King Dork

by Frank Portman

  Once when I was playing, he stuck his head in and said, “Spanking the plank?” I stared at him. “Uh, no,” I finally said, since as I mentioned I was trying to be nice.

  But it turns out I was wrong. I had been s-ing the p. S-ing thep. used to be a right-on, far-out, with-it expression for playing the guitar, supposedly. I guess when Little Big Tom was a kid, he and his friends used to go around saying “hey, you wanna get together and spank the plank tonight?” and they would be talking about having some kind of opium-den Timothy Leary country-blues-folk-bluegrass-Afro-Caribbean jam session wearing leather vests and velvet pants in an incense-y room that had one poster of Che Guevara and another of Frank Zappa sitting on a toilet, and beads instead of a door.

  Supposedly, they also used to call a guitar a “piece of wood,” as in “hey, that’s a great piece of wood you got there.” You know, it’s almost like they want you to get the wrong idea when they say stuff like that, but knowing Little Big Tom, I’m pretty sure there was nothing going on at these jam sessions but soft drugs, hard-to-follow conversations, and terrible music.

  Neither Sam Hellerman nor I had an amp yet, but we continued to practice using the living room Magnavox stereo console. Sam Hellerman figured out how to plug us both in, so he was in the left speaker and I was in the right. He seemed a little put out, strangely. I think he was beginning to see the enormous fake wood–paneled stereo console as his trademark gear and didn’t like me horning in on it. He wanted to be the only one to say “yeah, I like to use the Magnavox Astro-Sonic hi-fi stereo console” to Guitar Player magazine when they interviewed him about his signature thin, burbly, distorted bass sound. “We never expected Oxford English, Moe Bilalabama on guitar, me on bass and lollygagging, first album What Part of Suck Don’t You Understand? to be such a big success,” he’d say. “But in all modesty, I’d have to say it’s that Magnavox magic that always seals the deal….”

  In reality, though, Oxford English was off to a pretty terrible start. I mean, the guitar sounded awful through the Magna-V. And it was so hard to distinguish between the bass and guitar that neither of us could tell for sure what we were playing. It was a mess.

  Here’s how bad it was. We were doing “Don’t Play Yahtzee with My Heart.” Little Big Tom stuck his head in, tilt-stared at us for a moment as though searching for the right words, gave up, and pulled his head back out. Essentially he had said, in body language, “let’s pretend this pop-in never happened, shall we?” If you can’t even get a resigned “rock and roll” out of LBT, you’re in trouble.

  I tried running the guitar through this distortion box I got at Musicville at the mall. The Overlord II. That was a mistake. There was a squeal, and then there was: silence. And I think maybe a smell like smoky toast, though that may have been from something else: it always smells kind of weird around here. The Magnavox was dead.

  It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.

  THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER SUBSTITUTION CIPHER

  Now let me try to explain my thinking about the Tit’s weird code-parallelogram.

  Sam Hellerman and I used to have this code hobby. It began in sixth grade, continued sporadically through junior high, and had even hung on slightly through some of ninth grade, though by that time we were mostly just going through the motions. It was time-consuming and tedious, and, more importantly, we didn’t have anything of interest to be all secretive about.

  There were different methods, but one we had used pretty frequently was the Star-Spangled Banner Substitution Cipher. What you did was, you chose two words at random from the “Star-Spangled Banner” lyrics. The first letter of the first word would be your “in” character, and the last letter of the second word would be your “out” character. So say your words were “dawn’s” and “stripes.” You’d write out the alphabet starting with “D” from “dawn’s,” adding the “A,” “B,” and “C” at the end; and underneath these letters, you’d write it out again, but this time beginning with “S,” the last letter of “stripes.” Like this:

  D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C

  S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R

  You substituted the letters in the second line for the first line’s letters in your original text. So in the SSBSC dawn’s/stripes cipher, ZNGHITC QAPZTCTN XH RWPGPRITGXOTS QN GTRTHHTH PCS HWTAITGTS WDAADLH would mean “Kyrsten Blakeney is characterized by recesses and sheltered hollows.”

