Forever Nerdy

ONE

POSEHN AND NERDY, THE EARLY YEARS

I wasn’t born a nerd. I don’t think anyone’s born a nerd. I used to say that in my stand-up act: you never look at a little kid or a baby and say, “What a fucking nerd. That baby will never get laid.” Hilarious joke and I stand by it. You’re not born a nerd. You find it. Or fall into it. Or, in my case, grow into it. Literally. I first exhibited nerdiness or nerd-like behavior around ten years old. By age eleven I looked like a full-blown nerd—the little guy on the front of this book, full of Star Wars and awkwardness. In these first chapters I will take you through the first chapters of my life: my transition from a totally normal yet massive baby to an eleven-year-old nerd.

I was birthed on the sixth of July, 1966, at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, California. We’re so proud of our trees in Northern California that we name everything after trees. Not really. Just those two places. I’m not sure what Redwood City is like now, but then it was a quaint, tree-lined little suburban town south of San Francisco and the San Francisco Airport. It was next to the more affluent Atherton (home of Stanford University and where my mom grew up).

When I was a metal-loving, “Satan”-obsessed teen I found it pretty amusing that my birthdate was 7/6/66. Birthday of the beast! Whooo! METAL! I would promise you that this is as dumb as this book is going to get, but that would be lying. I can’t start lying this early in; then you won’t believe me later when I really need you to believe me. I can promise, however, that this book will get way dumber.

Both of my parents grew up in Northern California. My mom, Carole Turner, was born in November of 1939 and raised in Atherton by George and Norma Turner. She had a brother, Gary. My Grandpa George was three-quarters Irish, one-quarter English, and my Nana Norma Ziegler was, duh, German. She was also Irish and Italian. They were both born in San Francisco, California. My Nana’s mom, Irene Schuler, was Italian and German. She was born in 1900, in San Francisco. So on her side I’m fourth-generation Bay Arean, which is totally different from a gay Aryan. That dude would have some shit to work through.

Being the fourth generation probably explains why, of all the places I’ve traveled, the bay is still my favorite and feels the most like home. My Great-Nana Irene was only fifteen when she had my Nana Norma. She had lived through the infamous 1906 earthquake that ravaged the whole city, so having a kid while being a teen was no big whoop. I heard the earthquake stories a lot as a kid. My Great-Grandpa Wes Ziegler was a German/Irish jockey from Chicago when he met my Great-Nana Irene. I spent a lot of time with my Nana Irene the first few years of my life, amazing lady and a cheap babysitter.

Great Grandpa Wes, I never met. He shot himself three days before my mom’s wedding because he was dying of cancer and didn’t want to ruin his granddaughter’s wedding by being a cancer bummer. You do know how people with cancer always ruin weddings? Instead of ruining my mom’s wedding, he shot himself. Which also ruined her wedding. Suicide doesn’t run in my family, but selfishness and bad decisions do. You’ll see.

My dad, Robert, or Bob, grew up in Sacramento, California. He was born in 1942 to Edmund and Clara Posehn. He had a younger brother, Michael. My grandmother was born Clara Petersen. She was a tall, beautiful Swedish girl from Minnesota, and my Grandpa Ed was German and from Saskatoon, Canada. They had migrated from Germany to Russia to Canada to Sacramento. My Grandpa Ed was kind of an asshole, but everybody loved him. I’m kind of an asshole too. Thanks, Grandpa. My dad was a tall, skinny jokester who loved hiking and fishing and building things with my Grandpa Ed. He went to American River College in Sacramento for English and Drama.

My mom grew up a fifties nerd. She wasn’t a nerd obsessed with the fifties, she was a nerd in the fifties, when they invented nerds. She says it was rough, but wait ’til you get to my high school chapters. She was working at a title agency in the South Bay when she started dating my dad. My dad was six foot eight, and my mom was six foot even. Tall lady. I always knew I was going to be freakishly tall. My grandparents were tall. Almost all my mom’s close friends were tall because she belonged to a tall club.

