King Dork Approximately (33 page)

I mean, I guess I get it, because in the dynamic, glittering social scene of drinking Coors Light, smoking dope, and blasting “booty music” down by the reservoir, a silent, pensive boyfriend is just an embarrassment. If it had been just Pamm, the Robot, and I, like how it started out, it would have been nice, even fun, maybe. But in the greater semi- to full-on normal world, I wasn’t cutting it as a boyfriend. And I knew the other girls were all saying things like “What’s the matter with your boyfriend?” and “He’s weird,” and even “He’s creepy.” I suppose I should have known it would only be a matter of time before this exposure of who I really was would be my undoing. But I was naive. Free girlfriend, I thought; what could go wrong? But as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free girlfriend. And as a philosophy, or at least as a practical guide to how to conduct your romantic affairs, the “Hey, I’ll Take It” philosophy isn’t quite the be-all and end-all of philosophies that I’d imagined it to be.

Now, you’ll have noticed, perhaps, that Roberta the Female Robot’s name is largely absent from the explanations I have just given. That’s because R. the F. R., though a school spirit
girl herself (and how), was largely excluded from these wider social activities. Edging her out had been a gradual process that I only noticed after it was already well under way. My main contact with the Robot was through her still-frequent letters, a ten-minute briefing/debriefing in homeroom, and the conversations we would have at lunch or in the band room or on band trips at those odd times when I didn’t happen to have a second tongue in my mouth. But Pammelah Shumway’s circle of friends had been gradually widening, and in a place like Clearview, that meant that it—the circle, I mean—was becoming increasingly normal.

It was not at all surprising to me that the rank and file of Clearview High normalcy had rejected the Female Robot. She was as eccentric as they come, and clearly not normal material any way you sliced it: basically, she was one of those kids with nothing whatsoever to offer to the normal people of the world other than to serve as a target, a servant, a doormat, or a punching bag. The Clearview Spirit protected her from the worst of it, as it had thus far protected me, but that was as far as it was going to go. It infuriated me—still infuriates me, in fact—that she accepted this fate, welcomed it, even, with such bland goodwill. She should have been on my side, declaring total war on Normality forever. She was either oblivious to it or simply liked being marginalized by her favorite people in the world. That was incomprehensible to me, but it was her problem, not mine. The surprising part, at least at first, was that while the Robot clearly admired Pammelah Shumway almost to the point of idolatry, and whereas in my preboyfriend experience of the two of them in only “pep band” situations Pammelah had seemed like a nice enough friend to her, in the outer world and behind her back she was actually quite mean, and was in fact becoming nearly as bad as any normal person.

“Roberta’s so weird,” she would say. Okay, so Pammelah Shumway doesn’t exactly have a powerful vocabulary and you have to read between the lines. “Weird” covers a lot of ground, but I knew it was the third-worst thing she knew to say about anyone, right behind “creepy” and “not that cute”: it meant, your existence is embarrassing; it meant, you are beneath contempt. It sounds silly, I know, but translate it from normal-speak and put the whole weight of the psychotic universe behind it and it basically amounts to a death sentence.

Well, it was a slow-developing eye-opener. And all this, along with one other thing that I’ll tell you about in a minute, is why I decided before too long that I would have to break up with Pammelah Shumway. Like Celeste Fletcher, she had basically turned normal before my eyes. And unlike the Robot, I found I couldn’t just let it slide and play along.

All I had ever wanted was a Sex Alliance Against Society, and I had been quite willing to overlook the sex part in the interests of maintaining the alliance. But now it was turning out to be not much of an alliance, either. And it certainly wasn’t, in any meaningful sense, “against” society. Quite the opposite, in fact. Having a girlfriend, contrary to the conventional wisdom, kind of sucked. I wanted out.

Love was dead.

In the midst of all this, I solved the Puzzling Case of the Perplexing Pizzaballa Papers by accident, which should be no surprise, as that is the only way I’ve ever solved anything.

My second attempt at playing book roulette in the basement book boxes had yielded a challenge to a reckless vow
like no other:
Naked Lunch
. It’s about … well, I defy anyone to say what it’s about. It starts with a drug guy on the run from the cops, I think. Beyond that, I really couldn’t tell you, and since there’s no story in there, at all, it’s hard to see the point of someone’s having written it. Or of reading it. You know, it really seems like all those sixties people were just so proud of all the drugs they took that every single one of them felt like he had to write at least one incoherent book to demonstrate it, or prove it, or celebrate it. This was one of those.

I guess you could say that the
Flow My Tears
writer, a guy by the name of Philip K. Dick, was part of the same general drug writing movement, but with his stuff there was a story you could follow, and a whole lot of interesting ideas, and it was possible to tell that the ideas were in there because the writing didn’t suck. Plus, it was frequently hilarious. I had the suspicion too that Philip K. Dick was possibly literally crazy, which made the relative coherence of the books seem like a stunning feat. Great writer, one of the best, right up there with Jane and Graham.

I had been reading another of his,
Clans of the Alphane Moon
, about this psychiatric space colony where each different psychological disorder was its own separate community-like clan, when Sam Hellerman and I stopped by to visit Little Big Tom at his motel on the way to practice one day. (As for these clans, I’m pretty sure I would have been an Ob-Com, though there’ve been times when I was a definite Dep, and maybe sometimes a Pare.… Oh hell, I could have been in every one of them. I may be a nut, but I’m a well-rounded one.)

Little Big Tom noticed and nodded with that appreciative half frown he has.

“Clans of the Alphane Moon,”
he said. “Very cool book. Wild stuff. I’ve always liked Dick.”

Sam Hellerman and I looked at each other. I tried not to say anything, I really did, for at least a brief little bit of time.

