Rappalachia 911

Michael Dowdy

1.

Like many buildings in my hometown, my middle school, which had been my father’s high school, was demolished a decade ago, after I’d left the mountains for good. The plot on the edge of the small downtown remains vacant, the parade of redevelopment schemes, with drab uniforms and saccharin songs, receiving only scattered cheers.

Mr. M, my 7th-grade Social Studies teacher, preferred of all artificial sweeteners the blood-sugar spike of disaster. Every Friday, in the building that no longer stands, Mr. M would wheel in a TV and cut the lights. Seconds after he inserted his VHS tape the sirens started to wail. Rescue 911, the CBS docudrama hosted by the Star Trek captain and cut-rate renaissance man William Shatner, exemplified Mr. M’s shaky pedagogy, or simply his fetish for the red lights of catastrophe.

 My father tells me the latest “mixed use” plan for the middle school site will be approved any day now. The Equal of real-estate sweeteners, “mixed use” pleases the tongue just enough to choke down the swill. My high school was bulldozed a few years after the middle, when the roof of the gym where I played basketball collapsed. Its earthen hole awaits a developer’s desire.

 The Wikipedia entry for Rescue 911 styles its small-screen reenactments of 911 calls as de facto public health policy. “Though never intended as a teaching tool”—a fact clear to any 12-year-old—“at least 350 lives have been saved as a result of what viewers learned from watching it.” I’m as dubious now about this statistic as I was then about the “social” dimensions of our “studies” of the show. For Mr. M, Rescue 911 was a treat for a week’s work, an hour of candy for four of whole grains. Mr. M’s “mixed use” lesson plans—to entice the 12-year-old, a bit of sweet to cut the bitter—mirrored his country’s. First, screen the misfortunes of others. Then, simmer for a sitcom-clean 30 minutes. Last, let the wounds enact their civic service willy-nilly.

 Rescue 911 debuted in 1989, the year that marked, according to one critic, “the end of history.” That year jumpstarted the history I tell myself about myself. The year I first kissed another kid on the lips, the year I watched aghast as my t-shirts pitted out in homeroom, the year I learned to touch myself, the year my tongue twitched with taboo words stripped of their bodies.

 Recorded that same year, “911 Is a Joke” appeared on Public Enemy’s 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet. Backed by a video parodying Rescue 911, the performance is vintage Flavor Flav. The group’s hype man clowns with glee, lampooning those deified “first responders” as the tardy janitors of white supremacy, black people bleeding out wherever they fell. In Social Studies, 911 was a sweet savior; for Public Enemy, 911 was accessory to murder. Between these sirens, a nation throbbed.

 Public Enemy topped the list of rappers my friend M3 and I made on notebook paper during Mr. M’s lessons. We fell a dozen MCs short of triple digits. Some names—Redhead Kingpin, Just-Ice—have faded into oblivion, while others endure—De La Soul, Slick Rick—as ciphers of rap’s “golden age.” The plastic age of Rappalachia, there on my sleepy Main Street, was being traced with this white boy’s promiscuous pen.

 In 5th grade, on safety patrol together, M3 and I sported orange belts and sashes, faux badges, and plastic yellow helmets. We made sure students boarded the buses in an orderly fashion. We raised and lowered the flag. We got up at the crack of dawn. Then, it was a prestige gig, mostly for the end-of-year trip to Busch Gardens. Now, I cringe at the cop-in-training vibe. A year of service for two days of vacation: American adulthood shrunken to size.

 When M3 blasted Run-DMC’s Raising Hell, he rejected headphones, rattling his bedroom’s tower speakers, daring his mother’s knock, missing the lyrics for the pose. By the time we ran down the MCs in Social Studies he’d basically stopped listening to hip hop. I hear he became a Wall Street bro.

 Unlike M3, I craved the retreat of my imitation Walkman. On a school bus creeping toward Busch Gardens’ “Old Country,” where we’d ride the Big Bad Wolf before skirting the all-white reenactors of Colonial Williamsburg, I played my Rap’s Greatest Hits cassette. Released in 1986, the tape featured classics (Roxane Shanté), one-hit wonders (Timex Social Club’s “Rumors”), and near-minstrel shows (The Fat Boys). My mom must’ve bought the Fakeman at Radio Shack. It was beige, the most uncool color, and its headphones were foam.

I was lucky to be on the bus. The previous month, wielding his helmet, M3 had taught me an early lesson in knowing who your friends are. I stood by as he dipped the helmet in the boys bathroom toilet and flung piss on the mirrors. Mrs. F caught us in the act, threatening our trip. Her verdict targeted my conscience, opting for the bittersweet dose of shame over the bloodier bite that would keep me at home. Guilt by association, Mrs. F pronounced. 