Yep, a fucking tall club—San Francisco’s premiere tall club, the Golden Gate Tip Toppers. That’s where my parents met, at the Golden Gate Tip Toppers. Premiere? Like there was a shitty low-rent tall club or a thriving community of mediocre tall clubs and Golden Gate Tip Toppers was the premiere tall club. Whenever people—small, dumb people—ask me how I got so tall, I give them the short answer, “Um, my parents…” I had no choice. My dad had tall semen and my mom had a tall vagina. So tall was normal for me, but when I started to get really tall, normal people didn’t think I was normal.

I don’t remember much about the day I was born. The day after, though? Every single detail. HA HA! Not really, you guys. Babies don’t remember shit. They also don’t really do shit. I was one and I had one, so I know babies. I was a big baby. My mom has repeated the story of my birth a lot over the years; I think it really fucked her up, and I don’t mean her hoo-haa.

Apparently I was the biggest baby in the hospital. My parents were both very tall and young. When my six-foot-eight dad looked through the nursery window at me, everybody around him knew I was his baby because I was thirty-eight inches long and weighed twenty-five pounds.

Or twenty-three inches and ten pounds, three ounces. I forget. I was actually the latter. Called my mom to confirm while writing this. Like I said, big baby. My dad died when I was two. I’ll just get right to it. I don’t remember that either, but it still kinda affected me. My dad died very young; I’ll say it a bunch more in this book.

I’ve played the dead-dad card a lot over the years. Anyway, my dead dad died in 1968. Robert Edmund Posehn was twenty-five when he made the twenty-eight-year-old Carole Irene Posehn a single mom. My middle name is Edmund also, but that’s not really your fucking business. (Oh wait, I guess it is.) My grandparents were around a lot those first couple of years we were alone, and my mom spoiled me when she could.

After my dad died, my mom bought me a puppy. I think I got him at my dad’s funeral. A guy dressed like my dad climbed out of his casket carrying the puppy. Actually, I’m pretty sure my mom waited until my third Christmas to give me the puppy. For my second, third, and fourth Christmases she went all out. My mom said later she was trying to make me happy. Which is sweet and sad. Sorry. She tried. Apparently she burned through whatever insurance money we got from my dad pretty quickly. So there’s that.

Anyway, the puppy. Puppies are fun. I super creatively named the puppy Snoopy. I was three, so let’s all cut me a fucking break on naming him Snoopy. Snoopy was destructive. He ate through the phone cord, like a dumb little furry dick, while my mom was talking to her friend Anne. Because this was thirty years before cell phones, Anne got in her car and drove over immediately to see if my mom had been raped and/or murdered 1970 style.

We had also owned at least two rabbits and a turtle in Redwood City. They died. Or got out. Or both. In that order. Don’t remember. Maybe I killed them. Well, this book isn’t about me becoming a serial killer, so…

My grandparents were awesome, and I had a lot of them: five grandparents and a great grandmother. They were all incredibly cool and loving, with amazing personalities, and they’re all dead now.

I don’t think they were irresponsible, but I did get thrown from a horse while I was two or three while I was with my dead dad’s parents in Sacramento. Mild concussion. I’ve had a couple of those over the years. But it must suck to be a grandma and have a horse try to murder your grandkid.

Around that same time I was at my Nana’s house in Redwood City, and I fell into her apartment swimming pool while I was running around by myself at night like a dumb three-year-old in the seventies. Luckily my Nana’s neighbors had their patio door open and heard my stupid little body splash into the pool. The husband ran downstairs and jumped in and saved me. Thank Satan. I don’t really worship Satan—well, only on Christmas and Easter.

Some of my earliest memories that I actually remember are of TV shows I saw and nightmares I had. The first TV shows were Batman and Sesame Street. That says a lot about me. Not sure what. Maybe that I still love Batman and look like a Muppet.

I must’ve also seen the Universal horror classic Dracula, because the first bad dream I remember happened when I was around three. It was a Dracula dream. I think he was trying to kill me. You know, killing kids, just like Dracula, the famous kid killer. I guess I really was a dumb kid or my dreams were dumb. Or maybe someone shouldn’t have let a three-year-old see Dracula, Mom.

