King Dork Read online

  Everybody wins, though, really, in AP Land.

  But watch out. When all the little Holdens leave the building, it’s open season again. Those who can’t shed or disguise their Catcher-approved eccentricities will be noticed by all the psychopathic normal people and hunted down like dogs. The Catcher Cult sets ’em up, and the psychotic normal people knock ’em right back down. What a world.

  “Did you get in any APs?” Sam Hellerman had asked on the way to school that first day. He hadn’t gotten in any APs.

  Whether or not you end up in AP is mostly a matter of luck, though the right kind of sucking up can increase your odds a bit. So considering that I put zero effort into it, I didn’t do too badly in the AP lottery. I got into AP social studies and French; that left me with regular English and math; and I also had PE and band. “Advanced” French is mainly notable for the fact that no one in the class has the barest prayer of reading, speaking, or understanding the French language, despite having studied it for several years. AP social studies is just like normal social studies, except the assignments are easier and you get to watch movies. Plus they like to call AP social studies “Humanities.” Ahem…. Pardon me while I spit out this water and laugh uncontrollably for the next twenty minutes or so. This year, “Humanities” began with Foods of the World. The basic idea there is that someone brings in a different type of ethnic food every day. And the class celebrates cultural diversity by eating it. Day one was pineapple and ham, like they have in Hawaii! We were gifted and advanced, all right. And soon we would know how to have a snack in all fifty states.

  I suspected regular English was going to be a drag, though, and I wasn’t wrong. AP teachers tend to be younger, more enthusiastic, and in premeltdown mode. They are almost always committed members of the Catcher Cult, and easy to manipulate. The regular classes, on the other hand, are usually taught by elderly, bitter robots who gave up long ago and who are just biding their time praying for it all to be over. Getting in touch with your inner Holden is totally useless if you wind up in a class taught by one of the bitter robots. You will not compute. Or if you do compute, the bitter robots will only hate you for it.

  I didn’t get into AP English because my tryout essay last year was too complex for the robots to grasp. So I ended up in regular, nonadvanced English, run by the ultimate bitter robot, Mr. Schtuppe.

  “I don’t give out As like popcorn,” said Mr. Schtuppe on that first day. “Neatness counts.

  “Cultivate the virtue of brevity,” he continued. “There will be no speaking out of turn. No shenanigans. No chewing gum: of any kind.

  “Shoes and shirts must be worn. There will be no shorts, bell-bottom trousers, or open-toed ladies’ footwear. No tube tops, halter tops, or sports attire. Rule number one, if the teacher is wrong see rule number two. Rule number two, ah…if you are tardy, the only excuse that will be accepted is a death in the family, and if that death is your own—mmmm, no, if you die, then that death is, ah, accepted as excusable, mmm…”

  Mr. Schtuppe’s introductory lecture was not only morbid, but had a few glitches, as well.

  It is like his bald robot head contained a buggy chunk of code that selected random stuff from some collective pool of things teachers have said since around 1932, strung them together in no particular order in a new temporary text document, and fed this document through the speech simulator unit as is. And sometimes there was some corruption in the file, so you’d get things like “my way or the freeway.” And of course, all the girls in the class were in fact wearing halter tops, and practically every guy had on some kind of “sports attire.” You can’t have a dress code for just one class. It was nonsense. There must have been a time long ago, in the seventies, I’d guess, when he had been in a position to impose a dress code, and he kept it as part of the introductory speech because—who knows? Maybe he just liked saying “open-toed ladies’ footwear.”

  Mr. Schtuppe was still droning on about forbidden footwear when the bell rang. He stopped midsentence (he had just said “In case of”) and sat down, staring at his desk with what appeared to be unseeing eyes as the kids filed out. I had a feeling that everyone in that room was thinking pretty much the same thing: it was going to be a long year.

  HIGH SCHOOL IS THE PENALTY FOR TRANSGRESSIONS YET TO BE SPECIFIED

  Despite the ominous beginning, the first day of school had been refreshingly uneventful and easy to take. So, after weighing our options, we decided to go back and do it all over again the following day.

