King Dork (11 page)

in a slightly different funny way than the funny way they used to look at me when I wasn’t trying so hard to induce them to look at me funny. I was still a nonentity. But I believe I managed to introduce enough uncertainty about my stability into the equation to give at least some would-be harassers pause when they might otherwise have pushed me back into the boys’ bathroom without a second thought.

What I learned was this: people like to pick on people

of lower status whom they believe they understand. But if

something freaks them out enough, it can plant seeds of self-doubt, and sometimes that can be enough to inhibit action, even when you present no real threat to them. Some people are more easily rattled than others, and everyone has a different threshold. But it sure seemed like Matt Lynch’s personal self-doubt threshold was such that his self-confidence started to erode involuntarily when confronted with the guns and ammo trip. I had accidentally stumbled on his number. I lucked out.

There are a lot of factors in the situation, and the gun-freak act may have been only one of them. All I know is that when I started to wear the army coat and carry
Today’s Mercenary
under my arm and talk about precision sights and shot group training methods and cordite and so on, Matt Lynch seemed to lose interest in trying to push me into bathrooms and beat me up.

Though I’m sure he still participated avidly in the anonymous locker exploits and gum throwing and derogatory Chi-Mo graf-fiti and so forth. He’s only human. In a manner of speaking.

DAZ E D AN D OB S E S S E D

I couldn’t stop thinking about Fiona and her mysterious

ways. I could still feel her teeth marks on my neck, from the inside and from the outside. I began to notice this distant, yet 78

somehow intense, constricted feeling in my chest whenever I thought of her, which was—well, a lot.

I don’t want to leave the impression that I was obsessed

with Fiona, walking around in a Fiona-addled daze. The reason I don’t want to leave that impression is because it would be pathetic. But I don’t know who I’m trying to fool here: of course I was dazed and obsessed.

The Fiona couch episode had been the most successful

interaction with a female in my life, surpassing many of my least plausible dreams. A case could be made that it had been my only genuine interaction with a nonrelated female ever, the previous ones having taken place in my head as pure fantasy or in the real world where I had been an object of

amusement rather than a true participant.

How could I not be obsessed? It was the most significant

event in my life so far.
By
far.

But there was a lot about it I didn’t get. She was a mys-

tery. I’m not going to go into all the different angles from which I tried to examine the Case of the Disappearing Fake-Mod Girl. But the central, most important question was: why had Fiona decided to kiss on me and everything, when no

previous girl I’d ever come in contact with would have been caught dead in that situation?

I came up with six points, or topics for discussion, which I present in ascending order of validity (one being the most valid) along with some of my notes.

Six:
She was impressed with the band.

True, she hadn’t seemed too interested. But when I first

mentioned the Stoned Marmadukes she said, “Yeah?” and

there was something about that “yeah” that seemed a little more fascinated than other “yeah’s” I had experienced in my life. Dubious, yet possible.

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Five:
She was captivated by my masterful command of the English language.

By my count, I had said no more than twenty-one words

to her, and that’s only if you count “um.” And my first bit of dialogue had been nothing less retarded than “I’m cool.” But clearly my ability to make words my slaves had had some

comedic effect. And girls dig guys who can make them laugh.

At least, they do according to scripts written by TV and film comedy writers. Likely, but not necessarily crucial.

Four:
She had no idea who I was, and hadn’t figured out that I was an Untouchable.

Lack of accurate information had to have been a factor. And anonymity. I only knew her first name and she didn’t know any of my names. But was that enough? The mere fact that my reputation had not preceded me? Could I have come off as some kind of Cool Dude when disassociated from Chi-Mo, the dork, the myth, the legend? Hardly. I still radiated me-ness, I’m sure.

Relevant, but insufficient.

Three:
Fiona prefers dorks.

