King Dork

by Frank Portman

  “Did you get the letter?” said the voice.

  Letter? What letter? And who, or what, was this mysterious voice?

  Okay, you know what? I’m already tired of this “for it was he” gimmick, “the voice” and everything. You and I both know it was Sam Hellerman on the phone. Who else would have been calling me to talk about Satan and Mussolini and whether I’d received some letter? He was pretty much the only person I knew.

  “What are you talking about, Hellerman?” I said. For it was he. “What letter?”

  It was hard to interpret the silence that followed.

  “Meet me in front of Linda’s in forty-five minutes to an hour,” he finally said.

  “Will you be the one wearing a yellow carnation?” I said, because the conversation sounded a bit like we were being spies, and that’s a joke I sometimes make when proceedings have taken a spylike turn. It’s from a movie, probably, though I couldn’t tell you which one. One of those old black-and-white ones where the guys’ pants come up to their chests and Humphrey Bogart has to stand on a box just out of frame to kiss the tall ladies.

  “And bring the stuff,” said Sam Hellerman, ignoring my brilliant carnation gag. Okay, Agent X-T9. I decided to give the carnation joke one more try sometime soon and then, if it didn’t get a laugh, retire it for good. Why no one thinks it’s funny is beyond me. I had planned to say something along the lines of “Just tell me what fucking letter… .” But he had hung up.

  “Christ, what an idiot,” I said under my breath. I was referring to myself. Sam Hellerman, as I’ve often remarked, is, despite considerable flaws, a genius. I’m just the one who always falls for it, whatever scheme he’s working on, in which I am occasionally the target but more often a mere pawn in some grand plan beyond my understanding. He’s that kind of guy.

  THE IRON FIST OF THE SANTA CARLA COUNTY SCHOOL DISTRICT

  Sam Hellerman, Sam Hellerman … Sam Hellerman. I believe I’ve already said all that needs to be said about Sam Hellerman. Our association began long, long ago, in the mists of elementary school. The state, having determined that its interests would best be served by turning the lives of its citizens into a living nightmare at as early an age as possible, had entrusted the day-to-day soul-crushing process to the local Santa Carla County School District. And the District found that its iron fist could most efficiently grind the aforementioned souls into a fine, terrified, inert paste if the bodies they animated were clearly marked and organized in a rigid, alphabetically ordered grid, like books, or socket sets, or fireworks. This system placed me–Henderson, Tom–always and everywhere either to the right or directly behind Hellerman, Sam. When the District’s iron fist wanted to torture one of us, it had only to flip through the letters till its murderous index finger alighted on “H.” And there we were. Teachers, parents, and their minions (the psychotic normal students who occupied the rest of the alphabetical grid) would obediently spring to action to take care of whatever was left.

  I don’t know why we ended up remaining in our assigned positions even after school, at home, onstage, pretty much everywhere. It was the path of least resistance, perhaps. And it was only natural to band together with whoever was closest at hand once the inevitable assaults began. But eventually, over time, one way or another, we got used to standing next to each other, which is pretty much the living definition of friendship.

  In a way, I should be grateful to the state’s iron fist, even though I am its sworn enemy, because I doubt I’d have been able to make a friend on my own. And then I wouldn’t have had anyone to be in a band with once I discovered rock and roll.

  Oh, you haven’t heard our band? Encyclopedia Satanica? Well, that’s what it was called at the time I’m describing–that is, at the beginning of Sam Hellerman’s phone call about the letter. You should have seen the logo: so squashed-together and spiky that it was completely illegible. No way anyone was going to be able to read that thing. And it was really more of a sinister cult than a band. By the end of every show all audience members, especially the ladies, were thoroughly brainwashed and eager to do our bidding like sexy robot zombies. (That’s why we’d been putting more effort into rehearsing our faces lately. I mean, obviously.) Now, that, my friends, was a great band. I miss it.

  One of our best band names ever, too. And looking back, I’d have to say, upon careful consideration, that it was almost definitely a mistake to change it to I Hate This Jar, based on a jar my mom was having trouble opening when I walked past the kitchen just after Sam Hellerman told me to bring the stuff and hung up on me.

  “I hate this jar,” said my mom, like I said, holding the jar in question in both hands and banging its lid against the counter edge.

