Meet "The Daltons"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_power_skinhead

My ex-boyfriend from college was in way over his head with me and he knew it, because people told him that over and over again. His manic obsessions bounced around in his head, making him sometimes think that people are fucking with him when they aren't, like classically paranoid hippies think about "the government" (as in "We, the People"), and sometimes people really are fucking with him, because he can act like a total fucking dick. He made a series of rude racist comments that he thought he could get away with as a six foot tall ex-quarterback/bouncer, which didn't help out his rep with us at all.

A tall annoying Jewish kid pledging a Long Islander frat lived next door to him freshmen year, and because the kid was a spoiled skateboarder with a rich daddy, Bart decided to mock his prominent nose in front of us one afternoon, when we were just hanging out on their dorm floor. That's how it went down with him: we could be drunk and high and having fun boarding up-and-down the hallway badly giggling about it, then Bart would trip when someone pointed out that he sucked at something like boarding, which he didn't do as a kid in his tidy whitey Bay Ridge neighborhood, because he's a fancy prep school boy.

After that, their "Cold War" began in earnest. For years, Mike Z. told Bart (after he told me he wanted to "see other people" in Montreal, because he didn't want to marry the woman he lost his virginity to) that he swore he saw me walking around Benefit Hill in Providence while I was at R.I.S.D. with a "black" guy (which wasn't true), but Mike had landed a direct hit on his target, square in the chest. I dated a handsome architect/furniture designer in the M.F.A. program from New Jersey who was newly divorced from his bipolar ex-wife, and he was a blond Dutch boy. I went on one date with Beau Bernstein, a good-looking Jewish boy from Manhattan whose famous father produced "The Beatles" first American tour (seriously), and he is definitely not African, not that there's anything wrong with that.

I also dated a messed-up cute sculpture student playing weird games with my Jewish, pot-smoking, and possibly bisexual hippie friend Beth who was "slumming" it in worn clothes that screamed "bohemian" loudly, with requisite woven-knit African tam placed on her long, scraggly, and frequently unwashed dark hair. They were experimenting with naked friendship, when they both lied down on a bed without touching, and then she scribbled manic sayings about worms and penises on cardboard for me to see, which she hurriedly crumbled up when I asked her about it. "Is it an art project?" I don't know. I was just there to help them grow some pot in her attic with his help, funded by their growing trust funds for the raised electrical bill and the equipment ordered from "High Times", like grow lamps with special bulbs. 

I have no fucking idea what was going on between them (still don't), except that maybe identity/personality disorders, trust funds, drugs, and really difficult art and design schools do not mix together well. Oh, and there was also a nice boy I fooled around with during the beginning of art school over a summer session (my Mom really liked him, but I barely remember him), and that was it. Truly. For years, Mike Z. played games with Bart's head in revenge for his racist and anti-Semitic comments, and I can't say I blame him for it. Bart used to grill me about the penis sizes of my exes (not that I had many to compare with, at 17 years old), asking me how much bigger he was.

It was kinda gay, but the kid was a virgin, after all. He was so fucked up about it, that he couldn't perform on the night we designated for the act to take place in my dorm room (Karen went home for the weekend, which was rare for her to do), and of course, we had to talk about it for way longer than was necessary. Go to sleep, I finally told him. We'll have sex in the morning. Really? Really. He was 18, and that's how it was. He believed me after that, pretending I was like a prescient "witch" when really, I was healthier and more mature than him, but he would argue with that, too. He could become arrogant, self-defensive, and boastful in a heartbeat, looking to place blame on the people around him, like blaming me for his failure at science, which blew up his boyhood dreams of tending to hunky football players as a P.T. 

Uh...sorry, bro? He didn't help me with any of my schoolwork or art projects because he couldn't then, and he certainly can't now. It was reactionary in the extreme. "Dutch Boy" called him "Old Man" to his face for being choosy, fussy, or picky about fucking everything, and there was something really weird about his fears that he forced us to talk about at length (as therapy for him), because he never really solved any of his problems. He was abusive towards me, too, saying crazy shit about my mixed heritage that he disparaged as a "Bourbon" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bourbon) Quebecois (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_%28word%29), a way of putting himself above me as an Original Métis because he was supposedly "whiter" than me, eerily similar to the color games African-Americans play with each other to disrespect each other as less colored or "too" colored, you feel me?

It was okay when he developed a red tan in the summer because he had eczema on his upper arms (don't we all?!), trotting out exotic stories about a French-Canadian Great Uncle with prominently full lips who could have been part Indian...what did I think? Uh, sure, bro....they didn't exactly keep records about indigenous squaws and their fur trappers back then, you know? Except for my line, they did. In fact, I have a copy of my ancestors' handwritten diary with names and dates. In this century, we even have a genetic database! Hard to fake or beat, but like any desperate "student of history", Bart searched for clues among the stacks to prove that he was better than anyone else, when we were just a bunch of working class New York kids trying to make it, you know? It was oddly striving for someone of his age, but he wouldn't be the first bad scholar who can't compete with the actual chops of an impassioned academic and we were that as a group, overall.

Because of my beauty, brains, drive, and work ethic, his comments never really bothered me as much as his questioning seemed to knock him off-kilter much quicker than anything I ever did to him. I felt bad for him, actually. He could be a sweet boy when he let his guard down. He reminded me of the chesty character "Gaston" from the Disney version of "Beauty and the Beast" (http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Gaston); an overblown cartoon character searching for himself by breaking apart other people into shards that he could examine at his leisure, except life didn't move at his pace. It got even weirder after I broke up with him. He dated and married a plain-looking teaching student who liked him from afar during college (typical, typical) with the "horrible" brown eyes that he supposedly was worried about mixing into his precious blood lines through me, because blue eyes are recessive genes to my stronger line, and perhaps domination by childbirth was his real fear with me, because it's true.

After we met up several years ago (he heard I was back in the Slope, and tracked me down via my phone number after a supposed random drive-by when he saw me walking Teddy down the block, because his boss just happened to live in the neighborhood), and he was still in love with me. He told me years ago when I broke up with him that he was upset because I was the best-looking woman he ever dated, which should have been a big clue, no matter how many times he heard it from me and other people. Yeah... major douche chills, right? So what?! He had aged poorly as I had aced aging, as we both predicted in our teens. I've always been younger looking than my actual age.

He didn't stop with the texts and emails, as I knew he wouldn't. When I was in a tough spot after my early morning accident with Teddy, I met up with him after work for a beer so he could carry me upstairs to my apartment on his back while I was still on crutches. He naturally disparaged my rent-stabilized historical apartment for looking "just like "college" because I was a rather recent move-in to the place, similar to my former "frenemy" Cheryl's comments about my aunt's "starter" apartment in Kensington, as cues to me that they were far ahead of me in life. It didn't work, obviously. He's reading me along with her right now, eh? But it did give me cues that I was 100% correct in dropping them from my life, not that I needed much verification. After that, he got weirder with his rapidly responding emails.

He'd told me we could have an affair because he had Lupus from those poor recessive genes of his (we hadn't known that in college), and as a result of his diseases, he was sterile. Ha! He'd boasted so often about his virility and rugged good health that it was the greatest justice I'd ever heard of. Poor kid! What an ass! He'd forced his lower-earning wife to bear triplets in a hospital bed through many in-vitro sessions (poor thing!), which I accurately described to my family and friends as "dodging a bullet", true in every sense. The Loup Garou of our mythical pasts had returned (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loup-garou_%28homonymie%29)! After that, he sent me a series of emails under a series of weirder pseudonyms, as a prelude to an affair that never happened. I married an Indo-Euro, bro! No going back from that.

One of the last email account names he used was so weird, I just had to ask him about it. What the fuck does "Dalton" mean?! One email name was an easier trace to a certain "Star Trek" episode (we'd met in our dorm as he watched Star Trek alone in the common room smoking a cigarette that I bummed from him to make conversation, and our pretext to meeting him as our new college-age drug dealer who lived in the room right beneath us....ha! Nice one, Karen!), but this one was more obscure....WTF? His reply was just as bad as I feared for him. He wrote that he was tired of explaining and spelling out his obviously French-sounding name to the movie people he worked with out west, so he decided to "Anglicize" it for their comfort. WHA???!!!

