King Dork Approximately

by Frank Portman

  “I was just wrestling with a skunk,” he said, and started laughing. Then he said: “Oh. Yellow.”

  Because while he had been out skunk-wrestling, a girl had arrived and was sitting in Celeste Fletcher’s former spot in the big, grubby vinyl beanbag in the corner, looking kind of hard to miss with her shorts and cowboy boots and legs and breasts and everything.

  I introduced them to her: “This is Shinefield. And you know Sam Hellerman.” The girl emitted a slight sigh, the usual way, the universal sign, really, of conceding one’s acquaintance with Sam Hellerman.

  “Are you going to play my song, sweetie?” she said. I winced with a weird combination of embarrassment and a kind of perverse, guilty pride. But of course I said “Yes.”

  But I’ve got to back up quite a bit to explain how and why what was going on here was going on.

  A PRETTY GOOD BONE

  I suppose I should start with Roberta the Female Robot’s note. Well, “note” is really an inadequate way to describe it. Missive. Epistle. Dispatch. Disquisition. Monograph. Just going through my powerful vocabulary here, trying to come up with a suitable term, but there really, really isn’t one. For one thing, it was long, six whole binder pages of close handwritten text, both sides. For another, it was vibrant, with what I’d estimate to be around a dozen different colors running into each other at the points where she had switched pens. For a third thing, the right edge of the last three pages was stained a mysterious dark brownish color, making a substantial number of the words, mainly those written in yellow, practically indecipherable. And for a fourth, but by no means final, thing, it was … My powerful vocabulary is failing me once again here, but I’ll just put it out there nonetheless.

  For a fourth thing, it was: just incredibly boring.

  My Dearest Thomas,

  it began.

  I’m in English toodle-lee-oo. This is the same desk I had last simester, it still has my gum on it! At least I hope its mine! Ewwwwww! Gross! Are you enjoying Pizzaballa or do you think she’s a witch or a bitch or a glitch? Look how small I’m writing!! I don’t know why! Ewww God this is boring, I’m sick of thesis statements just bring on the fucken porn!! Just kidding! I got the porn right here! Just kidding!!! What sports do you play? I’m in cross country and Mr. Gamma-ray is such an asshole but he works you hard so I guess its good. Ewww but I had shinsplintz yesterday, ouch. So, Tommie boy, which is it Coke or Pepsi, boxers or briefs, umquiring minds want to know! [indecipherable] I can write big too. Now it’s small again. English be over! English be over! It’s not over. (sigh) I’ll be seeing you in band soon. Tom get your horn up!!! Will you say hi to me? You better! Or I’ll knock your block off! Just kidding … or maybe? Not? [indecipherable] [indecipherable] Pammelah says you are a pretty good bone and I’ve known many bones in my industrious career (wink wink) NOT REALLY!!! Shirts are weird.…

  Now, if you think that’s maybe a little charming, I’d probably have agreed with you up till about halfway down the second page, but, trust me, eventually this type of thing overstays its welcome. I skimmed much of it, scanning for some indication that there was actual information or a message of any import, but honestly, there was none. I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this: the Female Robot had just pretty much written whatever happened to be in her head, ripped the pages out, folded them into a tight little square, and handed it in at the end of the day.

  So maybe you spotted the one bit where it was revealed how Pam Something spelled her name. Pammelah. I present that without comment.

  And I sure didn’t know what to make of, or do with, Roberta the Female Robot’s letter. I took out a sheet of paper and wrote: “Dear Robot, look how small I’m writing …,” but that’s about as far as I got and I soon gave up trying.

  I’d expected I’d have to say something about the note, or at least excuse the fact that I hadn’t written a detailed account of every single moment of my entire night in response, when I saw her in homeroom the next day. But the subject didn’t come up because she simply handed me a new tightly folded packet—an even longer letter, to judge from the heft of it.

  “Thanks?” I said.

  “De nada” was her reply.

  Why couldn’t I just play the damn song? I’d been doing everything right, growing the fingernails on my right hand so they could pluck the strings more effectively and practicing for hour upon tedious hour, but “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian” was still refusing to come through my fingers. In fact, I seemed to get worse at it the more I practiced doing it, which shouldn’t have surprised me too much. After all, it is an axiom that forms a powerful thesis among the many theses of my General Theory of the Universe, as I have outlined above: the harder you try, the worse it gets. Nevertheless, lots of hippies could do it. What was their secret? Drugs?

  The Henderson-Tucci household without the Tucci was a pretty sad place to be. My mom was the same as ever; that is, a silent, barely present presence in her vibrant clothes, coming home from work and drifting from room to room with her bourbon on the rocks and cigarette, lost in thought, or at any rate, lost in something. But I, for one, found I missed the Little Big Tom pop-ins quite a bit. I mean, silly and annoying as they could be, they did keep things moving. Without them, and without the sights and sounds of Little Big Tom making his rounds, monitoring each room with doglike diligence, everything felt empty, stagnant, boarded up, like the soul had gone out of the building. And quiet, so quiet you could hear yourself think, which is never a good thing.

  I may be projecting here, but I kind of had the impression that Amanda might have been missing him too, in her own way. Of course she was outwardly exultant. Ever since my mom had brought Little Big Tom home with her so long ago, Amanda had had no dearer wish than to see that situation reversed. But she can’t have enjoyed the emptiness and silence, not really, and there were even times when I believed I saw as much in her hunched shoulders, occasional sighs, and aimless wandering of the grounds with her phone-baby dangling all but neglected from its antenna in her seemingly weary hand.

  I’ll say one thing: whatever it had meant, if my mom had really wanted space, she had it now. Nothing but, in fact.

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME

  Your humble narrator turned fifteen on a cold, wet day in January, wearing an orange beret, white pants, and an orange and white shirt that said “Badger Power,” prancing around and playing “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” on the trombone in front of a crowd of school-spirit-addled, bloodthirsty normal people.

  Okay, other stuff happened on that day too, but I’d say that’s a pretty bad way to start off such an important year, wouldn’t you? An ill omen. When once upon a time a father might have taken his just-come-of-age son out to teach him to shoot guns or drive a car, to get drunk, or to lose his virginity at a local brothel to a plump, merry, blushing, gregarious, ample-bosomed, redheaded lady named Big Griselda, there I was, fatherless twice over, holding a trombone above my head, doing a gay little dance, and playing a “pep band” arrangement of what has to be one of the worst songs ever devised by man. “Streetlights people.” The corrosive idiocy of it all was going to leave permanent scars on my soul, and I could almost feel it happening in real time.

  I’m not a big birthday guy, so it didn’t bug me too much that my mom and Amanda hadn’t remembered it. They had their minds on other things; plus, I was spared the awkwardness of having to respond to whatever half-assed commemoration they would have thrown together at the last second by saying “Oh, you shouldn’t have” or something like that. Once again, though, I missed the nonsensical words of wisdom Little Big Tom would undoubtedly have assembled to mark the occasion: I missed having the opportunity to roll my eyes at them, anyway. We both used to enjoy that, probably.

  As it turned out, Little Big Tom had slipped a birthday present into my backpack—no idea how he had managed that. Had he been secretly returning to the house at 507 Cedarview Circle in the small hours, roaming the all but
empty rooms like a silent, ghostly caretaker, placing a birthday present here, a vegan cheeseburger there, guarding his former domain, vowing to return one day? It was a disturbing yet strangely comforting thought.

  It was CDs. Ugh. Best-ofs. I know, ugh. Good stuff, though, all fingerstyle guys—Bert Jansch, who’s the guy Jimmy Page stole all the Led Zeppelin acoustic instrumental arrangements from; another dude named Big Bill Broonzy; and perhaps best of all, Blind Blake, who was to become something like my idol in the months to come, though at that time I hadn’t heard of him yet. What is it about these blind guys that gives them the improbable superhuman power to play guitars like pianos? Something beyond nature, without a doubt (disproving atheism conclusively, if you ask me). Little Big Tom seemed to know his stuff, I reluctantly conceded. The sight of the familiar yellow Post-it note, LBT’s preferred form of communication, caused a brief welling-up of sentiment, not so much for what was written on it, but because of the bittersweet recollection of all the other Post-its he’d left me over the years. This one said: “Let your fingers do the walking!!!—Big Tom. P.S. Come see me sometime.”

  I winced at the notion of coming to see him. It was the least I could do, but man, how awkward would it be to visit your mom’s estranged husband in his motel room? I almost wished he hadn’t given me the CDs, but not really.

  This is what my life had become:

  Are you excited? Go Badgers! Go Badgers! I can’t believe you’ve never done pep band before. I bet you wish you could play your guitar instead! Maybe Matt-Patt would let you but he wouldn’t because your a bone. Bones are bones. At least your not a trumpet! I almost slept through the alarm today but then I didn’t. Do you like milk? I guess I do. Pammelah has pretty eyes. What kind of eyes do you like? I totally hafta pee, like right now. Ewww this chick Janice just breathed on me. She smells like Chinese food.…

  I already had a stockpile of several unread notes from the Robot kicking around, set aside for when I had time to catch up on my reading, so I simply added this to the pile. Being acquainted with her was a big job. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to matter to her whether or not I did the reading.

  I would say that of all the indignities associated with being in the Clearview High School “pep band,” and there were many, the absolute worst one was that they made you wear the little outfit all through the school day on the days when you were supposed to play at the games. And yet, while the school spirit at Clearview was just about the most irritating thing in the world, it also functioned as a useful protective force field. Being in the band certainly marked you as a second-class citizen compared to actually being a sports psycho, but because you were part of the general project of promoting the Badgers and celebrating the breathtaking awesomeness of the fact that guys wearing gay little shiny orange shorts were pretty good at prancing around and playing with balls, everyone left you alone. There seemed to be no dissenters, no misfits, no one who wasn’t with the program. Except me, semi-secretly, and some of the other Hillmont refugees, though most of them had by this time learned that the easiest way to assimilate was to pretend to be just as enraptured by the Spirit as everybody else. If I had shown up at Hillmont High wearing white pants and a beret, they’d have been scraping my remains off Center Court within seconds. But at Clearview, I was serving the designs of the normal psychos, so I was golden, protected by the Spirit.

  Because now that I’d been there long enough, I’d seen a bit of what happened to people of the second tier and lower who were not protected by the Spirit at Clearview, and though it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it had been at Hillmont, it wasn’t pretty. Since it wasn’t happening to me personally I didn’t feel it nearly as keenly, but the normal psychos preyed on the defenseless at Clearview High just as they do anywhere else.

  I don’t know if you recall from my previous explanations, but there’s this narcoleptic kid named Bobby Duboyce who has to wear a helmet all the time to protect his soft skull. At Hillmont the normal kids knew just what to do with a Helmet Boy: they would wait till he was asleep and then descend upon him and write obscenities on his helmet, or do things like roll him in the mud or carry him to strange allegedly amusing locations so that when he woke up he would be in a state of confusion, embarrassment, or terror. And they’d do it right out in the open, under the approving, or at least willfully oblivious, eyes of the teachers and administrators. Now, as one of the Hillmont refugees, he no longer has to worry about that kind of public humiliation. Instead, the normal Clearview guys, and even some of the girls, I believe, just randomly, and with a kind of cheerful attitude, subtly knock him on top of the helmet throughout the day with their books or knuckles as they walk by. That’s all. I’m sure it’s irritating, but I guess it’s the sort of thing you get used to after a while. His parents probably think it “builds character.” It’s not nice, but for a guy like Bobby Duboyce it must have felt kind of like winning the lottery.