  All the recipient would need to know to decipher the message was where the alphabet began on each of the two lines. The way we used to do it was by number. “Dawn’s” is the eighth word in the SSB, and “stripes” is the twenty-third word. So the key to the Kyrsten Blakeney message would be SSB-F8-L23. We used “The Star-Spangled Banner” because we both knew the first twenty-six words of the lyrics by heart. The “F” and “L” stood for first and last, because sometimes we would vary what letters we would use, so we could have L/F or F/F, or even midword letters that we would identify by Roman numerals: SSB-8iii-23iv. It could get pretty complicated.

  Even though the letters of the coded portion of Tit’s note were arranged in a neat little parallelogram rather than in one line like normal text, I was pretty sure it was some sort of cipher. It is possible to solve a substitution cipher by trial and error, even without a key, but Tit’s message wasn’t long enough to gauge the frequency of commonly occurring letters like “E” or “T,” which is how you usually begin. Plus, if I was right, he had broken his ordinary coded sentences into fourteen-character clumps, so you couldn’t even guess at common words like “the” or “of,” though some of the double letters might have provided a clue. There was only one way to decipher it, practically speaking, and that was to discover the key. If it had been based on something they had memorized, like “The Star-Spangled Banner,” there was no hope of recovering it. For reasons I’ll get to in a second, however, I didn’t think it had been memorized. In any case, there would likely have been some indication for the recipient of how the key should be applied, along the lines of the SSB-F8-L23 notation I mentioned. My assumption was that it would be somewhere on the note itself.

  At first I thought it might be in the body of the message, which was uncoded, but cryptic, and which indeed made almost as little sense as the cipher. But then I looked at the date. There are only thirty days in June, so the date 6/31 doesn’t exist. The original date, 5/31, does exist, of course. Why had Tit scribbled out the five and written a six over it, changing a real date to an imaginary one?

  Here was my idea on that:

  What if my dad had underlined the passage in Catcher, CEH 1960, not because of his deep interest in back rubs, but as a decoding key? It would explain why only one seemingly random passage had been underlined. And if so, there would probably be something on the note that would indicate how the substitution worked, and the date seemed likely. Of course, even if the back rub passage had been a decoding key, it wouldn’t necessarily have been the one that had been used for this particular message. That was a long shot. Nevertheless, with the Star-Spangled Banner Substitution Cipher in mind, I got out the Catcher and started counting words, just to see. I tried a few possibilities, using 5 or 6 and 31, but they yielded only more gibberish.

  Then I noticed something: counting letters instead of words, the fifth letter of the passage was “T” and so was the thirty-first. That wouldn’t have been any use for a substitution cipher, since the in and out letters would all have been the same. What if Tit had written “5/31” and then changed the five to a six when he realized the 5/31 combination wouldn’t work as a key? Sixth letter from the beginning was “H,” and the thirty-first was “T….”

  Damn. It still didn’t work, not in any of the configurations I tried. Yet it seemed too much of a coincidence that Tit would have happened to cross out a date that would not have worked as a key and replace it with one that would, if he hadn’t been working from that particular passage. And it explained why there was only one underlin
ed passage, and perhaps also why there were all sorts of other mysterious pairs of numbers scribbled all over the Catcher. It was the perfect theory in all but one respect: it didn’t work. What was I missing?

  THE GIFTED AND THE TALENTED

  Meanwhile, though it seemed a bit much with everything else that was going on, I continued to attend my inane, pointless classes.

  In Humanities we were still doing The Turbulent Sixties, working on the Peace Collage. There was this big pasteboard “wall” on which you were supposed to glue things cut out from magazines that had to do with the sixties, or peace, or civil rights, or the women’s movement, or, well, just about anything at all, really. There was a lot of potential mischief afoot with all that glue, but I managed to avoid getting glued to anything for once.

