King Dork

by Frank Portman

  MY POOR INEPT PARENTAL UNITS

  It seemed as though the smoke from the Sex-Vietnam-Stratego Incident had only just cleared when out of the blue I got called into the kitchen for another family conference. It was the Thursday before Halloween, not too long after our second practice with Todd Panchowski. I passed Amanda on my way in, and she gave me the look that said “you’ll never get out of this one, boy.” Dear God, what now?

  This time my mom was officiating rather than Little Big Tom, though he was hovering in the background. She looked terrible. Her hair was all wild, like it was when she was going through one of her crazy episodes. She was smoking with tremendous ferocity even for her. She looked up at me through her hair with this unreadable but distressed expression on her face. What on earth was wrong?

  We stared at each other.

  Finally she said, her voice distant and depressed sounding, though also with a little sob, “A lot of kids your age are experimenting with drugs.”

  I went: “?”

  And I’ll tell you why I went “?” The first thing my mom did every single morning was to reach to the bedside table for her weed. She couldn’t function without it, like some people are with coffee. And even now she had her afternoon lowball, bourbon and soda, no ice, in her hand. And coursing through her veins at this and any given time was a constant stream of about a dozen orally administered tranquilizers and psychotropics and God knows what else—Xanax, Prozac, lithium, Vicodin, Halcion, you name it. The irony was that I was the only person in that room, and probably the only member of the Hillmont High student body, who wasn’t experimenting with anything. Other than love, literature, rock and roll, and cryptography, I mean.

  The notion of these teen drug “experiments” always cracks me up. Like they’re in a secret laboratory conducting research on a government grant. As opposed to being in a public lavatory doing lines of crank and holding some poor bastard’s head in the toilet till he drowns or till the bell rings, whichever comes first. Well, in a way that’s on a government grant, too. What a world we’ve got here.

  My assumption was, of course, that my mom had finally noticed that Sam Hellerman had been raiding her Vicodin supply and had assumed that I was the culprit. Now, if that had been the case, here’s what would have happened: I would have looked up and seen Little Big Tom tilting to one side and holding, maybe even rattling, a half-empty medicine bottle, with a concerned yet wry expression. In fact, though, when I looked up, it turned out that Little Big Tom was holding not a bottle, but rather a piece of paper and a little booklet.

  It was my lyric sheet to “Thinking of Suicide?” and a copy of the school pamphlet of the same name. I had stupidly left the lyric sheet out after band practice. We had broken out the pamphlet as a visual aid to try to explain to Todd Panchowski why the song was cool. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out, but never mind about that.

  My poor inept parental units. Once again, their opening line wasn’t the topic sentence, and everyone ended up confused. They were trying to have the suicide talk and somehow got it mixed up with the drug talk.

  THINKING OF SUICIDE?

  You can put your straightjacket away

  I don’t plan to kill myself today

  Maybe tomorrow, maybe not at all

  I’m not ready to make that call

  But don’t assume that I’m all right

  I won’t be with my baby tonight

  There’s no baby, there’s nothing there

  What baby? I don’t care—

  Thinking of Suicide? Yeah, that’s right.

  It’s a Thinking of Suicide Saturday night

  It’s not funny but it’s true

  I think about suicide when I think about you

  So put your E back where you got it from

  I don’t plan on going to the prom

  I know I add up to a figure of fun

  But I don’t want to be the only one

  And there’s only one of me

  And no one else that I can see

  And I’m so tired of trying to

  Make believe I’m not dying to, so—

  Thinking of Suicide? Yes, I am.

  Thinking of Suicide? Hell, goddamn.

  It’s not funny, but it’s free

  Do you think about suicide when you think about me?

  And if I’m suddenly gone

  Then you’ll know what’s been going on

  I’m always thinking

  And I never do anything

  But,

  Thinking of Suicide? Yeah, that’s right

  Thinking of Suicide with all my might

  I have got a history of

  Thinking of Suicide when I think about love.

