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"Drugs fer White People"
February 15, 2012
Artist's Statement
This cartoon is of the same genus as another, much older one, titled, "Hey Baby, Maybe Yer Little Bunny'd Like to Suck My Dick?" (No we're not linking to it.) That cartoon, which unfortunately somehow ended up making the cut into my first collection, showed a terrible hairy man waggling his girlfriend's beloved childhood stuffed rabbit's face at his hideously engorged penis. Both cartoons are based on things I thought of saying or doing in real life but realized I should probably not really say or do, and instead elected to draw as cartoons. My girlfriend agreed the bunny cartoon was funny but confirmed she would not have been amused had I done it in reality. It is a pity that so many of the things that are hilarious in cartoons get you yelled at or beaten up in the real world.
This concept finally made the transition from funny but bad idea to funny and hopefully passable cartoon when I realized that I must be wearing the polar bear hat in it. I do in fact own such a hat, and although it endears me to women and children I fear it earns me little respect from the corner drug dealers. (What they do respect, I've found, is my magnificent raccoon coat, which I break out only in the direst cold. Once I walked into the corner bodega resplendent in The Coat and one of them, seeing me, interrupted his cell phone conversation to whirl around and point and me and say: "That's what I'm talking about!") In the context of this cartoon (and possibly outside it as well) it makes me look like the most feckless doofus imaginable. Sartorial detail is actually fairly key to this cartoon. I painstakingly based the urban fashions on clothes worn by the actual drug dealers who hang out in front of my apartment building every day. (I did change their facial features, for obvious reasons.)
So yes: I live at the less-gentrified edge of a neighborhood where drug dealers do business every morning. I don't know, maybe this is racial stereotyping, maybe they're not drug dealers, maybe they're just local guys who like to hang out in a cluster on the same corner every single day no matter how raw or wet or freezing the weather is and get really uncomfortable whenever the police drive by. I am on friendly terms with these guys; one of them, whom I haven't seen in a while now, used to fist-bump me when I walked by on my way to the patisserie to get coffee in the mornings, which made me feel (incorrectly) cool. He and I once shared a moment of glum bonding over my beautiful lesbian neighbor, shaking our heads in despair not just for ourselves but for all mankind. I am on less friendly terms with their customers, many of whom I suspect of being drug addicts, and whom I believe to have been involved in the thefts of two (2) laptops from my apartment last year.
These thefts led to the single most hypocritical day of my life so far, a day on which I both 1.) called the police on the drug dealers and 2.) bought drugs.* (Not, of course, from those drug dealers, which really would have been tacky.) If you were to ask me which of these two acts I am more ashamed of it would be no contest at all: calling the police on anyone, for any reason, unless that person is at that moment standing uninvited in your living room stabbing your wife, is the act of a busybody, a craven, and a fool. Voluntarily involving the police in your life is just a bad idea (once they show up I feel like the odds are even that they'll arrest you instead), and, more importantly, you forfeit, or at least compromise, your God-given right to hate and fear the police as all decent (mostly) law-abiding citizens do. I like to have some plausible-sounding rationalization ready for all my poor decisions, but I have to say I've given this one a lot of thought and I've come up with nothing. It was completely indefensible. All I can say is that having two (2!) laptops stolen in one year is very vexing indeed, and junkies were hanging out in the stairwell, and I just lost patience. To drug dealers everywhere: I apologize.
(Do I even need to mention that calling the police had exactly the same effect as not calling them does? Arresting drug dealers is not really the police's thing, it seems. Nor is finding burglars. If you see any unarmed college hippie kids sitting passively in a park, though, they will show up en masse in Kevlar armor and pepper-spray them right away.)
Anyway, this whole ethically absurd and confusing day caused me to think of doing the very thing depicted here, just going up to the drug dealers and asking them whether they sell any white-person drugs. You know--Vicodin, Xanax, Ambien, etc., drugs to soothe and relax the stressed-out middle-aged white-person mind. But I suspect it's all just heroin and coke, plus they might shoot me. Similarly, I've often wondered about the methadone clinic not far from here: do you need to be a heroin addict before you can get methadone? Or are you allowed to just wander in off the street in your Canali overcoat and knit polar bear hat and say you've always been curious about methadone, you were wondering whether you could just try some, like an introductory offer, maybe get a little go-cup? Probably you have to have a note from your doctor.
Instead I sit here taking cold medicine for boringly legitimate medical reasons--i.e., I actually have a cold. It's better than nothing.
Next week (really, this time): Jim's birthday cartoon!
* Note to law enforcement anf family: this website is satirical in nature and allpurported statements of fact should be taken as exaggerations or fabrications for humorous effect.
†Note to impressionable young people: drugs are bad for you and you should not do them. This is not sarcasm; it is more hypocrisy.
