eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
From one of the most ferociously brilliant and distinctive young voices in literary nonfiction: a debut shot through with violence, comedy, and feverish intensity that takes us on an odyssey into an American netherworld, exposing a raw personal journey along the way.
Locked in battle with both his adult appetites and his most private childhood demons, Kent Russell hungers for immersive experience and revelation, and his essays take us to society’s ragged edges, the junctures between savagery and civilization. He pitches a tent at an annual four-day music festival in Illinois, among the misunderstood, thick-as-thieves fans who self-identify as Juggalos. He treks to the end of the continent to visit a legendary hockey enforcer, the granddaddy of all tough guys, to see how he’s preparing for his last foe: obsolescence. He spends a long weekend getting drunk with a self-immunizer who is willing to prove he has conditioned his body to withstand the bites of the most venomous snakes. He insinuates himself with a modern-day Robinson Crusoe on a tiny atoll off the coast of Australia. He explores the Amish obsession with baseball, and his own obsession with horror, blood, and guts. And in the piercing interstitial meditations between these essays, Russell introduces us to his own raging and inimitable forebears.
I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son, blistering and deeply personal, records Russell’s quest to understand, through his journalistic subjects, his own appetites and urges, his persistent alienation, and, above all, his knotty, volatile, vital relationship with his father. In a narrative that can be read as both a magnificent act of literary mythmaking and a howl of filial despair, Russell gives us a haunting and unforgettable portrait of an America—and a paradigm of American malehood—we have never before seen.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780385352314 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/10/2015 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
2. AMERICAN JUGGALO
I’d been driving for seventeen hours, much of it on two-lane highways through Indiana and then southern Illinois. Red-green corn sidled closer to the road until it stooped over both shoulders. That early in the morning, a mist was tiding in the east.
I figured I had to be close. A couple of times I turned off the state road to drive past family plots where the houses were white, right-angled ideals. Rising from many of these plots were incongruous humps of grass—homespun cemeteries. I wondered what it would be like to grow up in a place like this. Your livelihood would surround you, waving hello every time the wind picked up. You wouldn’t be able to see your neighbors, but you’d for sure know who they were. You’d go to one of the Protestant churches seeded in the corn, take off your Sunday best to shoot hoops over the garage, and drink an after-dinner beer on your porch swing, certain of your regular American- ness. And one day you’d get buried feet from where you lived, worked, and died.
Doubt about this trip unfurled inside me as the odometer crawled on. I couldn’t have told you then why I was doing it.
Back on IL-1, I glanced to my right and saw an upsidedown SUV in the corn. It must’ve flipped clear over the stalks nearest the road, which stood tall and undamaged. The SUV’s rear right wheel—the whole wheel—was gone, but the axle still spun. Stumbling alongside the wreck was a dazed kid in a Psychopathic Records fitted cap. The fingertips he touched to the side paneling seemed to keep him from pitching over.
When midwestern bugs hit your windshield, they chink like marbles. When I’m feeling indecisive in a car, I mash the accelerator.
When the hip-hop label Psychopathic Records released its seventeen-minute trailer for the eleventh annual Gathering of the Juggalos, a four-day music festival, five people I knew sent me links to it. I suppose that for them it was a snarker’s Holy Grail: everyone involved in the video had such a boggling lack of self-awareness that the whole thing bordered on parody. “The Gathering has fresh and exciting shit to do all around the fucking fizzuck,” the trailer went. “One hundred rap and rock groups! Helicopter rides! Carnival rides! Seminars! . . . And if you like midgets, we got midgets for you.” Mind you, I had no idea who or what any of this was.
The trailer featured bedraggled white folks and nary a complete smile. “Fresh-ass” was used as a compound modifier denoting quality. Willis from Diff’rent Strokes would be there, and Vanilla Ice was going to sign autographs. There’d be wrestling all night, four nights in a row.
