King Dork Read online

  I soon found one, in one of the many ragged boxes of random books that were stored down there. It was very old, very beaten-up, not a paperback but not exactly a hardcover book, either—it was like a hardback but with a slightly flimsy cover, and it was almost as small as a paperback. The title on the spine had been rubbed off, but was legible on the front cover, which was only hanging on by a few threads. Some of the little bunches of pages were loose. The whole thing was falling apart. It had once been held together by a rubber band, which had now disintegrated, though pieces of dried-up rubber band still stuck to the outside.

  I flipped through it idly on my way upstairs. It was really banged up. There was some underlining, some illegible scribbles, and a lot of weird stains. The dedication, To My Mother, had been scribbled out and someone had written “tit lib friday” in blue ink on the title page. Heh, I thought, now there’s a band name for you. I suddenly realized that, since it wasn’t the same edition my class was using, the page numbers wouldn’t match up, and I almost tossed it back onto the book pile. But then I saw what was written on the inside front cover, and I stopped dead with my foot on the fourth step of the basement stairs, the assignment forgotten.

  It said “CEH 1960.” Now, CEH stood for Charles Evan Henderson. So this had been my dad’s copy of The Catcher in the Rye when he was (doing the math), um, twelve. My God, I thought: my dad had been one of those people who had carried Catcher with him everywhere when he was a kid. He had been a member of the Catcher Cult.

  I don’t know why it came as such a surprise. My dad was from the Catcher generation. I guess I just never thought of him as the type. Little Big Tom had given me the “Catcher changed my life” speech, of course; I’d have been surprised if he hadn’t. But I can’t remember my dad ever mentioning any books. I was only eight when he died, though, so maybe he thought I wasn’t quite old enough to be initiated into the Holden Caulfield Mysteries.

  I didn’t much like the idea of his having been a Catcher Cult guy, but I guess I found it more fascinating than distressing.

  Anyway, I sat down on the steps to examine the book more carefully. I don’t know what I was looking for. It suddenly hit me that I didn’t know that much about my dad as a person, despite the fact that I would have said, if ever asked, that we had been very close. You can feel you’re close to someone you hardly know; people do all the time. But I had never realized that this had been the case with regard to my dad, and I found that it freaked me out a bit. You don’t think of your parents as actual people when you’re a little kid because you don’t need to, I guess, and his half of the father-son relationship had been prematurely frozen at the son-at-eight stage. Mine had continued to develop as a one-sided thing, but we had missed out on quite a bit, and I guess to a degree I still saw him through eight-year-old eyes, though I knew that was a pretty silly thing to do.

  For those reasons, there was something spooky about simply holding the book in my hands. I felt dizzy. And I don’t know—a little crazy somehow. I realized that I was crying. Not just with slightly moistened eyes, like I was used to, and not over-the-top racked-by-sobs bawling à la Amanda either. Just large, silent tears pouring out of my eyes, landing in the open book in my lap, so subtle I hadn’t even noticed them till I saw the fuzzy dark circles they made on the page when they started to absorb into the paper. Some stuff dripped out of my nose and landed on the book, too. Revolting. I shook the thoughts out of my head, in that way I have, and forced myself to get a grip and get back to examining the book.

  There wasn’t a whole lot of information, though. Besides “CEH 1960” and “tit lib friday,” there were a few other scribbled words I couldn’t make out, a lot of numbers, and what looked like part of a date: 3/something/63. The day was smudged and faded and stained and impossible to make out; the month was also not too clear, but it did seem like it probably was a three. No significance to that date jumped out at me, though by my calculations he would have been about my age in March of 1963. The stains could have been anything: food, coffee, wine, beer, blood. Blood? Uh, yeah. Calm down, now, Columbo. The first body hasn’t even turned up yet.

  There was only one underlined passage, as it turns out. It was the scene where this girl called Jane Gallagher gives Holden Caulfield a back rub at the movies. Why would he have underlined that particular paragraph and no other? It didn’t seem quotable or inspiring or meaningful in any way, just more blather in Holden Caulfield’s annoying Leave It to Beaver lingo. But that was my instinctive anti-Catcher bias talking. I made what felt like a physical effort to keep my mind open. I didn’t get it now, but maybe there was something to it that I was missing. If the back rub scene had been important enough to my 1960 dad that he had underlined it, there had to be a reason.

  Then something else hit me: maybe there were other CEH books down there. I scrambled back to the box area and spent the rest of the day going through them all, book by book, setting aside those marked CEH. It took around three and a half hours. By the end, there was very little light coming through the window on the aboveground downhill side of the basement wall, and I had twelve CEH books, including the Catcher. They had been inscribed between 1960 and 1967, when my dad would have been 18 or so. There was also another one that I wasn’t sure about, inscribed only “CH” with no date. It looked like the same handwriting, but it was hard to tell.

  They sat in a little stack on the basement floor, a crooked, dusty treasure.

  Little Big Tom came down and noticed me pawing through the books. He flipped on the light and said, “How about a little light on the subject?”

  Then he said, “It’s a classic!” And of course I knew without glancing up that he was tilting to one side and looking at The Catcher in the Rye when he said it.

  LOVE, FOR WANT OF A BETTER WORD

  It seems as if I am always horny.

  That’s bad because the chances that I will ever get to express that horniness in the context of a fulfilling relationship with an actual other person have always seemed pretty slim. It’s a thing you have to live with. In fact, before October 1 of this year, I had never even touched a girl in “that way.” And even then—but I’ll explain all that soon enough.

  In youth-oriented movies and books, the guy like me often has a huge crush on a specific blond cheerleader who doesn’t know he exists and would never stoop to talking to him. Or maybe she is kind of mean to him even though she’s friends with him and asks him for advice on how to get the football guy to make out with her, which drives him crazy, and so forth. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely that guy. But there isn’t any one particular girl that fits that formula, and the idea that someone like that would ever be friendly with me in any sense, even as a device to dramatize my own pain and loneliness, is rather preposterous.

  But of course I do have this mousy but cute female sidekick who has been right under my nose all along, only I won’t realize how great she is till I’ve learned a few painful lessons about commitment and responsibility and what’s important in life.

  Just kidding; I don’t have one of those, either. Pretty much all the girls in school are cruel and unattainable, and the great majority are also beautiful and sexy and desirable in at least some way. None are at all interested in or available to me, and why would they be? When I dream of how it would be if I were suddenly transformed into the kind of guy that does not repulse the females of our species, I don’t necessarily think of any particular girl. Pick any one; it doesn’t matter. This whole topic is so in the realm of pure theory that we might as well call her x. Or rather xi, “i” denoting “imaginary.” Conceivable in theory, but unrecorded by history and impossible in nature. An imaginary girl.

  If it makes it easier to visualize, though, let’s say xi is, hmm, how about Kyrsten Blakeney? She’s blond and wears really short skirts. I don’t know if she’s actually a cheerleader, but she looks the part. Real foxy. Looks great poolside, chewing on an eraser, leaning over to buckle her shoe, riding a bike, eating a banana. Looks g
reat paying a late fine at the library, taking out the recycling, buying a newspaper, playing with dogs, whatever. Nice rack. Sagittarius. Birthstone: yellow topaz.

  I find myself thinking of how I’d like to express my horniness in the context of Kyrsten Blakeney fairly often. So does practically everybody who has ever seen her—students, teachers, janitorial staff, etc.

  In all the movies and books, the guy like me is totally in love with Kyrsten Blakeney and only Kyrsten Blakeney. If you forget the quaint adherence to monogamy in the realm of pure ideas, and depending on how much you want to quibble over fine shades of meaning in the word “love,” that’s pretty accurate and true to life. And it would be quite true, in the strictest sense, to say she is not aware of my existence. Which is a mercy: I can’t see that I would have anything to gain from her knowledge of my existence.

