They shoulda called me Little Cocaine, I was sniffing so much of the stuff! My nose got big enough to back a diesel truck in, unload it, and drive it right out again.

—Little Richard

It was only this morning that I was walking down a country road in the syrupy-humid Georgia sunshine listening to Little Richard’s “I’ve Got It” on my iPod. Fridays are when me and the missus get takeout from a coal-black soul-food place on Atlanta’s east side, and it warmed my heart to hear the Georgia-born Reverend Richard Wayne Penniman shouting his gay black ass off about cornbread, buttered beans, collard greens, and candied yams.

And then I heard the news that he died of a heart attack in Los Angeles yesterday.

I’m still collecting my thoughts. Sounds, lights, tastes, feelings, and smells are swirling past me like multicolored plastic chips in the Great Bingo Game of Life.

The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll is dead. I want to cry, but I’m genetically incapable of it.

Since I was in college, which is before most of you kids even had cooters and pee-pees, Little Richard has been my favorite musician. I make no bones about the fact that I’m a white male homosexual faggot gayrod who lifts weights while listening to music, and Little Richard’s music was so dizzily energetic, it was almost impossible to keep up with him. He makes Black Flag look like Perry Como. Bar none, his was the hardest workout music ever.

I spoke to him briefly back in the late 80s when I thought it would be a good idea to be a music journalist. I received an inside tip that he was staying in the penthouse of a Sunset Strip hotel, so I dialed his room.

“Hello?” he asked in his seductively silky Mad Hatter Black Christian Faggot voice.

“Is this the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll?” I asked.

“Who’s this?”

I identified myself as a young wigger journalist keen on interviewing him for the world-renowned Music Connection magazine in Los Angeles. He was polite and gave me his agent’s number. I never followed up, because I’d already spent a good thirty seconds or so luxuriating in his golden, waxy, chicken-soup-and-poppers-smelling consciousness. I had touched greatness, and it left me glowing so brightly, I felt radioactive.

I first heard of Little Richard back in the 1960s, when my Racist White Female mother and sister were mocking him for acting a little, you know, “Tutti Frutti.” But even though they were making fun of him for being a NigFag, they did it with RESPECT. They knew, as John Lennon did, that he was better than Elvis.

In 1973 when our high-on-acid nation was tripped-out on an incongruous 50s nostalgia revival, I saw a double bill of American Graffiti and Let the Good Times Roll, the latter of which was a live concert film featuring many of the Underappreciated Negro Stars of the 1950s such as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. But the most awe-inspiring spectacle was of Little Richard. He oozed enough sweat to feed all of Africa. Coked out of his Macon-born gourd and wearing what appeared to be a Negroidal Proto-Mullet wig atop a super-faggy silk jumpsuit spangled with mirrors, he howled and screeched and climbed atop a stack of pianos, taunting the audience to be gayer and blacker and more coked-out than him. It was as if he was saying, “I’m black, I snuffle more blow than Ike Turner, I gobble schween, and you’d better get used to it!”

Thank you, Little Richard. You’ve made the world safer for black homosexual Christian coke fiends, and our lives are all better for it.

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