King Dork (12 page)

Amanda came through the back door, stared for a few sec-

onds, and then turned on her heel and walked back in. I really couldn’t blame her.

It got old quickly. But Little Big Tom was having such a

great time that I hated to pull the plug, so I continued doing it for a while, looking at him with a frozen yet fading smile that gained and lost altitude while I tried to figure out a way 85

to end the baby-loves-love-a-thon gracefully. He couldn’t

take a hint, though. Finally, I just had to say:

“Hey, you know: I’ve got some things to do.”

Probably not the best way to handle it, but I was desper-

ate. I went into the house, hearing his trademark sigh and eventually his sledgehammer-on-concrete sound.

WOM E N G ETTI NG I N TH E WAY

Maybe it was more or less predictable that the whole Fiona situation would eventually start to affect the band. It’s well known that that has been the downfall of all the great bands of the world: women getting in the way.

Sam Hellerman had a weird attitude. At first I thought he

was mad at me for leaving the party without him, but it turns out he didn’t care about that at all. It was Fiona.

When I told him what had happened, at our first post-

Fiona band practice—and then told him again, presumably so he could pay attention once he realized I hadn’t been making it up—he said: “Fucking bitch.”

Now, you have to understand something about Sam

Hellerman. He never swears. I don’t swear much, either, out loud, but that’s mostly because I never say more than a couple of words at a time. I keep it to myself, but in my head, I’m like a late-night cable comedy special. Everyone would be

shocked if they had access to a transcript from my head. I don’t know about Sam Hellerman’s head’s transcript, but he talks out loud all the time, and as he’s talking you can almost see him struggling to avoid saying swear words. Like, he’ll always say have sex instead of fuck, or boobies instead of tits.

The first works sometimes, though it can sound awkward;

the second is pretty much inexcusable and reflects poorly on 86

him. Once he said crotch instead of nuts when he was de-

scribing where Matt Lynch had been trying to kick him dur-

ing a recess scuffle. That alone was good for a couple more beatings. I think his parents are Seventh-Day Adventists or Mormons or something like that.

That was part of the reason Serenah Tillotsen had to

break up with him. Not the having Mormon parents. The

swearing thing, I mean. To be dateable at the time, you had to excel in at least two of the following four areas: swearing, bullying, smoking, sports. And to go out with a girl who

dressed as slutty as Serenah Tillotsen you probably had to have mastered at least three, and even that might have been pushing it. Sam Hellerman had the smoking down, but he

was a disaster at all the others.

Sam Hellerman’s swearing thing had already affected the

band a bit, but so far only in a good way. He objected to the song “Normal People Are Fucked Up” in favor of the alternate version “People Who Are Normal People Are the Most

Retarded People in the World,” which turned out to be a

much, much better song.

So it was shocking to hear those words come out of his

mouth. He was taking the whole thing pretty seriously. Now I admit, I may have
slightly
exaggerated when I told him the story. Just a little, in that I may have managed to imply that things with Fiona might have gone a little further than they actually had. But even considering that, it was still just a stoned teen party grope-a-thon any way you sliced it. He

should have been happy for me. Maybe he was jealous; I

guess I would have been.

In any case, that’s so not how I saw the situation: for me, Fiona was not, literally or in any other sense, a “fucking bitch.” I had nothing but esteem and admiration for her and her sinful ways. And I had a kind of high-minded reverence 87

for her memory. Sure, there was much I felt remorseful and embarrassed about, and I had had absolutely no luck trying to figure out a way to understand her confusing behavior. But I blamed all the awkwardness and most of my current

predicament on my own deficiencies, and I was quite sure I was right about that. So was I bitter and hate filled at the thought that that had probably been my one opportunity to

participate in a make-out session in this lifetime? Sure. But I could hardly blame the one girl who had been sporting

enough to give me a shot at it: it just made me hate everyone else even more, which automatically made me love Fiona

more by comparison. See? It’s all a matter of proper hate calibration. You have to take a balanced view.

