King Dork

by Frank Portman

  As for Sam Hellerman, he clearly had his own little obsession going for Celeste Fletcher qua Celeste Fletcher, and her true fake identity made some of his behavior just a bit easier to understand. He had been pissed off and jealous when, according to my slightly exaggerated account, he heard it had gone beyond second base, which hadn’t been the “deal.” On top of that, he hadn’t wanted me to find out the real story, not to mention his role in it. So he attempted to dampen my interest in the imaginary mystery girl and to draw my attention away from the real girl who stood behind her. He wanted Celeste Fletcher to be his imaginary fake girlfriend rather than mine. Pointing to Deanna Schumacher, who had been selected for her glasses and her distant location, had been a diversionary tactic that totally would have worked if I hadn’t called her up and if she hadn’t been the kind of girl who would say “you’d better come over, then” in that situation. That was just a crazy stroke of luck.

  The basic scheme was clear almost as soon as I heard Celeste Fletcher say “mamelukes.” I filled in more details later. In the meantime, we were just staring at each other, trying to guess what the other was going to do.

  I don’t know what normal people would have done. The girl would flounce out of the room in tears. Or the boy would say something along the lines of “leave me, I would be alone.” Or they would have a big, soul-baring conversation that would drag on deep into the night, until somebody eventually ended up hitting somebody else with a heavy object.

  But we weren’t normal people. And this situation (a pretty hot girl standing in front of you with your name scrawled all over her in black Sharpie) doesn’t come up all that often. Believe it or not. So what I did was, I reached out to touch the Trombone Chablis Ampersand breast and dipped two fingers under the T-shirt and bra from above. And what she did was to lean into me and to start sticking her tongue into my mouth and saying “mmmm.” Soon we were fully making out, and it was just like at the party, except she wasn’t in Fiona costume, and I was in pajamas instead of my army coat, and instead of a sound track of distant mod-related music, there was only the sound of Mr. Aquino’s moaning.

  Soon I had my other hand on the Chi-Mo breast and was moving the TCA hand down to the back waistband of her jeans so it was jeans-underwear-fingers-skin, and instead of resisting like before, she scrunched up so I could reach farther down, though it was a pretty tight squeeze. This was more like it. The autographs were getting smudged, so she said, “You’ll have to redo these sometime.” Sounds good to me. If you insist.

  Then, and you can believe it or not, I don’t really care, she reached her hand under the covers, said “Let me see if I can help you with that,” and started to give me what I believe is technically referred to as a hand job. Mind-blowing.

  I was thinking that there was a fairly good chance of this developing into full-blown ramoning. At this point in the proceedings, however, Mr. Aquino’s moans got louder and he started to wheeze. “Someone’s coming!” I said. We shared an extremely brief slan look about that hilarious choice of words—yeah, because we slans love our sophisticated jokes—but she quickly disengaged, straightened herself up, reached into her back pocket, handed me a folded note, mimed a little kiss, and left the room.

  The new visitor, I kid you not, was Deanna Schumacher, wearing her IHA uniform. She and Celeste Fletcher glared at each other as their paths crossed at the curtain. I shoved the note down behind my pillow with Sam Hellerman’s envelopes.

  “Who was that?” said Deanna Schumacher.

  “Sam Hellerman’s illicit lover,” I said.

  “She seems like a bitch.” She sat on the edge of the bed.

  “You have no idea,” I said. Which was true.

  Deanna Schumacher launched into her usual alternating hot/cold, mean/nice, hostile/polite routine. I’ll tell you one thing: navigating the twists and turns of a Schumacher conversation is way easier when you’re on prescription medication. It’s the only way to go. I just bided my time, till, as expected, she finally finished being schizophrenic and we started to make out.

  “Let me see if I can help you with that,” she said, sticking to the script. But Deanna Schumacher had had a lot of practice with that sort of discreet, sheet-covered help and she knew what to do. It was just like in her room, with a similar sense of urgency and looming time limit, but also with perhaps a bit more confidence on my part. Everything went well, and there were no interruptions. And I was glad all over all over again. Then she left, calling me a jerk, reminding me that Mondays and Thursdays are best, and asking that I say hello to my mother for her.

