King Dork Approximately

by Frank Portman

  The book was on Mrs. Pizzaballa’s list. I got it out of the library and started to read it, and it was indeed some great writing. I could very much see my dad reading it and even being in it. He was in a war too, you know. But I realized that there was still no way of knowing what Mrs. Pizzaballa was looking for in a review. I’d really thought I’d hit the bull’s-eye when I’d diagrammed one of the great sentences in Pride and Prejudice and wrote about how it’s more of an economics story than a love story. That seemed like a serious kind of thing to write, and it had the unusual distinction of being something I actually did think, about a book I actually had read, but it came back a zero like all the rest.

  That was when, in desperation, I finally looked at Mrs. Pizzaballa’s descriptions on the book list, which I guess I should have done in the first place. The one about Farewell to Arms wasn’t even about the book at all. It was about how this guy Hemingway was mean to women because his mother dressed him up as a girl when he was a baby, turning him secretly gay, and how his suicide was the cowardly act of an entitled, impotent brute in denial of his own sexuality. (“Impotent” means you have trouble ramoning, more or less, and Mr. Schtuppe would have been pretty confused about how to mispronounce it, since the only way to get it right is to try to do it wrong.) Anyway, I don’t know if that’s true or not, or if it even could possibly be true, but even if it is, how did it have anything to do with the book? No wonder I couldn’t figure out what she wanted. It turned out that all her descriptions were like that, personal attacks on the authors for being bad people. They were racist, or sexist, or homophobes, or colonialists, or rich people who mistreated their servants or who abandoned their mentally handicapped children or who happened to live in countries that did bad things, or just plain old drunks who cheated on their wives and evaded taxes. Nothing in the descriptions required any knowledge of the books themselves. In fact, it was looking very much like the author of the list (Mrs. Pizzaballa herself, I had to assume) was the one who had figured out a way to get out of doing the reading, not me. And if so, I didn’t blame her. If I were an English teacher, I’d want to put in the least possible effort too.

  I started to write something in my journal to the effect that I wasn’t sure that the Hemingway description was quite as politically correct as she seemed to think it was, but then I crossed it out, because I had just remembered one of Mrs. Pizzaballa’s own Life Lessons.

  “Anyone who isn’t the president has a boss,” she had said, “and anyone who has a boss has to do what their boss says, to the letter. And you’re not the president.” Something clicked in my mind as I realized that most of Mrs. Pizzaballa’s Life Lessons had been along those lines.

  Armed with the knowledge that I was not the President of the United States and based on the premise that Mrs. Pizzaballa was, for the purposes of this class, my boss, I copied out her irrelevant descriptions for ten of the ten-point books, word for word, to the letter.

  The journal came back with a perfect score of 100 along with a smiley face with an x for one of the eyes (a wink, I believe) and the sublimely Pizzaballian message: “Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

  And indeed I felt as though I had learned something important, and awful.

  So I didn’t have to read A Farewell to Arms after all, though I probably will one of these days. That was easily the most work I’d ever had to do to avoid doing work in a class. I guess maybe that’s what they mean by rigorous academic standards. I have no doubt that Mrs. Pizzaballa’s most important Life Lesson was right: in school, in social situations, in love, and in life in general, the way to succeed is to figure out exactly what is expected of you and do precisely that, nothing more, nothing less, while keeping your big mouth shut. And I guess that’s probably why I’m so terrible at all those things, like anyone else who can’t follow instructions and who isn’t the president.

  CARRIE

  I tried to break up with Pammelah Shumway four times before it “took,” and the way it went down when it finally did, well, a tale lies in there, as I think the saying goes.

  If you’ve never tried to do it yourself, you probably don’t know that it is virtually impossible to break up with a girl who doesn’t want you to break up with her, even if you’re not getting along, and even if she kind of hates you. I mean, I suppose you could do it by just leaving a note on her windshield or locker saying “Bye, toots, it was fun” and then never call her and never answer the phone or return her messages and, if necessary, change your identity and move to Cleveland. That’s actually how girls do it sometimes—if you’ll remember Celeste Fletcher’s breakup procedure with Shinefield, it kind of went that way, except she didn’t go so far as to move to Cleveland.

