King Dork Approximately

by Frank Portman

  It’s a good question. I wondered about it too. My experience at that Clearview party (the one where I met “Fiona”) had certainly left me with the impression that the drama people at this school were a mod subculture, much like the hippie subculture that had infested the Hillmont drama department. But I had been mistaken. That had been nothing more than a mod theme party, and in real life, the Clearview drama people looked and behaved just like all the other Clearview students. They were not, it seemed, particularly dangerous, but neither were they “my people,” as I’d dared to imagine all those months ago. Which should come as no surprise. My “people” are Sam Hellerman and … well, that’s pretty much it.

  But even if the place had been crawling with mods, I don’t see how that would have helped. It wasn’t like I was going to sign up for drama and try out for plays. It wasn’t like I was going to walk up to the first asymmetrical haircut I saw and say, “Hey, you must like Northern Soul, am I right?”

  I couldn’t expect a subculture to save me. In fact, it was extremely difficult to detect any subcultures within the Clearview student body. To the untrained eye, these people all looked pretty much the same. And a large number of them, statistically speaking, would probably turn out to be mostly harmless. It was the harmful ones that were the worry, and those were maddeningly difficult to identify.

  I only had one class (English) with Celeste Fletcher, but it was a doozy.

  First off, there was the teacher’s name. Again, I had the impression that someone was “putting me on,” as Little Big Tom might say. I mean, if you tried as hard as you could and if your life depended on it, could you possibly come up with a better, less probable name for a teacher than Mrs. Pizzaballa? Mrs. Pizzaballa, I kid you not.

  The other point in Mrs. Pizzaballa’s favor, as if the name weren’t enough, was a kind of, I don’t know, whimsical sense of humor that resulted in her delivering these deadpan clichés that had absolutely nothing to do with whatever they were supposed to be commenting on. They were not all that different from Little Big Tom’s weird little sayings, I guess, but in LBT’s case, at least it’s clear that he’s trying, on some level, to make what comes out of his mouth relate to reality. With Mrs. Pizzaballa, though, reality didn’t enter into it, not even slightly. She was a regular Salvador Dalí without the mustache—or mostly without it, anyway—her class a piece of performance art: a portrait of the artist as an absurdist educator.

  For example, when the handouts Mrs. Pizzaballa was handing out slipped from her grasp and scattered all over the floor in front of her, she paused and said with a faraway look in her eyes: “Garbage in, garbage out.” And when this girl raised her hand and said she needed to go to the bathroom, Mrs. Pizzaballa said, “Famous last words.” And when the girl came back, instead of saying “Everything come out all right?” as Little Big Tom might have said, Mrs. Pizzaballa simply shook her head and intoned a solemn “Michael, row your boat ashore.”

  I couldn’t help thinking that Mrs. Pizzaballa and Little Big Tom should get together sometime. They’d certainly have some great conversations. Maybe if things didn’t work out between my mom and Little Big Tom, and if Mr. Pizzaballa were to meet with an unfortunate accident, I could introduce them. She could tell him she had an itchy trigger finger and he could counsel her about it.

  Anyway, I took to Mrs. Pizzaballa almost instantly. I couldn’t say the same for her handout, a big annotated list of books with Catcher in the Rye at the top of it, followed by all the same other books they make you read in every single English class. I’d tell you what they were, but I’m sure you already know. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about having to do any homework for Mrs. Pizzaballa’s class: I had done it all before, many, many times.

  As for my plans for huddling with Celeste Fletcher and bonding over shared new school anxiety, I had to admit, it wasn’t looking all that good.

  I love Celeste Fletcher to pieces, as you know, but I’d be the first to acknowledge that while she was not outright normal, she had a tendency to flirt with Normalism and sometimes veered much closer to normalcy than I was comfortable with. She was pleasant enough in Mrs. Pizzaballa’s class and when I encountered her in the halls, but I’m not stupid: even though my status had yet to be solidified at Clearview, I could tell she was taking no chances and was clearly trying to maintain as much distance as she could, in case anybody was watching and taking notes for future use against her. We did eat lunch together that first day, but the entire time she was scanning the horizon for other, presumably better, lunch partner opportunities, and halfway through she got up “to say hi” to some girls from her homeroom and never came back.

