Excerpt: Monkey Brains and Blood Stains: The Self-Invention of a Perpetual Geek

Monkey Brains and Blood Stains: The Self-Invention of a Perpetual Geek

by Paul-Thomas Ferguson

PRELUDE – December 1983
Richie Cunningham was completely out of place in his own home.
Let’s begin there.

* * * * *

There was the name, of course, but that’s not really what I’m talking about. I
mean, don’t get me wrong. It was torture for him to have that name in the early 80s. Richie and I had been in the same class since 4th grade, and I don’t think a week had gone by in the four years since without me hearing someone make a Happy Days joke at his expense. I used to say to him, “Hey, it could be worse. You could have been named Fonzie.” But it never really seemed to help. The same went for his younger sister, Jenny, who, despite all of her protestations, was usually called Joanie, even by her friends.

So, yeah, there was the name that made him stand out, but that was just a way for the other kids to focus their ridicule; it wasn’t the primary reason he was an 8th grade outcast. This is where I’m supposed to explain the “thing” that made us all look at him differently, but I can’t really do that. You see… I don’t know what it was. Looking back, my mind tries to pick out that one element that made him different, but when I say it out loud, nothing makes sense. It’s like trying to explain why green M&Ms are so much better than brown M&Ms – some things people understand innately without a logical explanation. So what was it? The red hair? There were other redheads in school. His freckles? Lots of us had them. His height? Richie stood in the middle of us all, effectively not standing out at all. Not overly smart or dumb. No physical problems or speech impediments. No more rich or poor than anyone else in class. In fact, with the exception of his noteworthy name, there was nothing particularly interesting about him. It all sounds fairly petty. Whatever the case, he was an outcast.

Yet, many of us were. There was Duc, a friend of mine who lived on the same block as Richie, a neighborhood my family had moved from a year earlier. Duc, in addition to the difficulty of being a Franco-Vietnamese kid in a mostly white school, had name issues of his own. Then there was Don, who lived on my new block and who spent most of his time playing video games and was most noteworthy to me for giving me the nickname “Frog”, which was not a great nickname but beat the hell out of “Squeaky”, which had dogged me in grade school. Finally, there was Bobby, a heavy set kid who liked the new rap music that was coming out. He was the only kid I knew who liked it, and Duc and I were the only kids I knew who liked Bobby.

Everyone in the room was painfully un-cool. Everyone in the room was shunned by the popular kids. Everyone in the room had found 7th grade to be a seemingly endless nightmare, one only marginally worse than the new nightmare that 8th grade had turned out to be. In these ways, Richie was much like the rest of us. And yet . . . none of us were his friends. And though I would attend school with Richie for a total of eight years, living just five houses away from him for five of those years, this occasion, New Years Eve 1983, was the first and last time I was ever in Richie’s home.

While none of us considered him a close friend, we had all nonetheless accepted his invitation for a New Years Eve sleepover, the opportunity to spend the evening in a strange home, awkwardly self-conscious of the weirdness of it all. But emergency situations have been known to make temporary comrades out of complete strangers. I imagine that the men in the trenches of war, who perhaps would not share two words conversation in the barracks, find themselves soul brothers when under enemy fire. I imagine that hikers lost in the woods find uncommon strength in unity of purpose. In my thirteen year old mind, our purpose was just as critical as any faced by adults; and in the room there was an unspoken understanding that Richie was, this one time, our leader and guide. He had our loyalty for as long as it took, or midnight, whichever came first.

You see, unlike the rest of us, Richie had cable, and that made him, for one night at least, the most popular kid in the world.

* * * * *

“How much longer?”

I had lost count of how many times Jenny had asked the question. It must have been dozens. Richie reacted as though it had been one hundred, slamming a slice of lukewarm pizza back into the box and snapping at her.

“Twenty more minutes! How many times I gotta tell you?”

The twelve year old girl frowned at her older brother and pointed at the ancient,
couch-sized Magnavox television that had kept our attention for most of the night. “You said before midnight. It’s after midnight now!”

I jumped in before Richie could respond. “It’s only midnight in New York because of the time difference. We have to wait an hour longer.” I regretted the words the instant they came out of my mouth.

“An hour? You said twenty minutes!”

Richie shot me a disgusted look and stormed off to the kitchen with his mostly empty glass of R.C., leaving me to get out of the conversation on my own.

I sighed, “No, Jenny, we have to wait an hour longer than new York for midnight, because the time is . . . we only have twenty minutes left . . . less than twenty, I swear.”

This satisfied her for the time being and we went back to concentrating on the program that was trying to hold our attention for the evening: MTV’s New Years Eve Bash. The various performers so far had been okay, but not terribly exciting. The Stray Cats were okay, and the Police were always good. The Thompson Twins had already played twice, but I was apparently the only one in the room who didn’t much like them. Then there was crazy Cyndi Lauper, who was kind of cute, but sang a song I didn’t really like; and Joan Jett, who just looked like a freak to me; and then Billy Idol, my favorite so far, dancing with himself and his trademark sneer. We all sat, glued to the television, anticipating each new act, watching closely, and not really caring that much.

We were waiting for something else, you see, and all of the rest of it was just an unfortunate delay we had to sit through to earn our way, a preamble before the main event. And as we waited, we occasionally glanced at each other to see if everyone else’s level of anticipation was as significant as our own. And what we found in each other’s eyes was an unspoken agreement, an understanding borne out of the primal subconscious, that this moment was going to change our lives forever, that everything else had been leading up to this, that nothing would ever be the same.

This wasn’t a typical New Year’s Eve, one like so many others, where we tried like hell to stay awake all the way until midnight, to prove that we were grown up enough to do what our parents did. Three years in a row I had made such an effort, my parents granting me permission to stay up as late as I wanted. And three years in a row I had failed, falling asleep on the coach or the floor well before midnight, only to have my mother or step-father nudge me awake long enough for me to drowsily witness the ball dropping in New York, the universal signal that the new year had come.

But tonight none of us would offer up such a pathetic effort to prove to our parents. For the first time, New Year’s Eve, with the help and collaboration of MTV, belonged to us. Our parents didn’t understand the moment, had heard but shrugged off three weeks worth of excited whisperings between the kids who knew what had happened and the kids who wished they knew. For some, the world had already changed; and those who had seen the future had spent much of December like the wisest of the wise. Like that hermit in the B.C. comic strip, they received pilgrims in search of knowledge. Richie was such a pilgrim, a high priest in a new church, and tonight… we would all be ordained.

* * * * *

And then it was midnight.

It came with the typical flourish of streamers and noise. Here was a celebration as the world (or at least the Central time zone) welcomed the arrival of 1984. There were celebrities and video stars, and Prince partying like it was 1999, a distant date that we realized to our dismay would find us pushing the impossible age of 30. But this was all noise, largely tuned out and all but forgotten when the smoke cleared and the event we had been waiting for arrived.

There, in a cramped living room in central Illinois, our unlikely band sat in complete silence, sharing a moment that would live forever in our memories. There we gazed in wonder and saw the world change before our very eyes. In the trenches of popular culture, dodging the fire of annoying light rock and terrible country music, we quietly watched Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Nothing would ever be the same.

* * * * *