Introversion

One of those songs, #6.

(Haven’t done one of these in months! Previously: “Rag Doll,” The 4 Seasons; “Baby, The Rain Must Fall,” Glenn Yarbrough; “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” The Beatles; “We Built This City,” Jefferson Starship; “We're Not Gonna Take It/See Me, Feel Me,” The Who.)

I was heading this way anyhow but the pandemic lockdown, which removes a lot of otherwise reliable external stimulus that might have kept me in the here and now, has turned me inward and backward. I was always a weird, lonely kid, and I have tended to romanticize that state, for obvious reasons, but with the distance of years and the focus of isolation I have surmised that I was also insufferable.

They used to call my condition “hyperactive.” I had trouble focusing and ran around a lot and talked fast about whatever was running through my head. I’m not entirely sure that my pediatrician mentioned ADHD, a diagnosis known at the time, but my mother did mention years later that “they wanted to pump you up with drugs” (alternately, “they wanted me to feed you pills”), which made both of us laugh. I see now that the preferred ADHD remedy at that time was Ritalin, and it’s a good thing they didn’t feed or pump me with that because what was really jacking me up was an undiagnosed pheochromocytoma adrenal tumor, for which I understand Ritalin is contraindicated and who knows what would have happened to me if I’d taken it. I’m not sure whether my mother had a mystical intuition that it wouldn’t be good, or whether she was just mortified by the thought of her son on psychiatric drugs.

That pediatrician, by the way, was a dick. He told me I was “dogmatic” and told me to look it up. I was already mad at him for some reason, and that made me madder. (He also called me a “chronic complainer.” Now I’m wondering if he wasn’t actually a pedo.) I was maybe seven or eight years old at the time and when I looked the word up the definition was too difficult for me to comprehend, which just made me madder still.

I’m sure I was making unexamined assertions to him, though, given my state. I recall seeing a show on our black and white TV about disturbed children, in which some little motormouthed kid babbled, “I do not talk too much! Lyndon Johnson talks too much! Hubert Humphrey talks too much! But do I talk too much? No!” I was probably like that kid, but with a little more style, I like to think. Imagine this little adrenal gland going haywire for hours at a time. I probably barked all sorts of nonsense with a strong sense of conviction, and what was I going to do, run to the library and do research?

I don’t recall getting into trouble much during those pre-adolescent years, because I didn’t have many friends to get in trouble with, but looking back now I can’t see how my mother wouldn’t have been at least a little fed up. I seemed intelligent, because I was so manic that I was constantly devouring whatever books and magazines were around to distract me (we didn’t have Twitter back then), but my intellectual achievement didn’t accrue any obvious rewards besides good report cards; in fact I was pretty much a stereotypical nerd avant la lettre. (The accepted term at the time was “faggot.”)

I was aware of and even sometimes found myself relating to popular music, as I have mentioned before, but I also gravitated to whatever weirdness was presented to me. Understand, there was no Dr. Demento then or anything like it — if someone wanted to hear something like that, he had to wait to get old enough to move to Greenwich Village and flip his wig, or for the occasional novelty record to come around and break up the monotony.

There was, for example, a “party” record that a friend of my mother owned, called “Delicious,” performed by the TV actor Jim Backus “and Friend” who pretended to get drunk on champagne while a lugubrious lounge piano played in the background. I was nuts about it. The characters started out playing inebriation in something like an expected Otis the Drunk manner, but they quickly became barely coherent, and just repeated Delicious! and shrieked and roared as the piano dribbled away. I sort of got the gag — she says “delicious,” see, and it becomes a running joke, and as they get drunker it gets funnier and funnier to them — but more than that, I felt — well, you might say the poignance of the schism between their hysteria and the miserable piano music; there was something in there that mirrored things I was feeling, a kind of dank, impoverished longing under a frantic froth. In fact, when I got older and interested in theater, I imagined the song “Why Should I Care” from Osborne’s The Entertainer sung to that music, notwithstanding it didn’t scan to the lyrics, because I thought the feeling suited it.

I don’t know if you could say this was precocious on my part. Everyone is capable of deep feelings, but I think some of our deep feelings are also very strange — not valentine love or horror-movie terror or funeral-card sorrow, but feelings that are hard to put into words or maybe even for our minds to acknowledge, so we often don’t know they’re worth naming, and act as they’re not there. As a weird kid, I think I often felt this way about ordinary feelings — that they didn’t have anything to do with me that I could understand. But the odd feelings — those I was keenly sensitive to.

Younger people today know about “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha!” by “Napoleon XIV” (actually song plugger Jerry Samuels) from curators of curiosities like Dr. Demento, which as I said we didn’t have, and the thousands of other equivalents that sprung up in later years as weirdness became not only tolerable but acceptable and, finally, widely marketable. But when it came out it was the only thing like it and it was on the radio all the time and it lit me up like a Christmas tree. The goofy joke of the insane man and his unrequited love for his dog (!) was part of it, but like the dumb jokes in Mad magazine it was less about the joke and more about the style. Mostly I twigged the delivery; actors playing psycho usually went too far, but this guy sounded really crazy, the strain of holding it together obvious in every syllable. And when the vocal sped up on the choruses, it wasn’t any cheap Alvin and the Chipmunks trick; it was organic, a perfect objective correlative to his derangement, his voice following his mind into oblivion, accompanied by sirens.

But what hardcore users like me dug was the flip side. It almost unnerves me to remember how obsessively I listened to that backward version — so often that I could have sung those backwards lyrics to you, with the same intense observation and nuance I’d later give to quoting lines and sound effects from movies — and how those reversed drums and sirens excited me — which, hey, punk rock, figure it out.

The weird kids who came after never had to wait for something like this the way parched settlers wait for rain. Maybe I was part of some advance wave of weirdness that Napoleon XIV awakened, leading inevitably not only to Dr. Demento and Weird Al but also to REsearch and Bob Dobbs and entire “alt” networks to the current situation, where everyone has their audio/visual kink catered to from their first Cartoon Channel viewing. I don’t begrudge the new breed their advantages. We all are what we are, and have to either be that or trade whatever happiness or unhappiness it gives us for something that, experience tells me, is even worse. Which is to say: sometimes the only way to go forward is backwards.