Brush with Fame: Zack de la Rocha Hugged Me. TWICE.

********** UPDATE **********
Saw that this post found its way to to a Rage fansite forum. Thanks for reading and OP for linking my story! :)
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“I don’t care what you say, I’m going to tell everyone you got a hug from Zack de la Rocha.  Zack de la Rocha hugged you!” My godsister is way more excited than I am.

I smile.  I haven’t yet told her that that wasn’t the first time I got a hug from Zack.  What I did tell her though, what she is purposefully editing out from the rest of her sentence, is that I was a small, knobby eight year old at the time.

Zack de la Rocha was my after school daycare counselor.

It was 1990 — or ’91, I forget — and my dad enrolled my brother and me in a K-6 daycare program at a center unfairly close to our house.  We loved it at first (there was a castle in the park! It was called “Castle Park” because there was a giant castle in the park!)* and then quickly tired of it.  After a while, I grew to hate it.  The kids were gross, or mean, and the counselors strange, or disconnected, but mainly, as I am prone to do now, I just wanted to stay home.

There were, maybe, three counselors that made being wholesale babysat somewhat tolerable: Kirby, with her tiny ear yin-yang tattoo and goofy surf vernacular; Kara, who was so laid back she let one of the kids cut her hair one summer (no lie); and Zack, from Rage Against the Machine.

But of course, that was pre-Rage.  That was when he was just some 20-year-old who loved making music, had things to say, and worked part-time at the local daycare center.

And I was eight and my brother was seven and one day the little shit pushed me off of a large cement sculpture.  I went down face first, eating the dirt as my chin felt the hardness of the ground.  I cried, and though the memory starts to get fuzzy right around that point, I do remember Zack coming to comfort me, smiling and saying “little brothers” before he gave me a hug.

The other time he hugged me was also to get me to stop crying.  And, uh, I swear those were the only two times I cried in my life.  Ever.

But besides the hugging, what is an even better memory is the inane recitation Zack forced us kids to memorize.** Randomly, throughout the day, Zack would grab one of us, push our youthful facial fat together so we looked like hamsters with harvest, and demand we repeat after him:

“Hi. My name is Chubby.  My mom is chubby, my dad is chubby, even my dog is chubby.  One day we couldn’t find his leg, that’s how chubby he was!”

Then we were told to smile big.  We had to smile so big it scrunched up our eyes and made the presence of our cheeks even more imposing.  We became all cheeks and no eyes, and without fail, it would make Zack laugh every time.

I laugh thinking about it now.

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*Most of the castle got torn down and rebuilt in Ronald McDonald plastic, I’m assuming, to accommodate child safety regulations that were not yet in effect when I was a child.  So, suffice to say, the “castle” is much less awesome now.
**It’s been so seared into my memory, so effective its hold on my brain, that I know, without doubt, that this is word-for-word exact.  It used to surprise me how tenacious this memory is.