We represented a wide variety of Sherlockians with other things in common, like virginity, for example. In those days, forming “clubs” like the Trifling Monographs was a handy distraction for people who hadn’t experienced sex yet. It kept our hands busy. One girl I took a particular shine to was not just a Sherlockian, but also a Trekkie, which made her positively exotic. I never dreamed of approaching her, though, as I imagined there was probably some sort of Victorian code that would forbid our mixing Sherlockian business with that sort of pleasure. Not only was there no such thing, but she told me many years later that she had actually been sexually active at the time, just never with Sherlockians. Back then, it transpired, when she wasn’t winning quizzes on Sherlock Holmes trivia like Name the Number of Dogs in the Canon, or What Type of Wine Was Watson Drinking When Mary Morstan First Came to Consult Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four, she was dating a Detroit-area disc jockey.
I was shocked. “A disc jockey?!” I exclaimed, when she told me this. “A disc jockey?! What about me? I was in need! I was up in my Sherlock Holmes trivia! What did your disc jockey know? Could he name the three colors of dressing gowns Holmes wore in The Sacred Writings?”
“No, he couldn’t,” she replied. “That’s why I was dating a disc jockey.”
To this day I read, reread, discuss and write about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes with the devotion and commitment of the Talmudic scholar to his holy writings. I have even, thanks to Susan Rice, been inducted into that storied society, the Baker Street Irregulars, whose main purpose, aside from drinking, is the study, celebration and analysis of the Holmesian canon. Amazingly, I’ve been around long enough to have actually been witness to a kind of schism within the Sherlockian world. Some old-school Sherlockians of my generation, I’m sorry to say, are finding the Sherlock Holmes fandom of the younger generation unworthy of inclusion in their Holmesian world. These older, frankly bigoted Sherlockians consider themselves “aficionados” or “elite devotees,” while younger, especially female Sherlockians are dismissed as “fans.”
I had friends in both camps, but it wasn’t difficult for me to pick the side I was on. I went with the fandom and I always will. I wasn’t an elite devotee in the sixties and I’m not now. I’m a fan and I’ve never forgotten what that whole-souled, years-long immersion in Sherlock Holmes gave me in those early days. Here’s a little story that will show you what I mean.
It was a particularly bleak winter in Detroit in 1969. We had returned from Switzerland and I was struggling to adjust to a teenager’s life in suburban Detroit with mixed results. I had a few friends now, but Preferred Girlfriends shares were down in the cellar with no takers, as they would be for years. I was sitting in my room overlooking Wiltshire Boulevard, my fancy, as a young man’s will, turning to thoughts of love. There was a girl I had fallen in love with at that time—her name was Jan—who liked me “as a friend” but who had a boyfriend who was a drummer in a rock band. The glamour quotient of this guy was off the charts, especially when compared to me, stuck as I was learning Woody Guthrie songs on my mother’s old Gibson. While he was gigging with his band on the weekends I, thanks to one of those cruel coincidences that Charles Dickens used to write about, was babysitting his young cousins. Plus he was a really nice guy. How I hated him.
Anyway, I was thinking of Jan that evening, probably listening to some appropriately depressing music to help the mood along when I had a sudden idea. I had just reread A Scandal in Bohemia, a Sherlock Holmes story that begins with Watson passing the well-remembered door of 221B Baker Street, where he had once shared rooms with Sherlock Holmes. He looks up and sees Holmes’s shadow passing the blind and impulsively goes up to visit him. It was the beginning of a new adventure and it occurred to me that what worked for Holmes might work for me.
I had somewhere acquired a violin, cracked and missing strings, which I had in my room because I had some ridiculous idea I might get it fixed and then take violin lessons, because Holmes, you know, played the violin. So I should. By the same logic, I should also start injecting a 7 percent solution of cocaine when I was bored because he used to do that, too. (I was already smoking a pipe on the sly, usually in the bushes in front of my house.)
Anyway, having just read this story, and my eyes falling on this violin, I thought what if I were to draw my bedroom shade, backlight myself so that my silhouette is thrown dramatically on it and pretend to play the violin? When the object of my affection would walk past my house, she would naturally look up and see me there sawing away and think, “Hum. He’s really a lot more interesting than I thought. Look at him up there, all solitary and brilliant…” and so on. And from there to the bed was just a few metaphorical steps.
I got myself set up and properly lit and got to business. Most of the time I just sat there, reading or staring off into nothingness until I would hear people talking in the street or a car drive by. Then I would desperately leap to my feet, grab the violin and start hacking away at it. Of course, Jan lived about a mile away and the odds of her ever driving or walking anywhere near my house were incalculable. Fortunately, math was never my strong subject, but I had more optimism and imagination than any fifteen boys of my age and weight.
I gave up eventually. She never walked by. She never came up to me with her eyes shining strangely to say, “Curt, I didn’t know you were a violinist!” or, “I’m worried about you. You spend too much time alone!” Actually, I didn’t. I continued to hang out with her and her boyfriend in the evenings at his house, while he practiced piano. (He played beautifully, of course.) We became very good friends, she and I, for years, even to this very day.
So pretending to be Sherlock Holmes may have been a poor strategy when it came to getting a girlfriend, but no one can say it didn’t give me solid fanboy credentials.
* * *
And now, we return briefly to 1964 for a look at that second life-changing influence. This takes us out of the book realm and into music.
While it took a few years for me to find a community with which to share my love of Conan Doyle, the same can’t really be said about my second obsession. You couldn’t miss this community. It wouldn’t have fit in Susan Rice’s apartment. I was just one of millions swept up in the cultural slipstream. Like Sherlock Holmes, this is a passion that continues to be a source of joy and nourishment to this day.
One comment I’ve heard over the years in meeting members of fandoms—and I’ve met a lot of them—is that they appreciate my appreciation of their own obsessions. I have a sympathetic understanding for their love of something, whatever it is, whether I share a love of that particular fandom or not. And there is an excellent reason for this.
As we’ve seen, I am one of them. For them it may be Star Wars, World of Warcraft, My Little Pony or Supernatural. For me it’s Sherlock Holmes, P. G. Wodehouse, Washington Irving, the classic horror film cycles of the thirties and forties and Laurel and Hardy.
Or, arriving finally at the nub of this section, the Beatles, which was where my proclivity for fandom really began. It was there that the dormant fandom virus first turned into the full-blown disease. It started for me with the Beatles, in Detroit, in 1964. It was only months after the assassination of JFK, during one of those bitter winters where Detroit was beginning to feel like you imagine Pluto must feel; at just the point when you suspected that spring probably died in Dallas along with the president; just at that moment, if you were anywhere near my age in the U.S. with a radio or television nearby, at that moment everything changed, and changed splendidly.
It was February 9, 1964, and my family was in a state of suspended animation, still in Detroit, everything boring and typical, as prosaic a suburban life as ever, but the clock was ticking down to our eventual departure for Switzerland and an unimaginable future. The earth had been shaking for some time in the anticipated arrival of the Beatles to the former colonies, in a way that makes me wonder sometimes what it all would have been like with social media, God help us. On February 9 I
was stretched out in pajamas staring at a small black-and-white screen, not much bigger than the one I’m writing on now, about to watch the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday night. And I was watching them under protest!
Yes, I didn’t want to watch Ed Sullivan that Sunday night and I didn’t give a shit about the Beatles. Amazing—I actually know to the precise date and hour the last time in my life I didn’t care about the Beatles. Here’s how little I cared: a couple of days before, my father came home with the paper, featuring a front-page photo of the Beatles on an airplane, bound for New York. My response?
“If there’s one thing I hate,” I said, to my eternal shame, “it’s women who try to dress up like men.” I was ten, but age is no excuse. For the first and last time in either of our lives, my father had to explain the Beatles to me.
My sister Kristin, like many girls her age, was tuned into the phenomenon before everyone else, by a kind of gender-based osmosis. People like Kristin hadn’t even heard the music—they just knew. I, a clueless boy, fought to watch The Wonderful World of Disney but was overruled, and so the Beatles it was.
Looked at today, it’s an indication of how the world has changed that there was a time when a man like Ed Sullivan would have had a television show at all, especially when there were only three channels and bandwidth was at a premium. Even more astonishing was the fact that his TV show—which had been a radio show before called Toast of the Town—was one of the most popular in the country.
He looked like somebody who sold televisions, not starred on them. But to say that he was the Simon Cowell of his day is not only incorrect but insulting to Ed Sullivan. Sullivan didn’t create pop gruel for the masses. His shows were clogged with Borsht Belt comics, cornball puppet acts, lounge singers, magicians and god knows what, and are pretty much unwatchable now, but he did have an uncanny instinct for cultural shifts, and when something like the Beatles popped up on the horizon, he grabbed them. He was not a nice man, by some accounts, but he was The Man, nonetheless. Popular culture had the Ed Sullivan Stamp of Approval in the America of those days, or it wasn’t popular. Or culture, for that matter.
So there I was, a pajama-clad, sullen ten-year-old, stretched out on my stomach, watching Sullivan doing his “And now, here they are, THE BEATLES!” introduction, as McCartney counts in the band and “All My Loving,” a song I had never heard in my life, begins.
It took a few minutes—change is never instantaneous. At some point during that show, during which the Beatles appeared only at the beginning and the end, I began to feel … something. A widening of the eyes, perhaps, a breathlessness. And then, a curious … tingling in the loins. Possibly my first conscious erection, as feeble and pointless as it may have been. Certainly the first I remember. Was it them? Was it the frequent camera cuts to the young girls in the audience, many of them around my age, who were experiencing similar stirrings themselves? It was a little of both, probably.
It’s hard to recount the moment when one’s world changes forever. Now, the closest thing I could compare it to in its unforgettable, life-altering, immediate intensity is sex, and honestly, it was better than that. Sex took some time to get the hang of (in my case well over two decades) and to really enjoy properly. But this? This was Instant Joy. This was Right and Complete The Very First Time. Guilt-free and no mess to clean up afterward.
Music was something I had always known. We were a musical family. Pianos were played in our homes, and records—classical, jazz and easy listening, mainly. But the Beatles made music a vibrant, living thing for me. Listening to those early records never really made me want to be a musician, the way it did for many. Listening to it, delving into it, living within it: that was my glory.
Somewhere between Meet the Beatles! and The Beatles’ Second Album I became a Beatles nerd.
In another even more important way they affected me. The first books I ever attempted to write were Beatles books. Modern fandoms know what I’m talking about. They were scrapbooks by definition, I suppose, but to me they were more. Whole biographical chapters, drawn from pop magazines, rumor and imagination, were my first stumbling attempts at writing something for the ages! I was translating my indefinable passion—what I would someday come to understand as a nerd’s passion—into a form of literature. The Beatles have remained—together and apart—as much a part of my life as breathing, tea, food, books and Scotch. They have fed me when I was hungry, warmed me when I was cold. After fifty years they mean as much to me as ever and when I hear them sing, I am young again.
More than any other single thing, they made me the nerd I am today.
GENEVA
1964–1967
The Beatles were also, along with my collection of books, the only things I remember taking with me when we left Detroit for Geneva in 1964. I had the first three American albums, which were beginning their slow, agonizing Death by a Thousand Scratches from continual replaying on the worst battery-operated turntables the sixties could produce. All my friends, initially unimpressed that I was moving to Switzerland, were now thrilled beyond belief that we were stopping in London for several days on our way, certain in their belief that we would run into the band at some point during our visit. That trip to London, coming in conjunction with my Beatles fixation, planted the seeds of a lifelong indulgence of Anglophilia that, years later, even Margaret Thatcher couldn’t extinguish.
Once I had recovered from the shock of displacement I came to realize that if Switzerland wasn’t a perfect world, it was quite good enough. Our neighborhood, outside of Geneva, was called Chambesy and it was a quaint Swiss village, suburb, wilderness area and farmland combined. I made friends quickly: Americans, English, Australians, Greeks—no Swiss, oddly enough. I had a bike that I could ride all the way into Geneva, a route which took me essentially through the old Rothschild estate, whose abandoned, moldering family chapel we were able to break into and play in for hours at a time. We could stop and stare at the palatial embassy mansions around the United Nations.
If time were of the essence, I could ride into the village and take the train into Geneva and then cycle through the city, with regular stops at the Maison de Disques for the latest 45s or the English Book Shop for a new P. G. Wodehouse or Ian Fleming novel.
There was a forest down the road and some summer nights once the house was still, my friends and I would meet, go down to the forest and, alongside the stream that ran through it, build a fire and spend the whole night telling stories, roasting potatoes and trying to smoke cigarettes. I tended to blow on them instead of inhaling them, sometimes sending the lit tip shooting off into the darkness. My older friends tried gently to teach me the method but it was too much like work and I gave up on it.
So, basically, it was a Tom Sawyer existence, only in the middle of Europe instead of Missouri. There was an old walled-in graveyard, overrun with weeds with the headstones all broken and stained, listing to one side or the other, and until you’ve heard ghost stories told in a place like that at midnight, you’ve never heard ghost stories. We even stole apples by night from an old man’s orchard down the road. In the States, he would’ve fired a couple barrels of buckshot at us. In Geneva, all he could do was loose his superannuated hound on us. Arthritic and short on breath, the dog’s heart was never in it, but it was probably the only exercise he got. That was my life in the summer of 1965.
My first school in Geneva was the Collège du Léman. I have few recollections of the place but there are three memorable events that, in small but significant ways, shaped me.
For a while we were driven to school in the mornings, but after a while it was decided that we should take a bus like everyone else. So one winter’s morning we walked the quarter mile or so through the bitter cold to the corner where the bus would pick us up.
This corner had a curious feature: a horse trough. A working one, for there were always horses about our neighborhood, with a steady stream of water trickling out of a pipe into the deep, bathtub-shaped cement
trough. This first morning at the bus stop we had had a sharp freeze that had frozen the water solid. Well, of course, you’d have to be an idiot to not take advantage of an iced-over horse trough. It was for me the work of a moment to stash my book bag and clamber up onto the ice, skidding back and forth almost like the good old days at Swallender’s Ice Studio. It was at that moment that the bus came over the hill and pulled up. I, of course, stayed on the ice long enough for everyone on the bus to get a good view of me just at the moment that the ice cracked and I plunged into the depths of the horse trough.
The shock of the freezing water was bad, but as I surfaced I at least had the comfort of knowing I had given my fellow students the laugh of their short lifetimes. I couldn’t hear them because the bus was closed up, but their mouths were all wide with silent laughter, which added to the nightmarish feeling of it all. The other kids at my stop boarded, and the bus driver drove off without a backward glance as I started the long miserable walk back to the house, my clothes literally freezing as I walked.
Another vivid memory involved a curiously barbaric game we boys were forced to indulge in on cold winter mornings like that just described. Immediately after arrival at school, upper- and lower-school boys were herded onto the football field. The younger boys were handed white towels that we had to tuck down into the back of our trousers, like tails. Then, on a signal, we were to run, hell for leather, down the football field, through a small gate at the back and off the school property, down a pretty, winding road that went past the school. After a count of thirty, the older boys would be unleashed to run us down, retrieving the while tail as a trophy. The boy with the most tails before the end of the game won.
Revenge of the Nerd Page 4