  “Good band name,” I said almost involuntarily, sealing Encyclopedia Satanica’s fate before I could stop myself. It’s just a reflex, but once it kicks in, there’s no going back. The Tomster on guitar and vox, the Samster on bass and never looking back, the Shinefieldster on the drumster. First album–

  This train of thought was stopped in its tracks when another train crashed into it and derailed it, scattering the first train’s cars and passengers in a bloody, tangled, screeching mess all over the thought countryside. Because my mom was really bashing the hell out of the jar in question, and it was weird. I mean, it just didn’t seem plausible that a human being, even my mom, could hate a jar quite that much. Though that weirdness was part of why the event warranted being memorialized in band name form for at least a few hours, it still didn’t compute, and the way I’m wired, I tend to take note of things that don’t compute and worry about them helplessly in that quiet, detached, brooding way I have.

  Now, I don’t know how well you know my mom, but even though I technically, and even literally, love her, I’d be the first to admit she has her quirks. A lot of them are charming, and even some of the less charming ones are mostly forgivable because she’s pretty. She dresses like the costume room of a community theater exploded and landed on her. She professes to believe the most preposterous new age nonsense even though it is clear that in reality she doesn’t believe in anything at all. She likes the Doors, and I’m not even exaggerating all that much. Also, she is unpredictable. And I don’t mean just unpredictable as in, she’ll get up and make a two-foot-high stack of pancakes in the middle of the night, or start tap-dancing on an airplane, or put a skillet on her head and sing “You Are My Sunshine” in a cartoon mouse voice when you least expect it; she’s done all those things, though honestly she hasn’t done anything that … what’s the word here … “exuberant”? She hasn’t done anything that exuberant in a long, long time.

  No, by unpredictable I mean that even though her usual mode is subdued, distant, and silent, she can go from catatonic to berserk in a matter of seconds, well before it’s possible for people within her blast radius to know what hit them. This behavior got a lot more noticeable after my dad died, I think, though it’s hard to tell for certain because I was only eight and I’m pretty sure my “we’re a happy family” memories of that time are well padded with fake content that my mind invented and placed there in order to underscore how bad things got afterward. What I’m saying is that if there’s anyone you might expect to overreact to a jar, it’d be my mom. But even for her, this seemed excessive.

  I rounded the corner where the hallway juts off from the kitchen’s mini-hallway, mainly to replace the phone in its little saddle thing before getting the hell out of there, because things were seeming like they could get pretty tense and uncomfortable at any moment. Quick as a striking cobra, Amanda’s arm shot out and took possession of the phone, hardly allowing any plastic-on-plastic contact at all. She had, as usual, been silently shadowing me, waiting for her first phone-snatching opportunity. She likes to keep control of the phone as much as she can, carrying it around as she used to carry her dolls when she was younger, so much so that I tend to think of them, the phone and Amanda, as a single unit, the Amanda-phone. For all I know, she dresses it in little outfits a
nd rocks it and pretends to feed it when no one’s looking. The purpose of this–the carrying, if not the dressing and feeding–is to discourage others from using it, to be sure, but it’s also to monitor who is talking to whom. She fields all calls that come in, sighing heavily and saying “Hold, please” when it’s not for her, and handing the phone off to the appropriate person like some hostile secretary.

  I was just shooting Amanda a puzzled look concerning the jar when I heard the voice of Little Big Tom, husband to my mom and fake dad to Amanda and me. And all became, well, not clear, but about as clear as anything ever gets around here.

  “If you don’t tell me what it is,” he was saying, “how am I supposed to know how to respond?” His customary placid voice twisted into a slight whine on the word “respond.”

  As though in answer to my puzzled look, but really, in fact, just to be a dick, Amanda cupped her hand at her mouth and stage-whispered:

  “If she doesn’t tell him what it is, how is he supposed to know how to respond?” She shook her head in mock concern, but underneath it all she was practically beaming. She is not a fan of Little Big Tom, and she loves it when my mom argues with him, even a little, about anything. My hospitalization had brought us all closer together for a brief time but as far as Amanda was concerned the truce was over, and hostilities resumed almost as soon as I returned home. In a way I couldn’t blame her. Little Big Tom is not a bad guy, but he can be hard to take, even at his best. I find it difficult not to feel sorry for him, even though I’m not above mocking him with sympathetic regret. We all do it, even my mom. But Amanda seems immune to sentimentality when it comes to family matters. “Sympathy is for the weak,” her steely eyes seem to say. Well, I mean, with regard to her eyes: they’re as steely as brown eyes ever get.