Forever Nerdy

by Brian Posehn

  By 1976 I had a bunch of Elvis records, spanning his whole career, even one of his gospel records. I was a kid—quit judging. I even did an impression of him to entertain my mom and my grandparents. I’m sure it was spot-on; they were super discerning. I even did my impression for my friends. It didn’t go as well. I had a birthday party at a pizza place in Sonoma—must’ve been my tenth birthday—when I fell off the stage doing the Elvis windmill.

  Remember the Elvis windmill? It’s different from the Pete Townsend windmill. Elvis would make that kick-ass stance with his one bell-bottomed leg forward and then windmill his arm while he looked super cool pointing at some lady in the audience. Well, I did that, except I pointed at my mom. And my new friends. Then I guess I didn’t have my stance perfected or my windmill was too fast—anyway, it got out of control. I fell off the stage and broke my arm.

  I took a little shit from my friends who had been there, but I think they mostly felt bad because we were pretty young. I had known a couple of these guys from little league (Larry, Karl, Seth, and Monte) and soccer (my friend Tony), and even though I was the weak spot on the teams, the real alienation hadn’t started yet.

  Believe it or not, I don’t blame my mom for never putting too much emphasis on sports. Sure, she encouraged me to try baseball and soccer, but that was mainly to make friends and try to fit in. Of course, it had the opposite effect: it showed the other kids one of my weaknesses and made me hate sports. I blame sports for being hard and dumb.

  I was always a bit behind the other kids in my grade. With my summer birthday, I was slightly younger and more immature. I still loved toys through sixth grade: Hot Wheels and Corgi die-cast cars, the ’66 Batmobile, and James Bond’s Aston Martin were my main obsessions at nine and ten. I still played with dolls like Big Jim and the Wolfpack, my few Megos, Evel Knievel, SSP Racers, Smash-Up Derby, and TYCO slot cars. Toys kept me young and out of trouble for a while.

  Eventually I made it through fourth grade, but not with the help of my fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Stork. He didn’t make learning fun; instead, he nasally droned on and ruled with an iron fist. Because I was often bored, I was in trouble with him a lot. He sent me to the principal on the regular, and it felt to me like he often tried to humiliate or embarrass me in front of the other students.

  On one of the many days I had detention in Mr. Stork’s class instead of recess or lunch, I peed my pants laughing. Sounds more fun than it was. Alone in the class, it was me, my “friend” Larry, Monte, and a kid named Robert, who also wore glasses. I never could figure out why Mr. Stork left all the worst students alone for about fifteen minutes.

  We were laughing at some dumb thing my friend Monte was doing. I warned Monte I couldn’t control myself, but he kept doing the joke. I peed. A lot. Soaked my pants. At nine. I had to slink off to the office and wear ill-fitting pants from lost-and-found. I definitely lost some cool points with Monte, Larry, and Robert, but they stayed my friends for a while.

  My mouth got me in trouble several times at school with Mr. Storky Dork, which, believe it or not, is what my mom called Mr. Stork. Not bad, Mom. My smart-assed tendencies became an even bigger problem in fifth grade. It even got me in trouble at church. One morning after church, during the coffee fellowship hour, I was messing around with my pals. I guess we were too loud or having too much fun because a youth pastor, Eli, grabbed me and scolded me. He was a young dad of two kids with hippie names.

  I quipped, like my TV hero that week, Fonzie, “Sit on it, nerd.” And then Eli slapped me with his adult-sized hand. He smacked my ear and cheek pretty hard for a hippie Christian. I didn’t go to the ground, but it hurt. I should have fallen into a ball and screamed and cried; it stung, and I was in shock. I couldn’t believe an adult had just hit me. Neither could the women who witnessed it.

  Church women. Elderly church women. He was so fucked. I’m pretty sure he quit that night, because he wasn’t there that next week. Eli, his wife, and his kids, Double Rainbow and Jerry Garcia 2,* actually moved. Which is good, because it would have been awkward, as Eli lived in my neighborhood. Come to think of it, those old church ladies may have killed him.