  I’m enough of a realist to have understood, when I zoomed out mentally to view the scene from above and saw a boy and his centipede seated on a bench sans Fiona with a wide zone of empty space on all sides and little groups of happily chatting, potentially hostile and dangerous kids clustered all around, that this was most likely a pretty accurate picture of the future. Clearview wasn’t Hillmont, it’s true, but it wasn’t going to be any kind of picnic, either.

  ONE-THIRD OF A LIFETIME SUPPLY

  The Teenage Brainwashers’ set was coming along. I was getting the hang of playing one song while thinking another, and we’d managed to alter the arrangements so they matched our own songs more closely with less trouble than I’d expected. Even Shinefield, as a math guy, could understand that we had to shorten all of these six-minute songs if we wanted to do more than five of them in a thirty-minute set, plus two for the obligatory encore. We got rid of most of the nonessential bits of “Live Wire” till “Fiona” was a short, sharp blast of concise mooning over an imaginary girl, just like it was supposed to be. But I decided I couldn’t resist keeping Bon Scott’s “Oh stick this in your fuse box”—that really fit in, if you know what I mean. (If you don’t, it has to do with sex.)

  One thing we hadn’t anticipated, though maybe we should have, was that Shinefield eventually noticed that our whole set was, as far as he knew, covers.

  “Let’s play some of our songs,” Shinefield would say, meaning my songs, little knowing that that was exactly what we’d been doing all along. “They’re actually pretty good.” My eyes said, “Gee, ya think, stoner boy?” but fortunately Shinefield was not much of an eye-reader.

  The whole thing almost blew up in our faces when it came to convincing him to play “Cat Scratch Fever” three times in the same set, and twice in a row, without the guitar intro. Even the dimmest, most stoned-out-of-his-skull hippie skater in the world would have smelled a rat there, and Shinefield was not nearly as dim as he was cracked up to be. I knew we were pushing it, but Sam Hellerman had insisted. “Which one would we cut?” he had asked me. “ ‘Sadistic Masochism’? Be serious.”

  He didn’t have to convince me to be serious about “Sadistic Masochism,” but Shinefield was another story.

  “Well,” said Sam Hellerman, when Shinefield’s disgruntlement had risen too close to the surface to push it back under all that easily, “I didn’t want to tell you this till it was for sure, but see, there’s a show. Well, not a show. I mean, it is a show, but it’s also kind of a contest.…”

  “Another battle of the bands?” said Shinefield, his eyes lighting up. He had loved the Chi-Mos’ terrible Battle of the Bands performance at Hillmont High School last year (about which, see my previous explanations, and laugh all you want to: it was the best we could do at the time, and plus, what terrible B. o. t. B. performances have you done lately?). He was always bringing it up and saying things like “That’s how I first got into you guys,” and he had made it very clear that he’d like nothing better than to experience some of that terribleness himself one day.

  Yes, Sam Hellerman had explained. It was kind of like a battle of the bands. Sort of. But more like a real show, too, where bands were supposed to do covers, and the band that got the biggest audience response would win … this really great thing. Sam Hellerman apologized for not having all the details commit
ted to memory, but as far as he could recall it included things like a small amount of money and possible studio time at a, you know, studio. And, Sam Hellerman thought he remembered, hats, maybe. Oh, and also a lifetime supply of Mountain Dew.

  “Are you serious?” Shinefield sounded almost giddy. “A lifetime supply? For each of us?”

  “No,” Sam Hellerman had said with a slightly worried tone. “Between the three of us. Still, that’s pretty good.”

  And Shinefield had readily agreed: one-third of a lifetime supply of Mountain Dew was pretty good. But of course, Sam Hellerman had added, the real benefit was the opportunity to show off how good our band was before a receptive audience, not to mention all the free publicity we would get.

  But Sam Hellerman had had Shinefield at “lifetime supply of Mountain Dew.” He was, in an instant, the compliant and cooperative drummer once again. For a bit of Mountain Dew, it seemed, Shinefield would play “Cat Scratch Fever” all you wanted till the cows came home. It was kind of weird, actually. But what can I say? The guy just happened to like Mountain Dew. A lot.

