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You're Making Me Hate You

Page 13

by Corey Taylor


  If you’re younger, you won’t understand this. Money still has that “parents’ coffers” feel to it when you’re young. It’s the magical replenishing cupboard that always has cereal, always has milk, always has juice or soda, and always has money for gas and smokes. But the older you get, the more you begin to appreciate the fact that money is finite—it’s not always so readily made to go around. I could sit back and blame parents who are bound and determined to make sure their kids have it better than they did, but again I’d make myself look like a major two-faced idiot. The biggest thing I can say is that I might be overprotective when it comes to the people I take care of. Deep inside, though, I know I might be doing my kids a disservice by not teaching them early on about the value of money, and that kind of value deserves respect and responsibility. Because of this I’ve had to start over, training my kids about what’s what and how’s now. It hurts but it’s vital, and in the long run it will benefit everyone.

  I encourage you all to do the same. Don’t be so frivolous with money you had to get your ass kicked to earn. Don’t throw it at crap you can do without. If you can afford it, really take a look at what you’re getting and then ask yourself, “Am I going to use this for a long time?” Get the most out of what you get. There is nothing bad about passing on a temporary distraction to save up for that permanent pastime. Some shit does go a long way. Some stuff is worth an investment. But there are a lot of pitfalls and platitudes swimming in the primordial gravy, poised to divorce you from your coin purses. If you’re smart, you’ll get the radar up and running before the kamikazes strafe you and your money clips are empty. Every commercial, ad, spam e-mail, and product placement on the planet is hell bent—not heaven sent—and they don’t care about you. They don’t care about your homes, your rent, your children or their college funds, your worries or your strife. Their bare necessities are your money, and if necessary, they will indeed strip you bare.

  I don’t want you to look back on some shit with regret. I want you to feel like you know what you’re doing. Take a better hand in what’s afoot. As much as I love to point and laugh at you, I have plenty of other shit I can use to tickle my funny bone. To quote the creepy man who purportedly owns J. G. Wentworth, “It’s your money. Use it when you need it.” Even if you want that special something, show some restraint. Because skin might come back and the forests may replenish themselves over time, but money ain’t green because it’s growing. If it’s gone, it’s gone.

  Time’s running out.

  Act NOW!

  CHAPTER 7

  GET ALONG, LITTLE DOGGIES

  IT WAS A balmy, enigmatic night back in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and ninety-two, at the head of an uneven driveway on the south side of Des Moines, Iowa.

  A night like any other, really, it was a night when you talked to hear other people, not just because you were in love with the sound of your own voice. It was a night for iced tea and laughing … a Lemonade Evening, as I like to call them. It was one part reflection, one part distraction, and, most importantly, several parts ambition. The discussions held in that driveway were some of the most vigorous and emotional I’ve ever had the privilege to be a part of, especially when the minds and hearts involved were just as devoted as my own. Some people would crouch on the concrete stoop step, perpendicular to the front door of my Gram’s house and the street fifteen away. Others might be perched on their own cars; others still took up real estate on the hood of my grandmother’s brown four-door car, a model that to this day is still a mystery to me—it could have been a Chevy and it could have been a Ford; all I know is that by the time of the night in question I’d thrown up in that car twice and four of my friends had committed sexual appeasements behind it when the street lights were low enough to hide them. But I still remember the license plate number: UAK 470. Look close—it has “AK47” in the middle of it. That was my Gram’s brown car of indeterminate make—a true South Side original.

  My friends and I huddled on the steps there on late nights, after band practice or parties, so we could talk good shit. You never knew where the conversations would go, but you knew they would be perfect for the moment at hand. It was exquisite fat chewing, slinging slang; you could get away with murder if you phrased it just right, and if you did they’d thank you for the kill. We sat there, smoking cigarette after cigarette, drinking twenty-ounce after twenty-ounce of various sodas that were usually laced with something a little more satanic, avoiding our duties for a little while, plotting our invasion of the real world, the adult world. These were the moments filled with thoughts that were never laid to rest, only left on the low burners so they never ever cooked off too quickly. It’s important for you to understand our states of being, our absolute steadiness even as our aspirations broke on the waves of excitement that seemed to keep on coming. We were originals, you see. We were one of a kind and proud of it. The world would never see us coming … and it never did.

