King Dork Read online

  One time I said “Get a haircut, hippie” to Little Big Tom, because I’d heard him mention that that’s what people used to say to him in Vermont where he’s from. He thought that was hilarious, and actually seemed quite excited that I’d said anything at all to him, since that doesn’t often happen.

  He raised his beer and put an awkward arm around my shoulder, and I tried not to stiffen up too noticeably. Then he pushed the mute button on the remote, turned to me, and said, “Kid, you’re all right.” There was a long silence. Then he took his arm away, de-muted, and sighed heavily. Well, the Giants were down by two.

  “Kid, you’re all right.” How sad is that? What an ass. For a moment, though, I felt a surge of—what? I don’t know the word for it. It’s like when you feel lonely, but for someone else. I don’t know how to say it. Like you feel sorry for yourself, but it’s somebody else’s situation that makes you feel like that. Not feeling sorry for someone in the usual condescending way, like when you feel bad if you run over an animal or when a midget can’t reach a shelf. More like you suddenly find yourself pretending to be the other person without meaning to, and feeling lonely while playing the role of the other person in your head. I guess, well…you could do it with an animal, too.

  But let’s be clear. In no way should this Special Moment undermine our central thesis, which I will always stand squarely behind: Little Big Tom should get a haircut. Seriously. That ponytail has got to go.

  When Highway to Hell was over, we put on Desolation Boulevard and started to roll stats for “War in the Pacific.” Sam Hellerman was playing the Japanese. At around “No You Don’t,” Little Big Tom came in and stood in the doorway. He nodded as though listening to the music; then he said, “How about we go easy on the decibels for a while? Your mom’s trying to rest.”

  I stared at him until he did a little decisive frown-nod and flitted out. Then I reached over and turned the volume up a notch.

  Little Big Tom is a pretty nice guy, actually, and it’s not fair that I’m so unaccommodating.

  He means well. He likes to walk around making little helpful comments.

  “Now, don’t fill up on milk,” he’ll say if he thinks someone is drinking too much milk. Or he’ll say, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the homework hour!” if he thinks there’s not enough homework going on at any given time. “Let’s put some light on the subject,” he always says whenever he turns on a light.

  He also likes to dispense words of encouragement when he’s making his rounds. Like, Amanda will be working on this plaster cast of her hand for art class, and he’ll come in and say, “nice hand.”

  Once, Little Big Tom stuck his head in the door while I was trying to play “Brown Sugar” on the guitar.

  “Bar chords,” he said. “Rock and roll.”

  Little Big Tom wasn’t actually saying that my halting rendition of “Brown Sugar” was rock and roll. No one would have said that.

  He likes to say “rock and roll” all the time, but what he usually means by it is “way to go!” or “let’s get this show on the road!” or “this is a fantastic vegetarian sausage!” Like, he figures out how to set the clock on the VCR and he’ll say “rock and roll!” Or he’ll say “rock and roll!” when everyone finally gets in the car after he’s been waiting for a while.

  Sometimes he’ll even say it quietly and sarcastically when something goes wrong. Once he knocked over my mom’s art supply shelf. He bent down to pick everything up, whispered “Rock and roll,” and sighed deeply.

  I’m a bit rough on Little Big Tom, I know, but I’m nothing compared to Amanda. She can hardly bear to be in the same room with him, and she says even less to him than I do. That time he said “nice hand,” for example? Her reaction was to pick up the half-finished hand, drop it in the garbage, and walk out of the room without a word. I don’t know if it hurt his feelings quite as much as she was hoping it would, but he sure didn’t enjoy it, if the strained tone of his whispered “Rock and roll” was any indication.

  We had just reached “7 Screaming Diz-busters” on Tyranny and Mutation and things had begun to turn around for the Allies in “War in the Pacific” when Little Big Tom stuck his head through the door and said “Chow time!” What he meant was that he had fixed some vegetarian slop with lentils and bean-curd lumps and weird-tasting fake cheese, and that we were welcome to have a crack at choking some of it down. So Sam Hellerman hightailed it out of there. Lucky bastard.

