Forever Nerdy

by Brian Posehn

  Not Tammy Faye Bakker from TV religion and scaring cats with her face. No, this was Tami Baker, the cutest, most popular eighth-grader at Altamira Junior High. Tami was a cheerleader and athletic, so when she ran in slow motion onto the football field wearing dolphin shorts and a half shirt to show off her impossibly tan belly and legs, that image was instantly locked into my brain. Her perfect Dorothy Hamill haircut bobbing around her stunning—for an eighth-grader from a seventh-grader’s perspective—features.

  She was running onto the field to stop an eighth-grade man from fucking with me. When I was in seventh grade, all the eighth-graders seemed a million years older, like adult men and women. And here was this beautiful lady who was upset that this gentleman had pulled my shorts down. It was so brief that I wasn’t even that embarrassed. I would never be wearing a jock strap, so I had underwear on, and at that point kids had done worse. But “Leave Posehny alone” saved the day. She even pulled his pants down and gave me a hug in front of everyone to really make it feel like a teen-movie moment.

  That wasn’t the only time Tami was nice to me. She was friendly whenever she saw me and, in turn, got people to cut me a break just by her sheer popularity. Other eighth-grade women were nice to me, which made the men try harder. It saved seventh grade and made eighth grade bearable because most kids knew who I was by then. Of course, I had a crush on Tami all of seventh and eighth grade and hoped she would be waiting at Sonoma High for me. Or, at the very least, there to watch out for me. She wouldn’t be. I found out she had moved, and I was pretty wrecked.

  I only had Tami in PE, so she wasn’t able to stop all the teasing, and I had already suffered through a fall and winter of ridicule before Tami stood up for me. Most of it wasn’t too hurtful; it just sucked feeling like a target all the time. It definitely made me dread school and put me on the defensive. I’m a relatively smart guy, so I tried to find a logical reason for being singled out. At Dunbar I was the new kid, but what was my problem here? We were all new kids. Of course, there could be something wrong with me. My looks were made fun of, so it made me hate the way I looked. And even as I grew bigger than a lot of kids, I had never fought back, so they knew I wasn’t a threat.

  In eighth grade there was a new kid—I don’t know… Geordie? Sure, let’s call him Geordie. He had picked up my scent and teased me a couple of times. He liked singing to me or at me. I walked by and he sang, “They Call Me the Lonesome Loser” by the Little River Band. I already didn’t like that song, but this dick-face ruined it forever. He was normal looking and athletic, and I wasn’t. He was in my PE class and early on noticed I was the weak link, so after a couple days of constant, annoying riding, I came up with a plan at home.

  It was partly inspired by Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder acting nuts in Stir Crazy and a Steve Martin bit where he talks about deterring a mugger by acting psycho. I waited ’til the next time he messed with me—we were playing handball against the wall, and he pushed me and made a threat. I told him to go ahead and hit me, but I would get him when he didn’t expect it, and I wouldn’t stop.

  I said I had a dream where I smashed his head against the ground until he was dead. Brutal, huh? I had no such dream, but it was pretty metal for a kid who wasn’t even metal yet, so it worked. By worked, I mean, he thought I was fucking psycho and reported me to the principal’s office. I’m lucky kids killing other kids was new. The “I Don’t Like Mondays” girl shooter in San Diego had just happened, so they didn’t take it super, super seriously. All that happened was I got the attention of the principal and the school counselor. And my mom. She was there a lot. Sometimes when I was the victim. Mostly because I was disruptive. That would lead to trouble at home: restriction and loss of allowance without really discussing my lack of social skills or that I was being bullied.

  I didn’t get a lot of empathy or understanding or really any help with problem solving from someone who had a master’s in psychology. I think the California state colleges should work on their psychology program, specifically child psychology. Every time I complained about being picked on, she would say that she too got picked on. She always reminded me, even if I was crying, “They called me giraffe in high school.” “Giraffe,” to me, lacked the sting of “faggot.” And my mom making it about her lacked the sympathy or empathy or really any “-thy” I was looking for.

