King Dork

by Frank Portman

  “I can give you a ride in my ’93 Geo Prizm if you like,” he said. He was always going on about his ’93 Geo Prizm, like it was some kind of cool car or something. What a moron. He reached into his sports-jacket pocket with the butt hand and pulled out this crumpled, grubby, curling fistful of papers. Presumably, this was the IQ test. He poked me with it. And I recoiled in horror.

  It was hilarious, though. I had serious doubts that Mr. Teone could write his own name, much less compose a whole book. He had supposedly started out at Hillmont way back as a shop teacher, which I could well believe: he had that air. Then he got some kind of administrative credential and became a principal. So the man had some education. But from what I could tell, he was still more or less functionally illiterate. He looked down at the papers in his butt hand and started to laugh like a maniac.

  “No pain, no gain!” he said. “No gain, no pain!” Way to sell your dopey afterschool program to a skeptical student body. Whatever, freak.

  Mr. Teone’s afterschool Gifted and Talented program might have been of some use as an anecdote factory, but that was about it, and I felt I really didn’t need the anecdotes at that price. Not that I ever would seriously have considered participating in something like that, even if it hadn’t involved Hillmont High School’s most bizarre and unhygienic administrator. I didn’t need any more self-congratulatory self-esteem baths and collage-making bees in my life at the present moment. Sam Hellerman had attended one of Mr. Teone’s ill-conceived afterschool activities last year, a sort of science fiction club. He never went back. He wouldn’t say much about it, except: “he’s a deeply weird man.” It hardly needed stating.

  THE LORD ROCKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS

  Meanwhile, despite the multifaceted depravity of Hillmont High School, and personal mysteries various and extremely sundry, the band was trying to soldier on. It wasn’t easy. I wasn’t worried that I’d get in trouble for blowing up the Magnavox Astro-Sonic hi-fi console. It hadn’t been used for years and years. Lifting the lid had let loose an enormous cloud of dust. It was just a large piece of furniture from long ago that was used as a thing to put other things on, its original function forgotten. We hadn’t even been sure it would turn on.

  However, that still left us with two-thirds of a band and nothing to plug in to. (Some Delicious Sky, aka SDS, Squealie on treble and vocals, Sambidextrous on thick bottom and industrial arts, band name squirted on a tanorexic female midriff in white toothpaste, first album Taste My Juice.) Because I’m so brilliant, I had blown up the left channel on the stereo in my room, too. I was philosophical about it: after all, a lot of the records I like are in mono. But we were running out of consumer electronics products to abuse in the name of Rock and Art.

  Till now, Sam Hellerman and I had done all of our band activities at my house because his parents, even though they were almost never home, came from Germany and were all weird and strict. They specifically disapproved of music, it seemed. How he had talked them into buying him a bass I will never know.

  Actually, out of the vast universe of things Sam Hellerman’s parents frowned upon, the one they seemed to disapprove of most of all was Sam Hellerman himself. He had to take great care to hide what he did and anything he might be interested in, because if they ever found out about an activity or interest their first impulse was to ban it immediately.

  By now so many things were prohibited in the Hellerman household that no one could keep track anymore, and a lot could slide by. Still, Sam Hellerman’s peace of mind required that he limit contact with his parents as much as possible, as each enthusiasm stomped upon by the Ministry of Stomping on Enthusiasms represented a tiny missing piece of Sam Hellerman’s soul that would probably never grow back. He didn’t know whether in reality it would be physically possible for German parent-vampires to suck the rock and roll completely out of the hearts of their defenseless offspring. But he didn’t want to be around to find out the hard way.

  Nevertheless, Some Delicious Sky had nowhere else to go, for the moment. So we crept into the tomblike foyer of the Hellerman house, carrying our guitars, with a palpable feeling that we were up to no good.

  The Hellermans didn’t have a Magnavox Astro-Sonic hi-fi console in their living room, but rather an extremely expensive-looking audio setup with all sorts of extra boxes that glowed purply blue. It was always on standby and was never used, as far as I know. Sam Hellerman wasn’t allowed to touch it, or even look at it. I suppressed an urge to kick the whole thing over as I tiptoed by, following Sam Hellerman down the hall and into his room.

