King Dork (13 page)

Actually, it’s kind of cute.

Just to amuse myself, instead of writing “Jane Gallagher”

in the essay-question space like I was supposed to, I wrote: Jane Gallagher had wanted to know

what time it was, but for some reason

Holden Caulfield hadn’t wanted Stradlater

to tell her. When Stradlater refused to

tell Holden Caulfield whether or not he

had told Jane Gallagher what time it

was, Holden Caulfield became enraged and

attacked him in a fit of horological

savagery, possibly because he was

mentally ill and hated anyone but him

knowing what time it was.

I thought I’d get the question wrong, but when Mr.

Schtuppe handed back my test, I got a hundred. The name

Jane Gallagher had been circled and the circle had been

checked. I guess he only needed to read the first two words.

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I was sad for a few minutes that my brilliant humor had gone unappreciated, but then I got over it.

Now, everybody’s favorite guy, Holden Caulfield, has

a younger sister named Phoebe. I’ve never found her very

believable. She’s way too sweet and loving and Holden-o-

centric. She’s nothing like my sister, Amanda, that’s for sure.

On the other hand, if Phoebe Caulfield had had a crazy mom, a dead father, a goofball stepfather, and a King Dork brother, and if she had grown up in blank, characterless Hillmont instead of rich, atmosphere-laden, fancy-pants Manhattan, who knows how she might have turned out?

Also, HC makes no secret of the fact that he is a patho-

logical liar, so the real Phoebe may not have been all she was cracked up to be. (Some might say I’m one to talk, but I’m really not a p. l. like HC. I’m more of an exaggerator than a liar, really, and unlike Mr. Wonderful, I don’t do it as a sick compulsion or a recreational activity.)

Amanda
is
hard to peg, though. She has many modes, some of which seem to be battling for supremacy over the

others. There’s her Harriet the Spy mode, where she’s kind of a grumpy, introverted oddball, constantly scribbling and drawing weird stuff on these notepads that she won’t let anyone see.

And then there’s the budding bitch-princess mode, where she and her friends seem to be going through training exercises to prepare for when they finally emerge as full-fledged sado-psychopathic normal girls. She’s a pretty girl, and all indica-tions are that, when she grows up just a little more, she’ll be a knockout. The thing is, she’s way too intelligent, and—what?

individualistic?—to pull off the normal mode very convincingly for too long. And I’m not kidding about the intelligence: she doesn’t always express it perfectly in words, but she’s supersmart, 94

and in a sort of deep-thinking philosophical way that is nothing like my clever and glib but shallow preoccupation with sex and trivia. Sometimes she’ll say these simple yet unexpectedly true things that make me want to consider giving away all my worldly possessions, taking a vow of celibacy, and devoting my life to studying at her feet. But then she’ll spoil it by doing the nose-forehead slide or mimicking my walk. Honestly, I find her clumsy attempts at normalcy more cute than insulting, but you know: it does kill the Yoda mood.

I do wonder if she’ll make it as a normal person in the

end—though simple hotness can make up for a lot of other

deficiencies, it’s true. The worry is that she’ll have to over-compensate by being even meaner and more psychotic than

usual in order to draw attention away from her Harriet the Spy–ness and pass as normal psychotic. If that’s what she

ends up wanting to do with her life.

Protonormal Amanda doesn’t seem to think too highly of

me and isn’t too fun to be around. I prefer the HtS Amanda, because I can relate to her better. We don’t interact much, but generally we get along okay.

There’s one more Amanda mode I have to mention, the

mode she assumes whenever anything has to do with our

dad. In those situations, she suddenly turns into a Phoebe-like little girl. She’ll cry, and sniffle, and reach out to hug me.

Sometimes she’ll put her arms around my neck and squeeze

so tightly that it seems as though her little arms could make permanent indentations. She doesn’t have anyone else to talk to about him. My mom is crazy and best avoided, and she

hates Little Big Tom, so I guess I’m it. In fact, though, we never actually do much talking. We just hold on to each other and cry. Well, she does.

