Erik Gundel (@EPGundel) investigates the life of "Old" Biff Tannen on a fall day in 2015.
Editor's Note: Erik Gundel did me a huge favor by tapping into our shared love of the the Back to the Future franchise and writing this piece, which he read at the Puddles of Myself Reading on September 7th, 2012. Erik wrote this piece in his spare time when he wasn't recording and releasing his latest single or playing and promoting his most recent album, the EP "A Home to Keep You." I encourage you to listen to both and try to see where themes from Back to The Future surface in his intricate music.
Biff Tannen hit the rehydrate button on his personal pizza
and waited. His rehydrator was an older
model, and it would take an eternal 12 seconds for his meal to be ready to eat.
Biff acknowledged the passing of the second second, noting it as the time in
which most modern rehydrators can prepare a pizza. By the third second, he was completely lost
in thought; now, at the age of 78, his daydreams took hold of him frequently,
swiftly and deeply. They awaited him
like bandits, lurking in the dark corners of empty moments (of which there were
many); they would find him as he watched TV, his screen engulfing him with the
cacophony of six channels broadcasting simultaneously in a grid display. Sometimes he would just display one channel
in an attempt at focus, but no matter what it was- the home shopping network,
an important Hill Valley Spacers game, the atrocity channel-nothing ever
provided mental solace.
Even in the middle of conversation, his mind would falter,
only for a moment, and his face would go a grey shade of blank. Of course, his most frequent conversation
partner was himself, his mutterings on sports and automobiles shrugged off by
onlookers as just the outpourings of another senile old man. Fortunately, there was still a tenuous
membrane separating his inner monologue from what he said out loud. For in the
third second of his pizza being rehydrated, with a slight glance at the
still-shriveled sausages on the microdisk of cheese and sauce, he was taken by
one of his most frequent reverie tormentors: shit.
It was usually a wafting scent that triggered it- a
refuse-cleaning robot floating by perhaps- and then he was lost in a fecal
afterglow some sixty years old. He could
still taste the manure that forced itself into his mouth when his car—his
beautiful, precious 1946 Ford Super De Luxe—slammed into that manure truck. The funny thing was that before
that moment, Biff had always associated manure with the happier times in his
life. When his parents had been around,
they had taken Sunday drives down the open stretches of farming roads in Hill Valley
and its outskirts. He would see the
farmers spreading the stinky brown dirt down the never-ending furrows, and
though he would hold his nose and plead for his dad to roll up the window,
eventually he accepted it as part of the day, as part of being outside with his
family. He had held onto those memories
tightly through the dark days that followed, and when he finally turned 18 and
came into his inheritance money, he couldn’t think of anything he’d rather own
than a Ford Super De Luxe. To say
nothing of its fantastic motor and aesthetic beauty, it was the car he and his
dad had coveted together. They shared a
nod and a smile whenever they passed by the Ford dealership in town, whose
black Super De Luxe was the shiniest thing Biff or his dad had ever seen. It beamed its heavenly reflections on all
lesser vehicles lucky enough to drive by, bathing them in the light of
something almost frighteningly perfect.
And then it had been Biff’s. His
grandmother’s protestations fell on deaf ears, and she had no legal right to
tell him otherwise anyhow. He had bought
it two days after his eighteenth birthday, and he drove it straight out of
town, out onto the farming roads. It was
March, and the fields were being tilled and fertilized for the upcoming growing
season. Biff let the smell infiltrate
his nostrils, then his entire being. He
accelerated past 60, past 70, up to 85 miles per hour. Rolling the windows up was pointless, he was
in a convertible—his own convertible—and the wind was drying up his tears as
soon as they left their tiny origins in his eyes. He was crying tears of joy, and that earthy
sweet stench of manure was a key ingredient to what would be the greatest day
of his entire life.
The good days continued (as did his goodwill towards cow
excrement) for a full eight months. He
had three of the best friends any guy could hope for, and they slotted
perfectly into his car for late night cruising sessions. He had an object of affection, Lorraine
Baines, who he was sure would return his sentiments if given proper convincing;
they came from different backgrounds, moved in different circles, and Biff was
having a hard time speaking to her in a way that would make her understand that
same thing any young man struggles to express for the first time- he was in
love. All he needed was a little more
time, maybe to the end of senior year, and he was sure Lorraine would willingly
settle into the shotgun seat of his convertible so that they could drive away
from Hill Valley together, for good.
That was when Biff’s life became layered with pile after pile of shit,
and Calvin Klein was the one who had shoveled it.
His arrival had been as quick as his departure, yet the
effect this stranger had on his life was devastating. Biff could never be certain why he had stood
out as a target for Calvin, but for whatever reason, his animosity towards Biff
instigated a shift of attitude amongst his peers. The accident with the truck had robbed Biff
of his dignity, and he couldn’t go anywhere in Hill Valley for years without
hearing manure jokes, or catching people miming olfactory agony behind his
back. The physical violence Calvin dealt in, which Biff first experienced when
being sucker-punched in Lou’s diner, spread to Biff’s former study partner, George McFly, whom he had considered a friend.
Biff couldn’t just be paranoid; he was certain that Calvin had turned Lorraine and George
against him, which had left him semi-concussed and broken-hearted. These acts of unprovoked aggression caused
Biff to become skittish towards strangers, and he lost confidence in
himself. He no longer had a desire to
explore the world; his only option was to stay in Hill Valley
and work on fixing up cars, the only things left in his life that couldn’t
torment him.
For all the years that followed, Calvin Klein’s name echoed
around Biff’s mind, ringing in his ears like a high note at piercing
decibels. He could scarcely believe such
a person had existed; he had no luck seeking him out in the neighboring high
schools, and none of the Kleins listed in the phone book knew of anyone named
Calvin. Biff suspected that he might
have been European, based on his knowledge of obscure music, sports, and dress,
but he had no way of finding that out for sure.
After a few years, Biff gave up finding him and sunk further into
defeat. His car detailing business was
afloat, but it was bobbing on the surface, waiting to be sucked under by an
economic downturn. Had he not desperately
needed the business, he may have found a way out of working on George McFly’s multiple cars. They had patched things
up, and both men would call the other his friend, but Biff never got over Lorraine. Seeing her in domestic bliss with three healthy
kids of her own was like a corrosive agent on Biff’s already-rusted
interior. He couldn’t help but like
those kids though, especially the youngest, Marty; there was something about
him that reminded Biff of his own youth.
Perhaps it was that Marty had the charisma and take-charge attitude that
Biff used to see in himself, and he liked being around it again.
His search for Calvin Klein was rekindled some years later,
when one of the advertising inserts in the Sunday paper fell to his feet. It seemed Calvin Klein had ended up in the
clothing business, and he was selling jeans. It made sense to Biff that someone so
manipulative and aggressive would become successful. Too successful, it turned out, to be reached
directly; his third letter requesting the three hundred dollars he was owed for
the car repairs was met with a cease and desist order, and Biff was legally
prohibited from contacting Mr. Klein. Biff started to second-guess his memory of the name, or considered that
maybe Calvin had changed it. This
resulted in his own personal boycott of the movies of Kevin Kline, which proved
especially difficult for the release of A Fish Called Wanda; Biff liked a good
comedy, and by all accounts, that was a good one. That had been so long ago now; perhaps if it
slipped onto one of the TV grid’s six stations by accident, Biff would call an
end to his strike- for the sake of entertainment.
The rehydrator dinged its twelfth second, snapping Biff out
of his daze. The pizza was as big as a
frisbee now, the chunks of sausage succulent and juicy. He slid the plate out and set it on the
kitchen counter. He added some extra parmesan cheese and poured himself a glass of lemonade. As he picked up his meal to bring to the
small table in front of the TV, he heard a shuffling at the front door,
freezing him where he stood: Griff was home. No grandfather is truly unhappy to see his grandson, but for Biff this
usually only meant more abuse and ridicule. Griff was too young and bullheaded to see the similarities between
himself and his grandfather: two damaged men raised by a single grandparent in
the absence of any other option. Their
connection was strictly familial, and Griff’s resentment towards Biff verged
closer to hatred, a pained emotional flailing too profound to be read as teen
angst. Biff heard Griff removing his
leather gloves, freeing his thumb to open the front door with the
thumbplate. In lieu of a ruined dinner, Biff
turned tail to his bedroom, where his door closed just as Griff was entering
into the living room. He ate the pizza
on a small desk adjacent to his bed where he normally tended to paperwork and
bills, most stemming from the foreclosure of his car detailing business. He could hear Griff howling with laughter at
some nonsense on the TV. Regardless,
Biff couldn’t remember the last time he had had a meal so free of any
distractions. He was thankful that the
rehydrator had done its job well this time, and the pizza tasted good to
him. As he washed down the last bite
with some lemonade, he gazed over at a framed picture on his desk. It was of Biff leaning on the front-left
fender of his black Ford Super De Luxe, aged about thirty or so. His hair was
still sandy-blond, his skin tanned from weeks of outdoor work, and he wore a
smirking expression on his mouth. Biff
had to smile; his mind drifted again, to the times he spent with his car. He felt the wind whipping around the
windshield when the top was down. He
could hear the roar of the horses moving in unison, pushing the engine up to
that sweet spot around 70 mph. Surely
enough, the smell of shit returned to Biff Tannen, but this time, for the first
time in many years, the shit smelled sweet.
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