No Child's Left Behind, Groove on That...

Groove on this, playas. The names have been changed to protect the guilty and the astro-freakified funky... Cleveland, 1 a.m. on a Tuesday night, Shelly and I had just been hauled into the slammer for being drunken and disorderly. Smells aside, bums and streetwalkers made for awful company. The place reeked of piss and overflowed with bad attitudes. The only decent soul was a wisecracking Poli-Sci flunky who was telling me that he flirted with communism but never slept with it. This young political activist had been arrested for running on the Indians' field and carrying a sign that read: "Lick Bush." Witty he was; clever, we weren't.

The Fuzz had rolled up on us about an hour ago. We were playing midnight basketball with some local black kids. The music was booming while we sipped on Colt .45. For a minute, I felt like Billy D. Williams. Any illusion of coolness was shattered when the Robocop look-alike ordered us down on the ground as his partner, the Gestapo lord, shined his flashlight in our faces. After they dragged us behind the squad car, they pulled out their nightsticks and threatened to beat our wimpy assess. Just then a flash of light surrounded us. Funky music filled the air; everyone felt groovy. Someone said it was the ghost of Ghetto-Fabulous. I wasn't sure what that meant, and pondered the situation on the ride downtown.

A fat, balding detective motioned us over to his desk. His suit was too small for his tree trunk chest and the coffee stains on his polyester shirt were beyond permanent. Meaty fingers pawed at a pen that had the appearance of being chewed on heavily. Life hadn't treated this guy well and he was going to take it out on us.

"Listen up, smart guys, you got all kinds of problems tonight," he barked and I could smell that he had recently eaten a cheese steak sandwich. "Not only did get caught drinking in a park, a known fugitive is listed as living at your address. His name is Wan Lee, but he also goes by Hung Lo. Apparently, some kind of adult movie actor."

"Hung Lo," I thought, "he has to be shitting us." Knowing we were already fucked, I bit my tongue and tried not to laugh. "No, no one by that name lives with us, officer."

"Lookie here, buster, this court document lists your address..." he said sternly, shoving the piece of paper in my face. He had a chin made of steel, proud and protruding like it was tempting you to take a swing. I looked up at the fluorescent lights and felt dizzy. They reminded me of high school -- there I was always in trouble, because I had hung with the wrong crowd.

Insouciant, Shelly belched. His eyes lit up and the wheels started turning. It portended something very bad. "Hey, officer... " Shelly muttered while putting his feet upon the cop's desk. What was he going to say now, I wondered? Sweat covered me. Even my balls dripped wet. I was getting very nervous, because I knew Shelly liked to engage in brinkmanship. Although he was harmless, he didn't draw the line very intelligently at times.

"We ain't got no Hung Lo living with us. Do we look Korean? Oi vey! Hey, I gotta' a question for you, Kojack: If my balls were on your big ole chin, where would my cock be?"

The universe stopped and my life flashed before my eyes... The next time I came to was hearing the gavel slamming as the judge ordered us to forty hours of community service. We were supposed to teach inner-city kids the benefit of reading.

Dufus one and Dufus two, we sat inside the library and waited for kids who supposedly wanted help with reading. After hours of twiddling our thumbs, no one came in for help, so I headed out for a sandwich. I returned to find Shelly sitting with a bunch of teens at a table. I overheard: "Now, did you hear the one about the Rabbi... How about the one about the two Jews..." Guffaws and more jokes that upped the ante.

I joined the table and pulled out a deck of cards. We all got down to playing blackjack. A couple of hands later, these kids really opened up to us. They were teeming questions. My policy with these kids was: "Ask anything!" And, well, they did. I felt like Socrates, dispensing nuggets of wisdom to the youth of Athens. Analogies, comparisons, and allegories! I instructed them that mopeds and fat chicks are both fun to ride until one gets caught by his friends. I taught them about the 2nd Amendment: This is my rifle, this is my gun. This one is for fighting, this one is for fun!

