King Dork Approximately

by Frank Portman

  Performing this operation these days involves his drawing himself up as tall as he can without too obviously standing on his toes, while I slouch and lower my head, like he’s the queen and I’m bowing in preparation for being knighted.

  I’ll tell you what: it’s not easy being anyone.

  IT NEVER ALL FALLS AWAY COMPLETELY

  Little Big Tom had looked at me blankly when I asked him if I had received any letters from Sam Hellerman.

  “Why would he need to send a letter?” he had said. “You guys are practically joined at the hip. He could save a stamp and just hand it to you.” (Little Big Tom had actually mimed the “hand it to you” part instead of putting it into words, presenting the invisible letter with a flourish and a bow, as though to say “Your missive, my liege,” and making a whistling sound. Actually, you know what? Describing Little Big Tom’s gestures, funny and profound as they are, is going to get pretty cumbersome if I take the time to do each one like that. From now on, just try to remember to assume that anything Little Big Tom says is going to be mostly mime, with some whistling and tongue-clicking sound effects thrown in. I think that’s a good plan.)

  I bristled at that “joined at the hip” remark, but he had a point: there was no reason for Sam Hellerman to send me a letter. There was no reason for him to call to remind me to meet him at Linda’s at one p.m. either, as we met up there around that time pretty much every day during Christmas vacation and we had already made a specific plan for today because we were going to go from there to band practice at Shinefield’s house.

  Beyond that, both Sam Hellerman and my mom knew full well that there was little chance I was going to forget my medicine, otherwise known as “the stuff.” I had it in my front pocket, all ready to go in little envelopes. Of the three kinds of pills I had been given at the hospital to take home, one was just an anti-inflammatory thing that was of no use to anyone who wasn’t inflamed in some way. But the other two, a muscle relaxant and a painkiller with codeine, were of keen interest to Sam Hellerman. They were only to be taken “as needed,” and I didn’t need them all that much. Sam Hellerman, though: that boy had needs. For him, “as needed” comprehended the universe, if I’m using that phrase correctly. So before you judge me, remember: I was just following the instructions on the bottle.

  The muscle relaxant makes you feel like you’re made of rubber, and I suppose I can see how that might be kind of fun if you don’t need your hands and feet for anything important. The painkiller just made me want to take a nap. Neither affected my centipede much, and anyway, I didn’t mind the centipede; it quivered and itched from time to time, which was a strange feeling since much of the forehead it rested upon was suffused in numbness, but I could live with that. My headaches, on the other hand, could be pretty bad. But I couldn’t see the use of just sleeping through them, and Sam Hellerman’s love affair with the nap, a kind of nap lust, really, mattered more in the big picture than my piddling headaches and the centipede that triggered them. So it’s only just and proper, and in the best interests of humanity, really, that Sam Hellerman always gets the drugs. That way, he can curl up in one of his great escapes while I stand watch, deterring predators. I wouldn’t want it to be the other way around. I’d wind up handcuffed in a freight car bound for Siberia, or wake up in my underwear on a basement floor in an unknown city with a dog licking my face. The guy you don’t completely trust? He’s the one you want napping with relaxed muscles, not yourself.

  Thankfully, once I was outside, the household tension fell away like clumps of sand sliding from the arms of a person who has been buried at the beach, and, like, he’s fallen asleep and the kids cover him with sand and he wakes up and says “What the …?” and scrambles to his feet to chase the kids away, waving his arms. And maybe his girlfriend or wife says, “Oh, don’t worry about it, honey, they’re just kids, lighten up.” And the guy says, “Like hell I will,” and charges after them, sand flying everywhere. So the sand that falls from his arms? That’s the household tension I was referring to. Got the picture?

  Long story short, as I headed to Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway, the household tension fell away, et cetera. (Actually, to be honest, there was still some of that household tension in my ears and in my shorts and in between my toes. It never all falls away completely, does it?)

