Jam Tops, the Fonz and the Pursuit of Cool

by Kris Lillyman

  It was like he was The Fonz (not that Daisy had the slightest idea who The Fonz was because she didn’t have a TV - but if she had, that’s what she would have thought), as almost with a snap of Steve’s super cool, (literally Cool) fingers, his father released his grip on Glynn Flynn’s neck whose sandals touched down on the tarmac once more with only the slightest bump on landing. “Your beer’s getting cold,” Steve added to his lummox of a dad and like some giant, dumb bear who had been trained to perform for treats, his father loped off back into his cave (actually it was rather a scruffy looking council house) to claim his reward.

  As this transpired Daisy temporarily forgot where she was, why she was there and, indeed, who she was as she stared in awe struck wonder at the magnificence of Steve Cool in all his out-of-school-uniform glory (or at least what passed as school uniform to Steve Cool).

  However, her parents seemed to somehow part in front of her as if Steve was Moses and they were a human, two-person version of the Red Sea, leaving her, with her Hair Bear afro and specky ginger looks completely in Steve Cool’s direct line of sight. Sadly, Daisy realised this just a moment too late as she found herself looking straight into Steve Cool’s dreamy - but presently rather angry looking - eyes before the object of her desire pointed sharply at her and said “You!” immediately recognising her as the object he only knew as ‘Hair Bear’ from school.

  Suddenly mortified and wishing the ground would open up and swallow both her and her God bothering parents whole, Daisy felt paralysed with humiliation. “S-s-sorry,” she whispered.

  “Sorry?”, Steve Cool growled, “You will be fucking sorry you mad bunch of hippies - now fuck off and leave us alone. No one wants you calling round here.” With that, he slammed the door and disappeared from view. From Daisy’s recollection of that hideous incident, there were no harps playing or angels singing now. Just her dad’s voice saying, “Well, I don’t think that went too badly, do you?” as he gathered up the pieces of his shattered guitar.

  From that moment on, Daisy had kept a particularly low profile at school, or at least as ‘low’ as her hair would allow. But she had admired Steve Cool surreptitiously from afar, wishing that he had never seen her on that fateful day and that she looked even moderately like Pippa Wilson. Because if she did, and if Steve Cool did not now assume her to be some religious nutter, then it might be Daisy’s lips he was kissing and not that blonde bobbed, beautiful bodied, big-boobed, boy beacon, Pippa Wilson - the Hair Bear blanking bloody bitch!

  When Daisy arrived home that day, after being blanked by Pippa at the bike sheds, she took a long hard look at herself in the mirror and promised herself that one day, some how, Steve Cool would look at her the same way as he did Pippa.

  Studying herself, Daisy took into account her hair, her specs, her freckles, the complete absence of feminine curves and her extremely flat chest and knew she was setting herself a huge task (a David and Goliath kind of deal but instead of Israelites and Philistines it was mainly about boobs and afros - which would surely make for a much better parable).

  Furthermore, Daisy was pretty sure Pippa’s parents were laid-back, trendy and popular members of the community (or at the very least, just ‘normal’) and not two flower-power, scripture screaming, Woodstock wannabees with a penchant for pot, paisley and preaching!

  But, nevertheless, someday, Daisy vowed, Steve Cool would be hers.

  Chapter Three

  Gordy decided that he needed to make a list. A ‘Things That Are Cool’ list.

  So, one evening, just after The Professionals, Gordy went upstairs, sat down on his bed and started to write.

  Gordon Brewer’s Things That Are Cool List

  1) Smoking.

  Bad for you, yes - but cool? Hell yes.

  2) Sunglasses.

  Absolutely irrefutable - even when worn inside in the dark - not all pop stars can be wrong.

  3) Leather jackets.

  Just look at the T-Birds from Grease - or at least Danny and Kenicke, not the other idiots. Also, The Fonz wore a leather jacket. Enough said.

  4) Good hair.

  A given. The Fonz was obsessive about his hair, which meant that Gordy should be, too.

  5) White socks.

  Not grey or brown and definitely not patterned like his dad’s.

  6) A shit-hot taste in music.

