Revenge of the Nerd

by Curtis Armstrong

  Unlike at the Collège du Léman, I was never bullied at the Lycée des Nations. I guess there were just too many better targets. Two of them haunt me to this day. I have no idea whether they are alive or dead. I have always wished I had been able to apologize to them. I was not one of their tormentors, but I never came to their defense either, which makes me just as culpable. One was a student named Angela.

  Angela had been dealt a shitty hand. She suffered from what appeared to be a variety of birth defects, including a cleft palate, which made understanding her difficult; bad eyes, which necessitated extraordinarily thick Coke-bottle glasses; and one leg that, I guess, was shorter than the other. She had one prescription shoe to try to remedy the problem but she still suffered from a strange, rolling gait. This girl had the worst imaginable type of target on her back, and the children were ruthless, especially the boys.

  Angela had already been the target of bullies before arriving at the school, and had developed a hostile attitude to everyone as a result. While it was not obvious at the time, it seems to me now that this was a pure defense mechanism, but it had the worst possible effect on those who didn’t need an excuse to bully her. She would be verbally abusive to everyone indiscriminately, in a futile attempt to lash out before being hurt herself.

  She needn’t have bothered. I don’t know if this child had a single day without pain or humiliation during the entire time I knew her. I had conversations with my mother about her, and Angela and I did have a few hours together once as an attempt to find some common ground away from the other children, to whom I was usually so busy trying to endear myself. It was unsuccessful. She had no experience communicating with boys at all and I was being my usual awkward, uncomfortable self. She went back to her own private hell and I went back to the few friends I had. My attempt at communication hadn’t only not worked, for all I know, it had made matters worse.

  The other victim of this kind of nerd persecution was actually one of the teachers. He was English, slightly pudgy, delicate, and clean shaven. He was terribly awkward in his dealings with everyone and, especially, the older sixth graders, whose instinct for the jugular was amazingly well developed. They had him spotted as a “fairy” from the start and some of them were unafraid of calling him one to his face. Horrible notes were left for him on his desk or tucked into his books. Complaints to the powers that be went unaddressed, I suspect because they thought it was all rather funny.

  The taunting of this man started with the sixth graders but when it became clear he was too weak to fight back, it trickled down, in a slightly less lethal form, to some of the boys in my year. He had milk poured on his head from the windows above as he entered the school. Boys would draw obscenities on the chalkboard for him to see as he arrived for class but no one would admit to being the culprit. One Christmas, the older boys left a wrapped Christmas present for him on his desk containing a brassiere.

  We finally broke him, I guess. He became reduced to a screaming, incoherent wreck by something someone had done in our class one day, I don’t even remember what it was. He left the school in tears, prompting the Scottish maths teacher to burst into our class almost speechless with anger at our treatment of this man.

  “If I’d done that when I was a lad,” he cried out in a strangled rage, “I’d ’ave been caned, I would!!”

  The teacher never returned to school and the word was he’d had a nervous breakdown and returned to England.

  Our age was no excuse. Regardless of who did what, we were all guilty and I still bear the mark.

  In Geneva, my friends were from other cultures, which was invaluable. Most of them didn’t even attend my school. Two of the most important were English brothers, Jon and Tom Higgins, the sons of a member of the English diplomatic service. Jon was the oldest, tall, lanky, with hair he was continually pushing back out of his eyes. He was truly sophisticated and experienced; he played cricket and smoked and remains probably the coolest person I ever met. His brother Tom was my age and he was the funniest person I had ever met. I know the two of them to this day and they haven’t changed that much. One of the things these boys did for me was to introduce me to the books of P. G. Wodehouse. If they had done nothing else, that was a gesture for which I will be forever grateful.