  But the day was crisp and clear. Brisk, I think they say, about as cold as it ever gets here in Hillmont. I mean, it was probably about sixty degrees or something, but I was still shivering without my old army coat. I felt vulnerable and unprotected without it. The tuba attack had left it covered in blood—mine—and my mom had taken it away and quietly disposed of it.

  “So you needed it for the case, I suppose,” I had said on discovering its absence.

  “The case,” repeated my mom, with evident incomprehension.

  “The lawsuit, then,” I said.

  “Lawsuit?” said my mom. “What lawsuit?”

  “The lawsuit,” I said, “about how I got attacked by a pack of wild normal people and almost died.” I pointed to my head. “That lawsuit.”

  Her quizzical look had informed me of another absence: the absence of any lawsuit, any plans for any lawsuit, any inkling of the possibility of even considering the option of exploring the notion of a lawsuit. I mean, I should have known. My dad would have been all over it in a second, suing the pants off everything that had pants, and doing “police work” on them as well, I’m sure, showing up at Matt Lynch’s house with a bunch of his friends from the department and beating them all senseless, and then, after the “investigation,” arresting them. That would have been good. But my family sans dad was far too disorganized and apathetic an organization to implement even the most meager campaign of righteous vengeance, let alone any sort of lawsuit.

  “Oh, sweetie,” my mom had said, kissing me on top of the head. “You don’t need to worry about that. The insurance will cover everything. You just concentrate on getting better.”

  As I think I’ve said before, when you’re in the hospital it’s like it’s your birthday every day. You’re everybody’s hero. It’s not a bad life at all. But I don’t think I mentioned which birthday it is. It’s your fifth birthday. Ice cream, candy, baby talk, condescension, total lack of concern for your wishes or interests, kindness. It’s the kindness I miss most of all.

  Little Big Tom came closest of anyone to grasping that there was an actual reason to be mad at someone in this situation, and he grasped it thusly:

  “Love your enemies, sport,” he said, raising an eyebrow and rumpling what was left of my hair. “It’ll drive ’em crazy.”

  I stroked my centipede in moody silence.

  A GENERAL THEORY OF THE UNIVERSE

  But what was I talking about? Oh yes, my coat.

  So I was down one bloodstained army coat, and feeling considerably less than a full Tom Henderson without it. The short hair didn’t help, of course, but that coat had been my signature look, for what that’s worth. The jeans jacket I was wearing in its place wasn’t cutting it as a jacket or as a signature. It’s a shame too, because I’m sure the bloodstains would have looked cool, besides serving as a constant “never forget” reminder.

  Despite Little Big Tom’s sage words about the best revenge being the confusion you cause by being a good sport, it still rankled that no one seemed to care all that much that I had been attacked so brutally and so senselessly, or about much of anything at all concerning yours truly. Well, what did you expect would happen, they seemed to be saying, when you insisted on being eccentric and uninterested in football and a bit smaller than everyone else? There was, in other words, a tuba with my name on it as soon as I picked up a guitar. Of course, as I’ve tried to explain in previous explanations, accidentally beating up this guy named Paul Krebs and stumbling onto Assistant Principal Tony Isadore Teone’s illicit sex conspiracies and memorializing them both in song probably didn’t hurt. Or should that be help? Anyway, when it comes to normal people, you fare best when they not
ice you least. But it was apt confirmation of my General Theory of the Universe, which some, like my erstwhile therapist Dr. Hextrom, if “erstwhile” means what I think it does, have mistakenly judged to be a bit paranoid.

  It is as follows:

  That the normal people who attack rock and roll misfits with tubas and put defenseless nerdy kids in garbage cans and throw gum in their hair and tease fat girls into suicidosity et cetera are merely the lowest foot soldiers in an integrated, extremely well-organized totalitarian social structure that extends through the student body, the school system, the city, the state, the country and its entire population and culture as well as those of the whole world, and, ultimately, to nature itself, all organized around a pseudo-Darwinian principle that may best be described as Survival of the Cruelest and the Dumbest, and just barely masked by an increasingly threadbare curtain of pretty lies, which—the curtain of lies, I mean—is most prominently exemplified by this godforsaken hellhole of a book called The Catcher in the Rye.

  About which—The Catcher in the Rye, I mean—don’t even get me started.

  Plus, Mr. Teone killed my dad. It’s all part of the same rotten-egg omelet. And that, my friends, if any of you truly are my friends, is not the kind of omelet you can comfortably be a good sport about.

  At any rate, the Hillmont world was likely going to be flooded with a great big floody flood flood of lawsuits about Mr. Teone’s hidden Satanic cameras in the girls’ and boys’ bathrooms and locker rooms and such. You could think, hey, what’s one more lawsuit among all the other lawsuits? Or you could think, Tom “Chi-Mo” Henderson’s feeble tuba lawsuit doesn’t stand a chance when competing for ratings with sex, satanism, and bathrooms. Lawsuit lawsuit lawsuit: sometimes when you say a word a certain number of times, like I just did with “lawsuit,” it starts to sound strange and meaningless. Lawsuit. Now, what was I talking about?

  Oh yes, lawsuits.

  But let me shift gears just a bit here and return from the mists of time where I took you on a journey et cetera to the current time now when I’m saying this.

  I figure there can be only two reasons why you or anyone would be interested in knowing anything at all about Hillmont High School.

  First reason: you are from the future, when the genius of my world-transforming rock and roll vision has finally been recognized, and ever since hearing my face-melting yet excruciatingly beautiful fifth solo album about love’s futile power you’ve been plagued by questions. Whence—is it “whence”? I think it’s “whence”—whence came this voice of a generation? How did it find itself, and how did it triumph over the evil forces that would have it silenced? Could the answer lie in Hillmont High School, the cradle of the rock revolution? That’s the first reason.

  Second reason: you’ve seen Halls of Innocence.

  Well, I’m a realist. I know it’s probably reason number two. But for you Reason Number One–ers from the future, if you’re out there, I should probably explain that Halls of Innocence is a TV movie that was loosely based on all that scandal stuff with the sex tapes and the hidden cameras and the bad assistant principal that happened at Hillmont High School at the end of the year and was rushed into production for the May sweeps week. (Well, from my perspective it was the end of last year; I don’t know how far in the future you are, but in our calendar system, it was just at the turn of the second millennium A.D. on planet Earth, at the edge of the Orion spiral arm in the Milky Way galaxy. I hope that helps you narrow it down.)

  I strongly advise you to avoid Halls of Innocence. It will teach you nothing. It is a piece of garbage. I mean, Hillmont High School was a piece of garbage too, granted. So Halls of Innocence is a piece of garbage about a piece of garbage, and it completely mischaracterizes this piece of garbage along with all the pieces of garbage that administered it and sent their kids to it and attended it.

  But no, you know what? You should see it, actually, because it’s hilarious. Everyone should. Now that I think about it, it may well be my favorite movie of all time. I mean, when the Jake character throws his jacket down and kicks his locker and tells the Christine character “I don’t even know you anymore” and runs off crying, well, that, folks, is TV cinema gold. It has been quoted and reenacted over and over again around here, including by me. Amanda does a great “I don’t even know you anymore.” You should see it sometime.

  So see Halls of Innocence, but keep in mind that it gets everything wrong. And I mean everything, not just little things like how they changed Hillmont to Millmont or how Mr. Teone, the assistant principal, became Mr. Cabal. (That’s how it’s spelled in the credits and on his desk sign, but everyone pronounces it like “cable.” Which, when you think about it, is pretty darn Hillmont-y. If we excelled at nothing else at Hillmont High School—and we didn’t, trust me—we were world-class mispronouncers.)

