Forever Nerdy

by Brian Posehn

  I was exposed to other popular music and entertainment during Mr. Cox’s class or on campus. Everybody was talking about Saturday Night Fever that year. It was huge—almost Jaws and Star Wars big. I had no interest, really. The trailer did nothing for me. A teenager in New York or somewhere enters a dance contest and falls in love with some girl while dancing around a bunch. Sure, it had an R rating, which was appealing, but I knew it was for language and nudity and Italian stereotypes and not gunplay and bloody fisticuffs or monsters. I wouldn’t see it for a couple of years, but I sure bought the soundtrack. I listened to it for several months. That was my super-short disco phase.

  Fleetwood Mac’s album Rumours was huge. That record or its singles were everywhere I went. And I liked it as much as America did. I also had a crush on Stevie Nicks, just like America did. I will remember for the rest of my life the first time I heard the classic Queen album News of the World. During lunch we would have music in the cafeteria. One day someone played “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions.” I had to have it. Like KISS, the album cover excited me. In addition to “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions,” I liked “Sheer Heart Attack” and “Get Down, Make Love.”

  I started to get nerdy about random things. I switched from baseball to football. I loved local teams, the Niners and the Raiders. I did reports in Mr. Cox’s class on Kenny Stabler and the other champion Raiders of the mid-seventies. And I liked America’s teams, the Cowboys and the Steelers. I was also into the Civil War. I read several books about it. Civil War and football. I also liked conspiracy theories and whisky. I was an old white man.

  I spent quite a lot of time in church groups. I actually belonged to two, so I was pretty busy with meetings and outings. One Saturday one of my youth leaders thought it would be fun to surprise us with mini-golfing, so they blindfolded us when we got in the van. After a while I whispered to everyone that we should put our faces against the window and pretend to be kidnapped. A couple of kids went along with me. Of course, when the grownups figured it out, we had to stop. Grownups always ruin kidnapping, except for when they are the kidnappers.

  There were plenty of things I didn’t like about living in Sonoma, but I loved spending more time with my Grandpa George and Grandma Grace. My mom would drop me off with my bike, and I’d hang out with them and ride around their neighborhood. I liked spending time with them, and I got to know their neighbors. There was a woman who lived across from my grandparents named Eve. She and her husband had never had grandkids, or regular kids, so she kind of adopted me. I did yard work for her, and she would feed me and let me take long breaks. I remember during one long break I watched the entire 1966 Batman movie. By the way, I sucked at yard work.

  Enter Ken the Monster. A year or two after they started dating, Ken the Monster gave up his apartment and moved in with us. I remember my mom’s warning being really short. She informed me he was moving in, and then he moved in. I think Ken did it to save money. He was a cheap dick. We found that out quickly. I’m not sure whether he loved my mom. I think she was mostly just lonely and liked his company and the regular sex. BLARG! Living with him was fine at first, but soon I would start acting out. She only lost it on me a couple of times. The wooden spoon was my mom’s punishment of choice. I had gotten smacked with it a handful of times when I was younger, and it fucking hurt. As I got bigger, it hurt less.

  She would lose it so hard, it could be funny. One time her spoon broke. And I laughed. I laughed my ass off. I pointed at her. That set her off even more. She was furious. Or, as she would say, “I am livid with you right now.” Our fights would start out over shit like me not wanting to do homework or take out the garbage or her not letting me go to my friend’s house. Minor shit. But they would escalate pretty quickly. She said a lot of mean things to be hurtful. They would get bad enough in junior high to send me back to therapy.

  Once Ken lived with us, half our fights were about him. But it was still awkward to fight in front of him. I always felt like our lives weren’t his business, and I resented him being there. By the time I got to high school I wanted to fucking kill him.

  But then came the good part about Ken the Monster being in our lives: R-rated movies. We saw Slapshot. I loved Slapshot: it was violent and dirty and the Hansen Brothers were fucking hilarious. We also had family outings to see Semi-Tough and Kentucky Fried Movie together. Both inappropriate and fucking awesome. That’s it. That was the best thing about Ken.

  The second best thing was that Ken and my mom went out a lot. That meant I could watch whatever I wanted. I saw the horror masterpiece Night of the Living Dead on TV one Friday night, alone in our apartment. It freaked me out. I saw Carrie around then too. It wasn’t scary, just fucked up. I also saw The Omen. I loved it. I had caught a TV edited version of The Exorcist, which at that point was the scariest thing I’d ever seen. Because of all the time I spent in church, movies featuring the devil freaked me out the most. And other flicks I just had the instinct to avoid. I had heard of Rabid and The Hills Have Eyes, but I was too scared to watch them.

