King Dork (5 page)

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

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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 DI E D I N A P LAN E C RAS H

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 30

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 whistle 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” super-

imposed 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.

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* * *

As for Sam Hellerman’s bizarre proposition, it went a lit-

tle 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?”

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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 prom-

ise 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 sec-

tion 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.

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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.”

TH E S P ORTI NG LI F E

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 the r. B. K. T. and attempt to put your regular clothes back on.

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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 horse-play 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 feel-

ing pretty good about PE. I mean, we had timed everything

well and hadn’t had any nasty run-ins with any normal psy-

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chopaths 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 peo-

ple 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

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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.

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 al-

ready 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 so-

cial 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.