King Dork

by Frank Portman

  It hadn’t occurred to me, but when I told Sam Hellerman about Little Big Tom’s Stratego Sex Inquisition, he pointed it out: I had just been a participant in the most retarded version of the sitcom sex talk the world had ever seen.

  So maybe my mom had heard the cock tease discussion and had told LBT he had to talk to me about sex. He was reluctant but couldn’t refuse. And in the course of his research he got sidetracked by Stratego and—boom! My sexual awakening was suddenly all about Vietnam.

  Meanwhile, Sam Hellerman still seemed bent out of shape about my Fiona obsession. And I still couldn’t figure out why. It seemed like more than just being bored by the subject, which I tended to go on about: that I would have understood. Was it related to his Serenah Tillotsen experience, in which he had felt the rejection so keenly that any description of a less than totally available and compliant female would push mysterious buttons and automatically send him into a blind fury at the injustice of love and those who snatch it from the mouths of the needy? And would ignite a fiery desire for revenge on behalf of all unfortunate lonely hearts, or at least on behalf of those lonely hearts he happened to be in bands with? That sounded pretty good. Maybe so. But I had to wonder if he knew something he wasn’t telling.

  So why didn’t I just ask him if he knew something he wasn’t telling?

  Not a bad idea.

  “Do you know something you’re not telling?” I asked.

  I suspected that this was just the kind of question that would send Sam Hellerman into another furious spasm of over-the-top sarcasm, and I wasn’t wrong. He no longer needed to resort to words. He just stared at me with bugged-out eyes that he appeared to be trying to spin in opposite directions. I believe his line of thinking went something like this: maybe if I stare at this creature long enough with these supersarcastic eyes, his head tentacles will eventually retract into his head, his back tentacles will retract into his back, his leg tentacles will shrivel up and drop off, and the external lung in the polyp on the side of his neck will burst, depriving the alien brain pod of needed oxygen and forcing the mother ship to relinquish control of the mind and body, after which the host organism will come out of its coma, rub its eyes, and say, “who’s this Fiona everybody’s always talking about, anyway?”

  Well, it was worth a shot. Maybe Sam Hellerman didn’t know more than he was telling after all. All I knew was, I was feeling a little feeble and vulnerable after that intense Hellerman eye-ray treatment. It’s a killer.

  In fact, however, despite Sam Hellerman’s persistent bad attitude about a certain faux-mod seamster who had one breast that had experienced just a little less of this life than the other, he was still my friend by alphabetical-order relationship, and that means something.

  So, to my surprise, it turned out that he had asked his CHS friends about her for me.

  But none of them knew a drama mod named Fiona. In fact, as far as anyone could tell, there was no one named Fiona in the CHS student body at all. There were, of course, many hot brunettes with sexy stomachs, but that wasn’t much help. And no one recognized the most unusual feature, the funky homemade denim and yarn jacket.

  But what about the little black glasses? That should narrow it down. Hot b. with s. s. and l. b. g.?

  “I’m sorry, man,” said Sam Hellerman, because we had started to say man recently. “She doesn’t exist.”

  PROTEST SOMETHING

  They had managed to make Foods of the World in “Humanities” last several weeks. We were well into October, on the Monday following Little Big Tom’s Sex/Stratego campaign, when we finally left the gifted and talented snacking behind and moved on to the Turbulent Sixties. The first assignment was, I kid you not, “protest something.” So of course, the entire class just didn’t show up the following day. You can get away with stuff like that in AP, as long as you can write a couple of sentences afterward explaining how your class cutting is analogous to marching from Selma to Montgomery. I’m sure the teachers kind of expected it and enjoyed the free period, too.

  I was on my own for my “protest.” Sam Hellerman hadn’t made it into Humanities, so he was stuck in normal social studies, copying God only knows what from some inane textbook, no doubt.

