King Dork Approximately

by Frank Portman

  Well, I mean, basically, I’m not an idiot: I knew I was being offered Pammelah on a silver platter here, in a plan obviously cooked up between the two of them, good cop/oblivious cop style, if o. means what I think it does. In other words, it seemed like something I could probably definitely get away with. So whatever “hots” I had for Pammelah, it didn’t look like they’d have to be “secret hots.” And I was, frankly, getting pretty tired of secret hots. Pammelah was no Celeste Fletcher, and Blossom van Kinkle was the hotter of the two by a wide margin, but I wasn’t being offered any sort of deal concerning them. And the one I was being offered was pretty cute and quite sexy, far beyond what I could have reasonably expected to “go” with on my credentials alone. The Robot was right: she had the “boobies like boys like,” and even her WHR wasn’t too bad. She did exhibit some unusual behavior, and maybe the crazy eyes. But she was available, available as they come. There was no doubt that she was the smart one to say I had the hots for, and it wasn’t even all that untrue.

  Yet somehow, despite having what can only be described as a “sure thing” on my hands, I found the prospect of actually following the Robot’s crystal clear, step-by-step instructions in real life to be extremely daunting. I wasn’t sure I could go through with it. And I also found I couldn’t manage to will myself to know what to say to the Robot about the matter either.

  “I don’t know,” I said finally.

  “You know,” said the Female Robot, “you don’t know more often than anyone else I’ve ever known.”

  I knew.

  MEANWHILE, I WAS STILL THINKING.…

  Later on, on the bus back from the Slut Heaven game, while Pammelah was “otherwise occupied,” Roberta the F. R. asked me what kind of girls I liked, and when I said I didn’t know she shook her head and said “Oh, Thomas, oh, Thomas …” But then she added:

  “Who’s the girl in the song?”

  After some confusion, I realized she was talking about the little bit of lyrics she had seen in my notebook way back after our first “pep band” experience, the beginning of the “King Dork Strikes Again” work-very-much-in-progress.

  There are things I’d like to get across to you, my dear

  Approximate emotions I believe you ought to hear

  hey hey hey, little calendar girl

  before you disappear

  I’ll try to make myself at least approximately clear.…

  “You say she’s your ‘dear,’ ” said the Robot, remembering pretty well.

  I didn’t see any reason not to tell her about Celeste Fletcher and how we used to be, kind of … close. She was incredulous.

  “Celeste?” she said. “Going-Out-with-Todd-Dante Celeste? That’s your ex?”

  Well, now, “ex” was maybe pushing things, if she meant ex-girlfriend, which she did. I’d made out with Celeste Fletcher a couple times, signed her tits once, got a drugged-up hand job from her in the hospital—at least, I think I did—and managed casually as if by accident to touch her ass a few times thereafter. Not the deepest or most “meaningful” relationship in the history of the battle of the sexes by any stretch. And if you had ever called her my girlfriend in her presence she’d have hit you with a tire iron. I mean, if she’d happened to be holding a tire iron at the time. I doubt she’d actually make the effort to go out and find a tire iron just to hit you with if she didn’t already have one. But she’d be mad.

  Anyway, I suppose I said I didn’t know in the “yes” way rather than in the “no” way.

  The Robot was staring at me in awe. Celeste Fletcher had clawed her way to the upper midrange of the Clearview girl hierarchy, and Todd Dante was a big-deal football or basketball guy, worshipped by one and all among the general population of the school, which, as I’ve noted, tilted heavily normal. Sam Hellerman had explained that a guy could raise his stock dramatically among females if they saw him associated with pretty girls, particularly those above their own status. It seemed to be what was happening here. I guess merely being the “ex” of someone who is the not-yet-“ex” of a popular sports guy confers a little of the sports guy’s allure. Chalk up another one to Sam Hellerman and the Hellerman tapes. They were running around four–zip, by my calculations.

  When Pammelah returned from the front of the bus, the Robot moved to make room for her next to me, but not before doing some hurried whispering directly into Pammelah’s ear. Telling her about Celeste Fletcher? I imagine so, because Pammelah’s off-kilter eyes instantly began to take on the same look of astonishment and awe.