I’ve heard that there are girls with this fetish. It’s a complicated matter that I don’t completely understand, but I’d guess it mainly applies to girls who for one reason or another can’t do any better and who persuade themselves that settling for a degree of dorkiness is better than nothing. Are there any girls as hot-looking as Fiona in this category? No way. But maybe her instinctive alterna-ness (in her capacity as a CHS drama mod) made her more tolerant of dorkiness, less repelled by it, even when it radiated from the anonymous King of the Superdorks.

Two:
She knew no one was watching.

This one almost goes without saying.

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One:
She was totally high.

Well, obviously.

M R. JAN I SC H’S U N DE RG ROU N D B U N KE R

I was mulling over some of these points in Geometry that

Monday when I felt an eraser hit me on the forehead.

“Somewhere else you’d rather be, Thomas Charles

Henderson?” said Mr. Janisch. He always calls people by their full names as they appear on the roll sheet. Just to be a dick.

“No, of course not, Mr. Janisch. Copying these problems

and their proofs from the front and back sections of this book respectively is the realization of a lifelong dream.”

Of course, I didn’t really say that.

What I did was: I gave him a look that was intended to

convey the impression that I had been contemplating the

mysteries of the world of Pure Geometry and that I had been on the verge of discovering an Important Truth that would

have been a boon to humanity and would also have had con-

siderable commercial value had my concentration not been

shattered by his supremely ill-timed, inappropriate, and possibly actionable eraser assault.

But at the same time, I was in no mood for Mr. Janisch’s

foolishness, so I’m not surprised that my look may also have managed to convey the sentiment “No duh, Einstein.”

Six of one, half dozen of the other, really.

The punishment for this sort of low-level insubordination

is usually that you are made to copy out something, typically a dictionary page, onto a sheet of notepaper. This is no big deal. There is little difference between this penalty and the other assignments they give you as part of your “academic”

work. The only difference is the thing you’re copying. A

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dictionary page is preferable to a chapter from
The Catcher in
the Rye,
even, because, well, at least the chances are good that it will be a page you’ve never copied before and that’s special.

Mr. Janisch, for reasons known only to him, likes to make

you fill a page of notepaper, front and back, with zeros, in groups of three like this: 000,000,000, etc. The weird part is that he seems genuinely pleased when you hand him the finished page of zeros. It’s like he gets caught up in the excitement and forgets that it’s supposed to be a disciplinary

measure. My theory is that he saves these pages in a series of black binders in a specially designed rebar-and-concrete lead-lined underground bunker. When the bomb drops, or on

Judgment Day, or by the time he retires and goes under-

ground to plot his revenge, he’ll have thousands of binders filled with millions upon millions of zeros. Then he’ll add a one to the beginning and suddenly he’ll be in sole possession of the world’s largest number in manuscript form. Or I guess it’d be even better to add a nine. Then he can laugh mania-cally and die happy.

Whatever gets you through the night, big fella.

Anyway, that was my punishment this time. I enjoy it, ac-

tually. It’s mindless, routine, repetitive, familiar, and no more pointless than anything else they make you do in school. The hand moves automatically; the pen goes circle-circle-circle-tic, circle-circle-circle-tic, a soothing rhythm; and the mind is free to wander. I started trying to think up some lyrics to

“Trying Not to Believe (It’s Over).”

TH E F LOWE R P OT M E N

One thing that was slightly freaking me out was the thought that even though I felt I couldn’t be more different than the 82

CHS people at the party, we did seem to like a lot of the same music. Because I love the Who. But I’m not a fake mod like the dolphins at the party. Not at all. I don’t dress up like anything. True, I did let my hair grow a little longer and started to wear flared jeans over the summer when I got more into seventies bands and stuff, as a sort of tribute to their fine work; and I’ve got the army coat, though that’s more of a practical tool than a fashion statement. But I don’t “dress punk,” or mod or metal or goth or garage or rockabilly or anything. I don’t wake up every morning and put on a music-genre-oriented

youth-culture Halloween costume—that’s what I’m saying.