  In part, I believe, this had to do with the Paul Krebs Brighton Rock incident. I had been worried about the consequences of the episode, but only a little. Technically, I suppose I had beaten him up, though that had been entirely due to luck and randomness. I still thought of it like he had attacked and persecuted me as usual, even though I “won.”

  One of the reasons it had been possible to knock him down, and probably the main reason he had given up so easily and resigned himself to whimpering in his own blood, was that he had not expected me to fight back. I never did. I never had. He wasn’t on his guard because he had assumed there was no reason to be. He had been shocked out of his normal aggressive mode, and his mind had stalled trying to process the unfamiliar information and finally locked. Plus, I had smashed his head into the gravel very hard and it had to hurt. I guess it was the combination of shock and gravel. And loss of blood.

  I had been as surprised by my reaction as he had, but I’m not going to say I don’t know what came over me. What had come over me was that in six solid years of being harassed, abused, beaten, ridiculed, humiliated, dehumanized, and tortured by Paul Krebs and his fun-loving buddies, they hadn’t ever attacked something I really cared about till they poured Coke on my dad’s Brighton Rock. There was no way Paul Krebs could have known, but he had picked the wrong fucking book to pour Coke on. I flipped out. I went berserk. I wasn’t in control of myself, and he wasn’t ready for an attack by a flipped-out, berserk King Dork inflamed by the rage that only grief and (devil-head) filial piety can summon.

  If the walkway had been concrete, or even asphalt, the blow to the head would have injured him seriously, maybe even killed him. Then I would have been in trouble. But I doubted it was that serious. The gravel would have absorbed and distributed the impact evenly. As I knew quite well from years of experience, head and scalp injuries bleed a lot and hurt like hell, but they always look worse than they are. The worst you usually have is a concussion, some messy clothes, and a lot of explaining to do. They are easily attributed to accidents. In fact, I have a solid, largely inaccurate, reputation as an absentminded, accident-prone klutz at the Henderson-Tucci HQ, owing to all the times I’ve said I’ve fallen off ledges or walked into walls or run into poles.

  And I was pretty sure that that was what Paul Krebs would do, as well. I will always think of him as the guy I accidentally beat up, but he would be rather eager to prevent the world at large from knowing him that way. It would hardly have been the first time he had come home from school all bloody, though the fact that this time it was his own blood would have been something of a novelty. But he would keep that part to himself. And he would hate me more than he ever had before, even if neither he nor I had believed such a thing to be possible. I knew I had to brace myself for some kind of retaliation from him and potentially from the other Matt Lynch minions as well, but I was sure it wouldn’t become a legal matter. That’s what I’m saying.

  Anyway, despite that, word did get out around school a bit, somehow. No one said anything to me, but people were looking at me from a distance with a kind of awe. I mean, I was in shock about it myself. These things don’t happen, not usually. I imagine most people discounted it as a grossly implausible rumor. Sam Hellerman didn’t doubt me, but he said, and I knew he was right, that I would have to watch my back from now on. I was totally used to watching that, though.

  It was a measure of just how sick Hillmont High School society is that smashing someone’s head to pulp in the gravel by the baseball diamond was such an unequivocal reputation enhancer. But so it was. It had worked for years for Matt Lynch and Paul Krebs and the other normals in their demi-human goon squad. Now, weirdly and in a way that wasn’t entirely welcome, it was temporarily working for me. (I had no illusions: the vital element of surprise was only destined to work the one time. But it had worked.)

  So maybe that’s why no one tried to glue me to anything in Humanities while we were working on the Peace Collage. Someone did, however, glue some stuff from a gay porn magazine on Bobby Duboyce’s helmet while he slept peacefully in his seat. Peace indeed.

  As for Paul Krebs, I figured he still had a few concussions coming to him. I have heard, though, that if you fall asleep with a concussion you can die, so I was relieved when I learned that he was back in school a couple of days later. And not to be all Bad Seed and everything, but just to be on the safe side I got some new Converse All Stars from the Shoe Mart and threw the old, blood-spattered ones in the shop incinerator on my way back to school. Because you never know.