  Not just a shit taste in music as Gordy’s was at present - which basically meant his record collection had to become more Jimi Hendrix and less Jimmy Osmond.

  7) Jam top shoes.

  The shoes that only truly cool people wore - i.e. Paul Weller and Steve bloody Cool.

  8) Strutting.

  All cool people strutted - a cool walk or ‘strut’ was essential to being cool. Fact. As proof of this, all Gordy had to do was think of John Travolta carrying his can of paint at the start of Saturday Night Fever.

  9) Nicknames.

  Like ‘The Fonz’ or ‘Sundance’ or ‘Hutch’. Cool people had cool nicknames. Nobody cool in the history of the world was ever called ‘Gordy’ and even less were called ‘Gordon’.

  10) Fashion.

  Even David Bowie, who wore make-up and looked like a girl was cool because he was fashionable - although Gordy was sure that his dad’s ‘disappointed face’ would quickly become his dad’s ‘unbelievably appalled and going into cardiac arrest face’ if he came home sporting a spiky red mullet, full trannie make-up and a humongous blue and red lightening bolt painted down the front of his chubby little face.

  11) Being a good dancer.

  Once again, Gordy took his inspiration from Saturday Night Fever.

  12) Talking ‘Jive’.

  Now Gordy knew he wasn’t black and there was very little chance that he ever would be. But black people were cool, especially the ones from New York, like ‘Huggy Bear’ from Starsky and Hutch who spoke in ‘Jive’. Gordy had never actually met a black person so his frame of reference was very limited, however, there was a black boy in the second year at Poplar Park (who happened to be the only person not white who Gordy had ever seen, other than on TV). He and the boy had never spoken but Gordy resolved to change that believing some of the coolness (which he would undoubtedly have) would rub off on him - maybe the boy even spoke ‘Jive’ - there was certainly every chance that he did if skin colour alone was anything to go by. Furthermore, Gordy decided to adopt certain phrases that he had heard black New Yorkers saying in the movies - things like, ‘shit blood’ (which sounded more painful than it meant - which Gordy took to mean, ‘really, you don’t say?’ and ‘bad ass mother fucker’ (which sounded utterly horrendous if you took it literally but very cool if you didn’t). Gordy also thought he might drop phrases like ‘groovy baby’ and ‘can you dig it’ into the odd conversation, which would surely boost his cool rating.

  13) Being a good kisser.

  This was undoubtedly essential but Gordy had no idea whether he was or he wasn’t as he had never tried and how do you go about trying when you haven’t got a willing collaborator? This was something Gordy was going to have to give a lot of thought to.

  14) Being slim.

  Nobody fat was ever cool - not even John Belushi in Animal House which had just come out at the pictures and that Gordy had snuck in to see instead of a re-run of Digby, The Biggest Dog in the World, which Gordy thought was actually pretty cool in itself. Anyway, fat people weren’t cool. Funny, yes, whacky, yes, but cool, definitely not.

  15) Being able to undo a bra strap with one hand.

  Either the traditional rear fastening variety or the newer, more dynamic and altogether more impressive, industrial strength, front loader (this presented yet another thorny problem for Gordy who had difficulty undoing one of his own shirt buttons single-handed, let alone something with two hooks, two eyes and a lot of strong elastic which had the potential to twang off and have his eye out. Furthermore, even usin
g two hands he could never do up the top button on his school shirt and always had to ask his mum to do it for him - he wondered how Pippa would react if he called a halt to their ’heavy-petting’ whilst he brought in his mum to unclip her bra strap for him - Pippa’s bra, not his mum’s - just to clarify.

  16) Having a blatant disregard for the school uniform.

  Cool people didn’t conform or ‘follow the sheep’, they were individuals, trailblazers, who would not let a little thing like ‘regulations’ stand in their way. They were rebels who wouldn’t be seen dead in a ‘Crimpolene’ blazer with cheap chrome buttons, or ties which designated what school ‘house’ they belonged to - Gordy was in ‘York’ house but there was also ‘Gloucester’, ‘Winchester’ and ‘Lincoln’ although they were all equally shit. And badges - a badge on your blazer, a badge on your jumper and a badge on your tie - what was it with all the bloody badges? Cool people didn’t wear badges - unless they were the small button type ones that had things like ‘peace’ signs or rebellious slogans printed on them - one lad at school had been given ‘six of the best’ for wearing two such badges - one said ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ on it and the other said ‘Muffin The Mule is Not a Criminal Offence’ - but all other badges - namely school badges, were not cool and neither were the uniforms that they were so frequently sewn on to. So if Gordy wanted to be cool, the school uniform, as determined in the Poplar Park school prospectus would most definitely have to be ditched.

