BY CHRIS NIERATKO
Do you like Polack jokes? I’ve always been a big fan of them. An Italian, a rabbi, and a smiling Polack walk into a bar. The Polack is holding dog-shit in his hand and says to the bartender, “Look what I almost stepped in!” Classic, right? Growing up I used to l-o-v-e to tell Polack jokes to all the Polish kids in my two-road Polish town in New Jersey. “Aren’t you half Polish?” they’d ask me and I’d say, “No. Half of a half. What’s that? One-sixteenth?” I don’t know how Polish I am. My father, I am told, was an Eastern European mutt and some part of his lab-mouse blood was Polish. My mom is full-blooded Portuguese. So for argument’s sake I now say I’m half-Polish, half-Portuguese, which is such an awful combination—on one hand I have fantastic skin and am very hardworking but on the other hand I do everything backward. (Folks, before you go into a woman’s uterus guns a-blazing, please consider your ethnic background. Do you really think the world needs more Australian Canadians or African Russians? It’s sort of like you’re Dr. Moreau.)
I once interviewed a metal band from Poland called Behemoth. I’d never heard of them and only really wanted to interview them so I could use the setup lines of Polish jokes as the interview questions. I wish you could hear the tapes. The lead singer went for it hook, line, and sinker. “Did you hear what happened to the Polish national hockey team?” I asked. “No,” he said. “They all drowned in spring training!” I told him, biting my lip not to laugh through the phone. He sounded sad when he said, “Oh my God. When did this happen? I have not heard about this. I always read the newspaper and I did not see any mention of this. That is awful.” Oh, he was precious. It was like shooting barrels of fish in a barrel-of-fish warehouse. Things got a bit heated when I asked, “Why do you think the Poles were so easily defeated by the Nazis?” He thought he knew the answer to that one, “My people were unprepared, they had a very small, weak army and weren’t ready for the Nazis.” “Nope, that’s not it,” I said, “The Nazis marched into Poland backward and the Polacks thought they were leaving!” This incensed him. He started yelling. “That is false! That is completely incorrect! I am a history major in university and I know that is not true! It was because our armies were weak and unprepared!” It went on like this for 25 minutes. He never caught on. At the end I thanked him for his time, then said I had just one more question: “How do you keep a Polack in suspense?” “I’m not sure, how?” he said and with that, I hung up on him.
Aaaaaaaanyway, I felt like I was cast in a live-action Polish joke when I agreed to be a judge at Red Bull’s soapbox derby in Providence, Rhode Island. My buddy Jeff Regis, Red Bull’s East Coast head of sports marketing, sent me an email that said, “You, Pras from the Fugees, a drag-car racer, and Miss Rhode Island walk into bar—I mean, will be the panel of judges.” I looked at the list of nobodies, has-beens, and never-weres and laughed out loud; then I thought to myself, Christ! What does that say about me?
What had I gotten myself into? What the hell is a soapbox derby anyway? I mean, really. That’s like some bullshit Boy Scout shit, right? Going to their official website put me at ease (redbullsoapboxusa.com).
Red Bull had created something much more fiendish and delightful than scouts building bullshit wooden racecars. The participants in this event were special. Looking at the images of fantastic, themed, wheeled vehicles of soapboxes past and their flamboyant costumed creators, I knew these were my type of people. They were the nerds, the drunks, the stoners, the good-time guys and gals with too much time on their hands, and they were dressed up like it was the last Halloween ever! Just to give you an idea, the winner of the Seattle race was the A-Team. They re-created the black child-molester van from the TV show and all dressed up as the various “guns for hire.” I thought it only appropriate that I fit in, so I drove to Providence in my Super-Cow costume and wore it the entire weekend.
See Chris at the Soapbox Derby on VBS.tv. For more of his writing, go to Chrisnieratko.com.
TO BE CONTINUED
MY OTHER SOAPBOX IS YOUR ASS |
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