Revenge of the Nerd

by Curtis Armstrong

  He was struggling to keep them back and unable to say anything in response to this wholly unexpected development. He was hurt. Not physically, of course. I doubt that even my most powerful hit would really have hurt him. It was something else. I realized at that moment that the constant shoving, kicking and head bashing had been Ralph’s way of showing affection. It would never have occurred to him that I would ever hit back.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I’m sorry.” I was sorry. “Are you okay?” He nodded and moved away. My guilt at having made this thoughtless bully cry was such that it wasn’t until years later that I could begin to see the irony. I want to make it clear that I’m not saying that violence solves all of our problems, though I know that’s the way it reads. Two things happened as a result of this: (a) Ralph never laid a hand on me again and (b) I took every chance I could to say hello to him. He started reciprocating and before long we became friends. Maybe “friends” is too strong a word. But we enjoyed each other’s company for short periods of time.

  Considering most of my relationships in middle school, that made us practically Damon and Pythias.

  After a few experiences, I made sure to stay clear of the showers after gym class. I was forbidden to eat lunch with the general population and was banished for many months to the Spazz Table. The Spazz Table became my cafeteria safe haven. This was where all the “retarded” children ate, supposedly, but I remember it as my introduction to nerds. Not brilliant, pop-culture literate computer geeks, who didn’t really exist as a culture yet. These were the real outcasts, the misunderstood, the bullied, the not-to-be-tolerated. A couple of them had eyeglasses so thick they made my head hurt. They were kids who moved oddly, smelled a little past the use-by date and dressed in mismatched stripes and checks, decades before any of that was fashionable.

  Obviously, no one who ate at the Spazz Table called it the Spazz Table. That was a designation bestowed upon us by others. It turned out, to my innocent surprise, many of my lunchmates were not technically spastics at all. As one of them patiently explained to me at the time, “We’re not retarded. We’re just slow.”

  I’m not certain they were even that slow. They were quiet, though. No ever one talked much at the Spazz Table and it was there I developed a lifelong horror of egg salad sandwiches, but these people were accepting and tolerant and always made room for me.

  Like any oppressed minority, they had learned the value of keeping your head down and not drawing attention to yourself when outnumbered in occupied territory. That’s actually a pretty good life lesson, and it would come in handy during my time in Hollywood years later. I came to school one day in a pair of bell-bottoms so tragically ill-conceived that someone shouted over the din of the crowded hallway, “Hey, Armstrong! Where’d you get those pants? Omar the Tent Maker?!” As a sally, it was actually an improvement over the usual stuff and I turned to see who was responsible. To my amazement it was actually one of the teachers. It had come to this. I switched to plain slacks.

  Into the nerd hell of bullying, verbal abuse and loneliness that was middle school one day appeared, looking like a kind of hip Greek god, Will Young, the new speech and drama teacher. There was a smudgy picture of him on the front page of the school newspaper in an article announcing his arrival. Looking resolutely unlike any other teacher in the school, impossibly handsome, with long, perfectly tousled hair, Will Young stared into the lens of the staff photographer with the quiet confidence of a man who knew where all the Minotaurs were hiding and, furthermore, intended to slay them all without breaking a sweat.

  But first, he needed to introduce me to my destiny.

  The little blurb under the picture heralding his arrival, obviously penned by a member of the Journalism Club in a state of feverish arousal, advised all the other female members of the student body not to faint, but this—THIS—was the new speech and drama teacher! If heart and unicorn emoticons had existed at the time, they would’ve been sprinkled all over the page. Anderson Junior High, as it was known then, may have had a speech or drama teacher already at that point—they may have had a dozen—but their existence was unknown to me. As a life raft to a desperate boy who had found nothing to keep him from slipping under the surface for the last time, they were less than helpful.

  Will Young changed everything. No one taking his speech and drama course emerged the same. Everyone discovered the performer rubbing up against the underside of their skin. People who took the class because it was an easy grade found themselves subtly changed. Some of my very worst tormentors in the halls and locker rooms came into Young’s class anticipating a midmorning nap, from which they would awake much refreshed; but before they realized it, they found themselves at the front of the class doing a three-minute storytelling mime exercise. It’s difficult to effectively bully smaller people after they’ve seen you pretending to be a poor homeless guy, begging for money on a street corner in the middle of winter. And then been applauded and praised for your performance, however rotten it may have been.

  Whatever purpose it may have been intended to serve, Will Young’s speech and drama class turned out to have been a great social leveler.

  One particularly tough character who wound up in Will Young’s class was Joey. Joey was tall, lanky, with shoulder-length blond hair and incongruously thick glasses. They were the kind of glasses kids at the Spazz Table would be teased about. Not Joey. Nobody teased Joey. This was a guy who made his own hunting bow in shop class. He was the sort of redneck brute that was very thick on the ground in the northern Detroit suburbs in those days. Ted Nugent owed his livelihood to characters like Joey. Though not a jock in the classic sense, he was still pretty much a pitiless thug when I first met him. But he wound up being one of those rare souls that, with a proper introduction to drama, found to his unutterable astonishment, that there was a little glimmer of immortal light inside of him. His friends on the lynching team might not have noticed the difference, but I did. He’d still knock me around the locker room after gym class, but now there were little differences, things only a regular victim like me would notice. Now there was a kind of twinkle in his eye as he knocked my head into a locker door. Or the way he would make sure the toilet had been flushed before sticking my head into it. They were small gestures, but I appreciated them.

