King Dork (16 page)

He was also evasive when I probed for the story behind

the new Hellerman/drama hippie nexus.

The first thing he said was “I didn’t expect a sort of

Spanish Inquisition.”

“Nobody,” I said blankly, “expects the Spanish Inquisi-

tion,” supplying the required response but continuing to stare 116

at him as though to say “there is a time for quoting Monty Python and a time for choosing another path.”

Then he said: “trust me, you don’t want to know.” Then,

after watching me continue to stare at him for some time, he cleared his throat and claimed that, actually, he was considering going out for drama and trying out for
The Music Man.

I allowed my expression to change from “your feeble at-

tempt at false jocularity will never succeed in changing this subject” to “who exactly is this moron and why is his Sam

Hellerman impression so laughable and unconvincing?” He

finally said, lamely: “There is a thing called hanging. It’s not a big deal.” And he asked me what my problem was, though

I don’t think he expected me to answer. He added that it

“probably won’t be for much longer anyway.” Which

sounded pretty fucking weird to me, but he clammed up af-

ter that, and no amount of eye-rolling, sarcasm, or even long, steady, unblinking stares would induce him to say any more.

Look, I never said it was a “big deal.” Just that it was unusual. And the more he tried to make it sound usual, the

more unusual it seemed. That’s all I was saying.

We were more or less civil to each other, and still spent a lot of time together working on the band (the Medieval Ages, me on guitar, Samber Waves of Grain on bass and bodywork,

first album
That Stupid Pope.
) And we were still alphabetical-order friends, and that’s forever. But there were now some topics that were more or less off-limits, and that made me feel self-conscious about bringing up other matters. Rock and roll was okay, but not too much else. Plus, for the first time since the Order of the Alphabet had brought us together back

when we were little kids, I was on my own for lunch.

I have to admit, though, that apart from all that, I kind of wanted to keep Tit’s note to myself. Even though it was little 117

more than nonsense, the fact that only I knew about it made it the most intimate thing connecting me and my dad.

Similarly, and rather selfishly, I hadn’t told Amanda about the CEH library, even though I knew she would have been

pretty interested in it. I had no clue what the coded message might be, but I had developed this absurd idea that if I did decode it, it would turn out to be a kind of message to me. I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone else to know what that message was. I wasn’t even all that sure I wanted to know it myself.

While it remained unsolved, it retained boundless promise.

Solving it could only disappoint. On the other hand, you

can’t just leave an unsolved code kicking around in your life.

LOU R E E D

It was in the midst of all the pod-hippie business that Sam Hellerman’s bass finally arrived. I had to admit, it was sweet. It almost looked like a copy of a Fender Jazz Bass, but it was made in Korea and the fine craftsmen in the Korean bass sweatshop had put their own collective individual stamp on it. And by that I mean the name on the oddly rectangular head stock was not

“Fender Jazz Bass” but rather “Apex Dominator 2.”

He didn’t have an amp yet, but we figured out how to

plug it in to the back of the Magnavox stereo console in my living room so the sound would come out of the speakers.

It sounded kind of distant and rumbly and fuzzy, but sort

of cool, too. Famous recording engineers and producers

spend millions of dollars experimenting with effects and

overloading preamps and poking holes in speakers with

pencils and even pouring foreign substances over circuitry to achieve the sort of thing Sam Hellerman could accomplish just by being too cheap to buy an amp. We are geniuses.

118

He looked cool with it, too. He had it slung so low

around his neck that it hung well below his knees, and in order to reach the G string he kind of had to dislocate his right shoulder a little. He appeared to be in considerable pain. Like I said, way cool.

We had just finished working on the band’s signature

tune, “Losers Like You,” which goes:

Catcher in the Rye is for losers

Losers, losers,

Catcher in the Rye is for losers

Losers like you

(The Sadly Mistaken, Moe Vittles on guitar, Sam

“Noxious” Fumes on bass and landscaping, band name

spelled out in bullet holes on the side of a family station wagon, first album
Kill the Boy Wonder.
)

It sounded a lot better with bass instead of clarinet, I’ll tell you that right now.

