Audio By Carbonatix
Well, it’s officially summer in Colorado. Strolling through the neighborhood, listening to the somewhere between endearing and shoot-me-in-the-face-with-a-shotgun-now chime of the ice-cream truck, you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the smorgasbord of summer smells: the fresh-mowed lawns, the backyard barbecues, the recently singed cat hair as that seasonal string of animal mutilations gets under way. God, it makes you feel so alive.
‘Round What’s So Funny way, summer vacation always meant plenty of diversions. They say idle hands are the devil’s tools, and we can verify this from firsthand experience, as our idle hands generally veered toward chronic masturbation and/or fire. Goddamn you, devil, for making us so sexy. While Mama What’s So Funny sometimes allowed us as much as two weeks to frolic in summer freedom — most of which we spent eating that now-unfathomable candy that was essentially a packet of five flavors of colored sugar that you sopped up with a solid, white sugar stick, staining your mouth all sorts of wacky colors — soon enough we were off to some institution for a little bit of summer learning.
By far, the best of these was Zoo School. It was over in the old children’s section at the Denver Zoo, which is now buried in the bowels of Primate Panorama — but on some rainy nights, you can still hear the howl of the miniature train that encircled the area, as well as the cackle of Old Man Withers, the conductor. Probably because he now sleeps in the soiled pit in front of the silverbacks. Toothless fuck.
Things were different back then. In those days, prairie dogs weren’t varmints shot by inbred Eastern-plains hicks and rich-kid daddy’s boys, but noble beasts featured prominently in an educational exhibit. There were badgers to be studied, as well as a cool, creepy house full of tarantulas and frogs. Sometimes we’d spend entire days combing through owl pellets to determine that, as advertised, they actually do eat mice. Those little mice bones were right there in the shit! Zoo School lasted only a week, and the final day was always the same: a farewell party with cookies and punch, and some photographer who’d take your picture while you held either a boa constrictor or a turtle — your choice. If you held the boa constrictor, it would pee on you. If you held the turtle, it would pee on you. Basements across this city must be littered with thumb-printed Polaroids of children wearing mixed expressions of simultaneous awe and revulsion, their shirts soaked sponges of reptile and amphibian urine.
On the opposite end of the Denver summer spectrum was Young AmeriTown, sponsored by Young Americans Bank, a group that used to charge children inactivity fees in order to teach the valuable life lesson that saving your money is wrong. (What’s So Funny does not know if this practice still exists, as our fact-checking monkey was found bloated and dead in the back alley over the weekend. Nobody knows exactly what happened to little Jonas, but the fact that every single bottle of Wite-Out in the office is empty certainly seems suspicious.) For one week straight, we took classes with names like “Check Writing,” “Interest,” “Fellating Your Boss for a Raise” and “Coping With Crippling Suicidal Feelings of Suburban Ennui,” learning how to function like little asshole capitalists. But we were just gearing up for that grand, final day when we were let loose in Young AmeriTown, a space full of miniature shops and buildings, to work the jobs for which we’d applied.
What’s So Funny served as AmeriTown’s hottest DJ at the radio station, spinning favorite tracks from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie soundtrack for the cosmopolitan crowd. Everything went smoothly until What’s So Funny got swept up in that age-old recess activity: throwing rocks at a wall. High on the inherent feelings of power and superiority that come from being a DJ, we decided to wow the assembled crowd by closing our eyes and hurling a rock. Though shattering a five-foot window was never our intention, there’s no denying that those kids were impressed. The AmeriTown town elders, however, were not. They summoned What’s So Funny’s parents, demanded a check for the damage and sent AmeriTown’s hottest DJ packing.
That town wasn’t ready for our mad crazy stoopid innovative skillz, anyway.
Driving home, now $400 in the hole, we realized an important lesson: Summers shouldn’t be about lame clinics that strip you of your childhood. They should be about forgetting everything you learned in school that year, eating so much sugar your heart actually begins to hurt, ridiculing neighborhood children smaller and weaker than you, chronic masturbation, and fire. So parents, take note: Let your kids run wild this summer, because there’s no greater fun than what they can find on the streets on their own. Unless, of course, it’s watching a boa constrictor pee on their friends.