  I had been curious about how Mr. Schtuppe would launch day two of English for the Not Particularly Gifted, and I was pleased to note that he stood up at the beginning of the class period and simply resumed in midsentence where he had left off the day before.

  “Fire proceed to the exit in an orderly fashion,” he said. “No talking.” While part of me was a bit envious of the AP English students, who were at that moment probably watching a movie or eating cookies or something, I was mainly just fascinated to watch my own educational train wreck in progress.

  Mr. Schtuppe had a certain charm, if you looked at the situation in the right spirit. He liked to call the girls guttersnipes and the guys “you filthy animals,” and he would say it with this weird smile that made him look like, I don’t know, the devil or something. A shiny pink devil with a lot of ear hair.

  First on the program in Mr. Schtuppe’s class, when the introduction had finally ended, was a book called 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. “In 30 days, you will learn how to make words your slaves.”

  This book is a big list of fancy-pants words, and our job as self-improvement vocabularists was to prove we knew what they meant by saying them aloud and using them in sentences.

  Mr. Schtuppe’s unique twist on this was that he managed to mispronounce around half of them.

  “The first word is ‘bête noire,’” he said. But he pronounced it “bait noir-ay,” with the emphasis on the “ay.”

  “Bait noir-ay,” we said in unison.

  “Excellent. Now, class, listen carefully: magnaminious…”

  (We would have to wait till the end of the alphabet before we witnessed Mr. Schtuppe’s finest hour. That would be “wanton,” which he pronounced like “won ton.” The delicious Chinese dumpling often served in soup at the Pacific Rim’s finest eating establishments. That’s why Sam Hellerman and I will sometimes refer to a sexy girl as a Won Ton Woman.)

  Of course, if I had known how important mispronunciation skills would prove to be in my sex life and in the events that followed, I probably would have paid more attention. But I spent most of the class in my own zone, thinking about the lyrics of Roxy Music’s “She Sells” and writing out a track list for Baby Batter’s third album, Odd and Even Number.

  Note to self: one of these days, my next band is definitely going to be Beat Noir-ay. First album: Talk Won Ton to Me, You Crazy Asian Superstar. Lots of wok solos.

  But getting back to Hillmont:

  I used to get beat up and hassled a fair amount in elementary and junior high school, but not so much these days. In part, that’s because the normal people of the world, as they mature and become more sophisticated, naturally begin to discover that psychological torture is in the end more satisfying, and easier to get away with, than the application of brute force; and, in part, or so I like to think, it’s because of a special technique I developed last year.

  What I mean is, actual balls-out physical attacks, where one guy wins and the other gets beaten to a quivering bloody sock monkey, are rare, though they do happen. It’s usually more subtle than that. They’ll try to trip you as you go by in the hallway; or they’ll throw little rolled-up balls of gum at the back of your head in homeroom; or they’ll write stuff on your locker, or squirt substances like mustard, milk, or worse through your locker’s slats; or they’ll superglue your gym locker shut so you can’t get to your street clothes. None of these techniques is all that devastating alone; but repeated endlessly and in tandem, they can build up
and start to drive you a bit insane. The basic idea is to wear you down with day-to-day social exclusionary exercises, and the repetition of mind-numbingly similar minor pranks and indignities. It’s all about ritual abuse, mental and emotional stress, psychological torture, and humiliation. They really are a great bunch of guys.

  The best way to handle such situations is to stare straight ahead and act like you don’t notice or care. Unless you happen to have some serious equalizing firepower. Which I don’t.

  My dad always used to say “Fight back,” but that’s not realistic. Even if you could successfully pretend to be some kind of bad dude there would still be something like eighteen hundred of them and only one of you. On TV, people in that situation claim that they know karate and that their hands are registered as lethal weapons and then they do this yelpy kung fu dance. Someone cues the laugh track and the tension is relieved. Then there’s a commercial, and they don’t show the part where Matt Lynch rides his skateboard on the guy’s face. No thanks.

  The only way to get Matt Lynch to leave you alone, if you can’t actually take him out, is to introduce an element of uncertainty into his slow-moving, gummed-up “mind.” It turns out Matt Lynch has a fear of uncertainty and the irrational. Raising such doubts is not as hard as you might think, though it took me quite a while to figure that one out.

