Genesis of a Snob
In which the author discusses his connections with Sir Charles Grandioseby Vance Briceland
Let me precede my remarks with a warning. If you are the sort of person whose first impulse is to call Animal Control every time you watch Toto tug back the curtain to reveal that the magical Wizard of Oz is nothing more than a disappointing old bald gentleman, you still have time to turn back. If you are the sort of person who still nurses a permanent grudge against the individual who told you there was no Santa Claus, this essay is not for you.I'm certainly one of the latter. When I was six, my parents moved from a suburban apartment into a house the city, and I transferred schools in the middle of the first grade. At first I was delighted with the change. My sister and I had a whole house to play in, with a real playroom in the basement, and a back yard of our very own. It was very Dick and Jane (which yes, we first-graders were still reading in those distant, misty days). But within a couple of weeks, I had acquired my very first bete noir, a feminine torturer named Katy Sweeney.
Katy announced to me on the playground my first day that she was guaranteed a spot in heaven when she died because her father was a minister. Katy's conception of her salvation was something like a 'Get Out Of Jail Free' card; she informed me that she could do anything bad she wanted and it wouldn't matter a bit, because she could declare her father's profession and join other aspiring angels in line at the Pearly Gates, if not outright cut past the rest of us. Then she proved it, by daring God to strike her dead right then and there with a bolt of lightning if it wasn't true.
I was instantly intimidated. My parents were only academics, and even at that young age I dimly suspected that presenting those kind of credentials after my demise would cause St. Peter to giggle, apologize, and point me down to the Express Elevator To Permanent Perdition.
Much to my dismay, Katy lived within a block of my new house, and my mother met her mother and together they decided it would be a lovely idea to carpool. It was then that Katy discovered the sweet power of the upper hand. For, as she warned me, if I didn't do everything she demanded, she would make sure her mother (who had the afternoon carpool shift) left me at school all night, where the janitor would find me and throw me into the furnace, as he had with that poor little boy just the year before. You remember that poor little boy. I think he's the same one who got his arm ripped off because he stuck it too far out the car window, got his face frozen when he was sticking out his tongue, and then exploded because he drank Pepsi with his Pop Rocks.
Fortunately, she didn't demand much to begin with. I had to play dolls with her, which was tedious, but bearable. And I did have to promise not to throw at her when we played dodgeball. But then that began to pall, for her, and she turned to mental torture. First she tested the waters by announcing loudly, on the playground one day: "Vance does a dance with ants in his pants in France!", which doggerel caused great amusement among the Playschool set, and speechless mortification for me. (Hackles still rise on my neck as I write about this traumatic incident.)
But she reached the height of her powers the day in which our lovely, gentle teacher asked us to go around the classroom and tell our classmates what we wanted for Christmas. One by one, the other children stood up noncommittally and announced, "I want a Lite Brite," or "I want a Mrs. Beasley doll."
Then came my turn. "Santa Claus is going to bring me a Mad Scientist Chamber of Torture With Live Action Torture Rack!" I announced confidently. I'd seen this particular nightmare-inducing item in one of my mother's educational toys catalogues (under the 'Look At The Purely Evil Things Mainstream Toy Manufacturers Are Trying To Foist Upon YOUR Child!' section, of course, with a heavy black warning around the edges) and coveted it dearly. Secretly, though, I would have settled for an Easy Bake Oven, because I fancied it would be absolute bliss to bake an endless parade of miniature cakes without having to rely on my working mother or father to do it for me.
After school let out and before Mrs. Sweeney arrived to drive us home, Katy approached me with an entourage of first-graders from another class. I recognized from the dangerous smiles on her face that she had nasty intent. But I never expected her to point at me, and announce, "There. He's the one who still believes in Santa Claus!" so that the other children could erupt in riotous amusement at my naivete. While I was metaphorically down and gasping, she explicated the whole process for me, from the terrible, terrible fact that it was my parents who spied on me and tricked me into telling what I wanted and who then fooled me and my sister by luring us to sleep only to leap downstairs and set out the presents for Christmas morning and that now I knew, I wouldn't get any presents ever again. The information was awful. Hearing it was cruel. And worst of all, I knew right there and then that with my mother manning the shopping cart, there wasn't a chance in hell I'd be getting that Mad Scientist Chamber of Torture With The Live Action Torture Rack.
