Text copyright © Kris Lillyman 2014
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For Netty, Scarlett and Dexter
Jam Tops, The Fonz
and the
Pursuit of Cool
By Kris Lillyman
Part One: The Seventies
Chapter One
Bradley, Northamptonshire 1978
It was all Steve Austen’s fault. The Six Million Dollar Man himself. With more than just a little bit of help from Evel Knievel.
Those were the two primarily responsible for pushing nice, normal, slightly chubby, quite four-eyed and very basin-cutted Gordy Brewer over the precipice of ‘Nerd’ and into the Lost World of ‘Geek’.
This wondrous land was chock full to the brim with box loads of boyhood booty - tempting towers of toys; copious caverns of comic-book collectibles and shiny shitloads of TV show tat which Gordy found just impossible to resist. He was drawn to it all like Popeye to spinach or The Honey Monster to Sugar Puffs.
But Gordy didn’t want to be a nerd. He wanted to be cool.
‘Cool’ was the future; cool was his destiny - he felt it in his water as his Nan would say - although he realised, with cruel irony, that quoting the phrases of an incontinent septuagenarian was probably not the best way to fulfil that destiny.
Nonetheless, he also knew that to be cool was the only sure fire way of him being irresistible to the opposite sex. And that, when it really boiled down to it, was his ultimate goal.
Yet Gordy suspected that the transition was fraught with difficulties as he was a boy not naturally disposed to being even remotely cool.
Indeed, Gordy’s idea of a perfect Saturday afternoon was sitting in front of the telly with his Mum watching old musicals starring the likes of Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor.
It didn’t matter what movie it was, Gordy and his Mum loved them all and Gordy’s Saturday afternoons were what Max Bygraves might cheerfully have called ‘sing-along-a-mamma’.
The pair of them would spend many a happy hour dancing around the living room singing show tunes at the top of their voices. Their combined vocal stylings belting out numbers such as ‘Surrey With a Fringe on Top’ from ‘Oklahoma!’ (a particular favourite) and ‘June Is Bustin’ Out All Over’ from ‘Carousel’ (another of their all time top ten). This was all to the considerable dismay of Gordy’s father who was convinced his son was growing up to be a ‘Chase me Charlie.’
Gordy had no such concerns but would, however, be mortified if any of his friends found out that he was a bit partial to a show tune and knew all the words to ‘I Feel Pretty’ from ‘Westside Story’ off by heart.
Nevertheless, he decided, that by hook or by crook, the musicals, the toys and the comics were all habits he was going to have to kick, because somehow, some way, Gordy Brewer intended to transform himself from super nerd into super cool.
However, thanks to Steve Austen, his journey did not begin well.
Two years earlier, in the August of 1976, Gordy had asked for The Six Million Dollar Man action figure for his twelfth birthday - seduced by the advert on telly which claimed (rather falsely as it turned out) that he would be amazed by ‘All The Excitement! All The Realism!’ and ‘All the ‘Bionic’ Action!’.
It looked fabulous on TV but when he opened the box he found it to be nothing but a piece of cheap plastic crap - clearly aimed at much younger children.
Indeed, it was hardly exciting, extremely un real and very far from bionic.
In fact a complete bunch of arse.
Gordy had always loved Action Man, ever since he could remember but he knew, with considerable regret, he had pretty much outgrown it. He just refused to admit it. The Six Million Dollar Man was just a way of clinging on to his fast diminishing childhood for just a little bit longer. But the toy itself paled in comparison to the far-superior Action Man.
As Gordy unwrapped Steve Austen on his birthday morning, the disappointment on his father’s face was plain to see, clearly unimpressed by the fact that his son was still playing with dolls (even though it was a doll designed for boys).
Gordy was thankful now that he hadn’t asked for a Womble, which was an idea he had briefly flirted with when drawing up his birthday list, as that would’ve really sent his father over the edge.
