My Life in Heavy Metal

by Steve Almond

  Ahem.

  You’re all set, Lance tells me. Just turn it on. He’s back to hovering over me. You know how to turn it on, don’t you, he says. I’m like, Yeah, it’s not the turning on I’m worried about. It’s keeping the hard drive going. And immediately, even before Brisby snarks, I regret having reduced myself to lurid banter with Computer Boy, who gives me his cheap and evil grin, causing this adorable declivity in his left cheek, not exactly a dimple, a crimp, a crimple, which he then has to ruin by saying: Maybe you could come back to my office sometime and we could work on that. And now, paddling to regain my footing and really hoping he’ll just leave me be, I mutter: Yeah, maybe when the new laptops come in, Lance, I could come back there and give you my special laptop dance.

  I’d like that, he says, I’d like that very much, then—get this—winks, so that finally I can muster a decently derisive laugh, a true ho-ho-ho-you-bonehead-why-don’t-you-crawl-back-to-whatever-mousepad-you-came-from kind of laugh, which still isn’t enough to get Brisby off my back, because the instant Computer Boy and his filet mignon of an ass have bounced off he messages me: When do I get mine? Meaning, laptop dance, the prick.

  What I really want to know is when this sad new genre of human being, the Geek Player, came into existence. Because even two years ago the Systems Manager was this little smudge of a person who frittered on about mainframe systems and was perfectly content to hang with his tech buddies and flirt with the forty-something divorcées at Mac Warehouse. Those guys had a certain pathetic, introverted arrogance, because they knew they had the rest of the office by the stones. But they were basically frightened of people. Then this new breed started up, guys like Lance, who are no longer Systems Managers. Now they’re Computer Guys, which means they can be cute and outgoing and some of them, such as Lance, even ripped. And they strut around the office, coming to the rescue of all us computer fuckups, including the publisher, whose dome turns the color of salsa whenever his Mac crashes and who worships the very ground Lance walks on, because without Lance his cursor won’t move. When he isn’t hustling the chicks in production and advertising and even that one chick in editorial (me), when he isn’t out amongst his subjects, in other words, Lance sits in his office talking to the other Geek Players in the other offices, on speaker phone, all of them hollering, and playing Nerf basketball via remote, and cheating.

  How did Computer Guy become the Lifeguard of the decade? How did the mild-mannered Systems Manager morph into an omnipotent Geek Player, Love Slayer? Brisby and I have developed the following theories:

  Geekerella: The existing SM population, recognizing player potential, has undergone an eerie Men’s Magazine transformation involving facial scrapes, free weights, some kind of Toastmasters public-speech seminar, and clothing from Structure.

  Trickle-down chic: Noting the wealth and power afforded anyone with a whiff of tech know-how, an entirely new population of vaguely cool and mendacious men (previously drawn toward, say, condo sales) has chosen a career in the computer sciences.

  Not-so-great expectations: The general population, steeped in the greasy autism of the Systems Manager, has a tendency to inflate the coolness of the Computer Guy. As Brisby puts it: When you’re expecting Bill Gates, Steve Jobs starts looking like Brad Pitt. A related phenomenon (The Naughty Wonk Effect) holds that a geek overlay accentuates sexiness through irony, the same principle that leads pornographers to script so many gang-bang scenes featuring librarians.

  But how far will this paradigm shift go? Geek mafioso? Geek supermodels? Geek gangsta rap? How much cultural power will the Geek Player amass before people realize he’s just a guy who can talk to machines? And, perhaps more to the point, why do Computer Boy and his crimple have to haunt my every waking moment?

  So we’re at one of these office-wide happy-hour deals, which are supposed to build company morale, though what they tend to do is reinforce the sense, at least between Brisby and myself, that we are being bribed into silence. Of course Brisby ducks off to some fiancée-engineered function, like the good little monogamous soldier he is, leaving me fully vulnerable to the forces of office tooldom, against which I have only drunkenness as a defense, so that when something lands on my hair I flail around in this slightly trashed girlie spasm and smack into what feels like a tree limb with skin. There’s Computer Boy and his cinematic teeth and he does this drowsy thing with his eyelids, some kind of demiwink, which makes him look like a cat in the sun.

