King Dork

by Frank Portman

  I knew I hadn’t been unconscious for long, because when I came to there was still time on the clock. I had fallen back into the chair, and it was possible that my blackout had been so brief that Dr. Hexstrom hadn’t realized it had even happened. I could tell she was taken aback by my reaction, though, blackout or no. We stared at each other, trying to work out who knew what, who was mistaken about what, and who was lying about what. I concluded she really believed that my dad had killed himself, and had also believed that I had known, and that she was shocked to learn that the idea came as such a spectacular surprise to me.

  Was she right? Well, that was really two questions. Question one: was she right that I ought to have known about the supposed suicide, or that I did know but was pretending not to know? Lying to myself? I’ve learned I should never be too sure about such things. I hadn’t known about the Catholic thing, though I should have—it was obvious enough that even Amanda had known all about it. If I were to ask Amanda about the suicide thing (which I would never in a million years do, but still), would she look at me like I was dumb as a cup of melting ice and say “no duh?” Well, I can’t speak for Amanda, but a quick, ruthless self-examination indicated that my ignorance was genuine. I truly had not “known” about the suicide, nor even considered it as a possibility.

  The second question was, was the suicide story itself true? It didn’t seem possible. I had read all about it in the paper, and even though there had been details missing, the car crash had definitely happened. If my dad had killed himself, he would have had to have done it in the car before the hit-and-run. How likely was that? Maybe someone had intended to murder him and just hadn’t realized that the guy in the car was already dead by his own hand? Or someone had known he had killed himself and had crashed into the car to make it seem like an accident? Or my dad had deliberately placed himself in a position where he knew he’d be crashed into, as a roundabout suicide method? That sounded really crazy. I realized I should probably go back and read those articles again: since I did the research at age ten, I’d had four whole years of being disappointed by my fellow man and having this and that illusion shattered, which had resulted in a firmer, or at least less inaccurate, grasp of reality, presumably. Maybe I’d read things differently now.

  Of course, everything Dr. Hexstrom knew about me and my family history came from my mom and from me, filtered through her own (admittedly impressive) knowledge of the world and corrected by her equally impressive powers of deduction. I had exaggerated and left out details and tried to make myself look better and/or worse than I actually was all over the place for various personal reasons. Her view of my world based on my account was wildly inaccurate, except in those areas where her own common sense corrected the picture. But she hadn’t gotten the suicide thing from me. So either my mom had lied to her deliberately for some unfathomable reason, or my mom genuinely believed, rightly or wrongly, that the suicide story was true. Since it was the better explanation for her freak-out over the song, I had to conclude that the latter was the case. She liked to exaggerate and fabricate things for melodramatic purposes, but she wouldn’t do that to someone to whom she was paying a hundred and fifty dollars an hour to cure her son of individuality. Would she?

  These thoughts took a lot less time to think than it just took to describe them. When I finally spoke, I was almost incoherent. The questions I was able to get out were, how did my mom know about this when everyone else seemed to think it had been a hit-and-run, and why had Dr. Hexstrom believed her, a known liar.

  “She said he left a note,” said Dr. Hexstrom, but then seemed to think better of continuing. “I need to speak to your mother about this. And our time is up.”

  She wouldn’t let me leave on my own, though. She insisted on calling Little Big Tom to pick me up. I spent the ride home in a daze, thinking about my dad’s alleged suicide note and how I’d have to do some Little Big Tom–style snooping to try to locate it amidst Carol’s stuff. If it really existed.

  A BETTER CLASS OF LIE

  I was starting to wonder how anybody knows anything at all about anything. All sources are suspect.

  Even if I were to find this supposed suicide note, chances were it would be inconclusive, too. “Dear Honey, I have decided to end it all,” it would say, and there would be no proof that he was talking about his life as opposed to eating red meat or subscribing to TV Guide. On the other hand, I suppose a wife would know. One thing I knew: asking her about it would serve no purpose. God help Dr. Hexstrom if she really planned to go through with trying to talk to her about it. I was sure the good doctor had encountered quite a few crazy people in her day, but my mom was in a category all her own.

  I was starting to realize the extent of the problem here: everyone is always lying to each other, and even when they’re trying to tell the truth, it can still be misleading or wrong. In fact, it almost always is wrong from at least one angle. I mean, in a way, the truth is really just a better class of lie.

  And then there was Fiona. She was still at large, whoever she was. The Deanna Schumacher episode, pleasant and mind-blowing as it was, hadn’t changed that. Sam Hellerman had stated categorically that Fiona was Deanna Schumacher dressed up as a fake mod, which was plausible, but which hadn’t been the case. He could have simply been mistaken, misled by his CHS friends. On the other hand, it was possible that he had known and had been lying, for obscure reasons of his own. Had he been trying to help me get over my Fiona-related pain and longing by providing me with a fake fake Fiona to focus on, feeling fairly certain I wouldn’t end up putting his story to the test by tracking her down and going over to her house for some illicit oral sex? (A safe assumption: I still couldn’t quite believe it myself.) Or maybe Sam “the Matchmaker” Hellerman had known all along that I would follow up on the Deanna Schumacher lead and had intended for us to get together? Maybe the Deanna Schumacher blow job had been a gift from Sam Hellerman unto me, in return for my years of faithful service to the Hermetic Order of the Alphabet. Maybe Deanna Schumacher had been in on the scheme, as well.

  All I knew was that Sam Hellerman always had something up his sleeve. He had a plan for the band. He had a plan for me. He had a plan for everybody, and he would only let you in on what he felt you needed to know.

  I suppressed the urge to point-blank him on it as I had done with Dr. Hexstrom. He would come up with an explanation that would be just as plausible as the others (in other words, just barely—but I would want to believe). Or he would refuse to say anything and subject me to the dread power of his overwhelming, wordless sarcasm. Fearing more Hellerman eye-ray treatment than I felt I could handle in my confused and enfeebled state, I decided to hold off on the point-blanking, at least till after the Festival of Lights. We still had a lot of work to do to get the band ready for the show, and, as I had learned the hard way when the whole Fiona business began, a disgruntled, sarcasm-soaked Hellerman is in many ways worse than no Hellerman at all. I had to keep the band together at least till the show, which was only two weeks away. I was grateful to the school schedule for providing me with a reason to postpone my decisions for just a bit longer. That’s all a man ever really wants, in any case.

  THE RODENT ROLE

  The first two weeks of December were a bit surreal and went by in a kind of blur. Mr. Schtuppe was trying to time Catcher in the Rye so that we finished the reading and brain-dead assignments on the last day before the Christmas break began on the twentieth. We were already almost to the end, so the reading had slowed to a crawl. I imagine we copied down and used in sentences and mispronounced practically every word in the book several times, including “the” and “and.” I spent a lot of time, in and out of class, engaged in an unspoken stream of questions that, if spoken aloud, would have been totally incomprehensible to anyone but me: “What’s the deal with Tit? Who was MT? Did Tit really ramone MT? And what about the Dead Bastard?” On and on.

  As for Deanna Schumacher, she and I were engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse, with m
e in the rodent role. We were okay when we weren’t talking, but practically every conversation was more or less a train wreck. The hardest part for me was her cold-and-distant routine, which she could turn on and off at will. It drove me crazy not to know what she was thinking about me, and there was never any point in asking—that would only spark a contemptuous kind of laughter. I knew the proper strategy was to act just as indifferent as she did, to try to keep her guessing, as well. But it was beyond my capabilities. I always broke down and revealed my anxiety in the end. Then she would pounce.

  My third visit to her house, on the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend, had gone pretty much like the previous episodes. She telephoned shortly after I got home, and I was all excited because that was the first time that had happened, until I heard what she said.

  “You know, this really isn’t working out for me. So, be seeing you in all those old familiar places.” And she hung up. I tried to call back, but her phone was off the hook. Anyway, she would have been with her boyfriend by that time anyway. The bastard.