I could understand how some might find joy in making fun of these people and their “infamous one-of-a-kind” admixture of third-rate fun fair and perdition. But I was also impressed by the stated point of the thing: “The real flavor, what separates the Gathering from every other festival on the planet, is the magic in the air. The feeling of ten thousand best friends around you. The camaraderie. The family. And the love felt everywhere throughout the grounds. You’ll meet people, make future best friends; you’ll probably get laid. And you’ll realize that the fam- ily coming together is what all of this is really about.”
I did some hasty groundwork on that boon the Internet and found out that juggalos are: “Darwin’s biggest obstacle.” “A greasy, fat teenager with a Kool-Aid mustache and no friends who listens to songs about clowns in his stepmother’s double- wide mobile home when he isn’t hanging out at the mall food court.” “They paint their faces, are aggressive, travel in packs, abide (supposedly) by a simplistic code of rules, and tell all those non-juggalos that juggalos live a happier and freer life.” I learned that Saturday Night Live spoofed them on the regular. There’s a band called Juggalo Deathcamp. “Illegal Immigrants Can Stay, Deport the Juggalos” is a statement that 92,803 individuals on Facebook agree with.
Who were these people? Why did everyone hate them so?
“Juggalo” etymology is this: Insane Clown Posse, the founders of Psychopathic Records, were performing in front of 1,800 at the Ritz in Warren, Michigan, in the early ’90s. Violent J, one half of the Posse, was doing “The Juggla,” a song off Carnival of Carnage. When he rapped the chorus, “You can’t fuck with the Juggla . . . ,” he asked, “What about you, juggalo? Are there any juggalos in here?” The crowd went nuts and the term stuck.
No definition exists. Nowhere in Psychopathic Records’ discography do any of their artists—not ICP, nor Twiztid, nor Blaze Ya Dead Homie, nor Anybody Killa, nor Boondox— attempt to delineate what a juggalo is or believes. The artists themselves self-identify as juggalos, but when they rap about juggalos, they do so with awe, incredulity, and more than a little deliberation.
From ICP’s “Welcome to Thy Show”: “We just glad we down with them, hate to be y’all / and have a juggalo shatter my skull for the Carnival.”
From Violent J’s interview with Murder Dog magazine: “Juggalos started with ICP and now it’s grown into its own culture. It’s still very much a part of ICP, but there are other groups that juggalos follow. A juggalo is not just a fan base of ICP. A juggalo is a way of life. . . . The juggalos is very much like a tribe. It’s like this wandering tribe who gather every year at a sacred place to have a ritual. It’s an ancient thing for humans.”
ICP are Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, a couple of white minor felons from the working-class suburbs of Detroit. In the early ’90s, the two of them dropped out of high school, donned clown face, and founded both Psychopathic Records and a mythology called the Dark Carnival. Without getting too deep into it: The Dark Carnival comprises six studio albums, released between 1992 and 2002, known as the Joker’s Cards. With each Joker’s Card—Carnival of Carnage, Ringmaster, Riddle Box, The Great Milenko, The Amazing Jeckel Brothers, and The Wraith— ICP disclosed more of their Carnival and its murderous personalities and attractions. They envisioned a kind of big-top kangaroo court run by vigilante carnies. A darkly righteous expo that traveled from town to town and blew up racists, tortured wife beaters, bled pedophiles dry, and consigned the wealthy to hell.
From Violent J’s memoir, ICP: Behind the Paint, which reads a lot like Bukowski’s Ham on Rye: “Every kid who came through the line was just like us. They looked like us, dressed like us, talked like us and all that. NO!!!! I’m not saying that we influenced them and their style; I’m saying that they already had the same style as us. We were all just different forms of SCRUB!!!! We were all the same kind of people! We were all the world’s UNDERDOGS. We were all pissed, and ready to do something about it.”
In the early days, this “something” sounded a lot like class warfare. For instance, there’s this, from the liner notes to Carnival of Carnage:
If those of the ghetto are nothing more than carnival exhibits to the upper class, then let’s give them the show they deserve to see. No more hearing of this show because you can witness it in your own front yard! A traveling mass of carnage, the same carnage we witness daily in the ghetto, can be yours to witness, feel and suffer. No longer killing one another, but killing the ones who have ignored our cries for help. FREE PASS FOR THE GOVERNOR’S FAMILY! Like a hurricane leaving a trail of destruction, the ghetto on wheels! My views may be ugly, but so are the bloodstains on the streets I roam. lf there is no change soon tickets will be issued to . . . The Carnival of Carnage.
