BORN TO LOSEHow to Ruin Your Child
Clockwise from top left: A piece of shit cast as a WWI Flying Ace (spelled "Fling Turd"); A disturbing written excercise in which an evil clown eats himself, turns into a cat, kills a pizza boy, eats itself again, then takes the narrator to hell (the teacher’s only comment is that he must use cursive and he’s using incorrect capitilization); you can’t see it here, but just below the gun is the faintly-erased text "You’re a looser [sic] Charlie Brown"; preliminary plans for a video game centered around fag bashing; a depiction of a racist Sears repairman and a runaway slave; a bastardization of Calvin and Hobbes.
This is a cautionary tale. If you leave your already fragile and brilliant 13-year-old son alone in a ratty apartment while you’re off with your boyfriend, and your son’s dad is drinking himself to death, some dark things will surface. In fact, your kid might end up not liking you that much.
These drawings were made around 1987-89 at the beginning of a legendary career in being bad that tore straight through vandalism, breaking and entering, winning tons of fights, crack, the loony bin, felony convictions, and county jail (where one of his uncles saw him and didn’t recognize him, but still saw fit to catcall "Hey, Elvis!" to him because of his sideburns). Oh yeah, there was also the drunk-driving accident where he lost a lung and broke basically every bone in his neck and torso and died for a few minutes. And it all started with these drawings.
His misbehavior led all the way to his being viciously choked with a payphone cord by the owner of the porno shop he was trying to rob while his best friend sprayed them both with mace. After that he went to college and got a degree in software engineering (his abiding love for designing video games can be seen even here). He is fairly well-behaved and happy now, except for when he beat that skinhead kid to a pulp in front of a bar last month.
But this is a cautionary tale, okay? The moral is this: If you see your child drawing things that look even vaguely like these works of genius, hug him really hard, remarry his father, and take him to Disney World immediately.
JESSE PEARSON
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