You Fake Adidas Wearin'

When I picked Colson up from Park Plaza Thursday before the reading, and he, Jimmy, and Connie May wedged into my clown-car--sorry for the tight fit, guys--Colson carried a large spiral sketchpad, the kind a caricaturist at Lake Eola uses. As usual, I missed the obvious question, "Hey, what's with the big sketchpad, Colson?" and instead drove the three to the reading in semi-silence. I suppose it was best I didn't ask, because it may have spoiled the surprise of Colson's visual aid. During a reading from some new, unpublished material, Colson flipped open the sketchpad, and on it, he had diagrammed the grammar of insults, the lynchpin something he called "the N verb," as in "wearin'" or "lookin'." I already respsected Colson for the cleverness and deft wordplay he employed in Apex Hides The Hurt, but his creation of "the N verb" sold me on his genius, and vaulted him way up my list of favorite authors. The "N verb" works likes this: you have your subject, such as "Fake Adidas" + "the N verb," in this instance "wearin'" + the object, which is always bitch-mothafucka-or-nigga; add them together, and you get, Fake Adidas wearin' bitch. Sometimes, as one of the characters in Colson's story does, you can attach the "nonsensical prepositional phrase" "with your monkey-ass." Hilarious. Genius. Most enjoyable reading I have been to since Tobias Wolff last year, or since Nikki Giovanni said white people had shark attacks coming to them (that's a paraphrase).