Forever Nerdy

by Brian Posehn

  My second Big Brother, Doug, was actually pretty great. We went to a hockey game, watched Oakland A’s games in his apartment, and ate KFC and drank soda. It was my first time eating KFC. I remember it well, and the soda sticks out because my mom wasn’t letting me drink sugary drinks at the time in a misguided effort to combat my hyperactivity, but I didn’t tell Doug my mom’s soda rule.

  We also built models, and he took me to the zoo and a boat show—yep, a boat show. Dude took a seven-year-old to a boat show. Doug and I had a deal: every other week was his turn to pick the activity. A grown man who, while giving his time to charity, still had to have “his time.” WTF, right, Marc Maron? So one week we went to a circus, and next week we went to a fucking boat show. I’m sure he made someone an awesome, selfish dad one day. Plus, Doug had two cats in his apartment, so who knows what the fuck was going on with Doug.

  My memories of seventies TV started with Sesame Street, Electric Company, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, the awesome animated Spider-Man show, and both versions of Batman, the animated and the live-action classic. I also enjoyed The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, Family Affair, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, The Munsters, The Addams Family, Nanny and the Professor, and pretty much any cartoon I laid my eyes on.

  It doesn’t sound like it, but my mom kept my TV watching pretty limited. I think I got to watch my shows for an hour every day. Saturdays I got two hours. And outside of the news and PBS, she didn’t watch a ton of TV. I remember her watching variety shows and specials, Flip Wilson, Laugh In, and The Smothers Brothers, which was my first exposure to adult comedy.

  A lot of popular shows I saw were courtesy of other people’s TVs. I saw Roger Moore as the Saint at my neighbor Sharon’s house. She had a teenage daughter, Kathy, who babysat me sometimes. When I stayed with my grandparents in Sacramento neither one of them watched a ton of TV outside of The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle.

  I saw Gilligan’s Island, I Dream of Jeannie, and Bewitched at my Grandpa Ed’s neighbor’s house. She was this nice lady named Marie. I would do yard work for her, and she’d let me hang out and watch TV while she fixed treats for me. She had a son but no grandkids. Her emptiness meant snacks and TV for me.

  I saw Elvis at our apartment manager’s place. On TV—he wasn’t hanging out in a San Jose apartment. She was this nice, heavyset lady named Liz, with a B-52s haircut and a southern accent. All I remember about Liz and her husband and son is that they were massive Elvis Presley fans. And I thought Elvis was pretty cool.

  My buddy and next-door neighbor Patrick was watching Yellow Submarine one Sunday night. When it was time for him to go to bed, I ran home to watch the rest of it on my TV. I was blown away by the animation, songs, and weird story. I didn’t even know who The Beatles were. This was my first exposure to cool popular music; my mom mostly played folk and Barbra Streisand at home and on the AM car radio.

  I remember thinking Mr. Magoo was super funny and sounded like the dude on Gilligan’s Island. It was. I honestly recall making that connection and thinking voice-acting seemed like a cool job. It is. I also thought sitcom acting looked fun and was drawn to the second-tier guys like Barney Fife and, later, guys like Schneider, Bull, and Reverend Jim.

  This sounds crazy, but I also remember hearing the term “character actor” at a really young age, and my first thought was that it sounded appealing. But I didn’t run around telling people, “I either want to be an astronaut or a character actor” or anything that on the nose.

  Ever hear about the note Jim Carrey wrote to himself about how he was going to be a very famous comedy star one day? Dane Cook apparently did something equally gross. I didn’t do that. I did write myself a letter, though, telling myself to never do anything Jim Carrey or Dane Cook ever did.

  There was scary stuff on TV if you looked for it, and when I found it, I was in love. Creature Features was a local monster movie show with host-wrap-arounds that ran on a Bay Area UHF channel. It seemed like it was on TV all the time. I remember watching it in the middle of the day on a Saturday and later at night. I wasn’t really into the British Hammer horror flicks, but Godzilla, Mothra, and the Universal monsters all blew me away, even after my Dracula nightmares.

  Bob Wilkins was the host of Creature Features, and I was a big fan. He was a local TV weatherman who also had this as a cool side gig, hosting horror and sci-fi flicks on the same channel he did the weather. So I was pretty excited when Bob Wilkins asked my mom out on a date after judging her in a beauty contest. A tall beauty contest. I think she took second place. My mom was pretty shy and still had high school “tall girl” issues, so I’m surprised and impressed she even competed. Mom passed on the date with Bob Wilkins, but I like to think she fucked him. Not really.

