If I had to guess, I’d say the plurality of people learned about Chet Hanks’s general mode of being when his dad caught the coronavirus, two years ago last month. If you don’t remember, part of the immediate fallout from Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson catching Covid was that their sons became unofficial spokespeople for the family, kind of like one of those times at a neighborhood cleanup where the eight-year-old with something to prove answers the bell when you say, “Hey, you know that old speed limit sign that got run over? The one the city replaced, but left the base of there in the ground waiting to give lockjaw to some poor, unfortunate, barefoot soul? Can someone dig that up?” and no one realizes he’s answered it until he’s sticking a chainsaw into God’s earth and pulling the starter cord. If that still doesn’t ring a bell, well, here is Chet Hanks’s video from that evening. I’ll give you a moment.
So, obviously, the general response to that video was, “That is Tom Hanks’s son?” Many people knew little about the younger Hanks at the time. Not me, though. Not me.
When I was working the corporate life, I had a coworker who’d gone to Northwestern and was a rapper. I’m still not positive what exactly his rap persona is or was, but there’s a chance it was geopolitically offensive, so we’re going to move on from that piece of the story except to say he was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. Loved that guy. Unless he’s problematic now, in which case I was an unaware pawn in his scheme. Think he lives in California now. Should look him up. Anyway, at said coworker’s “get to know you” lunch, when he transferred onto our team, the rapping came up and we learned that he’d done it in Evanston and when asked about Northwestern’s rap scene, he mentioned that Tom Hanks’s son had been around. We, a predominantly white workforce in our twenties and thirties, reacted as though this coworker had just told us he’d made out with Jenna Bush on the White House roof, to which said coworker sheepishly replied, “Well…” and told us Chet Hanks was “kind of a douche.”
Not exactly the full story, there, [redacted to spare The Barking Crow higher risk of cyberattack].
Looking at older photos of the younger Hanks, well, yeah, maybe he was only kind of a douche at Northwestern. At Northwestern, there’s probably a cap on how far towards present-day Chet Hanks a man can go before the campus starts glitching like the restaurant in the first season of The Good Place. But still, former coworker, what the hell, man? You couldn’t have stressed to us how much we were underestimating this guy?
Maybe he tried. Maybe we didn’t listen. Either way, every time any Hanks comes into the news, I think of my culturally provocative buddy who knew the heir in college, and I picture both of them at Northwestern, and my heart laughs. What a world.