Sir Charles Grandiose, everyone's favorite baronet, had his genesis in the Creative Arts House at the College of William and Mary, the year I was a sophomore. Now, there are other colleges around the country with a kindly, grandmotherly attitude when it comes to student housing. They build immense dorms to house several thousand students at one go, and while they might not be the most comfortable of domiciles, there's always enough room for one more. And then there are the colleges very similar in spirit to your mean Uncle Phil, the one who thought it would be a kindness to throw you into the chilly local river when you were seven, because you'd learn to swim fastest in a blind panic. The University of Virginia was something like that, in my day; they grudgingly allowed students to live in campus dorms as freshmen, and then they booted them off campus for the remainder of their school years.
Now, William and Mary was more like my mother, when it came to student housing. That is, when you requested an on-campus room, you'd get a probing look that would cause you blushingly to recall all your recent sins, and then a firm "Maybe."
Towards the end of my freshman year, I was enduringly weary of the roommate the college had randomly assigned me--Charles Green, an extremely wealthy boy from an extremely wealthy family from an extremely wealthy town in New England with dual claims to fame. Not only did he have the largest speakers in the dorm, but he also managed to get through the entire spring semester without washing any laundry. The latter brought me no small fame, because I was the only person who could authoritatively attest to it. After all, I'm the one who had to watch him sniff through the soiled clothes in his laundry basket every morning trying to find the least whiffy jockey shorts. Despite his many repulsive qualities, though, Charles fascinated me; I never understood how anyone with so many privileges could be such a pitiful scrap of humanity. But at the same time, there was no way in hell I was going to room with him again.
So blithely I went to the housing office to put in my application for the following year, and I was met with terrible news. The university didn't really have quite enough dorm rooms to go around, they never really did, and there was a good chance I might be 'bumped' from campus my sophomore year, although I could come back as a junior or senior, if I survived. Unless, of course, I was willing to consider one of the 'Special Interest' housing units?
I wasn't ready to rent my own apartment yet. At that age I was still blushing whenever I heard my name rhymed with ants or pants . . . so how in the world was I going to cope with adult tasks like paying rent and buying my own food? So I considered the 'Special Interest' housing projects. Of course, there were none that resembled my Special Interests. I would have fit right in if they'd had a Practical Jokes On The School Computer Network House, or a House Of Students Who Read Far Too Much Non-Course Literature, or even the House Of People Who Ingest Massive Amounts Of Cafeteria Food Especially On Taco Day.
But William and Mary had the Spanish House, and the French House, and the German House, and the Russian House. Now mind you, I spoke none of those languages, but I was willing to Berlitz my way to a bunk bed in one of them if it meant I could stay on campus. It was then that the nice lady at the housing office mentioned that there was going to be a new, experimental house opening the following year--the Creative Arts House.
Well, I was certainly qualified for that! I had stacks of bad poetry, calluses and mental scars from my piano lessons, and a couple of reviews of the one-acts I'd been in, to prove it!
Let me tell you from the benefit of retrospect that bringing together forty young people in a cramped dormitory is always a poor idea. Add poor ventilation, shower heads set hip-high from the floor, and a location on campus that was as remote from any of the classroom buildings as you could get without actually being underwater, and it's an even poorer idea. Now, I imagine that in the other special interest houses, the students could complain to each other in their little foreign languages and it would be educational. But give the forty young people artistic pretensions, and you've got a bus packed full of plastic explosives ready to explode the minute it decelerates to under fifty miles per hour, baby.
Think of all the irritating artistic characters you've seen in movies or TV shows such as Fame or Flashdance or Lambada: The Forbidden Dance. Picture most of them frequently declaiming "I've gotta dream, my friend, and nothing's going to stop me from gettin' to Broadway/startin' that dance troupe/playing drums for the next big group like Quarterflash/writing that moody novel entirely in the second person/singing Aida at the Met/writing poetry about my girlfriend's vulva!" Throw in a smell of dirty laundry (it seems you never escape that particular evil, in college), and you've got the general irritating picture. It was exciting at first, all those artistic temperaments flaring at once. But then after two weeks we'd all read more than enough entries in the never-ending Ginsbergesque poem cycle about Natalie's vulva, and we settled down to hate each other.