  When I was eight years old my Grandpa George retired from the meat business. He had owned a couple of butcher shops in the Bay Area. Before he retired, I called him Grandpa Salami or Grandpa Bologna because he always had cold cuts for me. In 1974 he moved with my Grandma Grace to Sonoma, California.

  That Christmas I was very mean to my Grandpa George when he was just trying to help my mom, but of course I didn’t know that ’til she told me. I threw a temper tantrum because he and my grandma didn’t give me toys. They gave me a winter jacket, which I needed, and I screamed about it. What a dick. A skinny, little, spoiled dick. I’ve felt shitty about that my whole life. A little well-placed mom guilt goes a long fucking way.

  In my defense, I didn’t know my mom was struggling because she didn’t start telling me that every day until I was ten or so. I loved playing with toys, but I didn’t have a ton. Waah, waah! But I did have a nice winter jacket. When I was eight I really coveted the toy collection of another kid who lived in the same apartment complex as us.

  He was younger and had the entire collection of Mego DC action figures, including the Batcave and Batmobile. Megos were and are awesome. They were like Barbies for boys, action figures with articulation and removable cloth costumes. And like Barbie, when you took their clothes off, they didn’t have parts, just confusing bumps. Made me wonder: Why do I have a wiener? Shouldn’t I just have a weird bump like Robin?

  This kid in my building had Robin and his weird junk and every hero and villain from the DC universe. That was an early lesson in jealousy. He also had both of his parents. I had a Mego Batman and Spider-Man and that was it.

  Which brings me to Evel Knievel toys. It was the seventies, so I had an Evil Knievel phase. All of America had an Evel Knievel phase. Even his failures like the Snake River Canyon were massive events and had toys created about them that you had to have. The rocket-car failed and Evel almost died, but if your mom didn’t buy you the new Evel Knievel Snake River rocket-car, she was a real jerk. Hang tight, though, because I’ve written whole chapters about my other early nerdy obsessions.

  My mom regularly took me to school with her at San Jose State. I would sit in the library while she was in class, and on nice days I would play outside in the quad by myself, totally unattended. At eight years old. My eight-year-old son doesn’t do anything alone. He has never been alone ever.

  One day I brought a couple of toys to the university quad with me. See, I had some. One was a rubber Dudley Do-Right figure I had from the seventies cartoon. I also had a Bullwinkle. Loved those dudes.

  So I was throwing my Dudley figure at a tree, as one does. Especially if one is an eight-year-old weirdo. I got the figure stuck in a tree at one point, and a student used his Frisbee to get it down. Thank god, it was the seventies on a California college campus, so of course some dumb hippie student was winging a Frisbee around, man.

  Glad it wasn’t the nineties—I would have had to stand there, waiting impatiently, while he kept throwing his hacky sack, saying, “Oh dude, almost… one more try!”

  I also went on job interviews with my mom. I remember being scared by this developmentally disabled lady at Agnews State Hospital chasing me in her pajama gown, screaming, “Kiss me! Kiss me! Kiss me!” I was terri
fied at the time, but maybe she was just a fan of The Cure.

  The craziest, most inappropriate thing my mom did with me, though, is while she was going to San Jose State for her psychology major, she had to do volunteer work for credit and work experience. So a couple of weekends in a row she took me to a sober-living house. I didn’t know what was going on with everybody there; I just thought they were weird. And chatty. Super chatty.

  I guess my mom really didn’t want me to have another bad babysitting experience, but she wasn’t concerned about me being abducted from the school grounds while I was chucking my rubber Dudley Do-Right at a tree and raped with a Frisbee or some other generational leisure device. It was also okay to raped/murdered by a rabid patient at a state institution. Or simply terrified by said rabid patient. Can kids have heart attacks?

  Mom apparently also wasn’t worried about me being sold on the white kid market for drugs by a desperate druggie trying to cop one more high, seventies style, on uppers, downers, or good old heroin—that classic. I was a white male, and white males are, as everybody knows, the most valuable children. Although I had a vision problem and peed the bed, so I was worth substantially less than normal white kids.