  READING MATTER

  When I was sure Deanna Schumacher had left the room for good, I retrieved Celeste Fletcher’s note. I had to laugh a little, because I hadn’t known what to expect, but I probably should have. It said my band rocked, blah blah blah, and there was a phone number; if I ever felt like killing some time I could call her. “Wednesdays are best, till around ten.” Hey, but what about the other day when her boyfriend works late? Maybe that’s Sam Hellerman’s day. Or Shinefield’s. Well, at least the work schedule proved Celeste Fletcher and Deanna Schumacher didn’t have the same boyfriend. That sure would have complicated things.

  She had written the note before she knew that I would have learned the Fiona secret by the time I read it. But it didn’t make much difference. Maybe I should have been more irritated by the deception, but without it, and without her having slipped up and my having realized it, the hospital make-out session wouldn’t have occurred, so I was mostly glad it worked out the way it did. Whatever. Celeste Fletcher was hot and I was more or less totally into her, details be damned. Though I had to admit, I preferred her in Fiona drag.

  What about Sam Hellerman? Well, he had sold me out, it’s true, and the whole thing was a bit embarrassing. But if it hadn’t been for his devil-head machinations, none of the making out in my life would have happened at all. None of it. I couldn’t be too mad at him. In fact, I thought I really should try to give him some kind of thank-you gift. Plus, we had to keep the band together, at least till we sold our first million records. Only then could we move on to competing solo careers and sniping at each other about our shared women and sleazy escapades in the music press, till we eventually reconcile around the time I record the third in a celebrated series of albums about having writer’s block.

  The maddening part was that I probably would never end up knowing how many of the results of his plans had been intended and how many had been because things went awry. Or how much he knew, or what he was planning for the future. I could talk to him about it, but I’d never know for sure if he was being completely honest. Plus, he clearly still had the hots for Celeste Fletcher, and I didn’t really want the subject to come up. I didn’t want him to know about Deanna Schumacher, either, just in case he might tell Celeste Fletcher about her. I certainly didn’t want those two knowing about each other. God, no.

  I almost forgot Sam Hellerman’s other envelope in all the excitement. Eventually, though, I retrieved it from under the pillow and took a look.

  In the envelope were two neatly folded pieces of paper. The first was a reverse-exposure printout from the library’s microfilm machine. Clearly, Sam Hellerman had resumed the Tit investigation while I had been out. The article reported that in early March 1963, a student had been discovered hanging by the neck from a rope in the gymnasium of Most Precious Blood College Preparatory in San Francisco. An apparent suicide. The student was not named in the article, but it seemed a good bet that his name had been Timothy J. Anderson. In the margin, Sam Hellerman had written, “Killed by Tit?” It was an intriguing notion, though I couldn’t see where he got that.

  Most Precious Blood College Preparatory. Man, I prided myself on coming up with good names for bands and titles and such, but compared to the Catholic church, I was a rank amateur. Most Precious Blood—probably the best name ever, for a school or a band.

  The other page was a computer printout of another, more recent article from the San Fra
ncisco Chronicle, dated nearly a year before my dad’s death. It was about a scandal and shake-up in the Santa Carla city and county governments. The details were cursory, but it appeared to be some kind of corruption scandal. The entire board of supervisors, the chief of police, and several other unnamed officials had had to resign; a few had been indicted, and, interestingly, there had even been a couple of suicides, including a Santa Carla policeman. I didn’t see how it could be linked to Timothy J. Anderson, but I guessed Sam Hellerman saw some kind of connection between this story and my dad’s death. Perhaps my dad had been involved in the scandal in some way and his suicide was delayed but similar to that of the cop mentioned in the article? If so, it was weird that this was the first time I’d heard of the Santa Carla corruption scandal, as I’d read dozens of articles concerning his death from the time and none of them had mentioned it. But of course, in those articles it had been reported as an accident rather than a suicide. Since my mom was the only person who thought it had been a suicide, as far as I could tell, I couldn’t quite put my finger on precisely how they might be connected outside my mom’s weird mind.

