King Dork Approximately (32 page)

We were driving on the freeway in Little Big Tom’s truck. He still seemed pretty out of it, but at least he’d had the presence of mind to put on pants. I admired that. And even if this supposed legal advice turned out to be a dead end, which I considered highly probable, at least it was getting him out of the house, or the motel, rather. My questions about where we were going and who we were going to see were waved away.

“Sit tight” was all he would say.

I sat tight.

It was yet another silent ride. I suppose that was partly owing to my having freaked him out with the Catcher Code, but also it was clear that Little Big Tom wasn’t doing so well in general. He even passed a trucker without doing the hand signal to try to get him to sound the horn, and he went by the ramp for Filibuster Road without even saying “Filibuster? I didn’t even know her.” It was almost like he wasn’t the same guy.

Eventually we exited the freeway and drove down a frontage road along the bay, finally edging in toward a little line of houseboats moored to a small dock. I almost literally slapped my forehead.

“Flapjack?” I said.

“Flapjack,” said Little Big Tom. “He has a law degree.”

“Wonderful,” I said. This ought to be good.

Flapjack answered the houseboat door with a shotgun in his hands, totally naked except for a grubby bathrobe that barely closed around his enormous belly and failed completely to conceal that which was in urgent need of concealment.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, motioning us in with the gun.

“Flapjack doesn’t like visitors,” whispered Little Big Tom reassuringly.

“Wonderful,” I said.

I had never been on a houseboat before, and I was surprised at how unboatlike it really was. Once you got down the stairs, it was like being in a compact, damp room. If a fastidious person had lived there, it might have been kind of a cool setup, everything stowed in a neat series of cleverly designed drawers and cabinets; pieces of built-in furniture doing double or triple duty, like the table-counter-desk; polished brass whatchamacallits; the sound of the shorebirds and the lonely whistle of the freight trains in the distance. Well, that was the ideal. The reality of Flapjack’s houseboat was quite different. It was a filthy, chaotic collection of little piles of junk and trash that were at various stages of joining together into larger piles of junk and trash. It smelled a bit like the girls’ restroom at the Salthaven Rec Center, the one with the broken lock. I was afraid to touch anything, lest I disturb any of the animals that were, in all probability, nesting within.

Several layers deep, poking out here and there through the grimy thicket of refuse, could be seen evidence of a once thriving and obviously pretty interesting life. I mean stacks of LPs, moldering books, guitars, electronic equipment, and quite a few large paintings leaning in careless clumps, apparently Flapjack’s own work. Some of them, despite the absence of naked ladies, seemed pretty good. I was looking at the wreck of a human life, a wreck that genius guitar playing and a supposed law degree hadn’t managed to salvage.

Little Big Tom looked at me meaningfully as Flapjack motioned to us to sit on a small benchlike sofa while he settled himself on the floor, or deck, I suppose you’d say, across from
us in what I think is called the lotus position—an impressive contortion for such a fat person—with the gun across his knees. Fortunately, his belly hung all the way down to the floor, restoring his modesty. Like the Buddha. We stared at each other.

Little Big Tom motioned me to begin. So I presented my indictment against the Universe, in all its particulars, for the fourth time, handing over the documents to Flapjack at the appropriate points, telling it all as carefully and clearly as I could. I was getting pretty good at it, with all this practice. Flapjack appeared to be engaged and following me closely but made no comment till I was finished.

Actually, he stared at me for quite some time after I’d reached the end, an unreadable expression on his face. I was used to that. It was a lot to take in all at once, I knew.

Finally, he started laughing. It began as a quiet chuckle and built to a boat-shaking thunder of deep, resonant belly laughs, punctuated by the occasional ghost of a cough, and in the end dissolving into the by-now-familiar emphysemic hacking that was his signature sound effect. He wore a wry expression.

“You’ll never manage it,” he said. “Not in a thousand years.” He began to laugh again, and to elaborate on why I’d never manage it in a thousand years, waving my documents for emphasis. They got Eisenhower, he said, and Kennedy, and they got Nixon, too. The key to the whole conspiracy is a code written into the United States Constitution that, when properly deciphered, reveals that all articles and provisions contained in it are really to be understood to mean the exact opposite of what they say literally. Presidents and other leaders who resist when informed of the code are destroyed by scandal or assassination, and regular people who begin to piece it together, if detected by the Reptilians, are either instantly vaporized or closely monitored by biological microchips rigged to superheat the
brains of those who get too close to unraveling the mystery. The biochips are introduced into the host subject by means of tiny darts shot from the robotic surveillance insects that monitor our cities. The only way to tell if you’ve been infected is if you see faint streams of code and Reptilian characters racing across your peripheral vision: a quick suicide is your only option then, since removing the biochip would entail the removal of the entire brain and spinal column. That’s what happened to Ambrose Bierce, Jack Parsons, and Bishop Pike, and to Jimi, Janis, Lenny, and possibly Kurt, too. And that’s how we got Vietnam, McDonald’s, credit cards, the designated hitter rule, and the Reagan presidency. Lyndon Johnson was himself a Reptilian in disguise, and in our contemporary world, the actor Keanu Reeves is perhaps the most powerful Reptilian of them all. The world’s population is enslaved by brain manipulation, mechanical insect surveillance, and credit card debt, all controlled at the Federal World Government Headquarters in deep caverns hidden in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

Then Flapjack showed me a bloody spot on his arm where he had managed to dig out a surveillance dart before it was able to deposit its parasitic biochip into his bloodstream. He nodded knowingly.

“So you see,” he concluded with a warm, ironic chuckle, “you’ll never fight them with
this
.” He waved my papers derisively. “They’ll melt your brain before you get within ten miles of any courtroom. But if you want my legal advice, here it is: when you see them coming, shoot to kill. It’s your only chance.”

“Wonderful,” I said.

We were silent yet again in the truck on the way back to the motel. I had certainly gotten Little Big Tom’s message, which
was: it is, in fact, possible to be too paranoid. And if I didn’t want to wind up like Flapjack, I’d have to try to recalibrate my paranoia to a more acceptable level.

My lawsuit days were over. Flapjack had scared me straight.

“Thanks … chief,” I said. Of all the lessons he had ever tried to teach me, this was perhaps the only one that had worked, or even been comprehensible.

Little Big Tom rumpled my hair and smiled wearily. I left him with Sam Hellerman’s motivational tape, because if anyone needed artificially induced self-confidence these days, it was Little Big Tom. It hadn’t worked too well for me, as far as I could tell, but who knew? It was certainly worth a try.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” said Pammelah Shumway, “and I’ve decided that from now on I’m going to wear only leopard print and drink only vodka drinks, and no underwear ever.”

“As long as you’ve got a plan,” I said. That wasn’t snide. It was way more of a plan than I’d ever had. But maybe I didn’t need a plan. Just letting things happen hadn’t turned out all that badly, at least so far.

Time passed. And then more time passed, predictably. My home life still sucked, but my personal life had never seemed so “on track,” despite the Clearview jacket-varsity confusion. Walking among the normal people and avoiding detection by cloaking myself in the Spirit wasn’t the worst way to live. My band was, finally, pretty good. (We had gone from How to Kill a Mockingbird to Lobster Telephone, then to the Rimjobs, then to Salvador Dalí’s Hot Underwear, then back to Lobster Telephone, then to just Lobster, finally settling on the Reptilians,
Thomas “Rock” Henderson on guitar-vox, the Hell Man on bass and spacecraft design, Lovelorn Phil on drums, first album
FAQ on the Removal of the Brain and Spinal Column
. Our illegible logo was really getting a workout.)

Moreover, I had a girlfriend, something I never thought in a million years I’d ever have. I even had a kind of nonthreatening social circle in the “pep band.” I hated the games and the routines, and spent a great deal of my time trying to will the basketball team to lose so we would have fewer games to go to. But I never had to worry that a band person would try to beat me up. And even though they found my lack of Spirit perplexing, the band kids were quite accepting in the end, seeing me, I believe, as a kind of lovable rogue. I’m sure making out all the time with Pammelah Shumway, who easily had the largest breasts in the whole music program, enhanced my standing even among my seminormal band comrades, as it did among the normal population at large. After all, they didn’t know that my girlfriend was in effect permanently locked down. I must seem like quite an impressive guy to them, I imagined, and it might even have been sort of true.

Nevertheless, I began to be conscious of a vague but growing sense of dissatisfaction.

Because having a girlfriend was not at all how I’d imagined it would be. I liked her a lot, and I found myself daydreaming about her and writing songs about her, and suffered bouts of crippling anxiety about whether she really loved me and what she was doing and with whom when we were apart: you know, all the hallmarks of true love. I told her I loved her with the precise required frequency, aided by the Robot’s helpful letters: once a day was too little, four times a day was too much. We talked on the phone to say good night to each other every single night. I meant it all too, at least to the degree that a person
can be sure of genuinely meaning anything. In other words, this was my one, perhaps my only, chance at having a non-imaginary girlfriend, and I was trying my hardest to do it well. That part, the liking each other and being nice to each other and being on each other’s team, wasn’t difficult at all.

And yet … being “had” as a boyfriend turned out to be a pretty stressful, anxiety-ridden affair, very unlike, as I said, what I’d expected.

For one thing, it involved quite a lot more walking than you’d think. Not only were there the obligatory laps around the Quad during lunch, but there were similarly organized laps around the mall in off-hours, plus a good deal of walking just out and about on the street and in parks and such, because there really wasn’t anywhere to go and at least at the park you could find some semiprivate place to make out. But other than the walking around and making out, we didn’t end up doing a whole lot alone together, just the two of us. When we weren’t kissing or groping or walking in an arm-in-arm clinch, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot to say, so when we stopped, there would be a kind of uncomfortable pause till we would just relieve the tension by starting to make out again. Most of the conversations we did have revolved around administering the “relationship”: where we were going to go, who we were going to see, what she was going to wear, whether I still thought she was cute, et cetera.

But the most difficult part for me was the endless array of social obligations that came along with being Pammelah Shumway’s boyfriend. Until you have been the boyfriend of a girl with “school spirit,” you have no idea how much non–making out activity it involves.

Now, you may not know this about me, but basically, I don’t like people all that much. One on one, I’m fine, if the other one
is halfway decent and at least sort of interesting and, most importantly, not trying to kill me. A trio, if everyone is nice and not too normal, I can handle. But a big group of kids, jabbering and chattering and whooping and hollering about their damnable school activities, their GPAs, and the terrible music they liked, and ranging in type from quasi-decent to full-on normal psychotic? That’s not my scene, baby. Just not my scene. I mean, you have no idea how many school-sponsored events there are on the calendar. It’s unreal. And I was obligated to go to pretty much every one—the games, the track meets, the plays, the dances, the gymnastics, the fund-raising bake sales, everything, and that was on top of the “pep band” stuff I already had to do. I felt like I was spending nearly all my waking hours participating in some school-sponsored activity, which is basically everything I stand against. I would come home from some event, look in the mirror, and say, “Who
are
you?”

The only break I ever had from this relentless socializing was on Tuesday nights, when Pamm would attend her Latter-Day Saints Youth Group meetings. (That’s three things I detest all in one: youth, groups, and, you know, meeting.) I never thought I’d have cause to thank God for not making me a Mormon. But it was the one thing I wasn’t forced to go to, and I came to look forward to Tuesday as a precious little island of freedom set in a sea of oppression.

Now, when I’m with a big group of normal people I withdraw into my own head. A defense mechanism, I guess it’s called. It’s either that or I explode; at least, that’s what it feels like. Or I manage to slink off to some corner and lick my wounds, or make some excuse and flee back home to where there are no people, only records and guitars, and a sort of family.

But when you have a girlfriend, you can’t leave. And you can’t withdraw into your head either, not if you don’t want
her to get mad at you and take it out on you for days. (My girlfriend expressed her anger and disappointment chiefly by walking slower. We would be walking along as usual and I’d suddenly notice she was back there going at a slowed pace, her head down. So I would scamper back and try to recalibrate, attempting to match her step, which would in turn get even slower. Sometimes she would just stop in the middle of the street altogether, head down, till I went back and grabbed her by the arm to pull her out of the way of the oncoming traffic. It was the most challenging game of Try to Guess What I’m Mad About ever.)