Untitled (Nerd Story)

(This was written for riot nrrrd, a zine dedicated to the idea of adults reclaiming their nerd childhoods and being proud of them. This is also the main theme of my fourth novel, t.w.o.h.)

To understand my tale, I have to relate two stories to you at once, and you must take care to keep up with both of them. I guarantee that they will cross by the end:

1) Last year, I spent about six months working for Frankel and Company, the world's third largest advertising agency concentrating in special promotions. I landed there by random circumstance -- I was temping at the time, when one day one of my recruiters mentioned, "Hey, you have a lot of computer experience, don't you?" An interview was scheduled, and scarcely three days later I found myself with my first ever salaried job.

2) The day in 1976 that I was suddenly skipped from first to second grade, my fate was securely sealed in regards to being a nerd throughout my entire growing up. I was a classic nerd, and there is scarcely any stereotype of nerdom that you could mention that I did not partake of between the years 1976 and 1986, when I graduated from high school. If you are reading this zine, it would be redundant to say that I have issues, issues that continue to confront me to this day and perhaps lead me back to a life of nrrdom in 1996, ten years after I originally turned my back on it for the purpose of getting laid.

There's a strange and quiet revolution taking place at the ad agencies and other corporate structures in these United States. For years -- years and years -- the sleek glass skyscrapers were the exclusive domain of the Corporate Worker, the Suburban-Living, Spouse-Possessing, Dog-Petting, Home-Owning, Sensible-Car-Driving Business Person. May I perform a little deconstructavism for you?

Adult corporate worker EQUALS college frat boy business administration major because nothing really interested him but business seemed like a sure thing and you sure can make a fuckin' bucketload of money, dude EQUALS rather dimwitted high school kid on a sports team who got all right grades and hung out with his friends and occasionally date raped or tortured some geek but boys will be boys EQUALS bratty snotty little kid who was popular because his parents owned a pool and he got the retarded kid on the bus to say 'My name is cuntface' and got so intimidated by the kid who was smarter than him that he did exactly what his daddy taught him to do, which was to beat the living crap out of him and yell "FAGGOT!" as loud as he could.

EQUALS JOCKCULTURE.

Did I mention that I have issues?

The skyscrapers were their playthings. They used to sit in their offices and stare out over all they ruled and wonder with bemused distachment over the fate of all us little ants trudging our way down Michigan Ave, fitfully trying to eke an existence out for ourselves.

And then Steve Jobs came along and ruined the whole goddamn thing.

And now these same companies find that they can no longer even wipe their asses without the aid of the Magic Box on their desk, the Magic Typewriter, the Beige Machine of the Damned. But they were business administration majors! What did they know about computers? 'Computers' were those things those geeks were playing with in the basement of the dorms on Saturday night, while they themselves were out the door, heading got the Sigma Chi house to drink Bud Light out of strange looking plastic funnel contraptions and light their farts on fire and high five each other and make their pledges give each other hand jobs while at the same time sincerely declaring that the only good queer is a dead queer. But computers? Who knew anything about computers? And who could they get to come work for their corporation to get these now utterly necessary, now utterly important Magic Boxes to work and keep working?

Who, indeed.

There are three eventual fates that each of my childhood habits, hobbies, passions and loves can fit into as an adult. There is 1) The eventual falling by the wayside, the gradual (or not so gradual) dropping of the activity, sometimes with great remorse and sometimes with not much love lost, but all done for what I thought at the time was the Greater Good. This list would include: Dungeons and Dragons; home astronomy; duct- tape electronics (and of course, it's bastard sister, model rockets); my plans to be a math major; band camp; Science Fairs; the Chess Club; and of course, my love of OMNI magazine.

2) Practices that I was able to successfully assimilate into mainstream adult life; indeed, some practices that actually allow me to get ahead in the world. Some examples would include: this immediate fascination with this strange gray box that said "TRS-80 Color Computer" across the top and had 4K of memory and stored its programs on ninety minutes cassettes and all the cool-ass things I could do with it when I tinkered around with it; my unusual love for wearing ties; my enjoyment in writing little stories, which has rather inadvertedly become my career; and a natural talent for cooking which I know not the origins of.

3) Practices which still firmly fall in the middle of nerd behavior yet I find so enjoyable, so integral a part of my personality, that I simply cannot give up, no matter how hard I try. Subsequently, I still engage in these practices, yet quietly now, secretly, without letting on to the public that I would be such a vile creature to actually enjoy them -- much like Jeffrey Dahmer and his midnight snacks. This includes: listening to classical music; shunning sports; overanalysis of presidential politics; an addiction to PBS; crying like a baby during sad or sappy movies; and a rare and pure enjoyment of turn-of-the-century British satirists, such as P.G. Wodehouse and George Bernard Shaw.

