On this subject, Allen asked me if I’d ever heard the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue.” I hadn’t—a lapse that, thinking back on it now, probably should have been a tip-off that I wasn’t a guy, since the joke in my circle of friends has always been that every guy in the world is a Johnny Cash fan on some level, “Ring of Fire” being the universal guy guy’s anthem of troubled love. Allen told me the story of the song about a boy whose renegade father had named him Sue. Naturally, the kid gets the shit beaten out of him throughout his childhood on account of his name. At the end of the song the
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