This was more or less of a piece with the greater gangsta rap ethos of the early ’90s, albeit espoused by two white clowns. But after Carnival of Carnage, ICP focused their creative energies on rapping about new nemeses and gory set pieces for their Dark Carnival; fanciful descriptions of retribution took precedence over politics. J and 2 Dope became like superheroes (at one point producing their own comic book series), and their slant-rhymed fantasies of comeuppance stood in for mobilization. If anything, their political beliefs could now be described as apocalyptic.
Or at least that’s how some juggalos have perceived it. In 2006, one juggalo named Jacob Robida attacked three men in a Massachusetts gay bar with a hatchet and a gun, fled to West Virginia, kidnapped a woman, and drove to Arkansas, where he killed her, a police officer, and himself. In 2008, two Utah juggalos armed with a knife and a battle-ax attacked a seventeen-year-old, hacking at him twelve times. A juggalette from Colorado got her juggalo boyfriend to stab her mother to death. Two Pennsylvania juggalos took a boy into the woods and slit his throat in 2009. Police in Utah, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and California consider juggalos a criminal gang. So does the FBI.
The man in the ticketing trailer told me someone would be by shortly with my press pass, which I had lied to get. Nobody assigned me to go to the Gathering of the Juggalos, and I couldn’t have said why I was standing there in the buzzing heat at the entrance of Hogrock Ranch & Campground, a hundred- plus acres of cleared land in the Shawnee National Forest just outside tiny Cave-In-Rock, Illinois. Next to me was a shirtless kid named Squee. I’d helped him carry a gunnysack down the steep declivity that connects the overflow parking to the camp- ground. I’d said, grinning conspiratorially, “Let me guess: This shit’s full of beers, right?” He’d said, “Fuck your beers, dude, we’re smoking that weed. This shit’s full of Powerades. Gonna sell these shits.”
Squee rapped on the trailer’s window ledge and told the ticketing man, “Uhh, I lost my car.” “You lost your what?” the ticketing man asked. “My hoopty.” “Can’t help you.” Squee turned to some other kids who were getting their bags checked at the gate and said, “Shit, I was in a tent with four juggalettes— sounds good, right?—Camry keys in my pocket, getting my drink on, my brain on. Now I can’t find that shit.” He glared at the kid next to him and said, “I told you it was a stupid idea to get that fucked up on the very first night, Randall.”
Sandy the PR agent, my age and attractive in a round-featured midwestern way, rode shotgun in a golf cart that skidded to a halt in the dirt in front of the trailer. She handed me a lanyarded, laminated card that had the dimensions of a child’s placemat at a chain restaurant. It was emblazoned with the Psychopathic Records mascot, the Hatchetman, and the letters “VIP.” I’d never been credentialed before.
“Charmed, I’m sure,” Sandy said, reaching her right arm over her left shoulder for me to shake from the back of the cart. At the wheel was a freckled child. “This is Justin. He works here, kind of.” Justin turned to me slowly. His smile was wide and shingled with loose baby teeth. He floored it.
We bounced down the dirt pathways that web Hogrock. “This is normally a biker camp,” Sandy said, “but sometimes also a Baptist kids’ camp. This is the third straight Gathering here. Every Gathering’s been in Michigan, Ohio, or Illinois. Seven thousand went to the first; twenty thousand went to the last. This business is a day longer than Woodstock.”
Tents sprouted from every inch of available flat land on either side of the path. Pup tents, two-person tents, bivouacs, walk-in affairs with air-conditioning. Back in the woods, red tarp domes showed between trees like pimples under hair. Next to most were dusty American cars filled to the windows with stuff: beers, empty motor oil bottles, liters and liters of Detroit’s bottom-shelf Faygo cola, pallets of Chef Boyardee, chips, chocolate, powdered Gatorade. Ruddy juggalo faces poked out of tent flaps at the approaching burr of the golf cart, adding to the surreal feeling of touring an encamped American diaspora.