  Sam Hellerman ran the bass through his stereo. As for the guitar: there was this old electronic toy called a Speak-amatic, left over from remote childhood. When you pushed the buttons, it would play funny sound effects through a tiny speaker. It was shaped like a little cow in overalls, and the speaker was the cow’s mouth. When you pressed button #1, it would say: “Moo. What would you like to hear today?” Sam Hellerman had somehow rigged up the Speak-a-matic cow so that I could plug my guitar into it and the sound would come out of the cow’s mouth. Well, it sort of did. The sound was rotten and squilchy, and very, very quiet, but come on, how cool is it to be playing a ’65 Melody Maker through a souped-up Speak-a-matic cow mouth? That boy is a genius.

  Yet I was starting to wonder if it was possible to fashion a crude band out of ordinary household materials. Without amps, I mean.

  A couple of practices of that sort were more than enough to demonstrate that rock and roll, like nearly everything else on the planet, was not destined to flourish in the bowels of Hellerman Manor. We had to find another way, I thought.

  And, as if directly in answer, Sam Hellerman revealed that he had a plan.

  “You know,” he said, on the Friday of the second week of his mysterious pod-hippie-dom. “I don’t think we should go to the Pep Rally.”

  I stared at him, with the look that said “Gee, ya think?”

  Once a month, the school cancels the period after lunch so they can hold a lengthy Pep Rally in the gym. Sometimes, when it is judged that lunch plus one period is insufficient, they cancel the period before lunch, as well. I wasn’t into the idea of two or three solid hours of—what? To be honest, I’ve never been to a Pep Rally, and I don’t know what goes on at one. But I can’t imagine it’d be too pleasant. You’re supposed to go, but they don’t have any way to check, so for anyone not interested in upping their pep intake for the day it’s like a little vacation. You just take off. Sam Hellerman’s saying “I don’t think we should go to the Pep Rally” was like Sam Hellerman saying “You know, I don’t think we should use these big rusty nails to hammer our hands and feet to the floor today.”

  This particular Rally promised to be especially gruesome, as it was billed as a “Cultural Awareness Pep Rally.” In a way, it was nice to know that Hillmont’s assault on taste and decency was going strong—a predictable world is a manageable world. But that’s no reason to participate in the madness, if there’s a way to get out of it.

  I was a little surprised that Sam Hellerman chose hanging out with me rather than Celeste Fletcher’s ass for the precious extended lunch break. But, as I said, Sam Hellerman had a plan, which for once did not involve any of Celeste Fletcher’s anatomical parts.

  The solution to our amp problem had been under our noses all along, though it took Sam Hellerman’s genius to uncover the secret. Ages ago, when the school system had more money and everyone was trying a lot harder to create the impression that Hillmont High School was more than just a clean, well-lighted place for hazing, they used to have a Jazz Band. It is beyond my capabilities to imagine what sort of god-awful “jazz” the Hillmont High band students might have managed to emit in those odd moments when they weren’t otherwise occupied in student-on-student abuse. The Jazz Band program had been discontinued long ago, its terrors and cruelties lost in history. (One day they will discontinue all the programs, and that will be a fine day. A world without programs will be just as hard to take, maybe, but at
least it will be more honest.)

  Some of the Jazz Band paraphernalia remained, however, and it included a couple of amplifiers that were buried behind and underneath several layers of other band-related junk. There was a Polytone twin guitar amp, and a Fender Bassman, which was actually a legitimately cool amp, though I gather from reading interviews with real rock guys that the cool way to use the Fender Bassman is as a guitar amp rather than a bass amp. Anyway, they were better than the nothing we had. And they were free. In a sense.

  The band room was normally locked when not occupied, of course, but Sam Hellerman had a key to the main building because he had signed up for a practice room. And he had somehow temporarily rigged the band room door so it wouldn’t latch properly when Ms. Filuli, the band teacher, left the building. That boy is a criminal genius.

