King Dork Approximately (20 page)

“ ‘Keister’ means ‘ass,’ ” she said helpfully. “Anyway, we have to practice. What did you do after school at the other place?”

Well, the answer is, I went home. I listened to records. Or played the guitar, wrote lyrics, watched TV, ate cereal, read books, looked at naked ladies, you know: the building blocks of a life.

So that’s what I mean about Clearview discouraging creativity. When was I supposed to write my lyrics about how awful everything was? But perhaps that was the point: prevent all lyrics from being written by filling every available moment with inane activity and everybody will just fall obediently in line. It actually seemed like it could work.

But it didn’t seem right that they could force you to stay
at school after school was over. I mean, hadn’t we already paid our debt to society for the day? But they could, and they would, and as it happened, they did. I was thinking that once my Indictment of the Universe lawsuit was done, there’d certainly be a case for a lawsuit against making you stay after school to do “routines.” Now, that’s a crime against humanity if I ever saw one.

So that, babies and gentlemen, is how your illustrious narrator found himself in a gym, after hours, trying to play “Louie Louie,” “On, Wisconsin!” and “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” on the trombone instead of working on his own actual stuff with his own actual band that played his own actual real songs. He was in a pretty foul mood about it too, let me tell you. They made him stand in the bleachers, point the slide part of his trombone upward, and move it from left to right and back again in time to “streetlights people”; they made him run onto the court in a procedure they called scattering and then dance in place with the trombone held above his head during rests, in a move they called freestyling. To his great relief, he was informed that he would not be required to wear a
Sergeant Pepper’s
outfit while engaged in “scattering” and “freestyling.” But his relief turned to ashes in his brain upon learning that he would need to purchase a pair of white pants and an orange beret to wear instead.

Poor guy. It’s hard not to feel sorry for him. Hey, wait a minute: that’s me!

Anyway, you want to hear something really weird? When Badgers talk about the Clearview High School “fight song,”
what they mean is “On, Wisconsin!” I don’t know why; maybe it’s that there’s a certain Milwaukee-esque-ness to Clearview because it looks like you could have filmed
Happy Days
there. Could you make that up? Could anyone?

In the aftermath of this gruesome episode I was sitting on the steps at the west edge of the front of the school under the overhang trying to work on my lyrics while waiting to be picked up by Little Big Tom—because Clearview is just a little too far to walk to from my house, and it was raining pretty hard—when Roberta the F. R. and this other girl from Band walked up and plopped down cross-legged in front of me. The girl with her was a saxophone named Pam Something. I’d noticed her before because she was not bad-looking, for a band Badger, with a fairly decent WHR and an even better BWR, from what I could tell, though she also had a funny look about her—super smiley but with a distracted eye, like she was seeing disturbing things off in the distance that no one else could see. They were a funny pair, side by side like that, because of their relative sizes, the tiny, spindly Female Robert and the comparatively more substantial Pam Something.

The Make-out/Fake-out sensor in my gut tingled warily, as it always does in the presence of more than one female, but only slightly. It was obvious that these girls meant no harm. So I tamped down the paranoia. What were they up to? Probably an attempt at Badger camaraderie. After all, Badgers need to stick together and give a hundred and ten percent if they’re ever to stand a chance of kicking St. Ass clear to the other side of Shrove Tuesday. That said, I couldn’t think of one thing to say to them. So I just did a little salute and gave them the look that says: “Ladies.”

“See, Thomas?” said R. the F. R. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was only giving about forty-five percent.” They both gave me the look that says: “Yeah, we could tell.”

There followed some largely incomprehensible conversation between the two of them about basketball and, specifically, about basketball players, that I was no more able and willing to follow at the time than I am a. and w. to summarize it for you now. My brain is immune to varsity talk. It just doesn’t penetrate.

“I have a question for you, Thomas,” said Pam Something, turning to me.

Was this “Thomas” business some kind of subtle mockery? My wariness-o-meter bumped up an eighth of a tic. But I looked at her with what I hoped was a neutral expression to signal my consent to being interrogated. She was looking off into the distance, though, kind of how my mom does when she’s mad at someone, but she didn’t look mad. We all waited.