When I was four I guess I had had enough of my mom and her Dracula shit, so I ran away. Really. At four. I grabbed my dog, Snoopy, and my tricycle and wagon and joined up with my friend Timmy, the kid from across the street, and we ran away. Sure, “Timmy” sounds like a bullshit name, but I know for a fact that was his name. And if your name is Timmy, yep, your name is bullshit. Anyway, we grabbed our stuff, Snoopy, and maybe some snacks, and we ran away.

Of course, my mom freaked out—she was having a rough couple of years. My Nana Norma knew a cop and called him directly. I guess he owed her a favor—don’t ask. My Nana was single for the late sixties and early seventies and kind of a partier. I think she may have fucked Frank Sinatra. I hope she fucked Frank Sinatra. Anyway, the cop found us at the park. Of course, he did. We went to the park like a couple of four-year-old assholes. Where else were we going to go? Ice Cream and Puppy Land was closed, so we went to the park. I’m not sure how serious I was about running away, after all. That was my first run-in with the cops.

I used to joke that I was raised by women. A whole village of them. It’s kinda true. When we lived in Redwood City I was around women almost exclusively. My mom had a couple of close friends who lived nearby and were always around, Sherry and Anne. They were both tall, of course. Anne was my first crush when I was a little bit older. Tall and thin with perfect porcelain complexion, and because it was the late sixties, she had impossibly long Rapunzel-length brown hair. More like Cher. I thought Anne was more beautiful than Marlo Thomas. That’s saying a lot: Marlo Thomas was pretty attractive when I was seven.

My two Nanas and my Grandma Grace were around a lot. Grandma Grace was my Grandpa George’s new wife. I didn’t know that my Nana and Grandpa had a rough divorce; I just thought everybody had three grandmothers. I saw my Sacramento grandparents a couple of times a year; as I got older I would make longer and more frequent trips. I loved being around my Grandma Clara. She was a cool lady and a great listener.

Until she died. Sorry to drop it like that. That’s some Stephen King shit, a trick I learned from reading Stephen King. He’s done it forever, and it can be devastating. He’ll describe characters or an action a character did, then in the next sentence say, “… and that was their last day on earth.” It’s true: she died. But not until a couple of chapters from now.

I do remember my mom being sad pretty often. I recall telling her stories or jokes to make her laugh, and this is the first “really clever” one she remembers: I was four years old, and my mom had just briefly dated a man named Miles. Apparently, good old Miles had taken money from my mom. That was the thing: he was a scam artist. He grifted my mom for some cash and bailed.

So my mom is relating this to Anne and a couple of her friends at breakfast at a little Redwood City diner. I’m sure it was an uncomfortable situation, and I think I sensed it, so when Anne asked about Miles, I said, with impeccable timing, I’m sure, “Miles is miles away by now.” Her friends all laughed and couldn’t believe that this weird little four-year-old had just said that. I’m glad my mom noted that in her memory bank as the beginning of me saying a lot of shitty, kinda mean things under the guise of wordplay.

I was mostly a happy kid, considering I was dadless. I didn’t really know what I was missing. I didn’t have a lot of friends with dads at first. When I later lived in apartments, most of the other kids who lived there also had single parents. The few dads I knew were not great examples of dadness, and by the time I was in high school and college it was clear to me that a lot of my friends’ dads were dicks.

Around age seven I was diagnosed as hyperactive. Before I was diagnosed, I was just a “spazzy” kid. And once I was around other kids on a daily basis, I was definitely disruptive. My mom once showed up at the daycare I went to and was told I was in a time-out in the closet. I had knocked over another kid’s brick castle. In my defense, it was an amateurish piece of shit.

My mom freaked out when she found out I was alone in the jacket closet. I actually remember my frantic mom pulling me out of the closet darkness. Apparently that wasn’t the first time I had been reprimanded that way. I tell the story not to point out abuse in the preschool or daycare system of the late sixties and early seventies but really to paint the picture that I could be disruptive.

I was exposed to death and sadness within my family at a young age, but I didn’t really react to it right away. Darkness, though, was a theme in my early life I picked up on later. I felt feelings in my teen years about some of the things I went through earlier, like—SPOILER—losing my dad and my mom’s boyfriend Bill and having a babysitter kill himself. Though, even at the time, I definitely missed having a dad, and seeing my great-grandfather in an open casket at age four was probably not the best move my mom could have made.

I’ll try not to blame my mom for everything in this book, but I didn’t have a dad to blame, remember? So around the same time, at age four, I was exposed to real darkness. A sad event made even darker by a bully. The next-door neighbor kid had died, and my neighbor across the street, Timmy’s older brother, teased me about it. I was playing with Timmy, and his older brother—let’s call him “Tommy”—told us that “Gary, the boogeyman” was going to get us. Oh shit, “Gary, the boogeyman,”—he’s gonna get us?

Wait, who is Gary the boogeyman? Boogeymen don’t usually have normal names. Well, Michael Myers. But anyway, my boogeyman was named Gary. The way my mother told me the story was that I was at my daytime babysitter’s house, this nice older couple my mom knew really well. I was playing with the old man and asked him if he wears his wife’s clothes. The old man said, “What now?” or “Wha-hah?” or “What in the devil?” or some other comedic response that fit the day when a child would ask surprising questions like I just had.

I think now is where his wife got involved and asked what I was going on about. I said, “My other babysitter, Gary, wears my mommy’s clothes.” And presumably they both collectively said, “Holy shit” or “What the fuck?” or some other colorful response. I remember them as Italian Americans and the old man wearing a wife-beater and early-seventies-style plaid pants, so maybe he said something stereotypically Italian like, “Holy cannoli!” or “Ave Maria!” or “I’mma gonna wiin! It’sa me, Mario!”

That night they talked to my mom, thinking my Uncle Gary was the creepy babysitter in this story. That is a tough conversation in 1970. My mom said, “No, my brother Gary is a lazy dipshit that lives in the Santa Cruz mountains banging this hot seventies chick named Linda.” Well, my mom wouldn’t say that, but I would’ve. Nope, the Gary in this story was a teenage boy who lived next door to us and babysat me on a couple of occasions and at least once wore my mom’s clothes in front of me.

My mom freaked out. All her friends heard. My nanas and my grandparents heard. I’m sure Uncle Gary heard he dodged a bullet. She eventually told the neighbors their son Gary was cross-dressing in front of me. He killed himself. Yep. There was no easy way to get to that part. His parents confronted him, and he took his teenage life. Should I have left this out of the book? Maybe. But honestly it had a lot to do with who I am. The story and my involvement has stuck with me.

So Timmy’s brother, Tommy or whatever, was a real dick because this poor kid Gary had been driven to commit the ultimate shitty act and Timmy’s dumb-fuck brother was scaring other little kids with his death just a couple of months after he died. That’s my take-away from that story. Timmy’s brother was a giant dick. I often think of that poor fucking kid, Gary, and whatever feelings that led him to kill himself. So sad.

Now I feel nothing but empathy for Gary, but when my mom first told me the whole story at age eleven or so, I reacted differently. I was confused and angry. When I was five, my mom threw a party for me, and no kids came other than good old Timmy. It was just me, Timmy, my mom, Nana Irene, and Nana Norma along with a bunch of party favors and ice cream cake sitting around an empty table.

I am almost positive that the other kids my mom invited stayed away because the teenager next door had just killed himself and *whisper whisper* “Did you know Gary used to babysit for the Posehn widow?” *whisper whisper* “Do you think the Posehn widow or that weird little redhead had something to do with it?” *whisper whisper* “They must at least know what happened.” *whisper whisper* “She did stop coming to church.” *whisper whisper*

That’s true. We did stop going to church around the time of Gary’s death. My mom left Catholicism that year, which makes sense, considering my dead dad and a couple of rough years. I’m guessing Gary’s death had something to do with it. I’m also guessing our duplex and the neighbor’s house were tough sells. “It’s two bedrooms and one bath, small kitchen, dogs allowed, the former tenant moved because the neighbor boy wore her dresses in front of her little son and then he hung himself right next door. Would you like to see the backyard?”