  But if you’re like me and you want to have a conversation about it that ends with the acknowledgment that breaking up is the thing to do, possibly with a friendly mutual concession that it’s best for everybody and a pledge to remain on good terms, well, you can just forget it. It’s never going to happen.

  Try this one: “You know, honey, it seems like you’re always kind of mad at me, and it’s clear that you’re not happy with our relationship and my personality and how I think and behave—which is perfectly fine, I know I’m an acquired taste—and moreover we don’t like to do the same things and when we do each other’s ‘things’ neither of us has a good time, so maybe we should just acknowledge that we’re not the most compatible couple and move on to other relationships that might be more satisfying to us both.”

  How’d that work out for you? I’ll tell you how it worked out for me. My girlfriend told me not to flatter myself, and that everything would be just fine if I would stop being such a dick to her friends and learn to have a little fun sometimes and not be so weird. Then, somehow, she made it into this thing about how if I thought I could do better then go right ahead if I don’t think she’s pretty enough for me. Well, I couldn’t look her in the eye and tell her she wasn’t pretty enough for me. I just couldn’t. And that was all that seemed to matter to her.

  Sometimes she would say she didn’t want to be my girlfriend if I didn’t want her to, but she clearly was only saying that to sound reasonable, because it was obvious by how difficult she was making the whole thing that that was pretty much exactly what she wanted. Sam Hellerman’s take on it was that she probably wanted to be the one to break up with me rather than the other way around to avoid a loss of face, and that seemed pretty plausible, so I experimented with lying low and biding my time, waiting for her to give me the “it’s not you, it’s me” talk I’ve heard so much about, or simply to disappear to Cleveland, which, frankly, would have been my preferred option. But it never happened, not even close.

  Admittedly, after all the stress of these conversations, it was a relief to back off from them, act like their failure was a resolution, pretend things were okay and that we’d “worked it out,” and just go back to making out. Sometimes it’s nice just to be able to stop talking.

  It all came to a kind of head, if I’m putting that right, because of … well, I’ll show you a bit of the Robot’s letter that first alerted me to the matter. And yes, the Robot’s letters continued their function as a relationship facilitator even after Pammelah Shumway and her normal friends had shunted her aside. Indeed, it was almost as though providing me with passive-aggressive marching orders was the Robot’s one remaining use to her. Anyway, as to the relevant bit of the letter, it ran:

  … what do you think is smarter, trees or plants? You know what Pamm said? You give her “girl wood”! Are you still mad at her? I hope not. I don’t like when she’s sad. Come on Thomas, think about the makeup sex! (wink) [unintelligible] ugh [unintelligible] When are you gonna ask her to prom? Get off your ass man! JK!!! She showed me a picture of her dress and what a knockout, I think you’ll like her ass … etts! ha ha. get it? (wink) She’ll make it worth your while. Did you ever eat too much licorice? They should put rugs on walls so you can vackyume them (sp?)…

  Now, “prom” is short fo
r “promenade,” and I think it has its origin in the big debutante balls that slave owners used to have for their stuck-up daughters in the South before we won the Civil War. In modern-day high schools, it is pretty much the ultimate normal institution, involving all the worst characteristics of Normalcy: Pointlessness? Check. Embarrassingness? Check. Cruelty? Well, in the sense that it is a huge competition designed to make those who lack the status or money to join in feel debased, worthless, and inferior? Check. You dress up in a rented tuxedo, and the girls make their parents buy them gazillion-dollar dresses, and they book limos and sometimes hotel rooms for the binge drinking, ecstasy, and cocaine use that happens after the so-called dance part. And parents take pictures of their daughters with their dates and say things like, aw, how cute, they’re acting just like grown-ups. (As if actual people ever behaved like that at any time since the War Between the States.)