  I saw Annie Hall with my mom and Ken the Monster. Ken loved Woody, which makes sense, because they were both creeps. Alleged. I saw The Spy Who Loved Me with a church group. Yep, it’s a Roger Moore Bond film—not my favorite, but still pretty enjoyable. I saw Mel Brooks’s High Anxiety. I didn’t understand a lot of the Hitchcock references, but it made me seek out more of his movies.

  By my teens I had seen most of them. I loved the Wages of Fear remake, Sorcerer, with Roy Scheider. It was not what I was hoping for from Chief Brody, but it was still pretty intense. Of course, I didn’t know what Wages of Fear was ’til I lived with Patton Oswalt. One night Ken took my mom and me to see Oh God. Or, more likely, he drove, my mom paid, and he bought popcorn. His popcorn.

  I became obsessed with a flick called Damnation Alley. It was a postapocalypse action film featuring Jackie Earle Haley (Kelly Leak from The Bad News Bears), George Peppard (Hannibal from The A-Team), and Jan-Michael Vincent (famous fuck-up). I sat through multiple viewings one day in a San Francisco movie theater while my mom and Ken spent a day in the city. Not sure why. It’s terrible. The effects were shitty and the story is a wet fart, but I liked it because it was about the end of the world and that fascinated me.

  I worshipped Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds. I had seen all the Dirty Harry movies at that point, with The Enforcer being my favorite. I loved the trilogy of Harry Callahan flicks at the time, as most eleven- and twelve-year-old boys did. But I also dug the Eastwood flicks my friends didn’t know, like Play Misty for Me, a real creeper, Clint’s Basic Instinct–like stalker movie. My favorite was The Outlaw Josey Wales, a violent revenge western.

  I saw a lot of Eastwood’s movies on TV. But The Gauntlet was special. My mom dropped Hinchman and me off at the Sebastiani Theatre. She knew it was R rated, so she walked us up to the window and we saw one of the grittiest Eastwood flicks ever, complete with rapey bikers. Smokey and the Bandit was probably my favorite Burt Reynolds flick ’til I saw Hooper. Burt’s movies were a little more fun than Clint’s. Not counting Deliverance. Never count Deliverance, that wacky farce. It’s also known as National Lampoon’s Rape Raft.

  I found Saturday Night Live one night while my mom was out with Ken. I was supposed to be in bed by 11:30. I wasn’t. I stayed up for two reasons: because I was too scared to be alone and because I could. I was flipping around one night and found these funny people, the not-ready-for-prime-time players. I didn’t know who they were, but I thought they were the funniest people I had ever seen in my life—Belushi, Chase, Aykroyd, and Morris were all amazing. The women were beautiful and funny. I fell in love with Jane, Gilda, and Lorraine instantly. The host was this really funny, mean hippie named George Carlin. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be watching this, but I was hooked. I didn’t tell my mom about my discovery, but I did encourage more Saturday night date nights.

  I continued to dabble in sports. I played basketball under Mr. Cox’s
direction, and I barely remember one period. All my recollections of every time I played on a sports team are foggy, as though I played only one game, like Rudy. I guess I sucked the least at soccer, because I wound up with the “Most Improved” certificate at the end of the year. So that means I sucked at an unbelievable level when I started and sucked noticeably less by the end of the season. I guess Coach Billie, who was also my Cub Scout leader and my friend Tony’s mom, thought it was better than giving me a “Keep Trying, Dummy” certificate. By the age of thirteen I knew sports weren’t for me.

  Mr. Cox made reading at school fun, but it had already been my number-one pastime for a couple of years at that point. By sixth grade I read everything I could get my hands on. I plowed through the kids’ books in my school library and both public libraries in town. I started reading things a second time. Roald Dahl was a favorite. I started with the Charlie books, but James and the Giant Peach became my favorite. I dug The Phantom Tollbooth and read all the Hardy boys books, a shit-ton of Nancy Drews and then moved on to Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and Watership Down. Fun, breezy romps.

