Angst for the memories

If John Hughes were still translating suburban-teen angst to the silver screen, he’d surely dig the tale of Charlie, a 17-year-old high-school senior at suburban Crystal Lake South High School. By his own admission, Charlie has a cracking voice, big ears, a big nose, no chest hair and three pubic hairs (all of which have grown in straight). The horned-up misfit has failed his driver’s-license test six times, fights relentlessly with his overbearing father, Charlie the First, and has randy thoughts about almost all of his male classmates. John Waters would probably dig his story, too.

Told entirely in diary format, The Screwed-Up Life of Charlie the Second (Kensington Books, $15) is the debut novel from author Drew Ferguson, 35, a Crystal Lake native and current Uptown resident who earned both an undergrad degree and, in 1998, an MFA in creative writing from Columbia College. A few years back, Ferguson unsuccessfully shopped around a collection of short stories, one of which featured Charlie, albeit as a minor character. His motivation to turn Charlie’s life into a novel was two-fold. “My mentor Randy Albers, who now is chair of the department, basically said that Charlie the character was a total, total asshole,” says Ferguson, who didn’t see Charlie as full of himself as Albers did. Meanwhile, Ferguson was crushing on a fellow fiction-writing student who had a beef with The Catcher in the Rye. “He basically felt it was the single-worst book ever written [because] it never got to what a 16-year-old guy would think about: Holden [Caulfield] never beats off,” Ferguson says. So he set out to prove that Charlie was both a good guy and one with a healthy adolescent sex drive.

While the story concerns the trials and tribulations of adolescence, Charlie’s tense relationship with his parents, and his crush on and eventual relationship with the new kid in town, it also brims with frank sexuality. Charlie masturbates constantly, including onto his pillow; he then proceeds to lick up the spunk so his mother doesn’t see it. He even has a wank at his boyfriend’s mother’s funeral; his spooge then becomes encrusted on his tie. These are the things that teenage boys do, Ferguson says, adding that he didn’t want to neuter Charlie’s sexuality simply to appease squeamish readers. “The sexual frankness bothers a lot of people,” he says. “There’s a little bit of a double standard. Philip Roth can get away with [writing about] being Jewish, and no one gives a shit. If you’re gay, you have to be Michael Cunningham [The Hours] before anyone wants to read it. [Although] Philip Roth had to prove himself as well.”

Most admirable is the bull’s-eye Ferguson hits with Charlie’s voice. Every detail—from hanging at familiar Crystal Lake haunts such as the Village Squire and the Cottage, to his sexual meanderings, to passages illustrating how Charlie sees his family and classmates—is awkwardly, authentically chronicled from an adolescent’s perspective. “My extracurricular activities include soccer, being a total music and comics freak, and jacking off like a retarded monkey,” Charlie says. “C’mon, I’m seventeen and it’s not like I’ve gotten any action, short of the one time Bob Collins beat off in front of me.”

That voice isn’t necessarily Ferguson’s own. The author says he has some Charlie in him, but not a lot. “I would like to be Charlie in some ways,” Ferguson says. “He calls it like he sees it without fear of consequences. I would never do that. [But] he isn’t me. It’s not like a wish-fulfillment thing.” Which isn’t to say his former classmates aren’t imagining their own parallels. “People who I went to high school with are like, ‘I know who this character is and now I suddenly understand what you went through,’_” Ferguson says. “I’m like, ‘No one you know is in the book.’”

In classic coming-of-age-novel fashion, Charlie does grow up a little bit by the book’s end, yet the end is just the beginning: Ferguson is already writing the sequel. “He’s not fully formed yet,” Ferguson says. “He’s still got more shit to go through.”

The Screwed-Up Life of Charlie the Second is available at Women and Children First and other bookstores.

Buy The Screwed-Up Life of Charlie the Second now on BN.com