Revenge of the Nerd

by Curtis Armstrong

  I’ll begin with the distaff side.

  My maternal grandfather, Ovidio D’Amico, was born in the tiny village of Alfedena, in Italy. The D’Amicos, going back at least as far as Ovidio’s great-grandfather, had been stonemasons in Alfedana and Ovidio’s father, Antonio, had emigrated to the U.S. at some point, settling finally in Detroit, where he cut curbstones for the city’s rapidly expanding street systems. Ovidio made the journey to join his father with his mother and three younger brothers in 1919. One of those brothers, Tom, later went to work for Chrysler, at their Outer Drive stamping plant. Emma, the youngest D’Amico sibling, the only D’Amico born in Detroit, worked her whole life for Goodyear tires, on the assembly line. Tom and Emma represented the only instances of the D’Amico family having a connection to Detroit’s auto industry. As we’ll see when we get to my father’s side of the family, that connection was much stronger.

  Ovidio’s father died suddenly when Ovi was still in grade school. He dropped out of school at that point and went to work as a messenger for the Detroit Bank (later the National Bank of Detroit), where, over the years, he rose in the ranks to become a senior executive. My grandmother, the former Ida DeCesare, was born in Beverly, Massachusetts. Her mother died early and her father, feeling unequal to the task of raising two girls, packed her and her sister off to relatives in Italy, where, according to family lore, my grandmother made her village too hot to hold her; her wild-child behavior so appalled her keepers that they eventually shipped her back to the U.S., making her both a native-born American and an Italian immigrant at the same time.

  From a fairly early age I was aware of the weird tension at work between the two sides of my family, the Italian-immigrant, working-class side, the D’Amicos; and the “executive class” side represented by the Armstrongs. It was only when I grew older that I grasped the racial and class hostility between the two families. By the time I had come along, the D’Amicos lived in the East Side neighborhood of Harper Woods, just off 8 Mile Road, in a small postwar house set on an enormous lot, which was taken up with their garden. They grew virtually all their fruits and vegetables, with Ida making her own sausage, pasta, bread, pizza and sauces. Dough was always placed to rise in heavy stoneware bowls on the floor in front of heat registers during the winter, wafting the scent of rising bread throughout their small house. Everything was kneaded by hand, and between the kneading and the gardening Ida had arms like an Italian communist. She canned and pickled obsessively. There was even a huge grape arbor, under which we would sit and eat in the heat of summer and where they harvested grapes for the wine my grandfather made in the basement.

  To the extent that they socialized, they did so with an organization known as the Loyal Wing Society. This was an all-male Italian social club of which Ovidio was a member, but every now and then, during the summer, the women and children were invited to picnics in a local park in the heart of the Italian part of town, and it was during these afternoons that I came to understand the importance, and frankly, the otherness, of my Italian heritage. The women in floral dresses would sit in groups around the tables, fanning themselves, voluble and full of life. There were the other, older women, dressed in heavy black even in the hottest weather, as though in perpetual mourning, looking to me like crows among birds of brighter plumage. The men, meanwhile, in short-sleeved shirts, played bocce, smoking constantly, everyone speaking Italian. There was comfort in it and ritual, as well—a sense of timelessness and a kind of security in the knowledge that all was as it had always been and ever would be. That storied white American postwar sense of confidence that we’d gotten through the war and things would only get better from here extended to working- and middle-class Italians, as well, though the bitterness of the racism that had motivated my grandfather to ban Italian speech from the home during my mother’s and her sister Elsie’s childhood remained a problem for them. In the summer I would sit with Ovi on his porch at dusk as he smoked, mostly in silence, watching as the man across the street, a pigeon-fancier, released the birds for their evening exercise. They would fly, a small flock of them, in gentle circles above the street until, mysteriously summoned, they would return home. He also had a curious habit—this is Ovidio, not the man across the street—of sitting on the toilet with the bathroom door wide open, the light out, smoking cigarettes for long periods of time. At such times, all I could see of him in the darkened bathroom was the cigarette’s glowing tip.