  I spent the rest of the night in a kind of agony, saying to myself over and over, “Don’t call, don’t call, don’t call….” Then when I would finally break down and call, it was busy anyway. Johnny Thunders was singing “You Can’t Put Your Arm Around a Memory” on the stereo, or rather, I guess I should call it a mono, since it still had one blown channel: for the first time, I really felt I understood what he was getting at.

  The next day I was a zombie. I felt the estrangement physically, as though sharp objects were embedded in my chest, slicing me up, and, not coincidentally, making me feel like a total idiot as well. Then when I got home from school, there was a note from Amanda on my door: “phone call, some chick, said don’t worry and everything will be OK.” I was suddenly ecstatic, till I realized that “everything will be OK” could be read in different ways. And I wasn’t sure I would be all that pleased if things were Deanna Schumacher’s version of okay.

  Of course, I had other things to obsess over besides Deanna Schumacher and Timothy J. Anderson. There were just too many explanations for my dad’s death floating around. It couldn’t possibly have been murder and an accident and suicide. Any scenario I could come up with to explain why people seemed to think it could was preposterous. I didn’t have much to go on, but if the deeply engraved “help” in Siddhartha, CEH 1964, was any indication, my dad had had something of a history of feeling overwhelmed and desperate. Most kids do. But I guess it can continue when they grow up. The Crying of Lot 49 also had the word “help” written on it. I had thought it referred to the Beatles song, but if it was the same kind of help as the Siddhartha one, maybe there was a pattern there. It didn’t square with my memory of him, but if he had been a habitually depressed person, my mom would have known. Perhaps this knowledge and an ambiguously phrased note had convinced my mom that it had been suicide despite the evidence to the contrary. It certainly wouldn’t have been the only time my mom had believed something illogical or unsupported by the facts. On the other hand, she could just have been lying. I really couldn’t say.

  We had been working pretty hard to get the band ready for the Festival of Lights. We weren’t sounding too bad. It was still pretty rough, but in our better moments, we sounded kind of like Buddy Holly meets Thin Lizzy with a punk rock sensibility and a slight psychedelic edge, like UFO playing Velvet Underground songs or something. Or so I told myself. When I said as much to Sam Hellerman, he sniffed and told me I was “trippin’.” Well, at least we were getting better at playing at the same time as each other for most of the song, which was a big improvement.

  RYE HELL

  The title of The Catcher in the Rye comes from a misquoted poem by Robert Burns, which Holden Caulfield elaborates into a mystical fantasy about saving children from falling off a cliff. There are all these kids playing in a field of rye, and he stands guard ready to catch them if they stray from the field. A lot of people have found this to be a very moving metaphor for the experience of growing up, or anxiety about the loss of innocence, or the Mysterious Dance of Life. Or any random thing, really.

  To use HC’s own terminology, it has always seemed pretty goddam phony and all to me. Fantasies about Jane Gallagher’s preppie ass? Check—even I have those. Fantasies about twisting yourself into a tortured symbol of the precious authenticity of youth? I don’t think so. It’s the kind of thing you’d make up to impress an AP teacher. And the AP teachers are duly impressed with it, of course. Suckers.

  The brilliance of it, though, is that the people in the Catcher Cult manage to see themselves as everybody in the scenario all at once. They’re the cute, virtuous kids playing in the rye, and they’re also the troubled misfit adolescent who dreams of preserving the kids’ innocence by force and who turns out to have been right all along. And they’re also the grown-up moralistic busybody with the kid-sized butterfly net who is charged with keeping all the kids on the premises, no matter what. Somehow, they don’t realize you can’t root for them all.

  Say you’re a kid in this field of rye. You try to find a quiet place where you can be by yourself, to invent a code based on “The Star-Spangled Banner,” or to design the first four album covers of your next band, or to write a song about a sad girl, or to read a book once owned by your deceased father. Or just to stare off into space and be alone with your thoughts. But pretty soon someone comes along and starts throwing gum in your hair, and gluing gay porn to your helmet, and urinating on your funny little hat from the St. Vincent de Paul, and hiring a psychiatrist to squeeze the individuality out of you, and making you box till first blood, and pouring Coke on your book, and beating you senseless in the boys’ bathroom, and ridiculing your balls, and holding you upside down till you fall out of your pants, and publicly charting your sexual unattractiveness, and confiscating your Stratego, and forcing you to read and copy out pages from the same three books over and over and over. So you think, who needs it? You get up and start walking. And just when you think you’ve found the edge of the field and are about to emerge from Rye Hell, this AP teacher or baby-boomer parent dressed as a beloved literary character scoops you up and throws you back into the pit of vipers. I mean, the field of rye.