Gordy had seen disappointment on his father’s face quite a few times in the past. Usually when ’Top Of The Pops’ was on and his dad was trying to ogle Pan’s People. Because instead of just letting him enjoy this one moment of pleasure in his busy working week, Gordy would jump up and start dancing wildly in front of the telly, copying the moves of the sexy ladies on TV. His mum thought this was ‘sweet’. His dad, however, said nothing but his disappointed face said, ‘Oh God, my boy’s a bloody whoopsie!’
Thankfully, Gordy had stopped dancing in front of the television by the time Legs and Co. took over from Pan’s People but the seed of doubt had already been sewn in his father’s very heterosexual, very straight-laced brain. Gordy, in fact, was not a ‘whoopsie’ at all but it would take some convincing before his father believed it. And buying toys for younger children - dolls especially - did little to help Gordy’s cause.
Take a bow then, Evel Knievel. Not to be put off or deterred by the shame of asking for The Six Million Dollar Man or the disappointment he felt after getting it, Gordy then went on to ask for the ‘Evel Knievel GT Stunt Set’ for Christmas and low and behold on Christmas morning it duly appeared under the tree.
The moment of unwrapping was missed by Gordy’s dad who chose that precise moment (purposely Gordy felt) to go for a ‘Christmas poo.’
However, his father’s absence aside, the quality of the Evel doll made the Steve doll look positively superb. Indeed, the only thing of substance was Evel’s head which was made of cheap plastic whilst the rest of him was made of sponge - tightly sewn up in a white nylon jump suit. His hands were just white hooks that clamped onto the brittle plastic handlebars of the stunt cycle.
The stunt cycle itself was set in motion by winding a handle on the ‘energiser’ it locked onto. When released, the cycle sped off at ‘death-defying speed’ and could do wheelies and jumps with Evel clinging on for dear life. One such trip scared the dog shitless as the stunt cycle ploughed into it’s backside. The dog leapt up, farted and headed for the backdoor like a rocket, his feet skating on the newly laid Cushionfloor. The cycle then rebounded off the kitchen door, causing Nan to spill her sherry, and headed off towards the cat who, absolutely terrified, bounded up the Christmas tree, bringing it crashing to the ground and scattering baubles and chocolate coins all over the living room carpet. On top of all that, the impact with the kitchen door had snapped the stunt cycle’s handlebars and Evel had been thrown from the saddle somewhere between the dog’s arse and the Harvey’s Bristol Cream. The broken cycle lay mortally wounded beside a now dented tin of Quality Street.
What an utter let-down.
Unfortunately, the damage to Gordy’s already dubious status amongst his peers went much deeper.
His friends had all grown out of ‘kids toys’ like the Airfix Super Flight Deck or Ricochet Racers and had opted, instead, for more ‘grown-up’ presents. One got a Spenby Chest Expander, another got the Spenby Musculator with it’s big coiled spring in the middle (which was bloody lethal and cou
ld easily take someone’s head off if they accidentally let go of one of the handles). Two of Gordy’s mates got new racing bikes, someone else got a portable transistor radio and one even got a Philishave shaver (no doubt from his particularly proud father).
So when Gordy mentioned the ‘Evel Knievel GT Stunt Set’ he was suddenly set apart. That, when coupled with the Steve Austen debacle at his birthday party - when, much to his friends’ amusement, his sister had stripped off The Six Million Dollar Man’s manly red NASA jumpsuit and dragged him up in one of Barbie’s pretty pink ball gowns for a tea party with Ken - he had inadvertently stepped onto the nerdy side of the street.
Then, of course, there was the comics. Batman, Superman, Spider-man, The Fantastic Four, The Justice League and The Avengers, Gordy loved them all and his collection was huge. When he was younger, all his friends loved comics, too, but now only he and Trevor (about more of whom will follow) still remained interested. And unfortunately nothing screamed NERD like the words ‘comic collector’.
Gordy’s looks didn’t exactly help much either - the brown basin-cut hair, brown horn-rimmed specs and his slightly chubby physique all gave him a somewhat nerdy appearance.