  A couple of years later, while attending Will-O-Way Apprentice Theatre, a kind of theatrical day care center for rich people to dump their kids on the weekend, who should suddenly appear as part of the crew but my old nemesis Joey. The theater had proved to be as much a calling for him behind the scenes as it had for me centerstage. Letting the dead past bury its dead, I hailed him genially. After all we were now, as it were, brothers in the world’s second-oldest profession.

  He didn’t even recognize me. I couldn’t believe it. Frankly, I felt a little used.

  I tried to jog his memory.

  “Oh, come on, you remember me. It was only a couple years ago! You gave me my first wedgie!”

  He shrugged noncommittedly. Clearly he had given so many boys their first wedgie, he couldn’t be expected to remember all of them.

  “And that time I was climbing the big rope and almost made it to the top even though I was terrified and you suddenly grabbed the rope at the bottom and started to swing it around to try and throw me off?”

  True to form, his mind was a blank. But the fact that Joey and I were even having that conversation—if you could call it a conversation—was a kind of evolutionary miracle that I attribute without question to the drama course in general and Will Young in particular.

  But getting back to Mr. Young himself. One of the things about the man that kindled my imagination was that he was an actual actor. He wasn’t an American history teacher who had drawn the short straw and was stuck directing the school play that semester. He was the real thing. He had trod the boards. He knew the bitterness of rejection and the thrill of a great first night. He had sipped from the Cup. Will was the Gatekeeper.

  Everything th
at happened thereafter happened because of him. He was the one who gently pushed me into the National Forensic Society, where, for the first time, I seized the spotlight and never relinquished it.

  The National Forensic Society was basically an educational organization that recognized excellence by students in public speaking. There were numerous categories, such as declamatory speaking, current events, poetry and my choice, dramatic interpretive speech. The competitions started with one in the school itself. You then went on, in whichever category you had selected, to a local competition, district, then a regional, then a state final. What started out as a lark when you were just competing against the idiots you were going to school with would gradually become a heart-squeezing, breath-stopping agony of dread—less a friendly competition among fellow nerds and more like a difficult medical procedure than anything else.

  I underwent this torture a number of times. I never made it past the regional competition. The time I reached that, I faked illness to get out of doing it. My choices were predictably those of a boy who lived in books. One was Captain Ahab’s speech to the crew of the Pequod. Once I tried poetry and chose a poem virtually impossible to recite, Poe’s “The Bells.” But my masterpiece, the reading that established my reputation (such as it was), the piece that was so popular that I was requested to do it for classes all over the school, was my interpretation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, Scene 4, in which Cyrano humiliates those who mock the length of his nose by mocking it himself, brilliantly, for two pages. It was my mother who suggested I try it and, remarkably, there was a copy of the play on our shelves at home.

  It is a tour de force for any actor lucky enough to play it. After it became my signature piece I saw it truly performed in a production at the Hilberry Theatre in Detroit with Cyrano played, unforgettably, by actor John Sterling Arnold. I can hear his voice in my head to this day.

  For an outsider in middle school who was regularly picked on and mocked, and for whom revenge was always just out of reach, the power, the sense of self that Cyrano gave me wasn’t just gratifying, it was a revelation. “Acting,” as I thought of it at the time, gave me the self-confidence that all the martial arts in the world wouldn’t have done. I don’t know whether, when she made the suggestion, my mother understood the significance of the choice, or whether Will Young did as he worked with me to shape it. But there is probably no funnier or more tragic romantic nerd character in the post-Elizabethan canon. My discovery of Cyrano and John Sterling Arnold’s performance marked the moment my decision was made, positively and irrevocably, that I would make my living as an actor.

  The biggest immediate change was largely a symbolic one: as I found my niche, I started eating at a table with the drama kids. The Spazz Table became a thing of the past, a reminder of the dark days. I don’t remember the transition. One day I was with my fellow exiles, the next I was gratefully elsewhere. My former luncheon companions still sat at the old table, stolidly munching away in silence, serene, or at least philosophical, in the knowledge that people like me would always come to them when they needed a refuge but were guaranteed to disappear when they got a better offer elsewhere. I don’t recall any of their names.

  I still blush to think of it.

  1971

  THE NERD EMERGES

  Woodward Avenue, which begins at the Detroit River and runs far out through the northern suburbs and beyond, is the drab, utilitarian road separating East and West Detroit. As teenagers, the section of Woodward from 9 Mile to Long Lake Road was the legendary “cruising” area, as carloads of desperate suburban boys drove slowly up and down, seeking cars full of available girls, hoping for that one flustered, overheated grope that would give the lucky would-be cocksman sexual bragging rights over his friends. Cruising was something everyone did, but I don’t think I ever knew anyone who actually scored doing it.

