My Secret Career 21: God Damn King Kong, Or Pimp Fu Brings The Beat

Legends cross paths. In this case, Pimp Fu and Tommy D.

Timothy R.R. O’Malley arrived in Brooklyn and injected a new sense of fun into my music. My Secret Career stretched back to the ‘80’s and the underground punk scene. Timothy had a secret career as well, with another underground scene. Hip hop and rap. We immediately set out to mix these parallel obsessions. He called himself Pimp Fu.

And now, a bit of back story…

Tommy D., legendary ax-slinger from Fecund Youth, spent a summer working sixteen hour days at a fish camp in Alaska. At break time, the workers would separate into groups. Groups set up according to your drug of choice. The dealers would set up in differnt corners of the massive tin shack warehouse kept at freezing temperature and the workers would stand in line, eating lunch and waiting for their dose.

One line, weed. One line, meth. One line, cocaine. And, wonderfully for my purpose, one line whippets.

The man doling out the nitrous oxide hits was a Paul Bunyan-like figure who towered over his customers in a filthy winter jacket and a glowering attitude. He derided everyone who paid him. Not for their habit, but for the lackluster size of the hits they would take. Grizzled desperate drug addicts would take enormous drags of laughing gas and this giant would belittle their pathetic efforts.

Tommy D. waited all summer long and watched this parade of men get jeered at by the man providing them with their high. Finally he got up the nerve to get in the whippet line, even though that was not his D.O.C.

He shuffled along behind all the other degenerates. He approached the gauntlet. He braced himself. The canister was offered and Tommy D. hit that shit as hard as he could.

There was a pause as the behemoth stared down at him. A silence fell.

Then the greatest line ever was uttered.

A deep, triumphant, formerly caustic voice boomed out from within a bushy beard:

“God Damn King Kong!”

Decades later I stole that phrase and Pimp Fu helped me turn it into the first rap song I would ever write. It’s on Pimp Fu’s “Coffee, Pot” as a Pimp Fu joint but it is also by me, Brendan O’Malley aka Bomer-B and it appears on Out Of Charactor: Act I: Id City. 

Pimp Fu’s beat. An acoustic guitar. An electric guitar. Our separate voices.

Please get in line and take this hit. 

God Damn King Kong.