NOT DIRTY.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 17-JAN-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Russell Jones is a forty-four-year-old art director who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. In the early winter of 1996, he and his wife began to receive some unusual phone calls late at night. They would pick up the receiver and a voice would shout "Yo, Dirty!" or just "Dirteee!" and then hang up. Jones was mystified; he thought that maybe his number had been written down in a bathroom stall somewhere. A few weeks later, Jones's young cousin, who was conversant in hip-hop, stopped by.

"You know that rapper Ol' Dirty Bastard?"

"Uh, not really."

"His real name is Russell Jones. That's why you get those calls."

"No way. It can't be."

It was. Russell Jones, a.k.a. Ol' Dirty Bastard, had just left the...

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