These are pleasures that I once took great delight in and convinced me that all was right in the world and I along with it. Now they are guilty secrets. I engage in them the same way I excitedly lock my apartment door and masturbate to videotapes with titles like "500 Oral Cumshots" and "Nothing But Blowjobs #3" -- with utter ecstasy, but with an absolute horror of getting caught; haphazard cleaning and quickly formed lies when I have unexpected company; a complete denial of the behavior if confronted. I sit sometimes and wonder where and when I went wrong -- at what point I sold out my own soul in the futile hopes that I could ever be one of Them. I ask myself sometimes just what in the hell I did to myself. Then I think about how much I would enjoy becoming a Nrrd again.

A shaky, unholy alliance was formed between the Jockculture and Nrrdculture and Frankel and Co., much like that uneasy handshake between Roosevelt and Stalin in 1942 that marked the beginning of the en of the thousand year reign of the Third Reich. It was obvious to the jockculture that they were no longer going to be able to perform their jobs without the almost daily help of those strange boys and girls on the 18th floor, the ones with giant posters of punk bands and crumpled-up "Dilbert"s taped all over their cubicles, the ones with "X-Files" stickers on their computers and Bob Mould blasting out of their CD-ROM drives. And it was obvious to the nrrd culture that they wouldn't even have jobs without those strange boys and girls on the 19th floor, the ones with tastefully framed poster of Van Gogh paintings and crumpled-up "Nancy"s taped all over their cubicles, the ones with photographs of their fiancees tapes to their computers and Hootie and the Blowfish quietly emanating from their $300 portable CD players.

A civil manner of coexistence was formed. Jocks and nrrds attended meetings together, threw ideas back and forth to each other about "empowerment" and "fighting fires" and "assimilating personal initiative into the corporate structure." Hands were shook; backs were clapped. It was a sterile form of truce, one that always ran dangerously close to falling apart into open hostility. But hey, those are the things you have to do if you want to beat the Nazis. Or in our case, Leo Burnett.

There is perhaps one piece of nerd behavior that is the overwhelming trait of Me, of the enigma which is the humanity of the human being which is called Jason Pettus. It is this: I love to read. I mean... I LOVE TO READ, at a voracious rate, anything I can possibly get my hands on. I have always been this way -- I have been reading since before my personal conscious memories even start. My parents tell me that I began to recognize distinct letter of my own accord across the snowy television image of "Sesame Street" when I was two and a half years old, and that by the time I was four I was fully literate, reading newspaper articles over my dad's shoulder during breakfast and innocently correcting my kindergarten teacher's spelling mistakes in class. My parents tell me that I would take huge delight in reading billboards out loud as we tooled down Highway 270 in suburban St. Louis, on our way to a YMCA sponsored t-ball game that I would want to take my leave of by the second inning, always. My parents tell me that I would refuse to let my dad read me my bedtime story, instead grabbing the book and reading it to him myself. My parents tell me that the only way they could effectively punish me in my youth was to threaten my weekly visit to the library where, they say, I would routinely check out fifteen to twenty books to read over a seven day time period.

I remember none of these things. I do know that my reading skills were the catalyst for my move from first to second grade in 1976 -- I asked, and I was told. I do know that there was some problem in grade school for about six months -- something about a refusal from me to learn anything more and participate any more in school because I was so sick of the other kids making fun of me; something about an entire adult society not understanding why I wouldn't be proud to be smart; something about being sent to ineffective and impotent school counselors who would lump me in group sessions with juvenile delinquents and abused children and who generally fucked things up so much that it formed a phobia in my mind about psychologists that exists to this day. Frankly, this entire period of my life exists only as a series of hazy, misdated snippets of memory. But every time I examine it in my head, like I'm doing right now, every time I think that maybe this period would explain some part of my adult self to me more, I am overcome with a sudden, overpowering fit of nausea in the pit of my stomach, an immediate urge to run to the bathroom and throw up, and I think, "You know, I could probably live with myself without knowing those details."

I do know that I deliberately flunked classes in high school in an attempt to feel normal, and inadvertedly almost ruined my chance to go to college. I do know that I couldn't wait to get to said college (University of Missouri) and finally reinvent myself in non-nerd terms. I do know that I purposefully chose not to major in anything to do with words, because of my fear that it would consume me, choosing instead a major of fine art photography, a strictly non-word career. I do know that I eventually wandered my way back into the world of words again, and that my little stories of what exactly is right and wrong in the world have accidentally become extremely popular and just may have become a gateway to national fame and fortune, something I would have never guessed would have even become my ticket to a career.