The self-appointed Grand Diva of the Creative Arts House was an actor named Ron O'Malley. My, how I disliked Ron. I'd known him from several literature classes the year before, and from the theatre department. Ron starred in a production of The Elephant Man within weeks of arriving on campus, and I'd happened to be in class one day when he walked in with an edition of the student newspaper and quoted, pointing to a review of his performance, "I'm a freshman sensation!" To which my immediate impulse was to reply "Yeah, and I'm a freshman grump," while I pounded him on the head with an empty bottle of Yoohoo. But back then I wasn't a creature of impulse, and you couldn't get your deposit back on shattered Yoohoo bottles.
If Ron was a freshman sensation, he was a sophomore execration. Prone to black moods, he spent most of his time in the dorm scowling at the rest of us and our piddly little bands and dance troupes and sonnets on genitalia as he stomped between the rehearsal halls and his room. He spent hours admiring his admittedly angelic good looks in the bathroom mirrors. And then there was the night, during a rare Tidewater Virginia snowstorm, that he stripped off all of his clothing, stepped out through a second story window (which just happened to be right across from my room) onto the ledge, and began drunkenly to bellow Lear's mad scene at the top of his booming voice. Yes, it was that sort of place to live.
I'd begun by then to read early British novels, and the weirder everyone grew around me, the bigger the novel in which I'd immerse myself. I started off with Samuel Richardson's Pamela, which some of you college English survivors might remember as an entertaining one-volume work in which a maid repels her master's saucy advances until he somewhat surprisingly caves in and marries her (what, there weren't other easier maids around?). Then I read Richardson's Clarissa, four hardback volumes in which Clarissa Harlowe dies for chapters and chapters and chapters and endless chapters because her virtue has been tainted by the villainous Mr. Lovelace. There's something masochistic about reading Richardson, I think. I knew that I was supposed to be mourning the heroine's demise, but Clarissa was a droopy old thing, and I couldn't wait for her to get it over with and expire.
You'd think that after enduring Clarissa and her two billion pages of dying epistolary prose written on the cozy little desk she'd made from her coffin, I'd be wary of Richardson, but for some inexplicable reason right after the King Lear episode, I launched right into Sir Charles Grandison, a novel notable for its total lack of anything whatsoever resembling plot advancement. The hero of this dreary tale moralizes, does a lot of good deeds, gabs about them, then starts all over again, for a good four volumes. By the time I was done with the thing, I was ready to burn it. Sickening novels about good people can be tolerable, barely, when they're short (Pollyanna, The Five Little Peppers And How They Grew). Sir Charles Grandison was not.
It was immediately after I finished the final installment of this dull work (and thank goodness that was the extent of Richardson's output) that Sir Charles Grandiose was born. People in the Creative Arts House prided themselves on their elaborately decorated bedroom doors, but no one had made theirs interactive, before. So I taped a long sheet of paper to mine, scrawled 'Dear Sir Charles!' at the top, and then penned a letter from a lad who was looking for love and couldn't find it. I knew Sir Charles Grandiose had to be the exact opposite of Sir Charles Grandison--peevish instead of patient, self-interested instead of generous, huffy instead of good natured--so I had him castigate the boy for his improper use of salad forks.
And there he was. I think the idea lasted for two weeks in its original form, with maybe a couple of other people asking questions and Sir Charles replying, until finally the drummer down the hall (you could tell he was a serious drummer, because his hair was long) scrawled something illegible but no doubt obscene across the length of paper and I untaped it and tossed it into the trashcan.
Now, I'd like to be able to say that I cherished the idea and nursed it until it came to its current fruition. But that would be blatant falsehood. The simple truth is that I completely forgot about Sir Charles Grandiose for twelve years. It wasn't until my old Creative Arts House roommate, my excellent musician/artist/singer/writer friend Eric Peterson (who has the memory of all the elephants in Jumanji combined, and who thankfully would never be caught dead saying anything like "I've gotta dream, my friend") joked, one day, after I'd made one of my typically snotty remarks, "Dear Sir Charles. . . ."
