My parents and I used to play a game where one of us would think of some ridiculous dare, assign an arbitrarily low price to it, and then would keep increasing the ask until a “Yes” happened.
Mom, to me and Dad: Would you walk to Get n’ Go butt-ass naked for 100 bucks?
Dad and me: Nope.
Mom: 1,000?
Dad and me: Nah.
Mom: 4,000?
Me: Still no.
Dad: Cash?
Mom: Yup.
Dad: Aiight.
(Apparently, after I grew up and moved out, they’d lower the stakes with the dares—“20 bucks to go outside and get the paper butt-ass naked”—and one of them goofy niggas would invariably do it. I miss my mom.)
Sometimes, the game would branch into a less fun variant of it, where we’d ask ourselves how much we’d pay to experience or just witness a desired activity. This has been on my mind for the past year, as the possibility of Donald Trump facing some sort of criminal prosecution the moment he exits the White House seems to be increasing. (Which I suspect is why he’s fighting so hard to stay. Well that, and he’s broke as fuck.)
It’s been a year of tragedy, of upheaval, of ubiquitous disruption, of perpetual anxiety, and of a whiplash-inducing ecosystem of loss that’s scaffolding quicker than our ability to process it. And while watching Trump and his assemblage of feckless sycophants and triflin’ hellspawn get perp-walked is still unlikely—and would essentially be a pyrrhic victory—a nigga can still dream.
So, let’s say the Trump perp walk was a live PPV event. How much money would you pay to witness that?
$500 is too low. I’d pay that alone to watch game seven of a Nets/Warriors NBA Finals next year. $1,000 is too, because that’s what I’d pay to watch Ben Carson parallel park. So I think $2,000 is the sweet spot where the schadenfreude experienced would still surpass the loss of cash.
The real prize, I think, would be to witness him get physically dragged out of the White House by the Secret Service—an act they’d seem to have quite the incentive to do, considering that he’s a stank-bootied outbreak monkey endangering the lives of their families. I can see it now: him haughty and defeated, but performatively defiant, while they horse-collar him down the stairs, out the door, and on the lawn like how Belle did Willie and Leonard in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.
To see that live, I think I’d pay $10,000.