And I do know that there is at least one aspect of my reading habits that produces revulsion from every one of my circles of friends. My non-literary friends don't understand why I get obsessed with buying Pulitzer winners the day after the list is announced; my literary friends don't understand why I didn't enjoy said Pulitzer winner nearly as much as the novelization of "The Cannonball Run" which I had read the week before, purchased at a garage sale for a dime. My rich friends don't understand why I'd spend $30 for an import copy of a book I already own; my poor friends don't understand why I refuse to go to the library, what an extremely painful experience it is to read a book and then have to give it BACK. I even received comments at the recent Underground Press Conference, a place that you would think would be void of comments about reading habits. I went with sixty bucks burning a hole in my pocket, and I left with nineteen magazines, nine comics and four fully bound books. And as I walked around with my three stuffed shopping bags, people would say, "God, what are you doing, buying something at every table?" to which I would reply, "Of course!" to which THEY would reply, "Why? They're just zines!" Just zines? Just zines!?

Like I said... I have many issues.

Bud Frankel, the founder of Frankel and Co., is a big man. He is a strapping man. He likes to work hard and he likes to play hard. He expects no less from the six hundred subordinates under his control. Popular rumor has it that Frankel and Co.'s first ever expense account was at the bar on the first floor of their original place of business, where all twelve employees would adjourn each and every Friday evening and proceed to drink and drink and drink and get so incredibly smashed that they would have to guide each other to the bathroom and leave all their cars at the building, groggily retrieving them on Saturday afternoons.

Bud Frankel looks fondly back on these halcyon days of Friday night binges -- it's obvious when you have a conversation with him, which I did, at the Frankel Christmas party, held two days before, in fact, I got fired from Frankel and Co. Bud Frankel sees liquor as an important bonding tool in business -- for him, the sweet inebriation was a catalyst for personal understandings, intimacies, bull sessions around a dark corner table that would often lead to creative breakthroughs that led them to become the number three special promotions ad agency in the world.

This is why, to this day, Frankel and Co. shuts its doors at 4:30 on the last Friday of each month and provides free liquor to all six hundred of its employees and blares loud music out of the 20th floor conference room. They call them "Block Parties," and while technically you will not be punished for not attending, your absence is certainly frowned upon.

Now don't get me wrong -- I'm sure that in the infancy of the company, the Friday night binges did serve the purpose that Bud Frankel gets nostalgic about. In a limited setting, amongst small groups of people that all come from similar backgrounds and mindsets, liquor can indeed free the mind and set all kinds of creative wheels in motion. Anyone who was ever involved in a creative project in college can attest to this.

But can you guess what happens when you put three hundred jocks and three hundred nerds in the same room and ply them with free liquor? It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but really, I'm serious. You can probably guess the outcome, but I'll tell you anyway:

Simply put, it becomes a high school reunion, dreadful events where a roomful of adults get together and act civil and grown-up until the liquor hits, then eventually break down into familiar cliques and stereotypical behavior. By the end of the night, insurance salesmen and marketing consultants are wearing their ties around their foreheads and dancing on the tables to Meatloaf's "Paradise By the Dashboard Lights;" news producers and doctoral candidates are cowering in the corner, chain-smoking and lamenting the days of The Cure and R.E.M. before they sucked, and hoping not to get beat up in the parking lot. There's a reason why they're only held once every ten years, you know.

And the same happened at Frankel and Co.'s "Block Parties." One group would congregate in one corner and talk about the Cubs and common fraternity stories and how they were using their 401(k)'s to their advantage; another group would be in another corner, endlessly discussing how incredible their upcoming marriages were and what incredible fiancees they had and the incredible wedding dresses they had found and what an incredible deal they got on flowers for the ceremony; and yet another group would be in another corner, apparently not being able to run out of conversation about new hardware and new software and the new version of "Myst" and the new Dilbert book and the new Sebadoh album and the Six Finger Satellite show at Lounge Ax last week.

I was naive enough to believe that this fracturization could be avoided. In my drunken mind, I saw the world as full of adults, grown men and women who had transgressed these petty things of youth, who could now approach each other on even terms and discuss the topics common to us all -- growing up, fear of success, fear of failure, hope for a better tomorrow, and our growing sense of mortality. In my attempts to do this, I would flitter from group to group, striking up conversations with random people of all social strata, discussing the one topic that I assumed could ignite all of humankind.

And what was that topic I opined on? Why, the same topic I always opine on when I'm drunk -- books, of course.

