Betty Jo Weber outed me.
Not about me being gay. That was Keith Somebody-or-Other, the guy who had the locker above me in tenth grade. It’s a good sign of moving on that I don’t have a clue what his last name is. I sometimes went to class without my textbook to avoid a run-in with this guy whom I won’t call a bully. He was just an indiscriminate jerk. When he announced I was a faggot—his word, half a notch less offensive than cocksucker—I began fretting over what mannerism was the giveaway. How was this football jock so sure of his gaydar when I still wasn’t so sure myself? I had leanings, but I hoped they’d go away. Maybe I needed to watch more “Charlie’s Angels.” Maybe I should have abandoned my internal debate about which Hardy Boy had better hair, Shaun Cassidy or Parker Stevenson. (It was Parker, hands down, but I didn’t want Shaun to feel badly.) Maybe I needed to stop wanting to play with my locker mate Carol Lee Cook’s majorette baton and instead convince myself what I really wanted was to play with Carol Lee. Sometimes there’s not a shred of hope in maybe. I was gay—er, a faggot. Keith Somebody-or-Other said so.
Back to Betty Jo. She didn’t enter the picture until nine years after locker traumas when she became a teacher’s aide at the Catholic school where I was a special education teacher. We were at lunch or in a meeting and I’d said something rather ordinary, for me at least, when she laughed and shouted, “You’re such a geek!” She wasn’t being loud as a courtesy for our elderly, hard-of-hearing nun colleagues. (They seemed to work till they dropped; our school secretary was 83-year-old Sister Albertine.) No, Betty Jo shouted everything. She laughed loudly. She talked loudly. I can’t remember for sure, but my revisionist memory would like to say she even ate loudly. Soup and apples, every day.
Admit it...you've got a Manilow
t-shirt, too.
Geek? Undeniably. Betty Jo Weber said so. I have to admit, it stung. Almost as much as finding out I was a faggot. Seriously. I was in my early twenties and I still hadn’t given up on the idea that I could maybe, possibly, hopefully be cool. Like The Fonz. Or Barry Manilow.
Not only did Betty Jo laugh, but her pal and my pal, another teacher’s aide named Amy, laughed too. Up to that point, I’d thought we were something close to a cool trio but, just liked that, it seemed as though I’d forfeited my place to Sister Marie Herman, still sprightly at sixty-eight, dazzling us all with her latch hook coasters.
Self-acceptance takes time. When Betty Jo declared I was a geek, I’d at least decided that I was indeed gay. (I never took to “faggot,” no matter how many times guys shouted it from car windows while I jogged or, later on, when walking the supposedly safer sidewalks of West Hollywood.) Gay, okay. Geek? I stewed over that one.
There’d always been signs. While my classmates in elementary school in Ontario wanted to grow up to be NHL hockey players, like all good Canadian boys, I aspired to be an elf at the North Pole. No lie. I had the sense to keep this to myself. I figured if word got back to my parents, my mother would try to kibosh it. “You’ll get frostbite. You always lose one of your mittens. Besides every time you use hammer, you hit your thumb instead of the nail. Santa’s too busy to deal with crying elves.”
In third grade, my classmates rushed home after street hockey to watch syndicated reruns of “The Munsters” and the police show, “Adam-12.” I chose to watch “The Odd Couple.” (Oh, that Felix. So fussy!) I also got hooked on “Ironside,” technically a police show, too, but starring Raymond Burr as a paralyzed, retired detective. Instead of car chases and climbing over alley fences to catch criminals on “Adam-12” or “Hawaii Five-O,” the main action on “Ironside” was Burr rolling around in a wheelchair. The show felt cerebral and way ahead of its time, focused on ability rather than disability. Maybe I was ahead of my time, too—PC before that was even a thing.
