Short Story: “Spock, the Rock, Doc Ock, and Hulk Hogan”
2008. A moment in spring, a fifteenth birthday party, walking along train tracks.
It was in a small town, in New Jersey, and only a few people showed. All boys—they had female friends who could not make it—and all of an age to gossip, the crude way boys are liable to gossip, about friends who were absent. A hookup, a breakup (both truer than not), an abortion (scandalous; scurrilous; likely untrue; judgment withheld), rumors of bisexuality (true, but still mildly titillating in those days). The train track ran under the main street. On that main street they had, a few minutes before, stopped in a drugstore to buy candy bars.
They ascend from the train tracks back to street level and lope towards the McDonalds at the edge of town, across an often-busy highway; they’ll have to dodge cars to get there, but these boys are fifteen to seventeen, and overbold. The spring weather is balmy here, more or less, and they sweat a little as they walk through the sunny afternoon.
It was at this time still the case that being a “nerd” meant something, even in a high school of mostly “nerds.” YouTube was still fairly new and flash animation was not yet centralized on only a few main websites. Nerd comedy in particular was not centralized. Opinions on the merits of different videos, different websites, and different styles of this nerd comedy were exchanged, sometimes vociferously. The big band at this point is Paramore; boys like it too. The boy whose birthday it is has someone constrained familiarity with the music scene. He knows a little more about movies and TV. His friends do not live nearby, he does not yet have social media (although he does use LiveJournal), and he spends most of his free time reading. Ten or fifteen years later he will look back on all the reading and be sick of no longer reading so much.
They get to the McDonalds; unable to buy much, and unwilling, at least in some cases, to gorge themselves on French fries right after the candy bars, they take the tiny plastic cups meant for ketchup and use them to take shots of soda from the soda fountain. Nobody stops them. People may or may not be looking at them. Their metabolisms can take it. The birthday boy will end up a little pudgy in his twenties and excoriate himself for it without surcease or mercy.
There’s something to glory in in this afternoon. At one time, later, it will be said that this was a very normal day for these boys to have. One of them, at the least, will find meaning in that, and a little happiness, a store to draw from going forward into a later adolescence racked with self-sabotage and trauma. He will lack common sense and be overburdened with romance and mental fever for the rest of his minority. There will be a personal history for him to create. He will sometimes, almost, rise to that task.