  Meanwhile, I was thinking: I’ve got the chance and I ought to take it. And the way I saw it, there was no reason this whole thing couldn’t be accomplished without resorting to the terrifyingly extreme tactic of exchanging actual words.

  So I tentatively put the very edge of my hand so it was just touching Pammelah’s leg. Her hand found mine. And, in secret, hidden underneath our two pressed-together thighs, my slender one and her quite a bit more substantial one, we rubbed our fingers all over each other the whole way, while the Robot chattered on and on and the kids on the bus sang “On, Wisconsin, suck my johnson.…”

  It was a nice moment.

  “What’s the song about?” the Robot said at one point.

  “I think it’s about getting a blow job from the University of Wisconsin at Madison,” I said.

  “No, your song!” she said, and her eyes added: “Idiot.”

  What was my song about?

  “I don’t know,” I said. But I gave her the look that says: “I think it’s about how it’s difficult to explain how hard it is to figure out how to go about trying to express how difficult to explain everything is.”

  Sam Hellerman had advised, in the aftermath of the Jeans Skirt Girl operation, that the best way to kiss a girl the first time is, contrary to popular belief, just to zoom in and do it with little preamble. Talk to her first, of course, to ensure her comfort with you, but don’t waste time trying to “set it up.” Just do it. And whatever you do, don’t ask if it’s okay. Girls, apparently, hate it when a guy goes “I really want to kiss you, would that be all right?” and they instantly lose respect for any guy who does it.

  “Just make eye contact and lean into her,” he had said. “And if you can organize it so you can push her up against a wall as you do it, they love that too.” Kind of tragic, if so, when you think about how the Aladdin Arcade had had no available walls. Or maybe it was not tragedy but merely poor organizational skills.

  So meanwhile, I was still thinking. I was sure I could organize things better than that.

  I waited for my moment, and when circumstances allowed, I pushed Pammelah Something up against the wall—well, the shelves really—of the band room, made contact with her eyes, and then made contact with her mouth. Well, what can I say? It was maybe a bit awkward because of her being bigger than me. But it was kissing a girl and it went as well as it could have, in my estimation, except for this one part halfway through where I started to wonder if I was failing to be interesting enough in there and to worry that my tongue may have, in fact, overstayed its welcome and to consider the possibility that my best course of action might well be to cut my losses and run from the room sobbing, never to be heard from again. But then she looked at me and said, I kid you not, “Mm, I’d like another one of those.” Essentially, Pammelah Something (whose actual last name had turned out to be Shumway, of all things) responded with wild passion, just as the Robot had hinted and as Sam Hellerman had confidently predicted. And I had to hand it to the Robot on another matter as well, concerning the ass-grabbio: it was a pretty good butt, if not, perhaps, literally the “best in the west.”

  HEY, I’LL TAKE IT

  So that, my dear friends, is how your illustrious narrator, through no fault of his own and largely by accident, wound up with a girlfriend. And they said it couldn’t be done.

  I didn’t even have to ask her, in so many words, to “go.” Which I’m glad about, because the practice runs in my head hadn’t gon
e well. I mean, it’s pretty much impossible to say “Do you want to go?” and have it not sound sarcastic, no matter how hard you try. But in the event, the kiss (Hellermanian method, against-the-shelves variation) was all it took. We were going.

  And that’s how Pammelah Shumway wound up in the red beanbag in the Celeste Fletcher spot at our band practice, looking all sexy, calling me “sweetie,” and asking if I was going to “play her song.” By “her song” she meant the half-finished “King Dork Strikes Again,” though she didn’t know it by that title. I’m afraid I must admit that the title under which she knew it was “Pamm’s Song.” This is because, after hearing the Robot refer to it a few times, she had said:

  “Is it about me?”