We were playing the next tune when Little Big Tom

popped in.

“Nice!” he said. “Lou Reed, right? ‘Sweet Jane.’ ”

“No,” Sam Hellerman said. “ ‘My Baby Who Art in

Heaven.’ An original.”

Little Big Tom tilted his head in that birdlike way he has and said, “Hmm. I thought it might have been Lou Reed.”

Then he tilted his whole body from one slight angle to

the other by raising first the left foot, then the right, but keeping the rest of his body stiff, and stuck his lower lip out slightly while bringing his chin firmly downward, as though to say “I have just performed this little dance to celebrate the fact that I believe we’ve accomplished a great deal with this illuminating discussion.”

119

Then he said, “Rock on!” and flitted out.

Sam Hellerman and I looked at each other for a while with

the same thought, though he was the one who said it first:

“You know, ‘My Baby Who Art in Heaven’ does sound

an awful lot like ‘Sweet Jane.’ ”

“Fuck,” I said.

Sam Hellerman couldn’t believe I wasn’t more pissed off

at Little Big Tom for snooping in my room and confiscating all that stuff. I mean, I was pissed off, but not enough to go crazy about it. I was embarrassed about the notebook and resolved to take steps to protect my data more carefully in the future, but practically, it meant nothing. The magazines had already served their purpose. And as it happened, I had another “Kill ’em All” T-shirt as a backup. I didn’t even care too much about the confiscated records: I was at the point in my creative life where listening to other people’s music was just a distraction from my own stuff, and what he confiscated was mostly lame crap anyways. And believe it or not, I was finding I could get along just fine without the Talons of Rage fantasy blades. Just knowing the Talons of Rage fantasy blades existed, somewhere out there, was enough for me. I guess I was growing up.

But the real reason I wasn’t more pissed off is that I’m a sentimental fool, and I couldn’t stop feeling sorry for myself while pretending to be Little Big Tom. I could understand

why he and, well, anybody, might be freaked out by me and

the Talons of Rage fantasy blades and all the other Guns ’n’

Chi-Mo paraphernalia. Though I still think Stratego is pushing it.

When you stare at people, saying nothing for long peri-

ods of time while they try to think of ways to fill in the space, and they know they don’t get you at all, they can get a little 120

tense, and sometimes how tense they get is proportional to how likely they judge it to be that you might have access to some kind of dangerous weapon. I developed the method

to use on Matt Lynch. Little Big Tom just got swept up in the net by accident, a dolphin with the tuna. That had never been my intention.

I think it may have been the image of him as an uncom-

fortable, flailing, sitcom dad substitute caught in a net suspended from a crane on the port side of a Japanese fishing boat that made me decide to make a peace offering.

I took out a sheet of paper and wrote:

Dear Big Tom,

My magazines are not a cry for help.

They were only a tool to help deter a

bully. They are not needed now anyway.

I don’t have a girlfriend. Fiona is

an imaginary girl.

I’m glad you stopped the Vietnam War.

Peace and Love,

Thomas Charles Henderson

P.S. ban the bomb

And I left the note on the keyboard of his Mac.

My life hadn’t had a lot of content till this year. And now that it suddenly had some content, it was being turned upside down and slowly shaken, so that everything got a little mixed up with everything else.

As this process continued after the Fiona party, this weird thing started happening.

Whenever I would try to make a word my slave, that is,

when I would use a word from
30 Days to a More Powerful
121

Vocabulary,
a little image of Mr. Schtuppe’s head would pop up in my mind. Like, I’d say “obsequious” and suddenly I’d see a little shiny pink devil-head with lots of ear hair pop up really quickly, spin around, and pop back down again.

I was pretty sure that the little pop-up devil-head was

trying to prompt me to mispronounce the word. I rarely

ended up mispronouncing them, as it happened, because

when you get right down to it, it’s kind of hard to mispronounce most words. You have to work at it. How would

you mispronounce “obsequious,” for example? I guess it

would be awb-seh
-cue-
ee-us. But I had to think about it far too long. I mean, I couldn’t do it intuitively so that it would flow the way it probably would coming from Mr. Schtuppe.