  THE BIG MARBLE FILING CABINET

  My family goes to the cemetery to visit my dad’s grave every year on September 6, which is the anniversary of his death. This year, it happened to fall on Labor Day, so we were off school.

  We call it a grave, but it’s really this big building on the cemetery grounds with stacks and stacks of dead people in drawers, like a big marble filing cabinet. My dad is in powder form in a little vase inside one of the sealed filing cabinet drawers. It says “Charles Evan Henderson” and “Peace” on the outside of his drawer. There’s also the seal of the Santa Carla Police Department, and a little cup you can put flowers in.

  As usual, my mom put flowers in the cup, and we all stood there looking at the cup with the flowers on the filing cabinet drawer. It always feels awkward. There’s nothing to say. We just stand in a clump, looking up. My mom and Amanda cry, quietly. I feel sad. But for some reason it doesn’t make me cry. There may be something wrong with me there. My mom gets mad at me for not crying, like it shows that I don’t care or wish to show respect. It’s not like that. I got in big trouble once for bringing a book with me on one of these visits. It wasn’t even on purpose. I just automatically take whatever book I’m reading with me everywhere I go without thinking. But it really hurt her feelings and she wouldn’t speak to me for two weeks after that.

  When I get nervous or worried about something, I do this weird thing with my ears. They start to itch way on the inside and I have this urge to move them back and forth on the outside, trying to relieve the itch. My jaw gets involved also. It can make my whole face look funny and kind of warped and disturbing; plus my glasses go a little crooked. Once I start doing it, I can never stop it on purpose. If it stops on its own, because I get distracted or just calm down, and I notice that it has stopped, I’ll be relieved for a second, but that will remind me about it and I’ll start doing it again. The more I try to control it, the more out of control it gets. It’s a real problem.

  Standing by my dad’s grave with my mom and Amanda is the classic situation for the ear thing. I just get more and more nervous and twitchy. This year, my ears were going like crazy, maybe even more than usual. I was drenched with sweat, too. I tried biting the inside of my cheek really hard to give myself some other irritant to focus on. That sometimes works, but this time I couldn’t bite hard enough to have an impact, even though I could taste a lot of blood in my mouth.

  As I stood there, not exactly trying to cry but imagining how much of a relief it might be if for some reason I did, I couldn’t help thinking of Mr. Teone’s mockery. Hi, I thought sarcastically in the general direction of my dad’s drawer. The big marble filing cabinet is the one place I never feel like my dad can hear me talking, though. It just feels empty and lonely and stressful. Definitely not my favorite place.

  WE ALL DIED IN A PLANE CRASH

  I’m regretting how sloppy I’ve been with my notebooks, now that I’m trying to go back and remember exactly when everything happened. I mean, I write down all our bands, which ends up being a kind of record of events, but I hardly ever put any dates in there, and even though it was only a few months ago, the timeline seems a little fuzzy. My best recollection is that it was around the middle of September, three weeks or so into the school year, when the Baby Batter Weeks officially ended. And when Sam Hellerman came up with a strange and unexpected proposition.

  The band broke up in the customary way. That is, one day, when I met Sam Hellerman at the corner of Crestview and Hillmont Avenue on my way to school as usual, he started to whis
tle the first line of “Sweet Home Alabama.” Which told me that he wanted to change the name of the band again. That’s because we had our own words to that line: “We all died in a plane crash,” which was how all our bands ended. I could see his point. Baby Batter had been a great band, but it was time to move on.

  We worked out the details of the new band on the way to school. The Plasma Nukes.

  Logo: an intercontinental ballistic missile with a broken-in-half heart dripping blood on the side. “Plasma” superimposed in fancy cursive and “Nukes” underneath in retro computer bubble writing.

