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  To Elaine and Lily, the loves of my life

  FOREWORD

  What is a nerd?

  For forty years I’ve been a professional actor, practicing my craft onstage, screen and television, building a career that many young actors have told me they envy, and that is the question—along with “Was that really you belching?” and “Did Bruce and Cybill really hate each other?”—I am most frequently asked these days. (The answers to those two other questions are no and yes, respectively.)

  Not “How did you get your start?” or “Did you find the transition from stage to film and TV daunting?” or “How have you managed, against all odds, to achieve regular employment as a character actor in a brutal business in which barely making a living—let alone enjoying long-term success—seems like the elusive dream of a disordered mind?

  Nope, none of those. The question I get is: “What is a nerd?” As if it’s one of those large, metaphysical questions that most people would be unable to answer. Like when Lyndon Johnson met Louis Armstrong and said, with enormous weight and significance, “Louis, what is jazz?” Like he was expecting a big, heavy answer and what he got was Louis saying, “Pops, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.” Funnily enough, I suppose that’d be a good answer to the nerd question as well.

  Oddly, when Revenge of the Nerds was released in 1984, it wasn’t a question I heard that much. In the 1980s, everyone pretty much knew—or thought they knew—what a nerd was. Certainly no one cared enough to ask.

  Nerds were socially awkward outsiders: they may have been brilliant in math or science, but they could barely dress themselves. They never dated (and pretended that was a choice). Their skin was bad—this was nonnegotiable. They wore thick glasses/bow ties/and prescription shoes. Sports—or really any kind of physical activity other than running when being chased—was unknown to them. They collected comic books and subscribed to Famous Monsters of Filmland. They built and traded model trains, spacecraft, classic monster model kits and cars, and, if they were lucky enough to find another of their tribe in the neighborhood, they spent all their time in basements or garages together, deep in arcane role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, assuming the roles of characters who were not … you know, nerdy.

  Some of them were brilliant academics and some were middling students. Some were “retarded,” had learning disabilities or were abused or dyslexic. If they were lucky, they were ignored. If they weren’t, they were bullied. A few became dangerous sociopaths.

  But many went on to change the world in unimaginable ways, dreaming up ideas that would forever alter how we communicate, read, listen to music and send sexually explicit photos of ourselves.

  They were the nerds, spazzes, dorks, retards and geeks. They were picked on, put down, beat up and ostracized. They were often lonely.

  They were my people.

  In a million years, they would never have been able to imagine a future in which the word “nerd” would have any kind of positive connotation. That “geek” could be something that highly paid government officials trained in foreign policy or counterintelligence would use to describe themselves; or that the adjective “adorkable” could even be a word in the English language, let alone that a highly successful, long-running television show could be marketed using it.

  It’s long been known that the etymology of the word “nerd” goes back to a man who could be considered a kind of Nerd Founding Father: Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel. The first use of the word was in his 1950 book If I Ran a Zoo. Among the peculiar, bizarre and almost certainly socially inept creatures on display in Seuss’s phantasmagorical zoo was a “Nerd.” A year after the book’s release, according to a report in Newsweek magazine, the term “nerd” had gained currency in Detroit, Michigan, as a derogatory slang expression for someone who was “square,” or a “spazz.”

  And it was in Detroit, Michigan, at Harper Hospital, just two years later on November 27, 1953, where I was born, conveniently into the one town in America that had already coined the perfect word for some of its favorite sons to scream at me as they were pushing my head into locker room toilets.

  The men in my family were bankers and auto company executives. The women were “housewives” except for my mother and aunt, who were teachers. I was to follow in none of their footsteps. I was on my way to becoming a sort of Nerd Founding Father myself.

  I would accomplish that by going into a line of work as alien to my family’s experience as migrant farm working. I did it by consorting for the rest of my life with a motley cast of actors, playwrights, misfits, radicals, alcoholics and English acting teachers. I would gain a solid professional reputation and secure a small place in cinematic history by indulging, for the amusement of millions, in antisocial, unhygienic behavior that my parents spent years teaching me never to do even in private.

  I did it by dutifully playing second banana to universally acknowledged cool kids like Tom Cruise, John Cusack, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jaime Foxx. I did it by marrying a woman with impeccable nerd credentials herself, writer Elaine Aronson, and eventually raising a nerd of our own, our daughter, Lily, thereby doing our bit to propagate the species. I did it by embracing my inner-nerd early, fully, publicly and with pride, to the point of creating and selling, with Robert Carradine, a hit comedy-reality television series called King of the Nerds, the entire point of which was to celebrate Nerd Culture in all its manifestations.

  I did it by accepting the fact that to countless fans, the name I had carried with pride for many years was not just unknown, it was completely beside the point.

  So, the answer to the above question? What is a nerd?

  I am a nerd.

  My name is Curtis Armstrong. But you can call me Booger.

