Well…now that I’ve got y’all’s attention and I ain’t letting it go anytime soon, you’re probably asking to nobody in particular, “What the hell is an incel?” You spend more time touching grass than most of us do, so kudos to you, cowboy. Bonus points if that grass is a slang term for something else. Speaking of slang, an incel is a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate”. Most of the dudes who call themselves this are a bunch of pissed off nerds who couldn’t get laid with a blow-up doll.
But if you join a street gang that calls themselves incels,
you’re a different kind of dangerous. That’s what the three of us were. White
Snake was our main man, Scar Tissue was his first pupil, and then there was me,
Dogmeat, who got in the Corvette and pissed off from Sweetwater. Goodbye,
Elijah Canterbury, welcome aboard, Dogmeat. Young, pissed off, and horny as
hell. Can you think of a more dangerous combination than that? I guess Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms would be a close second place. Do those three things
really belong together?
Yeah, it all sounded pretty good on paper during that three-month
grace period. A bunch of horndogs looking for love in all the wrong places, who
hoped to one day stick our Johnsons in the wrong places too. We weren’t about
to let a bunch of neckbeards get in the way of those plans. We were the Alphas.
The badasses. The trigger fingers that would make them all obey. Again, it
sounded good in theory. But once you listen to White Snake run his mouth for
three whole months, ranting and raving about women like a psychopath? It makes
you wonder why this guy hasn’t gotten the 51/50 treatment. He was long overdue
for a straitjacket, but maybe an orange jumpsuit was more of his style.
This is the part of the story I was least looking forward to
telling, but in the interest of show, don’t tell, I guess I’ll have to suck it
up and power through it. White Snake loved talking about what he’d do to a
woman if he got a hold of her, all alone somewhere in a dark lobby. It’s simple,
really: duct tape her mouth shut, pinch her nose until she was out of breath,
wait for her to hit the ground unconscious, and once she was in dreamland, pull
his jockey shorts down and…well, you do the math from here. Math isn’t a very
popular subject among the student body these days, but even an “Are You Smarter
Than a Fifth Grader” contestant can get this one right. And then you’d ask
yourself, how would a fifth grader know this?
Speaking of people who aren’t old enough to join the army
yet, another thing White Snake couldn’t stop running his motormouth about was “pranking”
little elementary school girls by chasing them down the street and laughing
like a lunatic. Eventually, the little ones would fall and scrape their knees,
but it wouldn’t be nearly as painful as listening to White Snake repeat
something he heard on a Tik Tok video once: “I CAN’T MOVE ON! I CAN’T MOVE ON!
I WON’T ALLOW MYSELF TO MOVE ON FROM YOU, BECAUSE YOU’RE ALL I WANT! I DON’T
WANT NOBODY ELSE!” And just like that, the little girl would do something not
even my old man could do: break the sound barrier with her screams of horror.
You’re damn right she was scared! What’s she supposed to do, put a ring on it?
White Snake might give you a different answer to that question than what a rational
human being might give.
And then we segue from pranking to spanking. Remember,
incels couldn’t get laid if they held a pimp for ransom. So what do they do to
relieve their horniness? You know, when they’re not too busy harassing women
and beating up other Reddit chuds? Pull it out and crank it up. I’ve done that
a few times in my life and I’m pretty sure that was the reason for the fracas
with my daddy. More on that later. But at least I had the sense to do it to
women who had more qualifications than being legally able to smoke a cigarette
and drink beer. White Snake had no shame. He dove to the bottom of the barrel
like he was in the pervert Olympics. How low could he go? Low enough to where they
can’t wear anything but a diaper and say little more than “goo-goo-ga-ga”. I
actually said to him one time, “You know those are kids, right?” And he was
like, “No shit, Scooby-Doo!” I don’t know what was more offensive: his hard-on
for kids or the fact that he butchered the easiest comeback in the world.
Yep. This was our guy. This was the guy that would lead us
to the promised land. The land of milk and honey, though his ideal girlfriend
couldn’t produce milk yet. This was the guy who drove the Corvette down a
freeway blasting bro-metal while Scar Tissue and I were sitting in the back
chillin’ like villains. Every time I was trapped in a car with White Snake, I
could have sworn some creepy crawlies were running up my arms and legs.
But Scar Tissue at the very least had something resembling
potential. While White Snake was blasting that bro-metal from the stereo, Scar
Tissue air-drummed along like he was loving life again. And this wasn’t just
casual air-drumming. Scar Tissue actually looked like he knew how to play the
drums. He did the tom fills. He pumped those bass and high-hat pedals. He
drum-rolled on that imaginary snare. He crashed them cymbals at the right time.
