King Dork Approximately (5 page)

Sam Hellerman was sitting at the bus stop in front of Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway with his headphones on and a yellow legal pad on his knees, his bass leaning against the bus stop’s windscreen thing. He was evidently making notes on the music he was listening to on this weird old beat-up portable cassette player, but when he saw me approaching he turned the notepad over, a bit furtively, I thought, and clicked pause.

I angled my guitar case up against his bass case and slid in on the bench next to him.

“See, the problem is, Henderson,” he said, taking a headphone off one ear, “that no one gets the Mussolini face. No one knows who he is. They’ll just think you’re constipated.”

I knew he was right. I only knew about Mussolini because
I’d been watching my dad’s old
World at War
documentaries recently, and he had seemed suitably evil and theatrical and pretty apt for a band called Encyclopedia Satanica. But few members of our theoretical audience, I had to concede, will have been watching the Italian episodes of
The World at War
. I assured Sam Hellerman that I’d seen the light and that Mussolini was as good as forgotten.

“Then stop doing the face,” he said.

“I’m not doing the face.”

“You’re saying that’s your regular face right now?”

I nodded.

“Well, Henderson,” said Sam Hellerman. He gave me the look that says: “It appears you’ve got bigger problems than Mussolini.”

I suppose thinking about my dad and my not-really girlfriends and the sadistic structure of the universe had been causing more of a dour, frowning expression than I’d realized. I de-Mussolini-ized the best I could, though I can’t say it wasn’t a struggle.

Of course, it didn’t matter anyway, as Encyclopedia Satanica had passed into the annals of history, if “annals” means what I think it does. I told Sam Hellerman about I Hate This Jar. He was visibly shaken, but he knew better than to fight me on a band name. On the plus side, I noted, we could still use the Encyclopedia Satanica logo, so all those hours spent on perfecting its illegibility would not have been in vain. So Sam Hellerman agreed in the end but recommended that we not tell Shinefield about the new band name till later in the day when he was good and stoned and more likely to take it in good humor. Shinefield was an agreeable sort of guy about almost everything, but we both had a feeling he wouldn’t have an easy time understanding I Hate This Jar.

I expected more discussion, but Sam Hellerman, to my surprise, simply sniffed and put his headphones back on. He was no longer taking notes but rather staring off into space, bizarre expressions animating his face one after the other. And he had just been complaining about
my
face! What a hypocrite.

Sometimes I don’t know what to make of Sam Hellerman.

I mean, you know the type of person I’m talking about? He may seem like he’s not much of a friend sometimes. He may kid around a bit and even cross the line occasionally, not caring all that much about the consequences or who happens to get hurt. His motives may not always be noble: in fact, they rarely are. And sometimes he can just be a total bastard for no reason whatsoever. Nevertheless, you know that when the chips are down he’ll be there to back you up, that deep down he’s a pretty good guy with something approaching a heart of gold. And somehow, coming from him, after all you’ve been through together, having any heart at all seems to mean more. And you have to admit, life is certainly a lot more interesting with him around. You blink in amazement at the surprising realization that in the end he turned out to be a pretty good friend.

Well, Sam Hellerman is nothing at all like that. I mean, are you kidding? Sometimes I think he might be pure evil. I’m joking. Sam Hellerman’s a great guy, really, greater than the sum of his parts, whatever the hell they may be.

Figuring he must have some reason for doing what he was doing, and that chances are it would turn out to be interesting in some way, I tried to be patient. But just sitting there next to him in silence while he listened to his tape and contorted his face was eventually too much of a strain. After what seemed
like two and a quarter centuries of trying to make my own face communicate something along the lines of “What the hell are you doing, Hellerman?” I finally resorted to the spoken word, much as I hated to do it:

“The fuck, Hellerman?”

Sam Hellerman, possibly the last person on earth, and certainly the only person under, like, forty, who still winces at an occasional “the fuck,” winced. You’d think he’d be used to it, coming from me, and just about everyone, but Sam Hellerman is a man of tender and unusual sensibilities.

I resisted the urge to pat him on the head.

“This is known as remaining aloof,” said Sam Hellerman, his tone implying that a little more aloofness on my part wouldn’t go to waste if I knew what was good for me.

The thing we were remaining aloof from, if you haven’t guessed, and as I should have realized, and as I soon discovered when I scanned the horizon for things it might be plausible for us to be remaining aloof from—this thing was a girl. I’m sure you guessed, though. Remaining aloof from anything less important than that wouldn’t be worth mentioning.

