Revenge of the Nerd

by Curtis Armstrong

  I would like to say that I was a natural ice skater, but I’m afraid that wouldn’t be entirely true. Unlike my friends, for me success in areas such as baseball, football, skiing, swimming, dancing, singing, woodwork, gameplaying, cooking or pretty much anything else were always the product of long, laborious slogging away, rewarded usually with uninspiring results. In fact the truth is I’ve never been a natural anything in my life except maybe a reader. Reading is the one thing that took no effort for me to master. Reading I took to like a duck to water …

  Why I embraced figure skating is anyone’s guess. I had probably convinced myself that skating didn’t qualify as a sport, thereby giving myself permission to succeed at it. I wasn’t a bad skater, as long as I stuck to the figure kind rather than the hockey kind. These days, after a few drinks, when I start yarning about my skating days, people will just assume since I came from Detroit I must be talking about hockey, Detroit being a “hockey town.” But even then I felt instinctively I had a better chance keeping all of my teeth if I stuck to figure skating, so that’s what I did.

  But I was talking about the night of my first public performance on ice.

  Now, you may be thinking we would all just be doing figure eights and skating backward for the entertainment of the many-headed. Not a bit of it. There were production values in this show. Costumes, choreography, even drama. I mean, it wasn’t The Cherry Orchard, but there was some suspense, some comedy and a resolution that left the punters feeling like they’d gotten their fifty cents worth. The evening was made up of several short “pieces,” as we call them in the ice-skating game. Some of the least interesting involved the youngest children, who were sort of led around the rink on ropes, like tiny livestock at a county fair. The rope business hadn’t been thought through, I noticed, because if one of them went down, the others tended to go down with them in a tangled mass of rope and recrimination; but even this rudimentary display was received with solid rounds of applause, making me suspect these kids had papered the house with supportive friends and relatives.

  Now, my first appearance that evening was actually as one of a small knot or chorus of kids, including my sister, who were dressed as Chinese peasants. I have pictures of this and for the life of me I can’t recall the point of the whole Chinese peasant motif. They probably had the costumes left over from some other show, The Good Earth on Ice, possibly, and just used them whenever they were stuck for a theme. Not an auspicious start, but I was a good sport because I could afford to be. What the audience didn’t know was that in the very next “piece,” I was going to do my solo bit, and all memory of this insipid bobbing and nodding and grinning in our very best faux–Chinese peasant manner would be wiped from the collective memory.

  Finally the rink was cleared and a new group of children started surging around the entrance for the next piece, or as I liked to think of it, My Turn. You could feel an almost electrical thrum of excitement, of anticipation in the room. For you see, everyone knew this was the last scene and the last scene was almost always guaranteed to knock their eyes out.

  Now I have to give you the scenario so you can appreciate what happened next.

  We had two instructors, a young man and woman who were probably in their late teens, though they seemed impossibly sophisticated and worldly to me, especially the woman, who wore tight sweaters that I admired enormously. At this point, the two of them donned their costume for the scene, which was a large, incredibly lifelike donkey suit. In the excitement of the moment, I don’t honestly remember which of the two had the front end of the suit and which the rear, but it didn’t matter because once they were suited up, I swear to God, they looked like a real donkey. These people weren’t fucking around. They were the donkey.

  So in this climactic scene, the donkey appears on the ice, surrounded by a bunch of children, and then makes the first of three complete circles of the ice rink, the children yelling something, or singing—I forget, it’s not really germane to the story. Now the genius of this is that the three circles gave the audience plenty of time to admire the donkey costume, while the children—who were not great skaters—were able to hang on to the donkey and make it through the scene without falling over. Also, it gave me my first lesson in the art of building suspense, because after the first circle, the audience would be thinking, “Okay, donkey? Check. Yelling children? Check. Nicely done. But how do they top this?” After the second circle, they’re getting restless. “Jesus Christ,” you can almost hear them thinking, “the suspense is killing me!”

  Well, I knew how they felt. As I stood there in the wings, I was thinking I had never seen a slower donkey in my life. These circles leading up to my entrance felt like they were taking years off my young life. Being an ice rink, it was always cold in there, but I felt a chill of excitement that went to the core of my being. I suddenly realized for the first time that ice had a smell! I inhaled, deeply, savoring it. In retrospect, I think it may have been me I was smelling, because I was really excited, but at the time I was only aware of the heightened state of my senses.

  The donkey was rounding the final turn and it was my moment. As the donkey passed me this time, I was to let it skate a ways past before launching myself onto the ice—with the donkey’s tail in my hand! That’s right! I didn’t mention this before, but one of the only things anatomically incorrect about this donkey suit was that there was a large patch of Velcro where the donkey’s tail ought to have been. My role was that of the child, appearing like magic in the last moments of this oeuvre, who skates up behind the donkey and slaps the tail on the Velcro patch. Laughter, applause, exit, curtain!