But, if none of that wealth of irrefutable proof had been enough to brand him a nerd then his choice of friend certainly did, merely by association.
Which brings us nicely, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, to the oddity known as Trevor Robert Savoury - for whom the word ‘nerd’ was surely invented. Indeed, if you were to look it up in a dictionary, you would undoubtedly see his name printed underneath as the concise definition.
If Gordy was considered something of a nerd then Trevor was undoubtedly Darth Nerda.
He was the consummate nerd - the living embodiment of nerdism and it was a lifestyle he embraced to the full and gloried in.
Trevor was Gordy’s best friend and had been almost since the day he was born. Trevor loved comics and Action Man and The Six Million Dollar Man too. He also loved Star Trek, Star Wars, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Joe 90 (actually anything by Gerry Anderson). He loved The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Mission Impossible, Hawaii Five-0, The Persuaders, The Protectors, Department S, Jason King, Dr. Who, The Champions - the list went on and on and Trevor was an expert on every single one.
However, what further advanced Trevor’s status as King of the Nerds was that he dressed up like the characters he loved so much. Not just for an hour or two during a game of make-believe but all day, every day. He would go into town dressed as a Captain Scarlet, go on school outings as Luke Skywalker and turn up at the cinema on a Saturday morning dressed exactly like Virgil Tracy. All of which seemed completely normal to Trevor who never once considered it to be out of the ordinary.
And he was right. There was absolutely nothing wrong with dressing up like a TV character. Certainly not at eight years old or nine, probably even ten at a push but once he was into secondary school and he hit eleven, twelve and thirteen, it just started to look a bit weird.
Until he was about ten years old, Gordy hadn’t really thought much about Trevor’s penchant for dressing up and on occasion he had actually joined him (usually as a secondary character - such as Spock to Trevor’s Kirk, or Tonto to his Lone Ranger - once he had been Sarah Jane to Trevor’s Dr. Who but that hadn’t felt right at all - and heralded yet another ‘disappointed look’ from Gordy’s dad). But other than that, Trevor’s dressing up certainly hadn’t bothered Gordy.
However, as Gordy got older and started to take a more than casual interest in girls (much to Mr. Brewer’s relief) he realised that having someone next to him dressed as Batman - complete with homemade cape, cowl, gloves and the obligatory silk pants over grey tights (very much in the vein of Adam West’s extremely camp version of the Dark Knight) was a little bit of a drawback when trying to impress a girl that he fancied.
At fourteen, Gordy knew that he would have to disguise his natural nerdiness in order to A) Make more friends and B) Possibly one day get a girlfriend. Trevor, on the other hand, most definitely did not.
This presented a slight problem as in the Summer of 1978, aged fourteen, Gordy had set his sights on one particular girl who he was determined to get to know better - and being Robin to Trevor’s Batman was certainly not the right way to go about it.
The object of his affection was Pippa Wilson - the undisputed, undoubted and, above all, unrequited love of Gordy Brewer’s young life. To him, Pippa was a Goddess, the perfect ten, the absolute ultimate - and he was convinced there would never be another. She was a girl so good-looking, so stylish, so amply chested that every time he saw her his stomach did a somersault and a party started in his underpants. So much so that on the few times she had actually glanced his way (usually through him, not at him), he thought his trousers might possibly explode - a bit like John Hurt’s stomach in Alien but instead of a creature popping out there would be a rather sorry looking penis.
Once, in the dinner queue, Pippa’s breasts had accidentally made contact with Gordy’s back. This brief encounter had lasted no longer than two seconds and was more of a glancing blow than a full on shunt - but their close proximity, and the weight of them as they parallel parked comfortably between his two stationary shoulder blades (which, if he closed his eyes and thought about for a moment, he could still feel) had given him a persistent boner that lasted the full hour and which he’d had to carefully hide with his briefcase (yes, briefcase) for the rest of the lunch break.
