FQ part 2

 

Jacob was supposed to meet with Dr. Paddock on Thursday morning to hand over his research from the trip and to discuss his dissertation progress, or, in this particular case, his lack thereof. Jacob had picked up the rental car and driven to Princeton on Saturday. The plan was to spend Monday at the Princeton collection, then take the short drive down to Bryn Mawr in the evening. He had spent Tuesday morning at the Cananday, still on schedule and according to plan. However, as we know, things had gone a bit awry from there. He was supposed to have returned to Ohio late that Tuesday evening but ended up staying an extra night, what with him getting sucked into the rift in the time/space continuum and all. Still, returning Wednesday afternoon and making the Thursday meeting was still reasonably in play had he not left the book full of poems Rossetti had not written yet in a walk in closet at her brother’s house. Had this gone smoothly, he might have still made the meeting with Paddock. As things presently stood, he spent Thursday morning tracking down a towing company to get his rental car out of an impound lot where he had to pay exorbitant towing, storage, and administrative fees that he could hardly afford.   

            Jacob finally returned to his apartment in Northern Ohio in the dead of night two days later than expected. He found Ashley and Serafin listening to the newly launched liberal radio station where a famous actress from the previous decade and her co-host were discussing the Abu Gharib controversy, which they blamed exclusively on the current administration. It was the primary season in an even more than usually divisive presidential election year. The English graduate students at NOU did not always agree on everything but were unified in their disdain for the incumbent candidate and his supporters, who they generally saw as stupid, and his entire political party, who they generally saw as evil.

            “He can’t even pronounce Abu Gharib right?” Serafin was saying as Jacob entered. “If you’re going to torture and humiliate people, at least pronounce the place you’re doing it correctly.”

            Ashley seemed to be more interested in the Sonic Heroes video game he was playing on his GameCube and barely acknowledged her or Jacob.

            Serafin welcomed the returning hero in song parody: “Guess whose back/back again/Jakey’s back/tell a friend.”

            “Stan Shady been at it again?” Jacob responded. Stan Shady was their nickname for their neighbor who aspired to become a rapper and who they could often hear demonstrating his limited skills on the other side of the thin walls of their apartment building. As Ashley had put it, dude had seen 8 Mile a few too many times.

            “Oh, he has a new song,” Serafin put her hand on Ashley’s shoulder and Ashley nodded to verify this fact. “It’s so great. We could hear him this morning. He just samples ABC by Jackson 5 as the chorus, but the verses are his usual stuff.” Serafin decided to demonstrate and began rocking her body and moving her hands back and forth. She began rapping:

You punk bitch mother fucker

I’ll kick your fucking ass

You faggot assed bitch

Shoot you in your fucking face

 

(chicka, chicka)

ABC easy as 123

ABC easy as 123

 

I’ll fuck you up so bad

Put my foot up your punk ass

You fucking pussy assed ho

Kick your faggot ass to the curb

 

(chicka, chicka)

ABC easy as 123

ABC easy as 123

 

            Ashley looked up and nodded again as verification lest there be any doubt.

            “Sorry I missed that,” Jacob said. “Sounds like he hasn’t expanded his vocabulary since I left.”

            “But he’s learning his alphabet. I call that progress.”

            “It’s like he’s influenced by Eminem, but only that one verse on the Marshall LP where he says faggot like twenty times.”

“When are you going to introduce yourself?” Jacob asked Ashley. They always joked about how much she and their neighbor had in common. Ashley had begun work on a dissertation tentatively titled Queer Desire in HipHop Culture, which would include a long, central chapter applying psychoanalysis and continental theory to Eminem. And here, right next door, lived an aspiring Caucasian rapper with bleached blonde hair and a dream.

            “He’s no Eminem.” For reasons Jacob could not fathom, Ashley adored Eminem and would argue with you at length that he provided the best example of poetry serving as a loosening of speech and, thus, a window into the subconscious. Ashley’s agenda was to deconstruct the lyrics and show that feminist women actually should love Eminem as his work transgresses the thetic space to bring language into the semiotic chora associated with the maternal body and its subversive desires.     

            “He’s more like Vanilla Ice with Tourette’s,” said Serafin. Jacob did not laugh at this as Tourette’s jokes had become pretty stale over the past few years.  

            “More in the Kid Rock tier,” added Jacob, but this did not get a laugh either.

            “I actually like that song Kid Rock did with Sheryl Crow,” said Serafin. “He does more like country/rock now instead of rap. Who knows, he might end up being a pretty good artist after all—like a modern version of outlaw country or something. The next Waylon Jennings.”

            This kind of thing was part of why Jacob could not stand her—always correcting him and displaying how much she knew about everything to everyone.   

            “The first time I saw a Kid Rock video on MTV, I seriously thought it was some kind of parody. It took me several minutes in before I realized it wasn’t a bit,” Ashley had completed the level she was on and shut off her game to join the conversation. “In fact, I remember walking around the dorms the end of my senior year and I heard someone playing Kid Rock unironically. That might have been the moment I realized that I had become an adult. Like, I suddenly knew I didn’t connect with the younger generation anymore.”

            “Who knew Kid Rock would be the watershed for our generation?”

            “For me it was Britney,” Jacob said. “When I first started teaching I was like, ‘no one actually likes this right?’ But then I realized that some of my freshman comp students actually did.”

            “Anyway,” Sera jumped in, “your boy Stan has been putting up flyers around the building for a show he’s doing downtown. I would totally go but it’s the same night as the mixer.”

            “I mean, I guess he’s trying to do something creative.” Jacob suddenly felt inclined to defend their neighbor. “He must feel like he’s got something to express.”