Made me wonder what he was doing hanging out with a couple of losers like us
instead of playing in a heavy metal band.
I asked him on the spot, “Where the hell’d you learn to play
like that, bud?”
He gave me the world’s cheesiest grin as he waxed poetic. “Three
chicas, homie: The Warning! I got a hold of their CD’s, took ‘em for a spin,
and let Pau-Pau beat them drums like they owed her dinero. They don’t teach
that kind of drumming at my school, homes. You listen long enough, you figure it
out.”
“Self-taught, huh? I respect that! You still got any of them
CD’s?”
Scar Tissue shook his head. “Nah, man. Started to get the
feels for them chicas, so I had to ditch them. I don’t simp for nobody, essa.
They don’t give me the time of day. Too busy or something like that. So now I’ve
got some old school Drowning Pool in my collection. Tear Away is a classic!
Goddamn, I love me!”
Of course he says, “I love me”, because nobody else would.
It was true for the songwriter and it was true for Scar Tissue unfortunately.
That’s rule number one in incel ideology: when it comes to a woman’s love, you’re
in the back of the line. You think we picked out these names Dogmeat and Scar
Tissue? Hell no. White Snake gave them to us to keep us “black pilled” and keep
us in line. You get too confident, you might actually get caught by one of
these black widows. What’s more heartbreaking than a demeaning nickname like
Dogmeat or Scar Tissue? Those are the kind of names that make you feel ugly.
Maybe we WERE ugly, I don’t know.
And in case we forgot about that, White Snake turned his
head towards us and said, “Hey! You guys making gay porn back there or what?”
“Sorry, essa. Won’t happen again.” Scar Tissue shrugged his
shoulders at me while I just rolled my eyes. Gay porn? Really? The guy who
pounds his pud to diaper-wearing kids is judging other people for making “gay
porn”? I didn’t tell him that. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Remember, Black Tar
Kiss was a gang. You mess with the leader or try to run away, they’ll follow
you to the ends of the earth. Once you’re locked in, you’re locked in for life.
It can’t be the same as before.
And speaking of things not going back to the way they were
before, you’ll never believe who tried to send me a text message on my phone:
Ben Canterbury a.k.a. my old man from Sweetwater. I pulled the phone out of my
garbage bag of this and that just to see if it really was him. No question
about it. He had been trying to contact me for a long time now and every time
he did, I just let the call go to voicemail or delete the text entirely. Yeah,
life with White Snake wasn’t so great, but going back home wasn’t an option,
because that would suck even more. At least with Black Tar Kiss, I could make a
little money and get a little honey. Can’t say that with a mechanic’s salary in
little old Sweetwater.
“Who was that, Dogmeat?” White Snake asked.
“Nobody. Just someone I used to know,” I told him I the most
pathetic tone imaginable. I guess we all had someone like that in our lives.
Otherwise, we wouldn’t be joining street gangs. We’d be at home playing
videogames or building Legos, at least that’s what I’d be doing. Kind of hard
to play videogames when your old man says they’re rotting your brain. And it’s
kind of hard to build Legos when your old man keeps calling you out to the
living room to do some mind-numbing chores. I can’t even put on a heavy metal
CD without my dad’s voice drowning out the guitar work.
Black Tar Kiss wasn’t a great option. It was the only option.
That was made abundantly clear to me when White Snake got off the exit ramp and
started driving towards Battleground Park, where our first real test as a gang
would take place. Me Encanta Femicidio was waiting for us there. I had no idea
how many of them there were or what they were going to bring to the fight. I didn’t
even know how many of us there were. Were there other Black Tar Kiss members
that were going to meet us or was it just us three? Do we at least have some
guns or something? I don’t need an AK-47 or a Styr Aug or anything like that. A
nine-millimeter would have been just fine.
Pardon me for having a million questions running through my
mind before this battle took place, but…if I’m keeping it a buck with you guys…my
heart was pumping, my blood was colder than a fishing creek, and the rumbling
my stomach was worse than if I ate some bad fish from that same creek. Want some
plain English? I was scared to death and I wasn’t about to tell Whtie Snake or
Scar Tissue about it. Me Encanta Femicidio didn’t scare me nearly as much as
White Snake did. And if I lost my rapport with Scar Tissue, that was it, man.
If there was a god up there in heaven, I know I wasn’t well-behaved worth a
damn in them pews at church…but I hoped he was looking out for me.
