King Dork Approximately (19 page)

Anyway, I hated it, mostly. It wasn’t a song I could imagine the hair scrunchie guys with the underwear girls doing, not at all. It was as uncool as it’s possible for a thing to be. But I found myself inexplicably drawn to it at the same time. It was kind of catchy. And without understanding why, I knew that I wanted to be able to play it. Maybe I could pull a kind of Shinefieldian switcheroo on it, changing the chords around and rewriting the lyrics so they’d be about Sam Hellerman and Jeans Skirt Girl instead of the Irish dude and his Honolulu Lou. It seemed like a pretty good plan to me.

Unfortunately, while Little Big Tom wasn’t all that bad at playing it, he was terrible at teaching it. He would play a bit and then say “You just—” and instead of saying what it was that you do, he would mime it and then do it again. Still, I figured if Little Big Tom could do it, I probably could manage it eventually. I made him do it very slowly and took down the lyrics in my notebook. I’d have those skinny dancing girls showing their underwear if my life depended on it.

Well, that didn’t take long, did it? I’m referring to this: by the end of the second week of classes at Clearview High, Celeste Fletcher could already be seen around the school wearing this jacket with a letter on it that was two sizes too big for her.

“What the hell is that?” I said, when she flounced into Mrs. Pizzaballa’s class, swimming in the
Bye Bye Birdie
dating symbolism of yesteryear.

But Mrs. Pizzaballa cleared her throat and said, “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” which, in this context, meant that we weren’t supposed to talk during our vocabulary test and that if we kept it up we’d get Fs and possibly detention. Because at Clearview, they actually do grade the tests and give you failing grades if you talk during them enough to look like you might be cheating.

Celeste Fletcher took advantage of Mrs. Pizzaballa’s test and her warning about it to avoid having to tell me what the hell it, whatever “it” was, was. If you follow me.

I passed her a note that said: “Did you really get pinned?” But she just rolled her eyes at me, not getting or failing to acknowledge the reference and refusing to dignify my sarcastic note with a reply.

Forty-two minutes later, soft piano chords began to play on the intercom—that’s what Clearview has instead of a bell, because we Clearview students are far too precious to have our tender ears assailed with a jarring buzzer while being enfolded in the warm embrace of Learning. At the chords, Celeste Fletcher bounded up without a word to me and handed her paper in, rushing out the door, 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio and all.

Now, Mrs. Pizzaballa had this habit of delivering what I had begun to think of as Life Lessons at the end of many class
periods. She would introduce them by saying something like “Children, if I can teach you nothing else, I hope at least that you walk away from here understanding that …” (And yes, she always called us “children,” which made me feel kind of, I don’t know, Amish or something. But I preferred it to “men and women,” which was the usual preposterous way of addressing students at Clearview.)

Her Life Lesson on that day was typical.

“Children, please remember that school is hokum,” she said, a sentiment with which I found myself in full agreement once I looked up “hokum,” which is another word for bullshit. “One day you will have to get a job, and whatever that job is, you’ll find you’ll be much better at it if you simply learn what is expected of you and do it with no nonsense.” I believe the implication was that we were to think of her class as a kind of practice run. Then she added: “Hope is the thing with feathers.”

You know, it was nice to hear someone being honest about things for a change. I had no doubt that the true objective of education really was to condition people for a future of mindless obedience, and that the attempts to dress it all up with encouragement to “think for yourself” and “draw your own conclusions” were just hokum. No one has ever been rewarded in any way, that I know of, for drawing his own conclusions. Quite the contrary.

Find out what is expected of you and do it with no nonsense. I’m sure it’s pretty good advice. This was in fact precisely what I faced in the developing Clearview ordeal, and it was helpful, if hugely depressing, to have it spelled out with such clarity. I was trying the best I could to
look like
I was doing what was expected of me, but it was touch and go. One false move would reveal my true King Dork nature, sending me straight
to the bottom and into the torture hopper, despite Clearview’s benign school spirit façade. I didn’t see how I could sustain this for much longer. But Celeste Fletcher seemed to be doing just fine at figuring out what was expected of her and doing it with no nonsense.