The girl was seated on this low wall in front of the 7-Eleven across the street from our bus stop, sucking her Slurpee and kicking her legs, obviously waiting for someone to come along who just as obviously wasn’t us. Bare legs. Little boots. Ski jacket with fuzzy hood because of the California chill, but with a short jeans skirt too. Warm on top, freezing her ass off on the bottom, everything balancing out. And of course, she seemed to be aware of how good she looked.

I squinted through my glasses at her legs from skirt hem to knee, and from knee to ankle, imagining I could make out the goose bumps that were probably running down them and
mentally constructing a picture of what everything might look like in the concealed regions. As you do. My guess was it was all in pretty good shape, a well-maintained garden of delights. In other words, she wasn’t the kind of girl for whom our aloofness or the lack thereof would register in the slightest. Plus, though she seemed like a nice enough person from a distance, she was almost certainly normal; that is, at least potentially psychotic and without an ounce of kindness or human decency anywhere in her sadistic, corrupted, robotic, petty, nerd-hating soul. Cute, though.

Tearing my eyes away from the legs caused a little part of me to die, but I did, and joined Sam Hellerman in examining the street sign up and to our left. Corte Del Mar Camino Road. “Chop Down the Sea Road Road,” if I’m translating it right, and not a bad band name, at that. “Hey, we’re Chop Down the Sea Road Road, and this one’s called ‘Up Yours, Your Majesty (Digitally Remastered Version).’ One, two, eat lead …” It could work, sort of.

I spend a great deal of my time humoring Sam Hellerman for this or that, and now was no exception. I gave him the look that says “You have my attention.”

Whatever it was that we were doing was cut short when a green station wagon pulled into the 7-Eleven parking lot and the jeans skirt girl jumped in. Sam Hellerman clicked the tape off, made a couple of notes on the legal pad, and began to gather his stuff.

“A solid seven point two,” he said.

It was harsh grading, though I didn’t necessarily disagree, but so what? Sam Hellerman was silent, refusing to answer any questions or even attempt to parry any of my pointed attempts at ridicule. He did ask for “the stuff,” but I wasn’t dumb enough
to give it to him before band practice. The last time I’d done that he’d spent half the practice sprawled on the floor with his head in the bass drum.

It wasn’t till late that night, long after returning from band practice, that I realized I had forgotten to ask Sam Hellerman about his letter. My curiosity about it was mild, but it still managed to keep me up half the night wondering about it with a vague, inexplicable sense of dread, because I’m King Dork and that’s what I do. I tried to kill time by writing lyrics for a possible song called “Jeans Skirt Girl” but didn’t get too far. The chorus was going to go something like “remain aloof, remain aloof, Jeans Skirt Girl, baby you’re the proof,” but I couldn’t get much beyond that, other than to make a note and underline it three times that somehow, some way, I’d have to manage to arrange things so she’d end up on a roof by the third verse.

And you know, I never did wind up finishing that song. I was an artist of a sort, but I was no Salvador Dalí. He’d have figured out a way to get her on the roof.

Band practice, when Sam Hellerman and I finally did arrive, had been less than satisfactory. Celeste Fletcher was there, but so was Shinefield, obviously, as he was the drummer, after all, and moreover, it was his house. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but in case I haven’t, Celeste Fletcher had ditched her sort-of boyfriend, whoever he had been, and as far as anyone could tell was now Shinefield’s sort-of girlfriend, though the most I could ever get her to say on the subject was that she “mainly hung out with” him. At practice she had been friendly
toward me, but distant, and nowhere near as flirtatious as she sometimes has been, historically. She remained aloof, in fact. But unlike the girl in the jeans skirt, she actually knew us, so any aloofness that was afoot in Shinefield’s basement had a whole different feel to it.

This lineup had had several practices since We Have Eaten All the Cake broke up and we rearranged ourselves into the Shopping Centers, before a half-a-practice stint as Ice Cream Gulag, during the second half of which we disintegrated and remelded as Encyclopedia Satanica. So Shinefield was at this point a true veteran with several bands under his belt.