This was the same kid who'd openly bragged about his roots to all of us in college over and over, about how much of a real "working class" champion he'd be for all those poor union people after graduating, but this? This shit....?! The "sell-out" moniker he'd always feared becoming had landed squarely on his shoulders, and not ours. His brother Quentin's girlfriend Shelley had been a "sell-out" for straightening her curly hair like girls sometimes do (I did it in the 90s, too), but not him! No, becoming an entertainment lawyer who watches show-biz types for contractual violations that he can sue over, well, that's just great. Not a sell-out at all! Except he was, and poorly so. 

I didn't respond to him after that, even after he pretended that we established some sort of yearly check-in pattern as old friends that didn't exist. He goaded me into responding to him by insulting my obviously Acadian last name through his description of a Toronto band with it, a name I am fiercely proud of. It was the first legal stipulation I made in the paperwork I filed at a Colorado courthouse for the no-fault divorce I paid for on my own, after a 1/2 hr. consult with a bitchy female attorney who insulted me for taking up her valuable time, as I scribbled away all the legal advice I could afford for the $75 it hurt to pay, because I felt I'd lost something I would never get back when I gave up my name. I was so relieved to have my last name back that I immediately knew on each and every level that I'd absolutely done the right thing, just as I'd done with every other bad boyfriend I had in the past. I'd kept my name and my identity, even when it wasn't convenient for me to do so, and people, it has never been convenient for me to do so, but I stayed true. I got to keep my soul. Hard to beat that.

Wired

Wired Anxiety (Wikimedia Commons)

For years I've trucked through many different kinds of creative crowds, ones that are particularly acute, emotional, and open by nature, as we're taught and so inclined. Through the years, we've openly discussed just about any facet of the human experience fit for talk, and some things not so carefully done. Artists creatively problem-solve in many different types of ways, so obsessive chatter from neurotics tend to grate on our collective nerves after awhile, like watching a dog run around in circles without benefit of a funny video online, and you are that dysfunctional unfunny human to us. Where exactly are is this going? Brainstorming is fun, if it produces something eventually.

Like many artistic people, I've struggled in the past with blowhard college boyfriends who spent a lot of time tanked on talk, high on way more than actual learning. My first real boyfriend was the first person to openly admit to me that he vastly preferred natural biochemistry to artificially-induced ones, expensive as drugs tend to be, because of the vulnerable compulsiveness that actively marks addiction. He seemed to think that higher learning meant you could ramble on about any crazy idea that you had out loud to anyone in the room, rather than internalizing concepts or, even better, writing them down cohesively, but that's why he's an entertainment lawyer who guards artistic paychecks that he's dependent on for a living, and you read me instead of listening to him talk, not that he didn't try every trick in the book to knock me down as many pegs above him as I was.

My father and every one of my brothers hated him for being the all-boys prep-school quarterback he bragged about endlessly, along with his pretensions towards greatness for being a blue-eyed French Canadian/Irish guy living in our world on the east coast. Yeah, dubious at best. It was until years later that I saw him accurately depicted in the awesome comedy "Wedding Crashers" (he finally realized his media dreams of fame!), through Bradley Cooper's dead-on impression of a back-stabbing bitch of a boyfriend with serious homoerotic issues that I realized how many of my friends, family, and acquaintances despised him, which happily brings us together, here on my site today: a place where we can all get along, and group grievances are finally aired out in the open...not that he did any of that.

He plays a lot of "head games" that go nowhere and do nothing, which I often found to be more common among non-creatives, because they have to wait while we make the work the world uses, as a set of people that I sometimes feel sorry for, because they're relegated to the sidelines of life while the big hitters take the risks that earn the big glory. He can't do that because of his disorders (among them addiction, compulsiveness, Lupus, and a big case of "asshole"), but that doesn't stop him from trying hard to impress. I've always hated his egotism based on being a "serious scholar", which often means he spends a lot of time trying to marginalize the star power on center stage ineffectively (ironic as his job must be for him), and that's what I remember most about him now, besides his chemical addictions; an insecurity so violent, he loses way more ground than he gains.

He tried hard to convince me that I was dumb (because I'm an artist, so "genius=stupid", I guess), and often "crazy" over serious family problems that I didn't control as a working class teenage girl, and that my "partying" was motivated from the same interesting, glamorous manic ennui as his that he would only obliquely refer to in "nonversations" that didn't matter, with people too stoned or drunk to care about his points, because directly addressing his issues would make him lose precious leverage in society, even though as a spoiled white boy from a poncy private school, he had all the power then.