  INTRODUCTION

  There’s a story my ex-wife, Cynthia, tells about when she and I first came to Los Angeles for film work after years in the theater.

  It was 1984. I’d had a nice supporting role in a Warner Bros. movie, Risky Business, which had been released, and another nice supporting role in Fox’s Revenge of the Nerds, which hadn’t, but I had no illusions: I’d only just started to establish myself in New York as a stage actor and I wasn’t expecting my arrival in Hollywood to shake the place up much, which turns out to have been a good bet.

  But Cynthia had gone to meet her new West Coast agent and when she returned, I asked her how it went.

  “Oh, fine,” she said. “They seem nice. One of them mentioned you.”

  “Really?!”

  “Yeah,” Cynthia said. “I said I was married to an actor and she asked which actor and I said Curtis Armstrong. And she said, ‘Ah! Curtis Armstrong! The new Michael J. Pollard.’”

  Now, maybe you need to know who Michael J. Pollard is to really appreciate the story. I guess it was the sheer unexpectedness of the comparison that surprised me. I would never in a hundred years have ma
de that connection. I wasn’t insulted, you understand. I like Michael J. Pollard. You’d just never think there could be two of him. I mean, Michael J. Pollard was short, a little dumpy, with a funny face, an unmistakable voice and an unruly mop of hair, and was known mainly for eccentric comedy roles, whereas I was … umm …

  Okay, point taken.

  And if that weren’t enough, a few months earlier, MAD magazine had published their parody of Risky Business, and sure enough, in their treatment of the famous “What the fuck?” scene, there was young Tom Cruise, looking just like young Tom Cruise, and next to him, unmistakably, was Curtis Armstrong, looking just like a middle-aged Michael J. Pollard. Even MAD magazine couldn’t tell us apart. There are probably still people who see me up on the screen and say, “Gosh, Michael Pollard’s holding up well after all these years.”

  But getting down to this memoir business. Turns out I’ve written one and now here we are—I, shyly proffering the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime spent capering under hot lights for your amusement—and you, in a bookstore, perhaps, rummaging through the remainders bin, leafing through this introduction trying to decide if it’s worth the buck and a half or whatever it’s been marked down to, wondering if it might be good plane reading.

  Well, let me tell you, this wasn’t something I entered into lightly. In preparation, I have read a lot of contemporary memoirs written by various peers of mine. Reading these books was a humbling experience—not to mention expensive and, frankly, sometimes a bit of a slog—because it made me wonder if you are not really famous or wildly promiscuous or if you haven’t wasted your best years waking up in a pool of your own vomit, is there really any point in writing a memoir? Obviously, promiscuity and alcoholic blackouts were always things I strove for, but is just striving really enough? In the harrowing-life-story department, there may be some areas I’m a little light in.

  I was born in Detroit, which I know sounds promising, but it turns out not to have been the harsh, brutal Detroit of Eminem’s youth, for example. Nearly four years of my childhood were spent in a foreign country, but not in a cold, heartless boarding school or anywhere I was made to eat dog. The country was Switzerland and it was clean and beautiful. (We did eat horse there, but it was always presented in such delicious sauces that we wouldn’t dream of complaining.)

  I was the product of a mixed marriage. My father, Robert, who spent a solitary adolescence buried in books, was a Nerd. My mother, the daughter of Italian immigrants, looked like Gina Lollobrigida. She fenced and taught judo to members of the Detroit Police Department. She was not a Nerd. It is a testament to their mutual love and devotion that they were able to bridge this significant cultural gap and remain a loving couple to this day. I have one sister, Kristin, who I never tried to sell into white slavery even when the opportunity presented itself. We’ve had our ups and downs, Kristin and me, for which I mainly blame myself. Certainly some of the constraint in our relationship stems from an ill-conceived prank I played on her when we were young. Having just seen Hitchcock’s Psycho, I thought it might be a piquant thing to dress up in one of my mother’s dresses, put on her wig and high heels, take a large butcher knife from the kitchen and then, just as Kristin was leaving the shower, leap in with the blade raised, shrieking, “REE! REE! REE!!” In retrospect, I realize this may have been the root of some long-term trust issues. Other than that, our childhood was the usual suburban mid-century American thing: she upstairs quietly playing with horses, me in the cellar trying to construct a torture chamber.

  It may strike you that there are a fair number of school-related anecdotes herein, both in Detroit and Geneva. If so, that’s because if we learn nothing else in school, it is usually the place where we first learn we are nerds. Depending on the person and circumstances, these can be difficult lessons, traumatic, even; or they can be glorious epiphanies, accompanied by a swelling soundtrack of celestial choirs. I think of nerd orientation as being kind of like sexual orientation. It’s usually around age nine or so that people start being aware that something’s up. Some are later bloomers and I guess some earlier, but school tends to be the great crucible of nerd self-identification. So I spend some time on it. If you want to skip ahead to the movies, be my guest.

  I first appeared onstage as a professional actor in 1975, when I was twenty-three years old. For the record, it was in the role of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Terence Kilburn, at Meadow Brook Theatre in Michigan. (You probably didn’t see it.) I made my first movie, Risky Business, in 1983 when I was thirty years old. My first appearance on television was in 1987 in an episode of Moonlighting, when I was thirty-four. I’m writing this book now at the age of sixty-two, in 2016, more than forty years later. I held off as long as I could.

  My goal from the start was to be a stage actor, and to that end I attended the Academy of Dramatic Art at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. I was trained in the classical English tradition (at least, that’s what they told me it was and at those prices I expected nothing less). I began my career as a stage actor in Ann Arbor, Michigan, then moved to New York and, finally, to Los Angeles, where I still live to this day. All of this should be worth something, right?

  The thing about show business is there’s always a steady stream of optimists who are trying to break into it. Well, fine then! Some of them may be curious about what the business was like for someone who came before. Not a marquee name or an A-list celebrity, but a journeyman actor. One of those familiar faces with elusive names; one of those players who you figure must work all the time but they don’t really; one of those character people who started by slaving away in the trenches and now, all these decades later, are lucky enough to find themselves still slaving away in the trenches. If that sounds like a joke, it wasn’t meant to be. Unless you thought it was funny, in which case it was.

  So all you sunny optimists, you thespians yet unsullied; you actors still brimming with ideals and passion; you uncynical masses still surging round the gate, looking for a way in—look no further! Revenge of the Nerd is just what the doctor ordered. Or maybe you’re a civilian who has nothing to do with my profession at all, but who has a taste for this sort of rubbish and a long plane trip ahead of you—your search is over! This is a book for you.

  Just to be clear, this is not a book that will try to teach you anything about acting. If you learn anything about acting here, it will be a fluke. It is, rather, a look back at a life lived while acting. Or, while not acting, as the case may be. Actors spend a lot of time not acting, which is why so many of us take up hobbies, like drinking. It might give you an idea what life as an actor would have been like for an actor in the last four decades, or at least what it would’ve been like if that actor were me. Or what it would’ve been like for an actor who looks just like me and had my exact career, without actually being me. (I’m hoping that last sentence will cover me in case any legal issues crop up.) Also I have, here and there, changed names in the book, though only those of people you probably wouldn’t have recognized anyway. The famous ones are named and if they don’t like how they’re depicted they’ll probably never speak to me again. Most of them haven’t spoken to me in decades anyway, so who gives a shit?

  * * *

  One last thing: One night about twenty years ago I walked into a Mayfair Market in Hollywood at about one in the morning. It appeared to be completely deserted, but as I turned into an aisle I saw a man about halfway down standing very still, looking intently at a can he was holding. He wasn’t just not moving, there was an aura of otherworldly stillness about the guy that was a little disconcerting. He was dressed in a green, shapeless coat, maybe an old army jacket. He had dark trousers, battered shoes and a tangled mess of hair and I knew the second I saw him that it was Michael J. Pollard.

  I approached crab-casually, sideways, like I was scanning the aisle for something. He was just staring at the can he was holding and I was thinking, Here I am in a completely deserted grocery store with Michael J. Pollard! I felt lik
e Robinson Crusoe finding Friday’s footprint on the beach, only with Friday still in it. What to do? I had to say something, didn’t I? What better than to share with him my ex-wife’s story? What if I told him that years before an agent told me that I was the new him? And now here we are, the two of us at the Mayfair Market at one in the morning! My mind was racing as I tried to come up with the exact way of telling the story, but then I started having second thoughts. It was a great story, but as his role in it was, essentially, the punch line, would he see the humor?

  Then again, taking a broader view, was the story really that funny in the first place? Maybe not. At that moment, I realized even I didn’t find it that funny anymore. I knew too much. I had been an actor long enough to know how deeply even well-meant japes can cut. To this day I have scars myself and some of them are fresh.

  I don’t know what Michael was looking at so intently that night. It looked to me like a large can of Campbell’s Tomato Juice, but he may have been seeing something entirely different. In fact, I’m sure he was. He certainly never saw me; the moment passed and I moved away.

  If there’s a moral of the story it’s that character people are a resilient race. Michael J. Pollard is still around. And so am I. And in Hollywood, history is written by the supporting players.

  DETROIT

  I’ve said jokingly that I was the product of a mixed marriage, but there is more than a little truth in that statement. From a class, socioeconomic and even religious perspective, I was pulled in different directions as a boy. Detroit succeeded as a city because of the contributions and sacrifice of wildly disparate cultures. The ultimate clash and inequality of those cultures is what finally undermined it. Both sides of my family represent classic examples of American success stories, but they are very different stories. Detroit made my family and left a lasting imprint on me. But like the rifts exposed in the city itself, my family, the Italian Catholic D’Amicos and the upper-middle-class WASP Armstrongs, found that just interacting could be a fraught proposition.