“Oh,” said Pam. “Oh. Yes. I was wondering.…” She paused again. Then resumed: “Oh. I was wondering what happened to your face?”

I had grown so used to my centipede that I’d almost forgotten that other people could see it. Its legs had mostly dissolved by this time, though there were still a few spots where traces remained, but it was still very much there.

“Tuba wound,” I said.

“No, really,” said R. the F. R., “what was it really?”

“Really,” I said, “somebody hit me in the head with a tuba.”

After a quick pause both girls started laughing wildly, their mouths wide open. Now, I knew from my experience with Amanda and her friends that this sort of laughter doesn’t always mean that they think something is funny. It can just be a reaction to something being weird and their not knowing what
to say about it. It’s similar to my own reaction when something is weird and I don’t know what to say, except in my version, it mostly involves just sitting there and not saying anything.

“But … 
why?
” said Roberta the F. R., finally, when they had regained control of their faculties.

I considered explaining about Mr. Teone and the Catcher Code and my General Theory of the Universe. But I didn’t: it would have taken forever, and I was pretty sure these girls couldn’t handle it.

“Long story,” I said instead.

Roberta the F. R. was pulling at my notebook because she’d seen me scribbling in it. I had subtly tried to slide it under my trombone case, but not subtly enough, it seemed.

“What are you working on?” she asked, looking at it before I yanked it back from her.

“Just some lyrics,” I said as her eyes widened.

“For Pizzaballa?” she said, skeptical. Outside of the reading journal, about which I will say more by and by, Mrs. Pizzaballa’s class was well known for consisting only of diagramming sentences and rapid-fire reading and vocabulary tests, no creative writing of any kind assigned or allowed. I explained that it was just something I was doing on my own. Both girls looked incredulous, and I believed I was beginning to catch on here. It seemed that in the weird, school-loving atmosphere of Clearview High, the notion that anyone would do anything at all that wasn’t for credit or part of an assignment was more or less unthinkable. What’s the point of doing something, they reasoned, in my imaginative dramatization of their probable line of thinking, if you’re not graded for doing it or penalized for not doing it? It seemed to me like a vaguely totalitarian state of mind, but freeing the minds of Roberta the F. R. and Pam Something simply wasn’t my job, so I let the matter drop.

I did explain that I was in a band, a real band, the sort of band that is not “for credit.” I mean, boy, is it ever not for credit. And here I will note, as I have so many times before, the strange, inexplicable power that just saying you’re in a band can have when it comes to certain females. It wasn’t like they suddenly climbed on top of me or anything, and it also wasn’t like that was something I was angling for—though I suppose I wouldn’t have minded too much in the case of Pam Something, with all her ratios, weird eyes notwithstanding. Anyway, it wasn’t anything that extreme. It was just a slight but noticeable uptick in their interest in me, not much more. The Female Robert leaned in, invading my personal space ever so slightly, and Pam Something, I swear to God, sat back on her hands like she was yawning, pushed out her breasts, and licked her lips, like a kitten. I kid you not. I don’t think they even know they’re doing it. You say “band” and they get hot. Simple as that. KISS knew it.

It was disconcerting to find, when R. t. F. R. asked what kind of music it was and I said “Rock and roll,” that neither of them seemed all that familiar with the term. (“Is that like rock?” said Pam Something. My look said, “Yes, it’s a little like rock.”) But I explained that we were going to be doing this big Mountain Dew show coming up and that I was working on some songs for it. And I showed them the logo.

“It used to say ‘Encyclopedia Satanica,’ ” I explained. “Then it said ‘I Hate This Jar.’ But now it says ‘Teenage Brainwashers.’ ”

I think they were more impressed with the Mountain Dew than anything, and I had to concede that it was possible that as powerful as rock and roll may be as an aphrodisiac, adding a lemon-flavored caffeinated beverage seems to make it even more potent. At any rate, the Mountain Dew seal of approval
seemed to count heavily in the Teenage Brainwashers’ favor with these two. I guess our imaginary Mountain Dew endorsement deal had, in effect, given us “credit” that the Clearview mind could understand.

Roberta the F. R. wanted me to tell her what the song was about, but I deflected that. I mean, talk about a long story.