It was desperate and striving, character flaws that I finally couldn't forgive or put up with anymore, along with the many unsolicited hours of boredom he would bring to the card table, when all we really wanted to do back then was play drinking games and have fun during our precious off-hours from work, or school, or both. I have never forgotten his immature pillow-talk about his chemical addictions that I thought were just puppy love ravings over my sexual prowess, and the desire for me that he channeled into his "highs" that he could yank me around with, though given the difference in our looks and status, it was highly unlikely to ever pan out. It was okay if he was moodily and maudlin, but if I had an actual serious illness, I was "weak" and I'd never be "virile" like him (see also: "Gaston"), though in reality, he's the one with the in vitro triplets and I'm the one with the long-lived fertility.

If I spent a lazy summer drowsing and dreaming, I was a bad housewife hurting my chances at a favorable marriage with him in the future, because I didn't get twitchy or itchy from seeing dishes in the sink. If I had a hard time managing my very sick and very large extended family as a working young woman in school, it was obviously because I was too stupid to do so; I couldn't read books like he could as a history major (because I'd already spent my youth reading as many books as I could find), and that must be sad. All I could do was get into a school for brilliant Leonardo da Vinci-types :( Poor me!

He'd drone on for hours, interesting only to him and his particular biochemistry, like the badly staged scenes he directed with a drama queen's tenseness, in these diva-like displays that had absolutely no talent behind them at all, and that was the crux of it: he earns off of talent, because he's drawn to us as much as he hates us for it, in a classic up-and-down, love/hate cycle that became the biggest bore I'd ever met. His passions for some brand of iced tea were rave-worthy and "smile-rific" which you HAD TO try or he'd just die, whereas my charcoal drawings were lame for an untrained teenage girl, and "EW!" Nudes! Who would do something like that?!

For the record, Bart, the productive people who run the world do "gay" stuff like that. That's who. By the way, you're welcome for the nice house in Brooklyn, the wife (with those unfortunate brown eyes that you told me hurt my chances for a good match in college...oops!) and 3.5 kids you forced your poor wife to bio-engineer for you with rounds and rounds of expensively-provided fertility treatments (because you're sterile) with long hospital stays that required her total bed rest for months; the same very family you step out on and/or check out from physically and mentally periodically, because your work is so important as a contracts guy for your union that you have to hit the road whenever things get bad, seeking the rush you need from other people's more exciting lives (like the actors who provide for you and your family, you know, "gay") that you watch from the set in the shadows, picky as ever, and fussily looking for problems that will cause a pay-out for violations from your plush union. You can thank this "dumb artist" for your life, whenever you get the chance. Bro.

 

Hey, O-towners! This one's for you today. I felt your pain. Thanks for hanging with me back in the day anyway, arrogantly over-bearing boyfriends notwithstanding. I really needed the support, just like you did. 

Bodega

Bill Clinton was considered the first "black" American president because he came from the lowbrow South (earning him the name "Bubba"), with a crazy-ignorant mama and an alcoholic brother who's in-and-out of jail, before, during, and after his Presidency. It was something that people like us from the 'hood could understand, with a huge sigh of relief. It certainly made a lot of sense to me as I entered the Ivy League, because I'd never met that many fucked-up rich white kids in my life. I wasn't "out" as Acadian, because I was close enough to Canada that a New Englander with an axe to grind could destroy me through bias against French-Canadians as the key to my college career ruination, which is exactly why my people were mass murdered centuries prior: for a supposedly shameful act of love between a European man and an Indian squaw with offspring so defying beautiful, that many of us are still hunted in envious sport.

Think I'm exaggerating? The Canadian government has just officially recognized the "ethnic cleansing" of Acadian Métis (or "Aboriginals", as they derisively insist in calling all natives  common to the Americas), let alone admit to the child abduction and rape that was a common practice for wealthy Europeans hoping to wipe out key witnesses to their crimes. It's not unlike the United State's checkered past with it's own native peoples, that a President like Barack Obama has been actively working to address with Sally Jewell, the Secretary for our Department of the Interior, by taking meetings with tribal elders to heal the hurts here, from way back when.

Instead, I stuck to what I thought were the relatively easy immigrant-bias experiences of my maternal Irish and Italian forefathers, but I was wrong on those accounts, too. I was attacked in an advanced photography class for daring to refer to me and my ConEd grandfather as "working class," by a British git who thought he could get away with it, and he was right. The teacher was a grad student I knew, who chose to smooth over my revelations with an "across the pond" type of cultural misappropriation that was grossly ignorant, preferring to refer to their welfare childhoods as much more severe in poverty and bias than anything we could have possibly have endured in New York City, paved with gold as the myths were.

They co-opted my conversation (which would have opened the door to further inquiry with the mostly New England student body present in that class) between the two of them; he as a poor boy from Mississippi with torn jeans he couldn't afford to fix (?), and he with council flats and a company coal-mining dad. Both were older than me, too, and so it was easy for them to swipe my background to the side successfully, as having the most hurts from the working class, and it certainly didn't end there.

In the tony Painting Department (I was in the relatively "working class" major of Illustration so that I could get a job after graduating which I did. I was also the first in my graduating class to obtain a full-time job with "health benefits", too! I also had 3-4 part-time jobs while attending RISD, in stark contrast to the po' white boys who were on scholarship just for singin' their song), and I was openly laughed at by the slightly dykey, arty, rich white lady with the short, mousy-brown haircut and the "John Lennon glasses" for daring to make a painting about my Irish great-grandfather's work on the iron and copper work around New York City. When I asked her why, she just huffed at me, "I don't know 'why'...it's just so...so...so...funny!", because she'd never seen a project like that before.

Me and another kid from New York (a rich Jewish Long Islander in school for film-making, but with a populist bent that was extremely unfavorable at the time) decided to prank her for being a delusional rich asshole with no sense of reality, but that's a story for another day. Suffice to say, my working class housemate Riddell helped me forge the copper frame for the piece, and I used copper wire to sew the denim to the frame as a canvas, direct references to his bridge-building and metal shop-work (he was a master craftsman who made a copper version of "The Last Supper" that still hangs in my mother's place, and which I cleaned myself many times, so as to carefully note the finesse and detail attached to it as being very finely done), as direct references to our "working class" history that couldn't be denied, and that was just the easy Irish stuff from a century ago. I could not have built with my current lexicon the full story of my people, built on the backs of murder, rape, and theft as they are.

I ran up against white bias and European prejudices all the time, in almost every critique I had in studio, or outside-of-class social encounters. Out as an "Indian"? Do you know what they did (do) to us?! It was a family secret that had no time during my tenure there, fraught as it was with all the above reasons I just noted, easily observed as they were by my friends and classmates. I barely made it out of there with my life, as a crime victim of robbery while working a job, and "blacklisted" by rich profs afraid of losing their tenure, as they lost their minds at our expense. You see, "The Ivory Tower" is only good as an edifice if you uphold their traditionally white WASPy values tied to lip-service and exclusion, not by extolling the real, true, expat rebellion with a long-storied past, as actual descendants of the "Daughters (and Sons) of the Revolution" like I am through my paternal grandmother's line (http://www.dar.org/). It was too much for their warped, privileged minds to bear.

It was in this way that I became infamous as the first openly "black" student at R.I.S.D., which I didn't really know at the time, because I always had three or four part-time jobs and a full studio schedule, which is unheard of among the plush upper crust set who struggle to read and write, like the illiterate cast-offs from wealthy families who were in the majority against me and my offensively real New York roots. I could get away with "ethnicity" if I did phony displays of African Dance (like my friend Riddell did), because the museum wanted African artifacts and a faux arty display would play well overseas with fancy donors, not with actually beleaguered native Americans hip to the game. Money came untied with that kind of awareness.

And so I found myself in a car ride with my punk rock housemate Sue and her weird hippie friend Ellie, who I naturally thought was a rich Jewish girl from Michigan, because she had all the superior airs typical of the boho "Trustafarian" set with no real talent, but who liked to spend time in academia as pretentious intellectuals. She never really liked me, open as I was about my ethnic roots (as much as I could get away with, alone and unsupported as I was), and it wasn't until many years later that I figured out the specifics as to why. I knew she hated "pretty girls" (not that I thought of myself, even as people openly gape and stare at me). I thought she was embarrassed because she and I had to take basic drawing class (with my mentor, Lenny Long), because we were really far behind the older and richer matriculated students.