95

F I LLI NG I N TH E SO

My mom has this funny habit of ending practically all of her sentences like this: “[ Random sentence]. So . . .”

There’s another part that comes after the so, but it’s ei-

ther so obvious that it’s not necessary to say it, or she doesn’t quite know what it is and gives up trying to figure it out.

“I’ve got to get to work early tomorrow. So . . .” That

means “I’ve got to get to work early tomorrow. So I’m going to bed early and I don’t want anyone making too much

noise.” Or possibly: “ . . . so I’m taking this big glass of bourbon into the bedroom and I do not wish to be disturbed and I’m seriously considering giving you the silent treatment for the next couple of weeks starting now.”

More interesting, and sometimes more disturbing, are the

mysterious ones where you can’t figure out exactly what’s

supposed to come after the “so.”

“Elaine [old lady down the street] said she’s sorry she decided to have children after all and wishes she had spent the money on herself instead. So . . .”

“When I was growing up, they didn’t expect you to go to

college. High school was enough. So . . .”

“Well, they do say if you ignore something, it goes away

on its own in ninety percent of all cases. So . . .”

I bring this up because of the following:

Sam Hellerman had somehow talked his parents into giv-

ing him an advance on his Christmas present and had mail-

ordered a bass from the Guitarville catalog. Now I needed to get my act together and get an electric guitar. I was currently playing my dad’s old nylon-string folk guitar, which I cher-ished because of my respect for him but which really wasn’t the right tool for heavy rock. If Silent Nightmare (me on gui-96

tar, Samson on bass and gynecology, first album
Feel Me Fall)
was ever going to get off the ground, we needed pro gear.

Somehow, I couldn’t see the Christmas present advance

concept being comprehensible to Carol Henderson-Tucci,

but I figured it was worth a shot.

I brought it up with a great deal of subtlety, mentioning

that Sam Hellerman’s parents had given him a bass as an

early Christmas present and that it had been very easy to order it from the Guitarville catalog. I let my voice trail off.

Her answer amounted to a no, which didn’t surprise me.

But for the life of me I really, really couldn’t fill in the so.

“Baby, don’t even talk to me about Christmas right now,”

she said. “More people commit suicide on Christmas than on any other day of the year. So . . .”

TH E E NTI R E CONTE NTS OF MY RO OM

“Hey, chief,” said Little Big Tom. “We’d like a word with you.

If you’ve got a minute.”

It was the Thursday evening of the first post-Fiona week.

I followed Little Big Tom into the kitchen, puzzled and a bit apprehensive. He only called me chief when it was serious or when he was nervous about something. He had this grim expression, like he wasn’t even trying to look cheerful the way he usually does. I figured they must have found out that I went to the party in Clearview instead of Sam Hellerman’s

house on Friday night, but boy was I wrong. Well, I mean, I guess they
had
found out about the party, indirectly, but that wasn’t the main issue.

My mom had on her Picasso
Guernica-
print shorts, cowboy boots, a red and white checked halter, and a polka-dot 97

scarf worn like a headband, and was leaning against the

counter smoking one of her Virginia Slimses. You’ve come a long way, baby, I thought. It was shocking to think how

much she wasn’t even kidding.

Little Big Tom started to caress his Little Gray Mustache

at the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, as though he were trying to stretch it out to get that extra droop that used to drive the ladies crazy in Vermont in the seventies.

There was an uncomfortable pause while we all looked at

the kitchen table. A whole lot of my stuff was spread out, neatly arranged in little piles. Some books. Some records and CDs. Some random martial arts materials. My Talons of Rage fantasy blades that I got from Ninja Warehouse, which had

been used as a D and D prop long ago and were now purely

decorative. Some of my old role-playing military strategy

games, and some board games, including Risk and Stratego.

Some of my dad’s stuff: videos of Clint Eastwood movies

and war movies.
Tora! Tora! Tora! The Enforcer. Patton.
The bowie knife he gave me for Christmas the year before he

died. My army coat. Jane’s
Military Small Arms of the 20th
Century
and the
Tanks and Combat Vehicles Recognition Guide.