  Could this possibly end well? It was difficult to see how. But the songs were sounding so good, and I was, as ever, Sam Hellerman’s faithful and obedient servant, so I really had no choice but to roll with it and leave everything in Sam Hellerman’s capable, if slightly sinister, hands. God help us all.

  At first I had half wondered if there might have been any basis at all to the story Sam Hellerman had told Shinefield, because you never could tell with that guy. For all I knew, there really could have been some kind of covers contest Mountain Dew show with free hats. But it had soon become apparent that he was making it up as he went along.

  “What are we going to do,” I asked Sam Hellerman afterward, “when Phil figures out there’s no show?” Because we had started calling Shinefield “Phil” in honor of Phil Rudd, his kind of patron saint.

  “Oh, there will be a show,” said Sam Hellerman, his eyes shining with an unearthly light behind his glasses. “Of that I can assure you.”

  And that was how I learned that Sam Hellerman, having inadvertently talked his way into the concert promotion and soft drink public relations business, intended to go through with it. But where? But how? But who? He wouldn’t give me any details, as usual, and I think it pretty likely that he didn’t know any details himself at that point. But I could as good as see the machinery grinding in his odd but retardedly brilliant little head, and I knew better than to interrupt a genius at work. Plus, he said the thing that always silences further discussion.

  “Leave it to me, Henderson,” he said.

  And of course, as always, I left it to him as directed. I was all too happy to have someone to leave it to, and it might as well be him. And really, what choice did I have?

  SAM HELLERMAN’S CAMELOT

  Sam Hellerman wasn’t having an easy time at Mission Hills High School, if his puffy eye and the slightly scraped side of his face were any indication.

  “What happened to you?” my look said, mingling curiosity, sympathy, and relief that it wasn’t me.

  “What do you think?” said Sam Hellerman’s look in response, adding a hint of bitterness and a dash of casual thirst for vengeance to the communal pot of c., s., and r. Oh, I remembered it well.

  There was little more to say. A puffy eye in the first week: it wasn’t unprecedented, but it sure wasn’t a good sign.

  “Never mind,” he said, in words. “Two months from now, I’ll be running the place.”

  Part of me had enough faith in Sam Hellerman’s fractured genius to consider the possibility that he might be right about that, but the other part, the bigger part, looked at Sam Hellerman with his stinky Iron Maiden T-shirt, off-kilter glasses, scraped-up face, puffy eye, and sad little phone holster and knew pretty much beyond doubt that Sam Hellerman’s “running” with regard to Mission Hills High School in any sense other than “fleeing to evade capture” was just some mad dream. Those confidence-building tapes had done their work all too well, it seemed: someone was liable to get hurt. Even more so, I mean.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him about Clearview’s relatively benign bizarrely Brady Bunch brotherhood of benevolent blockheads. I did mention the “letterman” jackets, though, and he gave me a look that said something like “Gee whiz, Scooter.”

  At any rate, Sam Hellerman’s mind was on publicity, not jackets. And the main thrust of his publicity plan was this: (a) he would call radio stations, TV stations, record stores, nightclubs, music stores, libraries, and places like that; (b) he would say “The Teenage Brainwashers are coming” in a soft, growly, threatening voice; and (c) he would hang up the phone. He’d been doing it for hours when I arrived at Hellerman Manor that day, and he was ready to take a break.

  Now that there was a show in the offing, and “the publicity” was afoot, Sam Hellerman had changed his mind about my lawsuit. A public trial, even if doomed to failure, he reasoned, would be as a good a way as any to draw attention to the Teenage Brainwashers, the equivalent of dozens of crank calls. And if the case was big enough and splashy enough to “become a thing,” as Sam Hellerman put it, well, we’d be household names before the first chords of “Fiona” even sounded.

  So the purpose of our rendezvous at Hellerman Manor that day was to work on the lawsuit as well as to continue practicing our think-playing. Sam Hellerman was still irritatingly dismissive of the greater case against Normalism and its institutions, and when I pulled out the Catcher Code he gave me a surprisingly intimidating look, like he was going to slap it out of my hand or something.

