A friend of mine heard about this story and a few others and enjoyed them. She said that my upbringing would be a good resource for my comedic musings. Strangely, I don't have much material in regards to be old neighborhood or the schools I went to. I've got a few jokes about my parents but not any about the town that raised me. I haven't been incorporating this facet of my identity into my stage persona. The reason I don't is because my experience was quite average to me. I went to a black school but adapted well into black culture. So I never felt awkward or out of place and therefore find nothing humorous about it.
Regardless though, it is an experience that is unique to me and therefore can make endearing to audiences. I remember running into a friend from high school a few months ago. He asked me if I was writing jokes about the old neighborhood, the boys from NMB (North Miami Beach, my hometown) and the mix tape I had produced with him. I was disappointed to say no. Now may be the time to tap into the environment I was born out of. So let's see what we can conjure up.
I went North Miami Beach Senior High School. There were plenty of other white kids than me there but they were all in the magnet program. (Editor's Note: There were plenty of black kids in the magnet program as well.) They had different teachers and even a whole other floor of the building compared to the rest of the student body. I was an oddity. I was the white kid not in the magnet program. This would confuse teachers. In fact, one year the school had placed me in one of the magnet math courses. I tried to explain to them that the course was too advanced for me but they didn't do anything about it until I started to fail it. They pulled me out and put me in a math class I could handle. They had to alter my schedule to make this work and ironically pulled me out of my African American studies class to make it work.
A lot of the kids I hung out with listened to rap. I didn't like it much at first. The only rap I listened to was when Weird Al parodied Gangster's Paradise. The constant exposure to rap led me to have an affection for it. I started to write my own raps about the dumb and stupid things you contemplate about when you're fifteen. I wrote a lot about break ups despite not having had a girlfriend yet. Soon, I began to understand the idea behind battle rapping and free styling. I wrote little punch line raps and even though I wasn't as good as other kids, I got a lot of respect for having the courage to do it. There was also a novelty to me being white that the kids took a shine too. Probably had to do with Eminem being immensely popular at the time.
I soon got together with my friend Mike and we recorded a mix tape together. We pirated beats and rapped over them. The sounds quality was less than glamorous considering the recording process. The process involved playing the beats over the computer speakers and recording them onto the computer's microphone with us rapping. My rap name was Killah Kracka and he was Mic Deizel. Together we called ourselves Cold Equations. I named us that. I read a short story in English that year with the same name and really liked it. We burned our recordings on to blank CD's and passed them around school. They got pretty popular. People could automatically tell I was white by my voice and my subject matter. On one track in particular I crooned out, "Stay out of my life." Something only emo white kids said so my racial identity was unmasked. Luckily, it didn't hurt our popularity.
That was fun but I think that's enough dabbling for now. Writing about it makes it so vivid all of a sudden. My high school days were very kind of me and have a whole lot to do with who I am now. Writing about them could be just what I need to be more relatable. Perhaps next time we'll go on another vacation in my memory.
"As a matter of fact dawg, here's a pencil, go home, write some shit, make it suspenseful; and don't come back 'til somethin' dope hits you. Fuck it, you can take the mic home wit' you."
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