"Huh?" I replied, succinctly.
"Don't you remember, in college, how you wrote that column from Sir Charles?"
Then it had all flashed back to me--that terrible night of King Lear, and the Richardson, and peevish Sir Charles Grandiose. I went home that night and wrote the first column, and placed it the next day on the office web server.
At first the column was something of an in-joke. Eric knew about it, and I printed it off to show Craig at home, and I also shared it with a few friends on the Internet. Then smirkingly, I signed it up with Yahoo, back in the fledgling days when it was just struggling to its feet. And I'm not exactly sure at what point it happened, but the column very early grew from something jokey shared between six or seven friends to something that hundreds of people a day were reading. It was also at about that point that the column transformed from something I could write every Friday afternoon during my lunch hour to something that occupied my conscious mind for hours a week, requiring me to be funny during long stretches that I didn't feel funny, and demanding that I pay attention to it even when I much rather would have been lying on a couch rereading E.F. Benson novels for the four hundredth time. And it's still growing.
Now, I could ramble on about everything Sir Charles Grandiose and his column have given me (indigestion, despair when a joke flops, a taste of attention, but above all, discipline) or I could blather about my creative process (desperate panicky sweats late at night, frantic drafts shown to Craig with me screaming at him, 'Is this funny? Is this funny?'), but the only thing that readers of the column who send me fan mail ever want to know is how much I really resemble Sir Charles Grandiose.
That sort of question provokes an itchy reaction from me. When I was in graduate school, still deludedly thinking my fate was to be a professor of English, it was outre--nay, heresy!--to suggest that an author's works reflected his or her own experiences and life. Gosh, even begin a sentence like "Perhaps Jane Austen's poignant examination of a spinster's emotions in Persuasion was colored by her own self-perceived failure to find a hus. . . ." in a graduate seminar, and you'd get a thundering response of "That will be QUITE ENOUGH of THAT SORT OF TALK, Mr. Briceland!" and a post-modern slap on the post-modern wrist with the post-modern ruler.
Of course, now I think that sort of prohibition is absolute crap. To some extent, every writer embodies his own characters. The good ones and the bad ones. Most of the time, though, I tend to think of myself more as poor, dreary Mr. V. Briceland, Sir Charles' dim-witted and ABBA-loving secretary, than the baronet himself.
Here's the truth, plain and simple. Sir Charles has a personality all his own. He has a vocabulary and history to which I cannot even aspire. He writes the column. I do the typing. Sometimes I check his spelling.
However, sometimes he'll surface unexpectedly.
One Sunday afternoon at a department store, for example, I was shopping for a birthday card. The pickings were slim, but I finally chose something and approached the counter. When I reached the clerk, three other gentlemen who had been choosing their own greeting cards reached a decision and lined up behind me. The clerk apparently found it odd that four strapping men had invaded the traditionally feminine Demesne Of Hallmark, because she smiled at us all as if we were shopping as a group, and said, "You fellers going to a poker game or something?"
"Madame!" I sneered loudly, feeling my back stiffen and my lip curl as I snatched my bag from her. "One does not play at poker."
I will admit to a few certain intolerances that I share with our favorite baronet.
I fail to understand, and I never will, why certain members of the human race will attempt a feat they know is willfully stupid, and show surprise when it backfires on them. Of course if you go out to a parking lot in your truck on a snowy morning to do doughnuts (and for those of you unfamiliar with this quaint custom, it involves swerving through the snow in a way that makes your vehicle run out of control and spin three hundred and sixty or more degrees), the person stupidly sitting on your hood is going to fly off and be killed. Of course if you are skateboarding and catch onto a speeding tractor-trailer's bumper, you are going to be sucked under the wheels when the truck suddenly stops for a kitten crossing the road. It's tragic for the families involved, but frankly, when I hear of people attempting stupid feats without thought to the consequences, I just pray that they hadn't reproduced and passed on to their progeny the Heedless Gene.
I hate smilies. The human race, in its written literature, did perfectly well without smilies for thousands of years. It is possible to convey emotions--whether they be sarcasm, disappointment, or joy--without benefit of sideways faces constructed from punctuation marks.
