King Dork Approximately

by Frank Portman

  One problem right off the bat was that my nose hadn’t yet completely healed from Todd Dante’s punch and my voice was sounding pretty strange, nasal and also not all that loud. Hearing it in the monitors freaked me out, and my singing was about as awful as singing ever gets.

  However, the house was packed and the crowd was in a pretty good mood, ready for some actual entertainment after the sabotaged sets of the opening bands whose names I have now completely forgotten. (Sorry about that, dudes. You seemed like pretty nice guys.) I had figured we’d manage to do at least two songs before Shinefield would notice something was wrong that was systematic and engineered rather than the result of us just not being very good. Then it was anyone’s guess what he’d do. Be good-natured and continue the set? Storm off like Todd Panchowski had at the Hillmont High Battle of the Bands? Something in the middle?

  In fact, Shinefield managed to last an impressive four and a half songs. This was partly because Sam Hellerman had told the sound guy to turn off the drum monitor so he’d have a harder time hearing what we were doing; it was partly, perhaps, because he was high and didn’t have his wits about him; and possibly it was partly also because of his good nature and willingness to roll with things—always his best quality.

  It turned out to be a lot more confusing and disorienting to play the switcherooed versions of these songs in the auditorium setting than it had been in Shinefield’s basement. But “Fiona” to the drums of “Live Wire” still sounded more or less like an actual, if shaky, song, as did “Down with the Universe” to the drums of “Cat Scratch Fever.” With “King Dork Approximately” (also to the drums of “Cat Scratch Fever”) things were basically still on track, but getting ragged. I noticed Celeste Fletcher drifting into the venue halfway through that song, which kind of jumbled me up and made me make some mistakes. I was glad she got to hear some of it, though, somehow.

  By the time we got to “Cinthya with a Y,” it had finally begun to sink into Shinefield’s dope-fuzzed, good-natured brain that this whole set had been a deception, and possibly even a joke at his expense. And on “Caring, Healing, Understanding” he did some sabotage himself by returning to his old abhorrent technique for the duration of the song, making it almost incomprehensible, and then he threw his sticks down, walking into the crowd. Maybe we should have kidnapped his family after all.

  Now, Sam Hellerman remembers it differently. He claims that Shinefield was okay with playing the songs and was even smiling while it was happening. But then he saw Celeste Fletcher in the audience and decided that being in closer proximity to Celeste Fletcher was more important to him than continuing to play the set. Either way: drummers, right?

  At any rate, we were stuck onstage without a drummer, and with a restless crowd already booing because the last song had sucked so bad. And because we’re us, despite this thoroughly predictable state of affairs, we found we had absolutely no plan whatsoever.

  Sam Hellerman tried to appease them by reminding them why they were there in the first place, saying, “Come on, people, let me hear you say it: recycling! Can I get a ‘recycling’?” And while there was indeed a surprisingly responsive “recycling” chant, pandering to their rabid love of recycling wasn’t going to hold this crowd’s interest forever.

  My next decision was a pretty bad one, in retrospect. But I felt I had to make some noise, and the only nonband noise I was capable of creating was “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian.” This I attempted to play. But as bad as my feeble attempt at Irish novelty ragtime blues fingerpicking had sounded through my cigarette-box amp in my room, that was nothing compared to how bad it sounded coming through a heavily distorted Marshall JCM 900 and a kind of crappy feedback-prone PA system, with my fingers hyperclumsified by stress and nervousness. The look on Flapjack’s face, as I glimpsed it in the crowd, was really something, and I stopped abruptly as soon as I saw it. It had only been a few seconds, but the damage had been done. We were officially sucking even worse than the mediocre sabotaged bands that had gone before us.

  It was at this point that things got really strange.

  Sam Hellerman tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around to see that Little Big Tom had climbed onstage and was heading toward the drum kit. I could see what was happening, almost in slow motion, but I was paralyzed and powerless to stop it. By the time I got control of my faculties, Little Big Tom was already seated at the drums. And by the time I finally found enough voice to scream “Nooooo!” it was too late.

