King Dork Approximately

by Frank Portman

  “I’m glad she has someone to talk to now,” Pammelah had continued, meaning me, and she displayed what I thought was surprising honesty by admitting she sometimes saw the Robot as something of a burden and didn’t know how to deal with her and had no idea what to say to her most times. It was almost like she was relieved to be passing her off to someone else, or at least to have someone to share the burden. I didn’t think it was all that burdensome, really, but then again, I didn’t know what to say either. I figured just asking her if she was okay from time to time was both the least and the most I could do. She always said yes.

  At any rate, it was pretty convenient to have easy access to a brain-deadening agent—the Robot’s alcohol supply—though I didn’t overdo it by any means. I’ve never been a big drinker, but it was really pretty much impossible to take Clearview High’s weirdness without some help.

  Later that day, in the band room, the Robot came in holding a big book close to her chest.

  “You like books,” she said.

  I nodded warily. I trusted the Robot, but this was a sore spot. I didn’t want just anyone tagging me as a book reader, as I’ve explained.

  “I think they’re okay,” I said, hoping she could read on my face that “okay” was a euphemism for really, really, really terrific.

  “I think they’re okay too,” she said.

  There was a pause.

  “I liked How to Kill a Mockingbird,” she said. “Do you like art?”

  My look said that I didn’t know much about art, but I knew what I liked, which was basically naked ladies, so I guessed the answer was yeah, it’s okay. She understood, and nodded. Boy, was this conversation awkward. I honestly preferred to do this in written form, where I’d read ten insane pages and then respond “I don’t know” to everything later at my leisure.

  At long last, the Robot got to the point, showing me her book, which was a book of Salvador Dalí art from the library. That’s where I first saw the picture of him with the sexy deskwoman. That photo made a powerful impression on me, but there were paintings of interest as well, including one called Shirley Temple, The Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time, and another called Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening, which had a naked lady in it. These would have made fantastic album titles, and covers, and the ladies were decent as well. Impressive guy. It was kind of too bad he lived before rock and roll.

  “And here’s one about you,” said the Robot, turning to a page featuring a painting called The Great Masturbator. Her voice dissolved into a storm of giggles, but I was nonetheless taken aback: however did she know? But then I realized: yeah, that’s pretty much everyone, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t it? Anyway, I guess setting up that “joke” had been the whole point of the conversation. Most amusing.

  At that point, Pammelah came into the band room and said, “Excuse me, Roberta, I need to talk to Thomas about something.”

  The Robot said “Bow chicka wow wow” and scrammed. And Pammelah Shumway stuck her tongue in my mouth.

  NEW BAND NAME

  How to Kill a Mockingbird.

  Guitar and vocals: the Great Masturbator

  Bass and lobsters: the Good Masturbator

  Drums and ennui: the Halfway Decent Masturbator

  First album: The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table

  WOMEN!

  Sam Hellerman had been dead accurate in his prediction that having a sexy, not-too-bad-looking girlfriend would raise my status at Clearview High School. “Other men” seemed impressed, and girls also seemed to be friendlier, or at least less hostile, than I was used to. You’d think that my official choice of Pammelah Shumway would have dampened things considerably between me and Blossom van Kinkle, but in fact, Blossom van Kinkle still, it seemed to me, had that unholy light in her eyes when she looked at me, and she began to flirt with me quite openly and as never before. This, in turn, seemed to give the wider population of girls the impression, mistaken though it undoubtedly was, that there was, perhaps, a little more to me than met the eye. It was like the Hellerman tapes had come to life before my eyes. The secrets of women had been revealed.

  There was one time when Pammelah was dressed particularly sexily, in a little skirt and long socks and those high-heeled boots with fur on them, and this normal guy walking past told me I was “da man” and fist-bumped me. (I’ve still never quite gotten used to that, as I tend to see every approaching fist as a developing punch, but I recovered enough to do the bump in the end, if only just barely.) But how often does King Dork get told by some random guy, even a big dumb normal lug, that he’s “da man”? Answer: not often. But it happened once. It was hard not to enjoy that, at least a little.

  “You know,” I said, only half joking, “if you keep dressing like this, some normal guy is going to take a liking to you and decide to stomp me into the ground till only the stones remain.”

  “Aw, thanks, Thomas,” Pammelah said, with a look in her weirdly distant eye that left the distinct impression that to her way of thinking such a course of events might well have its silver lining. “You’re so sweet.”

  Silly as it seems, I took the precaution, when walking around the Quad with Pammelah Shumway, of invoking the protective Spirit of the Clearview Badgers by wearing my orange Badger beret, pulled down tightly around my ears. Surely you wouldn’t stomp a card-carrying, beret-wearing Badger in good standing into the ground till only the stones remain, was the message I hoped it communicated. It may not have been much, but sad to say, the Spirit was pretty much all I had.

  My having a girlfriend even had an effect on Celeste Fletcher, who had mostly shunned me since becoming a jacket girl, refusing to acknowledge my existence despite sitting right in front of me in Mrs. Pizzaballa’s class. Not that she was all that nice, mind you. But I had moved up in the world enough to where she evidently felt she could get away with being seen conversing with me without damaging her reputation too much. (Incidentally, I had recently learned that Celeste Fletcher had joined drama and was currently set to star in a school production of … Grease. Sometimes you can actually hear the universe laughing behind your back.)