  Well, it was a bit better with the music. Not the music as played by me and Sam Hellerman and Todd Panchowski, which was pure (devil-head) cacophony. I mean how it sounded in my head. Maybe you’ll have to trust me on that. Anyway, I just thought you should see what my mom had been reading when she flipped out. Plus I’m kind of proud of that song and I’m showing off a little, even though you have to sing “from” a little weird to make it sound like it rhymes with “prom.” But actually, that’s kind of like my favorite part.

  I totally couldn’t see what the big deal was. It’s a pretty ordinary topic. Not too shocking or unusual. They make a pamphlet about it, for Christ’s sake. In fact, it wasn’t even me in the song. The song had been inspired by the pamphlet girl, as I’ve explained; and as for those specific lyrics, I had in fact been feeling sorry for myself while pretending to be Yasmynne Schmick when I came up with most of them. But I couldn’t figure out a way to explain that to my mom and Little Big Tom without causing even more confusion.

  When my mom is in crazy mode it’s just not possible to talk to her reasonably. Still, I gave it a shot, trying to make it as simple as possible.

  “I’m not on drugs and I’m not going to kill myself,” I said. And it was true. I really wasn’t. Though I couldn’t tell you why not.

  No one knew what to say. Then Little Big Tom cleared his throat and filled in some of the background.

  My own cleverness had tripped me up. Way back, I had needed to find an excuse for why I never spent much time at home, particularly after school. The real reason was that LBT kind of freaked me out back then, and I felt so uncomfortable with the whole vibe of the Henderson-Tucci household that even the ghastly pall of Hellerman Manor seemed preferable to it. So I invented a series of clubs I was supposed to be in, plausible ones like the Chess Club, Rocketry Club, Monty Python Club, The Middle-earthlings, or the Trekster Gods, and sometimes crazy ones I would make up for my own amusement, like the Caulking and Stripping Club, or the Doorknob Appreciators Society, otherwise known as the Knob-heads. Not that they ever paid much attention to what the clubs were called. My brilliant humor, once again wasted.

  Ironically, part of the reason I started hanging out at home more, in addition to the fact that we couldn’t do band activities at Sam Hellerman’s, was that I had started to warm up to Little Big Tom, even actually almost kind of liked being around him sometimes. But to them it looked like I had suddenly lost interest in all the clubs and afterschool activities. That was a Danger Sign. Then they found the lyrics and pamphlet and that had tipped the whole thing over. I screwed up. And now I was looking at a vast stretch of inept suicide-watch activity from the parental units for some time to come.

  “You’re not going to like this, chief,” Little Big Tom began. What? What could they confiscate in this situation? I was all ears.

  “We’d like you to see someone. Just to talk to you and help you work things out.”

  Out of the three people in that room, there were two in serious need of psychiatric help, and I wasn’t one of them. This point would have been lost on them, though, because between them they were already “seeing” a small army of counselors, therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, analysts, facilitators, and what have you. They thought that was man’s natural state. In fact, I was surprised
they hadn’t tried to force me to go to a shrink long before this, if only in the spirit of trying to provide me with everything they hadn’t had as kids.

  It was going to be a drag, of course, but as punishments go, I’d certainly had worse.

  LINDA’S PANCAKES ON BROADWAY

  The following day, Sam Hellerman and I decided to skip PE. The main reason was because we had just started boxing and sometimes that’s just too much to take. Sam Hellerman was doing it mostly in solidarity with me. I mean, he didn’t really need to, as he had a special talent that made boxing easy for him. But also, he had said, somewhat mysteriously, that there was something important that we needed to discuss, and that he had something to show me. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. “Just wait,” was all he would say.

  There’s pretty much nowhere to go in Hillmont except for this place called Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway. When all else fails, which is in fact quite often, Sam Hellerman and I end up going there to sit in a booth and drink coffee from these big plastic pitchers they refer to as bottomless cups.