  I decided to go off on my own to read Brighton Rock, which I was beginning to think was the best book ever written. I was getting to the end and I was excited to find out what was going to happen. So I went out to a deserted part of the school grounds, the slope behind the outfield of the baseball diamond, and lay on the grass to read. It was damp, but a pale sun was out, and I had on my waterproof all-weather army coat, so it didn’t faze me.

  One thing I did while I was reading was pause every now and then and turn back to the inside front cover to look at the “CEH 1965.” Then I would try to imagine what the circumstances were when my dad had read it. Listening to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “Help Me, Rhonda” on the radio? Riding the streetcar wearing neat but rumpled midsixties student-type clothes, with older men in suits with skinny ties and women wearing gloves and little hats? At the dinner table, with my I Love Lucy grandma hitting him on the head and telling him to cut it out already? In the few photos I had seen of him from that time, he looked kind of Beach Boys–collegiate, so that was how I pictured him, with a little button-down short-sleeved shirt, floods, and Brian Wilson hair, sitting on the curb waiting for the bus, Brighton Rock open on his knees. It was kind of fun to do that. It was all bullshit, too. But in spite of myself, I had this feeling like I was getting to know him in a way I never had. I would get to a good part and I’d think, where was he and what was he doing when he read it? What did he think about the fact that Pinkie said he didn’t believe in anything yet was totally convinced he was damned? That kind of thing.

  It wasn’t only the story but the physical object that did something to me. Just being aware that I was holding it made me feel kind of—what? Spooky? Reverent? If I started to think about it, I’d get kind of dizzy sometimes, and start to have this ringing in my ears, and I felt almost like my mind was spinning, rising backwards toward the sky. Maybe I am crazy, I thought. For real, I mean, not as a ploy.

  The lunch bell rang, but I was pretty into the story, so I stayed where I was and continued reading.

  Before too long I was down to the last few pages, and it was really exciting and suspenseful. I was feeling spacey because of the spooky thing I mentioned before (and maybe even more than usual because there were a lot of priests and so forth in the book and that always adds to the spookiness). And then a shadow suddenly fell on the page. I saw an elongated shadow head and shoulders on the grass in front of me and felt the presence of someone behind me. Then, and this was all in just a second, not how long it’s taking me to describe it, I saw some stuff splashing on the page, though first I think I heard the sound of it hitting the page, which was very, very loud in my ears.

  “The fuck?” I said, and turned around. It was Paul Krebs, one of Matt Lynch’s pals and as psychotic a normal person as ever there was, pouring Coke out of a can onto my book and giggling like a simian maniac.

  Now, this all happened in a split second, like I said. Paul Krebs was up there on the crest of the slope giggling, doing this little taunting dance, like a boxer or something. My ears were ringing so loudly I couldn’t hear much else, and I was seeing little multicolored blobs that started small but expanded to obscure my field of vision slightly before they dissipated and new ones would take their place. Little circles of green, yellow, and red. A liquid kaleidoscope. I got up and he kind of danced away from me, still giggling and yammering. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I started to chase him, and somehow, I don’t know how, I managed to trip him and pull his legs upward so that he fell down on to the rough gravel path. He must have hit his head pretty hard on one of the bigger rocks that lined the pathway, because there was a tremendous amount of blood seeping from a cut near his hairline. I had fallen in a big patch of mud in the process. I scrambled to get u
p, sliding around a bit, but he was just lying there blubbering and bloody. I grabbed his hair and smashed his head into the gravel as hard as I could. Then I stepped on his neck and said, “I will kill you.” And we both knew I totally meant it.

  While I had been chasing him, I had still had Brighton Rock in my hand, but I had dropped it when the whole head-smashing thing was happening. It was lying open on the path, with little splotches and splatters of Paul Krebs’s blood on it, reflecting the sun, shining on the page. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking, stupidly, maybe this is how The Catcher in the Rye, CEH 1960, got bloodstains on it.

