True Story©... The Ballad of Jiggaboo Jackson

 

    I don’t like going out in public…
It isn’t so much that I am antisocial – well I kinda am, but I fuck with who I fuck with and that makes a huge difference – but I have also done an absolute lifetime's worth of fuckshit in the community as the two of you have read in these pages in just the past two years. One of my greatest fears is that I will be out with Wife Person™ and or my little one and something that they don’t know I have done comes face-to-face with me. Don’t tell THEM that, but that is partially why I am so reluctant to go out and be places.

    … so I am in The Walmarks a couple of weeks ago, minding my own business, collecting things for the Superbowl party and I hear someone in the distance calling apparently for me…

Voice: “S’cuse me. Aye man! AYE!!!”

Me: “You talking to me?”

Him: “Yeah, yeah man… Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

Me: “I’on think I know you bro.”

Him: “Yeah, ain’t yo name like–… Somethin’ weird, like Fap Fappington or something like that?”

Oh shit… The Wrist Twistin’ Kitchen… FUCK!!!

Me: “No, but yeah. I hosted that debacle, but Fap Fappington was my cohost.”

Him: “Yeah, and I’m–…”

Me: “Jiggaboo Jackson!”

EVERY face in the store is flushed red now, I hadn’t even realized what I had done.

Him: “Yeah, I’m not going by that no more.”

Me: “Whew, thanks… That was awkward.”

Him: “Yeah, I am trying new stuff now, mostly putting that rap shit behind me.”

Me: “So what is it now?”

Him: “I wrote a book.”

Me: “No, I mean what do I call–… WAIT! You wrote a book!?”

Him: “Yeah!”

Me: “Mr ‘I’m not a rapper, I’m a real n**ga’ wrote a book. I am morbidly curious.”

Him: “Well I been trying to find you so I could get you a copy to read and tell me if you liked it or not.”

Me: “So like what is it about?”

Him: “It’s kinda like a ‘mem-wires’.”

Me: “A what?”

Him: “A mem-wires, where people write about their life and shit?”

Me: “Oh a memoir! Yeah, I wanna read this shit.”

[Phlip note: I DESPERATELY need to read this shit!]

Him: “I got some copies in the car with me.”

Me: “Well lemme get my wife’s prescriptions, meet me at the exit by the garden center in 15 minutes.”

Him: “Aight.”

    As instructed, I gathered my last couple of items and Wife Person™’s drogas and met him out by the exit. He was offering me the book free of charge, but as a creative who writes for people for free every week, I couldn’t let him do that and gave him ten bucks. He thanked me and we exchanged contact info, then went our separate ways.


    Before we get into the teeth of what this book said, I want everyone who reads this to personally thank me for sparing them the actual words of this book. It reads like the words of a 9th-grade dropout who was raised in Memphis.  I could LITERALLY hear his voice on the page.

[Phlip note: I really should be charging y’all for shit like this]

    So yeah… This under-edited word salad titled Building The Walls of Jericho goes on to explain how he was born and raised in the Orange Mound neighborhood in Memphis and how all he saw as a kid was drugs and violence. Things being as they were, he saw his only way out as either crime, music or basketball and how he had grown to resent his parents because 5’7” was his real adult height. Dejected at the longshot chance of doing sports, he started hanging with the older boys and dropped out of school in 11th grade but he was basically “dead man walking” the whole time prior, being passed through due to age and not grades.

    His parents, wanting something – anything – better for him, moved to Greensboro of all places hoping that a new environment would be the kick in the ass that he needed to get back into and finish high school and hopefully latch on at one of the local colleges or if not at least a community college and learn a trade…

Wrong™!

    In Greensboro, he would land in a city full of fine-ass and less-than-street-smart girls who are moist for a country-ass dude. And gangs, he found these semi-gangs that like to think they’re doing shit around here. Through the semi-gangs, he found what he THOUGHT would be his passion in rapping despite not actually being very good at it. To him and those around him, though, that shouldn't have to matter because the “I’m not a rapper, I’ma real n**ga” trope remained to be held onto if ever questioned.

    He and his friends enjoyed some weird level of local and TikTok notoriety for their videos purporting to be big time local criminals and driving like absolute jackasses in their Chargers. The problem, though, was that all of their criminality was more bluster for the onlooking iPhones than it ever was actual malice.
Until they saw the recruiting call for the Wrist Twistin’ Kitchen. As the as-decided most marketable of the group of friends, they collectively decided that HE would be the one to stop rapping about crack and actually show off that they were about what they said they were… One problem though: these boys are all Gen-Z’ers born to Gen-X parents. As a Gen-X’er and a parent, I can tell you for absolute-ass sure that growing up in a time where crack was a thing turned US off of ever desiring to become a crackhead and most of us actually shied away from preparing and selling it. With that said, any of our kids claiming that life DAMN sure didn’t learn it from us.

    So the Wrist Twistin’ Kitchen…  It is nigh impossible to get in front of a stove and fake that shit if you lack an absolute INKLING of what to do when you get there, so he – and with him, his crew – suffered an embarrassing exposure as being all talk and no action. They couldn’t show their faces around the city anymore. Comments on their videos were all mocking and negative in nature. One could ATTEMPT to write it off as “hate,” but when it is valid criticism can you really call it that.

    He distanced from the group and tried to reinvent himself. Dropped the “Jiggaboo” moniker and SOLELY went by his actual name.
With his new direction, he kept rapping but this time on the solo route. He still NEVER considered going the education route. He did, however, reach out to FuqBoi Da Xan Gawd to do “one of them black n**ga upliftment” (his words, not mine) tracks but never heard back.
Short on other options, he decided to write a “book” about his experiences and hopefully steer little kids in a better direction.
We will talk in a minute about why the word book is in quotations.


    After a painful slog through the literary work of someone who quite apparently has no real (or at least literate) friends, I was finished. I sent him a text that I had finished and he called me instead of texting. I will forgive him for not knowing that I HATE that shit…

Him: “So whatcha think?”

Me: “I think you should have found me before you logged into Amazon and published this.”

Him: “Whatchu mean?”

Me: “It was a rough read and not because of the content.”

Him: “Oh.”

Me: “And who writes a memoir that is only 39 pages long?”

Him: “Huh?”

Me: “That hardly counts as a ‘book’ my man.”

Him: “So what I do now?”

Me: “I mean, what’s done is done… I see and mildly respect what you TRIED to do here, but…”

Him: “But what?”

Me: “But it was my actions that humbled you enough to seek a better way, any more and I would be piling on you.”

Him: “Oh… Well what if just, like, ASKED for advice.”

Me: “You wanna write? I suggest you read… a LOT.”

Him: “Okay.”

Me: “You-you want to rap… My stronger suggestion is that you need to learn to weld.”

Him: “Ouch.”

Me: “You wanna pull back and turn this into an appropriate-enough-length book to call it one, an editor or ghostwriter is probably the way and I ain’t cheap. People who do that full time are even less so.”

Him: “Okay.”

Me: “But you’re onto something there. Don’t you quit, Jiggab–… um… Jericho Jackson.  I’m cheering for you.”

Him: “Thanks man.”

Feels like I COULD have been harder on him but I had already done enough damage. 

Let’s all just hope he takes up that welding program at GTCC in August.