  Fifth grade itself wasn’t super memorable other than the fact that my teacher, Mrs. Sullivan, would kiss you if you disrupted class or got an answer wrong on a verbal quiz. She didn’t kiss us in an inappropriate or awesome way; she just kissed boys’ faces to humiliate them. She’d even put lipstick on. Oh yeah, she made a big show of it. You knew you were in trouble when she pulled the lipstick out. It was like she was a pro wrestler, and this was her finishing move.

  Needless to say, I got kissed. It was my second kiss following my legendary performance of “Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” at my third-grade Christmas presentation. After Mrs. Sullivan, it would be a little while before I would get kissed again. Mrs. Sullivan was a character. She also treated the best students in the class—like the top five kids, not me—by inviting them to her house to do yard work. Nice treat. No thanks. I’m glad I was a mediocre student.

  I should tell you about the dump we lived in, the Glen Ellen Manor Apartments. There were around two hundred tenants in about fourteen buildings. We had a tiny two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment with a tight floor plan; a narrow, small kitchen; and an adjacent seating area with a miniscule patio off the living room. It wasn’t private at all. People could look right into our apartment from the courtyard that butted against our patio.

  The owner, Mr. Corpi, lived in San Francisco and was a grouchy dick. He was a diminutive ball of a man who always wore pin-striped overalls and a matching train conductor’s hat when he climbed out of his Mercedes to fix anything at your apartment. He looked like a dipshit. We never got along, and it got worse as I got older. He always hired female apartment managers, and my mom usually befriended them, which worked out nice when we needed apartment maintenance or the check was late.

  In the nine years we lived in Glen Ellen Manor I would make a lot of friends and only a couple of enemies. There were never kids my exact age, but I made friends with older kids and younger kids. One of the older kids, Nathan, would later bully me, and John, another older kid in my courtyard, would wind up being a bad influence on me.

  My friendships with the younger kids turned out better. I met a kid named Chris who was a year younger than me, and we are still friends. Chris, unfortunately, was only there on weekends and school breaks with his younger brother when they were visiting their dad, Cliff. I had a lot of great memories hanging out in their room, cranking Van Halen and Iron Maiden and watching Chuck Norris flicks with the boys and their dad.

  I was also friendly with a girl named Sophie who was a couple of years younger than me. Her mom was a hippie, and Sophie knocked on my patio sliding glass door one day to tell me her hippie mom was having sex with her dumb hippie boyfriend and the curtains were open. Sure enough, so was the window. I saw and heard everything. Not for long. I was quickly creeped out and ran back to our TV.

  In 1976 I was having trouble fitting in at my new school. I still mostly listened to my mom; I wasn’t rebelling hard yet. The relationship between me and my mom really started to sour when she met a guy at the pool. That man’s name was Ken the Monster. He was born with a different last name. I changed it. Ken the Monster was quite a bit shorter than my mom.

  I guess she’d had enough of tall guys dying on her, so she was checking out short, sarcastic, cheapskate, freeloader, asshole guys. He had a mustache and a terrible Hitler-esque hair helmet. She and the Monster dated about six years. We fought a little in the beginning of their relationship. Later he moved in, and we fought all the time. Maybe I was bummed about losing my wrestling partner. I didn’t hate him at first, but by the time he moved out I hated him more than I hate homophobia and bad music.

  Around 1976 was when I really got into comic books and superheroes. I always liked Marvel and DC equally. Spidey and Bats are still my two favorites. They were my first nerdy likes. I never had any nerdy friends, so I never had anyone tell
me you had to pick a publisher, either Marvel or DC. I turned ten during the summer of ’76 and collected those cool bicentennial issues that DC Comics did that year. Every comic did a special issue that July, and that summer I was traveling around California, Oregon, and Nevada in a camper with my grandparents, Ed and Clara. It was a great trip with my two favorite people at the time.

  I remember stopping at newsstands and liquor stores during the couple-week road trip and combing the comic book section for the “stars and stripes” DC banner that indicated they were special. I think I bought around twelve of a possible thirty, only the few heroes I was into. I wasn’t a complete-ist nerd yet or I would have had the whole collection.

  Speaking of cool-ass grandparents who encouraged my comic book reading. Meanwhile, in Redwood City, Nana Irene was collecting the Amazing Spider-Man comic strip that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle. John Romita Sr. drew it and it’s still my favorite version of Spider-Man. She bought a scrapbook, clipped the daily strips and the Sunday edition color version, and collected them all in a homemade comic book. Amazing Nana is more like it.

