{"id":9784,"date":"2011-01-12T15:51:35","date_gmt":"2011-01-12T20:51:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=9784"},"modified":"2011-01-23T15:18:21","modified_gmt":"2011-01-23T20:18:21","slug":"pot-high-school-and-chuck-norris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/01\/12\/pot-high-school-and-chuck-norris\/","title":{"rendered":"Pot, High School, and Chuck Norris"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Part three of a five-part story. Click here to read part 1<\/a> and part 2<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Hillbilly Jim went through a few incarnations on his path to becoming Hillbilly. Long before he met the Earthquake, he was simply Jim Morris, a large kid from a small town in Kentucky. Then he started wrestling in Tennessee, Canada, working small-time gigs as \u201cHarley Davidson,\u201d an enormous, leather-clad biker. Things got big for Hillbilly when he met with WWF representatives who figured it had been a long enough stretch since a country-boy character had gone national (Haystack Calhoun and the Scufflin\u2019 Hillbillies had retired years before). <\/p>\n

They gave him a shot: put him in overalls, wrote him a theme song, threw him into a story line that included getting trained by the most popular wrestler of all time, Hulk Hogan.
\nAnd now the fans love him. Fourteen-year-old me loves him, too. He is action figured. He wrestles in front of 94,000 people, one of the largest indoor crowds ever assembled, and everyone screams his name.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m getting a little experience with crowds myself. I\u2019ve been broadcasting between Fox\u2019s morning and afternoon cartoons for a while now, building up a following of kids who send in their jokes and artwork, hoping I might highlight them on TV. It is Josh\u2019s Jokes, Josh\u2019s Gallery, Josh popping up right after Animaniacs<\/em>, sixty seconds at a time, talking about composting while Nashville\u2019s children gobble up their after-school cereal. But not just kids. I\u2019ve become a household name for everyone between the ages of five and twenty-five, and all the parents know me, too, because they are the ones who have to drive their kids to our events, to the wave pool or the zoo or the Nashville Knights hockey games. <\/p>\n

The hockey games are the scariest. Ten thousand drunk fans who just want to see blood. The TV people put me in ice skates. I\u2019m asked to waddle out into the rink before the game starts, right before the national anthem is sung by a local country western star, and I\u2019m supposed to invite everyone to come to our Fox Kids Club booth after the first period for an autograph. I don\u2019t slip, but as I thank everyone for their attention and wave good-bye, the \u201cfuck you!\u201d\u2019s and “suck on it!”‘s drown out my loud-speakered voice. <\/p>\n

I go back to our Kids Club booth and wait for all those same hecklers to actually line up for autographs during the break, and know I will have to smile nicely as they ask me to sign my name on the glossy eight-by-eleven head shots of my face. <\/p>\n

And here comes high school. I slipped through junior high in a kind of pseudo home schooling, which allowed me to hide out comfortably in the living room most days, but Mom and Dad are tired of me spending all my time watching cable instead of tackling pre-algebra. Public high school is supposed to teach me some discipline and make sure I\u2019m caught up with other kids my age.<\/p>\n