Revenge Of The Nerd

Pink has always been the perfect color–pastel pink preferably; It is the color of soft cake, the hue of babies breath, the slippers that belong to blonde wives married to mob bosses, the tone swirling in the sink after I cough up a little blood, the tincture of the tramp who truly tells you all the things you want to hear…

 

And I hid this affection, this adoration of said tinge, for fear of the fellows fucking me up at the tender age of thirteen. Enter Tom Bruise on the television screen wearing those wayfarers the only way he could, and I saw the Izod whilst my reflection shook in his shades. Such heights of narcissism were risky business, I thought to myself standing in my tidy-whities and sport socks as the apparatus then known as the VCR struggled to clear a thin stream of static on the screen. What great technology, the neighbor would belt out over his fence admiring his own.

 

I knew then, a baby-pink alligator shirt was my next item of order. But how, oh how, would I, a punk, acquire such a fine garment? I wondered.

 

“We’ve got BUSH, we’ve got BUSH,” blared a character called Booger on the boob tube as I sat watching the women undress in a film called Revenge Of The Turds. I must have watched that thing a hundred times. And not just because of the gratuitous nudity, or the beautiful beaver shots, as I imagined Booger would say. I would count off the pink Polo shirts in every scene: four…five…six…Dug the music and the crude comedy. The golden-haired girls cheerleading for their chumps.

 

Now at the bruised age of forty, I own two handfuls of Lacoste shirts, of many colors and patterns…but my pride and joy hangs in the corner of the closet, ah yes, the pink…the pink polo. And every time I slide into such a bad ass t-shirt, I swear I can hear Bary Numan singing in Metal and I turn around sharply, in nothing but mentioned garb and point with both index fingers at an empty space and expect some young kid watching me…as he sits alone in a room because he’s afraid to go out of it in fear that his Uncle might beat him, his cousin might give him the why-don’t-you-run-away face, the world and all the pretty girls in it will reject him and remind him that he doesn’t belong with those spaghetti legs and crooked teeth…

 

 

Films by the Numaninator now kick in with its heavy bass line and sultry, slithering and colossal synth lead, and Lambda Lambda Lambda register by the wacky wizard of this pleasure principle–and now I know the truth: anything can happen–anything can happen. I was a nerd and still am, and fucking proud of it. I am successful at what I do: I have been tattooing almost fourteen years professionally , I have released a couple of music albums, I have painted for a couple of galleries in Los Angeles, girls get giddy when I garble on, I buy myself whatever my nerdy heart desires from groovy gadgets to radical records. I could keep going, but like a Fax-machine, you get the message.

 

As much as I love to wax on about my favorite decade, I need to stop here and get some sleep since it’s almost three in the morning, gotta be somewhere early. I will jump out of bed and moonwalk over to the crapper and commence the morning due. When I’m enshrouded in Polo and Ray-Baned, I will climb into my car where I feel safest of all.

 

But hear this: Your kids, the pathetic punks at the convenient store, the video-game-nerd of a nephew, the incessant reader at the park, the black-clad demons smoking cigarettes in empty parking lots with a little too much eyeliner…they will one day take over the world–they will bloom into your doom.

 

And I close this with one last thing…my ultimate revenge is: a happy life…without you.

∞