We drifted past the seminar tent, the second stage, the auto- graph tent, the freak-show tent, the adipose food booths. The sky was as dully off-white as the inside of a skull. I’d read that these four days would range in temperature from ninety-six to a hundred degrees. Sweat-wise, I was already beyond recall.
“I did the whole Gathering last year,” Sandy said. “I’m not staying past sundown tomorrow. I hope you brought something green, or an orange.” Justin slalomed around shirtless juggalos. Seen from behind, most had broad, slumped shoulders and round, hanging arms. They were not stout. These people were grubbed with fat. They looked partially deflated. You think I’m being cruel, but these were the most physically unhealthful people I’d ever seen. “Because if not, you’re shit out of luck. Unless you especially love carnival burgers, or fried curds from out the back of someone’s RV.”
We visited a swimming hole nicknamed Lake Hepatitis that was the kelly green of putt-putt hazard water. A waspy helicopter you could ride in for forty dollars. A trailer full of showers, a wrestling ring, and the half-mile-long valley that held the main stage on one end and a small fair at the other. It turned out that Justin was the son of Psychopathic Records’ VP. My credential flapped in the false breeze, whining like a musical saw.
Justin braked hard on a narrow bridge that spanned a parched creek. There was a backup of cars looking for open campground. Not more than twenty-four inches in front of us sat twin girls on the rear bumper of a white minivan. They couldn’t have been a day over fourteen or a biscuit under 225. They wore bikini tops, and the way they slouched—breasts resting on paunches, navels razed to line segments—turned their trunks into parodies of their sullen faces.
The air here was dry and piquant. Cigarette and pot smoke convected, chasing out oxygen. One of the girls called out to Sandy, “You’re really pretty,” emphasizing the “You’re” as though being pretty were suspect. Juggalos swarmed the bridge, and when the traffic stopped, they closed in, hawking whatever they had. Hands shot into the cart, holding cones of weed for fifteen dollars, glass pipes for ten dollars, bouquets of mushrooms for I don’t know how much, Keystone Lights for a dollar, single menthols for a dollar. A clutched breast was pushed through the fray and jiggled; a disembodied voice demanded a dollar.
Then somebody screamed, “WHOOP, WHOOP!”
Understanding how this sounds is important, as it forms a refrain to the entire Gathering. A single “WHOOP, WHOOP!” is like a plaintive, low-pitched train whistle Dopplering from afar. The Os are long, and there’s a hinge between the first “WHOOP” and the second. You sort of swing from one syllable to the next.
The crowd fortified the call, returning it deeper and rounder. “WHOOP, WHOOOOOOOOP!” Sandy overturned her handbag, found oversize sunglasses, and put them on. “Just say it. Just do it,” she said. Thinking myself a funny guy, I did a kind of Three Stooges “Whoop whoop whoop!”
Which I know now was wrong. “WHOOP, WHOOP!” is juggalo echolocation. Its not pinging back means trouble.
The twins screamed, “Show us your titties, bitch!” at Sandy. A tall guy with a massive water gun screamed, “Man, fuck your ride!” and sprayed us with a stream of orange drink the pressure and circumference of which made me think of racehorses. A “FUCK YOUR RIDE!” chant went up and around the crowd, and garbage was thrown. I would describe what kind of garbage, and how it felt to be the object of such ire—but I had so much garbage thrown at me at the Gathering of the Juggalos that showers of refuse became commonplace, a minor annoyance, and describing one would be like describing what it’s like to get a little wet on a winter’s day in Seattle. Justin, bless his heart, floored it, parting the crowd with the derring-do one is capable of when one’s father is running shit……
Excerpted from I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son by Kent Russell. Copyright © 2015 by Kent Russell. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
1 Ryan Went to Afghanistan 3
2 American Juggalo 37
3 Mithradates of Fond Du Lac 99
4 Showing Up 143
5 Say Good Morning to the Adversary 180
6 Artisanal Ball 202
7 Island Man 228
8 Let's Get This Tub of Shit Up to Speed 260
Acknowledgments 287
Interviews
Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Kent Russell
Kent Russell sprinkles his speech with SAT words. Talking with him is like sharing a beer with a Rhodes Scholar-turned- Alaskan fisherman in a dank bar past its glory days, neon Old Milwaukee signs still crackling. An NYU master's degree in Journalism buffed him to a shine. Half-baked missions to recreational baseball games in Amish country (and waking most mornings with cottonmouth) left tarnished marks. His silver tongue allays his frequent shots from the hip.
Russell is an impressively decorated journalist, though he'd never let you call him that. At just 29, he's already laid the groundwork for a solid writing career, with work published in places like The New Republic, Harper's, The Believer, Grantland, and others. He grew up in balmy Miami. Hurricane Andrew flooded his home. His father, a hardened military vet, was the patriarch, guiding the Russells through their young lives with fervent love cloaked in ribbing commentary. ("You can love a snake," he writes, "but the snake's got no way of showing it loves you back.") Russell's dad blends into each essay in I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son, his asides stitching together scenes from his son's raucous adventures. Kent describes his late grandfather's last living moments: "Prior to that day, I had never thought to ask him about his past. He was a grandfather, you know? What's a grandfather but a grinning, declawed mascot of the man he used to be? An anthropomorphized beast."
Russell's trials are varied. Detailing a childhood friend's morose correspondence while stationed in Afghanistan. Camping alongside Insane Clown Posse's disciples, called ninjas, on a ground soaked with Faygo at the Gathering of the Juggalos. Sitting quietly next to the husk of hockey legends now hollowed by retirement and listlessness. Throughout, Russell proves fluid, vivid, and frank. He is a devout fan of bubble baths, and readers might crave a solid soak upon completing his book, to soothe joints left sore from the truth bombs he ruthlessly drops. "I am so purposefully divisive," writes Russell. "Especially in my ill-fated relationships with the similarly self-sabotaging people I gravitate toward. A dog barks loudest at its own reflection, as they say. Do they say that? They should."
I spoke with Russell by phone from his apartment in South Brooklyn. At the end of our conversation, he politely made a request. "Hey Beca?" he said. "Limit my dickishness, huh? Help me not sound like an asshole." This from a man candid enough to write, "My theory has been: human beings are not meant to go hand-in-hand the whole stretch of the way. Or even part of the way. Always have sympathy, always be accompanied, always to be understood — that sounds fucking intolerable." What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, in which what Russell calls his "dickishness" proves to be nothing less than pure, admirable honesty. —Beca Grimm
The Barnes & Noble Review: How did you decide you wanted to make American masculinity the central focus of these essays?
Kent Russell: I wrote all these essays while working a day job. I was going after what interested me during the High Holidays breaks at Yeshiva University, where I worked. It was a weird, unconscious process: "Here's this kind of question that I need to have answered. Something about this — in a nebulous way — has something to do with me or the members of my family." So ultimately, I would just go out and report on these things. When I'd written about three of them, an agent I had been talking to was like, 'I really like the collection you're making. [I was] like, "What are you talking about, bro? What collection?" It didn't dawn on me that he could shape what I was doing. Then people are like, "This book is about dudes! It's about American dudes!"
You're from Florida, I'm from Florida — South Florida. I remember when I first came up to New York, talking to people from the Northeast. I'd never lived outside of Florida before, and people were like, "You're such a dude. You're such a doofus, dude."
That's a long way of telling you that it's about what it's about because ultimately, it was unconscious or accidental — serendipitous if you wanna be kind.
BNR: I hear you on that. It's interesting, too, even in our conversation and a couple instances sprinkled throughout the book just your use of the word "bro," in a totally glib way.
KR: (Laughs) Yeah, that's Miami. [In] Miami, whether you want to or not, you'll wind up using the word "bro."
BNR: When you first started setting out and embedding yourself in these sorts of situations that just interested you, what was your goal?
