Forever Nerdy

by Brian Posehn

  I did a year of volunteer work at the Sonoma State Hospital; my mom even helped set it up. I didn’t hate it—I could ride my bike to work. I wasn’t good at any of it. I sucked at the yard work and ground maintenance I did. I don’t think I was much better working with the patients or residents or, as my mom called them, “clients”—I always thought that term was weird and impersonal. I see why it’s better than “patients,” and “clients” will always be a better term than local favorites: “tards” and “feebs.” Near the end of the year the same idiot counselor informed me that my volunteer work didn’t cover it and I would also need to go to summer school to make up credits.

  I took a summer course in film at the Santa Rosa Junior College. It was really fun, actually. I got to do one of my favorite things: watch movies and talk about them. One of my favorite things—I didn’t love talking about them. At that point I’d never seen Shane, The Searchers, Nosferatu, Angels with Dirty Faces, or Singin’ in the Rain. And I was exposed to cool, older kids from the big city. In my class were two glam-rock dudes who I thought were super-fucking cool; one of the dudes played with that eighties glam band Vain. There was also a cool skater kid with John Hughes movie hair; he had stickers all over his skateboard for something called “The Cure.” I sought out The Cure immediately because that kid seemed cool and I wanted to be cool too.

  I was always bringing Fangoria, Stephen King, and music magazines to class. I got sent to the principal for reading about a new ghost movie by Steven Spielberg and the dude from the scariest movie ever, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That dude’s name was Tobe Hooper. And the movie was called Poltergeist. The article got me hyped, and the pictures of the effects were awesome. But I was supposed to be working on algebra, not reading an entire article about a horror movie.

  One of the classes I failed my junior year also had me actually kicked out of the class. Spanish? PE? Algebra? Not sure, something I sucked at. Anyway, I didn’t mind sitting in the office for a semester; I called it my free period. Sitting in the office, drawing on my books, and not doing homework is where I met Ricky Rat. I think he gave himself that nickname, but I didn’t care. We had a bunch of punk kids at our school, but even among them, he stuck out.

  A lot of guys had shaved heads and wore Misfits and Black Flag shirts and Vans. Hell, everyone wore Vans. I grew up in California in the eighties—shit-kickers wore Vans. Ricky, however, wore a leather jacket, no matter the weather, along with motorcycle boots and a giant liberty spike mohawk. I’m pretty sure I ditched more than one day of sitting in the office, but I really only remember the one I got in trouble for.

  Ricky and I went downtown, which meant walking four short blocks to our tiny town square. We probably got an early lunch and were walking across the town square when I saw my mom and, of course, she saw me. My mom was having lunch with some friends from work when she saw my dumb ass and freaked the fuck out. She made a beeline over to us. I was immediately interrogated. She was pissed and embarrassed and told me she was embarrassed and pissed. We walked back to school; Ricky didn’t give me any shit about it. When Ricky was twenty he spray-painted “Dead People Suck” all over a tomb. He didn’t make it to twenty-one. Yup, he died. Creepy, right?

  My favorite high school teacher—guess what she taught. Woodshop, you say? Nope. Calculus? No sir, or madam, stop trying. She taught English, and more importantly, she taught creative writing. Again, my best grades, and I got to be creative. When the assignment was to write from the POV of an animal, I wrote the story of a young male deer in the Sierra Nevada Mountains that got hit by a car. It was graphic and dark and funny in a twisted way. It told his final thoughts as his life flashed by.

  For one assignment I did a letter to Reader’s Digest from the mother of a blind kid. She told the reader how tough life has been for their family since her son went blind. They get him a dog, and he worships it. One day there was an accident, and their dog lost two legs. They didn’t want to break their son’s heart, so they never told him his dog was missing legs. They followed their kid and his two-legged dog to make sure he never detected the missing legs. There is another accident, and the dog loses its vision. They come to the difficult decision that the situation is too sad and they need to put the dog out of its misery, so in a hilarious misdirect, they kill the kid.

  I wrote a novella for my senior project. Yup, a novella. It was a Stephen King–style revenge story. I was seventeen, and it was a complete Creepshow rip-off. “The Ultimate Sin.” Before Ozzy’s record of the same name. I paid a guy in my class, Mike Ross, the best artist at the school, to do art for it. My assignment. In my free time I wrote an anti-commercialism Christmas letter that got printed in the Sonoma Index Tribune. It was complete bullshit. Just an exercise to write from this conservative Alex P. Keaton POV. Grandma Grace loved that. I wrote papers for two jocks who trusted me to do a free creative writing episode. I got them Bs and pocketed a couple of bucks.