  Not only that, but it is also the ultimate staging area for, and possibly the origin of, the classic form of the traditional Make-out/Fake-out, with people being asked to go “as a joke,” or the nonnormal people who are foolish enough to dare to attend ridiculed and condescended to relentlessly by sadistic drunken normal people high on their own power. Just see the movie Carrie, if you want it spelled out for you.

  I hope that I would never knowingly participate in any activity, particularly one involving jumping through multiple hoops, whose chief objective is to make adults and normal people look at me and say “How cute.” The only good I ever saw in the “prom” was that it gathered all the normal people in one convenient location if anyone wanted to blow it up or lock all the doors with psychokinetic powers and burn everyone inside to a crisp.

  Now, it’s true, ramoning is part of the tradition as well, and it should go without saying that I fully support ramoning’s rich tapestry. It’s one of the main reasons kids look forward to the “prom” with such intensity, and fair enough. Hence the promise dangled before me that Pammelah would “make it worth my while.” Well, despite my deeply held principles, that might possibly have swayed me once, but as you know, the most that would happen there would be a sort of warp-speed Happy Days, the usual schizophrenic teasing, but in an expensive dress this time. Plus, as much as I cherished the dream of ramoning a nice-looking girl one day, I actually think I might have drawn the line anyway. I’ll endure a lot of humiliation for love, as you well know, but the “prom” was a bridge too far.

  I wasn’t going to the “prom.” No way in hell.

  Nevertheless, my clear orders, transmitted from headquarters by means of its Robot messenger service, were to get off my ass and ask headquarters, that is, Pammelah Shumway, to go to the “prom.” As is my usual custom, I procrastinated and avoided the subject as long as I could, but the pressure soon escalated to the point where it was impossible to avoid it any longer.

  I knew explaining the way I was feeling in an honest, sincere way and trying to make my girlfriend see my point of view enough to respect my wishes had no chance of success, but I tried anyway. She just ran circles around my logic, taking advantage of my nervousness and tied tongue and basically just wearing me down till I was so exhausted by the conversation that I had to back off and say we’d talk about it later. She took that as surrender, and it was, but on the big matter my resolve was firm, even if I couldn’t quite express my position, to anyone’s satisfaction, in words.

  “But,” I said, trying one last time, “why do you even want to go with me? You know I don’t want to, and you don’t even like me all that much.”

  Even she couldn’t deny that very convincingly, but her attitude seemed to be that she’d invested so much time and effort in being my girlfriend that the least she was entitled to was to be able to go to the “prom,” even if, as was certain, we were guaranteed to have an absolutely terrible time. She repeated the promise to “make it worth my while,” but she said it in a quite remarkably angry tone, and even had I believed it, at this point, I have to say that the prospect was sounding increasingly gruesome. And yes, I still can’t believe I’m saying that.

  So I tried explaining to the Robot why I didn’t want to go. Like this:

  “Ever seen the movie Carrie?”

  She hadn’t, and what was more, she wasn’t interested in trying to use the magic of cinema to decode my sentiments, which were, to her, incomprehensible. The Robot couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to participate, and I couldn’t make her understand. She just kept cajoling me, by letter and in in-person arguments, with the refrain: come on Thomas bone you know you want to just ask her Thomas just ask her.…

  As my resolve became more apparent, my girlfriend and the Robot proposed a compromise: all three of us would go to the prom together, “as a joke,” just to mess with everybody. I could even wear my Chucks with my tux, and we would defy convention and be deliberately weird, and dance all crazy with each other. And the pictures would be cute. It was the closest any Clearview person had ever come to grasping something of the spirit that animated me, and I was well aware that it was a big concession on my girlfriend’s part. But it didn’t address the issue. You can’t fight back by surrendering and joining in, even if you say you’re doing it as a joke. As I tried to explain:

  “Ever seen Revenge of the Nerds?”

