Lethal Attraction

It's a Friday night at the Bottleneck in Lawrence.

The hundred or so mostly white kids have come for rock and roll — punk and metal, to be specific. Headlining is the Esoteric, favorite of the region's hardcore crowd. Playing third but no stranger to this kind of lineup is Mac Lethal, who, as his few fans here are aware, has just inked a deal with the Midwest's top independent hip-hop record label.

He checks his sole instrument — the microphone — and banters with the kids who have gathered at the front of the stage.

After his backing music starts pulsing through the PA, he steps up onto a chair and unfurls a torn American flag with the words "Download Your Donation" painted on it.

It's a strange sensation, the shock of seeing the defaced flag. Such props are rare in hip-hop shows. (Also, "Download Your Donation" doesn't immediately make sense — it just sounds clever and rebellious.) He launches into "Shotgun," the up-tempo, acoustic-bass-thumping opener on his new album, the track that, if all goes well, will introduce him to the hip-hop world. Soon, he's rapping about his hometown of Overland Park, where all the women have teeth that are glow-in-the-dark/And the streets are patrolled by remote-controlled creepy gorillas.

As his set progresses, Mac Lethal pulls out the tricks he's been showcasing around town over the past few months — a break for the theme song of The Family Guy, a pause to teach the audience "the Elaine dance" from Seinfeld — but he still manages to make everything seem off-the-cuff. He also works in the line "George Bush doesn't care about Mac Lethal," a reference to Kanye West's post-hurricane Bush dis, to much applause.

But then he slows things down with an a cappella "Vanish." The song begins with a somber incantation — 'Cause every time I make a new friend/That's another funeral in the future I will attend — a crowd-silencing line if there ever was one.

He glides into an impressionistic monologue addressed to his mother. It starts with the image of a kid trying to fake sick so he won't have to go to school. The trick doesn't work, but the child's longing to escape into his mother's arms is palpable. Suddenly, though, the tables turn and the mother is the one who's sick, the child powerless to save her. In the end, he's numb to the condolences, gutted after six months of torture/My whole family tree was just ripped from the orchard.

For the final number, Mac brings up Stevie Cruz, screamer for the Esoteric, to sing on "Strike Me Dead," a nihilistic fantasy about the Earth being destroyed by a comet.

It's a barrage of death, angst and sarcasm, and the kids in the crowd are bouncing like it's a punk show — except for one girl. When Mac Lethal leaves the stage, she is waiting. She embraces him, crying and repeating, "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."

The girl's father died a week before the show. She tells Lethal that he has articulated her pain, brought things to light that just moments earlier were an incomprehensible tangle of anguish and remorse.

Mac Lethal knows the feeling. Almost a year earlier, his own mother, Janet Ruth Sheldon, died at 57.

Mac Lethal has always been able to make audiences laugh. Since he lost his mother, he's learned to make them cry, too. What's been on his mind lately, however, is how to strike a balance between the two. His future success demands it.

David McCleary Sheldon — "Mac" to his friends — was born at Saint Joseph Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, on July 25, 1981.

He's lived all over the metro but currently inhabits — and pays a hefty mortgage on — the condo where his mother lived in the final years of her life. It's half of a duplex in a tree-lined subdivision of identical dwellings off 103rd Street in Overland Park. As if to reinforce the stereotype of his neighbors as blackophobic retirees, the condo is equipped with a security TV that shows the distinctly un-crime-ridden street outside.

After his mother died, Mac says, his sister bought her car. "I put whatever little money I had toward her mortgage, and it's going to take me a long fucking time to pay for it. But it was just worth it, it was worth it to keep her, because there's so many artifacts about that place that reminded me of her."

He keeps the first floor and upstairs tidy, and he does most of his writing in the living room on a big, new sofa, also purchased from his mother's estate. The basement, however, is a disaster, littered with CDs and debris and equipped with not only the filthiest bathroom in the 'hood but also the only recording studio.

The portal to this room is a partly demolished door that's a few well-placed blows from splintering completely. It's the victim of Mac's frustrated outbursts after a scene that repeats itself too often: He presses "record" on his computer-contained mixing board and rushes into the soundproofed closet to put on headphones and begin spitting into the microphone — then he flubs a line. When he has to start over, the door pays.