  After a junior year journalism class I joined the school paper and ran the Dragon’s Tale Rock and Review with my pal Jon Krop. By my senior year it was clear that I loved writing, and even though I’d spent hours with my school counselor discussing how I was going to make up my grades, we never once discussed my passions or what I was good at. I leaned toward radio because of my love of music. But Mrs. Garner had encouraged my writing, as did my Shakespeare teacher, Mr. Cole, and my second creative writing teacher, Mrs. Lale.

  Mrs. Lale never directly told me to write comedy, but she made me aware that it was a possibility when she informed the class that she had been paid for writing jokes for Phyllis Diller. I thought Phyllis Diller was hilarious. My Nana Norma loved her and even dressed as her for Halloween. And this teacher in a small school had submitted jokes to her and been paid for it. A bell didn’t go off right then, but I thought it was cool.

  Thanks to Joel, I was also a school DJ. He had asked his friends in the student government to get the money for us to broadcast on the new school sound system. We had a PA and a cassette deck and a turntable. He and I played music during morning break and lunch. I loved being on air and writing jokes for the show, and I especially loved forcing my music on the entire school. Partly because of Joel, my senior year was, no question, my most fun. There was a shit-ton of drinking going on, we were partying every weekend senior year, the last couple of months were off the fucking rails, there were parties during school, and senior cut day was a train wreck on top of a car crash.

  One night I made the mistake of hanging out with Hinchman and a couple of older kids. Hinchman drove. I drank six Mickey’s big mouths—boy, are those horrible. I’ll remember the terrible taste forever. I still can’t drink out of a skunk’s asshole. We went to 7-Eleven a couple of hours later, and I was fucking hammered. As we were loading up on munchies, I realized I was going to throw up—or blow chunks, as they said back then. I made my way for the door, yelling for people to get out of the way. I cleared the door and launched vomit everywhere. I stumbled to Hinchman’s car, got in the passenger seat, and started to pass out.

  But the door opened, and as I fell out, a pissed-off blurry dude yelled, “You puked on my girlfriend, mother fucker!” He socked me hard in the head. My upper torso hit the ground. He kicked me in the face. I still don’t have feeling in the cheek where he kicked me. Hinchman panicked and took me home. Left me in front of my mom’s. I passed out. She found me the next morning. I don’t blame him, but we hung out even less after that. The dude who kicked me was a guy named Mikey. He was a sketchy motherfucker, a real angry stoner, the only one I ever met. That Monday I told Joel what had happened, and unexpectedly, he freaked out and said, “Fuck that shit. I’m gonna talk to that guy.” He did. Mikey wasn’t that tough when faced with a kid who knew how to throw a punch. Or take one. Joel told him to never touch me again. He didn’t. Thanks, Joel. My hero. Two years later Mikey got in a fight at a party, probably with a girlfriend puker. A guy tried to break it up, and Mikey stabbed him. Thank god he didn’t stab Joel—that would be
a terrible ending to this chapter.

  At the end of it all, I barely made it out of high school. I only graduated thanks to summer school at Santa Rosa Junior College. I wasn’t able to graduate with all my friends, but I got the final credits I needed for my diploma. Lesson learned? Um. At the time, not really? I was happy to be out. Not in a big hurry to figure out what the fuck I was doing. Film, radio, newspapers, magazines all seemed potentially promising. I wasn’t that concerned about my grades hurting my future because I didn’t think a four-year college was really a part of it. More people liked me, and that’s what was important. My sacrifice for the joke had paid off. Up next? I fucked around for a year and managed to get kicked out of my mom’s apartment twice.

  But first I feel like I painted what high school was like without the soundtrack. This next chapter covers all the metal (good and bad) I was obsessed with during those last two years in high school. Cue the RATT.

  ELEVEN

  1982–1984: THE MAKING OF A TEENAGE METALHEAD, PART TWO

  By 1982 I was no longer dabbling in heavy metal—I was obsessed. Every heavy band I heard about I had to check out. And the more interest I put into metal, the more kids I met who also liked the same stuff. And soon we were turning each other on to new bands or at least bands that were new to us. I also had punk friends I was tape trading with, like Ian from the nerd fight. I may not have looked like a metalhead yet, but I was. Some of my newer friends, like Jon Krop and KC from my school bus, had long hair, the cool jeans, and denim and/or leather jackets. Sadly, I wasn’t allowed to go full metal yet. Soon.