  Credits:

  Guitar: Lithium Dan

  Bass and Calligraphy: Little Pink Sambo

  Vox: The Worm

  Machine-gun Drums: TBA

  First Album: Feelin’ Free with the Plasma Nukes.

  Album cover: a woman’s high-heel shoe on a chessboard, with blood dripping out of it (front). Band members’ heads in jars on shelf (back).

  I was Lithium Dan and I played in a cage. Little Pink Sambo was Sam Hellerman. And we just made up the lead vocalist. The drummer was imaginary, too, but for the record, TBA is pronounced like tuba.

  As for Sam Hellerman’s bizarre proposition, it went a little like this:

  “There’s…this…this…sort of party…um…thing I heard about,” he said.

  Pause. “Really?”

  “Wanna go?”

  I gave him a “yeah, right” look. Then I realized he was serious. I stared at him. Sam Hellerman and I weren’t the kind of guys who got invited to parties. The last party I had attended had had cake and streamers and a magician-clown. I was five. And I was pretty sure that if I ever did go to a high school party I wouldn’t be any more comfortable than I was then. But it was immaterial because there was more chance of gumdrops falling from the sky and all God’s crystal unicorns overthrowing the government and dancing on the White House lawn than there was of anyone at Hillmont High letting me or Sam Hellerman into any of their precious parties. It just wasn’t gonna happen.

  But Sam Hellerman had some old friends who’d gone from McKinley Intermediate to CHS rather than Hillmont. Maybe they hadn’t grasped how risky it would be to be seen hanging around with him. Or maybe, for some bizarre reason, they didn’t care all that much. They do things differently in Clearview. It’s like a whole other culture.

  At any rate, Sam Hellerman was planning to attend this party, which was being held in a couple of weeks at the house of some CHS kid whose parents were going to be out of town. I could come along, too, if I wanted. In fact, he was kind of insistent. He really wanted me to go. I had a “let’s play it by ear” attitude, but he was having none of that: he wanted a solid commitment.

  “So,” he said, “you’re definitely coming, right?”

  It’s strange to think what a different type of sophomore year I would have ended up having if I had refused, as I almost did, or if, in the event, I had tried to wiggle out of it in some way, which would have been very much in character for me. But for some reason, I said okay. He made me promise to honor that okay, too. I gave him a look but agreed. Maybe he was nervous and needed moral support. No one would know me, so I felt pretty safe saying yes. Plus I’d only experienced this situation in movie and commercial form. I wanted to see what life was like on the other side. Of Broadway Plaza Terrace Camino, that is.

  30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary didn’t take anywhere near thirty whole days in Mr. Schtuppe’s English class. So once we reached “weltschmerz,” we immediately started over again with “abortive.”

  Eventually, though, time was up, and the vocabulary section was over. I think we stopped the second go-through at around “dipsomania.”

  Now it was time to start the reading.

  I was bummed, but not terribly surprised, to see Mr. Schtuppe writing The Catcher in the… on the board. There really is no other book they ever want you to read. I had my own copy. It’s standard school equipment.

  Everyone is required to carry a copy at all times. Hall monitors stop you on your way to class and won’t let you pass unless you show them your valid Catcher in the Rye. The Salinger Boys kick your ass and you get expelled if you’re caught wandering in the halls without one. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. We don’t actually have hall monitors at our school. But otherwise, that’s pretty much mostly almost exactly how it is.

  Anyway, I opened my backpack and pulled out my Catcher.

  Now, the AP English teachers would have smiled an “aha, one of us” smile and said a silent prayer of thanks to the nonconformist gods. Or they might even have taken me aside to tell me the fond story of how they used to carry around a copy of that book with them everywhere when they were young and how it helped them through troubled times and how their door is always open if I ever need to talk.

  But Mr. Schtuppe didn’t have that level of interest. He was waiting to die. Why should he care about instilling a sense of tame rebelliousness in the above-average students? I got two extra credit points for having my own book. But then I got three minus credit points for writing “Beat Noir-ay rules ok” on my desk.

  Once again Mr. Schtuppe had his own approach to teaching the joys of literature. The first assignment was to copy out chapter one, highlight the words with three or more syllables, define them, and use them in sentences.

  I just sat there staring at page one, wondering if it was even possible to mispronounce “autobiography.”

  THE SPORTING LIFE

  PE is probably the most unpleasant fifty minutes of a person’s day-to-day life at HHS. For one thing, they force you to wear this brutal outfit consisting of these gay little blue and white George Michael shorts and a reversible T-shirt that says “Boogie Knights.” There are many danger zones, but two of the most dangerous are: at the beginning when you take off your street clothes to put on the gay little blue and white shorts and the reversible Boogie Knights T-shirt, and at the end when you take off the g. l. b. & w. shorts and ther. B. K. T. and attempt to put your regular clothes back on.

  There are a few seconds there when you are essentially naked, standing among a bunch of big, mean normal guys who hate you just for existing and who are constantly asking each other “who you callin’ faggot, homo?” (It’s a call-and-response game, the response being: “I ain’t no homo. Who you callin’ homo, faggot?” This is a self-sustaining loop that can literally go on for hours if uninterrupted.) As a rule, they are so absorbed in this game and assorted homoerotic horseplay amongst themselves that they barely notice you. But if your timing is such that you end up being naked at the same moment that they are partially or fully clothed, and one of them happens to notice you, you can be in big trouble. All the usual high school tortures can come into play here, but being naked while they are happening makes them all much worse. Plus there’s something about the PE situation that makes a certain type of socially well-situated psychopath unable to resist issuing threats about how his plans for beating you up include the ambition to stick various things up your butt. Which can be pretty disturbing. Yay, team. What a great bunch of guys.

  It’s a little foretaste of our fine prison system, I suppose. And it doesn’t take much. The lesson is clear: unless you happen to be one of those guys, and if you don’t particularly want to be beaten senseless and raped with a foreign object by one of them eventually, stay as far away from sports as you possibly can. I mean, prison.

  So around midweek, the Plasma Nukes (that is, Sam Hellerman and I) were walking away from PE class, on our way to “Brunch,” which is what they call the seventeen-minute gap between second and third period. We were feeling pretty good about PE. I mean, we had timed everything well and hadn’t had any nasty run-ins with any normal psychopaths while we happened to be naked. You get one of those days every now and then. It’s like finding a twenty-dollar bill in a library book.

  So great was the general feeling of relief that I hardly minded when Mr. Teone, waddling by on his way into Area C, yelled, “Henderson!” and saluted with
what seemed like a determined attempt to set a new standard in the field of sarcastic greetings and with the air of a man who believed he was auditioning for Head Idiot and really had a shot at it this time. True, Sam Hellerman winced like he always does when Mr. Teone said “Miss Peggy!” But I could tell even Sam Hellerman was feeling relatively carefree as well. We had made it through PE. We were high on life.

  But then something happened.

  Sam Hellerman had this funny little hat he got at the St. Vincent de Paul. No one else had a hat like that, which may have been why Sam Hellerman liked it so much. Maybe he liked to imagine people saying to themselves as he walked by, “There goes that fellow with the unusual hat.” He loved the hat. He wore it all the time. But I knew that hat was trouble the minute I saw it.

  And so it proved to be. We were walking past a group of jabbering half-human/half-beast student replicants when a smaller subgroup of what seemed like angry orangutan people broke away and started running toward us, shrieking in that way they have: “Oof, oof, oof!”

  As they rushed by, one of them snatched Sam Hellerman’s hat and knocked him into the gravel walkway. Holding the hat aloft, they disappeared into the nearest boys’ bathroom. Well, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what they were planning to do with the hat in the boys’ bathroom. But Sam Hellerman had to check. After the orangutan people had burst out and clambered off in search of other victims, he trudged into the bathroom. Then he trudged out again looking hopeless and miserable. The hat was beyond help. He just left it in there.