Mamelukes (maym-LUCK-ayce): mounted warriors recruited from slaves, who dominated Egypt for several centuries till they were destroyed by Mehemet Ali Pasha in 1811. And a great fucking band name.
Charles Manson (CHAR-less mon-SOON): the world’s most famous Beatles fan, the ultimate boomer, and the Voice of his Generation.
Mao Tse-tung (Meow TAY-zee-tongue): a Chinese communist revolutionary who managed to thin out the Chinese population considerably, earning him the admiration and gratitude of a small but irritating segment of The Most Annoying Generation. Author of The Little Red Book, about which the best that can be said is: well, at least it’s not a big red book.
George Michael (YORE-gay Mich-elle): there’s lots to say about this guy, perhaps, but the shorts alone are bad enough.
Monty Python (MIN-tee PITH-ee): short for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. A documentary series on everyday life in Great Britain.
Most Annoying Generation, The: see Boomers
Motorhead (MELT-er red): the seventh-greatest rock and roll band of all time.
multiple personality disorder (em-py-DEE): a feminine courtship strategy.
The New York Dolls (the NEW-ark DOY-leez): a New York transvestite version of the Rolling Stones. The fifteenth-greatest rock and roll band of all time.
normal (nor-MAL): lacking in taste, compassion, understanding, kindness, and ordinary human decency.
obsequious (ob-see-CUE-ee-us): a fancy-pants way to describe a suck-up.
orgasmic (or-JAZZ-um-ick): of, like, or pertaining to being glad all over.
partner (pard-NAIR): a euphemism for spouse or significant other. When a woman reaches the age where everyone starts to giggle whenever she refers to her “boyfriend,” and if the dude won’t marry her or if she doesn’t think “husband” sounds special enough, and possibly if she wants to preserve ambiguity as to whether or not she is a lesbian, she will usually settle on “partner.” I have no idea why guys use this word, unless it’s because their girlfriends or wives are a little touchy and they’d rather not get into it. This situation could be worse, however, as there are misguided parents out there who, I kid you not, like to introduce each other by saying things like “this is my lover, Don,” which can be quite a bit more nauseating.
PE (pay: as in, you will): “physical education.” I believe the Nazis used to make people dress in gay outfits and play tennis and do exercises in school, too.
Suzy Quatro (SOO-zee cue): hot rock and roll chick developed by the same guys who masterminded the Sweet. She was also in this TV show called Happy Days about people in the fifties who had seventies clothes and hairstyles.
The Ramones (duh rah-MOAN-ayz): if you can pull off the juvenile delinquent style when you are in your thirties and beyond, you are doing all right. The eighth-greatest rock and roll band of all time.
ramoning (ra-MAWN-in): a form of the verb “to ramone” (derived from the French ramoner, to scrub out a chimney). The point of human existence, i.e., sexual intercourse.
roach (rootch): the stubby end of a marijuana cigarette, held in a clip and smoked till it can be smoked no more, after which it is swallowed. This is believed to confer upon the stoner what are thought to be the magical properties of the plant itself, such as leafyness, harmlessness, listlessness, lack of short-term memory and motivation, and a slightly greenish coloring.
The Rolling Stones (the KID-nee stains): the Star Trek of rock and roll. The thirteenth-greatest rock and roll band of all time.
Rosemary’s Baby (ROH-zmer-eeze BABB-ee): scary evil devil people trick a skinny foxy chick into being ramoned by Satan so they can raise the resulting half-human/half-devil baby themselves and take over the world. The best movie ever made.
Samhain (sam-HANE): a Celtic festival marking the summer’s end, which was supposedly the origin of our Halloween. Funny people with capes, medallions, and large rings sometimes go to the park on whatever day they imagine Samhain to have been to do fake ancient rituals, drink wine from a box, and listen to heavy metal music. It’s a fun adventure.
sex (six): an abbreviation for sexual intercourse.
sexual intercourse (secks-YOU-all IN-ter-co-URS): a pathetic attempt to make ramoning sound less sexy.