  “Well, boys,” said Little Big Tom. “ ‘Screeching for Vengeance’?” And no sooner had he said that than the stick click count-in was upon us and I pretty much had to join in if I didn’t want to be a dick. In other words, there we were, Stupid Eyeball, the future of rock and roll, the Great Masturbator on guitar and quiet nasal vox, Sam Hellerman on bass and suit and tie, and Little Big Tom, yes, Little Big Tom, on drums and inept parenting. Covering Judas Priest’s “Screaming for Vengeance.”

  Now, I wish I could tell you that Little Big Tom turned out to be this great drummer, and that his stepping in at the last minute saved the day and rescued the set. I wish I could tell you that I was able to sing like Rob Halford. I wish I could tell you that the song we played sounded anything remotely like “Screaming for Vengeance.” I wish I could tell you that it sounded like anything in particular. And I wish I could tell you that it sounded even vaguely like a song.

  But in fact, as you can probably surmise from the way I have framed this tender chain of wishes, it just didn’t happen that way. Little Big Tom’s drumming, such as it was, was not simply abhorrent. It was, rather, incomprehensible, like drumming from another dimension where they have a different kind of math and a different concept of time. Or maybe he was just hitting as hard as he could at random, hoping something useful would come out. Playing the drums is harder than most people think. You can’t just sit down at the drum kit for the first time, hit stuff, and hope it comes out all right, as in finger painting or making soup. But that, it seems, was precisely what Little Big Tom was doing. It was the same approach he took to making a big pot of vegetarian slop. And actually, “slop” is as good a way of describing his drumming as anything else.

  When things go wrong onstage, your impulse is to overcompensate in reaction. A string breaks, you scream louder. The bass cuts out, you turn the guitar up. Well, I’m no Rob Halford, even in the best of times. But singing “Screaming for Vengeance” on top of a band that sounded like a natural disaster in progress made me work that much harder, trying to scream for vengeance in a way nature had never intended my dear little voice to do. And I suppose that somehow, in the process of doing that, my still-healing nasal fracture refractured itself. I heard a loud pop in my head and blood started flowing like wine out of my face, except it was a lot more like blood than wine.

  Sam Hellerman, well known for his special talent of being able to make his own nose bleed on command, was unable to prevent a sympathetic nosebleed of his own.

  So both of our noses were gushing blood all over ourselves, all over the stage, and all over the mics, while the song was still going, after a fashion, sort of. The sound guy, worried about his mics, cut the power and rushed up to wrestle them away from Sam Hellerman and me. Little Big Tom, seeing me knocked to the floor by the angry sound guy and having my back, leapt from behind the drums and attempted to tackle him. At least, I think that’s what he was trying to do. But the stage was now slick with blood, and he lost his footing, missing his target and winding up face-first in the steel grating of the floor monitor. When he picked himself up, it was revealed that he too had blood gushing from his nose and running all over his face and down his shirt.

  The chaos and carnage onstage had reduced the crowd to stunned silence. And it was at that point that I heard, drifting from somewhere in the front of house, the now-familiar voice of Todd Dante saying “This the guy?” followed by a thud and a sickening crackling sound. And I knew without even looking that he had punched Shinefield in the f
ace.

  Thus were all three members of Stupid Eyeball, plus their stand-in drummer and partial stepfather, reduced to a collective bloody mess. In the crowd’s ensuing scramble to escape the carnage, an inevitable punch was thrown, and several little clusters of fistfights soon blossomed, eventually merging into a general, floor-wide brawl, a true ballroom blitz, in fact. It was kind of beautiful in its way.

  And thus ended what will probably go down in history as the strangest, the most unlikely, the bloodiest, and certainly the least successful rock and roll show since the last time Sam Hellerman and I had attempted one. Move over, Altamont: our legacy will live on in some form, I’m certain of that.

  I climbed off the stage in a kind of daze, hoping that my light-headedness and loss of blood were not too closely related. As what remained of the crowd scattered to avoid getting bled on, I ran headlong into Amanda.

