and kid computer geniuses with talking dogs. Austin had a terrible speech impediment. “Walph,” he would say to the casting assistant playing the talking dog at auditions, “wanna come suwfing, boy? I’m heading down to Wedondo. You should see how the guys thewe whip!” Gently, the casting directors would ask Lee to stop bringing her son to these things, but Lee didn’t listen. She registered Austin under fake names. She ran speech drills with him mercilessly on the thirty-hour drives. On one of these road trips, having had enough of Lee, Austin secretly recorded her nagging him, added some effects, and put it on YouTube. He called it “My Dumb Bitch Mom.” Six million people watched Lee, a cigarette clamped in one corner of her mouth, swerving to avoid a tractor trailer as she prompted, “The rooster...crows...in the morning!” Austin kept making the videos, egging his mom into tantrums she had no clue were being filmed until a Hollywood manager, Craig, showed up at their Dixie Highway rancher. Six weeks later, Austin inexplicably had a record deal, and a contract with a network that specialized in crass content for men. They invited him to create and star in his own sitcom. By the end of the year, Austin and Lee were living in Malibu, and she was wearing ribbed tanks that said DBM everywhere. Austin was sixteen.
Things quickly imploded. The sitcom, about a boy plotting to kill his dumb bitch mom, was met with uproar. Cable news—particularly the channel that shared an office building with the male-network douchebags—delightedly booked outraged parents and scandalized reps from religious leagues. (Teenage girls, taken with Austin’s blinding grin and soft black wavy hair, were tuning in to the show behind their parents’ backs, coming away with catchphrases like “Ground me, bitch? Imma burn your corpse!”) The male network canceled the show, apologized to the public, and found a way out of paying the Kumons. Scrambling to keep her new lifestyle, Lee moved to sue everyone in sight. She even hauled Austin into court on charges of defamation. Though the judge threw it out, the damage had been done to the relationship. Craig advised Austin to emancipate himself; Austin agreed, stuffed his jeans and phone charger in a plastic shopping bag, and moved into Craig’s guest bedroom.
Shortly afterward, Lee tracked Austin and Craig down at a Pinkberry. She lunged at her son, who raced around the other side of the counter, hiding in the toppings. Lee followed, and when Craig stepped between them, she grabbed Craig’s head and smashed it into the counter. He came up holding his nose, bits of crushed Fruity Pebbles sparkling in his blood. So many bystanders had cell phone footage, the news stations were able to put together a practically professional film of the fight, complete with facial reactions and alternate angles. Some “Dumb Bitch Mom” fans wondered whether the whole thing had been staged.
Which was what gave Craig, before his nose had even healed, the idea to pretend that it was. To spin all of Austin—from his earliest YouTube videos through his auto-tuned singles and the slurs he whipped at his mother—as one long experiment in media and morality. “If you think about it,” Craig begged his department head, “he really is an artist. He challenges our notions about language and propriety.” The department head snorted. “He’s a bratty backwoods idiot,” she said. “I’m only entertaining this because every teenage girl in the country wants to suck his dick. Go ahead, knock yourself out.”
So Austin changed his name to one of the fake ones his mother had come up with—Aston Clipp—and declared himself an artist. He traded in his Jordans for sandals and traveled the world, mainly amassing a collection of beaded bracelets. He sat shirtless atop the Holocaust memorial in Berlin and bothered monks in Tibet for selfies. He went to explore his roots in Japan, where he got bored of the customary bows and began to invent spontaneous dance moves in response to them. (He also asked for a fork everywhere he went, because, as he put it, he did not “fuck with chopsticks.”) On a trip to South Africa, he tweeted, while sitting in his Learjet on a Johannesburg tarmac: My heart is heavy thinking of the genicide here in Rwanda—think of how many young girls (and guys! LOL) couldve become Clippers.
Eventually, Craig insisted that Aston create something. A song, a book, a web series—anything he could monetize.
“I was thinking about a stand-up special where the