  My mother, Norma, was not just glamorous, she was the older child with a fierce intelligence and endless curiosity, whose ambition to better herself equaled that of her father. How disappointed Ovidio may have been to have no male progeny is just a matter of speculation, but from an early age it was clear she was meant to be something other than an East Side suburban housewife.

  The Italian-Americans were an isolated and insular society in those days. In school, we were always taught to take pride in Detroit’s diversity of cultures, of its immigrant melting pot. But the Italians, like the Irish, Polish, Jewish, Greek, Arabic and—most significantly—black communities had their areas and stuck to them. It was only at this time, in the late fifties and early sixties, that we began to see a bleeding together of these cultures, to the disapprobation of Detroit’s ruling white class, which was the class my father’s parents belonged to.

  I was a white child of privilege and I was raised under the influence of the automobile industry at a time when that really meant something. My paternal grandfather, Roy Armstrong, had been born in Herkimer, New York, and was an executive at General Motors, in the Fisher Body Division. Like Ovidio, his absolute opposite in almost every other respect, Roy never finished school, dropping out to join the navy, where he was small enough to earn the nickname “Pee Wee Armstrong.” So underweight was he that, after one rejection from the recruiter, he devoured a dozen bananas in one sitting, returned and was accepted. His ship was the U.S.S. Ohio. He never saw a shot fired in anger and in one port got a tattoo that he spent the rest of his life regretting. He had used home remedies trying to rid himself of the thing, until it had become so blurred and smeared as to be unreadable. He caught me staring at it once. He held his forearm up to my face and said, “Don’t ever do this. If someone tries to talk you into it, don’t. Worst mistake I ever made.” I once asked him what the tattoo had said, thinking it must have been something shameful, like “Roxy and Roy Forever” (my grandmother’s name was Dorothy) or maybe “Kill ’em all: Let God sort ’em out.” In fact, it was the U.S. Navy insignia.

  And yet, tattoo notwithstanding, he was proud of his navy experience. He was an old-fashioned patriot. When we shook hands, often he would say, “That’s the hand that shook four presidents’s hands!” He would do an exaggerated, slightly comical salute whenever the words “United States of America” were spoken and would hold the salute until I returned it. The only real connection to “show business” in my family comes from Roy. As a youth, he played small roles in New York touring shows that would stop in Herkimer as a kind of cut-rate touring package. He was also part of a traditional, semiprofessional minstrel show. Blackface, banjos and everything. One of the jokes he used to tell onstage went:

  “How’s you feelin’, Mr Bones?”

  “Why, I’m feelin’ like a dentist’s forceps.”

  “How’s dat?”

  “Down in de mouth!”

  He was a Mason, a fly fisherman, a duck hunter and a Protestant, though the last was pretty much in name only. He was a voracious reader and an autodidact and he owned books, more than I’d ever seen in a private home, housed in beautiful built-in bookshelves. My love of books was born in his den.

  He liked to eat and drink, was loud and funny and brash. He was an Automobile Man.

  Roy and Dorothy lived in a lovely mock-Tudor house in an area called Rosedale Park, on the West Side of Detroit. Unlike Ovi and Ida’s house on the East Side—hot, treeless and very “new” feeling—Rosedale Park felt to me that it had been there forever, with quiet, well-appointed streets
stretching out under the shade of cathedral arches of ancient elm trees.

  Roy had married Dorothy Weekes, the diminutive daughter of George and Ivy Weekes of Smiths Falls, Ontario, Canada. She was in nurse’s training in Utica, New York, when my grandfather met and courted her, a small-town girl who adapted quickly and decisively to life as the wife of a General Motors executive. She was a member of the Detroit Women’s Club and wore white gloves when shopping downtown at Hudson’s. Their house had a stained-glass window halfway up the stairs to the second floor and a formal dining room, reserved for state occasions like Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  One Thanksgiving, we were all seated around the dining room table, I in my scratchy suit and bow tie. The candles were lit, and we were waiting for Dorothy, who was possibly a little lit herself, to make her entrance with the magnificent turkey on a Currier & Ives platter. Roy had just opened a bottle of champagne when the swinging door from the kitchen opened, and in swooped Dorothy with the turkey, to a round of applause. She was moving a little fast, though, or unsteadily, and the turkey soared off the platter, flying into the dining room and skidding across the floor.

  There followed a moment of shocked silence, instant and absolute. Dorothy froze, expressionless, staring at the once perfect bird, lying upside down in a shambles on the floor. No one spoke or moved. Then, at an astonishing speed for a woman of her body type, Dorothy pounced on the turkey, scooped it up and disappeared back into the kitchen.

  There followed a stage wait, during which no one dared look anyone else in the face. A moment later, Dorothy reappeared with the turkey back on the plate, as if nothing had happened.

  “Thank God I cooked another bird,” she said. So volatile was her temper that this palpable lie was accepted without comment and everyone dug in.

  Roy and Dorothy had their own rituals, which included dining out at places like a private sportsman’s club known colloquially as the Hunt and Grunt, Joe Muer’s famous downtown grill, Carl’s Chop House and the Top of the Pontch. They had cocktails every evening, and after a couple of my grandfather’s Manhattans, my grandmother’s stroppy side came out, sometimes with a vengeance. She couldn’t do enough for her grandchildren, but she was a woman with a temper and a regrettable set of ingrained prejudices. Apart from the usual ones, including a notoriously short fuse with her husband, she had a particular aversion to Italian Catholics, especially when they tried to marry her son.

  I became aware of racism in my city as something endemic to Detroit. It was a black versus white issue that had nothing to do with me and it was a shock to realize it was also a canker in my own family, to the point that Dorothy boycotted my parents’ wedding, literally not showing up to the church until they had already started the service, and then only when she was forced to by Roy.

  My father Robert was slight and short and looked years younger than his age, a family trait. No “Pee Wee” Armstrong for him, though. When he joined the navy, they nicknamed him, apparently without irony, “Army.” He loved travel, good food and is, like his father was, irresistibly good company. He, too, was a book man. To this day, he enjoys a drink or two of an evening even if some of his other pleasures are lost to him. Until his conversion to Catholicism, following a chance encounter with the Pope at Vatican City, he was a Protestant. His ship was the U.S.S. Topeka and he also never saw action.

  He started working for General Motors, switched to Chrysler and worked loyally for the company for the rest of his working life. Twice, at his request, our family was transferred overseas—the first time in 1964 to Geneva, Switzerland.

  The second time was after I had left home, when my parents and sister were sent to London. This period between 1964 and 1978, when they returned to Detroit for good, is generally considered the Golden Age. My father, like his father, was an Automobile Man. And no matter how much they loved their lives in foreign lands, and they did, Detroit, with a hometown’s grim, inevitable insistence, always dragged them back.

  When I stayed with my mother’s family, I felt like I was in the Old Country. When I was with my father’s parents, I was in Detroit.

  It may sound like a contradiction, but while I had no conscious desire to be an actor during the first decade of my life, I was obsessed with Robert Preston in The Music Man, the film version of Meredith Willson’s acclaimed Broadway hit. Not just obsessed: it was my sole goal in life at that point to present a full production of this play in my basement. I, of course, would assay the role of the roguish con man, Professor Harold Hill.

  This apparently contradictory reality—wanting to star in a production of The Music Man and having no desire to be an actor—can be explained when you understand my mother had a crush on Preston, which she actually talked about a lot. On a trip to New York a couple of years earlier, my father had taken her to see the Broadway production. She loved it and insisted on going backstage to meet the actor after the show. My father begged off and was waiting for her in front of the theater. Apparently, Preston invited her to come out for a late supper with him—an offer that she actually had to think about for a while before rejecting. Therefore, my determination to play that same role would appear to have been more Oedipal impulse than legitimate desire for artistic expression.

  I had my mother’s copy of the soundtrack album to guide me and had been taken to see the movie in the cinema by my parents at least three times—the first time was my parents’ idea. The subsequent viewings were all my own. I liked everything about this movie, which to this day remains the only movie musical I can say I have watched probably a hundred times.