  I certainly didn’t. My friend Ron Merkin and I would cruise Woodward every weekend, always with an optimism that remained undiminished in the face of constant failure. Ron was one of my best friends, a guy I looked up to for several reasons. One, because of his extensive experience with women (much of that completely invented, as he has admitted since). He was also an old hand at Will-O-Way Apprentice Theatre, that center of theatrical learning to which I aspired. And Ron drove a white Roadrunner, for God’s sake. A new one, with an FM radio and those race car things stuck on the back. If you couldn’t pick up girls in a white Roadrunner, we figured, you just weren’t trying. Ron even installed a telephone receiver—just the receiver, you understand, not the phone itself—so that if we drove up beside any likely prospects, we could pretend to be talking on the phone. Incredibly, even this didn’t work.

  The only time that anyone even noticed us was the night two very promising types with big hair came up beside us at a red light. Ron and I both scrabbled for the phone while trying to remain cool. After giving us a once-over, one of them rolled down her window, pointed at me and shouted to Ron, “Hey, is that a girl?” The charm of “cruising Woodward” paled considerably for me after that.

  I really hated cars. I still do. I didn’t care that, in the broad, abstract sense, cars put food on the table, clothed and educated me. By the time I was old enough to drive them, I wanted nothing to do with them. My friends had cars and we were usually going to the same places. In a pinch I’d take buses.

  In Detroit in those days, driver’s education was a part of every high school student’s life, like everywhere, only being Detroit, even more so. It was a part of the curriculum, unless you were Amish and could opt out on religious grounds. One of our driver’s ed teachers was an alcoholic, and once the students were actually out behind the wheel, we’d have to go on quick runs to the liquor store. This was fine by me. The actual mechanical driving of cars was never a problem for me. But then it would come time for the written exam and I would absolutely go to pieces. I could not—or would not—pass this goddamned test.

  I amused and amazed friends and family alike by failing the written driver’s education exam not once or twice but three times. Finally, in despair, my parents sent me, secretly, to take the course taught by a seedy character who rented a filthy room in the basement of Northland Mall whose name, he claimed, was Fashman. He was paid in cash, there was no sign on the door and you had to knock to be admitted, so the whole process felt like a drug deal. It was clear even to me that this was where they sent real idiots to drive.

  There really was a sense of shame in the whole thing; kind of how parents would send their pregnant daughters to give birth out of town so no one would know. I never told a soul that I was matriculating at the Fashman School of Driving or whatever it was called. It took me forty years to find out that my best friend in high school also took driver’s ed there. He never told anyone either.

  But by the 1970s, everyone my age either had their driver’s license or had lost their virginity, or both. Lots of people only got their license in order to lose their virginity. It was a rule.

  For people with big families, the car was literally the only place they had any privacy at all. I had loads of privacy. My parents spent a lot of time out of the house and my sister was often with friends. I had the house to myself. The only thing missing was the other person.

  Anyway, to everyone’s relief, I finally passed my test and became an adult in the eyes of the state of Michigan, if not exactly my own. The sex thing was still some ways off, but this was a start.

  The night of the day I passed, I stood with my father next to the car he didn’t care so much about, which was, by unspoken understanding, the one I would drive. I remember it so well. A late autumn evening, the musk of burning leaves hanging in the air, the first chill heralding a long Michigan winter. It was kind of a big moment and we both knew it. As he handed me the keys to go out for the first time on my own, he had a word of fatherly advice. It wasn’t “Don’t drive drunk,” or “Remember to drive defensively, there are some crazy people out there.” No. His sole piece of advice in th
e driveway that night was, “No copulating in the car.”

  No copulating in the car? Who did he think he was talking to? Was he joking? I give you my word, until that moment, the thought of copulating in the car had literally never entered my mind. Beds, certainly. Beaches, zoos, beside railway tracks, in woods, in airplanes, absolutely. When you’re not having sex, pretty much anywhere sounds like a good idea. But in cars? I couldn’t even imagine how you would do it. But of course, thanks to my dad, from that moment on, all I could think about was copulating in the car.

  Never did, of course. Which brings me to a recounting of my adolescent romantic history, a subject that has the advantage of brevity if nothing else. I have said that I couldn’t get dates in high school, which is mainly true, though that didn’t stop me from having girlfriends. Far from it: I had, by a rough estimation, dozens of girlfriends between the end of middle school and high school graduation. The catch was, none of these young women actually knew she was my girlfriend.

  This was the peak of my Imaginary Girlfriend stage.

  To clarify, the Imaginary Girlfriend is not the same thing as a crush. It isn’t just not being able to take your eyes off someone. It isn’t someone you want to be with if you could only get up the nerve to ask her. It isn’t even the one you fantasize about when you’re masturbating, assuming you know how to do that.

  No, an Imaginary Girlfriend is one who you may or may not know, who maybe knows you; who might even be your friend, in the strictly platonic sense. She can even have a boyfriend. She can even talk to you about problems she’s having with her boyfriend or boyfriends, because as her friend, you are safe. Only, while she’s talking and you are listening sympathetically, you are thinking about what’s going on in your Imaginary Relationship with her.