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Otherwise Pandemonium

By NICK HORNBY

It was just a lousy secondhand VCR—but it brought him to the

very brink of love and desolation!

Mom always sings this crappy old song when I'm in a bad mood. She does it to make me laugh, but I never do laugh, because I'm in a bad mood. (Sometimes I sort of smile later, when I'm in a better mood, and I think about her singing and dancing and making the dorky black-and-white-movie face—eyes wide, all her teeth showing—she always makes when she sings the song. But I never tell her she makes me smile. It would only encourage her to sing more often. ) This song is called "Ac-cent-chu-ate the Positive," and I have to listen to it whenever she tells me we're going to Dayton to see Grandma, or when she won't give me the money for something I need, like CDs or even clothes, for Christ's sake. Anyway, today I'm going to do what the song says. I'm going to accentuate the positive, and eliminate the negative. Otherwise, according to the song and to my mom, pandemonium's liable to walk upon the scene.

OK. Well, here is the accentuated positive: I got to have sex. That's the upside of it. I know that's probably a strange way of looking at things, considering the circumstances, but it's definitely the major event of the week so far. It won't be the major event of the year, I know that—Jesus, do I know that—but it's still a headline news item: I just turned fifteen, and I'm no longer a virgin. How cool is that? The target I'd set for myself was sixteen, which means I'm a whole year ahead of schedule. Nearly two years, in fact, because I'll still be sixteen in twenty-two months' time. So let's say this is the story of how I ended up getting laid—a story with a beginning, and a weird middle, and a happy ending. Otherwise I'd have to tell you a Stephen King—type story, with a beginning and a weird middle and a really fucking scary ending, and I don't want to do that. It wouldn't help me right now.

So. You probably think you need to know who I am, and what kind of car my brother drives, and all that Holden Caulfield kind of crap, but you really don't, and not just because I haven't got a brother, or even a cute little sister. It's not one of those stories. Insights into my personality and all that stuff aren't going to help you or me one bit, because this shit is real. I don't want you to get to the end of this and start thinking about whether I'd have acted different if my parents had stayed together, or whether I'm a typical product of our times, or what I tell you about being fifteen, or any of those other questions we have to discuss when we read a story in school. It's not the point.

I found it a couple blocks from my house, in this store that sells used electronic stuff. It cost fifty bucks, which seemed pretty good to me, although now it doesn't seem like such a great bargain, but that's another story. Or rather, it's this story, but a different part of it. And I bought it because . . . OK, so maybe I will have to give you a little background, but I won't make it into a big drama. I'll just give you the facts. My mom and I moved from L. A. to Berkeley about three months ago. We moved because Mom finally walked out on my asshole of a father, who writes movies for a living—although as none of them ever got made, it would be more accurate to say that he writes scripts for a living. Mom is an art teacher, and she paints her own stuff, too, and she says there are millions of people in Berkeley with an artistic bent or whatever, so she thought we'd feel right at home here. (I like it that she says "we. " I haven't got an artistic bone in my whole body, and she knows that, but for some reason she thinks I take after her. It was pretty much always me and her against him, so that became me and her against L. A. , and because I was against L. A. , that somehow made me able to paint. I don't mind. Painting's pretty cool, some of it. )