  In real life, I admire her from afar and quietly celebrate her beauty, just as I would do if I were playing my character in the finest, most typical teen movie or young-adult novel our civilization has to offer.

  In this movie, Kyrsten Blakeney somehow discovers my hidden depths, decides she likes my eyes, smells my pheromones, and goes crazy for my body. She decides to risk everything and shock God and country by becoming the girlfriend of a nameless, sad-sack dork like me. Society is aghast. Parents and teachers wonder where they went wrong. The president declares martial law. Meanwhile, Kyrsten and I make out in the gym at the homecoming dance while everyone stands around in a shocked, silent circle. Then she gets up on the stage and delivers this great speech to the student body, condemning them for their superficiality, insensitivity, and racism (because maybe in the movie I could be black or Filipino or Native American and handicapped, too). And when she’s finished, after a panoramic shot of the stunned, silent crowd, one person starts to clap slowly. Soon another starts to clap. Before long, they’re all clapping. They raise me up on their shoulders and ride me around the gymnasium shouting, “Chi-Mo! Chi-Mo! Chi-Mo!” just like they used to in junior high, except now they mean it in a positive sense. And my dad comes back from the dead and smiles at me from the bleachers and kisses my mom on the cheek. And as the throng hands me a check for a hundred thousand dollars and carries me out the door to my brand-new car, you hear the voice of my back-from-the-dead father saying, “I’m proud of you, boy….” Kyrsten and I start driving off to Vegas to get married. She gives me a blow job on the highway under the steering wheel and kisses me on the mouth and says, “Chi-Mo, you better get used to this, because from now on you’re stuck with me….”

  Okay, I got a little carried away there. Take it up to right after the speech to the student body, and change me back into a white, suburban, typically abled, clever, if angry, yet somehow almost loveable mixed-up kind of weird guy. Slightly more believable.

  King Dork to wed Homecoming Princess. News at eleven. It’s a nice thought, and it turns up all the time in movies and books. The one minor problem is that in reality, it never happens. I don’t mean rarely or hardly ever. I mean it has never even come within the ball park of being even slightly close to almost happening in the whole history of high school, since the beginning of time.

  Not even once.

  It turns up in all those books and movies for the same reason that parents and teachers want you to read The Catcher in the Rye all the time. It’s the world as they would like it to be. It’s the fantasy that the short end of the stick somehow comes with hidden benefits that only people outside the situation can see. The fantasy that the nonentity in the background is secretly the main guy who has his revenge in the end. It’s a nice thought. But it’s bogus, man. Total crap.

  TOYS IN THE ATTIC

  That CHS party was just around the corner, and I was starting to dread it a little. I mean, what good could possibly come of such a thing? Still, I didn’t want to let Sam Hellerman down. And anyway, I had more important things on my mind. Because it was starting to dawn on me: the band wasn’t going anywhere. We really needed to take it to the next level. Sure, we had great band names and stage names and album titles, and I could play bar chords, though it would sometimes take me a little too long to switch between the E and the A one. Sam Hellerman still didn’t have his bass, but I was getting tired of waiting.

  Don’t get me wrong: Liquid Malice was and is a great, great name. But without songs that are as great, it would never amount to much.

  So I decided I would write some songs and we would get together to rehearse them, even if we didn’t completely have our shit together.

  One thing I learned right away. It’s way easier to think up names and album covers than to write the actual songs to plug into them. I wrote this song called “Kyrsten Blakeney’s a Total Fox” only to realize that what I’d done was basically rewrite “Christine Sixteen” with new, suckier lyrics. There just aren’t any words that rhyme with Blakeney. Kyrsten does rhyme with “thirstin’,” and I was sort of proud of that one, but the fact remains that my first song set the band back several stages all on its own.

  I was starting to sketch out the lyrics for a new song with the tentative title “Advanced Placement Is a Scam” when Sam Hellerman finally came over. He had his clarinet and a book of Aerosmith for Reed Instruments.

  He had a good point. We could start with Aerosmith and work our way up to our own tunes.

  I played the chords on my guitar and Sam Hellerman played the melody line on the clarinet. It didn’t sound too bad.

  Little Big Tom poked his head in and said, “Dream on!” which I thought was a little mean.

  It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that I had so much trouble writing songs. They always say, “Write what you know.” And that was the problem: I didn’t know anything.

  The following morning, Sam Hellerman dropped something on my desk in homeroom. It was the “Thinking of Suicide?” pamphlet from the Student Resource Area. (They have a whole wall of poorly written, amusingly illustrated pamphlets to help students sort through their problems. The titles are always in the form of a question, like “Pregnant?” or “Drugs and/or Alcohol Addiction or STD?” “Thinking of Suicide?” is our favorite, though.)

  “Oh, Ralphie,” I said, because sometimes we call each other Ralphie. “Is it that obvious?”

  This was a running joke between Sam Hellerman and me. He would pick up one of the suicide pamphlets and bring it over and I’d say, “how did you know?” And he’d say something like “killing yourself is a cry for help, you know.” And I’d say, “but isn’t death just a part of life?” “Yeah,” he’d say, “it’s usually the last part.” It passes the time.

  But this time around, my mind wasn’t on the hilarious banter. Instead, I was looking at the extremely familiar cover of the pamphlet as though seeing it for the first time. “Thinking of Suicide?” has this great drawing of a retro girl in a sweater and a short plaid skirt with her calves apart and her knees together and her stack of schoolbooks falling out of her arms. The expression on her face is supposed to be anguished, but she has her mouth open as though in surprise and to me she has always looked pretty sexy. Her glasses are on the floor near one of her clumsily drawn Mary Janes, which seems kind of sexy, too, for some reason. Glasses have always turned me on. It’s one of my favorite pictures, and we had already used it for several album covers (most recently for the Underpants Machine, me on guitar, Sam Sam the Piper’s Son on bass and bottle rockets, first album We Will Bury You.)

  What I was thinking, though, for the first time was, this would make a pretty good song. All I had to do was give the girl a name and feel sorry for myself while pretending to be her. And figure out some lyrics and chords and stuff. It was worth a shot, anyway.

  I was distracted for the rest of the day, wishing I had my guitar with me so I could play around with suicide song ideas. It was frustrating. On the other hand, it did give me something interesting to think about while Mr. Schtuppe was trying to teach us how to mispronounce words from Catcher in the Rye.

  But then my world was plun
ged into darkness.

  We were in PE sitting in the lanai, boys on one side and girls on the other, listening to some lady give a speech on what she called Rape Prevention, but what was really more like a list of dating dos and don’ts. Do be passive and tentative at all times. Don’t try to persuade anyone to do anything or not to do anything, nor allow yourself to be persuaded to do anything or not to do anything of any kind at any time under any circumstances. Do recoil from human contact at the first sign of discomfort or awkwardness. Don’t go out with anyone anywhere if there’s a slight chance that drugs or alcohol will be or have ever been consumed by anyone in the vicinity. Realistic stuff like that. And remember, girls, if a boy does something you don’t like, you can always poke him in the eyes with your index and middle fingers, thrusting upward under glasses if necessary.

  I noticed some of the girls laughing and pointing my way, plus making these little pained grimaces. I knew that I had to be the person they were pointing and laughing and grimacing at. I just didn’t know specifically why.

  Later that day in Band, Scott Erdman, who is kind of going out with Molli Miklazewski, one of the girls in that PE period, told me that she had told him that they were laughing because they thought they could see my balls. That’s totally believable, because, as I’ve explained, they force you to wear these extremely small blue and white George Michael shorts in PE, and not only do they make you look completely gay but they’re not very effective at fulfilling the minimum requirement for a below-the-waist garment as I see it, which is, if nothing else, to cover the genitals. I guess it works out okay for George Michael, but for me it was far from ideal: if you sit a certain way, like Indian style in the lanai, there’s always a chance that something will peek out, and I guess that’s what happened.