  So the state and the school district and the Hillmont school administrators had decided that Sam Hellerman and I would spend second period that day standing in a ring hitting each other, or getting hit by someone else, or watching somebody else hitting somebody else. But instead, at least for this one day, there we were, in a booth at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway, discussing this and that.

  Actually, I should explain how PE boxing works. They don’t have a real ring. Instead, there’s a mat on the floor of the lanai, and everyone stands on the edge of the mat in a kind of human ring while the two poor kids who have to box each other stand in the middle. If one of the boxers gets too close to the human ring, the ring people in that particular area are supposed to shove him back toward the middle. I probably don’t have to mention that everybody has to wear the tiny George Michael shorts while this is all going on. It’s your basic nightmare.

  While the boys are doing boxing, the girls are over on the other side of the lanai doing Rape Prevention, but they’ll always come over to watch if there’s an interesting matchup, making the whole thing even more embarrassing. There’s this pretense, never verbalized without a snicker, that they have boxing to “teach you how to defend yourself.” But in reality, it’s just a way for a certain type of guy to be able to beat up on a certain other type of guy during class time as well as before and after school.

  They’re required to stop the festivities at “first blood” (I kid you not, that’s the phrase they use). So your best strategy is to try to get hit in the nose and start bleeding as soon as you can and thus spare yourself the rest of the state-mandated beating. Sure, the PE teacher will then lead the class in a rousing chant of “pussy, pussy, pussy” at you, but they’re always saying that. Beats getting beat.

  Sam Hellerman’s special boxing talent was that he got nosebleeds all the time. He was so good at it that he could pretty much start bleeding at will, through the power of his mind. Mr. Donnelly would put him in the ring and roar: “I’m warning you, Hellerman! If you start bleeding before you’re hit, there will be hell to pay!” But little Sam Hellerman would just stand there with an angelic look, bleeding away. Mr. Donnelly would glower and yell and turn twenty-three shades of red, but he couldn’t touch Sam Hellerman because that would probably have been good for about three or four million dollars, by a conservative estimate. Sam Hellerman’s dad is a lawyer, as he makes sure to inform every PE teacher on the first day of class.

  The best part, though, is when he leaves the ring to go to the nurse’s office and tries to get as much of his blood on as many PE goons and their stuff as he can. I’ll say it again: that Sam Hellerman is a genius.

  Cutting class wasn’t so smart, really, as we’d pay for it later. But sometimes you need a mental health day.

  I settled into my side of the booth and looked at Sam Hellerman expectantly. He was cagey, and only seemed to want to talk about trivial matters rather than this big important thing about which he had called the meeting. Finally, I just came out and said, “What’s the story, Hellerman?”

  Now, you have to understand: my day-to-day life was kind of weird at that time. I was constantly in this frantic, anxious state, all wound up. I was doing the ear thing more often than not, and I was hardly sleeping at all. I was spending most of my time thinking furiously about real or imagined mysteries, many of which, I suspected, could well have no solution. I spent a couple of hours every night working on the Catcher code when I was supposed to be doing homework. It would always end in failure, and with my throwing some object across the room in frustration.

  Meanwhile, I was having no better luck with the CEH reading list. Brighton Rock was beyond doubt the best book I had ever read, but I sure didn’t know what to make of The Journal of Albion Moonlight. I spent a lot of time “reading” it, but I never seemed to get anywhere. I couldn’t tell you what it was about or what happened in it if my life depended on it. It’s like this thing was written by a crazy person. Even the printing was crazy, sometimes tiny, sometimes huge, and sometimes the sentences and even the words themselves were all out of order. There was almost half a page with nothing but the word “look!” repeated over and over again. I don’t know anything about the guy, but whoever he was, I hope he got help.