  The day after I attended the lunchtime gathering around the Hillmont Knight, I noticed for the first time that Yasmynne Schmick was in my Advanced French class. She smiled and nodded a greeting as I walked in, which was definitely a new experience for me. I guess my failure to say “guitar” properly had formed a kind of loose bond between us. Which was alarming, in a way. I mean, I wasn’t sure I wanted another friend: Sam Hellerman was about all I could handle. She was wearing a tight-fitting purple velvety bodysuit and a lot of silver jewelry. She looked like an enormous Christmas ornament. She was actually pretty nice, though, for a drama goth pod-hippie; maybe the drama hippies weren’t all bad after all.

  Now, I had started taking French in seventh grade, so this was my fourth year, and even I found it shocking to think how little French I actually knew after three-plus years. True, I knew quite a lot about Jean and Claude and how they go to the movies and eat beefsteak and fruit, and I could tell you all about their other fabulous adventures, though only in the present tense. I was a master of the present tense in French. I guess that is pretty advanced, when you think about it.

  I felt a little sorry for the French teacher, Madame Jimenez-Macanally, not only because students would often mispronounce her name so it sounded kind of nasty, but also because it must have been hard knowing deep down that whatever activities may have been going on in that class, the teaching and learning of the French language was not among them. Someone had hit on the idea of asking her to explain the complicated twenty-four-hour French system of telling time at the beginning of each class, just to see how long she would go along with it before cracking. She was determined not to crack, though: she explained the twenty-four-hour system every single day. Whether that was giving in or fighting back is hard to say: you could look at it either way.

  The last fifteen minutes of Advanced French is called Advanced Conversation, where the students pair up for advanced, stimulating dialogue. Yasmynne Schmick approached me and said, as near as I could make out: “Le nez est bête.” The nose is a beast? A little puzzling. Then she switched to English:

  “Renée is stupid,” she said. “You’re actually a pretty nice guy.”

  Pause. “Really?” I had to assume she was talking about Née-Née Tagliafero. What the hell had they been saying about me?

  Madame J.-M. frowned at us. We weren’t supposed to speak English in Advanced Conversation. So we continued in French:

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “It is 11:05,” she replied.

  “Thank you very much,” I said. “What a shame. If it pleases you, what do you call yourself?”

  “I am sorry,” said Yasmynne Schmick. “I am hungr
y. The young girls wear a very pretty dress. They eat and play soccer with the mother and the fathers. My name is Yasmynne. I am four years old.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “The young people love to buy discs of pop music for dancing and for holiday making.” I chose my words carefully. “They…they…my God: they eat beverages. It is true. My two friends Jean and Claude go to the cinema yesterday to view films. What a surprise. They eat. They are flowers.”

  Yasmynne Schmick nodded. “Thank you very much. I am sorry.” Her face clouded over. “There is a match between two opposing teams at the stadium. It is true, is that not correct? Therefore, my little friend,” she said quietly and with a sad smile, “all the world very much loves the automobile who calls himself a cat.”

  “You are correct,” I said hopelessly. “I am enchanted. Our little green hat is orange on the head of this very interesting horse.”

  “Would you like to sleep with me this evening?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Roboto.”

  It was kind of fun. That Yasmynne Schmick was all right.

  Later that day, I was on my way to Band, running a little late, when something grabbed the back of my army coat, stopped me short, and almost pulled me to the ground. It turned out to be one of Mr. Teone’s large, rubbery hands. He was scratching his butt with the other one. Ugh.

  “Henderson,” he said. “Henderson.”

  There was something about the way he said my name that made it sound like a particularly nasty swear word. Wait a minute, I thought: you can’t call me that. It’s rude.

  He told me that he was writing a book on gifted and talented young men and women, and that he’d like to give me an IQ test and interview me with a group of other kids after school on Friday. At his fucking house. I don’t think so.