  The Robot just told me to stop talking about movies all the time.

  “Well, why don’t the three of us do something fun together that night,” I suggested. “Can’t you ever do anything not sponsored by the school?” Like going to the beach and having a bonfire, or getting drunk by the tracks and talking about deep, important things, or going to a show in the city. Now, that actually sounded pretty nice to me, and I would have done it in a second. I looked fondly on those days back in the beginning, where it was just Pammelah, the Robot, and I, before my girlfriend turned evil and all the normal people came in and swamped our quirky, semihappy little world. “Why,” my eyes added, “does it have to be some contrived, humiliating ‘activity’ organized by the state in order to normalize and control everybody?”

  This didn’t make any sense to either of them, not that I expected it to, and in fact, it just made them madder, not that I expected it not to. It had to be the “prom.” But it wasn’t going to be the “prom.” It just wasn’t.

  On the day it happened, I was in a foul mood from all the tension. Everyone was irritated with me, it seemed, and it was certainly reciprocal, if “reciprocal” is the one where you do it right back at them.

  I was coming out of third period when I saw Celeste Fletcher heading down the hall toward me, with Todd Dante, the jacket guy of her dreams, in tow. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to act around her, but since we’d had a couple of conversations recently, I didn’t feel I could just pretend she wasn’t there, so I kind of nodded my head up in a cursory greeting as I walked past.

  Todd Dante grabbed me by the shoulder and pushed me against the Language Lab door.

  “This the guy?” he said to Celeste Fletcher, kind of sputtering.

  “No,” said Celeste, just as Todd Dante’s fist slammed with inexpressible force straight into my nose. There was a cracking sound as my nose broke, a hot sensation in my face as the blood rushed up and out, a pounding sound in my ears from the adrenaline, and a feeling of being unable to breathe from just, you know, being unable to breathe. Rushing blackness subsumed my field of vision, and I was gone for a while.

  ZERO TOLERANCE

  I think all people, men, women, children, and otherwise, should get punched in the face at least once, just so they will know what it feels like so they can grasp how important it is to avoid placing themselves in situations where it might happen and make their plans accordingly. For instance, if I had had the experience before being hit by Todd Dante, I would have known as soon as I saw him and Celeste coming that the most prudent thing to do would have been to turn around and run, not walk, in the other direction. I’m sure there would have been a broom closet or an empty classroom in which I could have cowered till th
e danger had passed. But no, I naively thought that nodding slightly in the direction of Celeste Fletcher when her normal psycho jacket provider was around was sound policy.

  I had, I realize now, been lulled into a false sense of invulnerability by the Clearview Badger Spirit. But there were limits, and nodding at Celeste Fletcher had crossed one of them.

  When I came to, I was in the hospital, and it was déjà vu all over again. As my eyes and ears and brain took in my surroundings, I saw Celeste Fletcher, still wearing the accursed jacket, standing in front of my little bed thing, saying “Tom, Tom, Tom …,” trying to wake me up. Which was déjà vu all over again all over again. Was she going to ask me to sign her tits and give me a hand job? I kind of doubted it, but you know, one lives in hope.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, once she had my attention. “Todd thought you were Shinefield. But you really shouldn’t have said hi to me. Where’s your girlfriend?”

  I ignored the question, because I didn’t know, and also because I kind of had an instinctive suspicion that I actually didn’t have a girlfriend anymore. I told Celeste that she should tell her primary jacket provider that when you ask “Is this the guy?” it is customary to wait until hearing the answer before hauling off and pummeling the person in question in the face with your enormous frozen brisket fist.

  “I know,” she said. “I keep telling him that.” Then she added, in a tone you might use to say someone has nice eyes or a dazzling smile: “He’s got a temper.”

  Indeed. Isn’t he dreamy. Good old violence. The chicks have always loved it, and always will.

  But there was to be no hand job or cleavage signing today. The world had moved on from hand jobs and cleavage signing, and we had moved with it, some voluntarily, some less so.