  Ciao bella, he says. Did I scare you?

  I thought you were a fly, I say.

  Maybe I am. Maybe I’m a Spanish fly.

  Oh please, I say. Go ask the wizard for a brain.

  Which you might figure would shut his piehole. But no, he has to speak, some ridiculous I-don’t-even-know-what rap about, oh Christ, something.

  What happened to your fan club? I say. For the last hour Marcie the Production Ho has been shoving her C-cups in his face and even as we speak she’s across the room sending me the official that-my-man death rays, which only makes the whole thing more pathetic, because there’s no angle in competing with a chick who lists nipple piercing on her résumé under Other Skills.

  What are you drinking, he says.

  G & T.

  He shakes his sweet, vacant head.

  Gin, I say slowly, and tonic.

  Gin, he says. Does that make you want to sin?

  Actually, it makes me want to chop your head off. Does that qualify as a sin? Or is that more like a public service?

  But good old Lancey, he’s not one to give up too easy. He keeps asking questions. Like he read a book once that said: Ask lots of questions. Chicks dig it when you take an interest in their lives. When did I start at the paper? How did I get into reporting? Where do I live? You can tell he’s not really listening, which neither am I, thanks to the drinks.

  Then he starts this whole touching my hair thing, playing with my hair, and I tell him to knock it off, not very convincingly. His eyes droop a little and he shoots me his look of false contrition, but in such a way that rather than noticing how supposedly sorry he feels, what I notice is the muscles flaring out from his neck, these twin blades of muscle, almost like gills. Jesus, does Lancey work out his neck? Does he go to the gym with a specific neck regimen? It occurs to me in this horrible flash I’d prefer not to classify as an epiphany that he’s probably strong enough to bench press my entire (naked) body with his neck. I could plop myself down on his upturned face, his wet, white teeth, and he could neck-press me.

  I look around helplessly for Brisby or someone else from editorial, who’ll snicker the whole thing away. But there’s no one left except the horny ad rats in their commission grins and the sulky face-mangled production scum. Marcie? Where the hell is Marcie?

  Computer Boy moves in for the kill and I can smell the white Russians on his breath, sweet and milky and boozy and his rotten cologne/deodorant and his gorgeous throat pullying away as he swallows. But just as I’m about to be carried off onto the sea of stupid love, this little yeoman of respectability tosses me a line and I say: How old are you? Tell me how old you are.

  How old do you think I am?

  I don’t know, Lance. Seven?

  Twenty-seven, he says. In December. Why, how old are you?

  Which, I mean, how can you reach twenty-seven in this culture without figuring out that this is a bad question? How does that happen?

  Where do you live? I say.

  This question seems to spook him. He runs a hand through his hair, which crackles, and shows me his biceps with the two veins that intersect like rural routes on a map, hoping I’ll be so mesmerized as to forget my question.

  Around here, he says, gesturing vaguely.

  Really? I bite into my lime. Where?

  Now he leans back, looking much less sure of himself, running my hair through his thumb and forefinger, like a suit he’s considering. Yeah, he says, I got this box right behind the bar. It’s pretty cool. I never have to worry about DUIs.

 
A response so lame that I’m sort of rooting for him to not be speaking English anymore. And it dawns on me, falls on me actually, as bricks fall upon the naive from a great height: Lancey lives with his parents. A twenty-seven–year-old dependent. His hulking Computer Boy bod cramped onto a single bed, Cheryl Tiegs tacked to the wall, Rubik’s cube on the dresser, mom bustling into his room with his underwear washed and folded into little squares, making him macaroni and cheese, dad yelling at him to take out the garbage. Only the great sadness of this realization rescues me from the competing desire to start chewing his lips, which, thank god, before I can do this Marcie knifes her way over, all miffed and studded, and I peel off to the bathroom before anything catty can happen and sit and listen to my bladder empty of tonic and wonder why Brisby couldn’t have stuck around long enough to save me from myself.

