"You look more like a professional accountant to me," she said, rolling her eyes and slinking away toward a brooding, leather-jacketed guy with the likely IQ of a hedge. The uncool story of my life.
We've all heard how women love bad boys, how nice guys finish last. There's a flip side�every nice guy wishes he could release the Cool Dude trapped inside. That's the deep dark secret we never tell. You're cool, you're oh so damn cool, we tell ourselves in times of heavy self-doubt. We're James Dean in a sports car, Humphrey Bogart with an unfiltered cigarette staining his fingertips. Then we waddle face first into a wall.
Cool takes practice. I started my apprenticeship in mid-70s Austin with my juvenile delinquent older brothers and their friends as role models. They dropped acid, dropped out of high school, and dropped into Gardner House, the Austin juvenile detention center whose confines I figured could drop a veil of mystery over anyone, maybe even the pimply geek in high-water pants that I was then. My brother's friends wore dingy, flared jeans with bottoms frayed from rubbing against the pavement. They rolled packs of cigarettes in the sleeves of their skin-tight t-shirts, worked construction and drank cheap beer. I was 14 and in awe.
Smoking was obviously the first step toward true cool. My pal Chuck and I hacked through the bamboo behind my house to create our own private smoking room. We bypassed cigarettes and went for their meatier cousins, the little cigars. With names like Winchester and Derringer, these were definitely the cool cancer sticks of choice. I was soon hooked on two a day�the amount I could inhale behind the bamboo before my mother arrived home from work.
Step two. Chuck and I had a newspaper route. Is anyone less cool than a paperboy? We were frustrated by customers who refused to pay up and who met our high-voiced threats with slammed doors. For our solution we went to a guru of cool�my brothers' friend who was surely the basis for Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. The wise one scratched his homemade tattoo and gave his best wide-eyed Charles Manson look. The wisdom flowed forth.
"Scare 'em," he said. "Mess with 'em."
Sure, Chuck and I thought, we'll show up with an overdue notice and an Uzi. (Do you feel lucky, punk?) But our teacher laid out the plan in detail as we took mental notes. "You have to wait until they don't expect you," he said. "Wait until after a good rain, particularly a rain that comes the night before trash pick up when every house has a can at the curb brimming with rot. If it's not already full of water, fill that sucker with a hose, then drag it to their door and lean it. Knock. Prepare to laugh your ass off as the sludge floods the deadbeat's living room."
"But there's no rain in the forecast," I said nervously.
"Get some gasoline, write 'FUCK YOU' in their yard, and light that sucker," he said.
"But we don't drive. We don't have gasoline," I said.
"No problem," our guide calmly replied. "You'll build a bomb instead."
Chuck and I spent the next two months unraveling Black Cat firecrackers and pouring the silver dust that was their lifeblood into a discarded pill bottle. Firecracker fuses were saved and knotted together. We had quit the paper route about a month before the designated day, but first we had collected mounds of surplus newspapers�and anything else we could get our hands on�as ammunition for our rite of passage into cool.
Chuck stayed over at my place the night of the attack. We could hardly sleep in anticipation, but the alarm rang promptly at oh-four-hundred hours. We hoisted the mild-mannered newspaper delivery sack that hid our weapons of destruction, and set out for battle. Chuck had spent days covering the pill bottle of firecracker powder with green rubber bands. It was bloated to the size of a cucumber.
Somehow we forced it through our intended victim's front door mail slot and, at the last second, lit the fuse. It sizzled slightly as the bomb dropped to the floor. We ran as fast and as far as our teenage legs could take us, expecting at any moment to hear the explosion. We didn't. Hidden behind a tree, we fought to catch our breath. Neither of us would admit it, but we'd built a dud. I was secretly relieved, but in my mind I could see our professor of cool scowling.