Month: May 2025

I ain’t green like Kermit, and I ain’t orange like Ernie nor yellow like his rubber ducky.

Why, ain’t no reason why I’m so darn lucky…

“A big surprise?!? Really?!?” I eyed my dear mother with a bit of suspicion. “Really?”

I wanted to be excited, but she also had a history of anti-climactic ‘surprises’. Even worse, she threw in some that were downright anti-surprises! Have I mentioned the whole banana split fiasco(s) yet? If not, well, that’s another lovely tale of childhood trauma that needs to be told.

“Well…” she paused somewhat thoughtfully. “I’m not really sure how excited you might be about it. I think you’ll be excited.”

“Ok, where on the ‘Dudly-to-Studly Scale'¹For the life of me, I can distinctly remember making up a goofy-ass name for a goofy-ass scale, but can’t remember exactly what that name was. Dammit. I’m not getting sleep for the next month. would you say it lands?” I inquired cheekily.

“Uh, you’re going to have explain that scale to me. How would you calibrate it again?” she said, humoring because obviously she was excited about whatever secret she was sitting on.

“Well, I would say a ‘1’ on the Dudly-to-Studly scale would be something quite underwhelming,” I said, tapping my finger to my peach-fuzz-free 11-year-old chin, deep in thought. “Maybe, say, like buying a new grill for cookouts this summer. I mean, that would be like polishing a turd. This sh*thole of an apartment doesn’t have much of yard or porch to even use it!”

I gestured around at the duplex we had been living in for the duration of my fifth grade year. While calling it a ‘sh*thole’ might have been a bit overly dramatic (and also something of an artistic liberty taken by the autobiographer), we–Mom, me, and my slightly older bro, 1SkinnyJ–all agreed that our domicile at the corner of Kellett & Kearney in good ol’ Springfield, MO wasn’t exactly the proverbial lap of luxury (even by rather low economically-challenged standards). Especially with the ass-hat neighbor who was apparently fine with chain-smoking in their apartment. What a ----- jerkoff.

“Okay,” Mom replied, “No need to use that language. But, anyways, what would you consider a ’10’ on this so-called Dudly-to-Studly scale?”

“Oh, that’s much easier,” I said perkily. “How about a day or two at Six Flags Saint Louis? Hint, hint…”

“Um…well, unfortunately, the surprise isn’t going to quite hit a 10 on your scale,” Mom said, trying to let me down easy.

“Damn.” I muttered. “Welp, a boy can dream, can’t he?”

“Well, if you really need a number from me, I would say maybe this would land around a 5 or 6, so just temper your expectations a bit there, Young Dreamer.”

“Alright. Cool. Well, when do we get to find out what this modest 5.5 surprise is?”

“I can’t say anything until I know for sure it’s a done deal, but I can give you a hint,” Mom said coyly.

“Well, don’t keep me waiting! What’s your clever hint?”

“Okay, you ready for this? It might actually involve buying a new grill.”

“Dammit, Mom, not again with the ----- grill…”

“Welp, it’s official!”

Mom came waltzing just a few days later into our sh*thole apartment waving some papers around in the air.

I looked up from a very intense game of Dr. Mario on my Game Boy.

“What’s official?”

“You know those nice apartments for, uh, ‘underfunded’ people like us over on Delaware Avenue?” she said, almost squealing with excitement.

“Yeah, they’re pretty sweet. But wasn’t there a long-ass wait list?”

“NOPE! No more wait list! WE’RE IN, BABY!”

“WHAT?!?” I about dropped my precious Game Boy. This was big news–huge!

“Yes, it’s TRUE–and we’re moving at the end of the month!”

“Ooooooooh…” I could barely form words. “Whaaaa?”

“I’ll give you a moment,” Mom said, clearly very pumped by my reaction.

“Oh, ah, well,” I said grasping for words. They finally came to me.

“Five-point-five?!? You thought this was a 5.5 on the D2S scale??? Yeah, maybe if you multiplied it by 2! These go to eleven!”

I was about to pass out. Like, you don’t even understand, bro. While we never truly had lived in a complete dump–save for the roach motel we stayed out for the first week when we moved to Springfield from Kansas, but that’s almost another story for another time–we never had lived anywhere that had been built before 1965. Every time I would stay over at rich friends house (and by “rich”, I really mean “at least marginally richer than us”), I would always fantasize about living somewhere with proper air conditioning and carpet that wasn’t slightly suspect. This boy can–and did–dream.

But in less than 10 days, that was all about to change: ‘twould not be a dream no longer. My lucky ass had somehow just won the Po’ Boy lottery…

“Man, moving to those nice apartments back in ’92 really was life-changing, wasn’t it?”

Roughly 30 years later, something had reminded me of the 2 wonderful years we had lived there, and I found myself reminiscing with my dear mother about the whole experience.

“Yeah, that’s an understatement. What was really nice was that we finally had room for our piano again, and you could start taking lessons again,” Mom added.

“You know, that whole ordeal…it was just so…surprising. Like, finding out that we had got into those apartments totally blind-sided me–in the best possible way, of course–‘cuz even I knew that when you applied for them in what? March of that year? That there was a sh*t-ton of people in line front of us. So for some reason I had the number in my head of 8-12 months to get to the top of the wait list…”

“Mmm-hmm,” Mom murmured, not bothering to interrupt the unexpected 3-decade old rabbit hole I was tripping into.

“Yeah…I hadn’t really thought about that since…well, basically since you told me the big news right before we moved there…hmmph…”

Mom continued to say little to nothing.

“It’s just that alot of people must have died in the 2 months in between. Like, it’s a statistical understatement to say that we got freakin’ lucky!”

As I finally came out of my halcyon days daze, I realized that mom had been oddly silent this whole time.

“What? Why are you looking at me with that half-smirk on your face?”

“Um…yeah, I guess one could call it ‘luck’,” she said somewhat cryptically.

“Uhhh…what are you talking about?” I could tell that she knew more than she was letting on, but I was still clueless.

“Well, let’s just say it wasn’t a coincidence that we got into those apartments so freakishly quickly…”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, just out with it already!”

“Well, I don’t think you ever met her, but the woman who handled all the applications? Real nice lady. She, uh, ‘fast-tracked’ our application to the front of the line…past many other qualified and deserving applicants, who, shall we say, didn’t need nearly as much sunscreen as we do.”

“Wait, WHAT?!?”

“Yeah…I found out from our mutual friend that not too long after we got into the apartments on Delaware that she got fired for it. I’m not sure if we we’re the only white folk she hooked up, though I’m sure there had to have been plenty of other poor white families mysteriously appearing in all the nicer subsidized housing in statistically disproportionate numbers.”

“Holy sh*t, Mother…”

I was trying to wrap my head around that bomb of a pseudo-family secret that had just been dropped on my head.

“It all makes so much sense now…

The point of the story, kids, is that White Jesus really does answer your prayers.

Well, either that or systemically-ingrained socioeconomic-agnositic privilege for pale people all across the pale spectrum is, unlike White Jesus, actually real…

Content created on: 17/18 May 2025 (Sat/Sun…and yes, I missed my deadline by a week and just backdated this post instead.)