Find out what is expected of you and do it with no nonsense. I’m sure it’s pretty good advice. This was in fact precisely what I faced in the developing Clearview ordeal, and it was helpful, if hugely depressing, to have it spelled out with such clarity. I was trying the best I could to look like I was doing what was expected of me, but it was touch and go. One false move would reveal my true King Dork nature, sending me straight to the bottom and into the torture hopper, despite Clearview’s benign school spirit façade. I didn’t see how I could sustain this for much longer. But Celeste Fletcher seemed to be doing just fine at figuring out what was expected of her and doing it with no nonsense.
Man, I felt low.
They didn’t actually call it “going steady” like in the movies of antiquity, if “antiquity” means what I think it does. They called it “going.” Skippy’s “going” with Peggy Sue. Hey, says Marcia to the Big Man on Campus, I like you, wanna ask me to “go”? Are Jughead and Veronica “going”? No, they’re just hanging out, but he really wants to “go” with her. Too bad she’s “going” with Archie.
This going, it seemed to me, meant “going together,” like clothes that match, or wine paired with the right entrée, or alternatively, like people embarking on a journey together, “going” somewhere, to the Orient, or Bakersfield, or the grave, or what have you, except instead of actually going to Bakersfield, the place the “goers” wind up “going” is, essentially, walking around and around this central area called the Quad. A couple of Badgers can manage to do seven laps during the thirty-minute lunch period if they “go” continuously, though stopping to talk to other “goers” or to make out can impede their progress. If they do begin to make out, Clearview custom dictates that everyone in their immediate proximity has to yell “PDA,” which stands for “public display of affection.” PDA is by legend forbidden on school grounds, but this rule is rarely if ever enforced. I’ve even seen Principal “T-Dog” trot over and “high-five” a couple of frisky Badgers who’d been caught PDA-ing, and everyone cheers, “Go, Badgers!” It’s that kind of place.
Of course, it’s all a euphemism for ramoning, like so much else. And we had a similar set of customs at Hillmont, though we said “hanging out” or “hooking up” more often than “going,” and the lovers’ laps were done around a “Center Court” rather than a “Quad,” and while we didn’t have the thing of chanting “PDA” every five minutes, there were other similarly dumb things we chanted, probably. But the jackets and the insane school spirit somehow made it all so much stranger and more depressing and, well, basically, I just can’t get over the damn jackets, okay? What kind of sick, twisted, jacket-oriented mother fuckery had I stumbled into over here? I ask you that most sincerely.
So Celeste Fletcher, apparently, was now “going” with the owner of the jacket, one Todd Dante, a big, dumb guy on a sports team of some kind and almost certainly, irredeemably, virulently normal. Wearing the jacket was her way, in accordance with custom handed down by the Clearview elders from time immemorial and embraced by her without a moment’s hesitation, of signaling that she was “taken.” That was more commitment and loyalty than I’d ever seen from her toward any guy she had “hung out” with in all the years I’d known her. I guess she just hadn’t met the right jacket before. I don’t know where that left Shinefield. But I knew where it left me. And that’s Nowheresville, daddy-o. King Dork strikes again.
TOM, GET YOUR HORN UP
There was nothing I could do except marinate in my own bitterness and, perhaps, commemorate this marination with lyrics composed specially for the occasion. This I endeavored to do—in a lively number I intended to call “King Dork Strikes Again.” But Clearview High School had a method of discouraging that sort of thing—by which I mean creativity and self-expression—in its own caring, healing, and understanding way.
Because I have to tell you about Band, the class. It was, like pretty much everything else, way, way different at Clearview than it had been at Hillmont.