  As the donkey went past me, he glanced briefly at me and I heard a muffled comment from deep inside the suit. Probably saying, okay, you’re on, or something. As they passed, I clutched the donkey tail to my breast, took a deep breath and flung myself onto the ice, having forgotten to first remove the plastic skate guards on the blades.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever tried skating with skate guards on, but it’s pretty generally regarded as something serious skaters should steer away from. Skate blade guards are excellent things for when you’re walking around off the ice. But probably our first lesson at Swallender’s included an injunction to remove the guards before skating. They tend to sort of stop the skater dead in his forward progress. It’s the suddenness of the thing that makes it so unpleasant.

  The fall was spectacular. The donkey tail went flying. Head met ice and for a second I sort of lost interest in the proceedings. The shame and embarrassment flooded over me in a wave. Then, through a dull fog of shock and despair, I heard the laughter and everything changed. All I could think was I’ve got to get this fucking tail on this goddamned donkey. Off came the skate guards. I scrambled to my feet, and snatching at the donkey tail, I charged off in a mad pursuit of the retreating animal.

  The laughter increased, along with a smattering of applause. I raced up behind the donkey and smacked the tail on, to cheers from the audience. Couldn’t have gone better if I’d planned it …

  I believe that there is a natural human reaction to being laughed at by a crowd of people and it is a primal one. Like the ancient fight-or-flight response, our Neanderthal ancestors probably felt it. There was always that one guy in the clan who would slip when they were trekking across the ice floe. The derisive, mocking laughter of others in his clan would turn him, unknowingly, from the clumsy schmuck everyone made fun of to the comedian whose classic bit involved constantly slipping on the ice floe.

  Not for the last time it occurred to me, if I could make people laugh by mistake that way, think what might happen if I really tried …

  1964

  THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR

  In the meantime, though, even a hunger for laughter and applause wouldn’t get me on a pair of skates again so I retreated to my first love—reading.

  I had never really left it, of course. From the very dawning of perception, books were vital to every aspect of my being. But 1964 was the yea
r I turned eleven, and that was the year that two endless loves, unbidden, entered my life. When passions take hold of you at that age it never occurs to you that this is the beginning of one of the Big Loves, one of the loves that will never go away as long as you live. In early 1964 I was ten and when you’re ten you’re pretty much living half an hour at a time. But it is also around the end of one’s first decade, as all nerds know, that we are first bitten by the things that will obsess us forever. It’s then that we first realize we are nerds, around the same time that we start figuring out which gender we probably belong to. Both awakenings can be sudden and instantly life altering or they can come gradually, in fits and starts. But however they come, the result is momentous.

  I don’t think I ever had any thought about the gender question. Like many children, I didn’t as yet realize there was a question to be asked. But as far as the nerd question went, this was the year of the Great Awakening.

  It was significant enough that I’m taking a break in the chronology of my story to devote this chapter entirely to two of the extraordinary influences that made me a nerd, and which both occurred within that calendar year. And I should emphasize that what made this year a landmark was the fact that my love of books and music, which had been a constant in the most general way throughout my childhood, abruptly and unexpectedly became very specific indeed.

  There were always books in my parents’ house and in Roy and Dorothy’s. Ovi and Ida, on the other hand, weren’t readers. In their house, there were three books. Just three. One—improbably, given whom we are talking about here—was The Selling of the President, by Joe McGinniss, which must have been a gift to Ovi from someone at the bank; then, there was a battered copy of an old Edgar Wallace mystery, of the “Club of Men with Missing Feet” variety, which came from God knows where, but which I know he never read; and finally the great children’s book Stone Soup by Marcia Brown. That was probably the first book I recall possessing. I mean possessing in the spiritual sense, as I wasn’t allowed to take the book home with me. Ovi and Ida, I think, liked the idea of having a book on hand for me to read, though after a time, like, a decade, as dearly as I loved Stone Soup, it was a little light in literary calories and I was forced to supplement it with my own reading material. But I read it constantly, and deeply, and read it with my daughter years later, to the point that I knew what the stone soup tasted like. To this day, I can savor the taste of it as clearly as any food I ever actually ate.

  In addition to my family’s books, I was a loyal devotee of the local Book Mobile, a little bus filled to the brim with books that would pull up every couple of weeks in front of Lockwood Elementary School, which had no library of its own. Stepping into the Book Mobile really was, in Conan Doyle’s phrase, like walking through the magic door. It was a total sensory experience: the visual feast of old bindings on sagging shelves, the feel of the thick pages in my hands and of course the unmistakable, comforting yet heady scent of hundreds of old books in an enclosed space. I never wanted to leave. In a sense, I never have. The room in which I’m writing this now has the same scent.

  I was probably part of the last generation for whom there was a canon of nineteenth-century books that were considered the essential reading for every boy. By the time I was nine or so, I had them all—Doyle, Poe, Twain, Stevenson, O. Henry, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Wells, Verne, de Maupassant. But even before then, there were books, titles and authors, forgotten now, that I slept with and ate with.