“Can we,” I said, with unfortunately perfect timing, “quote you on that, chief?”

Well, that visit didn’t end well, though possibly the joke had been worth it. But it got me thinking that maybe walking around with a bunch of Dick books wasn’t the smartest thing to do, considering the precarious state of my neutral status at Queerview and my near miss with Jane Austen.

So instead of another one of those, or another reckless vow book, I decided to try to read a book from Mrs. Pizzaballa’s list. And I mean actually read it, rather than just fake it based on my memory of the three thousand other times I’d been forced to read most of those books.

It was
A Farewell to Arms
. It was by a man named Ernest Hemingway.

And it made all the difference.

Now, before any English-teacher types who might be in attendance get too excited, let me make something clear: it wasn’t actually reading the book that made all the difference. It was
deciding
to read it that made the difference. And in fact, I didn’t actually have to read it.

Here’s how.

A Farewell to Arms
is a love story set during World War I, and this Hemingway guy was a seriously famous writer. He won the Publishers Clearing House Prize for Literature, so he’s obviously a really big deal. He’s known for being an adventuring tough guy who was in a lot of wars, and a no-nonsense writer of simple phrases made up of very short words connected with each other into sentences by frequent use of the word “and,” something that was controversial at the time
but ended up being so influential that now it just seems standard. Also he is known as a guy who blew his head off with a shotgun.

The book was on Mrs. Pizzaballa’s list. I got it out of the library and started to read it, and it was indeed some great writing. I could very much see my dad reading it and even being in it. He was in a war too, you know. But I realized that there was still no way of knowing what Mrs. Pizzaballa was looking for in a review. I’d really thought I’d hit the bull’s-eye when I’d diagrammed one of the great sentences in
Pride and Prejudice
and wrote about how it’s more of an economics story than a love story. That seemed like a serious kind of thing to write, and it had the unusual distinction of being something I actually did think, about a book I actually had read, but it came back a zero like all the rest.

That was when, in desperation, I finally looked at Mrs. Pizzaballa’s descriptions on the book list, which I guess I should have done in the first place. The one about
Farewell to Arms
wasn’t even about the book at all. It was about how this guy Hemingway was mean to women because his mother dressed him up as a girl when he was a baby, turning him secretly gay, and how his suicide was the cowardly act of an entitled, impotent brute in denial of his own sexuality. (“Impotent” means you have trouble ramoning, more or less, and Mr. Schtuppe would have been pretty confused about how to mispronounce it, since the only way to get it right is to try to do it wrong.) Anyway, I don’t know if that’s true or not, or if it even could possibly be true, but even if it is, how did it have anything to do with the book? No wonder I couldn’t figure out what she wanted. It turned out that all her descriptions were like that, personal attacks on the authors for being bad people. They were racist, or sexist, or homophobes, or colonialists, or
rich people who mistreated their servants or who abandoned their mentally handicapped children or who happened to live in countries that did bad things, or just plain old drunks who cheated on their wives and evaded taxes. Nothing in the descriptions required any knowledge of the books themselves. In fact, it was looking very much like the author of the list (Mrs. Pizzaballa herself, I had to assume) was the one who had figured out a way to get out of doing the reading, not me. And if so, I didn’t blame her. If I were an English teacher, I’d want to put in the least possible effort too.

I started to write something in my journal to the effect that I wasn’t sure that the Hemingway description was quite as politically correct as she seemed to think it was, but then I crossed it out, because I had just remembered one of Mrs. Pizzaballa’s own Life Lessons.

“Anyone who isn’t the president has a boss,” she had said, “and anyone who has a boss has to do what their boss says, to the letter. And you’re not the president.” Something clicked in my mind as I realized that most of Mrs. Pizzaballa’s Life Lessons had been along those lines.

Armed with the knowledge that I was not the President of the United States and based on the premise that Mrs. Pizzaballa was, for the purposes of this class, my boss, I copied out her irrelevant descriptions for ten of the ten-point books, word for word, to the letter.

The journal came back with a perfect score of 100 along with a smiley face with an x for one of the eyes (a wink, I believe) and the sublimely Pizzaballian message: “Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

And indeed I felt as though I had learned something important, and awful.

So I didn’t have to read
A Farewell to Arms
after all, though I probably will one of these days. That was easily the most work I’d ever had to do to avoid doing work in a class. I guess maybe that’s what they mean by rigorous academic standards. I have no doubt that Mrs. Pizzaballa’s most important Life Lesson was right: in school, in social situations, in love, and in life in general, the way to succeed is to figure out exactly what is expected of you and do precisely that, nothing more, nothing less, while keeping your big mouth shut. And I guess that’s probably why I’m so terrible at all those things, like anyone else who can’t follow instructions and who isn’t the president.

I tried to break up with Pammelah Shumway four times before it “took,” and the way it went down when it finally did, well, a tale lies in there, as I think the saying goes.

If you’ve never tried to do it yourself, you probably don’t know that it is virtually impossible to break up with a girl who doesn’t want you to break up with her, even if you’re not getting along, and even if she kind of hates you. I mean, I suppose you could do it by just leaving a note on her windshield or locker saying “Bye, toots, it was fun” and then never call her and never answer the phone or return her messages and, if necessary, change your identity and move to Cleveland. That’s actually how girls do it sometimes—if you’ll remember Celeste Fletcher’s breakup procedure with Shinefield, it kind of went that way, except she didn’t go so far as to move to Cleveland.

But if you’re like me and you want to have a conversation about it that ends with the acknowledgment that breaking up is the thing to do, possibly with a friendly mutual concession
that it’s best for everybody and a pledge to remain on good terms, well, you can just forget it. It’s never going to happen.