Hot damn, we were a hit! Two charlatans rolled into town and cleaned up without anyone being the wiser. We closed up shop and headed outside to catch a bus home. I was just about to joke with Shelly about his wisecracks to the police when it started to thunder. I mean really thunder! Fire exploded in the sky. A deafening rumble filled the air. The earth shook and we lost our footing. Shelly yelped repeatedly that this was the end; that he'd been a bad Jew and had to finally pay. Maybe he was right? We were fuck ups and the time to pay the piper had arrived at last. As the phenomenon unfolded, it seemed more interstellar than apocalyptic.

A huge spaceship had descended from the night sky. It landed right there in the library parking lot. A ramp lowered and down strutted a man in a white tuxedo with a red bow tie. He looked like Billy D. Williams. Fuck me, but this was some Area 54 shit!

"Stand up, my brothers, fear not for I am Lando Calrissian. Be one with the pomp and circumstance, for you have been most ceremoniously summoned by the grooviest master this side of the universe for a one-time only, exclusive audience with the honorably funky Ghetto-Fabulous. 'So put a glide in your stride and dip in your hip and come on over to the Mothership. Word!'"

A one-word summation: smooth... He could have had us eating from his palm. In a trance, we strutted over. I never strutted before, but somehow I was injecting hip into my gait. Shell moved like he was Shaft.

The inside of this most pimpest cockpit were only the finest accouterments an inter-galactic playa's money could buy. Wall-to-wall leopard print carpet, disco balls, strobe lights, furry white couches and the most bitchin' sound system ever! Fat bass reverberated off the walls. So fat, you could feel it shaking the room.

High upon a throne replete with diamond fixtures sat Ghetto-Fabulous. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to George Clinton, he wore a sparkly red fedora and a pair of star-shaped sunglasses. One crocodile shoe was red and the other white. He silvery cape flowed over his body. He had a sweet little Japanese honey girl on his lap. He whispered in her left ear: "Sexiness to the left of you." In the other ear he whispered: "Sexiness to the right. Baby, if there were two of me, you'd get the pimp-sandwich tonight." He raised his knee and patted her ass away.

Suddenly a stage rolled out in front of us. A 24-piece locker-room funk band busted out the jams. Bootsy Collins thumpin' the bass, Herbie Hancock on the keys... Shit, man, Eddie Van Halen was sitting in with them and just killed with high octave, high octane guitar leads. My ass couldn't keep still. I found the two, I found the four. All the beats and the spaces between, man my ass owned the groove. Hot girly girls in bikinis were strutting their lovely stuff everywhere. No ugly ones, just fine faces. Shelly was in heaven. The man danced like he was possessed. He even did the splits, taking his sucker all the way to the floor.

"Everybody stop on the one... ," Ghetto-Fabulous said as he snapped his fingers. The room fell silent. "Friends, Romans, countrymen... Welcome my most esteemed guests. To my guests, fear not, least ye be played instead. For I have summoned you from your earthly commode to my inter-space pimpified abode. The groovy children of Cleveland require your reading instruction, instead of providing, facilitating and liberating young minds, you have been playing it off with time-wasting corruption."

Shit, someone really is watching over us all! And had we screwed up big time.

"Reform from your unschooled ways, least ye labor at McDonalds the remainder of yer days," Ghetto-Fabulous commanded this to be so and raised a diamond encrusted scepter. "You must tutor them well, or I shall return to whoop ass on you; that's all this pimp will tell."

Lando Calrissian added with the most wondrous diplomatic coolness: "No child's left behind should be placed in the hands of two half-assed minds."

Word!

The cosmic, poetic double meanings jumped across the room like asteroids. At that moment, we knew weren't exactly on mission from God, but it was pretty damned close. The next day we had those kids hooked phonics. We'd seen fire in the sky. We had boarded the Mothership, an unidentified funky object... For the die was now cast: We came, we saw, we kicked ass. Word up, we made sure everyone would pass. Now who says I wasn't the good son?