At Hillmont High, the whole point of Band, from the students’ perspective, was to try to drive the Band teacher insane by means of constructive sabotage. Essentially, the students would all de-tune their instruments just slightly so that when the Band teacher, Ms. Filuli, would count in, the resulting cacophony would send her reeling in dismay and pain. When you have perfect pitch, like Ms. Filuli, even a slight deviation from in-tune-ness is like the world’s largest set of nails on the world’s most gargantuan chalkboard. And we deviated. Boy, did we deviate. She would try to be patient, and would spend entire class periods attempting to teach the class how to use the strobe tuner, and the class would play along, remaining more or less in tune when playing concert C in unison to exhibit the results of all this effort at tuning. But then, just when she thought she’d made progress, the first notes of “Stars and Stripes Forever” would come out just as bad as before, because everyone was playing their notes a different fraction of a tone sharp or flat from everyone else. What can I say, it helped to pass the time. But there was no Hillmont teacher more grateful to be put out to pasture than Ms. F., I can tell you that.
You could tell right away that Clearview band class was going to be different. For one thing, the band teacher, Mr. Matthew “Matt-Patt” Pattinson, was kind of a cult figure, not despised but in fact sincerely beloved by the students.
He would jog in every day and yell “How’re my Badgers today?!” And the students would whoop and holler and sound off their instruments in between spirited bouts of chanting “Matt-Patt! Matt-Patt!” (As an aside, can I just point out how weird it is that so many Clearview teachers and administrators seemed to think it was part of their job description to run around punching the air and high-fiving everybody? Except Mrs. Pizzaballa—she was the only non–air puncher on the faculty, and I respected her for it.)
Anyway, then Matt-Patt would click his heels, salute, and count off with “Ah one and ah two and …” and everyone would launch into “Louie Louie,” their standard opening number, and not just play it, but dance and march in place and do their best to mirror Matt-Patt’s insane, over-the-top enthusiasm.
I had long ago given up trying to discern any hint of sarcasm, or mockery, or even mild irony in this sort of behavior at Clearview High School: there really wasn’t any. These people, as crazy as it seems, really were this into it, and the “it” that they were into, believe it or not, was simply high school. Damnedest thing I ever did see.
There were a few Hillmont refugees in the class besides me, including the rotund yet nice Yasmynne Schmick and Pierre Butterfly Cameroon (though he had renamed himself Peter in an effort to “reinvent” himself for the school switch), plus a normal girl with a pretty nice WHR named Trina de los Santos, as well as a couple of normal guys whose names I refused to know as a matter of principle. Our collective bewilderment was obvious. None of us knew how to go about being in a band class where you were expected to play actual music, all in tune and everything. And not only that, but you were expected to do so with deranged, melodramatic fervor and a straight face. It was easy to read the look in the eyes of the refugees, the decent and the normal alike: a whole semester of this will surely kill us.
On that first day, Roberta the Female Robert, who was also in the class in her capacity as a strangely competent clarinet player, had kept looking over at me encouragingly and also doing these upward nods of her head and clarinet. I’d soon realized what she was getting at, because it wasn’t long before Matt-Patt started barking out “Tom, get your horn up” every time he noticed my trombone slide extending at anything less than a ninety-degree angle. Which was all the time. Have you ever tried to hold a trombone all the way up for forty-two minutes? It’s simply not possible.
But this became a recurring theme during Band, with Matt-Patt starting off the count by saying things like “One, and two, and Tom, get your horn up.…” Not every single time, but often enough to be worrying. Even if it was only Band, it could still endanger my precious status of
neutrality and reveal my secret identity if it became a catchphrase that leaked into the general population. I’d had way worse things shouted at me in my career as a socially unsuccessful person, but it was something to be avoided nonetheless. So, much as I hated to let the bad guys win like that, I did what I could to get my horn up, at least a bit, trying to shake the troubling suspicion that it is in small concessions like this that the process of becoming one of them begins.
But the truly alarming thing about Band was only revealed later during that second week, when at the end of class Matt-Patt said the cryptic words “Now, I want you Badgers RTP on the dot at three-thirty” and added something about how the project of kicking St. Keister would involve giving him a hundred and ten percent of something.
“What was that about three-thirty and a dot and kicking St. Keister?” I asked the Female Robert afterward, because it seemed like she, if anyone, would probably know, and because I didn’t have anyone else to ask.