He is a master of his craft and I had a lot to learn. But that’s why we have public education, isn’t it?

I N TH E S HAD OW OF TH E KN IG HT

The Hillmont High School drama hippies always spend

lunch period on this little patch of lawn on the northeast corner of Center Court, over by the Hillmont Knight. The

Hillmont Knight is this huge god-awful sculpture made of

scrap metal and old auto parts, welded together in what is supposed to be the shape of a knight, which is the Hillmont High School team mascot thing. If you squint and use your

imagination, you can just about see how it’s supposed to look like a knight, though it’s kind of a stretch. The funniest thing about it, though, is that on what is supposed to be the

knight’s shield, in welded-on letters cut from license plates and old metal signs, it says:

122

P R E S E NTATE D TO H H S

BY TH E C LA S S O F ’9 4

Presentated. A more fitting symbol of Hillmont High School would be difficult to imagine.

So the drama hippies sit in the shade of the Hillmont

Knight, leaning against its rusty “legs” or just lying on the grass in the general area. Sometimes they hang their coats on it or do something really funny like put a hat on it. And that’s where Sam Hellerman had been when I observed him that

first day, “hanging,” as he put it, just a little to the left of the Hillmont Knight.

Now, here’s something I’ve noticed about girls, after

years of careful observation. They tend to sort themselves into groups of three. There’s the hottest one, who is the boss.

She dominates and controls the second-hottest one, who is

the sidekick and second-in-command, and she instructs her

in the art of clothes and sexiness. Then there’s a third one, usually chubby or freakishly tall and skinny or otherwise af-flicted, whom #1 and #2 both boss around. #3 is a sort of gopher, doormat, punching bag, object of loving condescension, and project for improvement rolled into one.

It’s more complicated than it is for guys, where there’s a much clearer line between victim and oppressor, and you always know which one you are, and the victims and oppres-

sors never mingle or feign fraternity. In Girl World, #3 is truly friends with #1 and #2, and they do, in fact, enjoy hanging out together. #1 and #2 will help #3 with makeup and

clothes, pretending that that will make a difference, and if either of the dominant girls have a boyfriend, they will try to set up #3 with the least attractive of the boyfriend’s friends, though everybody really knows that that, like so many of

123

their other #3-related activities, is a (devil-head) charade.

Because even though they’re sincere about being kind and

helpful, there is an undercurrent of (devil-head) malevolence.

#1 and #2 love #3, but they’re also conscious of how much

hotter they are than she is, and they like rubbing it in. #3 resents it deep down but goes along with it because she likes being in a group of friends, which would not otherwise be

possible. Eventually, though, the bitterness begins to slip out bit by bit, and #1 and #2 decide #3 is a bitch and that they hate her and end up (devil-head) ostracizing her and replac-ing her with a new #3. Why don’t the #3s all team up and

form an anti-1-2 front? I don’t know: they just don’t.

Anyhow, it happened that the #2 in the subgroup of

drama people Sam Hellerman had started hanging out with

was Née-Née Tagliafero, the girl who was supposedly going

with Pierre Butterfly Cameroon. The #1 in that group was

Celeste Fletcher, who was, as drama girls go, pretty much at the top level of sexiness. And the #3 was Yasmynne Schmick, who was very short and whose body shape was almost perfectly spherical. She had a slight black-velvety goth thing going on. Sometimes it’s hard to draw the line between goth

and fake hippie, I’ve found.

In fact, this trio, though definitely in drama and thus associated with the whole fake-hippie pretense, was among the least extreme, most tasteful trios of drama girls. They could pass for nonhippies if they wanted to—maybe their hearts

weren’t completely in it, though they did listen to that awful jam music. They were on the (devil-head) periphery of the

fake-hippie drama movement.

Man, I’ve got to do something about that devil-head sit-