  I’m talking to Gala about this shit, because she knows my whole deal, every hopeful seems-like-a-nice-guy-really-smart-kissed-me-goodnight flameout, and I tell her, There’s no way I can give him the goods now, right? Right, Gala? If he’s living at home?

  Why not? she says.

  It’s, just, like a rule, right? Didn’t we have that rule?

  But Gala, though my best friend in the world, is maybe not the best person to consult, because five months ago she caught her husband cheating and gave him the boot, and the whole thing’s made her less sure of everything. She used to give me these stern speeches about not treating my body like a disposable washcloth; pride in ownership and so forth. Now, she just asks: Well, what do you want to do?

  I want to fuck him silly, I say. Oh my god, Gala, you have no idea. I was on my way to lunch today and he was sitting there on the floor of his office with these parts all around him and this big screwdriver and these forearms.

  A handyman, Gala says.

  A handyman who lives with this parents.

  You don’t know that.

  That’s what all the strutting is about, I say. Overcompensation.

  Maybe the strutting is just strutting. Maybe he’s hung, Gala says.

  Which, I mean: How did we get from disposable washcloth to hung?

  Call him, Gala says. You’ve got a phone list, right? Just call him.

  What if his mom answers? What am I supposed say: Hello ma’am. You don’t know me, but I want to lick your son’s balls. Is he expected home later?

  A door slams over at her place and my godson, Justin (who is so cute I would actually eat him if not monitored), comes howling in. Gala tells me to hang on a sec and yells at Justin to please go into the other room, mommy’s talking to someone on the phone right now, which makes me feel very much like a depraved auntie.

  He does know this computer stuff, I say, so he’s got to have some kind of an intellect, right? Besides, I’ve always been kind of a geek, haven’t I Gal? In school. Wasn’t I always kind of a geek?

  But Justin’s going crazy now, hollering something about pizza, daddy gives him pizza, he wants pizza. He’s such a little man I want to laugh, though actually what happens is I start crying a little bit, thinking about Gala and how she looked in her bridal gown, how she gazed at John during their first dance, with such dreamy trust that me and the other bridesmaids could feel the hammering of our hearts. Not that marriage is any bowl of mousse, but at a certain point you realize it’s better than tearing around town with the big scarlet Un on your chest. Getting involved with guys who are either dogs outright or else sensitive guys, which just means their molten core of misogyny is buried a little deeper, takes a little longer to get to, that place where you’re eating breakfast at some lousy diner after a night of wild angry sex, at-least-we-still-have-this sex, or no sex at all, and you want to ask him: What happened to that other thing we had? But he’s looking down at his plate, hacking up a waffle, and his face is like a cursor, a dead blink, so you just ask him to pass the syrup.

  Only it’s worse than that, because maybe it’s not them at all. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the one who somehow fucks it up, demands too much, needs too much, gets too angry, weepy, moody. Maybe I’m unlovable is the truth, and I plunge into one of those moments where I can see everything I’m never going to get—the guy, the dress, the one dance—and Justin’s wailing away and Gala says she has to go, so I hang up.

  Brisby and me are heading out for some tacos, but the elevator’s taking forever and the whole office seems trapped under a glaze of late-afternoon discontent, except for Computer Boy, who we can hear laughing, one of those insincere machine-gun laughs—chut-chut-chut—like the modern-rock jocks do all the time. Brisby looks at me and we drift toward his little tittie-poster-festooned office. It’s not like we’re eavesdropping either, because he’s practically shouting: No way, dude! She looked like ass. What were her stats, dude? You fucking liar! She was fucking bacterial! Chut-chut-chut. Yeah, if it was me, I’d send that shit out for dry-cleaning! Wait, where’d you find that? In the crack? Bleach, dude! Clorox! Chut-chut-chut. I’m fuckin’ serious, dude. That shit will make you go blind. Penicillin, dude. Penis chillin. Chut-chut-chut.

  And what’s remarkable is not that someone who has been alive for nearly three decades would speak like this (though that is kind of remarkable) but that it goes on and on and on, this proto-fratboy-speak that’s not so much offensive after a while as sad, imbued with the deep lonely rage of the Geek Player.

  All Brisby and I can say in the elevator is: Wow.

  I work up a few chut-chuts over lunch, but Brisby wants to talk about his fiancée, whom I’ve met twice and who seems cool, kind of pretty in a J. Crew way, maybe a little on the uptight side. She wants Brisby to take these classes before they get married, is the latest issue, with her priest. (She has a priest!) This will bring them closer together, she figures, which I’m not so sure about, because Brisby’s not a churchy kind of guy. Even after his mom had a stroke and he had to move back from Dallas, you didn’t hear him talking about God’s Great Plan or any of that crapola. He just said: What am I supposed to do, let her drown in drool?

  But now he’s looking at me, the poor guy, like what do I think he should do. Suddenly I feel flustered. What are the priest’s stats? I say.

  Brisby goes into his Morley Safer face, the one he uses when he’s got some bigwig on the phone, and for a sec I’m afraid I’ve pissed him off.

  He’s not currently bacterial, Brisby says. I know that.

  Is his penis chillin? Do you know if his penis is chillin?

  Shit. Brisby smacks his forehead. I forgot to ask.

  And just sitting there, munching on our tacos, with sour cream painting our lips and hot sauce burning our throats, I’m so relieved Brisby is around, that he’s a friend of mine. That we heard Computer Boy together so that he can provide, if not moral guidance, at least a foretaste of the devout shame I would experience post-bop.

  * * *

  Then it’s Halloween, which means the paper throws one of these mandatory costume parties intended to lube up the advertisers. I figure, what the hell, it’s a Saturday night, I’m not getting any younger, so I go as Lolita: kneesocks, pleated skirt, twin braids, and the dogs of this world howl and howl; there’s something about the prospect of boffing a twelve-year-old that sends the sperm count into orbit.

  Plenty of booze and some decent grilled shrimp appetizers and a DJ who somehow manages to not suck. The little club they’ve rented out, Sub Rosa, has this tiny sunken dance floor, and all the chicks, me included, do their thing once management clears out, screaming along to “Got to Be Real” and “I Will Survive,” shaking gynapalooza style, while the dweebs from business circle around fanning the flames, and the place actually starts to get a little sexy, a little sweaty, which is when Computer Boy makes his entrance. He’s wearing this Zorro-meets-Liberace getup, raccoon mask, pinkie rings, a spangled cape that whips around as he vogues, and this big whoop goes up and us chickees tear off the cape and all he’s wearing is a white leather vest and a matching codpiece and there it is, Der Weinerschnitzel, sitting up like a pleased lit
tle puppy. It all comes together now: he’s a queen. A big flaming murder-’em-with-my-abs queen. Perfect.

  Then his date appears, Marcie the Production Ho, trussed up in a tit-spiller, buried under blue eye shadow, and throwing sass. The pair of them, what a freak show, like Rocky Horror without the singalong.

  But what the hell! The music’s good and the gin’s cast a certain forgiving silliness onto everything and I’m enjoying flailing around in the belief of my sexiness, which is being reinforced by the menfolk, who ask me if I’m a naughty girl and do I want detention and paw my skirt and gaze upon my hair like it’s a divine accomplishment. I mean, how many of these nights does one get, anyway?

  I can feel Brisby checking me out from the edge of the room, where he and fiancée are poking at the remains of the appetizers. They’re both dressed in prison stripes and dopey little hats, with a little plastic ball and chain between them (get it?) and it’s obvious Elle Elle Bean is in one of her snits, wants out of here, away from the depravity, and even though Brisby is probably my last link to common sense, to my not doing something marvelous and stupid, I’m ready for them to ship off into their goddamn bloodless duet of a life and leave the rest of us to gobble each other up. What it is: I don’t like the look on Brisby’s face, so glum and smug that I want to walk over there and slap him, though before I can even take a step in that direction, he’s gone. Of course.