Keith Lowell Jensen - Punching Nazis---and Other Good Ideas

Copyright 2018 by Keith Lowell Jensen.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

Cover Photograph: IStock

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-3374-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3375-6

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

To Mom and Dad, for encouraging my creative efforts and for teaching me that racists are the worst.

Trigger-Warning Warning

The next page contains a trigger warning.

TRIGGER WARNING

This book is full of descriptions of bigotry, violence, and hate speech, and the forty-fifth President of the United States is mentioned several times by name. I tell you this, dear reader, so that you may make an informed decision as to where and when you read it, or whether to read it at all.

When I shared an article online that contained graphic descriptions of violence, I included a trigger warning. Immediately a fan messaged me. Dude, trigger warnings? Youre a comedian. Cut that shit out.

I asked what was wrong with trigger warnings and what this had to do with me being a comedian.

Being a comedian and fighting for free speech go hand in hand. Youre giving power to people who will stop you from speaking your mind down the road.

Im amazed how often Im told what I can or cannot say by champions of free speech. I argued that trigger warnings made me feel freer to speak my mind, allowing me to do so without worrying about triggering my friends who have survived trauma and who live with PTSD.

I pointed out that NPR always tells listeners if a story is going to be graphic in depictions of violence, which is handy when you drive around with kids in your car.

There are sad songs that make me cry. Should they put warnings on them?

When I explained that crying from a sad song was a little different from having a strong reaction after surviving a war zone or being sexually assaulted, the guy started to get angrier. He insulted me, he made ad hominem attacks, he became increasingly irrational.

I started to feel bad that I had upset the guy, especially since he had been a supportive fan of my comedy. I told him that I was really sorry that the trigger warning had affected him, and I promised him that in the future, to avoid repeating this situation, Id give him some kind of warning to let him know when I was about to post a trigger warning.

SUICIDAL

I m Suicidial.

It was a surprising thing for Jamie to be confiding to me just minutes into seeing each other for the first time in years. Wed both become legal adults since wed last hung out. Riding in his beautiful, tricked-out, low-rider pickup truck, we were speeding at ninety-plus miles per hour down the 91 in Corona, California, my old hometown.

My buddy Dan had made the trip from Sacramento with me. There wasnt room in the cab of the truck for him, so he was lying down in the bed, no doubt in the grip of terror.

Youre suicidal? Dude, Im sorry. Whats going on? I asked, wishing he hadnt told me this while behind the wheel of a fast-moving truck with no seat belts and one of my dear friends in the bed.

No, homes, Im not suicidal, Im Suicidal. Im a fuckin Suey, man.

Youre a suicidal person? You want to die? I asked, still not comprehending but admittedly a little impressed. Its wrong, I know, but as someone with suicidal impulses myself, I associate a certain depth of character with wanting to take ones own life. When I hear of someone killing him- or herself, who I initially hadnt thought much of, I reconsider my opinion of them. In the instances where it turns out to be accidental death by autoerotic asphyxiation, I think, Yeah, that makes more sense.

Jamie rolled his eyes, took one hand off the polished wood steering wheel, and pulled his shirt up to reveal Suicidal tattooed across his abs in Old English lettering. Im Suicidal.

After a few more clueless questions I finally was able to understand that Jamie had become a member of a local gang called the Suicidals.

Id moved up north to Sacramento with my parents when I was fourteen, leaving behind Jamie, my best friend in Corona, which is about an hour drive inland from Los Angeles. I barely recognized him now, buff, covered in tattoos, a far cry from the towheaded, blue-eyed Ricky Schroder look-alike who I used to listen to The Cure with.

I associated my friendship with Jamie with a sort of eighties take on Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, full of mischievous anecdotes like the time wed gone to Christian summer camp together and Jamie got caught shoplifting Lemonheads from a grocery store on the way home, humiliating but not surprising my mom. Apparently, he hadnt been as moved by the Holy Spirit as I was. Camp had affected me deeplyat one point I even tried to burn my Pink Floyd cassette tapes. Jamie was not quite so taken in.

Now it was the early nineties and his appearance suggested a darker kind of mischief.

It seems a big change had happened in Home Gardensthe neighborhood Id spent the first decade and a half of my life inafter Id left. The best I can figure is that the LA gang sweeps pushed the gangs into the Inland Empire, and they settled there, the same way the ocean winds pushed the LA smog onto us.

Thered always been some tension between the white kids and the Mexican kids in Corona. When I lived in Home Gardens, we only had about five black kids, so they were almost celebrities to us, able to move between cliques, welcome by most. But in the late eighties with the black gangs coming in, the original white and Mexican residents banded together, a bizarre hybrid of skateboarding, speed-metal-loving, racist cholo rockers. I guessed theyd taken their name from the band Suicidal Tendencies, but it seemed pretty square to ask.

In addition to joining a gang, my childhood pal had become a drug dealer, and a rather successful one judging by the truck we were in; the Impala and the Jet Ski parked in his moms driveway next to the van hed bought her; and the impressive collection of guns at the apartment he rented for storing his drugs (so that his mom wouldnt lose her house if he got busted, he explained) and for having sex, because, obviously.

Jamie made several stops at pay phones around town to arrange to pick up cash, which, we learned, was done separately from delivering drugs. At each stop I checked with Dan to see how he was doing, and remarkably, he seemed pretty okay with riding in the bed of an erratically driven truck on drug-dealing errands.