![]() ![]() As long as I kept the bass down, how was she to know that I was nodding along to the Fresh Prince song “I Th ink I Can Beat In the car, she’d be driving, and trying to lecture me about something, but I’d have the radio cranked so loud I couldn’t hear her. I took advantage of my mom’s deafness in small ways at fi rst. My first word, I’ve been told, was the middle finger. I picked it up easily, like any kid in a bilingual household, watching my dad and my older brother speak to her in sign. She’d lost her hearing through a mysterious illness three years before I was born, and I grew up speaking sign language with her. It must’ve been some kind of adjacent line of reasoning that induced me, growing up, to make fun of my mom for being deaf. Of course, if anyone else unleashed the same kind of jokes, they’d get their ass beat quick. “He’s my brother, I’m allowed to fuck with him,” he’d always explain. If anyone gave him grief for it, he’d say, “Hey, I’m just playin’ around-my brother’s a retard.” Kwame used to dropkick retard jokes right in his brother’s face. This gave Kwame license, he felt, to make fun of other mentally handicapped folks he encountered. When I was a kid, I had a friend down the street named Kwame whose older brother was mentally handicapped. NIBBLE, LICK, SUCK, AND FEAST CANADA OR BUST ROBERT RITCHIEĩ9 BOTTLES OF PEE ON THE WALL HOW I GOT THESE BOOTS SHADE Sometimes I hear that song, and I’ll start to sing along And think, Man, I’d love to see that girl again . . . I’m way too deep into the weird life Broken bottles and a butterfly knife. ![]() I’ve come to feel out on the sea These urgent lives press against me. But even as small creative liberties have been taken, all of these stories are grounded in truth. Occasionally, certain aspects- characters, locales, scenes, names of businesses, and bits of dialogue-have been altered, amalgamated, reordered, refashioned, omitted, or even fictionalized to conceal All of these stories are grounded in truth, but creative liberties have been taken. Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2012 Permission acknowledgments tk Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rothbart, Davy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 18 West 18th Street, New York 10011 Copyright © 2012 by Davy Rothbart All rights reserved Distributed in Canada by D&M Publishers, Inc. ![]()
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