  It was never very helpful. Eventually she made me avoid bringing my bullying or really anything personal to her. I shut off. I read almost constantly. In the car I’d sit as far away as possible from her, in a ball in the far corner of her terrible Pinto station wagon, and read whatever Stephen King or sci-fi or classic or even grocery store paperback I could get my hands on.

  My grades continued to be a problem. I didn’t have the positive creative writing outlet I had had in sixth grade and would again in high school. When I did get to go creative in high school, I went nuts—violent, dark, weird, really inspired by horror. Girls and guys thought I was super strange, but a lot of kids liked my routines. Like sixth grade, it made me feel good. But not in junior high. Seventh grade was the year I discovered drama and acting. Drama class was the highlight of my day. The teacher encouraged me and liked my silly side. I liked a couple of the girls in my drama class and the drama club, and I took the class seriously. But they didn’t love me.

  Any confidence I had with girls in sixth grade I had lost by the second day of seventh grade. They had matured. I looked weird and felt weirder. I had gotten gawkier looking with braces and a retainer. And some days even headgear. I was so fucked. I had friends who started the year in new relationships; that was not happening for me. I didn’t have any female friends. I still tried: I went to the places guys met girls—roller-skating parties and school dances.

  Roller-skating parties were stupid, and school dances were no fucking fun. I would hang out and joke with my friends, and then they would dance with girls. I didn’t dance; I just stood against the wall and watched. It sucked. I didn’t even try after a while; girls felt unattainable. I had no confidence; I thought I sucked at dancing. Asking girls to dance terrified me. All I remember is a few doses of rejection, giving up, and just making fun of the pop music the DJs spun. I liked it when they played Journey, Foreigner, or any rock. I hated Michael Jackson and other pop crap. I actually danced a couple of times in junior high, but in high school I would only dance once, and it wasn’t with anyone.

  During the eighth-grade homecoming dance I was distracted, to say the least. They had shown us the Zapruder film earlier that day in history class, and all I could think about was JFK losing his head and Jackie Kennedy grabbing his brains off the trunk of the car. “Back and to the left.” “Back and to the left.” It was horrifying, and I couldn’t take my mind off it: “Back and to the left.” I guess I could’ve turned it into a dance move or used it for conversation: “And then Jackie reached for his brain and didn’t even lose her hat—isn’t that cool?” “No, you’re weird.”

  Oddly, at church youth group I didn’t feel that weird. On the weekends and a couple of nights a week I continued to be involved in the church. My mom liked me being busy, so I spent a lot of time at church youth group get-togethers and ski trips. I actually liked youth group in my early teens. I belonged to two separate youth groups, one at my church and one at Russ and Darren Goodman’s church. Russ and I were pretty close in junior high, so it was fun to get to hang out with him. I became friends with a lot of the kids I was exposed to through church. Most of them were cool, smart kids.

  Then there was Ross Jox, a smarmy know-it-all. He was a bully and seemed to love making youth group miserable for me. A church group bully? Who the fuck? And why the fuck? I hated him so much. I think Jesus would’ve hated Ross. He was a colossal cock with a face God would find punchable. I would smart off to him—I wasn’t that scared of getting hit at church after the last guy who hit me had disappeared so quickly. So I stopped taking his shit and dished it right back. Ross was a year older, and I think he resented taking shit fro
m me. Good. Fuck him.

  Ski trips were fun. It was a relief to get away from my mom, and the youth leaders made it a positive experience. And once I learned not to go under the lodge, I was golden. I actually wasn’t a horrible skier and had fun skiing with Russ Goodman and my other Christian pals. And I got better after a couple of winters. I don’t remember any bedwetting issues at the cabins we stayed in, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t. If you want to pretend I peed the bed, you can. If you want to pretend I shit the bed, you can. Have at it.

  In seventh grade I really wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons. I had heard about D&D from kids at school, and it sounded cool and like something I wanted to try. So when a group of eighth-graders started a D&D club at my school, I thought I’d check it out and join. They held it in a science classroom at lunch. I didn’t mind the idea of missing lunch and ducking into a classroom for an hour, so I went to a meeting one day with my bag lunch, ready to play. I opened the door and heard, “Posehn? What are you doing here?” It was Ross Jox, I turned around and didn’t play the game until 1991. Where did I run to? The library.

