King Dork (18 page)

here: I was starting to lose my marbles.

I wondered how long this part was going to last. I mean,

mooning over the mystery woman, wondering who she was,

where she was, what she was doing and with whom, and

why she was doing it, walking around feeling like I’d just been punched in the stomach. I was starting to get a little tired of it. Don’t get me wrong. I still enjoyed thinking about expressing my horniness in the context of the mystery woman. I did it all the time. And I still tended to feel fairly lovey-dovey and soppy and emotional when I thought of her, imagining what

it might be like to be going out with Fiona and doing sweet, ordinary boyfriend-girlfriend things like going to the library 132

and making out, or going to the movies and making out, or

ridiculing normal people at the mall. And making out.

Actually, you know what? I’m still not all that clear on

what’s involved in doing sweet, ordinary boyfriend-girlfriend things. I just assume it’s a lot of making out and groping in public, sex in cars, blow jobs in public restrooms, going to movies, eating at restaurants, listening to the radio, arguing about trivia, and—what else? Do you help each other with

your homework? Play Scrabble, build models, buy food at the grocery store and cook it for each other, meet at the Rec.

Center or at the beach for a game of volleyball with her Nair-commercial friends? Does she ask you which dress makes her look fatter, like Carol does with Little Big Tom? Does she throw a stapler at you and stop talking to you for days when you can’t figure out the right answer? Do you share your secrets and deepest fears with one another, or are those subjects still just as weird and awkward and best not brought up, maybe even especially to someone to whom you are constantly, incessantly, relentlessly giving the time?

I only mention it because I have this idea, a dream, really, that part of what it would mean is that the boyfriend is in this little club with the girlfriend where when one is hurt or troubled or being assailed by the cruelties of the world, the other decides not to be on the side of the world, but to join forces with the other member of the club against the world, even if it’s frowned upon, even if it’s a doomed scenario, even if the world is definitely gonna win. Like you’re allies. The last rem-nant of your people. A Sex Alliance Against Society. But

maybe I have it all wrong. It does sound like a quaint, far-fetched idea, now that I’ve put it in words. And also overly dramatic, if something can be o. d. and q. at the same time.

Nevertheless, Fiona was like that in my mind. What does

133

it have to do with “having sex,” as Sam Hellerman might put it if he were in a particularly dainty mood? I’m not all that sure. But I know it’s related somehow.

Having made out with Fiona that one time made the is-

sue seem more real. But that was an illusion. There wasn’t any difference at all between the idea of being in a Sex

Alliance Against Society with Fiona and the idea of being in one with Kyrsten Blakeney. Both notions were remote, impossible, out of the question, preposterous. Both girls were, with regard to me, equally imaginary.

And I was sure, as sure as I was that C. S. Lewis invented Narnia, that neither of them would, in the unlikely event that the option were ever to come up, fail to choose the world. Of course not. I probably wouldn’t, either, if the world would have me.

MAKI NG AM E N DS

It wasn’t till a couple days after Little Big Tom and I got in touch with our feelings on the occasion of his apologizing for the Stratego Sex Incident that I happened to glance at the stack of deconfiscated weapons-and-tactics magazines on my dresser.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but Little Big Tom had put a

Post-it on the top magazine. It said “look in the closet.” I frowned and slid open the closet door and, well, maybe you guessed it already, but I was totally thrown: there was a guitar case in there with a Post-it on it that said “Merry

Christmas in advance.”

Damn. Little Big Tom had trouble expressing himself in

spoken words, but he was a master of concise communica-

tion in Post-it form.

134

I pulled out the guitar case and opened it. There was a

great
electric guitar in it. I mean, fucking great. Gibson.

Melody Maker. Midsixties. Kind of beat-up. The coolest

thing I’ve ever seen or touched with my hands that wasn’t at-tached to someone named Fiona. There was yet another

Post-it on the headstock that said “you’re on your own for the amp.”

Okay, so that might have been one Post-it too many.

Even the master of the Post-it communications revolution

can overdo it sometimes. But damn. How had he known that

that was pretty much my ultimate fantasy guitar? I had no

idea. Oh wait, yes I did. Because he had read my notebook.

Little Big Tom had done everything wrong and had broken

a great many well-established, TV-dramatized, “Dear

Abby”–certified rules about parental conduct with regard to respecting people’s privacy whenever drugs are not involved, but I’ve got to say that in the all-important stage known as Making Amends by Trying to Purchase Affection and Trust

with Extravagant Gifts, he had really come through.

Maybe it’s just the lust for worldly possessions talking,

but I think this may have been the first time in my life I was this unsuccessful when I tried to make everything disappear in a cloud of cynicism. I admit, I got a little choked up.

I made a silent vow not to ridicule him without his being

aware of it for at least a week.

Having the new guitar made me want to play better, to

sort of do it justice, and I started to practice a lot more. Little Big Tom had bought it from a friend of his who had been in some old blues-country-jam band and who now had a guitar

repair place, which was the reason it was set up so well and played so easily. According to my mom, Little Big Tom had

been planning to get me an electric guitar for Christmas even 135

before the Stratego Sex Incident. He had found out from my notebook that I lusted after a Melody Maker and had felt so bad about the snooping that he had decided to expedite matters and try to scare one up.

This was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me,

and I couldn’t forget it. I let a lot of prime opportunities for LBT ridicule slide right by because of it. I knew Little Big Tom could tell that the gift had worked and that I was more positively disposed toward him, because he increased the frequency of his trademark pop-in comments. That was the

downside. It was annoying. On the other hand, I didn’t mind too much. Why not let him have his fun, too?

Once when I was playing, he stuck his head in and said,

“Spanking the plank?” I stared at him. “Uh, no,” I finally said, since as I mentioned I was trying to be nice.

But it turns out I was wrong. I
had
been s-ing the p. S-ing the p. used to be a right-on, far-out, with-it expression for playing the guitar, supposedly. I guess when Little Big Tom was a kid, he and his friends used to go around saying “hey, you wanna get together and spank the plank tonight?” and they would be talking about having some kind of opium-den Timothy Leary country-blues-folk-bluegrass-Afro-Caribbean jam session wearing

leather vests and velvet pants in an incense-y room that had one poster of Che Guevara and another of Frank Zappa sitting on a toilet, and beads instead of a door.

Supposedly, they also used to call a guitar a “piece of

wood,” as in “hey, that’s a great piece of wood you got there.”

You know, it’s almost like they
want
you to get the wrong idea when they say stuff like that, but knowing Little Big Tom, I’m pretty sure there was nothing going on at these jam sessions but soft drugs, hard-to-follow conversations, and terrible music.

136

N

* * *

tinued to practice using the living room Magnavox stereo

console. Sam Hellerman figured out how to plug us both in, so he was in the left speaker and I was in the right. He seemed a little put out, strangely. I think he was beginning to see the enormous fake wood–paneled stereo console as his trademark gear and didn’t like me horning in on it. He wanted to be the only one to say “yeah, I like to use the Magnavox Astro-Sonic hi-fi stereo console” to
Guitar Player
magazine when they interviewed him about his signature thin, burbly, distorted bass sound. “We never expected Oxford English, Moe Bilalabama

on guitar, me on bass and lollygagging, first album
What Part
of Suck Don’t You Understand?
to be such a big success,” he’d say. “But in all modesty, I’d have to say it’s that Magnavox magic that always seals the deal. . . .”

In reality, though, Oxford English was off to a pretty terrible start. I mean, the guitar sounded awful through the

Magna-V. And it was so hard to distinguish between the bass and guitar that neither of us could tell for sure what we were playing. It was a mess.

Here’s how bad it was. We were doing “Don’t Play

Yahtzee with My Heart.” Little Big Tom stuck his head in, tilt-stared at us for a moment as though searching for the right words, gave up, and pulled his head back out. Essentially he had said, in body language, “let’s pretend this pop-in never happened, shall we?” If you can’t even get a resigned “rock and roll” out of LBT, you’re in trouble.

I tried running the guitar through this distortion box I got at Musicville at the mall. The Overlord II. That was a mistake. There was a squeal, and then there was: silence. And I think maybe a smell like smoky toast, though that may have 137

been from something else: it always smells kind of weird

around here. The Magnavox was dead.

It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.

TH E STAR-S PANG LE D BAN N E R

S U B STITUTION C I P H E R

Now let me try to explain my thinking about the Tit’s weird code-parallelogram.

Sam Hellerman and I used to have this code hobby. It be-

gan in sixth grade, continued sporadically through junior

high, and had even hung on slightly through some of ninth

grade, though by that time we were mostly just going

through the motions. It was time-consuming and tedious,

and, more importantly, we didn’t have anything of interest to be all secretive about.

There were different methods, but one we had used pretty

frequently was the Star-Spangled Banner Substitution Cipher.

What you did was, you chose two words at random from the

“Star-Spangled Banner” lyrics. The first letter of the first word would be your “in” character, and the last letter of the second word would be your “out” character. So say your words were

“dawn’s” and “stripes.” You’d write out the alphabet starting with “D” from “dawn’s,” adding the “A,” “B,” and “C” at the end; and underneath these letters, you’d write it out again, but this time beginning with “S,” the last letter of “stripes.” Like this: D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C

S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R

You substituted the letters in the second line for the first line’s letters in your original text. So in the SSBSC dawn’s/stripes 138

cipher, ZNGHITC QAPZTCTN XH RWPGPRITGXOTS

QN GTRTHHTH PCS HWTAITGTS WDAADLH would

mean “Kyrsten Blakeney is characterized by recesses and

sheltered hollows.”

All the recipient would need to know to decipher the

message was where the alphabet began on each of the two

lines. The way we used to do it was by number. “Dawn’s” is the eighth word in the SSB, and “stripes” is the twenty-third word. So the key to the Kyrsten Blakeney message would be

SSB-F8-L23. We used “The Star-Spangled Banner” because

we both knew the first twenty-six words of the lyrics by

heart. The “F” and “L” stood for first and last, because sometimes we would vary what letters we would use, so we could have L/F or F/F, or even midword letters that we would

identify by Roman numerals: SSB-8iii-23iv. It could get pretty complicated.

Even though the letters of the coded portion of Tit’s note were arranged in a neat little parallelogram rather than in one line like normal text, I was pretty sure it was some sort of cipher.

It is possible to solve a substitution cipher by trial and error, even without a key, but Tit’s message wasn’t long enough to gauge the frequency of commonly occurring letters like “E” or

“T,” which is how you usually begin. Plus, if I was right, he had broken his ordinary coded sentences into fourteen-character clumps, so you couldn’t even guess at common words like

“the” or “of,” though some of the double letters might have provided a clue. There was only one way to decipher it, practically speaking, and that was to discover the key. If it had been based on something they had memorized, like “The Star-Spangled

Banner,” there was no hope of recovering it. For reasons I’ll get to in a second, however, I didn’t think it had been memorized.

In any case, there would likely have been some indication for the recipient of how the key should be applied, along the lines 139

of the SSB-F8-L23 notation I mentioned. My assumption was

that it would be somewhere on the note itself.

At first I thought it might be in the body of the message, which was uncoded, but cryptic, and which indeed made almost as little sense as the cipher. But then I looked at the date. There are only thirty days in June, so the date 6/31

doesn’t exist. The original date, 5/31, does exist, of course.

Why had Tit scribbled out the five and written a six over it, changing a real date to an imaginary one?

Here was my idea on that:

What if my dad had underlined the passage in
Catcher,

CEH 1960, not because of his deep interest in back rubs, but as a decoding key? It would explain why only one seemingly random passage had been underlined. And if so, there would