  Yes, this driveway was ground zero for rounds of ribbing and out-and-out brutal matches designed to make you crow like a Lost Boy or chew your lip in defeat, known to those in the know as the Dozens. It was also perfect staging for some fairly infamous speeches in our circle of beastly friends and trust: the Square Foot scenario, the Jar of Marbles soliloquy, the Night of the Fake Ninja Practice, the Temperature/Thermometer debate, the Bad Sipa Sack gathering, the “Live, Mighty Cougar!” embarrassment, the Burning High Hat experiment, and, most importantly, the Fat Suit Album Cover fantasy. On that stoop I lied to a complete stranger about a father I didn’t know rather than admit I had absolutely no clue as to who, where, or what he was. On that stoop I suffered at the hands of humility—I was ashamed of myself more times than I care to admit, throwing my stubborn pride into the faces of people I claimed to care about and never ever admitting when I was wrong. So you see, that stoop was a place of both comedy and tragedy. But let’s get back to the comedy before I bum myself out.

  It was into this world of imagination and cogitation that something occurred, something so utterly ridiculous I can only tell it now in this context. It came out of nowhere, like a thunderstorm around a sand castle, so completely out of place that you felt stunned for a really long time, and it was a chore to rouse yourself from it. The ludicrous hilarity of it all is so genuine and so low-rent that to this day I smile just thinking about it. In remembrance it actually makes sense that something like this would happen. It fit with the society we were smack in the middle of: the suburbs of the south side, slack in jaw and stacked with jocks, cheerleaders, and fifties affinities. Against this backdrop I was the devil in blue jeans, the crazy kid the neighbors complained about, listening to loud heavy music of all kinds on the roof of my house and staring down the stuffed sweaters who walked by. This almost felt like a reverse prank. But the people involved didn’t get the memo, and thank shit for that.

  That night it was just me and Shawn Economaki sitting outside, mixing it up. I believe there were some people in the house. But it was just the two of us hanging out in the muted darkness, the fading sense of light cascading on the street leaving us in relative shadowed privacy. At that hour nobody was driving by, really, and we were laughing and talking good shit. I had my acoustic guitar in my hands and was playing chords absentmindedly as we continued to josh on our own terms. My Gram’s brown car was parked right up next to the porch step; you couldn’t really see us sitting there from the street. So you can imagine our reaction when a late-seventies Monte Carlo pulled up right in front of my Gram’s house and parked—on the wrong side of the street, pointed in the opposite direction.

  At first we just thought it was friends of ours, coming over to see what kind of mischief was on the dance card that evening. But as I peeked over the top of Gram’s car I could see that this car only had two people in it—a man and a woman, neither of whom I recognized. Shawn and I were a bit perplexed for a second. Shawn even said, “What in the Fuck?” We kept vigil, wondering aloud whether they were planning somethin
g nefarious. Then, all of a sudden, our answers came out swinging, and it was an answer so obvious we felt stupid we hadn’t realized it to begin with. As we watched from the shadows, the woman in the passenger seat took one last look around and then dove headfirst into the man’s lap. I’m no doctor, but it didn’t take me long to figure out what she was doing. Once we did, however, it was everything we could do not to howl with laughter.

  We sat there for a second, trying to figure out how to handle this. I certainly wasn’t going near that car—any couple this “classy” was sure to have a gun stuffed somewhere. However, I didn’t want two gross people sucking each other off in front of my grandmother’s house. What was I going to do? Just like that, I had an epiphany. There was a modified C-chord phrasing I’d been toying around with over the last few days, played way up on the twelfth fret, that had a fairly Spanish tinge to the sound it made. There was no progression for it to go with; it was just this weird chord thing I had been fucking around with that had no real home musically for me. It hit me that night: I looked at my acoustic guitar, smiled at Shawn, and said, “Should I play the head song?”