  I felt like an outcast most of the time already, so I made a conscious effort to lean into the nerdy outcast role. I started working in the school library. Yep, you heard me: I actually worked in the library. I volunteered in seventh and eighth grade to help out in the library. So I wound up spending an entire period in there. I already spent most of my morning breaks and lunches in there. When I started assisting as a seventh-grader, the eighth-grade library assistant Neil gave me tons of attitude. His lofty position of power was somehow threatened by my impressive aptitude for being a library nerd, I guess. Or he was just a petty, angry dick.

  The librarians wanted Neil to show me the ropes, so when we were alone he asked me if I already knew my way around the place. I did. So he just let me fuck off. And I did. I kept to myself; we divided the reshelving work, and I tried not to step on his toes. I was even an outcast in the library. Super cool. This wasn’t your normal library, though. There were tons of teen sex and partying going on in there. And drugs. All the drugs.

  Not really, but I read a book about drugs, Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack. I read everything I could in those two years. I did a whole lot of reading and hiding. Kids couldn’t ridicule or threaten me in the library, so the library became my safe zone.

  In my own neighborhood I only had a couple of safe zones. Well, one, really: My bedroom. And that’s it. Bullies at school are one thing, but having them in your neighborhood pretty much ensures that you’ll always be home or on edge. Any adventure outside of my apartment had the potential for violence and humiliation. I had several houses I tried to avoid when I was alone, for fear of running into one of two bully families. Yep: two whole families of mean assholes. Let’s call them the Wilsons and the Not-Wilsons.

  The Wilsons were almost all bully dicks, even the girls. Five kids. Four bullies. Doug Wilson, the middle son, wasn’t a bully, just kind of a sweet stoner. He turned me on to Cheech and Chong. So, indirectly, he got me high. And saved my ass one day. There were four Not-Wilson boys, and two were bully dicks. I was actually friends with the two youngest brothers. That saved my ass from any real beating, but it didn’t stop the older brothers from spooking me or intimidating me on purpose.

  I inherited Hinchman’s paper route. Russ and Darren had a paper route too. And they shared their customers and their payments. I paid for my movies, comic books, music, and snacks with money from my paper route as well as yard work in the neighborhood. One day I was riding home after my paper route. I guess I was super bored, because I closed my eyes while riding my bike. Remember when I said I was a smart kid? Forget that part. I closed my eyes for about five seconds, and it immediately went south on me. I felt myself swerving left, I went over a bump, and before I could figure out what was happening, I was freefalling off an embankment into a twenty-foot-deep ditch.

  Doug Wilson saved me. He saw me crash. I heard him call my name from the street. I was trapped under my bike and had my paper route bag wrapped around one of my legs. He came down into the ditch and freed me; then he yanked me, my bike, and paper route bags out of the ditch. Later he died in a super-shitty way. He was flying on his motorcycle through our neighborhood on a rainy day, hit an oily patch in front of his house, and got thrown onto the roof of his mom’s house. He was dead when he landed. Fucking awful. Doug was a good dude. I didn’t even know people could die that horribly until that day.

  By junior high I wasn’t really friendly with Larry anymore. I mostly stayed out of his way because he teased me nonstop. Although it went both ways; I thought he was a loser dick by then. When I wasn’t in school or at home or church, I was riding my bike around the neighborhood with Hinchman and the Goodmans. We were on bikes all the time. And when we weren’t on bikes we were in the creek. And almost all those times we were getting into shit. Or just being dumb as fuck.

  Both Hinchman and the Goodmans had the Sonoma Creek running behind their houses. The four of us built a fort in the creek behind Russ and Darren’s. As with a million other boys in the seventies and eighties, the fort became where we hid our porn stash. In our case, mostly Playboys and random Penthouses. I had a bad experience with the hardcore shit like Hustler. Let’s table that one for now.