A couple of my notebooks. (Uh-oh.) My “Kill ’em All and Let God Sort ’em Out” T-shirt. And a big stack of my weapons-and-tactics magazines, fanned out like cards on a blackjack table.

“What is this shit?” said Little Big Tom, eventually.

“The entire contents of my room?” I said.

Well, it wasn’t quite everything, but that was essentially the correct answer. See, in real life parents raid their children’s rooms and confiscate the porno magazines and drugs; in the back-assward world of Partner and Mrs. Progressive at 98

507 Cedarview Circle, they leave the porn alone and confiscate everything else.

There was another bumpy stretch of awkwardness, dur-

ing which all you could hear was the rhythm of my mom’s

sucked-and-blown Virginia Slims 120s. Short, hissing intake.

Pause. Long, exasperated release. It sounded like a factory in a cartoon, or in an educational film on how they make steel tools. Ordinarily, it can be very soothing.

“Why,” Little Big Tom finally said, “do you feel the need

to read this garbage?”

Why, I thought, do you feel the need to try to imperson-

ate Jimmy Buffett and wear shorts and sandals with black

socks and eat tofu loaf on Thanksgiving? Some questions

have no answers.

“I don’t know what to say. Your mother and I hoped to

set an example so you would respect and share our values.”

Now
that
was funny. I just looked at him. The look that says: “what are you, high?”

Then he said something that totally threw me.

“It’s very important to have respect for women.”

I stared at him.

Well, now I’m going to skip ahead to the part where I

ended up figuring out what the hell Little Big Tom was getting at.

It was hard to piece together because very little of what

he was saying made much sense, but here’s my best guess as to what had happened. Little Big Tom, making his rounds,

had overheard the conversation about the Fiona Deal and

had found it disturbing. He hadn’t liked the way Sam

Hellerman had referred to Fiona (I hadn’t, either, though I doubt we had exactly the same reasons). I don’t know how

99

much of the rest of the conversation he heard, but if he missed anything, he could have read all about it in my notebook. I’m ashamed to say that one of my notebooks contained, among

other embarrassing items, some tortured “letters to Fiona”

I had scribbled out during a stretch of maudlin, sleepless nights. And I’m sure he wasn’t thrilled about the lyrics to

“She Likes It When I Pinch Her Hard.” And many of my

other songs, I’m sure, like “Gooey Glasses.”

He must have read the notebook. Otherwise, how would

he have reached the conclusion that my “relationship” with

“my girlfriend” was undermining his generation’s sacred

achievement of the institution of easygoing touchy-feely

ouchless deodorant-optional crunchy-granola
Hair–
sound track butterflies-and-unicorns sexuality?

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. After overhearing

the conversation, and in the throes of a full-blown paranoid, sex-obsessed, politically correct midlife-crisis meltdown, he had decided to search my room for evidence of more

disturbing-ness and had basically freaked out over what he’d found.

He was much, much more bothered by the war stuff, the

magazines, the nunchakus, the “Kill ’em All” shirt, and the Stratego than he had been by the cock tease conversation.

And there’s where he made his mistake. He tried to combine two discussions, the one where you tell your stepson it isn’t nice to call girls bitches and the one where you express your inner turmoil over the fact that being into war and weapons betrays the deeply held values of the generation that stopped the Vietnam War. The result was incoherence, confusion, and the least successful attempt at Family Conflict Resolution since the White Album told Charles Manson to give the

world a big hug.

For Little Big Tom, these issues were like two sides of the 100

same coin. He could jump from Stratego to Respect for

Women without realizing he had changed topics, but he was

the only one who had any idea what he was talking about.

Even my mom, smoking in the corner, seemed confused.

I’m just speculating here as to his state of mind, but I think he looked at everything in my room, along with his very mistaken imaginative reconstruction of my “relationship” with

“my girlfriend,” as a kind of personal attack on him and his fabulous generation. And he saw everything in my world only as it related to his own self-image and personal style, which he held in pretty high regard. He wasn’t too interested in hearing where he had things wrong, either. The theory confirmed his suspicions and he liked it that way. My first make-out session was all about him. So were the Talons of Rage fantasy blades.