I have to say that everyone at the practice was behaving strangely, even for us. Sam Hellerman, who, like everyone else, it seems, had the hots for Celeste Fletcher and even claimed to have done some messing around with her at one point—not that I ever believed it—was remaining almost as aloof from Celeste Fletcher as he had remained with regard to Jeans Skirt Girl. The thought occurred to me that I could get used to this aloof Sam Hellerman. At least his eyes were on his bass neck and shoes rather than on Celeste Fletcher’s ass, which meant better playing and footwork. (It was more than I could say for myself: I found myself unable to resist staring at her much of the time.) As you may have figured out, a little of Sam Hellerman’s act can go a long way, and a bit less of it from time to time, whatever the cause, can be a nice novelty. Nevertheless, the weirdness, in the end, overshadowed the novelty, at least for me.

Everyone seemed to be talking past me, sharing some joke I wasn’t in on. I mean, more than usual. They kept saying things like “I guess we won’t be seeing each other for a while” and “So long, nice to know ya” and laughing. This threw me until
it struck me that they were most likely referring, in what I presumed to be a mocking spirit, to Sam Hellerman’s Y2K doomsday scenario.

Y2K is an abbreviation for “the year 2000,” and worrying about it was based on the fact that the dates of computer systems had been originally designed to show the year as only the last two digits. Once the year 2000 rolled around and you needed four digits, the whole world was supposed to melt down because the computers would all self-destruct in a violent puff of logic and then, somehow, would come to kill us. Sam Hellerman had been predicting Y2K doom for much of the past year.

“I’m just saying,” he would intone with solemn confidence and a distant look in his eyes, “convert your assets to gold and other precious metals. It’s our only hope.”

I would inform him that I have no assets, and ask: “What assets do you have?”

“Considerable assets,” Sam Hellerman would reply. And knowing him, I’d say there was a fair chance that he actually had “assets” and had indeed converted them to precious metals in preparation for the coming apocalypse, which I figured would go something like this: this big scary postapocalyptic guy with a chain saw for a hand and a spiky steel mask rides up on a ramshackle motorcycle and says, “Give me your assets,” and Sam Hellerman goes, “Okay, sir, let me put these assets in a bag for you.” And the guy says, “Thanks for the assets,” and drives away. This sensible vision of the future with regard to the topic of assets did not deter Sam Hellerman’s favored solution to the end of the world, however.

Now, it seemed to me, and still does seem to me, that people have been saying the world is going to end since forever, and yet, somehow, it never actually does. God, or Communists,
or nuclear power, or overpopulation, or the ozone layer, or the environment: they all tried to destroy the world and couldn’t manage it. Sam Hellerman was certain the computers would be what finally did it, but I was pretty sure that when the new year rolled around we’d still be here and everyone’s assets would be pretty much the way they were before. (And if you will travel forward again, briefly, through the mists of time to when I’m telling you about this, you will no doubt notice that I had the better of this argument. See? Now travel back again, if you please.)

We sounded okay doing “Live Wire.” But when it came to our own songs, well, here’s something I’ve noticed about band practices: the first time you run through a song, before anyone really knows it, it sounds rough, perhaps, but kind of great. It has boundless potential, and often there’s even a real feeling of true rock and roll energy and spirit about it. Wow, you feel, this is the real thing; this is worth doing after all. And if it sounds this good now, just think how great it’ll be when everybody has had a chance to learn it properly and work it all out.

But somehow, the more you play the song, the more it degenerates. The drummer will gradually start to add fancy bits here and there, and soon the fancy bits take over till it’s all fancy bits and hardly any beat. The bass player will then be unable to play with the drummer very closely because what he’s doing is so unpredictable, so he figures he might as well noodle it up himself because just playing it straight actually makes it sound like he’s off compared to the drums. The guitar player hits the chords in what he hopes are the right places, but since the two one-man rhythm sections are contradicting each other, there’s no possible way to know exactly where those places are, so he starts meandering as well. After a few practices, everyone is increasingly lost, and soon the song is
just
done
, so damaged that it is no use to anyone and no fun to play, and can only be retired and forgotten. We’ve lost some of my best songs this way. “Live Wire” works because there’s an official recording to follow, and for some reason we all seem to participate in an unspoken pact to rein in our excesses, just for those six minutes, possibly because there’s a way to prove that you’re doing it wrong when you do it wrong. “My Retarded Heart” and “Mr. Teone Killed My Dad” weren’t so fortunate, and they bit the dust, as far as I was concerned, in that very practice. I hated to lose songs like that, but that’s the music biz, folks.