  We took rafts and inner tubes into the creek behind the Hinchmans’ and could ride them down to the Goodmans’. Both the fort and the raft adventures would end badly. Hinchman would nearly die when he took a two-by-four to the skull and water tried to murder me a second time one summer day under the Madrone Road bridge.

  The two-by-four story first. One day Russ, Darren, and I were hanging out at our tree fort down at the creek, eating snacks, looking at dirty magazines or motorcycle magazines or car magazines, being typical thirteen- or fourteen-year-old dorks. We heard a noise coming from the trees, and Russ, in classic tree fort fashion, yelled, “Who goes there?” because I guess he’d seen it in a movie or something. We didn’t hear anything. The tree we were in was thirty feet tall and on a twenty-foot embankment. Below the embankment was a thicket of trees and bushes, so when you were in the tree fort, you couldn’t see what was coming through the trees or bushes below.

  Russ yelled, “Who goes there?” And no one answered, so Russ said, “Watch this.” I didn’t know then that those were a redneck’s last words. He grabbed the two-by-four, and like we said back then, “he fricking winged it” through the trees. The two-by-four went zipping end over end and made a direct hit on Hinchman’s skull. If I had done it, nothing would have happened. I might’ve hit myself or not even gotten the board out of the tree. But because Russ was kind of a jock, athletic, and coordinated, he fucking nailed Hinchman. He stumbled out into the clearing and reached his arms to the sky, like Willem Dafoe in Platoon.

  Then we saw what had happened: the board hit him right between the eyes. There was a giant two-by-four mark—well, not giant: it was two inches by four inches, and blood was dripping down his face. Hinchman took his knees dramatically and fell forward, dropping everything in his hands. He had brought us a two-liter bottle of soda and a giant bag of Ruffles. We climbed out of the tree panicking, Russ went first and was scrambling too fast down the tree.

  He got his foot stuck in the ladder and then fell. He swung against the tree upside down, with his foot still caught. It was more dramatic than comedic at the time. Darren helped him down, and we all ran down and got Jim. We carried him out of the creek and home. Russ and I had to tell Jim’s parents what had happened. They took him to the doctor. It was a concussion. He was never the same. Just kidding—he was fine.

  The creek was where I almost died a second time. I could’ve/should’ve died in the creek one Saturday morning. It might have been karmic retribution for all the shit I had pulled at the creek. Hinchman and I experimented with Molotov cocktails because we saw it in Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. Once, we threw a Molotov up onto the bridge. No one was hurt, but, fuck that would be terrifying. We always had fireworks, so that went ba
d—burned fingers, ringing ears. Lit a field on fire. No big deal.

  Hinchman and I ghost rode other kids’ bikes off cliffs. We also would fake our deaths by pushing each other off the bridge. The cliff went far enough out that it was only like a six-foot fall, but to drivers it looked like kids were dying. People would jump on their brakes at the sight of seeing a kid murder his friend, and we would scramble and giggle like evil little dicks. The Goodmans were no saints either—they hit a Cadillac with a tractor tire and got in trouble. Thank god I was with my mom in Marin for that one. Sounded fun, though, in a sketchy way. The guys and Hinchman found a giant hundred-pound tractor tire and rolled it down a hill. And of course it fucked up some dude’s new caddy. He flipped the fuck out.

  Anyway, back to how I almost died. The water in Sonoma Creek was really high and violent after a big winter. I went flying under the bridge—got air. My tube flipped over with my dumb ass stuck in it. I was in a whirlpool. The part that needs air to breath was under water. I remember being flipped around and thinking, Oh man, I’m dying, I guess… that sucks, or something similar and way more panicky. My older, sometime-bully neighbor Nathan saved me. Don’t think he’s a good guy or anything, because he later made me trade him my awesome skateboard for a piece of shit.

  My mom had bought me a really nice skateboard for Christmas, a Logan Earth Ski with Tracker trucks and Kryptonics wheels. Not bad at all—the most popular board and accessories. Nathan had a cheap plastic board with cheap trucks and wheels. I knew it was a piece of shit, and yet I let him convince me that I was making out in the trade. He was a bully dick taking advantage of my need for approval and passivity.