  I dressed mostly the same as the previous two years—preppy on a budget. But band T-shirts were creeping into the wardrobe. Soon they would dominate. I had T-shirts, an impressive record and cassette collection, and a museum of metal on my bedroom walls. My hair was always thin and straight and never did anything. And my mom wouldn’t let me grow it long like I wanted. I finally stopped getting bowl haircuts, and eventually my mom let me get a perm. It sounds worse than it was: my hair was so straight that a perm finally gave it some shape and style. Then I started growing it longer.

  Two months after my favorite grandma died, my favorite guitar player lost his life along with two other people in a fiery crash. Randy Rhoads was just twenty-five and had only been in my metal world for less than two years, but he ruled it. Edward Van Halen politely stood aside in my brain the moment I heard Blizzard of Ozz in that Marin record store. So coming home and reading about the plane crash felt like losing a god. My Nana Norma was staying with me while my mom was in Oahu with Ken the Monster.

  My mom had called to check in on me, and Nana told her I was in my room listening to my music and that I was really upset about a musician I loved dying. My mom said to her, “Oh no, I hope it wasn’t someone in Ozzy Osbourne. That’s his favorite.” She was right. Ozzy was my favorite at that time. I was obsessed with Ozzy and his young godlike guitar player, Randy Rhoads. I took it hard. It felt personal. Even though school was mostly terrible my sophomore year, I do remember bonding with other Ozzy fans at school about the biggest tragedy in heavy metal.

  There were loads of rockers who liked Nugent and Van Halen and other mainstream heavy music at my school, like Hinchman and my friends Pete and Brian, who turned me on to Dream Police and had seen KISS before Ace left. There were the stoners who seemed to only listen to AC/DC. And I knew all the Rush guys (they were the smart partiers, and half of them also played music). There were three Neil Peart wanna-bes at my school.

  But there were only a handful of true metalheads at Sonoma High, and I knew all of them. Two of them were my really close friends, Baden and Krop. Those are their last names and what I always called them. Still do. Krop was a year younger than me, and we met in computer and journalism, and Baden was two years behind me; we met through some of the freshman skaters I knew as a junior. It was almost all about metal with the three of us.

  We talked about metal constantly. When we were together we played it nonstop, we went on record store quests together, and we would drive to Santa Rosa and spend most of a Saturday hitting every record store in town, the corporate ones like Rainbow Records, Musicland, and the Warehouse as well as our indie standbys, the Last Record Store and Rebel Records. The Last Record Store is still in Santa Rosa and is literally the last record store in Santa Rosa. Go there and buy music now.

  In the early eighties heavy metal was blowing up, and bands I liked were showing up everywhere. Quiet Riot, Randy’s old band, got massive my junior year. I bought their album right away. Soon it was ubiquitous, and so I cooled on it. But for most of 1983 they were one of my favorite bands. Their two big songs, “Bang Your Head (Metal Health)” and their Slade cover, “Cum on Feel the Noize,” had brought heavy metal to the mainstream. Those songs dominated MTV, the radio, and my high school. Quiet Riot were going to be on the US Festival, a massive Woodstock-like two-day festival in Southern California.

  I wanted to see the headliners, Van Halen, Scorpions, Judas Priest, and even Quiet Riot, but I really was stoked to see the opening act, my new favorite band that year, LA’s Mötley Crüe. But that wasn’t happening: my mom would hardly let me go someplace an hour away, so she certainly wasn’t gonna let me drive seven hours and sleep in a field for two days. I asked anyway. And I yelled and cursed at her when she said no. My friend KC went, as did a couple of other lucky rockers from my school. I was so jealous of anybody who got to see Mötley before me.

  An older kid, Dwayne, had the first Mötley Crüe album at school. He was a senior whose band Down Syndrome (I swear to you) played our cafeteria after school one day. He played an SG, had all the cool T-shirts, and was my heavy-metal man crush before I knew that was a thing. One day I saw Dwayne carrying the record Too Fast for Love. It looked so cool. I had to have it. It was so metal. It had to be awesome. Soon I had it in my hand, and the cover screamed, “HEAVY METAL!” It’s a close-up of singer Vince Neil’s leather pants, a heavy-metal update of the Stones’ Sticky Fingers. Turns out, I was early on the Mötley train—it was one of a limited vinyl release of twenty-five hundred. I still have it.