  The most interesting bit to me, though, was the fact that the article quoted a county official named Melvin Schumacher. The quote itself was bland and contentless, something about “respecting the process and seeing it through,” but the speaker was Deanna Schumacher’s father, clearly.

  Now, I’d known that her dad had worked with the county coroner’s office, so it wasn’t a big surprise to me. The question was, how much did Sam Hellerman know about that situation? Supposedly, he knew nothing about it. Deanna Schumacher had been chosen strictly for her appearance, for the superficial resemblance of her yearbook photo to the Celeste Fletcher “Fiona,” and presented to me as Fiona to throw me off Celeste Fletcher’s scent. As far as I knew, that was as far as it went. Sam Hellerman had no idea that I had struck up an illicit, blow-job-oriented relationship with her; he still believed that I believed that Deanna Schumacher was Fiona and that she was living in Florida with her suddenly transferred, non-CEH-associated father. But, as so often where Sam Hellerman is concerned, I had a few doubts. Was Deanna Schumacher more deeply involved in Sam Hellerman’s schemes than I knew? I had assumed that she had been chosen after the fact, on the basis of her resemblance to “Fiona.” But looking at the name “Melvin Schumacher” in the article printout, another thought occurred to me: perhaps Celeste Fletcher’s Fiona outfit had been deliberately designed to make her look like Deanna Schumacher, rather than the other way around. And Sam Hellerman had had a plan, going all the way back to the Baby Batter Weeks at the beginning of the year, before Dud Chart, before the party, that involved bringing Deanna Schumacher into my world.

  It sounded crazy in my head when I thought about it. Before the Catcher code, before my mom’s “Thinking of Suicide?” freak-out, there had been no reason for Sam Hellerman to be particularly concerned about CEH-related issues. The problem went beyond CEH, though. Now that circumstances had arranged themselves so that my life involved making out secretly with both Deanna Schumacher and Celeste Fletcher, with Sam Hellerman’s role ambiguous, the question took on some urgency. How I proceeded with D. S. and C. F. would in some ways depend on what Sam Hellerman knew and when he knew it. And what he planned to do about it.

  So the real question concerning that second article was what Sam Hellerman was trying to tell me with it. Was he trying to tell me something about CEH and Tit and Timothy J. Anderson, or was he trying to tell me something about Deanna Schumacher? I started to rack my brains for a way to find out without his realizing that I knew there was anything to find out.

  FIRECRACKER

  There was a pay phone down the hall in the hospital, and I used it to call Sam Hellerman shortly after I had opened the second envelope. He seemed pretty pleased with himself.

  “You mean you haven’t been able to figure it out?” he said, when I’d as much as told him I hadn’t been able to figure it out. “It all makes sense if you look at it a certain way,” he added. Well, I doubted that very much. But he said we could get together to discuss it when I got out of the hospital. I tried to come up with a way to get him to talk about Deanna Schumacher without actually mentioning her myself, but I couldn’t manage it. The best I could do was:

  “So, when you say it all adds up, you mean Timothy J. Anderson and Tit and my dad and the Catcher code and Matthew chapter Three verse nine?”

  “Uh, yeah,” he said, with that “no duh” inflection where you make “yeah” into two syllables, kind of swooping down on the last one.

  “Hey, how about that Celeste Fletcher,” I said, after a pause, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “She’s a firecracker,” said Sam Hellerman.

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  “Really?” I said. I guess there are guys who can sound cool saying that a girl is a firecracker, but Sam Hellerman isn’t one of them. Anyway, that exhausted my material, so I said “Later” and hung up.

  Life feels a little easier when you don’t have to make your own schedule. I didn’t have to worry about calling Deanna Schumacher till Thursday, which was a relief. Wednesday, Celeste Fletcher’s “safe” day, was right around the corner, though. I was due to be released Thursday, so that meant I’d have to call from the pay phone in the hall. Even though I didn’t find calling Celeste Fletcher quite as scary as calling Deanna Schumacher, I was still pretty nervous about it. Maybe you never get used to calling girls on the phone.