It was at these "block parties" that I began to get an understanding of who I really am, who I will always be and how I will always be regarded by Them, no matter how much I try to disguise myself. I shop at their stores; I wrap myself in garments from The Gap and Urban Outfitters; I buy my soap at The Body Shop and my scented candles at Crate and Barrel and my dishes at Pier 1; I get drunk at their Lincoln Park frat bars; I read their sports page and attempt to keep myself up-to-date enough to not embarrass myself at cocktail parties; I even occasionally watch their movies and listen to their radio stations and smoke their cigars and fuck their women. But none of these things matter. No amount of smoke and mirrors can even disguise what is inside our own heads, our own brains, our own souls. For better or for worse, as a blessing or as a curse, I am a nrrd and will forever be one, and the rest of humanity will always and forever respond to me on those terms.

It occurs to me that the last ten years of my life have been a complete and utter waste of time -- ten years of careful hiding, assimilation, denial of personal pleasures -- and it turns out I wasn't fucking fooling anyone the whole time. I don't know whether to jump for joy or kill myself. Perhaps I will attempt both, if such a thing is possible.

I will not be so shallow as to say that environment is more important than genetics. There were several jocks at Frankel who I indeed became friends with, who I indeed bonded with and who indeed taught me things about life that I previously had not known. What was apparent after getting to know these jocks was that they have always and will always consider themselves nerds in their own minds. They have always been in sympathy with the nrrdculture mindset, even with the addition of money, looks, athleticism and friends, and the subtraction of stereotypical nerd behavior or even interests. Conversely, there were several nerds at Frankel who I couldn't stand, who were complete assholes. They were jocks through and through, even though every single fiber of their being screamed "NERD!" They had simply refused throughout their lives to see themselves in those terms. And as a result, they weren't.

I also wouldn't be so pious as to say that I have never been guilty of the same dismissiveness that I find so deplorable in the jockculture -- there have been several examples in my life of my "writing off" someone too soon after I've met them, and consequently deciding that they have nothing of interest for me to hear and so Begone With Them. The main difference, and the thing that I sincerely believe jocks will never be able to understand, is this: Nrrds do not dismiss people as a means to publicly disgrace and humiliate them. Nrrds do not dismiss people to feel better about themselves. Nrrds do not dismiss people out of fear and intimidation of them, like jocks do to me. Nrrds simply dismiss people out of ennui.

My termination from Frankel and Co. on December 23, 1995 had nothing to do with my nrrdom; it was the fact that I hated my boss and she, in turn, hated me. It's a long story that's best saved for another rainy day, but needless to say, yelling "FUCK YOU!" at one's boss at the top of one's lungs in the middle of a room full of people does not bode well for one's job security.

I work for the Aon Corporation now, a large insurance company on the opposite side of Chicago's Loop from Frankel. I do the exact same thing that I did at Frankel and Co., for about six thousand more dollars a year. I was temping, when one day one of my recruiters mentioned, "Hey you know a lot about computers, don't you?" And the cogs of the world keep grinding.

If you don't know already, there are nothing but nerds at an insurance company. They come in two flavors -- computer nerds and accounting nerds. There are no company functions at Aon; there is no liquor. 'Bonding' is not a job requirement at an insurance company. I work with twelve other computer nerds, and my interaction with the rest of the corporation is strictly limited to phone calls only. And frankly, all of these things make me very, very happy.

I don't expect to be with Aon long. At the pace that my writing is going, I fully expect to be making a full and comfortable living off it alone by the year 2000. It would be, in my mind, a public declaration that I am a nrrd, and this still gives me some consternation. In fact, there's more -- there has been some early, extremely loose talk already about turning my latest novel into a movie. I doubt that it will happen, but if it did, I would have to come to grips with the fact that, like Douglas Coupland or Bret Easton Ellis or John Grisham or countless others, I would then actually be famous precisely because of my nrrdom. And at this point, I'm not exactly sure how I feel about that.

Still though, I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked for Frankel and Co., Aon and all the other corporate offices that I temped at. If I hadn't, I might have never re-discovered my true self. I might have never learned how important it is to me to hold these things I love about myself tightly to my chest and never let anyone or anything try to take them away again. I might have never learned that the jockculture is ultimately a laughable one; that jocks were put on this earth to maintain the world, while it is the nrrds that always make the great leaps forward for the human race.

I believe it's time for me to stop running. I believe it's time for me to swing my apartment door wide open and say to the world, "This is me and this is what makes me tick, and if you don't like it, FUCK YOU!" So do me a favor, won't you? Could you flip that TV next to you over from ESPN to PBS? The McGlaughlin Group's on and I never miss it.

Copyright 1997, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved.