King Dork (9 page)

in better shape, though some had stuff written in them as

well, mostly little check marks and lines drawn next to paragraphs at the margin, with an occasional note. Someone had written “Beatles” and the word “wow,” as well as the word

“HELP,” and had drawn what looked like a mushroom cloud

on the inside back cover of
The Crying of Lot 49,
CEH 1967.

Hilarious.
The Seven Storey Mountain,
CEH 1963, had a business card from a dry cleaner stuck between the pages, and

also another little card, which appeared to be from the funeral service of someone named Timothy J. Anderson. What

that told me was that my dad used to bring his books with

him in inappropriate situations, like the funeral of a family member or friend, just like my mom gets mad at me for

doing. And that he may have been into the midperiod

Beatles and had a fine sense of irony, as well as things that occasionally needed to be dry-cleaned. Hey, I’m a regular

Encyclopedia Brown.

I still couldn’t make out a lot of what was scribbled in

the
Catcher.
In addition to underlining the Jane Gallagher back rub passage, my dad seemed to have used it as a sort

of all-purpose notebook and scribble pad, jotting down this and that inside the covers and on random pages. Which

makes sense if it’s something you’re always carrying around, I guess. I use the white rubber parts of my shoes for the

same purpose. A lot of the scribbles looked like they might be dates, and maybe some of them were phone numbers,

though I don’t know—they didn’t look like phone numbers

to me. There was never much more than the numbers, either.

I could understand if they were phone numbers, which you

sometimes just write down when someone tells them to

you for temporary purposes. I’ve got some phone numbers

on my shoes that I have no idea what they are. But why

would you write down dates with no identifying information, 61

like an appointment or something? A date alone is mean-

ingless.

Some of the pages were missing, but I doubted there was

any significance to that. The book was in such bad shape I’m sure pieces of it were scattered to the far reaches of the universe by now. The scribbles that looked like words were

mostly illegible and incomprehensible, but, absurdly, of the ones I could kind of make out, the word “tit” seemed to crop up a lot. What the . . . ? All in all, there were four of them, including the “tit lib friday” on the inside front cover. One of the other books,
Slan,
CEH 1965, had some string in it that appeared to have been used as a bookmark and had a

scrawled note that said (I think) something “4 tit” something something. Four-Tit Something Something. Great band

name. Not much use in any other way.

In the end, the results of this phase of the investigation were pretty negligible. But I did know one thing: whatever my dad had been up to between the ages of twelve and eighteen, it had somehow involved tits, back rubs, and dry cleaning.

62

October

TH E TE E N WITHOUT A FAC E

For some reason, I didn’t want Little Big Tom and Carol to know I was going to a party, though it would probably have thrilled them to imagine that this could be the start of my finally trying to socialize with other kids. They’re worried about me in that respect. While being thrilled, though, they still would have teased me about it. I think the same thing that makes them worry about my lack of socialization would also make them uncomfortable about any attempts at reme-dial socialization that I might try. My mom would have

looked at me dubiously and asked if I was planning to dance with anybody. Little Big Tom would have said something

like “the girls better watch out!” or “looking good!” I just couldn’t face it.

So I said I was going over to Sam Hellerman’s house to

play D and D. There hadn’t been a late-night D and D ses-

sion in my world for some time, but they had no way of

knowing that. Carol and LBT were watching a pledge drive

on PBS anyway and had no idea something out of the ordi-

nary was going on. Amanda knew, but she wouldn’t tell be-

cause there were things she didn’t want me to tell about that she was intending to do. She had teased me almost as relentlessly as I had feared my mom would, but in the end we had worked it all out.

“Call if you need a ride home,” said Little Big Tom. “I’ve got a set of wheels!”

It only took around thirty-five minutes to walk to the

party, but once you get to Clearview Heights it feels like a different world. It looks pretty much the same as Hillmont, but somehow you get the feeling that there’s an invisible wall between the two towns and that you’re on the good side of it all of a sudden. There was a good chance that no one would 65

have any idea who I was over there. I was the teen without a face. There are worse feelings.

We got to the door of the party house and just walked

straight in. No one tried to kick us out. Outstanding.

There were a lot of normal people there. But quite a few

of the ones other than them seemed to be CHS drama peo-

ple, which was good.

Normal people freak me out, but I’m not scared of drama

people. There are some at Hillmont, of course. They’re all right, but they tend to be a bit faux hippie and into “jam bands” and the Grateful Dead and Neil Young, so they remind me of my folks a little too much, and they always seem to be trying too hard to be wacky. The real reason I don’t like them, though, is that I know they will never let me into their club. I wouldn’t particularly like to be a fourteen-year-old hippie re-vivalist with embroidered jeans listening to the Dead and

playing Man in Auditorium in
Our Town
by Thornton Wilder.

But the fact that they wouldn’t accept me even if I
did
want to be a f.-y.-o. h. r. with e. j. listening to the D. and playing M. i. A.

in O. T. by T. W. rubs me the wrong way.

There is, however, one thing I can guarantee: no drama

person has ever beaten anyone up.

The CHS drama people seemed similar to their Hillmont

counterparts, but they were faux mod rather than faux hippie, and that’s a vast, vast improvement. It seems to me if you are going to express your individuality by adopting the costumes and accessories of a long-vanished youth subculture, you’re better off with mod. At least you get some cool-looking boots and short skirts out of the deal, and the music is a whole lot better.

Sam Hellerman stood in line for the keg, then came back

and handed me this big red plastic cup of beer.

