“Why have you taken off your jacket, Jón?”
“Oh, I was just so very hot.”
Then I took off my waistcoat and then my tie, using the same excuse. Towards the middle of the party after Mom had had a glass or two and was starting to slacken off, I switched my shirt for a Sid Vicious T-shirt. The adults were drinking home-brewed wine. Then they all started playing bridge. That’s how all Mom and Dad’s parties ended. Drinking wine and playing bridge.
I was particularly excited about the money I would get as gifts and eagerly received each envelope I was handed; I counted the money and placed it very carefully in a drawer. I also got some interesting things. From Mom and Dad, I got a bass. It was pre-arranged. An excellent, red secondhand HOFFNER. The letters H and O had broken off the bass so it just said FFNER. Since I had a limited sense of musical instruments, I believed the bass was called FFNER, as bizarre as it sounds now. And then I somehow confused this with the legendary instrument label Fender and thought somehow they were the same, Ffner and Fender — not so different. I was extremely pleased with the bass and was totally obsessed with it the whole Confirmation party. In addition, I got Icelandic — English and English — Icelandic dictionaries. In my eyes, these were great treasures because they meant I had been brought the cipher for the code of English, and now I would be better able to solve the mysteries of punk songs. I would be able to pore over lyrics for hours at a time, and when words came along that I did not know, then I could look them up in the treasure chest of the dictionary to find out their meanings. It was a wonderful breakthrough. From my brother I got the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. It felt like a silly, inconsequential gift. Although I didn’t know my brother very well, and although he was some twenty-five years older than me, I still felt he should have given me a more significant gift than some silly hippie book. I smiled at him and thanked him for the book and made like I was awfully pleased. All the while, I was planning to take it straight down to the bookstore, return it, and get money instead. But I never did return it because when I started to look at it and read it, I found that it was really pretty interesting. Halldór Laxness wrote the foreword to the book. In it, he said it was the most important book in the world. I decided to keep it and read it. Tao Te Ching: the book of the path. A path it isn’t possible to pave. The reality is that this one book has had more impact on my life than anything; I have it to this day. I’ve read it more than any other book and have tried to adopt the things it suggests.
I wanted to take the Confirmation money and buy something, but my mother wouldn’t discuss it.
“No, Jón. This money all goes into a bank account.”
A bank account? Fuck! Why did she always need to create these inconveniences? Why couldn’t I do what I wanted? Wasn’t this my money? Why had I gone through this crappy Confirmation party if I couldn’t even have my own money? In the end, I got part of the money and was allowed go shopping at Grammið and buy some punk albums. Mom also drove me to the store where she’d bought the bass. The store was called The Sport Market, and sold music players, skis, and other stuff. There I proudly bought, with my own money, an excellent Sharp tape player. That meant I’d have a means of listening to music inside my own room. It would allow me to buy LPs, play them on the sound system in the living room with Mom, record them onto cassettes, and play them in peace inside my room, where I’d also have the lyrics and all the basic information about the songs, like their names and so on. I took this tape player with me everywhere I went. It had a handle so it was easy to carry around, and it took batteries. I often lay inside my room for hours listening to the tape player. I also enjoyed taking it with me into the bathroom, lying in the bath for hours listening to cassettes, and more often than not, I sang along enthusiastically.
It was a huge weight off me when Confirmation and all that related nuisance was over. My Confirmation clothes went into the closet. To my great disappointment, there was no hot dog party. No hot dogs, no Coke, and no Prince Polo candy. Ólaf Skúlason had flat out lied to Eiki the Druggie and me to make us behave. How could I have been so stupid? Like all confirmers, I got the New Testament as a gift. I only read the Book of Revelation. All about the end of the world and the devil. I had amassed all kinds of information about the Book of Revelation from various punk songs. They included, for example, lots of information about the number 666, The Number of the Beast, as the title of the Iron Maiden song goes. You can say that it was thanks to punk rock that I read the Book of Revelation. It was discomforting and thrilling. But after reading it, I did the same thing I did with my schoolbooks I didn’t like and had an aversion to. I set fire to it. Publicly. I went outside with the New Testament, poured gasoline over it, and lit it. I felt it was a definite statement and neatly made clear that I didn’t give a damn about this bullshit.
A few days later my mom announced that I had to put my Confirmation clothes on again because she was going to take me to a Confirmation photo shoot. I resisted, but she was no more willing to budge than on all the other occasions.
“I have Confirmation photos of all my children and you won’t be the exception.”
Mom didn’t listen to my objections, and I went, wearing my Confirmation clothes, to the PhotoStore on Kópavogur with her. To mess up things, however, I’d altered myself. I’d gotten some scissors, gone into the bathroom, and cut my hair into a mess of tufts. I was thinking that all the trouble caused by the Confirmation photo shoot would be called off. But it didn’t change a thing. Mom neatened my hair with hairspray and a comb so that the visible tufts in my new haircut could hardly be seen. My final hope in all this, the little I could do in the circumstances, was to take a firm stand by not letting them take a picture of me smiling like a fool, at least. I would lock my mouth so hard that it wouldn’t show a smile. I was going to be cool, looking on deadpan and appearing really tough in front of the camera. Angry. Cool, tough, not an idiot. I positioned myself with a serious and mean expression in front of the photographer.
“Well, Jón. How are you? You play soccer?”
“No.”
“Are you into sports?”
“No.”
“Well, Jón. Do you like school?”
“No.”
He adjusted the camera and looked through the lens.
“What’s your favorite subject in school?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay.”
He turned away from me and went behind the camera. “What do you want to do when you’re older?”
“Nothing.”
I tried to answer everything with short, terse words. The photographer didn’t react, just walked away from the camera and suddenly brought out this doll he put on his hand, then said really loudly and clearly, in a weird voice, “Hello, Jón!”
I burst out laughing. It was unexpected and funny. And then came the flashes, one after another. I was so damned frustrated. I’d been tricked yet again. In all the images I wouldn’t look tough but like an idiot laughing in a suit. What crap! The proof was when Mom came home with a print of the picture. There was the punk himself, Jónsi Punk, in a brown suit and tan shirt with dorky glasses like the politician Þorstein Pálsson and, on top of it all, grinning like a loon! An embarrassment. I was embarrassed right down to my toes by the picture and hoped it would go straight into a drawer. Mom had another idea, though, and put it up neatly in the living room in front of everyone’s eyes. I fiercely protested this injustice.
“I’m going to throw away this damn picture!”
“I want the picture, so you’ll leave it alone,” she commanded.
I hated my Confirmation picture. Every time I walked into the room, I put the picture down. Mom put it back up again immediately, and the two of us did this several times a day for weeks without talking about it.