  I stalled and avoided it for a while, but eventually I got up the nerve to go out to the hall and call from the pay phone.

  “Oh, thank God!” she said, when she realized it was me. I kid you not. “Oh, thank God.” Could anyone be so happy to hear from me that they would spontaneously burst into a prayer of thanks? Sounds dubious, I know. She said she hadn’t been sure I would call her, showing just how little she really understood me and what I was all about. That was okay—I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of her being able to understand me that easily anyway.

  Our phone conversation was quite long, considering that my half of it was on a pay phone in the hallway of a hospital floor surrounded by angry fellow convalescents who thought I was taking too long and didn’t much like what they were hearing me say. It resembled the phone-side scene at the Henderson-Tucci household a bit, in other words, and it was not the first time I’d noted similarities between my house and a sanitarium, I can tell you that.

  I knew there was one thing we would have to cover eventually, so I got it out of the way near the beginning. I assured her I wasn’t going to tell anyone about us or our activities, past, present, or (and here I knew I was taking an optimistic leap) future. We’d just pretend we hardly knew each other. Okay? She sounded relieved that she didn’t have to figure out a way to bring it up, as I’d known she would.

  “Because it would be really bad if my boyfriend found out,” she said.

  I took a stab. “Shinefield?”

  “Him too.” She laughed, a little nervously maybe. I wasn’t sure who her actual real official boyfriend was, but it seemed safest just to adopt a blanket policy of nondisclosure that would cover him along with everyone else. Make things simpler. How had she explained the smudged breastographs, I wondered? Well, I was sure she had it all figured out. She had that air. “And, um, you might not want to mention anything to Sam, either.”

  Way ahead of you, babe. Not that I thought she was still messing around with Sam Hellerman, too. Did I? Was she? She was a busy girl, but I sincerely hoped not.

  “Or Yasmynne.”

  Okay, this was getting weird. But I didn’t want to kill the “Oh, thank God” vibe, so I let it slide. “Don’t worry, Fiona. No one will find out.”

  “Stop calling me Fiona,” she said.

  “Okay, if you stop calling me Trombone.” Because she had started to call me Trombone somewhere during the conversation. But that was a deal she couldn’t or wouldn’t make, so I guess Fiona was
back on the menu in at least a limited way. Plus, for obvious reasons the word “trombone” would now forever bring to mind her breasts, or one of them, anyway. So I suddenly found I kind of liked hearing the word “trombone.”

  With the nondisclosure agreement out of the way, the rest went pretty well.

  “For the record,” she said, “I never thought you belonged on the dude chart.”

  Dude chart? Now, that was hard to interpret. In a variety of ways, that statement went against everything I had understood about Dud Chart, the Sisterhood, and Celeste Fletcher’s role in the whole thing. Or at least, it seemed to give the game slightly different implications. Had Sam Hellerman gotten it a bit wrong, or contrived that I should get it a bit wrong? But wait: why didn’t I belong on it, if it was a “dude chart” rather than a “dud chart”? What was she trying to say? Who fucking knows? Nevertheless, even though I didn’t quite understand it, it was just about the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me. I think. So I said thanks and left it at that. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  On the other hand, “dude chart” may just have been a playful mispronunciation. See, one thing I learned from the conversation really blew me away—and this is so typical of me it’s not even funny: Celeste Fletcher was actually in Mr. Schtuppe’s English class, and was something of a champion mispronouncer in her own right. I had been too devil-head oblivious even to notice. So while I was obsessing over the mystery girl, the mystery girl had been right under my nose, and we had been reading about Jane Gallagher and mispronouncing the same words from Catcher in the Rye all along without my realizing it. Hell God damn. So that’s why, when it was finally time to wrap it up, I asked her how things were in Old Nocturnal Emission Hills.

  “Libidinous,” she said, but she pronounced it so it rhymed with “shyness.” She was the real deal. A slan chick with a great rack, a devious nature, and a powerful vocabulary. Not bad at all. I think I’m in love, I thought, whatever I might have meant by that.