King Dork (21 page)

meetings, where they do God only knows what. What he

wanted to do was to play “Glad All Over.” (Not the Carl

Perkins “Glad All Over.” The other one.) Now, I love “Glad All Over,” don’t get me wrong. But instead of singing “
You
make me feel glad all over,” like the Dave Clark Five or the Rezillos, he wanted it to go “
He
makes me feel glad all over.”

Like you’re singing it about Jesus instead of a hot girl, get it?

I tried to explain to him that “glad all over” had a double meaning, a code meaning, like “giving her the time,” and that the song wasn’t about how great you feel when you read

Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians. Unless you’re weird.

It’s really about—well, it’s like this: boy meets girl, girl shows skin and wiggles, boy gives girl money or fabulous prizes, girl bends over, boy and girl invade each other’s personal space, 155

resulting in the propagation of the species and/or a big,

sloppy mess. That’s what “Glad All Over” is about, a tale as old as time.

Sam Hellerman was more direct.

“You have a crush on Jesus,” he said. “But Jesus doesn’t

know you exist. Is that it?”

Well, no, that wasn’t Todd Panchowski’s point, although

I think there may have been a grain of truth in it concerning what the Fellowship people might have had in mind when

they decided to co-opt that particular song for their youth recruitment purposes. There’s something weird and sexual

about the way some people talk about God—have you noticed?

Those comments could have cost us our drummer right

there, but in the end I don’t think Todd Panchowski fully understood what we were saying. How can I put this? Todd

Panchowski was not exactly a genius. But we didn’t need him for textual analysis of the lyrics of pop-rock standards. We needed him to hit things with sticks in a vaguely rhythmic pattern that more or less accompanied our songs, and that

was something he could do. Pretty much.

So we did “Glad All Over,” just to humor him, and if I

was thinking of Kyrsten Blakeney’s ass instead of the face of Jesus when I sang it, well, he’d never have to know. In fact, the notion that he was sitting there thinking of the f. o. J.

while I was thinking about being glad all over this or that female was amusing enough to make me crack up more than a

few times. I don’t know why I got such a kick out of that.

Todd Panchowski also wasn’t into how often we changed

the band name. He thought we should just pick a name and

stick with it. He didn’t understand that we were still searching, and that the habit of a lifetime of fantasy rocking dies hard.

“What’s the name of the band again?” he said, after our

second practice.

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“Occult Blood,” said Sam Hellerman, “Mopey Mo on gui-

tar and vox, me on bass and teleology, you on drums, first album
Pentagrampa.
”

“Well, first of all,” said Todd Panchowski, “I play
percussion instruments,
not ‘drums.’ ” Second of all, he added, he didn’t want to jam with a band with the word “occult” in it.

There was some Fellowship rule against it. So he happened

to be wearing an I, Cannibal T-shirt depicting a skeletal grim reaper cutting off a nun’s head with his scythe. Maybe they hadn’t given him the “be nice to nuns” talk yet.

It didn’t matter because halfway through the practice I

had already decided that the new band name was going to

be The Mordor Apes, Mithril-hound on guitar, Li’l Sauron

on bass and necrology, Dim Todd on drums-oops-I-mean-

percussion and stupefaction, first album
Elven Tail.

MY P O OR I N E PT PAR E NTAL U N ITS

It seemed as though the smoke from the Sex-Vietnam-

Stratego Incident had only just cleared when out of the blue I got called into the kitchen for another family conference. It was the Thursday before Halloween, not too long after our

second practice with Todd Panchowski. I passed Amanda on

my way in, and she gave me the look that said “you’ll never get out of this one, boy.” Dear God, what now?

This time my mom was officiating rather than Little Big

Tom, though he was hovering in the background. She looked

terrible. Her hair was all wild, like it was when she was going through one of her crazy episodes. She was smoking with

tremendous ferocity even for her. She looked up at me

through her hair with this unreadable but distressed expression on her face. What on earth was wrong?