  “Forget about that,” he said testily. “It has nothing to do with anything. Focus on the assault and battery.” Well, as I didn’t want things to develop into fisticuffs, which is an effeminate form of punching that they used to do in Sherlock Holmes, I thought it prudent to comply, at least outwardly.

  Sam Hellerman’s view was that the quickest and easiest way to a publicity-generating public spectacle was to target each of the kids who had directly participated in the tuba attack and related incidents. It’s a good story, he said, to which my eyes replied, “Thanks, I found it engrossing myself.”

  There was Paul Krebs, and Matt Lynch, of course, and Rich Zim, who had actually struck the blow with the tuba, as far as I knew. Then there were the kids who had carried me through the halls, banging my head hither and thither as they went, and Mark McAllister, who had initially knocked me senseless in the PE boxing ring while the others held me down … and Mr. Donnelly, the PE teacher, who had overseen it all, and Mr. Teone … but Sam Hellerman stopped me there: no teachers, he said. And certainly no Teone. It didn’t make much sense to me, but Sam Hellerman stood firm. If I wanted his help, I had to play by his rules, and for some reason one of those rules was that mention of Mr. Teone in relation to the tuba attack was forbidden. I reluctantly and perplexedly agreed.

  I had to admit, just making a list of the kids who had been involved was challenging enough. It included, potentially, the entire PE class, and some kids from band, and perhaps others. And maybe even my parents, too, since their uncooperative attitude toward my lawsuit plans had really gotten in the way of my lawsuit plans.

  “Can you sue someone to force them to sue someone else on your behalf?” I asked with my eyes, but Sam Hellerman refused to dignify that with a response.

  He did, however, pull out last year’s Hillmont High School yearbook, The Camelot. My assignment was to go through the class pictures one by one and make a list of the sueable among them. But it was hard to focus on that because, well, Sam Hellerman had completely covered these pages with tiny, meticulously scribbled, detailed, and thoroughly distracting notes. The girls were all ranked on what appeared to be the standard one-to-ten scale with neat little numerals inscribed in the bottom right-hand corner of their pictures, and there were notes in the margins next to the photos providing what looked like more detail on the rankings, as well as addresses, phone numbers, favorite colors, favorite foods, u
nusual interests, astrological signs, and psychological attributes like “loyal,” “mean,” “adventurous,” “generous,” “dumb,” “nice,” “prude,” even, I kid you not, “shrewd” and “sex-positive.” How he thought he knew all this stuff about these girls was beyond me, but it was clear that compiling it had involved many, many hours of careful, misguided research, even though the things he was researching were, I would bet, only his own fantasies. Even weirder, most girls had an additional number, a decimal fraction, of which I could make neither heads nor, even especially, tails. And even weirdest, some of the guys also had rankings, though they only seemed to go up to five.

  Whatever else it meant, one thing was clear: Sam Hellerman had made stunning progress in his long-cherished dream of reducing love to math.

  Well, this was weirder and creepier than I’d bargained for. I wanted out. So I shut the yearbook with a loud clap that made us both jump.

  I gave Sam Hellerman a look. And he looked back at me like “…?”

  Some time went by.

  “Do I really,” I finally said, in words, “have to ask?”

  “It’s a simple confidence-building exercise,” said Sam Hellerman patiently, as though explaining to a grandparent how to turn the computer on.

  Well, I might have known it had to do with those confounded tapes. According to The Secrets of Women Revealed, Sam Hellerman explained, careful, objective, detailed ranking and evaluation is merely a way of demystifying sex appeal and leveling the playing field, which is ordinarily stacked against “men” from the get-go. Training yourself to replace romantic daydreams with cold analysis makes “dating,” and women themselves, less intimidating. A man who is in command of the facts, unswayed by sentiment, is a confident man, a capable man, and ultimately a successful man.

  The guys’ rankings were intended to identify the other “men” who needed to be eliminated or neutralized, or, failing that, sucked up to and made into allies. Sam Hellerman assured me that it “worked,” though I couldn’t help noticing that as of yet, he had not succeeded in anything beyond acting like an idiot at a bus stop and defacing a school yearbook in such a way as to suggest to anyone who wasn’t prepared to give him the most generous benefit of the doubt that he was a disturbed and possibly dangerous nut.