  The look I gave her was one of surprise mingled with indignation and slight amusement at this presumptuous question. I’m not so cavalier with my songs, young lady, if “cavalier” means what I think it does. My songs are sacred. But Pammelah Shumway, being just about the worst face-reader I’ve ever come across in a lifetime of making people try to read my face, had taken that as a solid yes. Then, well, I guess I just kind of ran with it, because I didn’t know what else to do. And I was staring at her breasts, which distracted me at the crucial moment when I might have figured out a way to say “No, it isn’t, actually.” Not that I’m convinced there would have been one, practically speaking.

  So I guess I am pretty cavalier with my songs after all.

  But that brings us to the other matter, that of Pammelah Shumway’s sexiness. Almost as soon as we had reached the state of “going,” she had started dressing better, by which I mean sluttier. The skirts got shorter, the shirts got tighter and lower, and the shoes got higher. Sam Hellerman was fairly—and in another sense kind of unfairly—critical of Pammelah’s WHR, but he was encouraging about this development. It shows that she cares enough about you to try to look good for you and to make you look good in front of other men, raising your status accordingly, he said. Well, all due snickers and snorts to that other “men” bit aside, of course I liked it. I mean, that was the point, wasn’t it? Liking things about each other, I mean?

  As for what she liked about me, well, honestly, I can’t help you there. All I had to go on was stuff the Robot had said, that she liked my eyes, my hair, and my supposed resemblance to the kid on Malcolm in the Middle, and that she thought I was “cute and funny.” She liked my teeth. I kid you not, there was apparently something intoxicating about them, something that couldn’t be put into words. In fact, I’d pardon you for wondering if this whole thing might not have been a slow-building, meticulously planned Make-out/Fake-out. I had that thought myself but had rejected it for two reasons: (a) Pammelah Shumway, though moving up in the world of sexiness, to be sure, was nowhere near high-status enough to attempt a classic Make-out/Fake-out on me, especially since I was, as far as anybody at Clearview knew, in a neutral zone between normalcy and decency, and a fellow “pep band” member to boot; and (b) the Robot, whatever else she was, was unquestionably genuine. Everything she was, and every waking thought she had, was voluminously documented, in a form that would be simply impossible to fake.

  But you know my philosophy. Oh, you don’t? It’s called the Hey, I’ll Take It philosophy, and it goes like this: “Hey, I’ll take it.” I’d stumbled into Pammelah Shumway, and right or wrong, I was going to roll with it.

  Having a girl with large breasts on your team comes with all sorts of benefits, one of which I’ll illustrate by explaining what happened when Shinefield, hearing Pammelah ask about “her song,” began to look puzzled and perturbed, being under the impression, precarious though it may have been, that we were practicing only covers in the run up to the Mountain Dew show. And what happened was this: nothing. He was too distracted to notice much of anything in any way that mattered. Never underestimate the power of loveliness. It can move mountains, or at least make you forget that there was a mountain there in the first place, which is just as good. Maybe better.

  Sam Hellerman motioned to me to start the strum intro of “King Dork Strikes Again” and directed Shinefield to play “Cat Scratch Fever.”

  Well, I wasn’t finished with the lyrics, but it sounded pretty decent, though maybe on the quick side, tempo-wise. As for my girlfriend, she seemed to like the idea of there being a song about her. But it was clear that, for whatever reason, she just didn’t get it—the music, the song, just rock and roll in general. She would smile, but her basic attitude seemed to be one of total bewilderment with a tinge of, let’s face it, boredom. She had one of those car phones you carry with you everywhere, though mercifully she didn’t wear it in a holster like Sam Hellerman, and she kept going out to take calls while we were practicing. I tried not to be offended, but, you know, this was my rock and roll we were talking about here, and I was singing a song that I was pretending was about her, though of course, outwardly it still sounded like “Cat Scratch Fever.” But she could at least turn the phone off and give it some attention, it seemed to me.

  The Robot showed up later, having come straight from her cross-country race or whatever it was, still dressed in her orange and white Badger running gear. She had a big bottle of iced tea, which turned out actually to contain bourbon, and when the girls began to pass it back and forth, my girlfriend loosened up quite a bit. She liked the way I looked with a guitar, I could tell—once she’d had a few drinks, anyway.