I haltingly asked Sam Hellerman if he could ask his CHS

friends about her, try to find out, um, I wasn’t sure exactly what. But could he ask around, find out what her deal was, in some way?

“Her deal?” said Sam Hellerman. He said “deal” mockingly,

and did that thing where you put your hands up on either side in front of you palms out and wiggle your fingers sarcastically.

Sometimes it just means “ooh, I’m scared.” But sometimes it means, “the word that I am now quoting back at you is so absurd that the human voice alone is insufficient to convey the appropriate level of sarcasm, and therefore I must use my

hands as well, as they used to do in the days of the silent cin-ema and in vaudeville where they had to make sure that everyone way in the back who couldn’t hear the dialogue would still get the point that the person being addressed is a total ass.”

It was in this sense that Sam Hellerman did the sarcastic

hands thing on this particular occasion. I thought it was a bit over the top, frankly.

“Her deal?” he repeated. “You mean, other than the

whole cock tease thing?” Again with the swearing.

88

Yeah, that’s what I meant, Hellerman. Thanks for break-

ing it down. I really didn’t get his attitude. So I just stared at him.

But I almost forgot to mention how the Fiona Deal was

affecting the band like I said. (See what I mean? Making out with Fiona really seems to have poked permanent holes in

my brain that I can feel even now. Plus, well, you don’t know about it yet—it happens toward the end of the year and I’ll explain it all when it comes up because I’m really trying to describe things in the order that they happened—but I’m still recovering from this massive head injury I got from this attempt on my life. What I’m saying is, for a variety of reasons, the Fiona Deal among them, my thinking tends to be a little fuzzy these days.)

Anyway, it wasn’t just that the Fiona Deal made Sam

Hellerman act like a total dick. It had to do with the songs.

Sam Hellerman tended to like the topical songs the best.

He liked “Mr. Teone and His Lady Butt,” and “Matt Lynch

Must Be Stopped (from Spawning and Generating Ungodly

Offspring).” Political stuff like that. But he would tolerate the personal, sensitive tunes, too, even though I sometimes wondered whether he thought they were too corny. He liked

“World War B” and would even tolerate “I’m Only a Page of

Zeros but You Are the One,” for example.

But somehow he could tell what “Trying Not to Believe

(It’s Over)” was about, and it was way too Fiona oriented for his taste.

“We’re not doing that one,” he said.

Well, the difference between the ones we were “doing”

and the ones we were not “doing” was not easy to spot, as

most of them didn’t yet have many or any lyrics, and very few of them had repeatable music yet. Even the ones with words 89

and
music were—well, I’d play them on the guitar and mum-ble the words I had and say “mmm-mmm-mmm” for the

ones I didn’t have and Sam Hellerman would play random

notes on his clarinet.

What I’m saying is, I’m not sure the set list matters

enough to take personally at this stage in a band’s career.

Luckily, I realized what was going on soon enough to re-

frain from telling him about “My Fiona” or “I’m Still Not

Done Loving You, Mama.” He would have hit the roof. If it’s possible to hit the roof in the spirit of utter contempt and condescension.

I had wanted to keep the Stoned Marmadukes going for

a little longer, mostly as a tribute to the band I said I was in during my one conversation with her. And also because of

this very unrealistic line of thinking that went: were we to keep the name long enough that we would still have it when we finally got instruments and learned to play them, and

were we to have a “gig,” and were that
still
to be our name even then, and were she somehow to find out about it, well, then she might remember me and my powerful vocabulary

and decide to show up or something. (Rock legend in the

making: “Who is this mysterious Fiona that Moe ‘Fingers’

Henderson puts on the guest list every night?” “No one

knows. But she never shows up.” “And Moe is alone and silent with his mysterious pain?” “Yeah, that’s right.”)

Now, even I could see how pathetic that was. But it was

also kind of random and off-the-wall. Sam Hellerman was

starting to develop a nose for the Fiona-related, though, and he could sniff out the vaguest hints of it. And he sure didn’t like how things were smelling lately at 507 Cedarview Circle, Hillmont, CA.