KR: My goal was to not be working at Yeshiva University anymore. I came to New York and did grad school. I didn't really know why I did grad school, but I did it. The goal was always sorta [to] write "longform" — although I hate that word, don't know where it came from — but to write reported pieces and essays. There was a long [break] in my life of not reading or writing — almost perfectly coinciding with puberty. All throughout high school, I neither read nor wrote. It actually took me going to the University of Florida, reading stuff independently on my own. I studied journalism there. I'd begin to write these long, stupid, really dumb pieces, practicing the form I was coming across reading outside of class. Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace — like any doofus white guy with glasses. I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and was immediately in love. I guess all along the goal was to one day maybe be fortunate or lucky enough to do this as a job.
BNR: When did you start working on this collection as a book?
KR: The first one I actually wrote? I was like — Jesus Christ — 22 or 23? I turned 29 in December. So it's been kind of a process. Essay collections can feel more like a victory lap as opposed to a stand-alone product, you know? I was doing other stuff at the same time. I do a lot of writing about ice hockey that nobody likes. I know there's probably too much ice hockey in the book as it is, but I love to write about ice hockey.
BNR: Yeah, there is a lot of ice hockey. You write, "All involved believe in the personality of the law. A foul is as much an offense against the victim as it is a violation of the rules. The cry in hockey is, 'Let 'em play,' which rings about the same as 'Boys will be boys' and actually means 'An eye for an eye.' " Why do you feel like ice hockey is such a perfect example of masculinity in American culture?
KR: The first question everybody always asks: "If you're from Miami, what the hell are you doing loving ice hockey?" I guess it's not wanting to think about what attracts me to this thing until I actually have to sit down and write about it.
BNR: It's a very intimate collection, detailing accounts you have with men in their specific domains. How do you write about real people in deeply personal situations without exposing yourself too much? Or exposing them? How do you toe that line and find a balance?
KR: I wasn't going out there trying to expose myself too much, or lay bare these other dudes. That's the best part of writing about these dudes — why I was drawn to them. It was like psychology: a defensive posture I totally understand. A mirror image of myself in some instances. We can perfectly Matrix swipe one another without actually placing a punch. That alone could help [me] understand what's below the surface a little better. Instead of, "Hey, this guy is terrified of ever being vulnerable and that's why he does this stuff." It's something I'm very much attracted to and also repulsed by in myself. I was hoping more so than anthropologically cutting open a specimen and just having it be more performative, [to offer] more showing, not telling.
BNR: You do a good job of balancing that while maintaining a sense of humility in each situation. I'm curious, too, how exactly you embed yourself in these situations and scenarios that are completely foreign to you. Like the Juggalo camp, or kicking it with Tim, the eccentric snake venom immunotherapist, with his dirty mattress among the terrariums of specimens. How do you stay true to your identity, but still infiltrate?
KR: That's the whole trick with reporting: you just gotta appear like a total moron. Basically you have to appear dumb as hell. Even though I do a crapload of legwork and research. It's not like I wanna know what the story is before I arrive in a place. I just wanna know the context.
I'm trying to draw people out, or really understand a situation. You have to be a blank slate, because nobody wants to talk to a peer or somebody who actually knows. If you're talking to somebody who already knows what you're talking about, you're going to talk to them in a knowledgeable, inside baseball shorthand, right? You kind of have to act like a dumbass. But in a way, that's kind of a big relief, and part of why in my normal life I'm very sociable. The actual opportunity to go out places and kind of shut off that one part of your brain that's like, "You look like a fool and nobody likes you." It's a way to get outside of yourself.
BNR: How do you find these people? How do you decide what kind of adventure you're going to chase next?
KR: With Tim, the snake guy, one day I was just like, "You know, I like this axiom and a lot of people like this axiom: 'Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger.'" I was like, "Well, shit. Let's just take that to its most logical conclusion." And I started Googling, going down an Internet rabbit hole of just seeing if anybody could possibly embody this? Eventually I stumbled across self-immunization and Tim on the online forums. And he had a website where you could buy his PDF guide [to self-immunization].