  “How’s your girlfriend?” she said once, after the piano chords had signaled the end of Mrs. Pizzaballa’s class.

  “She’s fine,” I said.

  “I’m sure she is,” said Celeste Fletcher with enough of an eye roll to suggest that one or the other of us had just been insulted, though I had no idea about what. “Oh, and by the way,” she continued even as she set off down the hall, “could you tell your drummer to please stop calling me all the time? My dad wants to get a restraining order.”

  “Nice talking to you,” I said. Even her walk, though nice to watch as always, looked peeved and hostile. Oh, she was normal, all right.

  So Shinefield hadn’t taken Sam Hellerman’s radio silence advice, just as Sam Hellerman had predicted, and his failure to follow the radio silence advice was working out about as predicted as well. My heart went out to Shinefield almost in spite of myself, because I had an inkling of what he was going through, but it also occurred to me that he was, in part, suffering from the curse of being seminormal and optimistic and confident enough to do ill-advised things like make an ass of himself phone-stalking an estranged girlfriend. A single rebuff is usually enough to turn me into an antisocial, hyperventilating, lovelorn lyrics generator, shunning contact with the outside world and lovingly caressing my enemies list. All in all, that’s a much better way to handle the situation, it seems to me.

  As for Sam Hellerman’s love life, if such there were, it remained mysterious, and he remained his characteristic inscrutable self in response to any questions about it.

  “How’s Jeans Skirt Girl going?” I asked one time when I met him at Toby’s to look through the new arrivals. Jeans Skirt Girl had never made an appearance at band practice as I’d half expected, and he hadn’t mentioned her since that fateful day at the Aladdin Arcade.
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  “Cynthia with a ‘y,’ you mean,” he said. So he knew her name. That was progress.

  “But wait a minute,” I said. “Doesn’t ‘Cynthia’ normally have a ‘y’ in it?” What was the need to specify?

  “The ‘y’ is in place of the ‘i’ at the end,” said Sam Hellerman, “and there’s an ‘i’ instead of the first ‘y.’ And there’s an ‘x’ instead of the dot on the ‘i.’ ” He spelled it out for me: C-I-N-T-H-Y-A.

  “So it’s Cinthya with a Y, X above the I?” I said, clarifying.

  “Exactly,” said Sam Hellerman.

  We gave each other the look that said: “Women!”

  THE REPTILIANS

  I still hadn’t given up on my lawsuit idea, though it was seeming less and less likely to come about anytime soon, and Sam Hellerman’s interest in using it as a way to generate publicity for the Mountain Dew show seemed to have dwindled to just about zero. But whatever you do on your own, he cautioned, keep the Catcher Code out of it. It was hard to see why he should care, but the ways of the boy genius are unfathomable to mere mortals like me. I told him what he wanted to hear, but of course the Catcher Code was integral to my case, the linchpin of the whole thing, and I wasn’t going to leave it out. I wanted teams of investigators combing through the archives, digging up the grounds of schools, diagramming Mr. Teone’s associations and movements looking for patterns, exposing the whole rotten mess. But failing that, I at least wanted an opportunity to make a public declaration that Mr. Teone had killed my dad and that the normal world had conspired to cover it up and had facilitated the attempt on my life as well. If that resulted in general moral condemnation of Normalism itself, as it certainly should, well then, so be it.

  I had a feeling, though, that Sam Hellerman was right to the extent that as a minor I’d need the participation of a legal guardian to get anywhere with this plan. And that meant Little Big Tom. I knew it would be a long shot, but I gathered up my files and took them over to the El Capitano Motor Lodge for an informal consultation.

  He was pleased to see me as always, but he was looking pretty rough, still in his underwear and leaving the definite impression that he hadn’t shaved or bathed, or even left the room, in days.

  “How’s the radio silence going?” I asked. In response, he stared at me glumly, saying nothing, though if I’d learned anything from Sam Hellerman on this topic it was that it was probably not going all that well. Radio silence in the face of romantic trouble takes an iron will that few possess. And it didn’t seem very likely that Little Big Tom would turn out to be one of the few who did.

  Anyway, with those pleasantries out of the way, I launched into my carefully prepared argument for the indictment of Mr. Teone and the United States of America for murder, conspiracy, and crimes against humanity, including as exhibits all the necessary documentation, from my dad’s old copy of The Catcher in the Rye to the Catcher Code, the marginal notes in the books from my dad’s teen library, my medical charts, everything I had. It was my best presentation of the case thus far. And I ended it with a simple, heartfelt plea: will you help me?

  Little Big Tom took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes vigorously. He opened his mouth to speak and shut it right back up again no less than four times before seeming to give up on the idea of speaking for good. Then he just stared at me for what seemed like a long, long time.