Man, I felt low.

They didn’t actually call it “going steady” like in the movies of antiquity, if “antiquity” means what I think it does. They called it “going.” Skippy’s “going” with Peggy Sue. Hey, says Marcia to the Big Man on Campus, I like you, wanna ask me to “go”? Are Jughead and Veronica “going”? No, they’re just hanging out, but he really wants to “go” with her. Too bad she’s “going” with Archie.

This going, it seemed to me, meant “going together,” like clothes that match, or wine paired with the right entrée, or alternatively, like people embarking on a journey together, “going” somewhere, to the Orient, or Bakersfield, or the grave, or what have you, except instead of actually going to Bakersfield, the place the “goers” wind up “going” is, essentially, walking around and around this central area called the Quad. A couple of Badgers can manage to do seven laps during the thirty-minute lunch period if they “go” continuously, though stopping to talk to other “goers” or to make out can impede their progress. If they do begin to make out, Clearview custom dictates that everyone in their immediate proximity has to yell “PDA,” which stands for “public display of affection.” PDA is by legend forbidden on school grounds, but this rule is rarely if ever enforced. I’ve even seen Principal “T-Dog” trot over and “high-five” a couple of frisky Badgers who’d been caught PDA-ing, and everyone cheers, “Go, Badgers!” It’s that kind of place.

Of course, it’s all a euphemism for ramoning, like so much
else. And we had a similar set of customs at Hillmont, though we said “hanging out” or “hooking up” more often than “going,” and the lovers’ laps were done around a “Center Court” rather than a “Quad,” and while we didn’t have the thing of chanting “PDA” every five minutes, there were other similarly dumb things we chanted, probably. But the jackets and the insane school spirit somehow made it all so much stranger and more depressing and, well, basically, I just can’t get over the damn jackets, okay? What kind of sick, twisted, jacket-oriented mother fuckery had I stumbled into over here? I ask you that most sincerely.

So Celeste Fletcher, apparently, was now “going” with the owner of the jacket, one Todd Dante, a big, dumb guy on a sports team of some kind and almost certainly, irredeemably, virulently normal. Wearing the jacket was her way, in accordance with custom handed down by the Clearview elders from time immemorial and embraced by her without a moment’s hesitation, of signaling that she was “taken.” That was more commitment and loyalty than I’d ever seen from her toward any guy she had “hung out” with in all the years I’d known her. I guess she just hadn’t met the right jacket before. I don’t know where that left Shinefield. But I knew where it left me. And that’s Nowheresville, daddy-o. King Dork strikes again.

There was nothing I could do except marinate in my own bitterness and, perhaps, commemorate this marination with lyrics composed specially for the occasion. This I endeavored to do—in a lively number I intended to call “King Dork Strikes Again.” But Clearview High School had a method of discouraging that
sort of thing—by which I mean creativity and self-expression—in its own caring, healing, and understanding way.

Because I have to tell you about Band, the class. It was, like pretty much everything else, way, way different at Clearview than it had been at Hillmont.

At Hillmont High, the whole point of Band, from the students’ perspective, was to try to drive the Band teacher insane by means of constructive sabotage. Essentially, the students would all de-tune their instruments just slightly so that when the Band teacher, Ms. Filuli, would count in, the resulting cacophony would send her reeling in dismay and pain. When you have perfect pitch, like Ms. Filuli, even a slight deviation from in-tune-ness is like the world’s largest set of nails on the world’s most gargantuan chalkboard. And we deviated. Boy, did we deviate. She would try to be patient, and would spend entire class periods attempting to teach the class how to use the strobe tuner, and the class would play along, remaining more or less in tune when playing concert C in unison to exhibit the results of all this effort at tuning. But then, just when she thought she’d made progress, the first notes of “Stars and Stripes Forever” would come out just as bad as before, because everyone was playing their notes a different fraction of a tone sharp or flat from everyone else. What can I say, it helped to pass the time. But there was no Hillmont teacher more grateful to be put out to pasture than Ms. F., I can tell you that.

You could tell right away that Clearview band class was going to be different. For one thing, the band teacher, Mr. Matthew “Matt-Patt” Pattinson, was kind of a cult figure, not despised but in fact sincerely beloved by the students.

He would jog in every day and yell “How’re my Badgers today?!” And the students would whoop and holler and sound
off their instruments in between spirited bouts of chanting “Matt-Patt! Matt-Patt!” (As an aside, can I just point out how weird it is that so many Clearview teachers and administrators seemed to think it was part of their job description to run around punching the air and high-fiving everybody? Except Mrs. Pizzaballa—she was the only non–air puncher on the faculty, and I respected her for it.)

Anyway, then Matt-Patt would click his heels, salute, and count off with “Ah one and ah two and …” and everyone would launch into “Louie Louie,” their standard opening number, and not just play it, but dance and march in place and do their best to mirror Matt-Patt’s insane, over-the-top enthusiasm.

I had long ago given up trying to discern any hint of sarcasm, or mockery, or even mild irony in this sort of behavior at Clearview High School: there really wasn’t any. These people, as crazy as it seems, really were this into it, and the “it” that they were into, believe it or not, was simply high school. Damnedest thing I ever did see.

There were a few Hillmont refugees in the class besides me, including the rotund yet nice Yasmynne Schmick and Pierre Butterfly Cameroon (though he had renamed himself Peter in an effort to “reinvent” himself for the school switch), plus a normal girl with a pretty nice WHR named Trina de los Santos, as well as a couple of normal guys whose names I refused to know as a matter of principle. Our collective bewilderment was obvious. None of us knew how to go about being in a band class where you were expected to play actual music, all in tune and everything. And not only that, but you were expected to do so with deranged, melodramatic fervor and a straight
face. It was easy to read the look in the eyes of the refugees, the decent and the normal alike: a whole semester of this will surely kill us.

On that first day, Roberta the Female Robert, who was also in the class in her capacity as a strangely competent clarinet player, had kept looking over at me encouragingly and also doing these upward nods of her head and clarinet. I’d soon realized what she was getting at, because it wasn’t long before Matt-Patt started barking out “Tom, get your horn up” every time he noticed my trombone slide extending at anything less than a ninety-degree angle. Which was all the time. Have you ever tried to hold a trombone all the way up for forty-two minutes? It’s simply not possible.

But this became a recurring theme during Band, with Matt-Patt starting off the count by saying things like “One, and two, and Tom, get your horn up.…” Not every single time, but often enough to be worrying. Even if it was only Band, it could still endanger my precious status of neutrality and reveal my secret identity if it became a catchphrase that leaked into the general population. I’d had way worse things shouted at me in my career as a socially unsuccessful person, but it was something to be avoided nonetheless. So, much as I hated to let the bad guys win like that, I did what I could to get my horn up, at least a bit, trying to shake the troubling suspicion that it is in small concessions like this that the process of becoming one of them begins.

But the truly alarming thing about Band was only revealed later during that second week, when at the end of class Matt-Patt said the cryptic words “Now, I want you Badgers RTP on the dot at three-thirty” and added something about how the project of kicking St. Keister would involve giving him a hundred and ten percent of something.

“What was that about three-thirty and a dot and kicking St. Keister?” I asked the Female Robert afterward, because it seemed like she, if anyone, would probably know, and because I didn’t have anyone else to ask.

“After-school practice” were the dread words she uttered in response. “ ‘RTP’ is ‘ready to play.’ At three-thirty. For our routines for the rallies and the games. So we can help our Badgers to beat the Mission Hills Saints.” She gave me the look that says “I don’t know how I could possibly make this any clearer.” I was feeling faint. I mean, it was starting to look, a bit, like they were going to make us dress in little
Sergeant Pepper’s
outfits and march around a football field. But that couldn’t be. They wouldn’t go that far, surely.

“Not
football
, Thomas,” R. the F. R. said, shaking her head when I had murmured words to that effect. “Basketball. Badger Basketball.” Football, basketball, what did I care? Either way, it was just a bunch of normal meatheads chasing a ball. I wanted no part of it, and certainly not if it involved staying after school to work on “routines.” My time was valuable.