NEWSLETTER

NIGHT TWO
“What is a Juggalo? A Juggalo. Aks what it is well fuck if I know. / What is a Juggalo? I don’t know. But I’m down with the clown and I’m down for life, yo.”

ICP closes the festival each year, and from what I’d been repeatedly warned, their set is the Faygo shower to end all Faygo showers. Bearing that in mind, I changed into an oversized t-shirt with a bloody skull I’d scored the day before and borrowed a steak knife from my neighbors to convert my jeans into shorts. I was now all set.

A parade of Juggalos in their Sunday night best began making its way through the gravel trails leading to the main stage. For all the eyefucks I’d been dealt the previous days, nothing prepared me for this stream of amazement. There were clown and serial-killer-clown and serial-killer-victim costumes that must have taken hours to assemble. There were 15-foot-high wooden hatchet-men signs, tits of all shapes and sizes (though mostly pubescent-looking), and at least one naked guy painted half-green and half-red except for his dick. It was like some sort of creepy religious procession for poor Midwestern teens.

I met back up with Brad behind the soundboards and we began to work our way through the crowd. After doing makeshift keg stands from a water cooler full of “Juggalo Juice”, Brad and I met the acquaintance of a Juggalo named Pyro Blaziac, who decided to take us under his wing. Pyro had one of those ponytails where it’s pulled really tight at the top then shaved on the back and sides, as well as several thin patches of white fiber sticking out of his scalp that I think were either stitches or the remnants of a bandage. He also sounded exactly like they make teenagers sound in cartoons—right on the dividing line between surfer and Midwestern pothead. Basically, he was the living manifestation of Juggalodom as I’d experienced it.

After introducing us to his crew, Pyro laid out what we should expect once the music started.

“OK,” he said. “You want to be looking to the front and to the back the whole time. You’re going to be getting slammed with bottles of Faygo from the stage and shit from the rest of the crowd behind you at the same time, and people are going to be riding up on top of you. It’s pretty much going to be a full-on warzone.” He was literally dancing in place with excitement.



Within seconds of the band’s opening notes, I was coated in a film of sugar that left me and my glasses residually sticky for days after the festival (I just hucked all my clothes). I’ve been to any number of intense shows, but never have I felt so completely at the mercy of the crowd as I did that night. It was like being adrift in a churning ocean of skin and soda and fake blood. Onstage, ICP and a small army of clown-costumed assistants fired off two-liter after two-liter of Faygo root beer into the audience, drawing their ammo from huge gallon drums brimming with somehow more bottles. As Pyro had warned me, the onslaught came evenly from both sides. In addition to a steady stream of people, anything too large to fling toward the stage was crowd-surfed in that direction. I ended up getting hit square in the face with boots, fists, chairs, bare tits, other people’s faces, and an empty cooler. I also think I gouged some poor girl’s nipple with my thumb while trying to push her overhead. I feel bad about that one.

Following the longest 20 minutes of my life, I gave up and extricated myself from the maelstrom. I finally broke lose at the far edge of the stage by the space between the barricade and the stage where the crowd surfers were deposited after making it to the front. The folks who came out of this exit-chute did so in full, trance-like rap-dance. It was sort of like a filthy version of the Soul Train Line.

I walked to the back of the field and sat down next to a passed out kid as ICP launched into “Juggalo Homies,” the closest of their songs to a mainstream jam (it sort of sounds like Smashmouth doing rap). A woman swinging two glowsticks on ropes came up and screamed at me “Why are you sitting there like that!?” I pointed to each of my eyeballs, and she nodded and walked away.


After changing/removing shirts, I met up with Pyro and his crew at the Spazmatic Hang-Out tent, named for ICP’s new energy drink. Pyro inducted us into the Midnight Wanderers, reciting the group’s mission statement:

“Every year, at the Gathering, at Sunday, at midnight, we come together and wander until the sun comes up, annoying the living bullshit out of everyone we meet! WAN-der-ERS!” The last part was sung the same way five-year-olds sing “SU-per-MAN!”



It was a succinct and well-rehearsed speech I’d hear at least a dozen more times that evening, as we collected new members and followed the changing bearer of the “Wandering Stick” to bonfire after bonfire, through campsite drug dens, through other campsite drug dens being broken up by security, past the ICP foam party, and for one trying hour, onto the floating dock in the middle of Lake Hepatitis.

As the Midnight Wanderers marked their course for a pizza break, Brad and I broke away to check out the tent with the Juggalo pajama party, which had either devolved into or always been a stripping contest. To our amazement, the contestant who got completely naked the second the music started and spent the whole song bent over facing away from the audience didn’t win. The tall girl did.

I left Brad to check in on Daff at the Hatchet Rydas tent, but found him crashed in a lawn chair while the rest of the Rydas were scrambling around in a near panic. Kent stormed into the tent trembling with rage and began dousing his hands in sanitizer.

“The camp owners said we’re this close to losing this site for next year because of all the trash,” he said. “Psychopathic’s people asked us if we’d help with the cleanup, because our spot is so neat, but dudes keep kicking over trash cans and being like, ‘Yo, why are you picking up all that garbage?’”

I started to look around for scraps, but then the Wanderers crested the nearby hill and, momentarily torn between helping out the Juggalos’ five-percenters and reveling in the absolute, undistilled essence of adolescent vacancy, I rejoined the ranks of the dumb. At the bottom of the hill three of the Wanderers kicked the living shit out of a garbage can.

By 4 AM, we’d made it back to the original Wanderers’ campsite where Pyro, who had run ahead, was busy filling a tent with gas-soaked trash (and a table).

“The guy who owns this asked me to get rid of it for him, so we’re going to set it on fire.”

He unspooled an entire roll of toilet paper, we thought to use as a fuse, then bunched it up, lit it, and shoved the whole flaming mess under the table. The tent was fully ablaze in a matter of minutes.

As the flames and awful-smelling smoke rose into the night, a large SUV pulled up behind us and the tent’s owner rolled down the passenger window.

“Man… that’s tight.”

THOMAS MORTON


IN THE LAND OF THE JUGGALOS | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |

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