  At the beginning of the school year, all the psychotic normal people are mainly concerned with their own affairs, and even the minor irritants and pranks I’ve described can get off to a slow start. Which is why that first week went by without incident. Well, almost.

  THE WEEKEND STARTS NOW

  I say almost because on Friday, at the last possible moment, there was what I guess you’d call an incident. I was in my own world, thinking about Baby Batter, planning my stage banter (“Hey, we’re Baby Batter, and this one’s called ‘Up Your Face.’ Un, deux, trois, quatre…”) on my way out at the end of the day when I bumped into Mr. Teone. Literally, I mean: there’s quite a lot of Mr. Teone, and it’s pretty easy to crash into him if you’re not watching where you’re going. It happens all the time. In this instance I must have been going along at a fair clip, because I bounced so hard off his expansive trampoline-y stomach that I almost lost my balance and fell backward. Mr. Teone stood there smirking. No salute this time. Just a weird smile, if that’s what it was.

  “Henderson,” he said, in that mush-mouthed, nasal way he has, stopping me with his hand on my shoulder. He pulled his head back and squinted one eye as he looked at me. Not a pretty sight.

  I said nothing, looked up at him warily. What now?

  “Say hi to your dad for me.”

  I gave him one of my “whatever, freak” looks, disengaged, and shuffled off to the northwest exit.

  See, that almost sounds like an okay thing to say, if you don’t know that my dad is actually dead. But now that you know that, what do you think? I would certainly pardon your French if you were to reply that he’s totally fucked up. There’s no other way to put it.

  This was just a few days before the anniversary of my dad’s “accident,” which had me in a somber mood, despite all the Baby Batter excitement. At moments like these, it’s hard to tell whether you’re being too paranoid or just paranoid enough. It sure felt like they were all in it together, all the psychotic normal students along with their buffoonish mascot, Mr. Teone. It’s like they sit around all day trying to come up with ways to get to me. Some of the experiments are ill-conceived from the beginning; some are so moronic they wouldn’t trouble a retarded monkey; some have promise but go astray. But every now and again there’s one that lands. This one had a kind of subtle brilliance.

  In fact, I do talk to my dad, in my head, sometimes. Not that I think he hears me, not really. But I kind of pretend that I do think he’s listening, and would be dispensing advice and comfort if only there were a way for the human ear to pick up the signal.

  Telling him that Mr. Teone said hi just ain’t gonna happen, though.

  I was feeling kind of weird. When the subject of my dad comes up, particularly when it’s unexpected or sudden, I feel funny, kind of disoriented and light-headed. And there’s a strange pressure in my chest, like I’m recovering from being punched in the stomach. Mr. Teone’s remark had rattled me. Can’t they leave you alone for even one week? In fact, I don’t think they can. It’s in the school district bylaws.

  Sam Hellerman was waiting for me by the oak tree across from the baseball backstop, which was our usual afterschool meeting point (unless somebody was already there “smoking out”—then we would meet a little farther down, near the track). We couldn’t think of anything to do, so we went over my house.

  Friday is my mom’s half-day, so she was already home from work, leaning against the kitchen counter with her afternoon highball in her hand, smoking and staring blankly at the wall. She was wearing a shortish, vibrantly colored floral-print dress over white flared slacks, with big clunky boots. And a turban. Yes, a turban.

  “Far out, Mom,” I said as we walked by, but she was lost in thought and didn’t react.

  Sam Hellerman followed me into my room. I put on Highway to Hell.

  “The weekend starts now?” he said. I did the devil hand sign and said “Party.”

  “Mom says to turn down the teen rebellion,” yelled my sister, Amanda, pounding on the door. “She can’t hear herself think.”

  Bon Scott was singing “Walk All Over You.” I reached over and turned the volume up.

  “What’s her problem again?” asked Sam Hellerman.

  “Oh, she’s at that awkward age.” Amanda was twelve and was going through changes. It was like she had a supply of different personalities, a brood of alternate Amandas that she was trying out. You never knew which one you were going to get.

