The Anti-Cheerleader: Seventeen-Year-Old Marty Beckerman Fights the Good Fight
Marty seems to have a knack for getting on adults' nerves. The day I called him for an interview, he started out by saying, "I'm a little pissed off this morning." He'd written a fiction piece about a male prostitute with the unfortunate name Douglas Fletcherkike, and posted it on his website, called, not surprisingly, martybeckerman.com. "My dad read it and threatened to kick me out of the house and take me out of the will if I ever use the word 'kike' again." I noticed that the offending piece came down shortly after we spoke. It sucks being a teenager.
Despite the setbacks, Marty has just self-published his first collected works, Death to All Cheerleaders (Infected Press, 162 pages, $12.95). It's subtitled One Adolescent Journalist's Cheerful Diatribe Against Teenage Plasticity. There's funny stuff in here, some of it uncensored versions of pieces that originally ran in the paper. Typical titles?"Drowning in Bullshit at the Winter Psychic Fair," "You Just Can't Lose When Jesus Is on Your Cheerleading Squad" and "Throbbing, Heaving White Cocks" (about a visit by a touring Chippendales troupe to entertain the love-starved ladies of Anchorage)?telegraph that Marty is a very precocious smart-ass with a mean streak of cynicism.
In "Plasticity Shrugged," Marty interlopes on a cotillion: "The first thing I notice standing in the Captain Cook hotel lobby is the sheer number of teenagers vastly more attractive than myself or, for that matter, anyone I've ever met in my life. The complexion of each girl is tanning-booth orange, every guy is a well-groomed letterman giant. Everyone is dressed 'to the nines' in prom suits and oh-so-sweet miniskirts, and?though I have not yet spoken to a single person here?my heart is already burning with hatred for them all."
In a fabulous little piece that earned him some nasty mail at the paper, he reports on attending a rave (it was called "Nothing to Rave About" in the paper). On his way, "I walk down the downtown street. Little artsy-fartsy businesses and tourist novelty shops line the sidewalk. That, and people who would very much like a house to live in." At the rave itself, he writes, "The 'music' being played, if you can call it that (you can't), is of the wretched 'bass and drum' genre. This sonic annoyance is loud, repetitious, has no words, and sounds disturbingly similar to the noise produced while shoving a kitten through a cheese grater. Which normally is a sound I like, but not when amplified on sub-woofers 10 times the size of Earth." It was the kitty line, naturally, that got him in hot water with the moms of Anchorage.
Then there are the cheerleaders. Marty reserves a special bile (mixed with undisguised and unrequited lust) for cheerleaders. He interviews them and their airhead coaches and insults them with questions they're too vapid to realize are insults. He gets threatened with bodily harm by one's boyfriend. In a rather touching piece of teenage-wasteland fiction, he has a character rant that "the cheerleader is nothing more than a perfect example, an incontestable paradigm, of what is horribly wrong with our generation... Our generation, as a whole, has so much capacity, but we toss it all away on vacuous brand name loyalties and the superficial corporate blueprint for our lives that is unceasingly shoved down our throats. The movies that relate to us all too well, the mindless television programming, the hackneyed pop music..."
Cheerleading "is an activity that attracts a lot of people with a lot of capacity," Marty tells me over the phone, "a lot of really energetic people who are throwing that energy away on this meaningless, pom-pom, jumping-around activity that doesn't really stand for anything. Clearly that energy could be devoted to something more meaningful."
Marty, I say to him, are you a moody geek?
"No, I'm not a geek," he yelps. "I have friends. I do drugs. That makes me cool."
Marty, who turns 18 in January, has lived in Alaska all his life. His dad's an eye doctor, his mom's a psychologist. He says he lives in "nice white suburbia. I think I'm a normal teenager in a lot of ways. Hang out with friends, spend a lot of time on schoolwork." He's a high school senior in an accelerated program that's allowing him to complete freshman-level university courses, so he can finish college in three years. "This college is really difficult," he says. "I don't know how college kids find time to drink and fuck." There's always time for that, I tell him. "You can make time," he agrees.
What does he want to be when he graduates? "I want to be a writer when I grow up. If I can be the Hunter S. Thompson of my generation, that'd make me pretty happy. If that doesn't happen, I'll probably wind up in some crappy journalism job." Then again, he dreams, if he makes lots of money he'd like to put it into "a haven for shock humorists around the country... You ever hear of Epitaph Records? Well, like what they did for punk rock, I'd like to do for shock humor?making it mainstream and accessible."
Marty started writing for the Anchorage Daily News when he was 15. A friend was editing the teen page and asked him to contribute. He self-published Death to All Cheerleaders with $3800 "from my bar mitzvah stash" and printed up 1000 copies. A distributor is getting it into Anchorage bookstores, and he's hoping to sell more through his own site and Amazon. His publicity campaign, however, seems to be off to a rocky start. He was turned down by producers of The Daily Show, though I agree that he and Jon Stewart would make a great pair. The day after we spoke, he sent me an e-mail:
Hi John,
Just so you know, my local NBC interview was cancelled because someone actually took the time to read my book and thought "it might cause a controversy," and God knows that's not what good corporate journalism is about.
An excerpt from our conversation: