King Dork Page 4

  The look on Sam Hellerman’s face was enough to tell me that he was thinking of a Rolling Stones song, either “Mother’s Little Helper” or “Sister Morphine.” He had already begun counting the minutes till school was out. As I think I’ve mentioned, Sam Hellerman knows where my mom keeps her Vicodin, which is one reason he always wants to come over my house. In fact, he doesn’t really do it all that often, but when he’s feeling especially depressed, or in the aftermath of a major tragedy like the unjust loss of a favorite hat, he’ll head straight to my mom’s night-table drawer and take some of the pills with a tall glass of bourbon that he swipes from her entertaining area. Then he’ll fall asleep and wake up after a while with a headache and maybe have to throw up. It can’t be too pleasant, but he keeps at it nonetheless. I can relate to wanting to go away for a while, though that method is really not for me.

  Sam Hellerman is as low as I am on the high school social totem pole, which is as low as you can get if you can go to the bathroom by yourself and don’t need machinery to get from one place to another. But it’s worse for him, in a way, because until high school he actually had a sort of social life. I can merely fantasize about what I might be missing. He has experienced it firsthand.

  What I mean is, he had quite a few friends in junior high, and he had enough status that he could theoretically walk into a room without everybody laughing or throwing things at him or threatening to kick his ass and so on. Theoretically. I mean, he could hang out with normal people and be reasonably certain that the whole thing wasn’t part of somebody’s master plan that would end up with the joke being on him.

  And he was just at the level where he could talk to a girl or even ask a girl to “go” with him and the very idea wouldn’t automatically have struck everyone as totally outrageous and hilarious.

  In fact, he even had a sort of girlfriend for a brief time, Serenah Tillotsen. They used to smoke and make out behind the scout house sometimes, until she suddenly started dressing sexier and realized that dumping Sam Hellerman would be more of a move up in the world than not dumping Sam Hellerman. That sucked, but all in all he still had it pretty good.

  In high school, though, everyone suddenly seemed to realize that Sam Hellerman probably wasn’t going to grow any taller, and had kind of weird hair and a funny walk, and really didn’t have anything to offer that couldn’t be acquired much more cheaply and efficiently from someone else. The market, which had once rewarded him slightly for being the same height as the average eighth grader, had now determined that his services were needed elsewhere, and so he ended up at the bottom of the totem pole and at my house every now and then palming Vicodins and swallowing them with some bourbon from Carol’s entertaining area.

  In teen movies, there is often a guy like Sam Hellerman who is a minor but important member of the “in” group. A glasses-wearing cutup, kind of outrageous, whose sarcastic comments and goofy antics are accepted and appreciated by the others in the group, though they tend to receive his bits of dialogue with a degree of eye-rolling. Sure, he’s the second one to get his chest ripped open by the masked psycho with the garden implement (right after the sluttiest girl in the group has her throat slit while starting to take her clothes off ). But he had his moment.

  That’s how it was for Sam Hellerman. His moment was over.

  So I met Sam Hellerman at the oak tree, and we walked to my house. He assembled his materials, consumed them, came into my room, and lay down on the floor. I let him slip into the void, and put on Quadrophenia. Even though Sam Hellerman was there, after a fashion, I was alone with my thoughts.

  After Quadrophenia, I put on The Who by Numbers and thought rather intently about the lyrics to “Slip Kid.” I don’t want to take any Vicodin for the same reason that I try never to sit with my back to a door.

  MS. RAMBO

  PE had started with Track, which basically means you go around the track without stopping for the whole period. You’re supposed to run most of the time, though you can take periodic breaks where you walk till you’re ready to start running again. Of course, Sam Hellerman and I took full advantage of this loophole and walked most of the time, talking about this and that, like, say, whether the Count Bishops or Slade had had more influence on the sound of the first wave of British punk rock. Every now and then, Mr. Donnelly would notice and would yell something like “Come on, girls! Stop playing with your lip gloss!” By which he meant, though it’s not all that easy to explain why he chose those particular words, that we were walking too much and that he wanted to see some “hustle.” We would then jog sarcastically for a few minutes till his attention turned elsewhere, and then resume our discussion at a more leisurely pace.

  After the Track segment was over, near the end of the Plasma Nukes week, we moved on to Tennis. Tennis is kind of a riot. You’re supposed to hit the ball with the racket so that it lands in the space between the white lines on the other side of the net and bounces. Then you hit it back if it somehow manages to get hit back in your direction in such a way that it lands and bounces in the space between the white lines on your side of the net.

  No one is very good at this. But I have as much chance of performing this operation as a jar of wet gravel would have of calculating pi to a hundred places.

  Sam Hellerman is the same way.

  So here’s our Tennis technique. We hit the ball as hard as we can so it flies over the fence and lands in the bushes outside the tennis area. Then we spend the rest of the period “looking for the ball.”

  One day we were goofing off, holding the tennis rackets like guitars and practicing duckwalks and windmills and scissor jumps. I suck at this also, of course, but Sam Hellerman is surprisingly good.

  The PE teacher in charge of tennis-related activities is named Ms. Rimbaud, which is pronounced Miz Rambo. She looks a little like a frog. If she were actually a frog, she would be highly prized as a source of arrow poison by the natives of South America because of her rich red color.

  She noticed our arena-rock tennis-racket antics and ran over to confront us. I don’t think I had ever seen a human face turn quite that vibrant a shade of red.

  “How would you like it,” she said, “if we all came out here and started playing tennis with guitars?”

  New band name: Tennis with Guitars

  Logo: name printed phonetically as from a dictionary

  Love Love: lead axe

  The Prophet Samuel: bass and rat-catching

  Li’l Miss Debbie: vocals, keys, bumping, grinding

  First Album: Amphetamine Low. Cover is white with the album title in tiny black type on the back. The band name does not appear anywhere on the outside packaging.

  Second Album: Phantasmagoria, Gloria. Cover photo: a police dog licks a broken doll’s face.

  Band wears white shorts, shirts, and sweater vests, except for Li’l Miss Debbie, the girl singer. She wears a tiny nurse’s uniform with big black boots. Instead of guitar solos, I use my guitar to hit tennis balls into the crowd. With a delay on it, this makes a really cool sound when the ball bounces off the strings. Debbie and the Prophet Samuel are married but have an open polyamorous relationship. Band is on semipermanent hiatus because I’m always in Europe getting my blood changed.

  Oh, and the drummer is a drum machine called Beat-Beat. Because we kind of had to face the fact that we probably never would end up finding a drummer.

  THE ACCIDENT

  My mom tends to refer to my dad’s death as “the accident.” It’s true in a way, since that’s what you call it when one car crashes into another car, but it’s also misleading.

  I bought into the idea that he had been killed in an ordinary car crash for several years. But gradually I started to pick up on little hints that it wasn’t quite that straightforward. The biggest hint was that my mom and other adults always spoke so carefully about the subject and avoided giving details, even ordinary ones like where it happened and who was in the other car, and if they were drunk, and whether anyone else had been
killed. I can see the logic of doing that around a little kid, but as I got older they continued to do it, in pretty much the same way. When details were provided, they were often contradictory. They acted exactly like people do in movies when they’re hiding something, and I gradually became convinced that it wasn’t an act and that I wasn’t imagining it.

  The other thing my mom says about my dad’s death is that he was killed in the line of duty, protecting people. I can see why she liked to think of it, or for it to be thought of, that way. It kind of contradicted the “accident” theory, though. There may have been a grain of truth in it, even so, but, like the accident story, it wasn’t straightforward. My dad was a detective working on narcotics and vice cases for the Santa Carla police, and he certainly did do a lot of protecting people in a sense. But that’s not how he died, either.

  It wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks—some of them, anyway—once I decided I wanted to. I was able to read about it in old newspapers on microfilm at the public library. After I read them, I continued to pretend I didn’t know what had happened. My mom pretended it was plausible that I wouldn’t have found out. We have a lot of those arrangements in my family.

  My dad had been parked on the shoulder of the Sky Vista frontage road late one night. A car had rammed him on the driver side and driven away. He had died from unspecified injuries related to the impact. It was either homicide or manslaughter. That is, he may have been deliberately murdered, or the fact that he died in the crash may have been the inadvertent result of a random accident. They never found the car that hit him, or the driver. The assumption seems to have been that it was a random fatal hit-and-run rather than a deliberate homicide.

  But there were unanswered questions hovering over the newspaper articles, much like there were when my mom talked about “the accident.” Trying to read between the lines in both situations, you really got the impression that there was a lot of information that was being held back, glossed over, hidden, or buried. I had lived with the uncertainty for six years now, with the strange realization that the more I found out, the more uncertain everything seemed to be. And I admit, even as part of me wanted to know, another part couldn’t stand to think about it.

  WAGBOG

  There’s this kid, Bobby Duboyce, who has some kind of skull disease and has to wear this football helmet at all times. The little white chin strap is always fastened because if the helmet comes off and he hits his head it could be very serious. Even though there are ear holes in it, he still has a hard time hearing people, so he’s always saying “what?” or “what’s that?”

  He also has this problem where he is always tired, and he tends to fall asleep at random times. He often spends his time in class asleep, sometimes drooling, sometimes not, with his big helmet resting sideways on the desk. The teachers leave him alone. They don’t dare throw an eraser at his big helmet-head because they’re afraid his parents will sue their ass.

  When he falls asleep in Center Court at lunch, though, it can get ugly. Hillmont High’s finest will come up to him and gently write things on his helmet with a permanent marker, like “pussy helmet head” and “I am a fag” and “my mom’s a twat.” The gentleness is so they don’t wake him up before they’re done. His parents keep having to buy him new helmets, which they can’t be too pleased about. Maybe they have some kind of deal with the helmet people, and a big supply of backup helmets in the garage. He always has a new one the day after, on those occasions when the fine young men and ladies of Hillmont High School’s upper crust have decided to indulge in a little lighthearted helmet play.

  We (Tennis with Guitars) were on our way to the cafeteria when we saw Bobby Duboyce passed out on the center lawn and realized that our social superiors had developed a new tactic. Some guys from the Honors Society were pouring Coke into one of Bobby Duboyce’s helmet’s ear holes to see how long it would take him to wake up. Then, when he did wake up, one of them pinned the helmet to the ground and another continued pouring the Coke, presumably to see how long it would take him to start crying. Which was almost immediately. Then they scampered back to their girlfriends, who had been waiting for them by the lockers, and kissed them and grabbed their butts. Ah, young love. Mr. Teone was standing in front of his office door, smiling broadly. Figures.

  Sam Hellerman said, “WAGBOG.”

  Which stands for “what a great bunch of guys.”

  I mention this because that’s when we decided to change the band name to Helmet Boy, with me on guitar, Sambiguity on bass and procrastination. First album: Helmet Boy II.

  The bell rang. We watched Bobby Duboyce pick himself up and slink off to the boys’ bathroom near Area B. Sam Hellerman said, “Wait a sec,” and ran after him, either because he had to go to the bathroom himself, or more probably because he wanted to check to see if Bobby Duboyce was all right. Sam Hellerman is like that: he likes to keep tabs on everybody who can’t beat him up. After the coast is clear, of course. I was standing by my locker, waiting for Sam Hellerman to return so we could continue on to Band, when I saw Mr. Teone lumbering toward me. Bummer.

  Now, Mr. Teone is kind of like the Little Big Tom of Hillmont High School, in that his main job seems to be to walk around making strange comments. With LBT, though, the comments seem more or less good-natured. Mr. Teone’s comments always seem to have an undercurrent of malice. And often, they make no sense at all.