  Or there’s this chubby Asian kid named Pang. He’s kind of weird, but he isn’t harming anyone. When I take over the world, I’ll institute a strict policy of leaving the fat kids, and maybe especially Pang, alone: he’ll get a free pass to sit wherever he wants just being himself, unharassed. But till then, the normal psychos at Clearview High will have their fun with him, and the way they do that is to make him run back and forth all around the Quad and down the hallways till he is about to collapse from exhaustion. “Pang, give me a dollar,” one of them will say, and when he produces it, they send him running across the Quad to give it to another subhuman psychotic normal goon, who promptly sends him running off in the other direction. They make the game last throughout the school day, and they say things like “Come on, work off some of that blubber.” It’s in the interest of physical fitness, after all, so I guess it’s just fine; even good for him, maybe. I hate physical fitness myself, but there are those who swear by it.

  I mean, thank God it’s not me. But maybe, I found myself thinking, it’s not such a bad thing for the normal people to have these relatively benign ways of letting off steam, considering the damage they could do otherwise. When I take power, I’m going to be the best, sanest dictator ever, protecting not just the fat, but the gay, the shy, the short, the freakishly tall, the redheaded, the handicapped, the smart, the spastic, the meek, the cheese makers, the stutterers, the mumblers, and the readers. I’ll even protect the sporty and the normal in my beneficence, if b. means what I think it means. But everyone has to leave everyone else alone, and the instant they start hassling anyone, for any reason, the penalty is instant vaporization by my roving surveillance robots. Thanks for playing. Problem solved. But till then? Well, Clearview isn’t exactly nice, but it sure could be a whole lot worse.

  Even though I couldn’t do anything about the white pants, I buttoned my jeans jacket all the way up to hide the dumb shirt and put the beret in my pocket for most of the day, because even after all this, I still had some standards left.

  Now, one of the other terrible things about Clearview High is that they don’t have open campus for lunch. That means that, unlike at Hillmont, every single student has to eat lunch either in the cafeteria building or in the grass in the middle of the Quad. Basically you’re on display at all times, and it’s hard to find a private space of your own of any kind. I think the technical term for the thing I’m describing is a “panopticon,” which is a kind of prison where you’re being constantly watched, exposed to your jailers one hundred percent of the time. I was sitting with the “pep band” in our panopticon on the grass at lunch, beretless, my tiny gesture of rebellion in full view. And when Principal T-Dog walked by and pointed at me, saying “Where’s your Badger beret, soldier?” and tried to make me high-five him, and actually stood there till I put the beret on and high-fived him, and then led the band and assorted onlookers in a little round of applause at my expense—well, that’s about as low as low gets in the First World.

  “We have to support our Badger men,” said Pammelah Something, scrunching down her own beret.<
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  It was possibly the weirdest thing I’d ever heard anyone say out loud in my entire sorry life.

  About the game and “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” and “On, Wisconsin!”, the less said the better. The whole time I was conscious of little more than my shame and Celeste Fletcher’s jacketed presence in the bleachers. It was bad enough to be seen in such a state by people I didn’t know, but when it came to Fiona … I’ll just say I was almost crying literal tears of humiliation and leave it at that. I’ll tell you what, Sam Hellerman’s escape hatch, that is, a couple of illicitly acquired tranquilizers swallowed with a large glass of bourbon, wasn’t looking too bad. For the first time, I felt I understood.

  “We” won, by the way. By which I mean, the Clearview normal psychos had managed to throw their little ball through the hoop more often than the normal psychos from whatever the hell the other high school was called. It was indeed a great day for America.

  Everyone was happy, anyway. As the triumphant Clearview student body tramped off to celebrate, setting things on fire and beating up orphans or whatever they do to express joy and pride, we band people stayed behind to gloat amongst ourselves, congratulating each other on a job well done supporting our Badger men.

  Pammelah and the Robot and the always fetching Blossom van Kinkle were sharing a big energy drink bottle that turned out to contain red wine.

  They started to sing:

  “On, Wisconsin,

  suck my johnson

  lick my hairy balls.…”

  Now, okay, that was pretty funny. Because they were mocking everything they believed in. Plus: balls. I honestly hadn’t thought they had it in them, so to speak.