  Then I found even more mature stuff like the kinds of things you’d find on a rack at a grocery store if you were a young adventurous reader. I picked up a book called Machete Summer about the Miami drug world. It was as fucked up as you’d guess, and my mom had paid for it along with that week’s groceries. Super discerning. I read The Exorcist way before I saw the movie. I started reading movie adaptations like The Omen and Grizzly whenever I could find them. Soon I would find Stephen King.

  I loved magazines, whatever the topic. I read a lot of cheesy magazines and newspapers to get my Farrah and KISS news as well as kids’ stuff like Ranger Rick and Dynamite, and I was becoming a nut for Mad magazine. I read skateboarding and BMX magazines. I wasn’t very good at either, like most normal kid shit. But I loved reading about skateboarding and BMX and looking at the pictures. I also went through a car phase: hot rods, especially souped-up Corvettes, Camaros, and Mustangs.

  And like half the boys in Mr. Cox’s class, I liked foreign cars like Porsches, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis. I asked my mom for a Car and Driver subscription and would pick up Road and Tracks and Hot Rod magazines whenever I was at the grocery store. I drew a lot of cars and motorcycles. A bunch of the other guys in class drew cars too, and I was pretty good at it; it was definitely my way of bonding with the guys. I’m not really a car guy anymore. I currently drive a dad car. Let’s be real: I drive a minivan. Like a fucking badass.

  I saw the inside of my first dirty magazine in sixth grade. Actually, at school. I’d seen covers before, but I’d never dared to look inside until someone brought a Playboy to the playground. Pamela Sue Martin, TV’s Nancy Drew, was on the cover and had a pictorial inside. I was pretty amazed: one, that someone brought it to school, and two, that I got to see a star of TV and kids’ mystery books naked.

  That Playboy kid had to be outdone. Someone else—I’m pretty sure it was Larry—brought a Penthouse one day. One of the pretty, naked ladies had jizz loads on her. I had to ask Larry what it was. His answer was gross. He made fun of me for not knowing. I was starting to lose Larry as a friend already and was wondering why we were even friends in the first place. He had made fun of my dad, and when I said my dad was dead, he said, “Dig him up.” That made me hate him. I wanted to say, “Well, at least my dad liked me and my mom!” but I knew it was too mean and I’d get punched. I didn’t always have that kind of self-control.

  I liked being funny. When I sucked at basketball, I at least made it fun. As a ball circled the basket, I yelled, “Ring around the toilet.” Even Mr. Cox thought it was funny—he stifled a snort and smiled as he gently reminded me to focus. One of the early manifestations of my future career was that other kids seemed to recognize my skill in repeating comedy routines or acting out sketches or scenes from funny movies. One day I talked to a kid who had never seen the Bad News Bears. I couldn’t believe parents or other circumstances had prevented him from seeing the Walter Matthau classic.

  So over the course of the day I told him the entire plot of the movie, acting out every gag and leaning into the bad words with relish. And mustard. I had seen Bad News Bears multiple times. I loved Tanner, the smart-ass, but I was more like Timmy Lupus, the shy, bullied kid. My friend wasn’t allowed to see this flick that I thought was a comedic revelation, so I filled that hole for him. He was a great audience.

  By the spring, because of Mr. Cox’s incentive—or maybe just because he was a great teacher—I had improved enough to win “Most Improved.” Like soccer, I had gone from shitty to less shitty, and it felt great. Mr. Cox selected me and the other four guys who had improved the most. They were all my friends—Robert Also-Glasses, Russ Goodman, Hinchman, and Karl German-Name. It may have been rigged. Mr. Cox didn’t pull some Mrs. Sullivan shit and treat us to cleaning his yard. Nope, he let us pick where we went.

  We had all held a meeting. The decision was easy: we were all obsessed with cars. So we wanted to go to San Francisco and go to high-end car dealerships. We were sixth-grade boys and really wanted to look at Porsches and Ferraris. So that’s what we did. Mr. Cox took us all to San Francisco. We were so stoked. It felt really good to turn it around. It was the highlight of an already great school year. The trip was not lost on me that I had worked so hard to make friends and move up the social strata during the last three years and that after the summer I would need to start all over at junior high. “No fair!” And then again for my freshman year. “No fucking fair!” I dreaded junior high and high school, and I really had no fucking idea.