  Shawn laughed and said, “The what?” And before I knew what the hell I was doing, I had jumped up on the hood of Gram’s brown car thing, fretting this high chord, strumming furiously, and caterwauling like Jim Carrey attempting to sing a flamenco song, akin to Chevy Chase in The Three Amigos. It was so loud that it scared both of us, but Shawn fell on the ground in hysterics. I could barely keep the singing going because I was choking back my own fits of laughter. The effect was instantaneous: the woman’s head shot up out of the guy’s crotch. The man, abruptly pulled from the ledge of sex, reacted like he’d been hit with a baseball bat during a nap. The Monte Carlo fired up and began to pull away fast. I jumped off the hood and ran up the street after them, still singing out of key but shaking the shit out of every note, like a tone-deaf opera singer on filibuster, refusing to relinquish the stage for anything. When I did stop, I collapsed in the grass by the curb and giggled like a kid with a secret.

  It was after telling the story a couple hundred times to my friends, complete with a rendition of the Head Song, that I realized the most important part of the tale is the ridiculous couple, pulling over in the suburbs so the guy could get a blowjob and the woman could suffer through it. Over the years I’ve tried to create an interesting backstory for these voyeurs. Maybe they were married and it was their anniversary, this little excursion coming from the husband’s request to spice things up. Maybe she was trying to score some drugs off the guy and this was the price she had to pay. Maybe they were swingers and were hoping someone who happened to pass by might join them. Either fucking way, one thing’s for sure: people do dumbass fucking shit together. This is the price we pay for relationships—sexual, romantic, or otherwise.

  Now, before we get into this messy text, let’s outline what the word “relationship” actually entails, shall we? To do that, I’m going to go right to Dictionary.com for the definition, but fear not: there will still be running commentary (and maybe a dick joke).

  re·la·tion·ship [ri-ley-shuhn-ship] noun

  1. a connection, association, or involvement.

  Well, that’s real helpful, isn’t it? It’s pretty damn general if you ask me. … People have connections, associations, and involvements with a lot of things, such as lactose, TV psychics, and clothes dryers during use if you lean in close and correctly.

  2. connection between persons by blood or marriage.

  Okay, that’s getting a little more specific. This could mean anything from marriage to sibling rivalry. Being in a band has the feel of both, without the sexy payoffs. Well, I guess it depends on who you’re in a band with …

  3. an emotional or other connection between people: the relationship between teachers and students.

  That can take on a whole list of other meanings—way to go, web. “The relationship between teachers and students” … that could mean anything from how much I hated my ninth-grade English teacher to the lady who went to prison because she fucked her student so many times they had kids together.

  4. a sexual involvement; affair.

  Bingo: the Hunka Chunka. That’s what I call a relationship. I believe that’s what everybody else in the world considers a relationship as well.

  Relationships can be intense, like a heated romance or rivalry. They can be fairly innocuous, like the way we treat coworkers or people we go to church with—not that I would know anything about that. It can be a specific energy between yourself and a nonhuman, like food, clothes, and such. Relationships are the balance one strikes between oneself and the outside world. It’s a very relative term, because everyone has a relationship with something or someone. It’s like referring to something as “natural.” No shit, Mr. Holmes. Thanks for the fucking head’s-up.

  Another relationship we all have to deal with is with our family, blood or otherwise. I have to be honest: it’s getting brutal out there. Family reunions, established as a way for tight-knit broods to stay close as they grew up and moved away, have now become something of a UFC title fight with fried chicken and that shitty lime-green Jell-O that no one eats. There are whole limbs and branches of family trees that can never be spoken of in certain company. “Why aren’t the Boones here this year?” “Fuck those people—Janice can’t keep her fucking mouth shut!” Seriously, it’s like Game of Thrones with a softball game at the end that no one really wants to be a part of but everybody desperately wants to win.