  “No,” said Sam Hellerman. “I meant your mom.”

  “She’s at an awkward age, too,” I said.

  I was only half kidding.

  Sometimes I accuse my mom of being a hippie, though that’s an exaggeration. She just likes to think of herself as more sensitive and virtuous and free-spirited than thou. If that dream leads her down some puzzling or slightly embarrassing avenues in a variety of neighborhoods, it’s not the world’s biggest tragedy. “I’m a very spiritual person,” she likes to say, for instance. Like when she’s explaining how she hates religion and all those who practice it. Well, okay, if it makes you feel better, Carol. She’s really about as spiritual as my gym shorts, but I love her anyway.

  I think she might have unintentionally bumped up her own groovy-ometer just a bit after my dad died. Her eye for fashion certainly went through a strange and magical transformation around that time. I think the technical term is cataracts.

  Well, we all went a little bananas. That’s to be expected.

  My dad was more down-to-earth. He was with her on a lot of the touchy-feely save-society-and-admire-African-art stuff, I’m pretty sure. But he didn’t overdo it. Plus, he worked for the police, so he couldn’t be frivolous about absolutely everything. He liked war and action movies, which hurt my mom’s feelings. And he loved motorcycles, which I think she thought was daring and hot. I think he found her beautiful and quirky and goofy and charming, kind of how I do when I step back. Somehow, you always end up forgiving her for being totally crazy.

  Basically, she is a traditional suburban mom with a thin veneer of yesterday’s counterculture not too securely fastened to the outside. It’s not a good idea to kick the scenery too hard, but if you hold very still and view it all through a squint and from a certain angle, you can just about get a glimpse of how she likes to see herself, and it’s actually very sweet. She was quite a bit younger than my dad was when they got married and she had me when she was super young, so she’s still quite pretty. By the way.

  My dad was married to another lady before he got divorced and married my mom. I know nothing at all about my dad’s first wife, except that she lives in Europe somewhere and her name is Melanie. And that my mom ha
tes her guts, even after all these years. She calls her Smellanie, and says she’s getting a migraine if anyone ever brings her up. And believe me, you don’t want to be around Migraine Mom. I strongly recommend avoiding that subject.

  The current man in my mom’s life, technically my stepfather, is a full-on hippie, though. There’s just no getting around it. He’d say “former hippie” probably, but that’s too fine a distinction in my book.

  Our official legal relationship is pretty recent, though he’s been around for quite a while. I don’t know why they decided to get married all of a sudden. They went away for the weekend to see Neil Young in Big Sur and somehow came back married. They still refer to each other as partners, though, rather than husband-wife. “Have you met my partner, Carol?” Like they’re lawyers who work at the same law firm, or cops who share a squad car. Or cowboys in the Wild West. “Howdy, pardner.”

  Unfortunately, Carol’s dogie-wranglin’ varmint-lickin’ yella-bellied pardner’s name happens to be Tom also. Just my luck.

  He has tried to establish the system where I call him Big Tom and he calls me Little Dude. So that any observers (like, say, if someone had planted a spy cam in the TV room) could tell us apart. See, you can’t have two Toms in the same room. It would be too confusing for the viewer. Well, he can call me what he likes, but I hardly ever say anything at all, so it never comes up from my end. He’s the one who calls himself Big Tom. Which is funny because he’s very small for a full-grown man. The spy cam doesn’t lie: Big Tom is little.

  Little Big Tom can be annoying, but I eventually got used to him. Amanda, on the other hand, has never accepted his legitimacy. She spent the whole first year of the “partnership” sobbing. (So did my mom, come to think of it, but that’s not the same thing: my mom spends a great deal of time crying regardless of who happens to be married to whom. Odds are she’s crying right now. I’ll bet you anything.) These days, Amanda contents herself with methodically running through all the possible ways to give him the cold shoulder, one after another. No amount of bribery or family-counseling gimmickry ever manages to charm her, though he continually tries. It just makes her angrier. She gets pretty excited when my mom and Little Big Tom have an argument, because she’s always imagining that this will finally be the one that leads to their getting divorced. It never is, though. It’s weird to watch the situation unfold: you never know who to root for.