Ron Does Stuff

I gotta be honest here, I first downloaded this book to my Kindle way, way, way back. Back when I was still writing for a newspaper, I think. Back when it still had the title Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada and not Cody, which is what’s it titled now, apparently. But after literal years of it just virtually sitting in my TBR pile, I finally got to sat down and read the damn thing.

Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada follows the story of Steven Trottingham Taylor, better known as Trotsky, as he navigates life as a new teen transplant to Little Rock, Arkansas. Hislife in Little Rock starts out a little aimless until he encounters Cody, a blond, handsome, and charismatic classmate that shares his interests and socialist bent.

As Trotsky becomes more entrenched in life in Little Rock, he and his family soon become the target of small town closemindedness. As tensions between the town and Trotsky’s family begins to escalate, Trotsky finds his life irrevocably changed.

Gotta be honest, if you check out the description for this book on Amazon, it is very different from what I remember it being back in…whenever I first got this from Amazon. I was much younger back then and I remember the blurb being…hornier. I was young! I was drawn to the shirtless blond on the cover and the promise of honosexuality in the blurb.

I bring all of this up because it became apparent as soon as I started reading that the book is very different from that long-ago blurb that I read a long time ago. And because I had very different expectations about what I was going to get, reading this book was a little…whelming.

It’s not like it didn’t deliver on the gay stuff, or at least as much gay stuff it could get away with back in 1983. There’s scenes in the locker room, dreams where Trotsky and Cody’s bodies merge, sleeping naked in bed together, and eventually actually having sex with each other. The earlier parts of the book were especially heavy on Trotsky trying to figure out what Cody’s deal really is.

That said, all the gay stuff really seemed pointless and didn’t really lay out where the book was headed or even played a huge part in what the book was trying to show, which is the small minds of a small town. It’s like the gay stuff was put in as a requirement and not because they actually wanted to put it in the book.

What was more effective in depicting the small-mindedness of the town was what Trotsky’s mother had to go through as an out and proud socialist. In fact, the more interesting parts of the book are when Trotsky’s mother bemoans the state of America in the book, and you as a reader realizes it has only gotten worse in America since this book came out, and that what happened to Trotsky’s family in the book could happen and is probably happening to American families now in 2025.

While the ending was foreshadowed haflway into the book, when it actually happened it felmt…tired? And maybe that comes from me having read this literally four decades since this book was published, as well as from me having read a lot more gay literature that also touches on the same themes. I’m not opposed to a tragic gay coming of age story! I really like Jim Grimsley’s Dream Boy, which I feel is the book that tells this book’s story better. And it’s even more tragic than this one!

All in all, I feel like I wouldn’t be so underwhelmed by the book if it didn’t promise an entirely different thing in the blurb it had more than a decade ago. I feel like I was HOODWINKED and BAMBOOZLED, and not in the fun way that some mystery novels make you feel.