  Switzerland was also important because, being so centrally located in the continent, it gave my family the freedom to travel extensively. Aside from France, just minutes away, we traveled through Italy, Germany, Spain, England, Portugal, the Middle East and North Africa. We were in Greece just before the coup, Florence just after the flood, Beirut before the Six-Day War. In Morocco we saw unimaginable poverty and in Egypt we crawled through the Great Pyramid of Cheops. We swam in the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean. I danced with men in Jerusalem, took a ferry from Tangier to Lisbon when fog had grounded air traffic and tried—and came to love—every sort of food imaginable. And all this at a time when these places remained still untainted by American fast food and popular culture. The years I spent there remain probably the greatest gift my parents ever gave me.

  1967

  A SEAT AT THE SPAZZ TABLE

  I had left Detroit right after the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and I returned to it just after the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles weren’t the only ones who had changed during those watershed years. Though young, I had seen something of the world, and felt a growing sense of confidence. That was soon to be slapped out of me but I didn’t realize it at the time.

  Detroit had changed, too, and not necessarily for the better.

  During the few short years we had been away, Detroit had gone from what may have been considered its peak as a city that exemplified the dreams and possibilities of the industrial Midwest to a troubled and increasingly violent place. That was the summer that the Detroit riots swept the city, altering it forever.

  We were far from the center of the violence, having bought a house on Wiltshire Road, in the northern suburban town of Berkley, just two blocks from Woodward Avenue. My sister attended the elementary school on Catalpa Road, while I started doing my stretch in what I referred to as the Big House: Anderson Junior High School.

  My reentry into the suburban Detroit public school system was bumpy. I personally made certain of that the very first day, during orientation.

  It was one of those marathon days where you do fifteen or twenty minutes in one class, then on to the next—a break for lunch in the cafeteria—then another class and so on. Having come from the Lycée des Nations, it was a little intimidating. The Lycée was a house. You could’ve fit twelve Lycées into Anderson Junior High School. There was no cafeteria or gymnasium at the Lycée. There was no organized sport at the Lycée. If we wanted to play cricket, or baseball, we had to rip a picket off the fence in the backyard and play in the clothes we were wearing. It was kind of like going to school in Kenya compared to Anderson.

  My orientation had gone pretty well and I had begun to feel something approaching confidence when I walked into the classroom where we were to meet our gym teacher, Mr. Jordan. Mr. Jordan was like a high school gym teacher from central casting. Well-built, abundantly muscled, bald-headed, probably an ex-marine. He was dressed in matching gray sweats, with a whistle around his neck on a string. He needn’t have bothered. He wasn’t going to break a sweat talking to us in a classroom, and the whistle was just rank affectation. He entered the class after we were all seated and swung up onto the desk. All the other teachers had done orientation either standing at the blackboard or seated at the desk like human beings. Not Mr. Jordan. Desks were for sitting on. I got the feeling that desks were kind of beneath his contempt. They were things pussy intellectuals sat behind. He was sending a message to the boys: “I’m a goddamned drill sergeant in my gym. I’m your worst fucking nightmare. If you bring in a note from your mommy excusing you from push-ups, I’ll make you eat the note. And then do twenty push-ups. If you start whining during track that you’re sick and can’t run anymo
re, I’ll crush you like a fucking bug.” He might not have used those exact words, or really anything at all like those words, but that was the message he was putting out. The one I got, anyway. He was terrifying. He wasn’t just a gym teacher, which was bad enough. He was a fucking guy.

  You could feel the other boys in the class relax the minute they saw him. They’d started slumping down in their desks, smirking at one another—you know, the sort of thing they’d never try to get away with in civics class. They knew it was okay with Jordan. Desks were beneath their contempt, too.

  Jordan launched into his slightly bored recitation, with that “This is bullshit, but it’s what those eggheads on the school board expect me to say” attitude. He was telling us what was required, apart from absolute obedience on our part.

  “We will supply towels for showers. You will shower at the end of every gym class without exception. You need gym shoes. You will not be allowed in gym class without them. You will need clean gym shorts and tees year round. You will need one set of clean sweatpants and shirts in the winter. And of course, you will need a jockstrap. Any questions?”

  And this is where I made my first mistake.

  “Please, sir,” I said. “What’s a jockstrap?”

  Looking back, I see there were really two problems here, and it’s hard to say which was the biggest: the question itself or the twee little Lycée-inflected “Please, sir” which preceded it. It was an honest question. Partially I think I wanted to show him that I was paying attention and, since no one else was asking questions, if I asked one it might endear me to him. It was also, I’m afraid, a genuine request for information. Towels and gym shoes I was clear on. Gym shorts and tees I understood. “Sweats” was not a problem. But a jockstrap was, to my ears, an expression in a foreign language I did not speak.

  It was at least a minute by the class clock before the dust settled. There was one boy, I recall, with tears streaming down his face with laughter. Another fell from his desk, then stood up, laughing, and banged his desk repeatedly on the floor. These boys were howling, screaming—gasping—with laughter. Jordan looked down at the floor from his perch at the desk, knowing that there was no point in trying to regain control of his classroom for a while. And the laughter rolled over me like a great wave …

  Finally, once Mr. Jordan could be heard over the general hysteria, he said, “Okay, okay, come on, knock it off…” The boys settled down and he continued, in a surprisingly gentle voice. “A jockstrap, or athletic supporter,” he added, as if its official name might be more familiar to me, “is a strap you put on in gym to protect your balls.”

  This set the crowd off again as I felt that tiny thrill of confidence I had felt earlier in the day shrivel and die inside. The bell rang, we were dismissed and I was the proud possessor of my first school-wide nickname: “Jockless” Armstrong.

  I suppose that sort of thing was to be expected, but it didn’t end there. Verbal abuse in a place like Anderson was like a gateway drug to the hard stuff. It became pretty much open season on “Jockless” Armstrong after that and I found myself subjected to the occasional beating by my greaser friends. I was also mocked and persecuted by their girlfriends, who gave me another nickname: the Swedish Faggot. (I’d heard their blowjob skills were unsurpassed, but geography confounded them. I corrected them over and over, saying, “No, it’s Swiss Faggot. Not Swedish. Swiss!,” but it never seemed to sink in. “Faggot” was appended, I guess, because I could form sentences and didn’t use stray cats for batting practice, like their boyfriends did.)

  Greasers were interesting, sociologically. The subculture was unknown to me. Before I had left for Switzerland, I was in elementary school, where bullying was not an issue, or at least there was nothing about me that stood out to the point that I deserved it. About the worst you could say about me in those days was I thought the Beatles were women, which apparently didn’t warrant corporal punishment. Middle school was different.

  And I probably shouldn’t generalize about their girlfriends’ blowjob skills. Some may have been more accomplished than others, but I was obviously not in a position to judge. I understood what a blowjob was only in the vaguest sense, but the fact that blowjobs were something these cretins got on a regular basis was information I picked up one day during an otherwise routine bullying session from some guys in metal shop. They were all gathered around one of their lockers, huddled around something one of them was holding. As I passed by, one of them leaned across, knocked my books out of my hands and then kicked me over as I scrambled to pick them up. As I rose, I saw they were all facing me and one of them said, “Hey, Faggot. Look at this!”

  He showed me a photograph of his girlfriend—whom I recognized—with her mouth closed delicately around his massive, engorged penis. He and his pals snorted and butted each other like gleeful bison as I blushed and stammered, unable to take my eyes off the picture.

  Somehow, I said, with a desperate attempt at casual interest, “Huh. Cool.”

  His face lit up. “Oh, you like blowjobs from girls, too, Faggot? I’ll ask her, if you want. Maybe she’ll give you one!”

  I gave a sickly laugh—you know, just a little blowjob banter between the guys—and made my escape. I discovered later that this guy, whose name I long ago wiped from my memory, had at some point kicked out the back wall of his locker, revealing a space behind it large enough for him and his friends to get a little oral sex from their girlfriends at lunchtime. I didn’t believe it but then one day, during lunchtime, I was walking down the deserted hallway when his locker door opened from the inside and he and two of his friends and their three girlfriends emerged, like clowns tumbling out of a VW.

  This guy was one of my regulars. I’ve forgotten his name; we’ll call him Dan. Picking on the nerds at Anderson wasn’t just some kind of random thing, by the way. There was a kind of code among the abusers at that school. It was really kind of civilized almost: once one of these thugs found someone they felt comfortable brutalizing, the other guys tended to back off. For a while, it was open season on Curtis. Having come to Anderson from Switzerland, I was a particularly attractive target to these characters, and some days you could see them, hands twitching, waiting patiently in a line to have a crack at me, like senior citizens at a deli counter. But once Dan settled on me, it was a done deal, and the other guys respected that. Sometimes a new greaser might come into the school and just start hammering me at random, but the other guys would take him aside and explain the situation. “That’s the guy Dan beats up,” they’d explain. “Pick another one. There’s, like, hundreds here just like him.” And you know, the new greaser was always cool with that. Only when your regular bully dumped you—usually without so much as a phone call—would you be considered open game by the other guys. Kind of comforting, really. I went through several of these weird arrangements during my time at Anderson.

  For example, there was Ralph. Ralph was a big boy with a round face, pink cheeks and ham-like hands. His approach to dealing with kids smaller than he was to come up from behind and hit them very hard in the back of the skull with his heaviest textbook. He never said much. He wasn’t adept at verbal abuse. He preferred to let his textbook do the talking, and it was always effective. Ralph was the reason my mother decided to send me to judo classes on the weekend.

  Not knowing much about this ancient art of self-defense, I jumped at it. I figured I’d get a couple of easy suggestions on how to commit mayhem on other boys at my school and that would be it. I was horrified to discover that judo was a discipline that took time and trouble to learn correctly. Weekend after weekend I would attend classes to find myself thrown and battered by boys and girls years younger than I. I was also finding it difficult to imagine how I could induce my greaser friends to stand in front of me long enough for me to place myself properly to carry out my vengeance.

  In time, I became discouraged enough that when I noticed I was breaking out in a mysterious rash, I told my mother that I figured I was allergic to the gra
ss mats at judo school. I don’t think for a moment she actually believed me, but she relented.

  On my last day, I had a little farewell talk with my teacher.

  “Well,” he said, when I said I was leaving, “that doesn’t surprise me. Not really cut out for it, are you?”

  “Not really, no,” I confessed, with a frankness stemming from my certain knowledge I would never see this guy again.

  “What made you want to take the class?” he asked, knowing the answer. I told him I was being bullied and I thought it would help.

  He nodded thoughtfully. Then he said, “Okay, here’s a couple on the house. If someone is beating you, try to hook your index and middle finger in his nostrils. Like this, okay?’” He stuck two fingers into my nose. “Then pull back, hard. It’ll totally incapacitate him. If you pull hard enough, you can actually rip his nose off that way, so you shouldn’t do that unless it’s really an emergency. If you can’t get into their nostrils, just go for the eyeballs. That always works.”

  I’ve never forgotten his advice, though thankfully I haven’t had to use it. Strangely enough, having just received these pearls of wisdom from my instructor, I reached a moment of truth with Ralph.

  I was walking down the hall, when I felt the now familiar blow in the back of my head from Ralph’s textbook. And something happened. I experienced a second of blinding rage, threw my books to the ground, spun around, leapt into the air (Ralph was quite a bit taller than I) and hit him in the jaw with all my strength, with a closed fist.

  Ralph just stood there for a moment, the mindless grin wiped off his face like chalk off a blackboard. In the corner of his mouth was a small strip of saliva that had been knocked out by the impact. He stared at me without expression. Then, to my horror, I saw his eyes well up with tears.