  Sometime in the summer of 1976 I got into Jaws. I was hooked at the trailer and the TV ads. And then I saw it in a dark theater in Santa Rosa. Not even a year after being scared shitless in my town’s tiny, shitty haunted house, I was seeing a terrifying thriller. By myself. It was pretty life changing. I didn’t find the shark that scary after my first shocking viewing; I just thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Sure, the jump-scares got me. I think the scariest thing I’d ever seen at that point was a TV edited version of Psycho.

  So the jump-scare with Ben Gardner’s head popping at the camera in the hull of Ben’s submerged boat completely got me. And everyone else in the theater. I’d never experienced anything like that before. That year I got really into Jaws. I saw it a bunch of times in my town’s shitty theater because back then movies stayed in the theater for a year if they continued to do well. And at that point Jaws was the biggest movie ever. (GRANDPA VOICE) This was before DVD or even VHS… snore… I’m old. The Sebastiani Theatre, the only movie game in my small town, wasn’t actually shitty. Not the whole time.

  In the seventies the Sebastiani was awesome. It was a beautiful old theater in the middle of our quaint town square. And it became the first movie theater my mom would just drop me off at. I think she liked not having to see my “ludicrous” movies anymore. So at that point of my life, outside of the record store and anyplace that served pizza, it was my favorite place in town. Later I would take the bus and even later drive the half hour or so to see movies, and the old Sebastiani Theatre started to show its age. In the early nineties somebody restored it and made it cool again. It’s still open now. No one leveled it and put in a Pottery Barn—fucking amazing. Thanks, Obama. Seriously, thanks.

  I loved Bruce the shark, but it was the chemistry of the three main characters—Brody, Hooper, and ol’ Quint—that kept me going back. I read the book a couple of times and wore the crap out of my powder blue T-shirt with the famous cover art. I still have a framed movie poster and often wear my new powder-blue Jaws T-shirt and bump the soundtrack on vinyl. There is definitely an argument for Jaws being the first thing I was nerdy about. I read Jaws Log by Carl Gottlieb, a book that came out that year describing the harrowing process of making the movie. For sure, this was the first time I read a “Making of…” book. After my sixth viewing I thought that Ben Gardner’s head was actually an homage to Hitchcock.

  I felt it could be no coincidence that the head in the biggest jump-scare of the movie was bald and pale like Hitchcock and, therefore, a winking Hitchcock cameo. Stretch, I know. But I was ten years old and alone in a movie theater a lot. I was happily edging into Jaws nerd territory. Fuck that “Jaws didn’t scare me” shit. It absolutely did. Turns out, I like being scared. I was terrified of real sharks but also completely fascinated by them. I thought great whites were the coolest thing ever; they made dinosaurs look like a bunch of giant dead idiots.

  Though I had no desire to swim in the ocean for a while. My fear and respect for sharks led me away from the water. Before Jaws, thanks to Jacques Cousteau being massive on public television, I owned and loved a collection of marine biology encyclopedias he published. My mom bought me the books through PBS: at age eight I had wanted to be a marine biologist. No longer. Thanks, Jaws. Sure, the marine biologist lives in the movie, but fuck that—the shark cage scene with Richard Dreyfuss is terrifying.

  That year I wrote about great whites as much as possible. Jaws even made it to school. I wrote a fifth-grade book report on the Peter Benchley book, Jaws, and did a researched report on great whites, where I quoted the Jaws Log and Jaws screenwriter Carl Gottlieb. I even wrote short stories about shark attacks for myself. What a Jaws dork.

  By the way, the Benchley source material, Jaws, had a ton of inappropriate shit in it that didn’t make the Spielberg classic or my classic fifth-grade report. Way more fucking. Oral sex, cheating subplot, and fucking. Not much fucking in the film Jaws, unless you consider Quint’s death. He gets pretty fucked.