  Speaking of shit I would never do with my kid, I spent a lot of time alone in department stores while my mom shopped. I remember seeing Kolchak: The Night Stalker on TV at a Sears and wanting to know everything about Kolchak: The Night Stalker. The episode I saw at Sears in January of 1975 was “The Trevi Collection” (thanks, Google).

  Kolchak, played by the brilliant Darren McGavin, was investigating a murder in the fashion industry and winds up defending himself from crazed mannequins at a high-fashion department store. He finds out that the mannequins were controlled by an evil witch. Of course they were. Notice I said evil, not the sexy, barefoot, Stevie Nicks kind of witch.

  So there I was, sitting Indian-style (or the more current and politically correct “criss-cross apple sauce”) in front of the biggest TV this seventies Sears could muster, watching something called Kolchak: The Night Stalker. And I was in. I couldn’t have been more in. He was a reporter fighting werewolves, vamps, and possessed mannequins. I want to watch that now.

  I later saw and loved the 1972 movie The Night Stalker. The TV movie and the show were written by Richard Matheson, a Twilight Zone writer and author of one of my all-time favorite books, I Am Legend. I would find out later he’s one of Stephen King’s favorite writers.

  Kolchak and 1975’s Trilogy of Terror, along with my Dracula dreams and the giant monsters from Japan, planted the horror seed. Trilogy of Terror—have you seen that shit? Holy fucknuts! It was a made-for-TV movie in 1975, and it was exactly as advertised: three short stories meant to terrify. It did. It’s not something I have rewatched, though, so I doubt it holds up. To be honest, all I remember is the one story “Amelia,” where a woman, Amelia (Karen Black), brings home a little creepy voodoo doll, called a Zuni fetish doll.

  And oh god, is that tiny thing fucking creepy, with its crazy eyes and sharp teeth. It is tiny, though. You could totally kick the fuck out of it. When you’re not shitting your pants. Fuck that thing. So Amelia brings it home and sets it down. It has a tiny spear and a gold chain around its neck. When the chain falls off, the little fucker comes to life and tries to kill Amelia. She fights it and later destroys it. She burns it up in the oven.

  SPOILER: the smoke gets in her lungs, and she is taken over by the doll’s spirit. She later waits to kill her mom, with a knife, crazed and panting like a monster. It’s forty-three years old, so the spoiler is on you. Just thinking of that little Zuni doll still freaks me out, even as I’m writing this. That terrifying little face is burned into my memory. By the way, here is a nerdy fact (non-nerds, sit this one out): nerds, do you know who wrote “Amelia,” based on his own short story “Prey”? Richard fucking Matheson, y’all.

  The first movie I remember seeing in a theater was Bambi. It was a fucking bummer. SPOILER: Bambi’s mom dies. Then I saw Charlotte’s Web—you know, that cheery classic. SPOILER: oh, never mind. There was an early seventies-style multiplex (so, two theaters) in San Jose, and my mom and I would save money by going to matinees.

  We saw all the Disney classic animated films like Cinderella, Peter Pan, Aristocats, 101 Dalmatians, and then a bunch of those late-sixties/early-seventies live-action Disney films like Swiss Family Robinson, Parent Trap, That Darn Cat, Blackbeard’s Ghost, and The Love Bug and its sequels. My mom didn’t always enjoy the Disney comedies. I think it was when we saw That Darn Cat, and on the way out of the theater she was really negative about it and called it “ludicrous.” A Disney kids comedy about a Siamese cat that solved crimes was ludicrous? No shit. And thanks, Mom.

  Of all the Disney live-action films, my favorites were the Kurt Russell classics, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Now You See Him, Now You Don’t, and, in my opinion back then, the best of the bunch, The Strongest Man in the World. And then in 1975 I would have my mind blown by a Disney film, Escape to Witch Mountain.

  Escape had it all—humor, magic, creepy bad guys, aliens, and cute, little Kim Richards. I remember falling in love with Kim the first time I saw that movie. I also had a crush on Haley Mills and a girl on Star Trek before I found out those Haley Mills movies and Star Trek were old, so those girls weren’t kids anymore. I thought that was weird, so I stopped liking those “ladies.” Now, I’ll jerk it to people long dead.

  But it wasn’t all kids movies for this kid and my movie partner, Carole Posehn. No way. When I was older she brought me along to see anything Barbra Streisand was in. I actually liked the comedies; the ones where she sang the whole time, not so fucking much.

  But the most egregious parenting slip-up happened in 1972, when she took me and my Nana Irene along to see The Godfather and The French Connection in the drive-in. Yep, my mom took me and my great-grandmother to see a violent R-rated film. Twice. Both times she thought I would sleep in the backseat. I didn’t. I was six, not two, so of course I was going to stay awake.

  I haven’t talked to my mom about it, but I really feel like she took me everywhere because of what happened in Redwood City. Makes total sense now: she wouldn’t leave me with a babysitter for a while after my last one wore her clothes and killed himself. So of course I went along for The Godfather and The French Connection as well as school, job interviews, and volunteer social work.

  She thought I would sleep through two brutally violent—by early-seventies standards—classics, but no, I didn’t sleep. I watched every minute. My guess is if I didn’t see those gritty masterpieces when I did, I might not be who I am—a nerdy comic with a dark streak—and you might be reading a book from a real star, like a YouTuber.

  At one point, in the pages coming up, when I was around ten years old, I was the lethal combo of super tall and super skinny with dorky, black-framed glasses, pimples, and braces. And my mom loved to get me bowl haircuts, and we didn’t spend a lot of money on my clothes or have a real sense of what didn’t make me more punchable. And I thought weird shit, so I would say weird shit. So on the outside I was a giant fucking goof, for sure. But I wasn’t a true nerd yet.

  As I said earlier, I’ve always seen nerdiness as obsession. Nerds don’t like things passively. They love things obsessively. They get into things hard. It becomes their life. I feel like I didn’t really get nerdy or obsess over anything ’til I was ten or eleven.

  I definitely dabbled in pop culture from an early age and loved music, TV, and movies. And sixth grade is when I was exposed to the joy of true horror movies, and, yes, “joy” fits because for as long as I can remember horror movies have made me happy. Hang onto your hats and glasses and your wieners and vaginas—I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I would find my first nerdy obsessions in 1976 and 1977, but first I had to endure 1975.

  THREE

  POSEHN AND NERDY, THE EARLY YEARS: 3D

  Most of 1975 sucked. I got glasses. At the end of third grade I had to say good-bye to all my San Jose friends.
Right after I could finally see them. I remember being really bummed and feeling a sense of, “Hey, I worked hard for three years to get those friends and my current position, whatever that was, and now I am going to have to start all over. No fair.” My San Jose friends didn’t mind my glasses when I got them, but at my new school it was just going to be another thing that made me look different or stick out.

  I was in trouble a lot in third grade, but it didn’t hurt my popularity. I had a lot of friends. I played soccer, and no one pointed out I wasn’t great at it. Or maybe at eight years old we all sucked. Of course, we all talked about how we were as good as Pelé, the seventies soccer megastar. Whenever people talk about soccer not being an American sport, I think they’re young. It was huge as shit in the seventies. Pelé was one of the biggest sports stars in the world.

  Besides being a soccer star, I was in the Cub Scouts and went swimming a lot at the YMCA. What else? I had mastered a bike without training wheels, and I kissed a girl. And I liked it. Not sure if she tasted like Cherry Chapstick. I cannot even remember my first kiss’s name, but she was one of the cutest girls in the third grade. She had dark hair and porcelain skin and wore really cute Little House on the Prairie dresses all the time, so let’s call her Laura Ingalls.

  Laura Ingalls and I had to kiss in the school Christmas pageant. And I think the casting was solely because we were the tallest kids in our class and that fit for the pageant director’s interpretation of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” The shortest girl in the class played the kid in the song, the witness to Mommy’s Christmas indiscretion. We, of course, had to rehearse, so I actually got to kiss her a couple of times. Got to? Had to. Because, although she was super cute, I was new to girls and still kind of terrified by them. I had only decided the previous year they weren’t all carriers of cooties and worthy of sand tossing.

  It would of course be many years before girls liked me back, but I started liking girls in third grade. And anyway, Laura Ingalls, if you’re reading this, I had a crush on another girl, Kelly, who I remember having Farrah hair before Farrah. She also had a really cute smile and no clue who I was. I had no idea what was coming in the next couple of years. Soon I would wish I had a bunch of friends and a girl who liked me. Because behavior issues aside, third grade was not nearly the hell that fourth grade was going to be.