Wendy Vansickle, who is a staff writer at the Athens Messenger recently have the opportunity to interview a few juggalos/juggalettes attending the Gathering. Wendy interviews a grandmother, a couple expecting their first child, a man who traveled 60 hours to the GOTJ, and a man who contracted Lyme disease from a tick bite at the 2012 event. You can read the interviews in full below.
THORNVILLE — Obnoxious. Pseudo-hardcore. Whiny.
A search of Juggalo Internet memes reveals no shortage of unflattering depictions of the fans of hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse and the Psychopathic Records label.
“Hardcore Killa” one says above a photo of a man wearing menacing face paint. “Ask Mom for tickets to ICP show,” says the punchline at the bottom.
A Messenger reporter spent some time hanging out with members of the oft-ridiculed, and sometimes feared, group known as the Juggalos at their annual extravaganza going on through Saturday in Thornville in northern Perry County. Aside from fairly ubiquitous tattoos, clothing and car decals of Psychopathic Records logo Hatchetman, we found a group about as varied as you might find at any music festival. Some showed a proclivity for talking big. Others, like Rosemary from Phoenix, Ariz., were soft-spoken:
“People get the wrong idea. They think it’s all gang bangers,” said the 57-year-old grandmother as her son, Alexander, 15, and her daughter, Elizabeth, in her early 20s, helped her unload her portable oxygen tank from her car after she’d made the 2,000-mile drive to get to the 15th Annual Gathering of the Juggalos.
Rosemary’s motorized scooter sat nearby with her pink cowgirl hat with “Juggalatte” written on it perched on its top. The oxygen, she said, is related to her habit of smoking, which she kicked more than two decades ago but still came back to haunt her.
“I always tell people not to smoke,” she said in her quiet, calming voice.
She’s been to several Gatherings since an older son got her hooked on the music when he was a teenager. He’d play the music in the house, and, when he was 15, not wanting to let her son go off to a concert by himself, Rosemary accompanied him to Twiztid on the Rocks in Tempe, Ariz. Twiztid is a horrorcore hip hop duo whose songs include the likes of “Murder, Murder, Murder” with the lyrics:
You never heard of redrum in reverse
Bodies in the hearse
Now your life’s gone cause we wanted you to die
Rosemary views the lyrics of the types of songs one might hear at the Gathering as a parody.
“They’re making fun of it. They’re telling people not to do that. Nobody’s advocating killing people or doing anything harmful,” she said, waving away that notion with a flit of her hand.
She said similar messages can be found in “The Lion King” or “Phantom of the Opera,” but nobody bats an eye at taking children to those types of shows. Last year, she took her 1-year-old grandson to the Gathering.
Come next year’s Gathering, if there is one, Rosemary will be a grandmother again. Elizabeth met her fiance Brandon on Aug. 9, 2012, at the Gathering in Cave-in-Rock, Ill. Elizabeth has since moved to Marion, Ohio, to join Brandon, and this year they have a baby due on Aug. 9 — a gift from the Gathering two years in the making.
“I liked her socks,” Brandon said of what first drew him to Elizabeth. “She had green and black socks on, and she was on the Scrambler ride all alone. She got off, and I asked her if she wanted to go for a walk and we did, and one thing led to another.”
Another person whose life has changed drastically as a result of his attending the Gathering two years ago is Robert Teufel, known in the Juggalo circuit as Bobby.
At that Gathering, Bobby said, he noticed a small tick on his abdomen, but thought nothing of it. Shortly thereafter, he started getting sick. A string of doctor visits and months later, he was finally diagnosed with Lyme disease, a tick-borne ailment.
“It basically erased my entire brain and gave me a seizure disorder,” said the articulate Massachusetts native who recently moved to California to pursue better treatments for his illness. As a result of his seizures, he said, he lost his $70,000-a-year job as an executive chef and is now unemployed, taking 40 pills a day and getting regular injections.
Two Juggalos we talked to mentioned missing past Gatherings due to being locked up and several mentioned having missed festivals due to not having the money, but none, Bobby included, mentioned missing an event due to illness. Last year, he still had an IV port in, but he still made it to the festival.
“Ultimately, it’s a love and dedication to Insane Clown Posse,” he said of what keeps him coming back. He’s been listening to ICP since his early teen years. This is his 14th Gathering; in addition to enjoying the music and camaraderie, he’s used these past two as a platform to educate people about Lyme disease prevention. He has a tattoo of a deer tick to show people what to watch for and has made a tradition of having an anti-Lyme disease T-shirt printed for the Gathering. This year’s says, “F— Lyme Disease” on the front, and “Check for Ticks” on the back.
Another person who developed a love for ICP as a teen is Yanush. Originally from Australia, Yanush now lives and works at a hostel in the small European nation of Estonia. Yanush has been to several states, including Illinois for last year’s Gathering, which he attended with his then-girlfriend, but this is his first time in Ohio and he’s only here for the Gathering Of The Juggalos.
He came alone this year, traveling, he said, more than 60 hours to get here. He first took a bus through Latvia and Lithuania into Warsaw, Poland, where he caught a flight to Italy, then to New York and finally to Cleveland, where he rented a car to drive to Thornville.
As a conversation piece, Yanush carries a tote bag, from which he flies the Estonian flag, not that it’s usually recognized by anyone, but he likes to tell people a bit about his adopted nation with a total population of around 1.3 million — smaller than the populations of several American cities. He also just likes to shoot the breeze with other ICP fans.
“It’s just nice to be around people who listen to the same music as me, man,” Yanush said. “It’s good to be around some nice people.”
At the more in-your-face end of the spectrum are Kali, 24, and Gypsy, 34, two of the women of Passed Out Juggalos. The pair, who were wearing not much except some little bikinis and a bunch of tattoos Wednesday, said they and a couple of friends have gained fame in their circuit by finding passed out Juggalos at events, shoving body parts in their faces, and taking raunchy pictures with them to post online.
“We draw on them, tape them to their chair, stuff like that,” said Kali.
Also on the brash side was a Juggalo we met during a stop at a gas station across the road before we even made it to the festival grounds at Legend Valley.
The man was holding a sign reading, “Whoop Whoop (the official Juggalo call). Bet you can’t hit me with a quarter.”
We didn’t identify ourselves to each other, but as The Messenger’s reporter walked by, the shirtless man eagerly told his tale of how he arrived in Thornville. He hopped a freight train, he said, from Roanoke, Va., to Columbus. After panhandling awhile in Columbus, he said, he hitchhiked a ride at 2 a.m. with a woman who was out driving alone.
“It takes a special breed to do that, to pick up a guy like me,” said the disheveled man, who had “F— off” tattooed on his chest. During the ride to Thornville, he said, they saw two other people out walking and decided to offer them a ride. They were also headed to the GOTJ, still 20 miles off, and had planned to walk the whole way.
Was his story exaggerated? That’s hard to say, but he was eager to offer unprompted evidence corroborating at least part of it.
“Check this out,” he said, pulling out his cracked smartphone, and cuing a video, which appeared to be shot from a roadside. In it, a parked Columbus police vehicle was seen with an officer sitting inside. The videographer, apparently out of the officer’s line of sight, pulls out a marker and draws an anarchy symbol on the vehicle’s fender. The man explained the video was shot the previous evening when the officer was writing him a citation for his panhandling.
“Who does that?” he boasted of his handiwork. “Who DOES that?”
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