“You know what I love?” said Pamela Something.

I looked at her, bracing myself for more varsity talk, while Roberta the F. R. said “What?”

“I love how Thomas is all ‘yeah, whatever’ about pep band when he’s actually a pretty good bone.”

Now, a “good bone” is a good trombone player in band-speak, but while there’s always a possible hint of a sexual meaning in the term, I really couldn’t tell if the one here was intended or not. I couldn’t tell what was intended with this conversation, period. These girls were an unfamiliar breed of nonnormal semidecent fringe varsity “background,” like they were extras for the crowd scenes in a propaganda film that celebrates Sports Normalism. They used to call such people “collaborators” during World War II. I tried not to think too much about Vichy France, however, because even though the system that had earned their misguided support was evil, well, they knew not what they did. And they were pretty nice.

“Well,” R. t. F. R. was saying, “you know what
I
love?
I
love how the Hillmont Badgers just don’t give a single fuck about anything.”

I noticed Pamela Something doing a slight but decidedly Hellermanian wince. She hadn’t liked the swearing. You could tell.

“But you know what I really, really love?” continued R. t. F. R. We both looked at her as she grabbed the pen out of
my hand and made a motion as if to write something on my notebook cover.

Then she held up the pen and shouted: “This pen!”

Well, I had thoughts that I could express here as comments. But before I could do much thinking about them, Little Big Tom pulled up in his truck, stuck his head out the window at one of his trademark improbable angles, and called:

“Your chariot awaits, my liege.”

The girls started doing the don’t-know-what-to-say laugh again.

“Gotta go,” I said, pretty embarrassed but trying to gather my stuff with a bit of dignity. Little Big Tom means well, no doubt, but a single “Your chariot awaits, my liege” from him can puncture and deflate a person’s hard-won rock and roll credibility in seconds flat.

I was trundling my trombone and backpack into the truck’s behind-the-seat compartment when Little Big Tom called out once again, this time to the girls, who were still on the steps under the overhang:

“Can we give you two a lift?”

My heart sank as Roberta the Female Robert and Pam Something ran down the muddy slope with their hoods up and their instrument cases banging against their legs.

It took some doing to get into the truck, because there wasn’t enough official room for that many people. So Pam Something got the main passenger seat, while I was next to her in the middle, with Roberta the F. R. sitting with her legs splayed, kind of on both our laps.

“A little cozy,” said Little Big Tom with a mustache twitch. “But we’re all friends here. They call me Big Tom.”

“They call her Pam,” I said. “And they call her Roberta.”

“The Female Robert!” shrieked the Female Robert. There was low-level laughing almost all the way to whomever’s house we dropped them off at, up on Santa Carolina Pine Road Terrace, not too far from Hellerman Manor.

It was an awkward position. I didn’t know where to put my hands, though there were lots of interesting possibilities available. And I don’t know if I’ve happened to mention it before, but I am always at least a little bit horny. So a couple of girls practically sitting on me, even if their ratios wouldn’t necessarily get the best grade in the Sam Hellerman ranking system, and even with Little Big Tom sitting right there next to me—well, let’s just say, I’d be kind of surprised if R. t. F. R., at least, wasn’t able to gauge with pretty good accuracy the precise level to which my horniness had elected to express itself underneath my embroidered golden jeans penis, if you see what I’m trying to get across. I just had to hope the laughing wasn’t directed at me or, God help us, at
that
, but you really couldn’t tell. Ever.

The girls got out of the truck and retrieved their instruments.

“See you in the band room,” said Pam S. before they scampered off.

“I’ll be the one wearing the yellow carnation,” I said, and I was relieved when they laughed. But then, just to make sure, I asked why that was funny.

“That’s a flower, right?” said Pam S.

I sighed. The carnation joke was dead.

As they were leaving, R. t. F. R. had slid a note, a thickly folded little envelope of notepaper, in my front pocket. When girls give you notes, it’s always at the last possible second before they rush off, have you ever noticed that? Like you’re an
unpredictable device and they don’t want to be in the vicinity when you read them, just in case of … something? Well, to me that seems precisely backwards: I’m a thoroughly predictable device, as I’ve outlined above.