Slade (slah-DAY): four English guys who couldn’t spell to save their lives. The sixth-greatest rock and roll band of all time.
slans (slawns): aliens who can communicate telepathically; also, earthlings whose superior intuitive powers allow them to dispense with verbal communication at least some of the time. Both face continual extermination attempts by enraged normal people.
The Small Faces (theez MALL FASH-ists): the poor man’s Who. The nineteenth-greatest rock and roll band of all time.
The Smiths (da smurfs): music for when you are sad.
Stalin (sta-LEEN): Russian communist dictator who managed to thin out the Russian and Eastern European population considerably, earning him the admiration and gratitude of a small but irritatingly vocal segment of The Most Annoying Generation. A lot of them are a little embarrassed by this now that he has fallen from favor, an embarrassment they will often celebrate by avoiding the subject, buying a sports car, smoking a joint, or taking out the recycling.
Paul Stanley (pole STAIN-lee): the singer-guitarist of KISS, described, with a straight face, as The Lover in all promotional materials. Has set the industry standard for announcing songs in a high-pitched squeal at live shows.
The Sweet (the Sweat): maybe they were only the second-greatest rock and roll band of all time, but they made the first-greatest album of all time (Desolation Boulevard ) and the all-time greatest song in the history of music (“Fox on the Run”).
Thin Lizzy (TEEN LEZ-ie): Ireland’s greatest contribution to Western civilization. The ninth-greatest rock and roll band of all time.
veganism (WEE-gun-izz-im): a religion for people who never feel particularly hungry.
The Velvet Underground (thee VULV-uh TUN-dra): you can tell how badly someone wants to come off as a hipster by how fervently he or she pretends to have been into this group since early childhood. They were my favorite band as a zygote. The tenth-greatest rock and roll band of all time.
Vicodin (vick-OH-dun): medicine to help mothers forget they are mothers.
The Vietnam War (tha VITE-nam wair): for The Most Annoying Generation, the most fascinating and important topic in the world. For everybody else, not. When people from The MAG begin to reminisce about it, it’s a good time to balance your checkbook, catch up on your homework, learn a foreign language, or do the New York Times crossword puzzle. Don’t worry—they’ll still be talking when you’re done.
wanton (wahn-tahn): sexy, horny, game, chewy, delicious.
weltschmerz (well-cha-MERZ): German for “world-weariness.” This is a reasonable reaction to life on this earth, and it’s great that there’s a word for it, but if you can figure out a way to slip it into ordinary conversation, you’re a better man than I.
The Who (the hoe): the greatest rock and roll band of all time.
Wishbone Ash (vish-BONE-ay ASS): the, let’s see, 65,893rd-greatest rock and roll band of all time. Just kidding, guys. But I guess you really had to be there….
The Yardbirds (they ARD-varks): the sixteenth-greatest rock and roll band of all time.
Frank Zappa (flank zeh-PAH): if all hippie music had been this weird and good, maybe that subculture wouldn’t have been such a total waste of brain cells.
Excerpt copyright © 2014 by Frank Portman. Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
So I’m just going to pick up where I left off, if that’s all right with you.
Tenth Grade, act one, was pretty awful. I wouldn’t recommend tenth grade to anyone. Yet, I survived it. And while there was no particular reason to believe that the looming second act would be much better, the most pressing challenge, as I saw it, would merely be
figuring out a new hair strategy for the upcoming semester. My previous method of preemptive self-ostracism, where I would sit with my back against the wall hiding my face behind my glasses and my glasses behind my hair and my hair behind a book, would be severely hampered because I had quite a bit less hair to work with. They had had to shave some of it off to do my surgery, and then my mom had cut the rest of it pretty short with my dad’s old electric clippers once I got home from the hospital.
“You’re a nice-looking boy without all that hair,” she had said, causing my sister, Amanda, to collapse in melodramatic amusement.
Well, yes. I was a “nice-looking boy,” and it was going to be a great year. Maybe I could get a hat or something, was my main thought.
Of course, I was as wrong as wrong could be. The horrors of Tenth Grade, act 2, would not, and could not, be solved by a mere hat.
That said, do you want to hear something weird? If yes, just read this sentence out loud:
I’ve done it. With a girl.
It is basically true, as in, it’s pretty much nearly the case. Except “I” is me, not you, and I guess that’s more like one and a half sentences. So yeah, I screwed that up, but never mind.
Now, perhaps it didn’t sound all that weird when you said it aloud–I don’t know you. (And if you’re a girl and it didn’t sound weird, all I can say is, congratulations: you’re hot.) But when I say it, trust me, it sounds weird. And maybe you’re thinking I’m just being cagey, and it will turn out that the “it” that was done, with the girl, by me, was something like baking cookies, or playing Monopoly, or fetching a pail of water from the old well up the hill. But I assure you, it means what people usually mean by “it.” I’m talking full-on, approximately literal ramoning. (If you’ve somehow been fortunate enough to avoid my previous explanations, I’ll make it clear: ramoning is sex.)
I know you probably don’t believe me about this alleged ramoning. I wouldn’t believe me either. And it’s true that I’ve been caught in an exaggeration or three when it comes to women. For instance, being strictly honest, I had, at the beginning of the stuff I’m going tell you about, made out with three girls in my short career as a womanizer. Well, okay, technically two, but the third one kind of counts, as she was an alternate identity of one of the first two. And what if something extra special happened during one of these “sessions,” something that went above and beyond the call of ordinary making out? Shouldn’t that really count as a bit more than one? I think so. And then if I include girls who have, say, pretended to be interested in me as a Make-out/Fake-out stunt, and girls I’ve accidentally brushed up against, and girls where it seemed like they might have been looking at me and maybe would have possibly been potentially willing to make out with me? Well, then sometimes I can get the total up to as high as twelve or thirteen. Once I even made it to nineteen, but since two were comic book characters and one of those was a space robot, even I can’t accept that statistic as official.
But trying to be as honest and accurate as I can, we’re talking making out with anywhere from three to nineteen girls, but mostly just two, and doing it with at least one. Salvador Dalí couldn’t have done much better at fifteen, I’m pretty sure of that. I’ll tell you what, though: math of any kind makes me dizzy these days.
So who’s the lucky lady, and who’s this Salvador Dalí character, you’re asking? Well, Salvador Dalí–and I’m surprised at you for not knowing this–was this Spanish artist who painted things like melting clocks and ships with butterfly sails. He was a notorious lover of women, particularly of naked women, who all went wild for his crazy eyes and his big twisty mustache. There’s a photo of him using a sexy lady as a desk, doing office work on her belly. Even I can imagine being interested in homework under such circumstances. One day I may attempt to pattern myself after him, if I’m not doing it already. So that’s our Salvador. As for the “lucky lady,” that’s the thing I’m telling you about here, so don’t rush me. (But the Salvador Dollies would be a great band name, and if I ever meet three willing girls I will totally Kim Fowley them and turn them into rock and roll history. Who’s this Kim Fowley? Look him up, I’m tired of explaining.)
Anyway, you’ll have to bear with me because even though I was promised a full recovery, my brains are still scrambled on account of this head injury, which, if you remember from my previous explanations, I received when the normal people of the world tried to kill rock and roll by hitting me in the face with a brass instrument. Words come out a little funny sometimes, when I talk at all, and I find I lose track of things more easily than I believe I used to. Thanks, tuba.
Nevertheless, I’ve given the matter some thought, slightly, and here’s how I’m going to start the story part of this.
So travel back through the mists of time long, long months ago, in the twilight of a Christmas vacation much like any other, to a town called Hillmont, in a bathroom called “the bathroom.” Free your mind of all preconceptions, put your trust in my gentle care, and then, with any luck, I think you will find, dear reader, in the end, that it will, well, you know, sort of just pretty much be okay.