In December I went to [write about] brutally violent witch hunts in Papua New Guinea. A horrific amount of people get killed every year — hundreds and hundreds of people in Papua New Guinea, tortured and burned alive for being witches. That just began with, "Hey, are there still modern day witch hunts?"
BNR: How do you feel about people slapping you with this "Gonzo Journalism" label?
KR: Not loving that, not loving that. But you know, whatever. The fact that I'm just getting shit-faced with most of these people is what comes naturally to me. When I meet a new dude, what's the quickest way to level any kind of difference or distance between you and a new dude? It hasn't changed since college. Just go and have, like, 18 beers with that guy.
Everybody goes through a Hunter S. Thompson phase in college. I certainly did that myself, but it's not like I'm always trying to go out and have a crazy time and make the story about my crazy time.
It's better than "horrible journalist, Kent Russell." Even calling myself a journalist makes me feel a little . . . Let's just call me a nonfiction writer. I don't want to do a disservice to the actual people actually trying to speak truth to power or affect change for the better.
BNR: How do you feel immediate environments can affect masculinity? Like your home state of Florida versus your current setting in New York. Or your dad in Marin County. Australian Crusoe incarnate Dave out on his remote island, Resto. Or hockey players when they finally reach retirement.
KR: To me it's a good thing we're going away from that "strong, silent type." It's just melting on the inside from insecurity, loneliness. But there's something to me that's still incredibly platonically attractive about that type, that ideal.
It's this insane attraction to radical self-sufficiency. Like, "I don't need fuckin' anybody! I'll do it myself!" That remains a hugely attractive thing to me . . . it's bad and it's wrong, but it's super tempting. But for the most part, I feel [the rejection of that ideal] generally helps people see things from a point of view other than that of a white man. And that can only be good.
BNR: Definitely. Now it's OK to talk about men "taking baths like a lady," as your father accused you of in one fairly recent essay.
KR: Yep, I do love me a bath.
BNR: When did you start working at Columbia University as an adjunct professor?
KR: How did you know that?
BNR: I'm a journalist, bud. It's my job.
KR: Alright, well, good job . . . I've only been doing it for six weeks now. It's insane to think about, like we were talking about earlier, that my whole dream was being able to get to the point where I'm about to write stuff and be lucky enough to write about my interests and make close to a living wage doing it — close to, maybe not there yet.
If you're an athlete and you finally make it to playing on the fourth line and you're making the minimum salary, you don't go to the next round of college draft picks and say, "Let me tell you the secrets of getting in and stealing my job." But these kids are insanely, insanely smart. They're little brain boxes. They're already better than me at most things.
BNR: How did you sink into that role? How did it even come onto your radar?
KR: I was late to the first faculty meeting. I was hung over as shit and I had to take an $80 Uber — 45 minutes late. But it's a role I'm adjusting to. I think anybody likes when somebody who is closer to their station in life can kind of just be like, "Look, if you actually wanna write professionally for a living, none of this shit you're doing in class right now matters. All that matters is you actually go out, keep writing, keep practicing, keep getting incrementally better, try to publish your best work, all this other stuff." To disabuse these notions that I might have had. It certainly seemed like getting an A in Age of the Dinosaurs was important, ut holy shit, that was not important in the least.
BNR: They offered that course at your alma mater, University of Florida?
KR: To meet my state-mandated general education requirements, I took Age of the Dinosaurs, Oceanography . . . Biodiversity, Softball, Bowling. State school, bro.
You know, I haven't been back to Gainesville since 2008 and I feel bad admitting that. My mother went to FSU [in Tallahassee], as did my uncle. They were both actually in the Florida State Circus. I'd only go up there a couple times for FSU [versus] UF. It was my freshman year at Florida: we went back to a friend's apartment. Somebody'd filled up just a straight-up funnel with two beers or something. I was having a good time drinking that funnel when somebody — unbeknownst to me — behind my back passed a Xanax into the funnel that I drank. I have no idea what happened until I woke up the next day with my pants around my ankles, sitting in a chair with my glasses broken on my face. And it was like, 4 p.m. That's my most enduring memory of Tallahassee. Tallahassee, man. What else are you gonna do there?
BNR: When did you move to New York?