  I have been blessed with an amazing family here in what I call the “Afternoon of My Life.” My wife’s family has accepted me in a way I’ve never felt before in all my years on this plane. So let me say, with all the love in the world … they are the biggest bunch of crazy people I have ever known in my life. From the Bonnicis to the Bennetts, every one of them is wonderful, weird, and utterly unforgettable. They are ALL LOUD. They are incredibly opinionated. They love with the strength of the Hulk on deep Gamma saturation. They scare me a little, and I love every minute I get to be with them. Don’t get me wrong: I love my side of the family as well. But my family is a little more scattered, and there are only a handful I’m really close with, like my Gram and my cousins. My in-laws? They are a lot like if the Avengers and the Justice League got together for Margarita Monday and decided to spend the whole night debating everything from quantum physics to why Quantum Leap should have never been canceled.

  Every dinner starts and ends the same way: screaming over the top of each other. Here’s the scene: fifteen of us all waiting for a table at the Cheesecake Factory. Some are milling about outside smoking cigarettes and others are inside making comments about the many and varied cheesecake flavors that have manifested over the years. “Turtle cheesecake: why would they have turtle cheesecake? I bet it’s rich …” We finally get a table outside under the heaters, and the Bataan Dinner March begins. Some break off to go to the bathroom and thereby spend another ten minutes trying to find the table, hoping the others ordered the appetizers they wanted. It takes another thirty minutes to decide what everyone wants to eat.

  The whole time the conversation swings from the important—“I really think she needs to go to the doctor, that thing looks swollen”—to the banal—“I am not taking down my Christmas lights! Those colors are seasonal, and I think they look better in the summer anyway!”—to the insane—“You do this every time we come here. We know you’re upset they changed your favorite dish, Corey. Suck it up and get a damn hamburger.” Eventually the debate begins over who owes what and how to tip and who wants the leftovers. Finally the long loud procession moves toward the front door, where, as most of us smoke, the good-byes take another thirty minutes to bid farewell to people we will most likely see the very next day. This is a typical night out for dinner: five minutes driving, ten minutes waiting, thirty minutes eating, two hours talking about pretty much anything that comes to mind. You may think it’s a bit crazy, but I love it.

  I suppose that, b
esides family, the one relationship we all have in common is the herald of pain and compensation rogue CDs: the girlfriend/boyfriend. For a lot of us this is our last taste of an uninitiated experience. I mean, let’s face it: we grow up with family, we come of age developing friendships, and in between we’re all just adjusting to responsibilities like education, respect, and ethics. And just when you think you’ve got the whole science of life on a lockdown, puberty comes and hits you in the nuts and tits and throws this wrench called sexual tension in the bitch’s brew. As an adolescent—not quite young and sure as shit not old—this is like having to start from scratch because, depending on what your sexual preference turns out to be, you have to relearn who you are all over again. The end result can be awesome, but that shit ain’t right.

  So with that kind of adversity hanging over all our heads at such an early age, we proceed to trounce down a path of ridiculous mistakes that eventually leads to the idiocy we can all relate to, gay or straight, man or woman: the Dating Scene. Seems simple here on digital “paper”: having years of experience trying and failing to attract members of the opposite or identical sex, you’d think we’d have worked the kinks out, pun intended. But as it turns out, life and karma have even more strange adventures for you to endure. Funny that: anything else we’d spent half our lives working at we might actually get better at. Actually, because we spend so much time doing it the wrong way, we get set in those wrong ways and develop hang-ups, aversions, and cold silences. What in the virtual fuck is that?

  The crazy thing is that romantic relationships can lead to sex—something any sane person would love to do. With that in mind, you’d think we’d put more effort into figuring out the best way through the mind field. Nope. Not even close. I’ve got it sorted. Here’s the thing: for guys, when it comes to other men or women, we almost always revert unconsciously to whatever worked the first time we got someone into bed. It doesn’t matter if it was ninth grade or last week, guys have a tendency to compartmentalize the shit that works and forget what wasn’t effective, thereby giving them a wheelhouse they can consult when in jeopardy. However, we as dudes forget the cardinal rule: all keys do not work on all doors. Men and women have different things that turn them on, and believing that one way works across the board, sexual or otherwise, is a recipe for disastrous relationships. If men can just learn to adapt to each situation until they find the one that fulfills them the most, they would be a lot happier, as would their partners, and they’d spend less time at Happy Hour or pounding the shit out of the heavy bag at the gym.

 

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