  We had to burrow through quite a few layers, but it didn’t take long. The school was deserted; everyone was either at the Pep Rally or skipping the Pep Rally. So no one was there to notice when I picked up the Polytone and just walked out with it. No one even came to investigate when Sam Hellerman wheeled the creaky Fender out of the band room and into the hall, even though its wheels made a squealing sound like I imagine a five-year-old girl might make if someone hung her outside a window by the ankle. Preventing geeks from swiping decrepit school property wasn’t high on everybody’s list of priorities that day.

  We replaced all the band room junk and jumbled and jostled it a bit so it looked pretty much as it had before, kind of like how you would trample on the dirt on top of a grave you didn’t want anyone to find out about. Hardly anyone even knew the amps were there in the first place, so we were pretty safe. We left the school grounds and took turns wheeling the Fender with the Polytone on top of it back to my house. I had an absurd feeling of (devil-head) euphoria, like we were on our way.

  What finally made us get off our asses and solve the amp problem? Well, there had been another big development, bandwise. Sam Hellerman had taken some time off from his busy schedule of keeping tabs on Celeste Fletcher’s ass and had managed to scare up a drummer. An actual drummer. I kid you not. His name was Todd Panchowski, he had a drum set, and for reasons that remain dark to this day, he hadn’t flinched at the idea of being in a band with Sam Hellerman and me. Well, actually, he took determined steps to make it clear that he wasn’t “in” the band, so maybe that was it. There were other bands he was “in.” When he talked about our band (which when we met him was Arab Charger, me on guitar, The Fiend in Human Shape on bass and preventive dentistry, first album Blank Me) he would always say we were “jamming,” which is less committed sounding than practicing or playing.

  The Polytone didn’t sound too bad with the distortion box, the Overlord II. Much louder than the cow mouth. The Fender Bassman didn’t work when we first plugged it in, but that was just because the tubes were missing. Sam Hellerman had anticipated that and was ready with a new set of tubes that he got from the electronics store. I thought it sounded nice, though I think he was secretly pining for the thin, burbly, distorted Magnavox sound.

  We plugged this cheesy microphone from Amanda’s mini-karaoke set into the Bassman’s second channel and taped it to a bamboo pole from Little Big Tom’s gardening supplies, and stood the pole up by sticking it in the red and green Christmas tree stand from the basement. It looked exotic. The mic squealed a bit, and it was kind of hard to get it so that we played all at the same time, but it was loud and we sounded—well, not exactly like a rock band. More like three different rock bands with one member each playing different songs at the same time. But we played “Surrender” and “Cretin Hop,” “Fox on the Run,” and “Whole Lotta Rosie,” sort of, and if our attempt to do my own song, “Wetness for the Prosecution,” sounded a bit more experimental than intended, it was still pretty cool in a Trout Mask Replica kind of way. Or so I kept telling myself.

  This was all happening in the living room of my house. Little Big Tom popped in at one point. He tilted and said something I couldn’t hear. We stopped and waited expectantly.

  “Living room rock!” he said. I guess I had been hoping for a comment on the song, “I Pledge Allegiance to the Heart.” But it was probably pretty hard to make out the lyrics. Plus the mic kept shocking me, so I was shying away from it and not putting a lot into the singing. Living Room Rock was pretty funny, though, and I made a note to self to use it for an album title or something someday. Actually, it was one of the best band names I’d ever heard….

  Now, Todd Panchowski was a Christian stoner. That is, he was a stoner who had joined a Christian youth group to deal with his inner turmoil and problems at home and to find guidance and a sense of community. There were a few of those around. The youth group was called the Fellowship. In my experience, despite the cheerful hobbit-evoking name and their (devil-head) ostensible ethical standards, the Fellowship people were just as sadistic and psychotic as any other normal people. Maybe they were nice to each other behind closed doors and reserved their hazing for people of other religions or something. I didn’t really know a lot about them.

  I don’t want to get into the whole stoner classification system, but I should mention that practically every member of the Hillmont student body is technically a stoner, in that they all do various mild drugs continually and are pretty much always stoned to some degree. The difference is that the stoner stoners wear heavy metal T-shirts while doing it. They tend to be nicer to be around than full-on normal people, though, because their ideology includes a self-perceived admiration for social misfits. That part is contrived and not very sincere, perhaps, but in fact they don’t hassle me nearly as much as normal people do. I even get points for my encyclopedic knowledge of firearms and rock and roll history. I’m not one of them, but they don’t actively seek to destroy me, and that’s a nice novelty.