 When, two years later, I dove into the liner notes of Public Enemy’s 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, this guilt goosebumped my skin. The maximalist soundscape of the Bomb Squad, which produced the record, the militant symbolism of the S1Ws (“Security of the First World”), which orchestrated the stagecraft, and the jackrabbitry of Flavor Flav, which created antic levity, were all upstaged by Chuck D’s dense lyrics. Laced with allusions to black radicals, they kickstarted my education in unitedstatesian history, its sirens of rescue and neglect. My whiteness lit up like the tiny display on my beige Fakeman, blinking off and on between pleasure and shame.

 My first sleepover, that white rite of passage, was at M3’s house. At 11pm, in the din of my first panic attack, I had to call my mom, begging her to bring me home. True panic, I’d learn years later, means living in a body without a body, your own or another’s, to phone for rescue. Because we come to know ourselves when our alarms can’t be stilled, let’s call the soundtrack of white privilege Panic! At the Sleepover.

 I think now of liner notes when skimming the acknowledgments of a poetry collection, where it’s all good vibes, shout-outs, debts of gratitude. How I wish the poets would call out the haters, biters, non-believers. Minus the venom, the nectar slides down the throat like Sweet’n Low.

The Memorex copy of a rap tape would move like a fever among my middle school friends, the original’s liner notes kept with the love letters in a shoebox under my bed. Like the shoplifted Playboys we stashed in Ziploc bags in vacant lots, the storms of our weeks would quickly wear the copy down. The taboos of race and sex throbbing like sirens in all the white boys’ bedrooms. 

Because sometimes words detonate differently, depending on the mouth. In 5th grade, M3 and I would curse up a storm in the cafeteria. Shit and fuck spat into the air like undercooked tater tots. In 7th, I devoured Too Short’s “Cuss Words,” intoning lines about Nancy Reagan giving oral sex like she’s eating “corn on the cob.” The misogynistic Too Short was nonetheless speaking truth to power. To whom was my lip-synch speaking? When I rapped along to NWA in my bedroom, never bleeping the word I’d never say in public, what racial order was I protecting, what racist was I?

The first lines I recited in public were Kool Moe Dee’s more sugary fantasies. Mrs. M, my 7th-grade English teacher, was of no relation to Mr. M, but she too mixed materials. For our knee-shaking poem recitation, she didn’t bat an eye at lyrics from the 1987 song “Wild Wild West.” After basketball practice, I’d watch Yo! MTV Raps hoping the host Fab Five Freddy would play the strange video. Kool Moe Dee and crew dress as cowboys, in a forest of heavy snow, far from Harlem, the mythic American west now black as their trenchcoats. Today, I find the video on YouTube. No waiting, no luck required. What will come from this dearth of serendipity?

A year later, after he’d dropped rap and embraced the lies that would guide the future Wall Streeter, M3 confronted me at my locker. When, his question pitched between accusation and plea, are you going to start hanging out with white people again?

 2.

How strange I never dreamed of being a rapper, of writing rhymes, moving crowds, being interviewed by Fab Five Freddy after my video premiered. Back then, except for the Beastie Boys, white rappers didn’t exist. Back then, “white rapper” was a slur. This was just before 3rd Bass and MC Serch’s perfect high-top fade, long before Eminem opened the floodgates. Some dreams are off-limits. Rightly so. So I dreamed in liner notes, listing as I went to sleep my shout-outs and step-offs. Once asleep, I dreamt of being a basketball star.

 Like hip hop’s “golden age,” my hoop dreams faded by my junior year in high school, when I couldn’t handle the glare of coal country’s hot-box gyms. That winter, after practice, I drove to see A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul in the small basketball arena of nearby Radford University. Already by then, De La was playing their hit “Me, Myself, and I” grudgingly, opening with chants of “we hate this song, we hate this song.” Dreams, like selves in triplicate, can turn on you like that.

In the past decade many of my childhood heroes, athletes and rappers, have passed. Their highlights and songs, summoned on YouTube, scroll outside of time. “All died yesterday today / and will die again tomorrow,” the poet Pedro Pietri wrote of his generation of Puerto Ricans. This repetition, its inevitability and flatness, follows the loss, far into adulthood, of one’s childhood heroes. 

But the death of a hero during childhood lives longer. Perhaps each child has a death that sticks, burrowing between the shoulder blades and plunging into the gut, where it lodges like a vital organ. Mine was the basketball star Len Bias’s. Bias overdosed in June 1986, two days after being picked 2nd in the NBA draft. I was away at basketball camp, having just turned ten. I caught the news on the dorm lounge’s tiny TV. In tears, I called my mother, as I had at M3’s sleepover, this time collect by payphone. Thanks to Bias, I don’t mess with drugs. I’ve mostly stopped calling my mother, not because the sirens in my head, blood pressing my temples like a helmet, have ceased, but because I’ve grown accustomed to the panic.

The double entendre “Thanks to Bias” reduces the black body to a lesson in my education. So, let’s step back. My first death had come two years before. One night, as we pulled up to our house, blue lights and an ambulance were blocking our driveway. Our neighbor, who was twelve, had with his father’s gun accidentally shot and killed himself. Shot and killed. His father’s gun. Accident.

From these blast fragments Rescue 911 would not deliver him. Safeties unlatched, conjunctions and prepositions blown away. Take what I left out of the story. Our neighbors were the sole black family on our street. Here I am again, the black body packaged as a lesson.

The Rescue 911 episode “Bullet Wound Neighbor” has 12,000 YouTube views, the episode “Softball Hit” 441,000. The most watched, with 750,000, is “Runaway Boxcars.” Beating them all, with over 1 million views, is the video for PE’s “911 Is a Joke.” For those keeping score, Flav’s got Shatner’s number, while bullets too close to home are going unwatched.

There’s a lesson in the disparate lessons M3 and I found in hip hop. He grew into a body that would take, take, take, a mouth that would eat with relish the n-word swirling on its lips. The body I grew into had lots of questions. It would ask, ask, ask, and occasionally, too often for me, it would take.

That I made it so long before my life was touched by death illuminates the peace of the before. Was hip-hop a vehicle for toeing the danger of blackness, even as my whiteness would serve there as a shield? Beneath this ugly question rustles the idea that blackness—performative and embodied, both wilding out and dying all around me—showed me that the world is upside down and that I could assist—or at least offer my solidarity, as a teammate—in flipping the script.

Consider then how a question carries its answer: How did a white kid in southern Appalachia, far from any urban center, during the Eighties, get so into hip-hop? How, if his ears were pricked, could he not? How, in a sense, was it his passport away? And how could he not carry his Fakeman, from then on, wherever he went?

Artificial, fake, imitation, plastic, copy. To exhume these words won’t mean taking out the trash; it will mean bringing the garbage back inside. Once there, in heaps, dealing with it. Plastic may be cheap and mass-produced, but it never dies, bedrock of our closets. And “fake,” that silver bullet of white supremacy, is piling up, blocking the exits. When the house is in flames, 911 won’t arrive until the landlords reckon with the tyranny of their origin stories and leave to the fire their cherished property.

Consider then that it’s fortune or luck which brings the ambulance in time. But by Luck I mean White, and by Joke Flav meant White, and by “mixed” developers don’t mean racial integration let alone justice, and by reading liner notes like scripture and by listening to tapes like sermons I wasn’t delivered from my own sins let alone my country’s. 

3.

As I rewind the memory tapes of this time, the album I never cut wobbles into focus. My MC name was Fakeman, my record Rappalachia 911, its lead single “William Shatner vs. Flavor Flav.” Mr. and Mrs. M were the co-producers. I had no DJ, living too much in the lyrics. I had beef with M3 and let that racist MF and all the others I silently ignored in middle and high school have it on the dis track. I shouted out my sidelined mom and dad. On the cover, a beige off-brand Walkman perched on a limestone outcropping, headphones dangling over the ledge, swaying in the wind.   

Sent from the future, the liner notes cleared my samples. Rappalachia bites the West Virginia writer Scott McClanahan’s satirical memoir Crapalachia as well as the Affrilachian Poets collective, founded by the Kentucky poet Frank X Walker. The first neologism mocks the stereotypes of the region, even as it flirts with reproducing them; the second accounts for the blackness of the mountains, and from way back. One diminishes, the other builds. Both let in some light. My third slipped in their cracks.

Get lost, gun claps. Good riddance, buildings which stifle, take, kill. Good riddance, whiteness, old frenemy of mine. Live long, teachers who rattle in the memory. Live long, raps with justice visions.

The liner notes fanned out in the topography of a mountain range. Below the jagged ridges, shout-outs and step-offs rolled down the page like trails and washouts, gulleys flowing into the river of lyrics running through the valley of accordion mountains. There, Fakeman spit,

Once

in the ambulance

words      &     worlds

       (Rap                  &             Appalachia)

      which wouldn’t mix                                       nestle against

the other’s kicks                                                                      like Shatner and Flav

those master jesters                                                                                    of our plastic age.

Until the black light is unleashed Rappalachia 911 will be a spool of blank tape, lyrics flowing unseen through the snow-sugared valley. The nation pulsing within its whited-out lines will be a parade of runaway ambulances aimed at a target beyond which there is only a ledge and an abyss.

Michael Dowdy’s books include a collection of poems (Urbilly), a study of Latinx poetry (Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization) and, as co-editor with Claudia Rankine, an anthology (American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement). Originally from Blacksburg, Virginia, he teaches at the University of South Carolina.