  Sound good? I’m sorry, but I’m rooting for the kids and hoping they get out while they can. And as for you, Holden, old son: if you happen to meet my body coming through the rye, I’d really appreciate it if you’d just stand aside and get out of my fucking way.

  HOW NORMAL PEOPLE TRIED TO KILL ROCK AND ROLL, AND HOW ROCK AND ROLL CAME BACK TO BITE THEM ON THE ASS

  When the day of the show arrived, I was pretty surprised at how many other rock bands there turned out to be at Hillmont. We were on last out of four bands, according to the schedule. Everyone who was in the Festival of Lights was allowed to take third period off as well, to set up. So there we were in the auditorium standing around checking each other out while the three sullen drummers were off to the side, grumbling and swearing under their breath about how no one was helping them set up, and mumbling that they played percussion, not just drums. There were three rather than four disgruntled percussionists because Todd Panchowski was in two of the bands, ours and Alter of Blood. Actually, to judge from the retarded flyers they had made, their official name appeared to be Alter of Blood (Formally Black Leviticus). I supposed they were Christian metal, though they could have been just plain old metal. Hard to tell sometimes.

  It was easy to tell, though, who was in either Alter of Blood or Karmageddon, as they were the heavy-metal stoner types. By process of elimination, I guessed that the remaining band, Radio Free Atlantis, had to be made up of one stoner drummer, two goths, and two normal people. Everyone had better amps than us in terms of quality, but Sam Hellerman had them all beat in terms of coolness. He had purchased an old and extremely large nonfunctional Magnavox hi-fi stereo cabinet from the St. Vincent de Paul for twenty bucks and had replaced the insides with the electronics and speakers from the Fender Bassman. Okay, so Sam Heller
man and I were the only ones there who realized how cool it was. We’re used to it. One day they’ll wake up and realize that we were right about everything all along. Now, though, they were just standing there laughing at my guitar, which was, unbeknownst to them, by far the coolest and most valuable thing in the room. But I admit: it certainly didn’t have uber-super-mega-quadruple-distortion pickups like everybody else’s guitar.

  The hippie-ish drama teacher (Mr. Malkoe, but he wanted you to call him Chet) was in charge, because it was “his” auditorium we would potentially be trashing. The third-period drama class, those who were still there, including Celeste Fletcher, Syndie Duffy, and assorted boyfriends and minions, were all sitting in the back, laughing and “getting high,” I suppose. “Chet” had an easygoing manner on the outside, but inside he was an auditorium Nazi. He immediately confiscated our Balls Deep banner, just as Amanda had predicted. I tried all the usual tricks (calling him “man,” saying I was glad he stopped the Vietnam War, flashing him the peace sign). But despite his obvious admiration for Little Big Tom’s Che Guevara shirt, he had pretty much seen it all and positively would not be sweet-talked out of his fascist freedom-of-expression-crushing banner ban. So the banner was history. He also forbade everyone from setting anything on fire. I saw a little light grow and die in Sam Hellerman’s eyes: even if he hadn’t been intending to set anything on fire before, he certainly was indignant at the prohibition now. “What might have been,” his eyes seemed to say.

  “Wait till the revolution comes,” he whispered. “Chet Guevara will be the first against the wall.” And I could see his point, Matt Lynch notwithstanding.

  Only Radio Free Atlantis, the first band, got to sound-check, which they finished doing just as the small chunk of the Hillmont High School student body that hadn’t decided to skip the “festival” and take off began to filter in. I was impressed with how RFA sounded. And when I say impressed, I mean that in the sense of “extremely bummed out.” How come we couldn’t sound like that? Maybe it was all in the PA.