LIVE WIRE
I was doing the thing where you look in the mirror and try to decide if you recognize the face staring back at you. And I did recognize it. The bruises were coming along nicely, little rings of black, purple, and yellow, as if some evil hippie scientist had figured out a way to tie-dye random areas of my entire body with dark, foreboding colors, as a grim warning, perhaps, to any who dared question the sacred doctrines of recycling, organic dishwashing liquid, and the Doors. A centipede snaked across my forehead just under the hairline, the transparent legs of which, doctors had told me, would soon dissolve, leaving a legless centipede of scar tissue that would itself eventually fade to almost face color. At the moment, though, it was like a third, off-center eyebrow of fishing line. My hair, as I’ve already explained, was too short to cover the centipede in front, which was unfortunate, but looking on the bright side, I supposed it would allow me to test the conventional wisdom that chicks dig scars. I couldn’t resist stroking it. “We shall see, my little centipede,” I whispered. “We shall see.”
If I held my head at just the right angle and blurred my eyes up a bit, it didn’t look all that bad. Bruised as it was, I could work with it.
So I started to do the thing where you think of all the women you’ve had and pretend you are the Lord and Master of the Universe, making grandeur-deluded Mussolini eyes with an Angus Young lip curl and a slight head-bang, left hand idly positioned with the fingers draped over an invisible, floating guitar neck while the right index finger makes a series of rhythmic stabs, in time to which you growl tunelessly, under your breath, something like “I’m a live wire, live wire, I’m a live wire… .”
Don’t try to tell me you’ve never done this. Be honest, you were probably doing it just now. Also, don’t try to tell me that when you were doing it you didn’t at some point become conscious of a threatening presence behind you and slightly to your right. Everyone gets caught practicing eventually, is what I mean, especially when you live in a house full of annoying family members, like you probably do. In my case, the figure standing in the bathroom door that I should have remembered to close and lock happened to be my reliably inconvenient younger sister, Amanda.
Her thoughts were clearly visible on her face, as though written there in Magic Marker. “Ah,” they ran. “And another piece of the puzzle falls into place.”
But what she said, with her voice, in a withering, partially italicized tone, was:
“Hey, Live Wire. It’s your other half on the phone.”
She was holding the telephone like a TV remote control, pointing it at me as though deciding whether to switch the channel.
“How much did you see?” I asked.
“All of it, Live Wire,” she said. Then, after a pause, she repeated “All of it” and walked away shaking her head in an exaggerated manner, as she did in response to pretty much everything. Fortunately,
she’s family, so what she thinks doesn’t matter.
Now, “other half” is a euphemism for “mate” or “spouse” or any other person with whom you have what they used to call “sexual relations” on a regular basis. It’s meant as sweet-natured ridicule, implying that once two people have begun, you know, ramoning, they no longer have individual identities. It’s kind of sad and beautiful when you pause to think about it–one of the English language’s more lyrical insults, if “lyrical” means what I think it does. And an optimist might have assumed, knowing this history, that the voice on the other end of the telephone would be a female one.
But if nearly fifteen years of walking around on this godforsaken hellhole of a planet in the midst of its godforsaken hellhole of a society has taught me anything, it’s that this kind of optimism is rarely warranted. My godforsaken hellhole of a sister’s mocking, italicized tone said it all, transforming a gentle romantic put-down into nothing more than yet another tedious gay joke, the kind of thing that the normal people of the world, even up to and including your own sister, never ever ever ever seem to tire of. In other words, I was not at all surprised that the voice coming out of the telephone was not that of a female but rather that of a dude. Well, technically, anyway.
“Satan?” it said.
FOR IT WAS HE
“Mussolini, actually,” I replied, marveling at the voice’s keen powers of observation and deduction. All it had needed to hear was Amanda’s mocking “Live Wire” to know what she had discovered me doing in the mirror.
“Better stick to Satan,” said the voice.
“But I thought you were Satan,” I said.
“We can all be Satan,” it said, and I could see its point, which was actually pretty beautiful. The rock and roll Satan face was just the rock and roll Mussolini face with the addition of a flicking tongue. I could do that.
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