            “Trying and sucking.”

            “He’s expressing how much he sucks.”

            Sera and Ashley laughed, but Jacob was serious. “Yeah, but what’s worse: trying to create something that ends up being bad or not even trying at all?” This question had been lurking in his mind.

            “Aww, Jakey has a soft spot for Shady.”

            “I’m serious, though. Yeah, he’s awful. He probably humiliates himself on a regular basis. But there’s no fear with that guy.”

            “It’s that American Idol mentality,” said Ashley. “Everybody thinks they have a chance to be famous now. You don’t even have to be that good.”

            “But at least the people who try out for that show are putting themselves out there. Should we be criticizing them when we’re not even in the game.” It had been a long, lonely drive home from Pennsylvania and, after spending the past two days around actual artists, Jacob had been thinking about some of his own choices in life.  

            “Alright, give me a word,” Sera was up for the challenge.

            “What?”

            “Something provocative—what’s a word you hate? Something repulsive.”

            “Um.”

            “Just give me a word to start from.”

            “I really hate the word discharge.”

            “Okay,” Sera took a moment to gather herself and then began:

            I thought I had to piss large

            Turned out to be a discharge

            But not the honorable kind

            The intolerable kind

            Asked by doctor what I should do

            Said I should holler at you

            Sure wish you hadn’t of screwed me

            Now my pee is coming out goopy

“Ew!” Ashley chimed in here, but it only encouraged her.

            I need some antibiotics

To stop this dripping from my dick

Must have been tripping—now I’m sick

Hope they don’t put this in my biopic.

            Here Sera had pantomimed a mic-drop. Her flow was a bit erratic with several pauses. The rhythm was off at times. Yet, this was objectively better than anything they had heard from next door.

            “Tits rhymes,” said Ashley.

            Jacob was even sort of impressed. “Kind of amazing how you adopted the male perspective there.”

            “Androgynous mind, bitch!” said Sera, who was kind of feeling herself. She made an A with her thumbs and index fingers as if it were a gang sign.

            Ashley decided to give it a try now:

                        Dangerous like a hippopotamus

                        Take you through hell like Hieronymus

                        Bosch

                        You better watch your back

                        I’ll kick your crotch and smack

                        You in the face

                        And lace your snack with some crack;

                        Your rhymes are basic and stale

                        Like a pair of old Asics Gels

                        Taking you back into hell

                        Dark like you wearing a veil

                        Like a baby trapped in a well;

                        My rhymes are tits in a battle

                        Bout to blaze this shit like a saddle

                        Put your mouth in a bit like some cattle;

                        Bursting out with volcanic rhymes that will

            Make your whole world tremble and rattle

            Take your ass to school—like you dad will.

Here she did her own mic-drop and Sera cheered her on.

“You’re up, Jakey,” she said.

Ashley motioned to hand Jake the invisible microphone, but Jake waved him off.

“Come on, man.”

“I don’t think my brain can even work that fast.”

“Just think of a good first line or two to start and then you follow your brain from

there. It’s just like loosening of speech,” said Ashley.

            “The semiotic chora,” said Sera with Ashley joining her in harmony. The semiotic chora came up a lot in this household.    

Jake remained reticent.

“Just throw in some clichés here and there if you get stuck. Throw in a mother

fucker or something about smoking blunts if you need to keep it going.”

“C’mon Jake, we both did it. You’re up mister poetry.”

            “Alright,” Jake had actually come up with what he thought was a clever first line. “What about like, ‘I’m the mother fucking master/ Like Oedipus and Jocasta.’”

            “Yeah, cool.”

            “I see what you did there, Jakey.”

            “Keep going.”

            “Just see where it takes you.”

            Jacob started again from the top with some renewed confidence.  

                        I’m the mother fucking master

                        Like Oedipus banging Jocasta

                        Fucking his mom in the ass

                        With a rusty spatula

                        Blood all over the sheets

                        To a funky ass . . .

            “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

            “Jesus, dude.”

            “What the fuck was that?”

            “Seriously, someone might need a timeout.”

            “I’m literally frightened right now. I don’t know if I can ever look at you the same, Jakey.

            “For real, I didn’t realize the magnitude of your issues, dude.”

            “Holy fuck.”

            “Eminem says stuff like that and you think it’s hilarious.” Jake had turned redder than Christina Rossetti's favorite flower.

            “I don’t know man, you just don’t pull it off.”

            “Yeah, you sound like it’s coming from some real dark place.”   

            “Sera was talking about penis discharges. What the fuck is that?”

            “I was just going off your prompt, dude. I’m working with what you gave me—you sick fuck.”  

            “We probably should’ve known. Who comes up with ‘discharge’ of all the possible words?”

            “You said you wanted . . . man, you guys suck.” Jacob stood up to return to his room. He hated feeling like Sera and Ashley were ganging up on him. He had had a long couple of days and was in no mood for their shit. Truthfully, however, he rather embarrassed and a bit troubled by the direction his freestyle had taken. Jacob was beginning to think that the semiotic chora might best be avoided and in the future he would try to remain on the windy side of the thetic boundary.   

            “C’mon, man, we’re just messing with you,” Ashley pleaded.

            “I decorated your door. Did you see?”

            Jacob had reached the door of his room and saw that someone had cut a paperback cover off of a copy of Virginia Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room and pasted it on his door.

            “I found it for a dollar at the used bookstore and thought of you.”  

            This was actually fairly amusing and, he supposed, kind of thoughtful. Jacob found himself relenting. “Let me put my stuff away,” he said.