66

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“Put cup to mouth at slight angle. Swallow contents.

Repeat,” he said, demonstrating. But he knew what I meant. He recommended trying to “act normal” (yeah right) and mentioned that there was a TV room downstairs if all else failed.

Then he went off to talk to some of those old friends

who, for whatever reason, still felt they could afford to be seen talking to him.

Clearview really was Freedom.

The music on the stereo was all Small Faces and the Who

and the Kinks and the Jam. Not too shabby. The mod thing

was a bit much, though. There was a guy running around

wearing a British flag as a cape, and several people were

speaking in unconvincing English accents. They, and their hilarious asymmetrical haircuts, were trying too hard. But that’s the thing: trying at all is trying too hard. I granted them an indulgence on account of the fine, fine music and gave them absolution for their lapses in taste. I was in a generous mood.

I slouched around quietly, checking everything out, try-

ing to stay away from situations that might erupt into a sudden ridicule/torture session and blow my cover.

Despite the civilizing influence of the unusually numer-

ous drama people, there were a lot of these situations brewing. I mean: clumps of normal guys horsing around and

asking each other “Who you lookin’ at, homo?” And gaggles

of normal girls, any one of whom might suddenly decide it

would be fun to put her arm around you and pretend to be

hitting on you to see what you would do, with everyone

laughing at you the whole time.

That is one of life’s most trying and irritating situations.

Sam Hellerman and I have given it a catchy name: the Make-

out/Fake-out. I don’t know if it has a real name. The object of the game isn’t actually to make you think they’re sincere 67

and go for it, which no one would be stupid enough to think, but just to watch you squirm and see how you’ll try to get out of it. You can’t win. You might as well just bite down and break open the cyanide capsule concealed in your false front tooth. If you’ve got one of those. It was fresh in my mind because there had just recently been a Make-out/Fake-out at-

tempt on my dignity during PE class, and I could still feel the pain of having no cyanide capsule to make it all go away.

The danger zones were easy to avoid, though. Steer clear

of the schools of sharks and flesh-eating piranhas. Avoid the sirens. Drift toward the playful mod dolphins, who are so busy being entranced with their own wonderfulness that they don’t even notice your ungainly boat paddling in their midst. “It’s quite a lagoon you’ve got here,” I said, to no one in particular.

Eventually, I drifted into a little basement room down

some stairs at the end of the hall. This was presumably the TV room Sam Hellerman had mentioned. It was quite dark,

and almost totally empty. There was a turned-off TV and a

sofa, and on the sofa was this girl. She was staring intently at a candle that was burning on top of the TV and holding the smoking stub of a joint in a mall head-shop roach clip. You know, with feathers dangling from it, and I think maybe a

pentagram or an ankh.

She didn’t have a full-on mod costume, but I could tell

she was one of the funky CHS drama people because she had

a Maximum R & B T-shirt underneath a crazy-looking denim and—what? Yarn?—yeah, it was a yarn ’n’ denim jacket that

looked homemade. She had on this black soft cap that looked kind of military. And these little black glasses. I was pretty sure she was older than me, a junior maybe. The Who shirt

was tiny and didn’t go down all the way and her belly looked really good, what I could see of it. I mean really good.

68

She waved me over and said, “I’m trying to make the can-

dle go out with the power of my mind.”

I walked over, unsure of what to do. She said I should sit down and help her. Concentrate, she said. I sat down next to her and stared at the candle. It didn’t go out.

“You call yourself a hypnotizer?” she said after a while.

No. I’m quite certain I had never said I was a hypnotizer. I hadn’t said anything. Part of me was off in the corner thinking, Maybe these are my people? Eccentric and funny and weird with good taste in music and off-the-wall hobbies, I mean. Another part of me realized that I was so self-conscious that I wasn’t exactly radiating Good Eccentric around here. But the biggest part of me was just staring at her bare stomach, which was, like, the nicest thing I’d ever seen in person, though I was trying to do it kind of sideways, hoping she wouldn’t notice. She didn’t seem like she was in much of a noticing mood, to be honest.

She asked me if I wanted the roach. Now, the thing I said

sounds really stupid and goofy, but I know from having

watched people smoke pot all my life that it’s the thing you say. I still felt like a big ass saying it, though.

“I’m cool.”

Never in the history of the world had there been a less

accurate statement.

She shrugged and popped the roach in her mouth—

reminding me, weirdly, of my mom—and grabbed my half-

filled cup and drank it all in one long swallow.

“Fiona,” she said after a lengthy grimace. “I’m in drama.

I’m an actor and I also do costume. What’s your story?”

Wow, a female actor. Just like Mrs. Teneb. I guess she

could tell my jumpy brain was mulling over the concept of

the female actor, because she quickly added, in a slightly lecturing tone: “We don’t say actress. Everyone is an actor. It’s unisex.” Then she said, carefully, “Actress is diminutive.”

69

Well, okay. Not that I didn’t love how she said “diminu-

tive”: with great care and delicacy and solemnity and attention to detail, the way you lean two cards together on a new level of a card house.

But I still had to tell her my “story.” What was my story, exactly?

“I’m in a band,” I said.

“Yeah? What are you called and where are your gigs?”

“The Stoned Marmadukes,” I said, making a mental note

to make sure to tell Sam Hellerman the new band name so

our stories would be straight. Me on guitar, him on bass and paleontology, first album
Right Lane Must Exit.
Then, out loud and rather lamely, I said, “We’re working on some, um, on some . . .” Gigs. As if.