  17) Cool friends.

  This was a biggie as Trevor was Gordy’s best friend and there was no way he could see of Trevor ever becoming even slightly cool - not unless shouting ‘Uh-oh, Chongo!’ at the top of your voice like the character from the Danger Island segment in The Banana Splits Show every time anything slightly out of the ordinary happened, suddenly became cool or the next big thing was going to be clicking open your biro in the classroom and speaking into it saying, “Hello, Mr. Waverly, open ‘Channel D’” like ‘Napoleon Solo’ did in ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ but failing that, then it just wasn’t going to happen. Furthermore, Gordy’s other friends showed no interest in being cool, in fact they probably wouldn’t have known ‘cool’ if it hit them in their very spotty, very uncool, very nerdy faces.

  18) Not wearing glasses.

  Cool people weren’t blind - not unless they were Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder, nor did they have to worry about getting their glasses knocked off in P.E. or get laughed at when they steamed up when they went from a cold place into a hot place or have to take them off in the showers after games when they couldn’t see a bloody thing and of having to be extremely careful about what they were touching! Cool people didn’t get punched for accidentally feeling up someone’s hairy arse when they were actually looking for the soap, or have to continually explain to people that it was “JUST AN HONEST MISTAKE!” - nor have nightmare’s and near O.C.D. by obsessively washing their hands for months after doing it!.

  19) An earring.

  This was a dodgy one as:

  A) it involved pain and, from what he’d been told, quite a bit of blood - two things that Gordy had an aversion to;

  B) his mum would kill him and if she didn’t then his nan definitely would and as for his dad, well, his ‘disappointed face’ would first go deathly pale before swiftly transforming into his ‘Oh Christ, my son’s a raving Nancy boy, what am I going to say to the chaps at the Rotary Club if they ever find out’ face;

  and

  C) which ear you had pierced apparently declared whether you were straight or gay and Gordy didn’t know which ear meant ‘straight’, nor did any of his nerdy friends and if he got the wrong one then it could prove very embarrassing - enough to endorse the aforementioned short-sighted shower fiasco which he was still trying to live down and secondly ruin his dad’s high standing at the very square, very straight, Rotary Club - even though Gordy was sure that Mr. Evans, the grocer and President of Rotary ‘batted for the other team’ - or at the very least helped them out at weekends. Needless to say, getting an ear pierced was going to prove extremely difficult). But if he had to do it to be cool then so be it.

  And, finally...

  20) Not being a nerd.

  This was critical as nerds were definitely NOT cool.

  However, Gordy knew, as previously mentioned, that ‘nerd’ was his default setting.

  He was predisposed to loving comics and toys and TV shows and dancing around the living room with his Mum singing show tunes.

  But it was no good writing a list of what was cool, in a bid to make himself ‘it’, if he was just going to revert to type at the drop of a hat.

  No, Gordy was going to have to bury his true self and re-emerge from the chrysalis of cool as a chain-smoking, sunglasses wearing, leather-jacketed, quiff-haired, white-socked, musically hip, jam-topped, street-strutting, enigmatically nicknamed, flash dancing, jive-talking mother-fucking, bad arsed (or possibly ‘assed’), french-kissing, slim-lined, bra-snapping, out-of-uniformed, newly friended, 20-20 visioned, earring wearing (not in a gay way), non-nerdy cool dude of a guy.

  After all, how hard could it be?

  Anyway, ‘The Cool List’ as it became known in his head, became Gordy’s wish list and he soon set about trying to make it become a reality. If he used it as a map, stuck to it’s teachings - regarded it as ‘Master’ and himself as ‘Grasshopper’ and ticked off every item as each one was achieved or purchased, then he would, surely, inevitably, become cool. Right?

