joke only to abandon it for another, hoping both to please and not get murdered.
    He ended with a monologue about how everyone on Twitter had begged him not to come, but that since his post-cancer philosophy was carpe diem, he wanted not only to come but to prove everyone wrong about juggalos. This was answered with raucous “WHOOP WHOOP!”s.
    I heard that, later, he tried to save Tila Tequila from her bombardment by jumping onstage to draw juggalo fire—to no avail.
    After sleeping for maybe two hours, I got up on the third day and went to see the actual Cave-In-Rock. It’s a fifty-five-foot-wide, hundred-foot-deep cave scoured into a cliffside by the Ohio River. For more than two hundred years pirates, counterfeiters, horse thieves, and murderers used it as a natural refuge and ambush. The river floods it from time to time, which is why it’s so cool and loamy inside, smelling of equal parts fecundity and decay.
    I was reading the teen inscriptions ( VINCE DID ALLIE X RIGHT HERE ), not finding any that were juggalo-related, when a mother and her two daughters entered the cave. The mother, who spoke with a deep Midwest twang, said she lived forty-five minutes away but had never brought her girls here. We’re liable to do that, she said—spend our lives missing the beautiful things rightin front of us. She had the blue eyes and curdled face of a 4-H beauty queen gone to seed.
    I fibbed and said I hadn’t heard of the Gathering but was passing through on my way home from a friend’s. She offered to pray with me right then and there. “Right here and right now to know you are saved,” was how she put it. “This wasn’t a coincidence. You and me here today. Don’t write it off as one.” My nods were bogus, like a drinking bird’s.