King Dork (7 page)

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 45

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 46

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 up-

stairs. 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 un-progressive of him, don’t you think?

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

B O OKWOR M I NG

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 47

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, intox-icating, 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.

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, 48

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 49

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

50

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, includ-

ing 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 with-

out glancing up that he was tilting to one side and looking at
The Catcher in the Rye
when he said it.

LOVE, F OR WANT OF A B ETTE R WOR D

It seems as if I am always horny.

That’s bad because the chances that I will ever get to ex-

press 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 of-

ten 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 51

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 side-

kick 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 great paying a late fine at the library, taking out the recycling, buying a newspaper, playing with dogs, whatever. Nice rack. Sagittarius. Birthstone: yellow topaz.

52

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 quib-

ble 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.