  And what about Naomi? Well, Naomi, Bert Jansch, Blind Blake, Big Bill Broonzy, O’Brien, and I were getting along just great. I still couldn’t play to save my life, and listening to Big Bill Broonzy made me kind of embarrassed that I’d ever tried to call myself a guitar player. My attempts to play like Blind Blake were an absolute fiasco. I even tried blindfolding myself while trying to do “Diddie Wa Diddie” just to see if it would help. (It didn’t.) But sighin’, cryin’, and tryin’ to learn to play “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian” wasn’t going all that badly, even if it wasn’t quite … flyin’. And even my own little songs were nice to play on Naomi—they had a warm, “real” feel to them that my cigarette-box amp just couldn’t equal. I even found I had some success willing “King Dork Strikes Again” to be about Pammelah Shumway instead of Celeste Fletcher. After all, my real girlfriend was a lot nicer than my old fake imaginary girlfriend, but that didn’t mean it was any easier to explain stuff. Quite the contrary, really.

  My girlfriend. It sounded so strange to say it. It still sounds strange to say it, as you will surely hear if you go back to the beginning of this paragraph, pretend you’re me, and read the first sentence of it out loud.

  FONZIE

  At home, very little had changed since Little Big Tom had moved to the El Capitano Motor Lodge. My mom had been going out more, always saying she was headed “to therapy,” but with my mom, the difference between her being out and not being out could be difficult to spot. Amanda and I wound up eating more delivered pizza and frozen food, which some people would complain about, I guess, but it’s safe to say that such people are coming from a place of never having experienced Little Big Tom’s big pots of vegetarian slop.

  I visited Little Big Tom from time to time, when I could. It was almost unbearably depressing in that motel room, but he was always so relieved to see me when he opened the door that I felt I just couldn’t deprive him of what seemed like the sole bright spot in his otherwise grim existence. He seemed to spend most of his time actually in the room, typing away on his laptop. When I asked what he was writing he said:

  “Memoirs.”

  Well, that sure sounds like an interesting “read.” You can’t make this stuff up, you really can’t.

  Of course I had gone straight to Amanda with the news about the Case of Little Big Tom and the Nonexistent Gym Bag.

  Her reaction had been “Well, of course he’d say that.” But she hadn’t seen the unquestionably genuine look of utter confusion on Little Big Tom’s face when I brought it up.

  Let’s find this gym bag, I thought, and rummag
ed through the dark, silent house, till at last I located, in the master bedroom closet, a duffel bag that contained, in each of two side pockets, a pair of ladies’ panties, one pink and the other powder blue. Kind of strange, I remarked to Amanda, that Little Big Tom hadn’t taken his gym bag with him to the El Capitano Motor Lodge. And even stranger, I continued, that Little Big Tom’s gym bag happened to have a Santa Carla Police Department seal on it and closely resembled our dad’s old police bag.

  To my mind, this pretty much wrapped up the case of the hot underwear in the gym bag. Whatever the interparental-unit conflict may have been about, the underwear in the bag was completely irrelevant to it.

  “Would I be all that far off in speculating, mademoiselle,” I said, going all Hercule Poirot on her ass, “that it was you, Amanda Henderson, who planted the underwear in this bag, under the mistaken impression that it belonged to the suspect, with the intention of ensnaring le Grand Tom in a clever plot to force his vacation of the premises? Is it not that that is the case?” Or words to that effect. My Belgian accent rules, have I ever mentioned that?

  Amanda looked back at me with a serene expression, as though to say “I couldn’t possibly comment, and even if I did, what does it matter? It worked, didn’t it?”

  I gave her the look that says “No, it didn’t.”

  Her response look of “Oh yeah? Then where is he?” was quickly followed by one that said, if I’m not mistaken, “You’re such an asshole.”

  Amanda’s gloating didn’t fool me: I could tell she wasn’t a hundred percent pleased with how things were turning out around here. I mean, how could she be? A weird impulse made me ask if she’d like to come with me to visit Little Big Tom at the motel sometime, but her exaggerated eye roll seemed to be a “No, I’d rather drink lighter fluid.”