  My first impulse was to run like hell in some random direction, but for some reason, instead, I sat down very deliberately on a big stone over on the other side of the path and read the last couple of blood-spattered pages of Brighton Rock, tuning out the sound of Paul Krebs’s gentle moaning. Then I paused and stared off into space. It was a great ending, the best ending of anything, book or movie, I’d ever experienced. Then I closed the book reverently and walked back toward the campus, because I needed to get myself cleaned up and fifth period was about to start and I didn’t see any reason to be late.

  POD HIPPIES

  It was a day or two after I accidentally beat up Paul Krebs that two very, very surprising things happened.

  The first was that Pierre Butterfly Cameroon, the diminutive, flute-playing, hippie-parent-stunted, relentlessly picked-on PBC, my brother in dorkdom, started “going with” Renée “Née-Née” Tagliafero. For real. I mean, eating together, having third parties deliver notes to each other, and spending lunch period walking in a circle around the perimeter of Center Court, just like all the normal freshman and sophomore couples did. (I’ve never really understood why couples do the joined-at-the-hip lunchtime laps. They stop doing it junior year because once you’re a junior you can leave during lunch and go to the Burger King instead.)

  Now, when I say that Pierre Butterfly Cameroon is my brother in dorkdom, I mean that we are both at roughly the same low level of the social structure. The Untouchable level. I don’t mean brotherhood in any other sense. I mean, I don’t know him. Hanging out with each other would just make us both look even more pathetic. Sam Hellerman is kind of friendly with him, as he is with everybody who isn’t a dangerous normal psychotic. I’m more of a loner. Still, if I’m the king of hearts in the dork deck, PBC is definitely one of the other kings.

  But Pierre Butterfly Cameroon was no longer Untouchable, or so it appeared from where I was sitting when I first saw them walk by. Née-Née Tagliafero was touching him quite frequently, in fact. They looked weird as a couple because he was not much more than half her height. But more than that: such things just didn’t happen. It was inconceivable.

  Née-Née Tagliafero was pretty and popular, with no handicaps or defects except, perhaps, for a very slight mustache, which she was able to bleach into insignificance. And she had pretty big breasts, too, which counted for a lot. I’d never seen her picked on by anyone. She had a kind of punky hair and thrift-store clothes thing going on, but that was fashion rather than true alienation, like it always is. I mean, she was definitely one of “them,” that is to say, mostly normal, not actually one of society’s unwanted. I would classify her as subnormal/drama. She’d had several normal boyfriends before. What the hell was going on around here? It was mind-boggling.

  The other thing that happened was hardly less surprising. Sam Hellerman suddenly started hanging out with the Hillmont High fake-hippie drama crowd. I swear to God.

  This came without warning. I walked out of fourth period expecting our paths to converge at around locker number 414, as usual, and to continue on to our usual lunch-period routine of eating at the cafeteria and trying to remain unobtrusive and unharassed till the bell rang. But I walked past locker number 414, and he wasn’t there. I backtracked, looked around, and finally saw him sitting on the lawn near the drama hippies. No, not near—with them. I can’t remember ever having been so surprised. He must have known I’d be looking for him, of course. I tried to get his attention, but he deliberately avoided looking up to the exit of building C and locker number 414, where he had to have known I’d be.

  God only knows what they were talking about. He didn’t seem to be doing much talking, but it was hard to tell. Somehow I couldn’t see him actually becoming a faux-hippie drama person himself—that would be too bizarre. But how would I know? Maybe that’s how it always begins: you sit with them on the lawn during lunch; then, later that night, a pod grows under your bed with a little fake-hippie version of you inside; then the fake-hippie you hatches, kills the original you, and takes your place. Before you know it you’re embroidering your jeans, singing “Casey Jones,” smoking pot from a pipe you made out of an apple, and playing Motel the Tailor in the class production of Fiddler on the Roof.

