King Dork Approximately (12 page)

Despite Little Big Tom’s intrusion, we were off to a pretty good start with the beat mining. We had to keep reminding ourselves that we weren’t just picking our favorite songs or bands. Much of my favorite music, like, say, the Buddah Records flavor of bubblegum, was too quirky to be suitable for this purpose. And we had to stay away from good but busy drummers like Keith Moon and John Maher, no matter how great their drumming was in context and no matter how much we liked their bands.

The crucial point in taking Shinefield to beat school against his will and without his knowledge was going to be to make sure the drumbeats we chose were clean, simple, and easily grasped. The arrangements also had to be straightforward;
otherwise they would get in the way of our own arrangements of the songs we would really be playing in our heads while outwardly playing the other ones.

Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy, Cheap Trick, Slade, the Undertones, even some KISS—all had stuff we could use. We could work with the Sweet, too (in their post–“Poppa Joe” phase) and with the Ramones as they appear on SRK 6063. We could use Motörhead for faster tunes. The Cook/Jones bands worked great: “Anarchy in the UK” was almost a perfect match for “Mr. Teone Killed My Dad.” To our surprise, no less than three of our songs could be overlaid almost seamlessly on “Cat Scratch Fever,” if you set aside the intro: “God Rot Your Bloody Soul,” “Meat Tenderizer,” and “Sadistic Masochism.”

And of course, there was AC/DC’s Phil Rudd, the metaphysical ideal of the tamed drummer, if metaphysical means what I hope it does. The plan was to start with “Fiona”/“Live Wire” as a test and, if it worked, to move on from there.

So there we were, still in my room, finishing off the last of Little Big Tom’s pizza, listening to PD 5537 in an attempt to restore some balance and sanity to our world. (I’ll save you having to go look it up, because I doubt you’d get that one: it’s the Pink Fairies,
Kings of Oblivion
.)

I looked at Sam Hellerman. He was strong. He was confident. He was in command of the situation.

“What are we going to do now?” he said.

“You tell me,” I replied, pouncing catlike on his mouselike words. “You’re strong. You’re confident. Women like and admire you.” It was like I’d waited my whole life to say it, though I had just recently heard it for the first time. And it fairly came tumbling out of me. I guess in the excitement I hadn’t managed to articulate the individual words all too clearly. So Sam Hellerman gave me the look and says “The fuck?” except for
Sam Hellerman it was more like “The heck?” and he didn’t react much at all other than that, so I knew he hadn’t quite understood me. So I repeated it more slowly, which got the desired result.

If you’ve ever heard about a person’s face clouding over and suspected it to have been a mere figure of speech or the one that starts with “hyper-” that means an exaggeration, I can assure you that it is possible for a face to cloud over. I mean, actual tiny clouds moved in and began to engulf Sam Hellerman’s face in darkness, though his eyes retained an eerie, vaguely threatening glow behind them. I believe that at that moment, Sam Hellerman came as close as he has ever come to uttering what he still calls “the F-word.”

“What the … fudge … darn … heck … hell …,” he said, like a Mormon with Tourette’s syndrome.

“Okay, okay,” I said by way of apology. I gave him the look that says “Hey, if you don’t want people going through your things, you should consider not being so God-almighty mysterious about them all the time.” “I just had to know what was on the tape,” I added, switching my words to audio mode. “It was driving me nuts.”

Sam Hellerman could see my point, it seemed. Plus, now that the preliminary invasion of privacy and subsequent ridicule was out of the way, he seemed to want to tell me what it was all about.

“What’s it all about, Hellerman?” I said, egging him on.

And Sam Hellerman began to relate the following tale.

Once upon a time, it went, there was a boy who had moved with his family to California from Munich, Germany. At the age of fifteen, he was a stranger in a strange land, misunderstood, mocked, and despised by his new peers. His English was good, because in places like Germany the schools actually teach you things and studying a foreign language means more than just memorizing how to say “I have a lovely box of red pencils” and “Emil, why are you so pale?” and eating snacks. But whereas the language was familiar, the culture was alien. He didn’t “fit in,” and his accent, glasses, and gaunt features, along with his interest in math and physics and his native intelligence, made him an obvious target for harassment by bullies of every stripe.

Unfortunately for him, the first syllable of his first name sounded to American ears a bit like a familiar term for a person’s buttocks, and his country of origin was associated mainly with Nazis—particularly, at the time, with the bumbling prison camp guards depicted in a popular television situation comedy called
Hogan’s Heroes
. Accordingly, he was known, in the Hillmont High School Class of 1970, variously as Hiney, Hind Quarters, Shulztie, Das Nincompoop, Colonel Klink, Gay Hiney, Super Gay Nazi Hiney, and even, on occasion, Herr Hitler Hiney, or merely Hitler, a name particularly galling to him, considering what he understood to have been his socialist grandparents’ actual suffering during the Second World War. Along with subjecting him to the usual indignities—stuffing him in garbage cans, locking him in lockers, and all the rest—his classmates never passed up the opportunity to draw a mustache on any photograph of him that came their way, in class photos or in the yearbook, or even, on a few occasions, with indelible marker on his actual face.

Now, this was in the late sixties, and teenage bullying wasn’t nearly as advanced as it is now. Still, he had had what for the time was a pretty rough experience of high school, and he came out of it hating humanity with a smoldering passion. As one does.

Bullying aside, little Heinrich was, to his own surprise, largely disappointed in America. The America of his childhood dreams—the cowboys and Indians, the fast cars, the trash-talking jazzmen in smoky clubs, the well-dressed private detectives in their fedoras with attractive full-breasted females bringing them martinis and posing seductively, not to mention Hollywood,
Playboy
magazine, the space program, and the abundant candy—simply didn’t seem to exist, at least, not in a form that was readily available to a fifteen-year-old of German extraction in Hillmont, California, which, at the time, was even less of a real place than it is today.

Most of all, he was disappointed in the women, or rather, not with the women per se, but with their lack of interest in cooperating with his ambition to couple with them. Instead, they ridiculed him, or almost worse, ignored him completely. So there was to be no “necking” in parked Chevrolets at “the Point,” no ass-grabbing slow dances at the “hop,” no “Wake Up Little Susie” scenarios at the local drive-in. No love of any kind, at least not for him. He was effectively invisible to those he wanted to be seen by, and at the same time all too identifiable as prey to those who wished to prey upon him.

Thus far, it was a variation on a familiar story, a typical American adolescence, in fact. Most people, outside of a small group of the most severely normal, I suppose, will recognize it instantly and probably see themselves in it to some degree.

But it was at this point that Sam Hellerman’s father (for it was he) discovered
The Secrets of Women Revealed: A Guide
to Getting (and Keeping) Girls
through an ad in the back of a comic book, and it, according to the story, changed everything.

The Secrets of Women Revealed
was a set of ten cassettes with an accompanying book explaining how the most socially unsuccessful person could gain confidence, take control of his life, and get down to the serious business of picking up girls. One side of each tape consisted of general principles and step-by-step instructions, while the other side, a bit of which I had heard, was motivational, designed to penetrate the subconscious mind with confidence-building messages: the more you listened, the more penetration, apparently, which explained Sam Hellerman’s recent spate of continual headphoning.

In any case, the teenage Herr Hellerman’s transformation, upon receipt of the tapes, was slow but dramatic. Before long he had acquired a circle of friends and another circle next to the first circle of admiring females vying for his attentions. No one drew a mustache on him again, ever. To this day, Herr Hellerman credits the tapes with his eventual success in life, from his triumphs with women to the career he has today as a sinister and filthy-rich lawyer.

This was the tale told by Sam Hellerman. Well, actually, I filled most of it in, using my imagination and my powerful vocabulary. But the bottom line was that Herr Hellerman believed in the tapes and wanted to bestow their bounty upon his only heir when he came of age. So he duly presented them to Sam Hellerman on his fifteenth birthday.

“Dzeez tapes are dzee zecret, viss respect to vimmen,” he had told Sam Hellerman in my imaginative reconstruction of the scene, holding the tapes above Sam Hellerman’s head and making him jump for them before handing them over. “Use
dzem wery visely, young man, use dzem orphan, or dzere vill be dze most terrible consekvenciss, if I make myself cleah.…”

And accordingly, Herr Hellerman had added an incentive: if, within a year of receipt of the tapes, Sam Hellerman had not managed to acquire a girlfriend, he was to be severely punished, grounded, deprived of a driver’s license for a period of not less than one year, and physically beaten, too, if I didn’t miss my guess.

Sam Hellerman was currently at tape three, the second section of which was entitled “Standing Aloof,” which explained his Jeans Skirt Girl activities, if not the sense behind them. The idea, according to Sam Hellerman, was that girls, not used to being ignored, are intrigued and ultimately attracted to men who fail to adhere to the expected pattern of following them around like sad, eager puppies. Eventually the female in question seeks reassurance that the ignorer is attracted to her to the degree to which she feels entitled. At that point, the man, that is to say, the Sam Heller-man in the ludicrous fantasy world we’re discussing here, having demonstrated that his status is high enough to afford him the luxury of ignoring her, can make a move to escalate the “relationship.”

I repeated a previously raised objection, about how standing aloof from someone who isn’t aware of you isn’t logically possible. People want what they can’t have, it’s true, but not if they are unacquainted with its existence, and also, I regret to say, not if, in the event that they become acquainted with it, the thing they can’t have turns out to be Sam Hellerman. On the contrary, I’d imagine a person in such a situation would experience an overwhelming sense of relief.

“If you think,” I said, in a combination of words and facial
spasms, “that Jeans Skirt Girl is going to want to be your girlfriend just because you’ve been watching her from a bus stop under an umbrella but pretending not to, you’re more impressively retarded than I ever gave you credit for.”

“Thanks,” said Sam Hellerman drily. But he stuck to his guns. “It’s a demonstration of status.”

Yes, I thought. It is. But not in your favor.

“And it will work,” he added, with that trademark Sam Hellerman assurance that in almost any other situation might have made me question the evidence of my own eyes and the validity of several deeply held beliefs. Not this time, however. This had disaster written all over it in great big flashing letters.

“Besides,” he said on his way out, “I can’t stop thinking about her.”

Preposterous as this statement was, considering he was talking about someone he hadn’t even met, and despite the fact that the English language lacks a word of sufficient intensity to describe just how far out of his league this girl was, there was a desperate pleading in his voice that I recognized from hearing my own voice on those rare occasions when I used it. And though I may have hated to admit it, whether you’re crazy about an imaginary girl in the real world, like me, or obsessing over a real girl in la-la land, like Sam Hellerman, it comes down to pretty much the same thing.

Sam Hellerman may be a genius, but love makes you stupid. No exceptions.

Now, if you were designing a schedule that divided the school year into two terms and you had to work around a lengthy
winter break in the middle of it, how would you do it? Have the first term end just before the break, and the second term start right after it? Good, that’s how I’d do it too. But for some reason the geniuses of the Santa Carla Unified School District had decided that the way to do it was to pause the first term for Christmas vacation and then continue it for a week and a half after everyone gets back, which is why we all had to return to Hillmont High for eight more days of torture and tedium before heading to our new so-called academic homes.

At Hillmont, it’s even sillier because this fall term hangover is called “Finals.” Technically you’re supposed to use winter break to “study” for some alleged final exams that I imagine a real school might use to test you on what you’ve learned in the past term. But to my knowledge no Hillmont student has ever studied during this time, and if you’ve had no unexcused absences, they don’t make you take the “Finals” anyway. So the best students—that is, the ones who love school so much that they never miss a day and those with no social life to speak of who couldn’t manage to miss a day if their lives depended on it (like Sam Hellerman and me)—are thus exempted. I’ve never had to take a “Final” in my life for this reason. So “Finals” at Hillmont High School are essentially little more than a punishment for poor attendance. And though I don’t speak from experience, I am pretty confident in saying that in practice, they are little different from any detention: you sit at your desk in a room full of other delinquents, head down, for a couple of hours, and you write lines or copy a dictionary page if they catch you looking up or being disruptive in any way.