  I was also struggling with the songs for the new band (the Nancy Wheelers, me on guitar, Sam Hellerman on bass and Ouija board, first album: Margaret? It’s God. Please Shut Up.) I could never get the songs to come out how I wanted. I’d have a great idea for this brilliant tune where the lyrics and the melody and the sounds and the arrangement would all complement each other and resolve into a perfect three-minute encapsulation of a true experience that would play with the listeners’ emotions while simultaneously crushing their skulls. I would start speculating about how it was only a matter of time before they awarded me the Nobel Prize for Rock and Roll, once word of it got round to Sweden. But then I’d actually try to play it or write down the lyrics and it would totally suck.

  Finally, there was the Fiona Deal. Fiona seemed more and more distant. I’d spent quite a bit of time riding my bike around various neighborhoods and school areas, scanning all the girls for any who looked even vaguely Fiona-esque. I got nowhere. Eventually, I just dropped it.

  I still thought about “giving her the time,” of course. But she had faded into the background, almost to the point where she was more or less equivalent to all the other imaginary girls whose images I used as masturbatory props. She was as distant as a movie star. Fiona Schmiona. Maybe she went to OMH, maybe she had known who I was, maybe she had been a real fake drama mod, maybe not. Maybe everything she had said was a lie. Maybe I had imagined her. Or maybe she was madly in love with me, and was wandering the earth pining away but could never reveal herself because the Illuminati had kidnapped her parents and had sworn to kill them and detonate a nuclear device they had hidden at Disneyland if she ever made herself known. She was doing it for the children. All of these scenarios were equally plausible. And I have to say I was starting to think I didn’t really care too much anymore. That was my attitude.

  In view of this, I was floored by what Sam Hellerman said when he finally got to the point.

  “I found Fiona.”

  I dropped my coffee cup.

  “She gave you a phony name,” said Sam Hellerman, once I had regained my (devil-head) composure and he had stopped laughing—for which I couldn’t blame him: I hadn’t planned it that way, but the momentary failure of my cup-holding abilities had asserted itself with near-perfect comedic timing.

  “Her real name is Deanna,” he continued. “And she’s a little weird.”

  He reached into his backpack and pulled out a large red book, which turned out to be last year’s yearbook from Immaculate Heart Academy in Salthaven Vista. He opened it to a folded-over page and pointed to a black-and-white picture. There she was: Deanna Schumacher. As I was silently kicking myself for not having considered the Catholic
school option as a possible Fiona habitat, he told me what he knew.

  Deanna Schumacher was the girlfriend of this guy named Dave, who was a CHS fake mod. She had probably made out with me to make him jealous, which was something she was known for doing. She was not a fake mod herself, but rather a generic Catholic schoolgirl, though she was in drama at IHA-SV. She was a little bit psycho and was always doing head trips on her friends and boyfriend. Oh yeah, and by the way: this Dave guy was looking for me and wanted to kick my ass.

  She was no longer even in the area. She had moved to Miami with her family just the week before, when her father had suddenly and mysteriously been transferred.

  “Miami,” I said dubiously. “Florida.”

  “Or near there,” said Sam Hellerman.

  I looked at the black-and-white yearbook photo of a dark-haired girl with glasses. She did look a little psycho. The glasses looked about right, though they weren’t exactly the same—but people can have different glasses, of course, from year to year. All things considered, she looked quite a bit like the Fiona I remembered, though I don’t know if I’d have recognized her if she hadn’t been pointed out. My memory of Fiona was idealized and faulty, shaped by the fake fake mod costume and my own fantasies, as I had to acknowledge. In a Catholic schoolgirl uniform she wouldn’t, in a sense, have been the same girl. I felt as though I would have been able to pick her belly out of a lineup and to identify what Sam Hellerman would have called her left boobie by touch alone, but maybe not. Girls all have the same parts, basically, and so much of how they look depends on the attitude, expectations, and obsessions of those who are looking at them.

  The moving away to Florida part sounded very fake, of course. Maybe Sam Hellerman was just trying to help me “let go” with a little white lie that removed all doubt about her lack of availability. And I appreciated it, I guess. Fiona wasn’t real. Whatever. Like I could keep track of all the imaginary girls in my life.