  Could that really happen to Sam Hellerman? Ordinarily I’d have said no, but after witnessing the courtship rituals of Pierre Butterfly Cameroon and Née-Née Tagliafero, I had to admit that my sense of what did and what did not constitute a believable thread in the fabric of reality suddenly didn’t seem very adequate.

  I wasn’t about to barge in on that groovy Happening, I can tell you that. Instead, I went on alone to the cafeteria, semidazed, with a lot on my mind.

  THE BAD DETECTIVE

  Channel two was showing two horror movies back to back every Wednesday and Sunday night for the whole month of October. I was in my room brooding over this and that—Fiona, my dad’s library, Paul Krebs, and the whole weird Sam Hellerman pod-hippie situation that had erupted earlier that day. Strangely enough, the first movie on channel two that night was Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which has pretty much the same pod-oriented story line. It almost made me feel as though I was on the right track with the pod-hippie theory. I put on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and turned the TV volume almost all the way down, watching the movie while listening to the music, and thinking things over.

  I know it doesn’t make much sense, but somehow the puzzle of my dad’s teenage library and the mystery about his death had become connected in my mind. I would decipher part of a cryptic notation in Catcher, CEH 1960, or be struck by something in Brighton Rock, CEH 1965, and it would somehow feel like I’d gotten somewhere on the “accident” issue, too. At weird moments, like that night, I’d also have this crazy sense that the other puzzles in my life, like Fiona and Sam Hellerman’s increasingly odd behavior, were somehow connected to my dad and The Catcher in the Rye as well. I mean, they all got muddled together sometimes.

  I’d always wondered why the police, at least to judge from the newspaper articles, appear to have put so little into the investigation of my dad’s death; usually when a cop is killed, they turn the world upside down to see justice done. Maybe it was obvious to them that it hadn’t been a murder, and the newspaper had just played up the ambiguity. They hadn’t found the car that hit him, which was weird, too. Or possibly they had found it, and it just hadn’t been thought newsworthy? I wished there was someone I could ask about it, but I wouldn’t have known where to begin. The reporters who wrote the articles? Hmm. I would also have given quite a lot to know what he had been working on when the “accident” happened. I’m sure that played a role in the investigation, but if it had ever been mentioned publicly, I had missed it. I even dared to try to ask my mom once, but all she did was cry. And what was Fiona doing tonight? And what the hell was up with Sam Hellerman anyway?

  But what this all had to do with tits, back rubs, and dry cleaning, I hadn’t the barest clue.

  I’m a bad detective, though, really. I let my emotions and prejudices dictate what I choose to investigate, rather than trying to look at the whole picture with an objective eye. I hadn’t looked at A Separate Peace and Lord of the Flies very carefully because they hadn’t been obviously marked up and pummeled like Catcher, CEH 1960, but mostly because I had something personal against them. And because of that I had missed something pretty important.
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  Invasion of the Body Snatchers had ended, and Rosemary’s Baby had begun. I put on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and turned to look at my dad’s books on my desk. I was reaching for The Journal of Albion Moonlight, CEH 1966, which I had decided would be next on the agenda of my one-man book club, when I accidentally knocked the stack of books to the floor. A Separate Peace, CEH 1962, fell in such a way that it was open under the bed, and when I went to retrieve it, I noticed a slip of paper that had fallen out. It was half a sheet of graph paper that had itself been folded in half. On the inside of the folded paper was this weird clump of letters, neatly written in the graph paper’s squares in dark blue ink:

  qffqgarfqqfasu

  xqdfqjguqyeumd

  qyumVeqxxumdqz

  grjgmgfemHqdhu

  gemexumfqPoqeq

  qzaymdumxqvfqd

  uaedqutFYghumV

  And on the other side, in black, and hardly less weird:

  Mon cher monsieur,

  The bastard is dead. Thrown into the fire. Long live Justice and the American Way.

  Regards,

  Tit

  So Tit was a person? “Tit lib friday”—an appointment at the library with Tit? And someone was dead? And it had something to do with Superman?