  But the book Jaws—lots of fucking. It’s dirty. I guess I’m saying that movie could’ve used more fucking. I wouldn’t have called myself a Jaws nerd at age ten, but I would now. Twelve years ago I got to live out the Jaws nerd dream and spend two days on Martha’s Vineyard on the Comedians of Comedy tour with Zach Galifianakis and Patton Oswalt quoting the movie while we drove around the island looking at local sites. Apropos of fucking nothing, I had a Hitler mustache that day. Don’t ask.

  Okay, I had been shaving every day from a full beard down to a Hitler. That was the plan, and I carried it out to completion. For no one. Actually, the crew and my friends loved it.

  For my fiftieth birthday my wife and Patton rented a theater and showed a great print of Jaws to all my friends. One of my buddies grew up in Nantucket, so he never saw Jaws growing up because he didn’t want it scaring him out of the water. He watched it for the first time with my rowdy friends and loved it.

  So, back to the summer of ’76, when Steven Spielberg ruled my cinematic world. I wouldn’t know true nerdy movie worship until a year later when his chubby, bearded friend from USC would make my new Best Movie Ever and dethrone Spielberg as my favorite director for a little while. And not to sell Jaws short, the movie easily makes my top-five films of all time. Also included are Star Wars: A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, Die Hard, and Halloween. Or Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Or Raiders of the Lost Ark. Or Goodfellas. Or Groundhog Day. Or John Carpenter’s The Thing. That fifth one is hard.

  You know what all those movies could’ve used, though? No, not more fucking. They all could use a funny fat kid who’s always sloppily eating a chocolate bar and saying, “I need this for energy!” Every movie would be better with that. Sure, I was pretty into Jaws, but I wasn’t truly obsessed yet. Yet. A couple of months later I would know true obsession. It came to me in October of ’76 when I found four kooks from New York City wearing makeup and superhero costumes: ABBA.

  Just kidding, silly. I’m talking about the band KISS. I really, really liked Jaws, but, pucker up, ladies, you’re about to meet a full-on KISS nerd.

  * I could be totally wrong on the kid’s names. It’s been a while.

  FOUR

  KISS: ARMY OF ONE

  Most KISS fans, I assume, found KISS through the usual different routes—their older brother, the cool guy who smelled weird at the record store, that Halloween special with that one dude, or because they were on the news for scaring Christians. Not this KISS fan. I found the band that changed my life while hiding from ridicule in the school library. Like a huge fucking nerd.

  I found KISS in the Dunbar Elementary school library. Actually, they found me. Brian Posehn, the rocker nerd, didn’t really even exist before KISS. I hadn’t heard anything heavier than Cher and Elvis pre-KISS, and I don’t even think I knew “hard rock” was a thing. At that point I thought “rock” was The Beatles and “rock and roll” wa
s fifties music.

  Until KISS I was just a kid drinking the homogenized milk that is pop music, and the four larger-than-life members of KISS hit a power chord. And Paul Stanley, with his lovable New York accent, said, “Hey young milk drinker, since I guess we’re sticking with that metaphor, did you know that milk could be chocolate or strawberry flavored and music doesn’t have to sound like it’s comin’ from your granny’s radio? So get on your knees and open wide for the hottest band in the world, KISS!”

  So one fall day during lunch KISS found me in my nerdy hiding place. The fucking library. It had already gotten me into trouble. I know why I was drawn to the library—I loved escaping into a book. It had been my go-to for a couple of years. I went there to forget about the other kids, my annoying teachers, and my mom. Truth is, I didn’t have a ton of friends, and the library wasn’t helping: “Hey friendless guy, you know where you’ll really not find friends? The library.”

  As I said in the opening, I liked music before KISS. Liked, not loved. Music such as Olivia Newton John, Cher, and Mac Davis—you know, music? I had 45s of their singles, a Mac Davis LP with “Stop and Smell the Roses” on it, an Olivia Newton John LP, and a couple of Elvis records—in 1975 that was my entire record collection. Now I have hundreds of albums. I blame KISS. Sure, I really liked Olivia Newton John for almost two years. I thought she was pretty and had a pretty voice. I was eight, remember.

  I LIKED CHER for her storytelling songs. She sang of being a half-breed* and about gypsies, tramps and also thieves.† And Cher had long hair like my mom’s friend Anne. I liked Mac Davis for who fucking knows why. And yeah, I liked Elvis. All of America did.