  One more thing: all the psychotic normal people are well aware that there is something weird about dismissing people as “stoners” when the stoners differ from themselves only in the kind of T-shirts they wear and in the diminished ferocity of their attacks on the defenseless. So they prefer to call stoners “burnouts.” But that’s a more appropriate term for teachers, if you ask me.

  Todd Panchowski was not without his Fellowship-related quirks, as we soon learned when we started to play with him. He was okay with playing our songs, and in fact didn’t seem to pay too much attention to the words or music. I guess he was so busy hitting things with sticks that he didn’t really have a thought to spare for the content. But there was one song he insisted that we do, and it was kind of an abomination. I guess he had picked up the idea at the Fellowship meetings, where they do God only knows what. What he wanted to do was to play “Glad All Over.” (Not the Carl Perkins “Glad All Over.” The other one.) Now, I love “Glad All Over,” don’t get me wrong. But instead of singing “You make me feel glad all over,” like the Dave Clark Five or the Rezillos, he wanted it to go “He makes me feel glad all over.” Like you’re singing it about Jesus instead of a hot girl, get it?

  I tried to explain to him that “glad all over” had a double meaning, a code meaning, like “giving her the time,” and that the song wasn’t about how great you feel when you read Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians. Unless you’re weird. It’s really about—well, it’s like this: boy meets girl, girl shows skin and wiggles, boy gives girl money or fabulous prizes, girl bends over, boy and girl invade each other’s personal space, resulting in the propagation of the species and/or a big, sloppy mess. That’s what “Glad All Over” is about, a tale as old as time.

  Sam Hellerman was more direct.

  “You have a crush on Jesus,” he said. “But Jesus doesn’t know you exist. Is that it?”

  Well, no, that wasn’t Todd Panchowski’s point, although I think there may have been a grain of truth in it concerning what the Fellowship people might have had in mind when they decided to co-opt that particular song for their youth recruitment purposes. There’s something weird and sexual about the way s
ome people talk about God—have you noticed?

  Those comments could have cost us our drummer right there, but in the end I don’t think Todd Panchowski fully understood what we were saying. How can I put this? Todd Panchowski was not exactly a genius. But we didn’t need him for textual analysis of the lyrics of pop-rock standards. We needed him to hit things with sticks in a vaguely rhythmic pattern that more or less accompanied our songs, and that was something he could do. Pretty much.

  So we did “Glad All Over,” just to humor him, and if I was thinking of Kyrsten Blakeney’s ass instead of the face of Jesus when I sang it, well, he’d never have to know. In fact, the notion that he was sitting there thinking of the f. o. J. while I was thinking about being glad all over this or that female was amusing enough to make me crack up more than a few times. I don’t know why I got such a kick out of that.

  Todd Panchowski also wasn’t into how often we changed the band name. He thought we should just pick a name and stick with it. He didn’t understand that we were still searching, and that the habit of a lifetime of fantasy rocking dies hard.

  “What’s the name of the band again?” he said, after our second practice.

  “Occult Blood,” said Sam Hellerman, “Mopey Mo on guitar and vox, me on bass and teleology, you on drums, first album Pentagrampa.”

  “Well, first of all,” said Todd Panchowski, “I play percussion instruments, not ‘drums.’” Second of all, he added, he didn’t want to jam with a band with the word “occult” in it. There was some Fellowship rule against it. So he happened to be wearing an I, Cannibal T-shirt depicting a skeletal grim reaper cutting off a nun’s head with his scythe. Maybe they hadn’t given him the “be nice to nuns” talk yet.

  It didn’t matter because halfway through the practice I had already decided that the new band name was going to be The Mordor Apes, Mithril-hound on guitar, Li’l Sauron on bass and necrology, Dim Todd on drums-oops-I-mean-percussion and stupefaction, first album Elven Tail.