“After-school practice” were the dread words she uttered in response. “ ‘RTP’ is ‘ready to play.’ At three-thirty. For our routines for the rallies and the games. So we can help our Badgers to beat the Mission Hills Saints.” She gave me the look that says “I don’t know how I could possibly make this any clearer.” I was feeling faint. I mean, it was starting to look, a bit, like they were going to make us dress in little Sergeant Pepper’s outfits and march around a football field. But that couldn’t be. They wouldn’t go that far, surely.
“Not football, Thomas,” R. the F. R. said, shaking her head when I had murmured words to that effect. “Basketball. Badger Basketball.” Football, basketball, what did I care? Either way, it was just a bunch of normal meatheads chasing a ball. I wanted no part of it, and certainly not if it involved staying after school to work on “routines.” My time was valuable.
“ ‘Keister’ means ‘ass,’ ” she said helpfully. “Anyway, we have to practice. What did you do after school at the other place?”
Well, the answer is, I went home. I listened to records. Or played the guitar, wrote lyrics, watched TV, ate cereal, read books, looked at naked ladies, you know: the building blocks of a life.
So that’s what I mean about Clearview discouraging creativity. When was I supposed to write my lyrics about how awful everything was? But perhaps that was the point: prevent all lyrics from being written by filling every available moment with inane activity and everybody will just fall obediently in line. It actually seemed like it could work.
But it didn’t seem right that they could force you to stay at school after school was over. I mean, hadn’t we already paid our debt to society for the day? But they could, and they would, and as it happened, they did. I was thinking that once my Indictment of the Universe lawsuit was done, there’d certainly be a case for a lawsuit against making you stay after school to do “routines.” Now, that’s a crime against humanity if I ever saw one.
MY CHARIOT
So that, babies and gentlemen, is how your illustrious narrator found himself in a gym, after hours, trying to play “Louie Louie,” “On, Wisconsin!” and “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” on the trombone instead of working on his own actual stuff with his own actual band that played his own actual real songs. He was in a pretty foul mood about it too, let me tell you. They made him stand in the bleachers, point the slide part of his trombone upward, and move it from left to right and back again in time to “streetlights people”; they made him run onto the court in a procedure they called scattering and then dance in place with the trombone held above his head during rests, in a move they called freestyling. To his great relief, he was informed that he would not be required to wear a Sergeant Pepper’s outfit while engaged in “scattering” and “freestyling.” But his relief turned to ashes in his brain upon learning that he would need to purchase a pair of white pants and an orange beret to wear instead.
Poor guy. It’s hard not to feel sorry for him. Hey, wait a minute: that’s me!
Anyway, you want to hear something really weird? When Badgers talk about the Clearview High School “fight song,” what they mean is “On, Wisconsin!” I don’t know why; maybe it’s that there’s a certain Milwaukee-esque-ness to Clearview because it looks like you could have filmed Happy Days there. Could you make that up? Could anyone?
In the aftermath of this gruesome episode I was sitting on the steps at the west edge of the front of the school under the overhang trying to work on my lyrics while waiting to be picked up by Little Big Tom—because Clearview is just a little too far to walk to from my house, and it was raining pretty hard—when Roberta the F. R. and this other girl from Band walked up and plopped down cross-legged in front of me. The girl with her was a saxophone named Pam Something. I’d noticed her before because she was not bad-looking, for a band Badger, with a fairly decent WHR and an even better BWR, from what I could tell, though she also had a funny look about her—super smiley but with a distracted eye, like she was seeing disturbing things off in the distance that no one else could see. They were a funny pair, side by side like that, because of their relative sizes, the tiny, spindly Female Robert and the comparatively more substantial Pam Something.
The Make-out/Fake-out sensor in my gut tingled warily, as it always does in the presence of more than one female, but only slightly. It was obvious that these girls meant no harm. So I tamped down the paranoia. What were they up to? Probably an attempt at Badger camaraderie. After all, Badgers need to stick together and give a hundred and ten percent if they’re ever to stand a chance of kicking St. Ass clear to the other side of Shrove Tuesday. That said, I couldn’t think of one thing to say to them. So I just did a little salute and gave them the look that says: “Ladies.”