“Here’s an idea,” he said. “The Fionas. You on guitar and

Fiona-phone, plus Sammy ‘I Heart Fiona’ on bass and Fiona

90

Reconstruction Therapy, first album
F-I-O-N-A! What’s That
Spell? I Can’t Hear You! Fiona! Fiona! Yay, team!
”

Hmm, I thought . . . but I knew he wasn’t being serious.

He was kind of funny even when he was being a dick,

though, I’ll say that for him. I’ll admit also that he may have had just a teensy-weensy point. But it still left something to be desired attitudinally from my point of view.

“The. Name. Is. Ray. Bradbury’s. Love-Camel,” he said

firmly, before walking out and slamming the door.

Then he had to come back because he had forgotten to

take his clarinet case with him.

He left again silently. But two seconds later he came back again, stuck his head through the door LBT style, and said very quickly: “Ray Bradbury’s Love-Camel, you on guitar,

Scammy Sammy on bass and calisthenics, first album
Prepare
to Die.
”

Which made me feel a bit better.

JAN E GALLAG H E R AN D AMAN DA

H E N DE RSON

Meanwhile, I still didn’t quite know what to make of the

CEH library. I had all but given up trying to interpret the scribbles, the dates, the whole tits/back rubs/dry cleaning puzzle. There was a story there, presumably, or at least an explanation, but there just wasn’t enough information available to figure out what it was. It was lost in the past, for good, probably.

Still, I had developed this crazy idea that by reading the books my dad had read at my age, I could get to know him

better retroactively. Maybe reading his books would provide some insight into his character, an indication of the kind of 91

person he had been and the sorts of things he had been in-

terested in and had thought about. Now, in one way, this insight was something I desperately wanted. In another way,

though, I wasn’t sure I wanted it badly enough to go through the ordeal of reading
A Separate Peace
again. I had been forced to read it last year and had found it to be among the most annoying of all of the state-mandated novels about disaffected East Coast prep school juveniles. Was anything worth that?

On the other hand,
Brighton Rock
looked promising. I decided to start there and save
A Separate Peace
for last.

Of course, while I was reading
Brighton Rock
on my own and rereading
Catcher in the Fucking Rye
for the zillionth time for Mr. Schtuppe’s class, I was also obsessing about Fiona.

This turned out to be a pretty weird setup. Mr. Schtuppe

would mispronounce something from
Catcher,
and it would spur cascades of competing thoughts of my dad’s teenage

years and of the mystery girl’s breasts at the same time.

Particularly when the subject was sex, which turns up quite a lot in
Catcher in the Rye,
though it tends to be expressed rather quaintly. And particularly when the girl being talked about was Jane Gallagher, because of the underlined Jane Gallagher back rub passage in my dad’s
Catcher.

Mr. Schtuppe’s tests were always true-false or multiple

choice, except for the last question, which was an essay question. An essay question is a multiple-choice question with the multiple choices left off, and three wide-spaced lines where you’re supposed to write the answer.

On one of the tests, the essay question was “What was

the cause of Holden’s fight with Stradlater on page 43?” By some entirely characteristic oversight, the identical question had also appeared above in the multiple-choice part of the same test. The answer to the m-c version was (b) Jane

Gallagher. The answer Mr. Schtuppe was looking for in the

92

essay question version was Jane Gallagher without the (b), or possibly something like “the cause of Holden’s fight with

Stradlater on page 43 was Jane Gallagher.”

The real answer is that Holden Caulfield had the hots for

this girl, Jane Gallagher, though he was too scared to try anything. And he was worried that his roommate might have

hooked up with her before he got the chance to. But in the quaint world of
Catcher in the Rye,
the phrase they use for fucking is “giving her the time.” I kid you not. Giving her the time. Another one is “crumby,” which is how they spell

crummy, but which you can tell from the context really

means fucked-up. Seriously. It’s like this thing was written by Sam Hellerman or something.