  It was around 1960 or ’61, I think, after an argument with my mother on some doctrinal point she was insisting on regarding television or homework, that I decided to run away. I stormed off to my room, pulled out a suitcase and started slinging my book collection into it. If I’d known any expletives I’d have been muttering them under my breath. By the time I was done, there were no clothes at all in the suitcase, just books, and they weighed about 160 pounds. I didn’t notice. I dragged it into the living room and informed my mother that I was leaving. Her eyebrows went up in an appraising glance, standing there, one arm akimbo, looking even more like Gina Lollobrigida than usual. All that was missing were the sunglasses and a cigarette. Actually, in those days, Norma was so cool she made you believe she was wearing shades and smoking even when she wasn’t.

  “I’m leaving!!” I shouted, as I dragged the suitcase behind me.

  “Okay,” she said. “Don’t cross any streets.”

  “I won’t!” I snapped. And I meant it to sting.

  She told me years later how she watched, bemused, as I pulled this massive weight down Kenwood Court, stopping approximately every two houses to rest. Sometime later, my kindergarten teacher, who just happened to be driving past, saw me standing with the suitcase at a corner, apparently trying to figure out how to continue my quest without crossing a street. She stopped and picked me up. Exhausted, I went along quietly.

  My decision to run away from home with nothing but a bulging suitcase full of books was not just a phase that I was going through. My bibliophilia was a full-blown condition long before I even knew what a bibliophile was.

  Books have been in my blood for as long as I can remember, but as I made the transition from child reader to adolescent budding bookman, I now realize that books were both the essence of my nerd being, and also my salvation and my refuge. Every nerd will eventually come to understand one of the Great Verities: that whether his or her obsession is mathematics, gaming, comic books or anything else, whatever it is that allows us to embrace whatever it is that sets us apart from others is what gives us the strength to persevere and overcome. As some might take to drugs or religion or gang life, I took to books.

  Later, when my family was transferred to Switzerland, my love of books became a need. Cut off from American popular culture, with no television to speak of and too young by Swiss law to attend any new film that wasn’t a Disney release, books and music were my sole source of entertainment. Fortunately, my parents had books, and there was an English-language library in Geneva. The library, though, was problematic. We lived outside of the town and the way I was burning through volumes at that point made it necessary to make twice-weekly trips just to feed my habit. I started raiding my parents’ bookshelves, which contained the expected classics that any middle- or upper-middle-class college graduate of the time would be expected to have. And it was thanks to my parents’ collection that the Great Detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and his friend and associate John H. Watson burst into my consciousness like a couple of drunken uncles into a bar mitzvah, forever altering my reality.

  Now, of course, more people are familiar with these characters through their modern doppelgängers in pastiches, on television and film, but even though Holmes had been regularly interpreted in all media for decades, he and I met as total strangers on an autumn afternoon in 1964, deep in an armchair in the Swiss countryside, and we met between the covers of a book.

  For the uninitiated, the original Sherlock Holmes stories were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle between 1887 and 1927. They number a mere sixty stories but they are deathless examples of literature that outgrew their “adventure tale” origin. They’re the best classic detective stories ever written. They are literature. They have become my church.

  My father made the introductions. The story he picked was The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips—an interesting choice for several reasons, especially as it was one of the few cases where Holmes doesn’t actually apprehend the criminals. That petty failing was as nothing to me. The atmosphere was dark and thrilling, the protagonist mysterious and fascinating, the murders baffling and the killers weirdly recognizable to an American in the mid-sixties (spoiler alert!): they were members of the Ku Klux Klan!

  From there, nearly panic-stricken with excitement, I moved on to the classic novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, and the die was cast. My utter absorption in the life and times of the Great Detective was such that by the late sixties my father became concerned. We actually had a couple of “talks.” The kind of “t
alks” that other parents were having with their children when they thought they were becoming involved with drugs or free sex or communism. Nothing he could say, however, succeeded in releasing me from the thrall of Sherlock Holmes, and he eventually accepted the fact that there were worse pathways for his son to wander down.

  And after all, it wasn’t an entirely solitary pastime. As it turned out, Sherlock Holmes was responsible for introducing me to my first group of real, like-minded nerds. Sometime in 1970 I started subscribing to the literary quarterly the Baker Street Journal, which was the print organ of the legendary New York–based society the Baker Street Irregulars, founded by the writer Christopher Morley and assorted friends and drinking buddies back in 1934. In one issue I discovered with a shock of excitement the existence of a new scionist group of the Irregulars that had been established just miles from my home, and that it consisted entirely of young Sherlockians.

  At this point, I had given up any hope of ever dating, let alone having sex with anyone, so my weekends were always wide open. I applied to join the group and was accepted. It was really the best of all worlds because I could indulge my love of Sherlock Holmes and do it in a social group consisting of both genders, which was all we had in those days. The group was called the Trifling Monographs, named for the scientific papers Holmes wrote for various journals in his day. The Monographs was founded by Susan Rice, a progressive, imaginative and sympathetic young woman who taught at the Kingswood School in Bloomfield Hills. Susan was my first and in many ways most important nerd mentor. Not just a Sherlockian, she was also my first feminist, and the breadth of her knowledge was intimidating. She read widely, traveled compulsively and was as eager to share with us as we were to be taught by her. I always envied those who were actually her students. Meetings were generally held at her apartment, and it was in this group that I first realized there were people like me, people who spoke a common tongue.