  The second highlight of that school year came right before graduation: my first big kid’s party, a sixth-grade house party. Also known as a sixth-grade make-out party. It was at a girl’s house. I think the girl’s name was Sandy, and she owned a horse, so we’ll call her Sandy Horse-Girl. My two crushes were Gina Italian-Name and Sandy Horse-Girl. She was cute, and her parents owned a nice piece of property in the hills.

  Everybody was there. The party was fun—food and soda, dancing and games. Later in the evening the games changed. My first game of truth-or-dare—I was pretty excited. During the game I wound up kissing Sandy Horse-Girl. The kiss was awkward, but kind of sweet. It was just a quick kiss, and it wasn’t like my third-grade love, Mommy in “I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” or my fifth-grade love, Mrs. Sullivan.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t follow through. What twelve-year-old does have good follow-through? Later Karl German-Name kissed her longer, and she really seemed to like it. I went home to my apartment alone. I’m kidding. We were sixth-graders—no one was fucking. But I do remember how nervous and hopeful and, later, disappointed I was that night. It felt good until it didn’t. Later my problem was that I always wanted it too much and didn’t have much confidence—a great combo: lack of balls and sweaty desperation. And I had super-high, unreasonable standards. Why weren’t girls flinging their vaginas at me? Well, I wouldn’t find out in junior high. Or high school. Or even college.

  SEVEN

  JUNIOR HIGH: NERDY AND NERDIER

  I was teased a bunch at the beginning of seventh grade. And hit quite a few times. The twelve-year-old passive-aggressive “accidental” bump or shove was no fun and pervasive. I never got in a real fight because I wouldn’t fight back. That actually helped and hurt as I got older. I don’t blame anyone. Six schools worth of seventh-graders—that’s a lot of new faces when you start junior high. We were all new fish. Prison mentality. If it had actually been prison, I would have died in the first two weeks because I got shanked on the playground a lot. And by shanked, I mean I got punched, shoved, and called “homo,” “queer,” “faggot,” “weirdo,” “queer-bait,” “fag,” “mo,” “dork,” “nerd,” and “loser.”

  Of all those names, I remember loser hurting the most. Not sure why, but it stung more, maybe because I thought of myself that way. I was a loser. And Turtle, my nickname—that hurt too. My close friends had stoppe
d calling me Turtle, but it stuck with everyone else. At first, being involved in sports paid off here, because I knew a bunch of kids from playing their school in soccer or basketball. But most of them knew me as Turtle already. They had been exposed to my spazziness, so I couldn’t really reinvent myself. A lot of my friends were from my neighborhood and St. Andrews, my church. My core friends, like Hinchman and Russ, were always there, even when I was shitty to them.

  Then there were the eighth-graders. I don’t remember my mom buying me clothes with giant targets on them when we went back-to-school shopping that summer at Penny’s, Mervyn’s, and Miller’s Outpost, but they must have all had them. Either that, or I was just a tall, skinny dork who acted weird. PE was the worst—I felt vulnerable and terrified every time I hit the field. Whatever the sport, I knew I would be terrible at it and that I’d either be overlooked by the other kids or, worse, singled out and ridiculed. I hadn’t been that bad at sports at eight years old, but the more I grew, the more uncoordinated I got. And the worse I got at sports, the more I hated them.

  Dodgeball and I had had a love-hate relationship: kids loved ruining my day with the dodgeball, and I fucking hated it. I was never ever good at it, and if I did happen to get lucky and tag a kid out with my “weenie-arms” or my “pussy throw,” then they would really wail on me with a concentrated effort. Dodgeball mutated into “smear the queer” or “tag the fag,” which was worse because I was always the queer or fag. Not sure why they aren’t played professionally; maybe their names held them back. Don’t let angry twelve-year-old dicks name your sport. And then there was flag football, or “fag football” when I played it. Fuck, I hated being twelve.

  On one miserable day during “fag football,” eighth-grade blonde beauty Tami Baker, with the words “Leave Posehny alone!” saved my ass and became my massive crush at the same exact second. I already liked blondes from TV—Jeannie, Ellie May, Samantha, and my favorite angels, Farrah and Cheryl Ladd… even the tall, boring, blonde Angel was more appealing to my young brain than the dark-haired girls on the show. Once I started talking to real girls—I mean, avoiding eye contact with real girls—I decided that blondes were my favorite. I married a cute, petite blonde, my dream girl, but I think one of the reasons a cute blonde ex-cheerleader even became my dream girl is because of Tami Baker.