  When I put the needle down for the first time on Live Wire, it was this almost punky take on hard rock—the guitar tone and the whiplash fast stops and starts. Even though I am currently a fifty-one-year-old man, when I hear that record I’m sixteen and alone in my tiny shrine to heavy metal when Mötley was my band. A year later came their classic record, Shout at the Devil. Their image had changed to kind of a glammy Road Warrior thing. Shout at the Devil was bigger and slicker than the first record but still retained the grittiness and attitude. It was. Mötley Crüe had the attitude and the poppy metallic sound. I liked Mötley first.

  I also found Mötley’s pals, Ratt, that year. I was drawn to the fishnet stocking on the cover of RATT’s EP Summer of 83. Fishnets meant metal back then. Their EP was awesome. I could hardly wait for their next record. The cassette for their full-length debut, Out of the Cellar, was stuck in my Walkman for a while. Ratt were slick, well-produced pop metal like Mötley, and I actually stayed on board with Ratt a little longer than I did with Mötley. Ratt had the twin guitar attack of Robbin Crosby and Warren DeMartini and the almost bratty vocal style of Stephen Pearcy.

  On one of our Santa Rosa trips we stumbled on Dokken. You know, from the famous “rhymes with rockin’” joke loved by idiots. As a hard-core Dokken fan from the beginning, I always rolled my eyes at that joke. We found Dokken, Breaking the Chains in the import section of Warehouse Records under the freeway. We knew nothing about them, but the record jacket looked metal. According to the credits, there was a Scorpions connection, we guessed they too were German. I fell in love with the playing of George Lynch. A former rival of Randy Rhoads, Lynch shredded and had insane tone, and his feel added to every song he ripped on. We would continue to follow Dokken even as we checked out heavier shit.

  Of the three of us, Krop’s house was the best hangout. He lived with his single mom in a big house. His room was
huge, and he had a good stereo, a Gibson Explorer, a Marshall, and a home computer. And his mom worked nights. So my mom hardly saw me because I was there a lot, as was Baden. Sometimes we were joined by other rocker friends, Krop’s buddy Mike and the two Petes, Pete and Evil Pete. We also had our punk friend Erik over. We would drink, listen to music, watch Letterman, and smoke cigarettes. Those guys smoked cigarettes, not me.

  But most nights it was just me and Krop and Baden. We would play music for hours. We’d spin our own collections and try out acquisitions after our record store trips. We listened to anything with guitars and distortion. All types of metal—traditional, new wave of British heavy metal, glam, thrash… anything: Scorpions, UFO, Michael Schenker, Gary Moore from Thin Lizzy. One night I brought a new member of my collection, Krokus, Headhunter. I had been a fan since their last single “Long Stick Goes Boom.” It was commercial-sounding metal, so we thought of them as the Swiss AC/DC. I heard Marc Storace, the lead singer, was considered for AC/DC years later when Brian Johnson couldn’t perform his duties anymore.

  I finally conned my mom into letting me go to my second live show in the summer of 1983. Dan, an older kid in my neighborhood, drove me and another neighborhood kid. It was a big all-day concert at the Oakland Coliseum, Day on the Green #1. There were several Days on the Green every year; Bill Graham, the famous SF concert promoter, had organized them—Journey, Heart, Bryan Adams, Eddie Money, and Triumph from Canada. Triumph were the reason I went. I liked Journey and had really liked them a couple of years by then, but I was leaning heavier then and more interested in seeing Triumph rip it up. They did. Rik Emmet and his three-piece put on an arena rock show. I’m not sure why they didn’t go bigger in America.

  In my tiny metal nerd cave I spent a lot of time with Triumph, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, Scorpions, Motörhead, Girl School, Lita Ford, and local legends Y&T. I got really into an East Coast metal band called Twisted Sister. Their Under the Blade record delivered attitude and KISS-and Mötley Crüe–like showmanship. Like those bands and Alice Cooper, they touched on that bad-boy thing that appealed to me about metal—quite literally with “Bad Boys of Rock and Roll.” I also liked “Shoot ’Em Down,” “Under the Blade,” and “You Can’t Stop Rock and Roll.”