  In view of this reaction, if he had said “Get out of here” like Herr Hellerman had, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised. But instead he said:

  “Karma …” Then he was silent again. “You know, chief,” he continued eventually, “there’s an old saying that you reap what you sow. It’s the old eastern idea of karma, really a very cool philosophy. When people have wronged you, the best thing to do is to turn the other cheek and not sink to their level. I think you’ll find that a life lived in negativity like that will have its effects. I understand that you’re angry, angry at those kids and … at other … various … things. But trust me about the karma. I promise you they’re not going to have an easy time, living with that kind of energy. The best revenge is not to wallow in their darkness but to seek the light. Clear a path for justice, and then let it happen. And it will. You see?”

  Yes, I saw very well: it was a brush-off.

  Now, it should go without saying, really, that Little Big Tom didn’t know what he was talking about. His knowledge of eastern philosophy was based, I’m certain, on a vague familiarity with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a bumper sticker he had once read while stuck in traffic behind a minivan painted like an eggplant, and possibly some mushrooms he once ate.

  As a matter of fact, I didn’t, and still don’t, believe in justice, other than the kind you make for yourself. If justice were real, there would be no Normalism. The normal people would all have gotten their comeuppance long, long ago and died out by natural selection, leaving the world to the decent and the nice to rule in their place. But I wasn’t about to argue philosophy with Little Big Tom. And anyway, it didn’t look like he’d be up to any courtroom appearances anytime soon.

  I was gathering up my materials dejectedly when Little Big Tom roused himself.

  “If you do want legal advice, though,” he said, to my surprise, “there’s someone who might be able to help.”

  We were driving on the freeway in Little Big Tom’s truck. He still seemed pretty out of it, but at least he’d had the presence of mind to put on pants. I admired that. And even if this supposed legal advice turned out to be a dead end, which I considered highly probable, at least it was getting him out of the house, or the motel, rather. My questions about where we were going and who we were going to see were waved away.

  “Sit tight” was all he would say.

  I sat tight.

  It was yet another silent ride. I suppose that was partly owing to my having freaked him out with the Catcher Code, but also it was clear that Little Big Tom wasn’t doing so well in general. He even passed a trucker without doing the hand signal to try to get him to sound the horn, and he went by the ramp for Filibuster Road without even saying “Filibuster? I didn’t even know her.” It was almost like he wasn’t the same guy.

  Eventually we exited the freeway and drove down a frontage road along the bay, finally edging in toward a little line of houseboats moored to a small dock. I almost literally slapped my forehead.

  “Flapjack?” I said.

  “Flapjack,” said Little Big Tom. “He has a law degree.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. This ought to be good.

  Flapjack answered the houseboat door with a shotgun in his hands, totally naked except for a grubby bathrobe that barely closed around his enormous belly and failed completely to conceal that which was in urgent need of concealment.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said, motioning us in with the gun.

  “Flapjack doesn’t like visitors,” whispered Little Big Tom reassuringly.

  “Wonderful,” I said.

  I had never been on a houseboat before, and I was surprised at how unboatlike it really was. Once you got down the stairs, it was like being in a compact, damp room. If a fastidious person had lived there, it might have been kind of a cool setup, everything stowed in a neat series of cleverly designed drawers and cabinets; pieces of built-in furniture doing double or triple duty, like the table-counter-desk; polished brass whatchamacallits; the sound of the shorebirds and the lonely whistle of the freight trains in the distance. Well, that was the ideal. The reality of Flapjack’s houseboat was quite different. It was a filthy, chaotic collection of little piles of junk and trash that were at various stages of joining together into larger piles of junk and trash. It smelled a bit like the girls’ restroom at the Salthaven Rec Center, the one with the broken lock. I was afraid to touch anything, lest I disturb any of the animals that were, in all probability, nesting within.

  Several layers deep, poking out here and there through the grimy thicket of refuse, could be seen evidence of a once thriving and obviousl
y pretty interesting life. I mean stacks of LPs, moldering books, guitars, electronic equipment, and quite a few large paintings leaning in careless clumps, apparently Flapjack’s own work. Some of them, despite the absence of naked ladies, seemed pretty good. I was looking at the wreck of a human life, a wreck that genius guitar playing and a supposed law degree hadn’t managed to salvage.

  Little Big Tom looked at me meaningfully as Flapjack motioned to us to sit on a small benchlike sofa while he settled himself on the floor, or deck, I suppose you’d say, across from us in what I think is called the lotus position—an impressive contortion for such a fat person—with the gun across his knees. Fortunately, his belly hung all the way down to the floor, restoring his modesty. Like the Buddha. We stared at each other.

  Little Big Tom motioned me to begin. So I presented my indictment against the Universe, in all its particulars, for the fourth time, handing over the documents to Flapjack at the appropriate points, telling it all as carefully and clearly as I could. I was getting pretty good at it, with all this practice. Flapjack appeared to be engaged and following me closely but made no comment till I was finished.

  Actually, he stared at me for quite some time after I’d reached the end, an unreadable expression on his face. I was used to that. It was a lot to take in all at once, I knew.

  Finally, he started laughing. It began as a quiet chuckle and built to a boat-shaking thunder of deep, resonant belly laughs, punctuated by the occasional ghost of a cough, and in the end dissolving into the by-now-familiar emphysemic hacking that was his signature sound effect. He wore a wry expression.