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We stared at each other.

Finally she said, her voice distant and depressed sound-

ing, though also with a little sob, “A lot of kids your age are experimenting with drugs.”

I went: “?”

And I’ll tell you why I went “?” The first thing my mom

did every single morning was to reach to the bedside table for her weed. She couldn’t function without it, like some people are with coffee. And even now she had her afternoon low-ball, bourbon and soda, no ice, in her hand. And coursing

through her veins at this and any given time was a constant stream of about a dozen orally administered tranquilizers and psychotropics and God knows what else—Xanax, Prozac, lith-ium, Vicodin, Halcion, you name it. The irony was that I was the only person in that room, and probably the only member of the Hillmont High student body, who
wasn’t
experimenting with anything. Other than love, literature, rock and roll, and cryptography, I mean.

The notion of these teen drug “experiments” always

cracks me up. Like they’re in a secret laboratory conducting research on a government grant. As opposed to being in a

public lavatory doing lines of crank and holding some poor bastard’s head in the toilet till he drowns or till the bell rings, whichever comes first. Well, in a way that’s on a government grant, too. What a world we’ve got here.

My assumption was, of course, that my mom had finally

noticed that Sam Hellerman had been raiding her Vicodin

supply and had assumed that I was the culprit. Now, if that had been the case, here’s what would have happened: I

would have looked up and seen Little Big Tom tilting to one side and holding, maybe even rattling, a half-empty medicine bottle, with a concerned yet wry expression. In fact, though, when I looked up, it turned out that Little Big Tom was hold-158

ing not a bottle, but rather a piece of paper and a little booklet.

It was my lyric sheet to “Thinking of Suicide?” and a copy of the school pamphlet of the same name. I had stupidly left the lyric sheet out after band practice. We had broken out the pamphlet as a visual aid to try to explain to Todd Panchowski why the song was cool. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out, but never mind about that.

My poor inept parental units. Once again, their opening

line wasn’t the topic sentence, and everyone ended up con-

fused. They were trying to have the suicide talk and some-

how got it mixed up with the drug talk.

TH I N KI NG OF S U IC I DE?

You can put your straightjacket away

I don’t plan to kill myself today

Maybe tomorrow, maybe not at all

I’m not ready to make that call

But don’t assume that I’m all right

I won’t be with my baby tonight

There’s no baby, there’s nothing there

What baby? I don’t care—

Thinking of Suicide? Yeah, that’s right.

It’s a Thinking of Suicide Saturday night

It’s not funny but it’s true

I think about suicide when I think about you

So put your E back where you got it from

I don’t plan on going to the prom

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I know I add up to a figure of fun

But I don’t want to be the only one

And there’s only one of me

And no one else that I can see

And I’m so tired of trying to

Make believe I’m not dying to, so—

Thinking of Suicide? Yes, I am.

Thinking of Suicide? Hell, goddamn.

It’s not funny, but it’s free

Do you think about suicide when you think about me?

And if I’m suddenly gone

Then you’ll know what’s been going on

I’m always thinking

And I never do anything

But,

Thinking of Suicide? Yeah, that’s right

Thinking of Suicide with all my might

I have got a history of

Thinking of Suicide when I think about love.

Well, it was a bit better with the music. Not the music as played by me and Sam Hellerman and Todd Panchowski,

which was pure (devil-head) cacophony. I mean how it

sounded in my head. Maybe you’ll have to trust me on that.

Anyway, I just thought you should see what my mom had

been reading when she flipped out. Plus I’m kind of proud

of that song and I’m showing off a little, even though you have to sing “from” a little weird to make it sound like it 160

rhymes with “prom.” But actually, that’s kind of like my favorite part.