  She paused to look at me.

  “That,” she said, “was the best thing I have ever seen in my entire life.”

  In books, and in songs, too, there is this thing called an unreliable narrator. With an unreliable narrator, you’re following what he’s saying because he’s the one talking, but you don’t necessarily believe everything he says because he slants it to his advantage, or exaggerates, or even outright lies. Or sometimes it is the writer who constructs the narrative in such a way as to make some point about the narrator, to demonstrate his ignorance or his prejudice or what have you, and he makes him narrate things in such a way that the reader can figure out stuff about him that he himself doesn’t even really know.

  Well, I’m not sure how much of that would apply to me, but I will cop to being at least as unreliable in narration as I am in all other things. And I will acknowledge right off the bat here that some of what I’m going to tell you now is absolutely true, but that some of it might not be quite as true as all that, and there is at least one bit that is not really that true at all.

  So as I looked up through my daze at the scene before me, this is what I saw: (a) my mom and Little Big Tom in a tight embrace, engaged in a passionate and extremely bloody kiss; (b) Celeste Fletcher bent over Shinefield, trying to rouse him, kissing his forehead, telling Todd Dante to get the hell out of there and to take his stupid jacket with him; (c) Cinthya with a Y, X above the I, cradling Sam Hellerman’s head gently in her lap, dabbing the blood from his face with a napkin; and (d) Flapjack chewing on a chicken leg, laughing his head off.

  And the reason I mention all that is so I can say this:

  Love had found a way. For everyone but me.

  AFTERMATH

  When I heard police sirens in the distance, I grabbed my guitar and headed for the back exit. I figured the worst person to be seen with in the bloody aftermath of the Mountain Dew Tribute to Recycling was Sam Hellerman, at least to the degree that there would be any explaining to do, and I kind of had a feeling that there would be quite a lot.

  As I was leaving, Amanda came through the exit and beckoned me back. She said she had forgotten to tell me that there had been a phone call for me just before she and my mom had left for the show.

  “It was that girl Pamm,” said Amanda. “She said she needed to talk to you and it was urgent. I thought you guys broke up.”

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  But I didn’t have time to explain the situation to her. Pammelah Shumway had a message for me, an urgent message. Maybe love would find a way after all. I had to find out. I entrusted my guitar and backpack to Amanda. And then I ran. I ran like I had never run before, not knowing what awaited me, but praying I wouldn’t be too late. It wasn’t too far down El Camino Real and up the Santa Maria Avenue Camino Street Road to the Shumway residence, but it was a long way to run, and I was worn out and exhausted by the time I arrived. I threw pebbles at her bedroom window, our usual signal.

  Pammelah Shumway came to the window.

  “Oh, Thomas,” she said, pulling the curtain aside. She looked like she had been crying. “Oh, Thomas. I’ve been such a fool. How will you ever forgive me? It was silly of me to try to force you to do something you didn’t believe in. I guess I cared more about my own social status and selfish desires than about your integrity and principles. But if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that it was your integrity and principles that made me fall in love with you in the first place, and I could never ask you to give those up. If you never want to see me again, Thomas, I understand. But if you can find it in your heart to forgive me, I just want you to know that I will wait for you. Forever, if that’s what it takes.”

  She looked so beautiful in the moonlight that I was almost tempted. I opened my mouth to respond, when we were interrupted by the sound of a ringing telephone. She held up a finger, telling me to hang on, while she withdrew to answer the phone. When she came back she was distraught.

  “Thomas! I just got word that my dog, Alfalfa, is trapped on the railroad tracks, and a train is coming! And my mom is dying of cancer, and the only thing that can save her is a Badger win in the Badgers-Saints game that’s happening right now! And the score is tied!”

  “Don’t you worry, Mrs. Shumway,” I called out. “I’ll save the game. And the dog.” Then I looked at Pammelah. “We can discuss your emotional turmoil at some later date. Now, there’s work to do.”

