A Bad Idea I'm About to Do by Chris Gethard Read Free Book Online

the wire above his head for balance. Mouths agape, all the kids stopped chasing him to watch, expecting Koozo to be electrocuted, fall to his death, or suffer some terrible combination of both. When he got to the next pole, he slid back down to the ground and took off into the wild. No one bothered chasing after him.
    â€œGod damn Koozo,” Gregg finally said, shaking his head as we walked away.
    â€œGod damn Koozo,” I echoed.
    The game ended like all Caughtie games with Koozo did: eventually, after the sun had gone down, everyone got bored
and wandered home, leaving Koozo sitting in whatever undetectable hiding spot he had found for himself.

    M y mother’s best friend was a special-education teacher in our town. This meant she dealt with the emotionally disturbed—of which some of us may have considered Koozo a prime example. Legend had it Koozo was so bad that before graduating elementary school he had already done turns in every local public school and been banned from entering them. For a while my mother’s friend had to travel to Koozo’s home at night to tutor him personally. The first time she attempted this, the story went, she arrived on his front porch and rang the doorbell. No one answered. Lights were on and she could clearly make out the sounds of a television coming from inside, so she knew people were home. She figured Koozo was just ignoring her, hiding out in hopes of dodging schoolwork. She had experienced worse situations and kept ringing the bell.
    â€œI mean, I’ve seen it all, but . . . ,” I overheard her say as she told my mother the story years ago at our kitchen table. “You shouldn’t let your kids around him. I mean, I’ve never seen anything like that, before or since.”
    After about ten minutes, the door finally opened. In the background, she could see Koozo’s father asleep on a couch. Koozo answered the door himself. He was wearing a T-shirt, but was otherwise nude. In his hand he was holding a roll of paper towels.
    It was on fire.

    W e had ample reason to believe Koozo’s pyromania didn’t stop at setting household cleaning supplies aflame in the buff. One
night, Koozo showed up on my street with a bag of fireworks. Fireworks, though illegal, were a hot commodity in my neighborhood. Rory Kearns was well known for his love of M-80s, which he used to put on public demonstrations that involved blowing up cinder blocks. Andy Connor, a grimy, gap-toothed bully who lived on Calvin Terrace, was known to employ fireworks as one of his many intimidation tactics, threatening to burn kids with their sparks. Fireworks were one of the things that separated the men from the boys, the weapon of choice for true badasses in our corner of the world.
    On this particular night, Koozo showed up and trumped everyone.
    â€œThey’re called nigger chasers,” Koozo told us as he held out a handful of cheaply made explosives. This blunt language was shocking, even from a guy who seemed as unhinged as Koozo did.
    â€œAh, they just look like bottle rockets,” someone chimed in from the back of the crowd that had gathered around Koozo. “Who cares?”
    â€œThey’re not bottle rockets,” Koozo snapped. “They’re nigger chasers. You see that eye on the side?” He pointed to a drawing that looked vaguely like the logo for CBS broadcasting.
    â€œYeah. What about it?” someone indignantly asked.
    â€œThat eye looks for anything dark,” Koozo growled. “And it’s like a heat-seeking missile that goes after anything black it comes across.”
    I remember shifting uncomfortably, and thinking to myself, This is fucked up, even for our neighborhood.
    But before I could completely formulate that thought, someone decided to challenge Koozo’s claims of the darkness-chasing qualities of his racist fireworks. A faceless member of the crowd shouted out the one contentious phrase certain to cause