I totally couldn’t see what the big deal was. It’s a pretty ordinary topic. Not too shocking or unusual. They make a

pamphlet
about it, for Christ’s sake. In fact, it wasn’t even me in the song. The song had been inspired by the pamphlet girl, as I’ve explained; and as for those specific lyrics, I had in fact been feeling sorry for myself while pretending to be

Yasmynne Schmick when I came up with most of them. But

I couldn’t figure out a way to explain that to my mom and

Little Big Tom without causing even more confusion.

When my mom is in crazy mode it’s just not possible to

talk to her reasonably. Still, I gave it a shot, trying to make it as simple as possible.

“I’m not on drugs and I’m not going to kill myself,” I said.

And it was true. I really wasn’t. Though I couldn’t tell you why not.

No one knew what to say. Then Little Big Tom cleared

his throat and filled in some of the background.

My own cleverness had tripped me up. Way back, I had

needed to find an excuse for why I never spent much time at home, particularly after school. The real reason was that LBT

kind of freaked me out back then, and I felt so uncomfortable with the whole vibe of the Henderson-Tucci household that

even the ghastly pall of Hellerman Manor seemed preferable to it. So I invented a series of clubs I was supposed to be in, plausible ones like the Chess Club, Rocketry Club, Monty

Python Club, The Middle-earthlings, or the Trekster Gods,

and sometimes crazy ones I would make up for my own

amusement, like the Caulking and Stripping Club, or the

Doorknob Appreciators Society, otherwise known as the

Knob-heads. Not that they ever paid much attention to what the clubs were called. My brilliant humor, once again wasted.

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Ironically, part of the reason I started hanging out at home more, in addition to the fact that we couldn’t do band activities at Sam Hellerman’s, was that I had started to warm up to Little Big Tom, even actually almost kind of liked being

around him sometimes. But to them it looked like I had suddenly lost interest in all the clubs and afterschool activities.

That was a Danger Sign. Then they found the lyrics and pamphlet and that had tipped the whole thing over. I screwed up.

And now I was looking at a vast stretch of inept suicide-watch activity from the parental units for some time to come.

“You’re not going to like this, chief,” Little Big Tom be-

gan. What? What could they confiscate in this situation? I was all ears.

“We’d like you to see someone. Just to talk to you and

help you work things out.”

Out of the three people in that room, there were two in

serious need of psychiatric help, and I wasn’t one of them.

This point would have been lost on them, though, because

between them they were already “seeing” a small army of

counselors, therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, analysts, facilitators, and what have you. They thought that was man’s natural state. In fact, I was surprised they hadn’t tried to force me to go to a shrink long before this, if only in the spirit of trying to provide me with everything they hadn’t had as kids.

It was going to be a drag, of course, but as punishments

go, I’d certainly had worse.

LI N DA’S PANCAKE S ON B ROADWAY

The following day, Sam Hellerman and I decided to skip PE.

The main reason was because we had just started boxing and sometimes that’s just too much to take. Sam Hellerman was

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doing it mostly in solidarity with me. I mean, he didn’t really need to, as he had a special talent that made boxing easy for him. But also, he had said, somewhat mysteriously, that there was something important that we needed to discuss, and that he had something to show me. He wouldn’t tell me what it

was. “Just wait,” was all he would say.

There’s pretty much nowhere to go in Hillmont except

for this place called Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway. When all else fails, which is in fact quite often, Sam Hellerman and I end up going there to sit in a booth and drink coffee from these big plastic pitchers they refer to as bottomless cups.

So the state and the school district and the Hillmont

school administrators had decided that Sam Hellerman and I would spend second period that day standing in a ring hitting each other, or getting hit by someone else, or watching somebody else hitting somebody else. But instead, at least for this one day, there we were, in a booth at Linda’s Pancakes on

Broadway, discussing this and that.

Actually, I should explain how PE boxing works. They

don’t have a real ring. Instead, there’s a mat on the floor of the lanai, and everyone stands on the edge of the mat in a kind of human ring while the two poor kids who have to box each other stand in the middle. If one of the boxers gets too close to the human ring, the ring people in that particular area are supposed to shove him back toward the middle. I