NEWSLETTER

DAY TWO
“What is a Juggalo? Well he ain’t a phony / He’ll walk up and bust a nut in your macaroni / And watch you sit there and finish up the last bit / Cause you’re a stupid-ass dumb fucking idiot.”

I awoke the next morning around ten to the sounds of fireworks and an argument between two groups of campers over whether or not Canada is stupid. Since activities didn’t start until one, I decided to drive into town and see if I could find something other than carnival food for breakfast.

Granted it was church-time on a Sunday, but Cave-In-Rock looked like the whole town had decided to take the weekend off. At least two restaurants boasted large, hand-lettered signs announcing that they would be closed for the exact dates of the Gathering, although the real prize I was searching for, a “Juggalos Not Welcome” sign I’d heard rumors of, had either come down or never happened in the first place.


When I got back to the campground, a mousy girl in glasses and a bikini top approached and cheerfully asked “Titties for a dollar?” I stuttered for a couple seconds trying to figure out the right answer, but she just shrugged it off and moved on to the next tent.

After checking on my stuff, I started to circle the grounds in search of Daff, but was waylaid by a pair of guys and a girl who looked like they were pushing maybe 14 and were offering titties for a cigarette. I took another pass (although I ended up scoring a freebie when some passing ninjas woot-wooted us), but did sit down for a little while to see how this year’s party was going for them.

“We all took some ecstasy the first night,” the guy without a shirt on told me. “Then me and her did some acid when we were coming down and now we’re just getting ready for ICP tonight, which is going to be amazing.”

“You can get absolutely anything you want out here,” the shirted guy added. “Acid, shrooms, K, opium—all you have to do is shout and people’ll come right up to you and offer it.”

“Yeah, everyone here’s so accepting and nice to each other,” the tit-girl said. “When I first got here, I was really shy.”

As soon as I left them I gave the acid-calling thing a try. Within seconds two Juggalos emerged from separate crowds offering to take me back to their tents. I have the feeling they were both on the level, but for some reason their eagerness totally triggered my sketch alarm so I pretended I’d left my wallet back in my car and fled.



Eventually I crossed paths with Daff, who had just won the Quest For Shangri-La finals and wanted to introduce me to a Tennesseean ninja named Brad who was deeply involved with another of the Juggalos’ more cerebral offerings, Morton’s List. The way Brad broke it down for me, ML is basically a mystical fraternal order as determined by an RPG-version of truth or dare. You roll a thirty-sided die three times, match your numbers to an entry in a big book of quests, and then have one hour to complete your assigned quest or at least give it a decent effort. If you’re successful you ascend to different degrees, like in Freemasonry. Brad had a bunch of the degrees he’d earned tattooed on his arm, and was going to do the rest as soon as he got the money together.

While he was showing me his quest-log and gear, a guy in basketball shorts and a t-shirt hanging from his head came up to us and asked if I worked for a magazine. I’d been upfront with everybody I’d talked to and was holding a tape-recorder in my hand, so I didn’t see any sense in trying to deny what I was up to.

“Oh man, I really need to talk to you when you’re done,” he said, with an unsettling smile on his face.

I thanked Brad for giving me the scoop on the List, then turned to face my new pal.

“We are the only two people who know the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes,” he whispered through his teeth. “I’m Brad Troemel. I’m a photographer from Chicago doing a project on the Gathering and you are the first non-Juggalo I’ve talked to in days.”

It was like I’d just run into Dennis Hopper’s in Apocalypse Now. After taking off my shirt so as not to “blow his cover,” Brad and I retreated to the corndog tent to swap notes. While I’d been more or less limited to a nerd’s eye view of the proceedings, Brad had been immediately accepted as a member of the Family and thereby given a more up close and personal perspective.

“I was stuck on the Ferris wheel with a girl simultaneously on PCP and acid,” he told me. “She kept alternating between quiet mumbling and lucidly threatening to hang me from my entrails. That was a little intense.”

He’d also been witness to two of the Gathering’s finest open-mic sessions, the first a band called the Jumping Ninjas whose deaf frontman rapped in sign language while dressed in full ninja gear. The second was a rapper from New Jersey named Daville, who after declaring his set the opening of “Krunk Fest,” proceeded to chuck full cans of beer point-blank into the audience, then ran through the crowd stealing people’s joints, returned to the stage smoking four joints at once, cried, barfed, then descended into the crowd one more time to brain people with a plastic folding chair.

The best I’d seen was a fat guy in clown paint who couldn’t think of anything to rap besides the line “You want fries with that?”

Per Brad’s recommendation, we went to ride the Tempest, a tilt-a-whirl variation being tended by a carny with a bent wrench and a can of beer. We stayed in our car for about five go-rounds—every new load of Juggalos who boarded instinctively turned to their right as soon as the ride started and began screaming “Yo, fuck the purple car!”

THOMAS MORTON


TO BE CONTINUED:
IN THE LAND OF THE JUGGALOS | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |

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