KR: Basically as soon as I graduated from UF in 2008. Went up there, went to NYU . . . working at Yeshiva until a year ago. I just moved to Prospect-Lefferts, right off the southeast corner of Prospect Park. If I'm here, you better believe here comes the fucking gentrification cavalry. They already put in some place with Edison bulbs and artisanal tapas and shit. So it's already the beginning of the end for this [neighborhood]. It's a little barren, aside from amazing Caribbean food.
What is keeping me from [moving to a cheaper city]? There's literally nothing keeping me from doing that. Like, going back to Gainesville and living for $250 a month in like, a rambling Victorian mansion. With a bunch of fucking Spanish moss hanging from the veranda. And yet I choose to live here.
I haven't been back to Florida in such a long time and my folks moved out to California, so now — and I don't even like saying this — this place feels more like my home. Now it's just me in New York, and I've got three friends from Florida whom I cling to like my last couple Cheerios.
BNR: After all your research and people assigning this specific title to you, how would you describe masculinity now?
KR: I find that in the fact that I'm an asshole: the slow awakening to what I was doing, the slow cognizance that should have happened a lot sooner.
For me, being nice all the time gets really, really tiring. And niceness isn't a quality inherent in a person. It's just a social strategy, you know? A way of ensuring there's no hard edges? When, in fact, for me now, or maybe always, I just don't feel like being nice a lot of the time. What platonically attracts me to a dude is if that dude's just like, "Fuck it. I'm just not gonna be that baseline niceness that we're used to now."
BNR: Very opposite of the whole southern hospitality thing.
KR: Well one thing I didn't expect to hear when I showed up in New York — I remember within a couple days of arriving, someone was like, "I love your Southern accent!" I was like, "What are you talking about? I'm from Miami. That's absolutely not the goddamned South."
BNR: Have you ever thought about if you had a son, what kind of role masculinity would play in raising him?
KR: My dad was the best father you could ask for, in my opinion. I wanted for nothing and he was present all the time. I think I was the luckiest person in the world. I would want to replicate exactly what he did for the most part.
I wanna carry on this idea of — not "sink or swim" — just letting a kid into a situation. Shove them in the pool, let them flounder around a little bit. Maybe if the kid's getting picked on or bullied, let them figure it out themselves.
I see sometimes now and when I was working at [Yeshiva] . . . you see some of these kids and wonder what the hell they're doing. You're ostensibly an adult when you turn 18, and yet these kids are calling their parents every day. I'm sure my mom would love it I called her every day. Whatever strengths I have - and also the myriad of terrible weaknesses — come from the fact that my dad's prime directive was to give me the space to roam and be myself. Never pressured me, aside from the soldiering, civic duty attitudes . . . [He never pushed] having to take soccer lessons, or playing the recorder.
BNR: Throughout the book, you mention your dad's paranoia of recording his actions and words. At one point he says, "If I read one fucking word about this, this or anything I've said in the past eight days — that's it. Don't bother coming home. You really will shut me up." However, his actual tenderness is obvious throughout the collection, like when he essentially forbade you from joining the armed forces after years of grooming to do just that. He was protecting you. As a central character, how does he feel about his portrayal in the collection? Has he read it yet?
KR: No! No, no. I put it in the book, how he's perspicacious. "I know what you're doing, fuckin' asshole. I know why you're doing this. I'm calling it now." He knew what the score was the entire time. He's the smartest guy. He's actually very supportive when pieces come out, when they first publish. He'll read it. He's proud of me. I know he's proud of me.
BNR: How do you feel about your book coming out?
KR: Oh my God. It's awful. It's the worst thing in the world.
BNR: Why? Seems pretty awesome, actually.
KR: Because! It's like waiting for a punch that's so long in coming. I'm clutching my stomach and grimacing like a fool, wanting to take the hit and get it over with. It's a weird goddamn book, right? Being ignorant of what your own limitations are, there's a level of scrutiny and criticism that "essay collections" open themselves up to. I try to swing for the fences and it's an in-field fly, but you know. We'll see, we'll see.
—March 11, 2015