I also liked school. A lot. Not the trips to my locker or P.E. classes or the Salisbury steak-vegetable medley lunch served in the high school cafeteria once a week. I’d never heard of Salisbury steak before moving to East Texas. In case it’s an unknown food to you, Wikipedia gives a handy definition of what it takes to be Salisbury-worthy:
"Salisbury steak" require[s] a minimum content of 65% meat, of which up to 25% can be pork, except if de-fatted beef or pork is used, the limit is 12% combined. No more than 30% may be fat. Meat byproducts are not permitted; however, beef heart meat is allowed. Extender (bread crumbs, flour, oat flakes, etc.) content is limited to 12%, except isolated soy protein at 6.8% is considered equivalent to 12% of the others. The remainder consists of seasonings, fungi or vegetables (onion, bell pepper, mushroom or the like), binders (can include egg) and liquids (such as water, milk, cream, skim milk, buttermilk, brine, vinegar etc.).
Um…gross. This is not why I eventually became a vegetarian, but it added to my suspicion that school lunches in the U.S. weren’t about giving kids healthy meals.
Back on point, yay school (with asterisks). Guys were supposed to hate school, all things academic classified as stupid, boring and/or dumb. (Developing a vocabulary was clearly stupid, boring and/or dumb, too.) I liked tests—even pop quizzes. I had the sense not to shout, “Yes!” like Troy Findlay every time a teacher told us to get out a sheet of notebook paper and number it one through ten. Now that was a geek. I got psyched up for research papers and learning the proper way to write a bibliography.[1] I loved the fact the photocopier in the library was free. There was so much fascinating information I wanted to keep handy from World Book Encyclopedia—which, damn it all, we couldn’t check out—the school subscription of Scientific American and that gem in the Dewey Decimal section 745.5, 101 Popsicle Stick Crafts. (You know your Dewey Decimals, right?)
Okay. The signs were always there. Always gay. Always a geek, even if I’ve never ever played Dungeons & Dragons. Like gays, geeks come in many forms.
I swear there was a time when being called a geek was a putdown. Nerd. Geek. Loser. All grouped together like stupid, boring and dumb. By the time Betty Jo Weber called me a geek a second time, I’m pretty sure my face didn’t turn red. (A bit rosy, maybe.) As she started saying it more frequently, she always said it with a laugh. She wasn’t totally making fun of me. She just kept marveling how I was so hopelessly out of step with the cool kids. But she always sat with me at lunch and when we had important staff meetings. Amy stuck with me, too.
That's right, I drove the same kind of car as
Mare Winningham's character in St. Elmo's Fire.
Mare Winningham! She was the coolest in the
cast...way cooler than Rob Lowe or Demi Moore
or Emilio Estevez.
In time, I learned to embrace being a geek just like I was proudly gay. On an April Fool’s Day while I was in law school, an L.A. radio station announced it was changing its format, going Retro Cool. I didn’t want it to be a joke. As I drove on campus with the top down in my Chrysler LeBaron convertible—so hip!—my friend Adrienne rode shotgun. They played Paul Anka’s “(You’re) Having My Baby” and I cranked it. Adrienne was mortified and wanted to change the station but, hey, my wheels, my tunes, right?
Who doesn't love a bad boy?
When you’re a geek, you don’t have to check yourself. No one will say, “Dude, be cool” because that’s like telling me to blow a bubble with my watermelon-flavored Bazooka gum. Not possible. The world needs geeks. I’m your go-to guy when the party hits an awkward point and you need me to step in and name the Seven Dwarfs. Easy-peasy. Hell, I’ll rank them! When the same party hits another snag after saying things in Pig Latin gets old, I can dazzle everyone with my command of Esrever. (That’s talking with all words spelled backwards. I can feel your awe at this very moment, but it takes practice. My friend, Nosylla and I have been talking Esrever since freshman year in college. Man, we rocked at parties!)
I still like Barry Manilow. I bought a Scooby Doo t-shirt recently…and I wear it in public. I’ve never seen “Game of Thrones” or a Vin Diesel movie, but I’ve watched every episode of septuagenarian-focused shows “Grace and Frankie” and “The Kominsky Method.” The only decorations I put up at Christmas are my plush, collector’s item toys, Rudolph and Hermey the Elf. (Okay, they were dollar store finds, but they’ll go way up in value. Mark my words.) Yeah, I never really got over the elf gig.
Geek for life. And that’s okay. It’s even something to celebrate. Jason Mraz says so.
