Loser Goes First
by DAN KENNEDY
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Loser Goes First Summary
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AllRight, California! Are You Ready to Rock! (I'm Not) Christmas Eve 1978, and I'm ten years old. The August of one's life, really, if you're anything like me. I can remember staring at our white suburban ceiling and being keenly aware that the good days wouldn't last forever now that I was sliding down the slippery dark slope of double-digit numbers. I fell asleep wanting one thing: a black Gibson Les Paul guitar like the one Peter Frampton played. And like the one Pete Townsend from the Who played. And Ace Frehley from Kiss. The guitar would be my passport into the coolest band in our neighborhood. The only band in our neighborhood . . . Jokerz. It was Tim Caldwell's band and they were going to play the next Valentine's Day dance at school: the gig that would change everything for me. The gig that would make me no longer a quiet loner who never spoke up or took what he wanted in this life. Every girl in sixth grade would be there, plus the high-school girls who had to "volunteer" to do things like serve punch or take tickets at the door as part of their detention. They were there usually because they were caught smoking or fighting and made to perform this sort of community service as part of their punishment. And my gorgeous, sort of Dyan Cannonish homeroom teacher, Mrs. Davis, would be there. And they would all be in front of the stage. And I would be on the stage, the new guitarist in Tim's band. When I woke up on Christmas morning, I walked down the hallway and approached the family Christmas tree in what felt like the first truly religious Christmas celebration ever held in our suburban Southern California household. I walked with the epic pace of a bishop . . . with the timing of a monk and a casual sort of confidence not unlike that of a pope or a church owner/manager or whatever men happened to walk in churches with a deliberate pace... |
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It all begins on Christmas morning, 1978. Dan Kennedy is ten years old and wants a black Gibson Les Paul guitar, the kind Peter Frampton plays. It will be his passport to the coolest (only) band in the neighborhood-Jokerz. He doesn't get it. Instead, his parents present him with what they think he wants most, a real-estate loan calculator (called the Loan Arranger) and a maroon velour pullover shirt with a tan stripe across the chest. It is the first of what will become a lifetime of various-sized failures, misunderstandings, comical humiliations, and just plain silly choices that have dogged this "hipster Proust of youthful loserdom," as author Jerry Stahl has so eloquently called Mr. Kennedy. Dan's hilarious and painfully awkward youth soon develops into a . . . uh . . . hilarious and painfully awkward adulthood. His first two choices for university are Yale (Lit or Drama) and Harvard (Business), so he reviews his high school transcripts and decides on Butte Community College in Oroville, California, where he studies for about four and a half weeks. We could go on here and describe in detail all of Dan's good-natured stabs at ambition, but he, himself, sums it all up quite nicely: "If you've ever tried and failed miserably at being a rock star (no guitar/talent), a professional bass fisherman, an extra in the movie Sleepless in Seattle (guy drinking martini in bar while Tom Hanks makes a phone call), a Madison Avenue advertising executive, a clerk/towel person at a suburban health club (named Kangaroo Kourts), an espresso street-cart owner and operator (in the one neighborhood of that coffee-swilling town, Seattle, where, remarkably, no one really seems to drink coffee), a dot.com millionaire, an MTV VJ, or a forest fire fighter, this book is for you." Along the way, a few lessons are learned and we are treated to one of the most original, riotously funny, unsentimental, and offbeat memoirs in recent history. Dan's a favorite in McSweeney's and at the very popular Moth readings in New York City. We should be happy that he failed so miserably at so many things-and took notes! From the Hardcover edition. |
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eBooks > Titles > Authors > Humor > Humor > DAN KENNEDY > Loser Goes First