  The jacket in the iconic jacket-throwing scene is one of those with a ruglike letter on it that you probably think haven’t been worn by anyone not in the cast of Grease for decades, if ever. I was to learn a lot about these so-called jackets in the coming months, but I can assure you that they certainly were never worn at Hillmont High School. And if the “real” Jake (who appears to be a combination of Matt Lynch and Paul Krebs and maybe one or two other sadistic normal psychotic meatheads) had thrown a jacket, it would only have been over the head of, say, a developmentally disabled kid before he mimicked his way of talking and pushed him down the stairs saying something brilliant like “Eat concrete, gimp.” And then everyone would high-five him and he’d get an award in a special ceremony on Center Court. Millmont High School, unlike Hillmont High School, seems like a pretty nice place to be. Sure, the assistant principal put hidden cameras in the bathrooms, but in every other respect it is far from the pit of terror, torture, and iniquity that was the real Hillmont High, if “iniquity” means what I think it does.

  I know this because I was there. And because I found a code in The Catcher in the Rye that revealed the true depths of Mr. Teone’s depravity. And because of a little guy I like to call Sam Hellerman. He may not look like much, but he is good at figuring things out and knowing things nobody else knows and understanding things with utter confidence even when the explanations don’t exactly add up. Also, as I’ve said, he’s good at taking tranquilizers. Which may or may not be related to that previous item.

  But maybe you didn’t know that Mr. Cabal went around killing people’s dads. Did you know that the various Jakes of the school, at Mr. Cabal’s direction, got together and attacked me, in the head, with marching band instruments in order to silence me? Did you know that the incisive social commentary in our rock and roll band’s songs were what exposed Mr. Cabal and spooked him enough to make him flee to wherever he fled to, bringing the whole system crashing down?

  Not from Halls of Innocence, you didn’t. My band wasn’t even in it at all. That should tell you all you need to know about Halls of Innocence. Pure garbage, basically, except for one sublime jacket-throwing scene. Oh, and I can’t believe I forgot the football game part. Remind me to tell you about that one, if you haven’t seen it, where Jake, I kid you not, rides his skateboard down to the tracks to save this dog from being run over by a train during a time-out and makes it back just in time to score the winning touchdown as he’d promised to do for Christine’s mother, who has cancer. Unbelievable.

  So now, come with me once again, on a journey through the mists of time, back to Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway, where our hero is heading to meet up with Sam Hellerman before continuing on to band practice, unaware of the future contents of Halls of Innocence.

  He—I mean, I was feeling a little down, thinking about my dad and the sands of domestic tension and lawsuits and the predations of the normal. And I was thinking about the women in my life, or the women sort of in it, anyway, one of whom, Deanna Schumacher, was refusing to return my calls, while the other, Celeste Fletcher, the one I really liked, was maintaining a similarly disconcerting distance. It had been so different when I
was hospitalized—or, I think it had. To be honest, I was so drugged up when I was there that it’s all a bit of a haze. Both of them visited me, I know that, and sexiness ensued, I substantially know that. And I’m all for it, don’t get me wrong. I was pretty proud of myself about the whole thing, to say the least. But just once I’d like someone to play Try to Guess What I’m Mad About with me and have it come from a place of love rather than a place of weird, uncertain manipulation. Like I said before, it’s the kindness I miss most of all. I wondered if I’d ever be that happy again.

  Sam Hellerman was sitting at the bus stop in front of Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway with his headphones on and a yellow legal pad on his knees, his bass leaning against the bus stop’s windscreen thing. He was evidently making notes on the music he was listening to on this weird old beat-up portable cassette player, but when he saw me approaching he turned the notepad over, a bit furtively, I thought, and clicked pause.

  I angled my guitar case up against his bass case and slid in on the bench next to him.

  “See, the problem is, Henderson,” he said, taking a headphone off one ear, “that no one gets the Mussolini face. No one knows who he is. They’ll just think you’re constipated.”

  I knew he was right. I only knew about Mussolini because I’d been watching my dad’s old World at War documentaries recently, and he had seemed suitably evil and theatrical and pretty apt for a band called Encyclopedia Satanica. But few members of our theoretical audience, I had to concede, will have been watching the Italian episodes of The World at War. I assured Sam Hellerman that I’d seen the light and that Mussolini was as good as forgotten.