Stand Pippa Wilson alongside Princess Leia, all of Charlie’s Angels, Wonder Woman (either comic or TV show) or even Lee Meriweather wearing her spray-on Catwoman suit in the Batman re-runs - who Gordy had been lusting over during the school holidays - and Pippa would come out on top every single time.
Even up against top drawer opposition like Victoria Principal - who frankly made Gordy feel slightly light-headed whenever she stepped out of the pool in Dallas or Sally James from Tiswas who made getting out of bed on a Saturday morning truly worthwhile, Pippa still reigned supreme.
Gordy sometimes spent whole hours just fantasising about her. Mostly during maths or geography because those were the lessons that held his attention the least. In his dreams he would always be good-looking, witty and muscly - three things he did not consider himself to be in reality (perhaps he should have got a Spenby Musculator after all).
Somehow in his dreams he was always naked to the waist, looking like a teen Erik Estrada from CHiPs, his bronzed six-pack glistening in the sunlight, and there would be Pippa, with her tight cotton blouse straining to bursting point across her chest. The buttons threatening to ping off like bullets under the industrial strength pressure of her marvellous bosoms. The look in Pippa’s eyes was always wanton and desperate for his touch. In these dreams Gordy was a stud with a sure, confident way about him and she was powerless to resist his charms. But the best bit of his fantasy by far was when he would kiss her and do all the things that a fourteen-year-old in the first flush of sexual awakening could think of. Which basically meant having a good old grope (probably accompanied by the word ‘phwoar’ and an Albert Steptoe ‘dirty-old-man’ expression on his face). The notion of groping would only ever be entertained over her school blouse though, as anything underneath was all a bit too much to contemplate safely. Gordy could certainly imagine the plump, pink perfection that pushed proudly against that thin cotton barrier but he just daren’t - not at school, at least, as the resulting explosion could possibly wipe out the whole humanities block!
When he was alone, in the comparative safety of his bedroom, Gordy’s mind did occasionally stray to Xanadu - that magical place that he knew lay in the Neverland to the south of Pippa’s waist. This almost always resulted in a frantic ‘Mission: Impossible’ type run to the loo for bog roll and the guilty trip back there to flush the clumped up wads down the pan once he’d had his wicked way with it - all without his nosey little sister spying on him and telling his mum and dad what a fil
thy pervert he was.
Gordy knew very well what Pippa’s bits looked like as he had actually seen them when he, and she, were both eight years old at the local swimming baths. He and his friends (although not Trevor who was too busy pretending to be Marine Boy) had been spying on Pippa and a few of the other girls through a hole in the changing room wall after their swimming lesson and noted that they looked a bit odd - in that they were different to boys. This, however, was before Gordy was interested in girls, when they were all still disgusting to him. Now though, that had all changed. Even so, the thought of perhaps one day having sex scared him a little - for a start everything now was so much more hairy (or at least he thought it would be) and this worried him somewhat. He, himself, had recently become more hairy and he was still not altogether comfortable with that unexpected turn of events.
His older brother, Kev, who at sixteen, two years Gordy’s senior was much more a man of the world (so he said) and the delights of the female anatomy apparently held very few secrets that were yet to be unveiled to him. However, the tales of Kev’s exploits varied greatly between delight and terror and Gordy decided that there was plenty of time for all that messy business. For the time being the contents of a bra was enough for him to consider and get excited about.
It seemed Gordy Brewer was a fourteen-year old tit-man, and the tits he admired most were Pippa Wilson’s.
Unfortunately, she was aiming them elsewhere.
***
Pippa, like Gordy, was a third year at Poplar Park Comprehensive School in Bradley, Northamptonshire. The difference between them, apart from the obvious, was that Gordy was a fully paid up member of ‘Nerds Anonymous’ and Pippa was a member of the school elite.
Gordy was also extremely inexperienced, having never even kissed a girl let alone been out with one, whilst Pippa, the love of his life, was already a dab hand at dating and currently going out with a fifth former. Not only that, but Pippa seemed to be as smitten with this boy as Gordy was with her.
Jam Tops, the Fonz and the Pursuit of Cool Page 1