My tastes do tend to be a bit retro, though. I’m really into the Who, the Kinks, the Merseyside/British Invasion sort of thing. And like I said, I also like a lot of seventies stuff, which I find myself listening to more and more often. 1975 was a great year for rock and roll, and don’t believe anyone who tells you different. But I can find something to appreciate about most pop music—it’s all part of rock and roll history, which I’m trying to know everything about. I have a pretty big record collection of mostly old stuff, and I’m totally proud of how schizophrenic it is. I even kind of like Wishbone Ash.

And I’m not even exaggerating all that much. But for some

reason I’m not necessarily too interested in very much of

what was recorded after I was born. And, as a matter of prin-ciple, I don’t dig whatever mindless, soulless crap all the normal people are into at any given time, because what would be the point of that?

My personal ultimate in art rock will probably always be,

well, either the Who or the Sweet. Or Foghat. But I’m also really into Bubblegum, and that’s probably what confuses

people most.

Bubblegum is this music they had in the seventies, cre-

ated and marketed for little kids, and, apparently, not taken 83

very seriously by anyone involved. But it somehow ended up being brilliant by accident without anyone realizing. I love that. I have a pretty big collection of Bubblegum records.

Now, I admit, maybe I got into it at first because it was so clearly the opposite of what everyone else liked. But whatever: it’s some of the best rock and roll music there ever was.

I think normal people think it sounds corny or wimpy, not realizing that there would have been no Ramones without

“Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” But I’m quite confident that

when we’re all dead, history will clearly conclude that my retro rock revival was years ahead of everybody else’s retro rock revival.

Sometimes, when I’m trying to cheer up Little Big Tom

by finding some interest we can temporarily pretend to share, I’ll ask him about the music of the sixties and seventies, which was his era. Back then, he and all his friends didn’t pay attention to most of my favorite music from the time. They

thought it was childish, not serious, meaningful music like, say, Led Zeppelin. Now, Led Zeppelin is all right (good

drums and guitar, anyway, though that singer should have

been silenced or muzzled or something—frankly, I prefer it in Yardbird form to be honest). But Little Big Tom’s example of how serious and important and adult it all was? “Stairway to Heaven.” I kid you not. Don’t get me wrong: I like hobbits and unicorns and wizards and hemp ice cream as much as

the next guy. And I suppose it’s the antimaterialist message that seemed so sophisticated and meaningful to those guys—

no one does antimaterialism better than multigazillionaire rock stars. But my view is that there’s something seriously wrong with a subculture that would prefer “Stairway to

Heaven” to “Wig Wam Bam.” Come on: go listen to “Wig

Wam Bam” and tell me I’m wrong.

I was thinking about all this, and kind of counting the

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ways in which the Sweet ruled Led Zeppelin’s relatively sorry ass, when I returned home from the first post-Fiona school day. On my way in through the patio, I noticed Little Big Tom using a sledgehammer to break big pieces of concrete into little pieces that would fit in his wheelbarrow. (He was trying to turn the backyard into Spaceship Earth by reversing the

paving process and planting ferns and vegetables so that one day they might be able to film a margarine commercial there.) I heard him whistling a tune I recognized from my own

record collection: “My Baby Loves Lovin’ ” by White Plains, originally recorded as a demo in their previous incarnation as the arguably superior Flowerpot Men. It is the perfect pop song, more or less. I had just been playing it pretty loudly the previous day. So—here I was, influencing Little Big Tom with an unjustly rejected gem from his own era. Kinda neat.

So I went over and started singing “My Baby Loves

Lovin’ ” and doing this little Greg Brady/Jackson Five

dance—well, not a dance, exactly. It’s more like genuflecting and using your knees to move your whole body up and down

while smiling like an idiot. There is simply no bait that Little Big Tom will leave on the hook. He broke into a big smile as well and faced me and started singing “My Baby Loves

Lovin’ ” and doing the Greg Brady/Jackson Five genuflect

dance, too, though I suspect he may not have been aware

that it was the G.B./J.F. g. d. So there we were, rising and descending, facing each other, singing “My Baby Loves Lovin’.”