  There was only one thing, that Gordy could see, which might possibly jeopardise his planned meteoritical rise up the ‘cool tree’ and that was money, or, to be more accurate, his complete lack of it. Being cool was going to cost and whilst Gordy’s parents weren’t exactly poor they were definitely not rich either and he could hardly see them wanting to splash out on things like leather jackets, cigarettes (especially not cigarettes) and dance classes (yes, dance classes - Gordy presumed that even John Travolta had to have somebody who taught him to dance like, well, John Travolta).

  So, if he wanted to be cool then he had to have money - and that meant, unfortunately, he’d have to get a part-time job.

  Now, cool jobs, that is to say jobs that were both cool in what they were and made you cool because you did them for living, were things like; secret agent, astronaut, lumberjack, test-pilot, stuntman or deep-sea diver. However, all these were also jobs which Gordy doubted could be done after school and at weekends. For most of them you would probably also have to be over the age of fourteen - maybe even eighteen, so sadly, due to time constraints and age requirements, they would have to be unavoidably ruled out.

  That left rather less glamorous, much less cool jobs open to him. Things like; petrol station kiosk attendant, shelf-stacker, paper-boy, warehouse sweeper-upper or shop assistant. None of them sounded in the least bit appealing but ‘shop assistant’ sounded the best of a very bad bunch and, by a short whisker, the slightly less nerdy of them all .

  So that was his career choice made. Now he just had to find a shop in which to ‘assist’.

  ***

  ‘The Quest’ - not the short-lived TV series starring Kurt Russell which Gordy and Trevor really loved - but the one which involved Gordy’s hunt for a part-time job, started, rather badly, the Saturday after ‘The Cool List’ was drawn up.

  The reason it started so badly was that Gordy’s mum and nan insisted on going with him.

  Generally, mums and grannies aren’t widely considered to be cool, at least not as far as Gordy was aware. After all, The Fonz didn’t ever turn up at Arnold’s with his nan on the back of his motorbike and Gordy was pretty sure Danny Zuko didn’t go racing for ‘pinks’ on ‘Thunder Road’ with his mum riding shotgun in her T-Birds cardie! So it was a fairly inauspicious first step on Gordy’s road to being cool.

  Nevertheless, on Saturday afternoon, Gordy found himself on the mean streets of downtown Bradley (just outside
Marks & Sparks), waiting for his nan to finish ‘spending a penny’ in the bus station toilets after swigging too much Bristol Cream at lunchtime whilst his mum paced the pavement outside hoping that her mother hadn’t decided to seize upon the chance for a poo (which she was prone to do if the opportunity of a lavatory break ever presented itself whenever she was out).

  Fortunately, on this occasion, his nan had resisted the temptation of taking a number two and re-appeared reasonably quickly so that ‘The Quest’ could begin in earnest.

  Anyway, they trawled up and down the High Street for the best part of two hours (with only a brief delay in the chemist’s for Gordy’s nan to buy some much needed haemorrhoid cream, which was packaged in a dangerously similar tube to her denture cream - as she had learnt to her cost on several occasions, although, to be fair, it had worked wonders with her mouth ulcers as well as disguising the slight essence of wee-wee that tended to follow her about - and a swift trip round Sainsbury’s so his mum could replenish her depleting stocks of savoury rissoles and Heinz Toast Toppers which had become the staples of Gordy and Kev’s diets, along with Bird’s Eye Crispy Pancakes, potato coquettes and Alphabetti Spaghetti). But it was a fruitless task.

  Nowhere had any ‘Saturday jobs’ available - not even Woolworths whose entire weekend workforce seemed to be made up of familiar teenaged faces (mainly very spotty, liberally Clearasiled ones) that Gordy recognised from school who were even further down the ‘cool food chain’ than he was - they were mostly amoebas whilst Gordy preferred to think of himself as plankton (which probably made Steve Cool a Great White Shark or a Killer Whale). However, as he waltzed into Woolworths with his nan and mum on tow, the faces of his school mates, who all seemed to turn to look at him, told him that he had just been suddenly and dramatically demoted to below amoeba level (which was probably something like a bogie).