  I listened to the soundtrack constantly. When I saw a paperback novelization of the movie on a rack in a drugstore, I begged my mother to buy it for me and then proceeded to read it to pieces. One night I dreamed the entire film. I finally gathered every kid in my neighborhood into my basement for what I imagined was to be our first rehearsal. The only child I remember, for obvious reasons, was the one I had selected to play Marian the Librarian, my romantic lead. Her name was Yvette and I’d had my eye on her for a while. I’d say she was small and cute, but really we were all small and cute. She was smaller, though, and even cuter, and I suspected she might be French.

  I filled them in on the story of The Music Man and what would be expected of them as my supporting cast. They would clearly not be doing this project for money, I said a little sharply in answer to one boy’s question, and we’d probably have to work every day because the musical numbers alone might take weeks to perfect. I played them the complex patter number that opened the show, the “Rock Island Line.” As it chattered its incomprehensible way through the tiny green speaker of my record player, they stared at each other blankly.

  Finally one of them said, “Are you KIDDING? We can’t do THAT!”

  “Yes, you can!” I snapped, determined to quell this uprising before it spread to my other actors. “I know the whole thing. It’s easy. I’ll show you.”

  At that point, Yvette piped up, noticing the lack of anything resembling a female voice in the mix.

  “Ah!” I remember saying. “You’re not in this scene, but later, you get to sing a bunch of songs, including “Till There Was You,” which is great, and we have a great scene on a bridge where we kiss.”

  “What?”

  The soundtrack album was playing on, the rest of the cast were getting restless and I saw I needed to get Yvette on board fast or I’d lose everyone. I told her I needed to talk with her in the bathroom privately.

  “Why?” she said, her adorable eyebrows furrowing with suspicion. She had a pageboy haircut and smelled of soap. I was sure she was French.

  I took her into the bathroom and explained the situation.

  “It’s not like that all the way through,” I assured her. “She hates Professor Hill at first. But then at the end she realizes she loves him and kisses him, but it’s really quick!”

  “I don’t know,” she said, glancing behind her, as “The Sadder-But-Wiser-Girl For Me” played on the other side
of the door.

  “Look,” I said, with a sudden unexpected breathlessness, “it’s just a small kiss. Like this.”

  And I leaned forward and gave her a chaste kiss on her chapped little mouth. For a moment, I felt my head was going to explode. There was a pause of several seconds. She appeared surprised at first but then almost thoughtful. She was clearly not rushing into anything. It was as if she were mulling over the pros and cons. It was an expression I would see for years to come on girls’ faces after kissing me for the first time. Then:

  “No.” She walked out of the bathroom and out of my life. When I followed her out I found the rest of the boys had disappeared, too. The record had reached the end of the side and the arm bumped dully into the play-out.

  * * *

  As it turns out, I never played Professor Harold Hill. When you’re eight or nine, typecasting doesn’t really figure into your thinking. By the time I was acting for a living, I could’ve been considered for the role of Marcellus Washburn, the comic foil played in the film by Buddy Hackett. Perhaps.

  But my formal debut as a performing artiste occurred in the autumn of 1963 at Swallender’s Ice Studio on West Sixth Mile in Detroit. I was nine then and was finding myself on the cusp of significant changes. For one thing, our family was being uprooted. Within a few months my father, mother, sister and self were to be transferred to Geneva, Switzerland, leaving friends, loved ones and all that was precious and dear and familiar to me behind, for an indefinite period of years. Then, our beloved dog, Chloe, had been put to sleep after biting my cousin Dana. I protested vehemently, arguing that dogs were allowed three bites before being put to death by law, but was overruled when someone pointed out that wasn’t true. And now, after the twenty-second of November of that year, my prized John F. Kennedy impersonation, once greeted with howls of laughter from the adults in my family, had been absolutely censored and barred by those same adults on the grounds of Respect for the Dead. As impressions of dead people were my party piece at that time (W. C. Fields, Bela Lugosi and Humphrey Bogart were other popular favorites), I fell back upon ice skating as my only true means of self-expression. It wasn’t something I could show off in the dining room after dinner, as in those carefree days prior to the assassination, but there seemed no alternative. My muse was stilled.