Calling in Sick: A J-Card Journey - Dangerous Dame

Chris Vermillion
Mar 26
2 min read

Taking time to reflect has become a ritual. It’s where the dots start to connect, where chaos starts to hum in key. My journey has always felt less like a plan and more like Forrest Gump on pause break—random events, stranger phone calls, mysterious mentors—the kind of story you only believe if you're already halfway inside it.

And it all started with Calling in Sick.

I mean that literally. Skipped school days. Flaky part-time jobs. I wasn’t sick—but I was ill for making music. Obsessively replaying tapes, scribbling notes on scraps of anything, dialing numbers off J-cards like hidden spells. That phrase—“Calling in Sick”—wasn’t about dodging school or work. It was about chasing something that makes you feel alive.

The first time I called one of those numbers, I got through.

Dangerous Dame. Jumpin’. That cassette had a number tucked inside like a secret meant just for me. And on the other end of the line was James Edwards Sr.—his father, label head, and believer. A man who took my curiosity seriously and mentored me through what it takes to begin creating. Recording in 1989 wasn’t just hard, it was heroic. But James had done it for his son, from scratch. And for me, he had all the answers.

Dangerous Dame wasn’t just a rapper. He was a blueprint. Co-writer of Too Short’s “Short But Funky.” The kid who turned his East Oakland upbringing into track after track of pure, lived-in poetry. “Oaktown,” released when he was only sixteen, had more weight than most records twice its age.

And I was just a young fan with a tape deck, a notepad, and a rotary phone. But that’s where it starts. Being a fan is the portal. The wormhole. The spark. It’s how you find yourself talking to legends before you’ve even hit record on your own story.

“Calling in Sick” was never about skipping life—it was about jumping into a different one. A sicker one.

That’s the magic you don’t hear about. The back-of-the-tape moments.The cassette spirit. The faith that someone picking up the phone might change your life.