“See, Thomas?” said R. the F. R. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was only giving about forty-five percent.” They both gave me the look that says: “Yeah, we could tell.”
There followed some largely incomprehensible conversation between the two of them about basketball and, specifically, about basketball players, that I was no more able and willing to follow at the time than I am a. and w. to summarize it for you now. My brain is immune to varsity talk. It just doesn’t penetrate.
“I have a question for you, Thomas,” said Pam Something, turning to me.
Was this “Thomas” business some kind of subtle mockery? My wariness-o-meter bumped up an eighth of a tic. But I looked at her with what I hoped was a neutral expression to signal my consent to being interrogated. She was looking off into the distance, though, kind of how my mom does when she’s mad at someone, but she didn’t look mad. We all waited.
“Oh,” said Pam. “Oh. Yes. I was wondering.…” She paused again. Then resumed: “Oh. I was wondering what happened to your face?”
I had grown so used to my centipede that I’d almost forgotten that other people could see it. Its legs had mostly dissolved by this time, though there were still a few spots where traces remained, but it was still very much there.
“Tuba wound,” I said.
“No, really,” said R. the F. R., “what was it really?”
“Really,” I said, “somebody hit me in the head with a tuba.”
After a quick pause both girls started laughing wildly, their mouths wide open. Now, I knew from my experience with Amanda and her friends that this sort of laughter doesn’t always mean that they think something is funny. It can just be a reaction to something being weird and their not knowing what to say about it. It’s similar to my own reaction when something is weird and I don’t know what to say, except in my version, it mostly involves just sitting there and not saying anything.
“But … why?” said Roberta the F. R., finally, when they had regained control of their faculties.
I considered explaining about Mr. Teone and the Catcher Code and my General Theory of the Universe. But I didn’t: it would have taken forever, and I was pretty sure these girls couldn’t handle it.
“Long stor
y,” I said instead.
Roberta the F. R. was pulling at my notebook because she’d seen me scribbling in it. I had subtly tried to slide it under my trombone case, but not subtly enough, it seemed.
“What are you working on?” she asked, looking at it before I yanked it back from her.
“Just some lyrics,” I said as her eyes widened.
“For Pizzaballa?” she said, skeptical. Outside of the reading journal, about which I will say more by and by, Mrs. Pizzaballa’s class was well known for consisting only of diagramming sentences and rapid-fire reading and vocabulary tests, no creative writing of any kind assigned or allowed. I explained that it was just something I was doing on my own. Both girls looked incredulous, and I believed I was beginning to catch on here. It seemed that in the weird, school-loving atmosphere of Clearview High, the notion that anyone would do anything at all that wasn’t for credit or part of an assignment was more or less unthinkable. What’s the point of doing something, they reasoned, in my imaginative dramatization of their probable line of thinking, if you’re not graded for doing it or penalized for not doing it? It seemed to me like a vaguely totalitarian state of mind, but freeing the minds of Roberta the F. R. and Pam Something simply wasn’t my job, so I let the matter drop.
I did explain that I was in a band, a real band, the sort of band that is not “for credit.” I mean, boy, is it ever not for credit. And here I will note, as I have so many times before, the strange, inexplicable power that just saying you’re in a band can have when it comes to certain females. It wasn’t like they suddenly climbed on top of me or anything, and it also wasn’t like that was something I was angling for—though I suppose I wouldn’t have minded too much in the case of Pam Something, with all her ratios, weird eyes notwithstanding. Anyway, it wasn’t anything that extreme. It was just a slight but noticeable uptick in their interest in me, not much more. The Female Robert leaned in, invading my personal space ever so slightly, and Pam Something, I swear to God, sat back on her hands like she was yawning, pushed out her breasts, and licked her lips, like a kitten. I kid you not. I don’t think they even know they’re doing it. You say “band” and they get hot. Simple as that. KISS knew it.
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