It didn't bother me, especially since Lenny had gotten to me at my core (he's from New York), by giving me an infamous speech about not letting "them:" win by making me quit, and it worked because I got angry enough to channel it into energy I could use, like fighting does for me as a warrior), plus I also knew that I had the deck stacked incorrectly against me, through no fault of my own. So? Do the work, he said to me, and that's what I did. That's what real working class kids from New York do, but Ellie didn't know that. I knew she was a former forest ranger in Oregon during the Mt. Saint Helen explosion, alone like a lot of anti-social hippies are in a fire tower for many months on end. 

She had that typical awkwardness about her, often wearing the usual Birkenstock-with-socks hippie garb that marks the warm weather kind who does not cotton to our climate well, because they "winter" in warmer climes. She also had the type of curl that we call here on the East Coast a "frazzled-haired yenta" and her last name was "Leon", a new Jewish name that easily could've been anglicized years ago for the MidWest, from what might be the original Leonberg(er), like they used to do with newly-arrived immigrants to Ellis Island, which coincidentally was the photo essay my first photography teacher from S.U.N.Y. had been assigned to through a grant from New York State: to document the renovations of Ellis Island in New York. She also told me back then that I could get into R.I.S.D., if she got into Yale as an Italian-American. "You can do anything", she told me. Thank you for that.

We were on a beer outing that went comically awry one afternoon, for reasons that puzzled me for many years. As we drove up to a shady-looking joint, I immediately balked about going inside to get beer for our group. "Uh uh," I said, "I'm not going into one of those places." Ellie turned to me in the backseat, with her childishly barretted hair in plain metal clips, and the de rigeur makeup-less face that are necessary components for the rich hippie crowd, "What do you mean 'that kind of place?'" I knew I said something wrong, but I was only 21 and living outside of New York for the first time, unlike my housemate Sue and her friend Ellie, both women in their 30s on their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th careers and educations. "That's a bodega!", I giggled slightly like she was a dimwit, or she had deliberately set a trap for me, and it was the latter. "Yeah, a bodega.", she huffed impatiently back at me. Uh, okay. Poor thing. "Yeah! That's a Puerto-Rican joint in New York." She turned up her nose at me, turning slightly in direction without looking at me in the backseat of their car, "And what exactly are 'those types' of places?", like a sour-faced teacher calling on the retard kid who never knows the answer.

"You know!", at this point I was the exasperated one. Where's she from, yo? "A Puerto Rican grocery store!" She sat still, so I went on, "See those 'booty' posters in the window", and I pointed to the ass-shot beer posters typical for a Hispanic deli in the 'hood. "They always have those in the window". She huffed again, "They?"...uh, yeah..."THEY always have those?!", she continued, working up steam to make some unknown point, "I'll have you know that I'm a 'Catalan'!!" Me and my friend Sue from Boston waited for her to finish her sentence...yeah...and? So...? "Tsk", she tsked-tsked fussily, still in a huff. "I'll have you know I'm a Catalan Spaniard* from my father's line." Ohhhh! Whew! What a relief. That's it? Yeah, bitch. We know! You're a European white girl, esse. I laughed, took their money, got out the back of their car, and bought us all beer for our party back at the old house on Benefit Street.

Shit, that bitch just wanted us to know that she was better than us. Just another day at R.I.S.D. for me, and then I didn't really think about her unless I made contact with my former housemate, Sue. How come she never reconnected with the rest of our transfer group? And then, a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Sue that finally cleared it all up for me. She was more than embarrassed by her time at R.I.S.D.; she was mortified. You see, Sue went to see Ellie in Michigan, her home state, and on that trip she finally learned her really shameful secret, the one that she really didn't want us to know about back then (besides some banal European history) and that's this: she's the daughter of a well-known and much more successful illustrator father that she could never compete with or keep up with, and that was why she picked on the one "negro" she felt she could safely get away with picking on: me. And she did get away with it, until today.

This one's for you today, Sue. Long may truth and freedom ring with a loud "Yanqui"** rebel yell! We know who we are, girl, and we are revolutionary. Keep on shining, my true punk-rock friend. We tore it up rough enough to scare 'em, didn't we? Yes, we did.

Kirk Lazarus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_Thunder

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language
 ** https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yanqui