And finally, like Sir Charles, I tend to be overproud of my perceived strengths and blind to my weaknesses. Aren't we all, though.
I must say here, though, that unlike Sir Charles, I am never spiteful, never gratuitously mean, never snotty, and I never, ever, ever gloat over the downfalls of those who have crossed me. No siree!
Oh, hey, did I ever finish that story about Katy Sweeney, the girl who willfully deflowered my innocence and rejoiced in it while smiling demonically? Why no, I don't think I did.
The Santa Claus incident caused a lot of changes in our family. My parents stopped the carpool and my mother never really forgave the Sweeneys. And eventually my sister and I turned Christmas into a really sweet scam. . . . With only one of their children still believing in Santa, my parents basically bribed me for several years, with lavish numbers of gifts under the trees, to keep my mouth shut to my sister Alicia. She, in the meantime, eventually discovered the truth on her own, but with the true cunning of only someone who grew up with me as a role model, she never told my parents.
For years, when Christmas would approach, my parents would ask me, "Does Alicia still think there's a Santa?" and I'd nod solemnly. Alicia, training early for an eventual career on the stage, would begin looking wistfully at the fireplace in early October, and ask in her sweet, bell like voice, "Daddy, when will Mr. Santy Claus visit our happy home?" Between Halloween and Thanksgiving she would amass a list of presents so lengthy it was nearly as thick as the Sears Catalogue from which she'd picked them. With rosy cheeks and a winsome smile, she'd drag her weighty gimee-list to our mother, and ask the poor gullible woman to make sure it really really really really got to Santa. So desperate were my parents to keep Alicia's faith in Santa alive that her Christmas hauls were legendary. It wasn't until she was sixteen that my parents realized how thoroughly they'd been had.
But then, one of Alicia's amazing strengths has been a subtle charm that made her forays into parental extortion seem guileless. After all, she's the one who, at the tender age of six, struck an unlikely deal with my father that she'd promise to continue believing in the tooth fairy if he'd buy her baby teeth for twenty-five cents more than what the ol' tooth fairy had been slipping beneath the pillows. Our father was helpless to do anything but acquiesce, so he'd give her fifty cents a tooth (seventy-five cents for the molars!), place it on his dresser, and go to bed relieved that she was still young, believing, trusting, and unaware of the world's harsh realities. Then Alicia would slip into his bedroom, steal the tooth back, and start the bargaining again a week later. My sister is the only person I know who lost over four hundred baby teeth.
As for Katy Sweeney: We would see each other in church all through elementary school, but she didn't have the same power over me as that winter in first grade. It wasn't until well after college that I met her again. I'd come from Detroit to visit my parents in Virginia, and decided to jog at a track down the street, near the local hospital. Eventually a woman came up and jogged beside me, smiling and saying "You're Vance, aren't you?" I looked at the woman and sixteen years dropped away from us both. I was six again, and there was Katy Sweeney, smiling at me with an evil intent and a certainty she was going to heaven.
Only she wasn't evil, of course. In fact, she was perfectly pleasant, and told me all about how she'd graduated from college and gotten married right away, only to divorce soon after. She'd just lost her job, too, and couldn't seem to find another one, and been in a car accident that had left a permanent twinge in her back whenever she stood up or sat down. And she was so out of luck, she was living with her parents until she could get back on her feet again. I commiserated, as is only natural, and proceeded to tell her about my fabulous, wonderful, exciting, and fruitful life in Detroit. Then we went our separate ways.
Now, it might be true that I was smiling when I got home. My mother told me once that she thought she'd heard the words 'hot damn!' come out of my mouth after the encounter, but I certainly don't believe I would ever say anything like that. And it might still be a wee bit true that I always make sure to mention our minor, insignificant, grown-up encounter when I tell the story of how Katy Sweeney made me lose my belief in Santa Claus. But exult in the misfortunes of others? Heck no. Sir Charles Grandiose might do such a thing, but me? I would never, ever, ever, ever. . . .
--February, 1997Written to celebrate the 100th edition of 'Advice from Sir Charles Grandiose'
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