  He takes some cues from the sociopathic normal students, in fact. For example, my glasses are always slipping down on my nose, and somewhere along the line I developed the habit of pushing them back up with the palm of my hand, so that the palm slides up my nose and kind of hits my forehead between the eyes. And ever since I can remember, kids have mocked me by mimicking this motion whenever they see me coming. It’s not a big deal. But there’s something weird about seeing an adult do it, especially one who is supposed to be in charge of something. When Mr. Teone isn’t doing the Henderson-salute routine, he’s doing the nose-forehead slide. And after he has done it, his face will contort into a grotesque parody of a smile, as though to say “ain’t I something?” I call that psychopathic-moronic.

  By the time Mr. Teone reached me, he was out of breath and sweating like a pig, but that didn’t stop him from doing the Chi-Mo nose-forehead slide.

  “Naked day of zombies,” said Mr. Teone. “Day of suicide-osity.”

  And then he started giggling like a maniac. I am often at a loss for words, it’s true, but at this moment, I felt the loss particularly keenly. What the hell? Maybe I hadn’t heard him right—his funny, nasal, syllable-swallowing way of speaking often made it hard to understand him. He wasn’t inclined to explain, though.

  He made me turn my T-shirt inside out because it had a skull on it, and I guess they had passed some kind of antiskull policy since the last time I’d worn it. I don’t look very good without a shirt, so standing there with my army coat between my knees, naked from the waist up while I clumsily reversed the shirt, was pretty embarrassing. Everyone was staring at me. Mr. Teone was staring, too, and laughing and kind of trembling. Pretty creepy.

  Sam Hellerman didn’t show up at the oak tree after school that day. It was kind of weird. I waited for a while. Then I couldn’t think of anything to do, so I just went home.

  As soon as I opened the front door, I heard my mom call out from the back patio in the voice she always uses to ask me to fetch her lighter and cigarettes. I didn’t really hear how she phrased it but the tone was enough to tell me what she wanted.

  And from the sounds coming from the patio, I could tell that I was about to walk in on a meeting of the Annoying Laugh Club.

  I braced myself and brought the cigarettes out, lighter on top of cigarette pack in a neat little stack, just like I’d been doing since I was a kid. My mom said the same thing she always says: “Thanks, baby, you’re so sweet.”

  The Annoying Laugh Club has only two members, my mom and Mrs. Teneb, and both of them were smoking and drinking iced tea at the patio table. Mrs.
Teneb is one of my mom’s friends from way back, maybe even all the way back to high school, and she’s also friends with Little Big Tom. My mom has a laugh like a car alarm. Mrs. Teneb has a laugh like a long scream and she says “frickin’” a lot. I stood there for a few minutes watching them smoke and drink iced tea, trying to figure out what they were laughing about, which is pretty much impossible most of the time.

  At one point Little Big Tom stuck his head through the door at that funny angle he always sticks his head through the door at. It almost looks like the rest of his body hidden behind the wall next to the door is sideways, too.

  “Take the Nestea plunge!” he said, and went back upstairs. He was working on his grant proposal.

  Mrs. Teneb and Little Big Tom know each other from the Renaissance Faire and the Community Theater, where they do plays and such. Mrs. Teneb is a woman, but she likes to call herself an actor. Not an actress like you might expect her to say.

  “‘Actress’ is sexist and diminutive,” she’ll say, if she thinks you’re thinking it’s a little weird that she’s saying she’s an actor.

  Carol and Little Big Tom always call her an actor, too, but for some reason Little Big Tom didn’t like it so much one time when I referred to him as an actress. He likes to think he has no hangups, but that’s kind of gendercentric and unprogressive of him, don’t you think?

  I’ll say one thing, though: whether he’s an actor or an actress, he sure is diminutive.

  BOOKWORMING

  I could still hear the annoying laughter after I entered the house and proceeded down to the basement. I had realized on the way home that I had left my Catcher in the Rye in my locker, and I needed it for one of Mr. Schtuppe’s brain-dead assignments. (“Define the following words and use them in sentences, noting the page on which they occur: linoleum, hospitality, corridor, canasta, janitor, conscientious, phony, lagoon, incognito, brassiere, burlesque, psychic, brassy, intoxicating, verification, jitterbug…”) I knew there had to be another copy of that book somewhere in this house. There are copies of that book lying around everywhere.