T to the P

"Cuz the boyz in the hood are always hard;
Keep talking that trash and we'll TP your crib."
--NWA "Boyz in the Hood"

When Middlebrow was in town we had a long conversation about whether wine coolers still exist. I am fascinated by wine coolers and their parent companies' brazen attempts to capture the underage market. My question to Middlebrow was this: Do wine coolers still exist in the quantity that they did when we were in high school? Or is it that we just don't notice them anymore? It's not unlike the phenomenon of buying a new car and then suddenly noticing that make and model everywhere around town--but in reverse. Do we cease to notice it or does it really just not exist? Or does our not-noticing somehow contribute to its nonexistence?

Every time we went to the store we forgot to follow up on this query. We agree that Seagrams and Bartles & James probably still exist in small tasteful quantities, but the days of the 2-liter Blueberry California Cooler are over. Rawq and I often comment that we were born at a perfect time in earth's history: children before and at the onset of computers as to have a rollicking, outdoorsy, cowboy-n-indian childhood, while allowing the conveniences of computers and the Internet to shape our adulthood. I think wine coolers were even more serendipitous. We were born at the perfect time--to witness and experience the wine cooler spike in its full glory, Kool-Aid-n-Booze for the underage set, sheer perfection.

I have similar thoughts about the craft of TPing houses. Again: Is this something that does not exist anymore or is it that I'm not-noticing it into nonexistence? The bored Friday nights, the spontaneous "plan," the caravan of cars to the store and subsequent piling in to one or two overloaded vehicles, the mountainous purchase of store-brand toilet paper, the inevitable jokes about "having the runs," the checker's knowing nod and smile, the half-run to the parking lot, the Mafiaesque drive and formulation of "strategy," the parking a block away, the walking in, the separation into "throwers" and "wrappers," the launching of TP into trees, over branches, the flutter of the paper in the air when thrown just right, the dull thud of the remaining half-roll landing down in the grass beyond. Does this still go on in the world?

Well, I've learned that it does. I was playing basketball off of Hoover, down in that low-income area north of USC and south of the 10. And there, off to my right, a small house with a chain-link fence and a dried-up postage-stamp yard sat, festooned with Charmin. Billowing in the breeze, if you will. Done up right, rolled, TPed--kind of festive, actually, in its own weird way. The whole thing struck me as very odd when removed from its (my) "Sixteen Candles" suburban context and its (my) mid-to-late eighties time frame. It reminded me of seeing incongruous hair bands and gangster rap in Japan. If there is any question whether a pop cultural practice is truly ridiculous, export it to another culture and see how it plays. Somehow this distills the activity to its very essence, where you can get right to the ridiculousness without hindrance.

Japanese rappers surrounded by low riders bouncing up and down, American women taking a perfectly good Chinese character--"harmony" for example--and getting it tritely tattooed right above their buttcracks, Shakira doing her Britney/Christina imitation but even more so, well, it all feels kind of the same. Give me urban TPing any day of the week. Give me a carload of thugs saying, "F*** the drive-by, let's TP that guy's house! Yeee-uh!" Imagine this. Imagine a future where people break into someone's yard...just to wrap it up with toilet paper. No more tweekers cooking up crystal meth in their kitchens or kids tagging public buildings. Just toilet paper trailing through the air, hushed whispering, then a light inside and a deep "Hey!", followed by a laughing, scurrying retreat out the front and a stumbly exuberant flight back to the caravan.

And in the morning that dive looks like a cheerful, house-sized, standstill parade. Then they clean it up.