  I commandeered a skateboard from one of the local kids and sped down the hill toward the tracks. It was dangerous weaving in and out among all the cars, but there was little time to lose and I knew it would be close. Very close. Taking a quick detour to the Clearview High School gymnasium, I skated like the wind through the gym doors, donning my Badgers jersey as I approached the court. Only five seconds remained on the clock as I zipped past the stands, called to the coach to put me in, and skated onto the court. The mystified crowd soon started to cheer and chant as I stole the ball from a Saints forward and, whistling “On, Wisconsin!,” lobbed it through the hoop a split second before the buzzer sounded, waving to the crowd as I skated through the opposite door, out of the gymnasium, and onto the main road.

  At the bottom of the hill, through the fine evening mist, I could see Alfalfa, whimpering, his paw caught in the train tracks, and a 133-ton Amtrak GE P42DC Genesis locomotive speeding toward him at a hundred MPH, whistling danger. It was risky, but it was my only chance. I reached the track and ollied into an aerial, grabbing the dog and landing on the opposite side of the track just as the train went clattering by.

  “Easy there, boy,” I said as Alfalfa licked my face. “This ain’t over yet.”

  I skated back to the Shumway residence, Alfalfa trotting close behind.

  “Good board, kid,” I said, tossing the skateboard to the little fellow I’d snatched it from just minutes earlier and striding up to the porch, where Mrs. Shumway and Pammelah were waiting, wearing anxious expressions. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Shumway,” I said. “It was pretty dicey, but I think your cancer is going to be just fine. And there’s someone here who’s eager see you.” Alfalfa bounded up with a cheerful bark, and we all shared a chuckle.

  “Now, as for you, Pammelah …” She looked up at me expectantly. “You hang on to that heart of yours. I’m sure there’s some lucky guy out there who needs it more than I do.”

  I sprinted back to the Salthaven Rec Center and retrieved my guitar and backpack from Amanda.

  “That was very brave,” she said. “You know, for a dork, you’re not such a bad big brother.”

  “You’re not so bad yourself,” I said, rumpling her hair.

  As I headed through the parking lot toward the woods that edged the Salthaven Rec Center park, I happened to run into a little squirmy creature. I will forgive you if you don’t act too surprised to learn that the little squirmy creature to which I refer was Roberta the Female Robot, who, it seemed, had been waiting for me.

  “I didn’t think you’d ever come out,” she said.

  Now, friends, despite my powerful vocabulary, I’m not very good at describing things where there’s nothing absurd, prep
osterous, risible, inane, farcical, or cockamamie about them, if I’m correct about what “cockamamie” means. Unless I can figure out a way to resort to sarcasm or to ridicule someone or something, even if it is only myself, I’m pretty much stumped. So I probably won’t be too good at expressing what happened in this part. But here goes anyway: I can say, without reservation, that I had never been so happy to see another person in my life. And without even thinking, or planning, or scheming, but just because I sort of wanted to, I guess, I found myself pulling the Robot to me and kind of crushing her in my arms. And I was going to add “as you do” there, as you do, but in fact, I had never actually done this before. I don’t know what came over me.

  “Ow,” said the Robot, but she was clinging to me almost as tightly. It was like I could feel each tiny, delicate, angular bone, like when they say something is “ribbed,” except these were, you know, actual literal ribs, so I guess that’s why they say that. Her face seemed a little damp, like from tears, but she explained, “It’s the wind and my contacts.”

  I could hear scuffling sounds and shouting coming from the Rec Center building, and I knew it would probably be a good idea to get farther away from the action, so I led the Robot deeper into the shadows of the park.

  “Sorry for bleeding on you,” I said. “Did you … see any of the show?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” said the Robot. “I don’t know why you keep saying your own music is better than pep band. Do you really think that?”

  I didn’t know what to say. It was a hard case to argue at that moment. It has something to do with wanting something that is your own, without being directed or ordered to do it by anyone, doing something that only you and no one else can do, no matter how much it may suck. But what I said was: