King Dork (37 page)

most famous person I know,” which was sweet. She was be-

ing all Phoebe-esque and nicer-than-usual to
me,
too. Weird.

Little Big Tom had put two and two together and had re-

alized I had been doing research into my dad’s youth reading list. So he decided, helpfully, to provide me with a comple-mentary LBT library. He had been impressed that I had

swiped his Che Guevara T-shirt, so the LBT books were tilted toward impenetrable and/or goofy books on radical politics that no one would ever read voluntarily anymore. Among

them was a beat-up copy of
The Little Red Book,
which is a collection of retarded sayings by this chubby mass murderer

from China. (He made an appearance earlier in this story on Sam Hellerman’s hand-lettered T-shirt—guy by the name of

Mao.) People in the sixties liked to be seen carrying this book around, hoping it would make them appear more radical and

cutting-edge and sexy and intellectual. I guess you started out carrying around
The Catcher in the Rye,
and then, when you got a little older and the thrill was gone, you “turned political”

and switched to
The Little Red Book
instead. The funny thing is, by all accounts, doing this really
could
get you dates. With the hairy women of the time, perhaps, but still.

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There was of course no need to investigate Little Big

Tom: he was already an open book, and there wasn’t even

one little thing about him that wasn’t painfully obvious. That was part of his charm, maybe, but it made the LBT library a bit less compelling than he probably imagined. I nodded politely, though, and went along with it.

“Kill the bourgeois pigs,” I said. “And the running dogs of the imperial yo-yo or whatever. Except for you and Mom.

We need you to hang in there long enough to pay for our college.” Amanda nodded solemnly and put her arm around me,

and we both flashed him sardonic peace signs.

You’ve got to hand it to Little Big Tom, though: he was

either too clueless or too “centered” to let anything like that bother him. He just smiled back and rumpled our hair.

“Kids today,” he said, and we all laughed. I mean, he did.

Just before they left, as I was saying good-bye to Amanda, I made a sudden decision and handed her the bloodstained

Brighton Rock.

“It was Dad’s book,” I said. “It’s the best book ever

written.”

As she walked out, she had the book open and was star-

ing at the inside front cover, at the bloody CEH 1965, and I had a pretty good idea what she was thinking. Maybe I’d

even tell her the whole story one day if she played her cards right. And if I ever figured it out.

Whatever they were giving me in the hospital was pretty

outstanding. They should put it in the water supply or something: the world would be a more peaceful and rewarding

place. Life flies by in a nice breeze, and you remember stuff as if none of the boring or unpleasant parts even happened.

So I’m not sure if it was before or after the LBT/Amanda

visit, and in fact I may be mixing up or joining a couple of dif-284

ferent episodes, but there was at least one other significant hospital event, and here’s how I remember it.

Mr. Aquino started moaning, then wheezing, and then I

saw Shinefield, Syndie Duffy’s floppy boyfriend, coming past the curtain. He was followed by Celeste Fletcher and Syndie Duffy. Yasmynne Schmick and Sam Hellerman came in a

couple of minutes later. Sam Hellerman discreetly handed me two sealed envelopes as he walked by.

So was Sam Hellerman hanging out with the drama peo-

ple again? Or had he been all along? Or maybe they had just given him a lift. At any rate, the scene was very much as it had been during his hippie lunch phase. They weren’t paying too much attention to Sam Hellerman, though they didn’t

seem to mind that he was hanging around. And the whole

time, even when he was talking to me, he just stared at

Celeste Fletcher’s ass, even going so far as to reposition himself so as to get a better view whenever she happened to

move it out of his line of sight.

The other weird thing was that Celeste Fletcher seemed

pretty friendly with Shinefield, though he was still Syndie Duffy’s boyfriend as far as I knew. When Syndie Duffy left to go to the bathroom or smoke, Shinefield would move even

closer to Celeste Fletcher and touch her butt, acting like it was accidental. I couldn’t tell whether she was in on it.

Maybe Syndie Duffy and Celeste Fletcher had switched

boyfriends or something. I’m not sure how dating politics

works in the subnormal/drama world, so I could be misread-

ing it. Clearly, though, on some level what we were seeing was the emergence of a new girl trio, out of the ashes of the Sisterhood. The question was, would Celeste Fletcher or

Syndie Duffy end up as the dominant girl? My money was on

Celeste Fletcher, because her open flirtation with Shinefield really did seem to give her the upper hand. Yasmynne

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Schmick, of course, would be a #3 till the end of her days, but I was glad she was there. She was always nice and usually

funny and generally seemed so happy to see me.

Much of the raw information about Mr. Teone’s activities

and the Chi-Mos’ continuing influence at Hillmont came

from the conversation between me and this weird-ass group.

I was kind of woozy and fuzzy, and the drama people were,

no doubt, totally high. Sam Hellerman was ass addled. Yet

somehow we figured out a way to exchange information,

though I didn’t manage to tease out all the implications till I’d had a chance to think it all over during the next few days. It was a pretty interesting topic. The whole time, though, I was holding Sam Hellerman’s envelopes, dying to know what was

inside them, but realizing that he had sealed them for a reason, and that I couldn’t open them till everybody had left.

I’ll say one thing: Shinefield was a true fan. He couldn’t stop talking about the Chi-Mos and the Festival of Lights and the zine. He had started to call me Chi-Bro. I kid you not.

The girls didn’t pay too much attention to the band talk, but even they said some nice things, too. I mean, it was ridiculous. We had sucked, probably worse than any band that had ever played at any high school ever. But I guess running the associate principal out of town, even accidentally, counts for a lot.

Just being in a band counts, too. I’m convinced of that. By my calculations, girls find you around fifteen percent more attractive and worth their attention if you’re in a band than they do if you’re not. It works with subnormal/drama girls, anyway. And apparently, in a different way, of course, it can even work with your own ordinarily ill-tempered sister; it doesn’t appear to have much effect on your mom, though.

Fifteen percent may not sound like much, but it feels quite substantial when you start the game at close to zero.

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E

* * *

talk later” look as he followed Celeste Fletcher’s ass past the curtain and out the door. I tore open the first envelope.

It contained $240, my share of the proceeds from the

song zine. On the twenty-dollar bill on top of the stack, he had written “Keep making me money, kid.” Which was from

some movie, I’m pretty sure. Anyhow, it was kind of funny.

More money than I had ever had at one time. Liquid assets.

Which is not a bad band name if you think about it. Hey,

we’re the Liquid Assets, and this one’s called “Pheromone

City. . . .”

I would have been happy if the other envelope had con-

tained more money, but it was a lot thinner, and I could tell by feeling it that inside were a few sheets of folded paper.

Documents, information of some kind. I slid my thumb

through the flap.

STI LL NOT D ON E LOVI NG YOU, MAMA

Before I got a chance to see what was in Sam Hellerman’s

second envelope, I heard Mr. Aquino begin to moan, and

then to wheeze. I hurriedly shoved both envelopes back un-

der my pillow. To my surprise, Celeste Fletcher came back in.

“They’re getting the car,” she said. “I was hoping I could get your autograph.”

I was surprised, to say the least. Or maybe it was here,

rather than before, like I said, that I made the calculation that girls like you fifteen percent more when you’re in a band. Or no, it was right after that, when she handed me a Sharpie, and then, instead of offering the zine or a piece of paper for me to sign like I had expected, leaned over and pulled her shirt 287

down. She wanted me to sign her tits. I had heard of this before, but come on: how many ordinary guys in lousy high

school rock bands ever land in this situation, let alone King Dork? It’s not supposed to happen. You know, thinking about it, it’s really more like at least twenty-five percent. What was I thinking? Maybe more like forty-four percent, actually. Give or take.

She was pretty demure and tasteful about it, but she also

did it smoothly, as though she’d done it many times before. I mean, she pulled the neck of her scoopy T-shirt down and to the left but not low enough to expose the nipple, and simultaneously pushed the breast up from below with her palm, so that the top of it bulged out and up. My guess is that that’s not the sort of thing you do well the first time you try it. I don’t know if you can picture it, but trust me: it looked fucking amazing.

“Certainly,” I said, trying to act as though I had done this many times as well, though my shaking hands probably gave

me away. I hadn’t touched too many breasts, you know. This was only number four, by my calculations.

So I leaned forward and wrote in a spidery hand: “Best

wishes, Thomas Charles Henderson.”

She said thanks. But as she was turning to leave, she

pulled her top out and glanced down and said, haltingly,

“Trombone Chablis Ampersand?” I guess my handwriting

was even shakier than I thought. They didn’t cover breast

autographs in third-grade penmanship, you see, though

maybe they should have.

I explained that that was my real name, well, pretty close, anyway. Clearly, though, she knew me as Chi-Mo, and wanted my autograph because I was one of the Chi-Mos, and hey, I

might as well face it, I was as much Chi-Mo as I was anything else. She wanted a Chi-Mo autograph, and who was I to deny 288

her? So she came back around with the unsheathed Sharpie

and pulled her shirt down and pushed the other breast so that most of its northern hemisphere bulged out and up. This time I wrote, much more carefully: “Nice breast. CM.” Which made her laugh and seemed to please her well enough.

“Thanks,” she said.

“No problem,” I said. “But I’m not sure how long we’ll

keep that name. What do you think of Sentient Beard?” (Me

on guitar, Samerica the Beautiful on bass and upholstery, first album
Off the Charts—Way Off.
)

“Well, it’s better than the Stoned Mamelukes.”

I was on drugs, so I was a little slow, but not so slow that it didn’t click. I could think of only one way she would have known about the Stoned Marmadukes. I realize now that

there may have in fact been other ways, especially if she had spent time hanging around with Sam Hellerman. But her reaction gave it away: she realized she had slipped up, and even made a kind of half-motion to cover her mouth, almost as

though to stuff the words back in. It looked kind of melo-

dramatic and theatrical, and only halfway unintentionally so, which was familiar, too. And that’s what clinched it, pretty much. Fiona. Celeste Fletcher was fake Fiona. Note the nice, Schtuppified deformation of Marmadukes, which actually

was a vast improvement, and which was another clincher:

that’s exactly the kind of joke the Fiona of my dim memory would have made while leaving you guessing as to whether

it had been intentional or not. Or wait, it was me, not her, who would make that kind of joke; but those were jokes she could get, so presumably she could make them as well. So it wasn’t breast number four after all. We were back to breast number one, with whose nipple I had spent so many happy

moments in my innocent youth.

Wait. Really? She totally didn’t look like Fiona, even

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adjusting for the lack of the Fiona costume. Fantasy and reality sure can get in the way of each other, can’t they?

When people disguise themselves as other people in

movies and no one in the movie is supposed to realize it, you usually don’t believe it for a minute. In real life, though, it’s not so easy to figure stuff out. I had only seen the original fake Fiona once, in the dark and while a little buzzed, and I hadn’t even known Celeste Fletcher or seen her up close at the time.

Plus, I had seen the Fiona’d-out Celeste Fletcher mostly from the front, whereas up till now, I’d only examined Celeste

Fletcher playing herself from Sam Hellerman’s vantage

point—that is, from behind. Even without the costume, and as a general rule, that’s a totally different look for a lady. Celeste Fletcher’s breasts even felt different from how I had remembered Fiona’s breasts feeling—but I had had a different focus at that time. I mean, I hadn’t had to worry about keeping my handwriting neat and steady. Not to get too philosophical on you here, but in different contexts, and depending on what you’re doing, the same rack can be totally different worlds.

Anyway, God help ’em if they ever try to make a movie out

of this, with the same sexy teenaged actress playing both fake Fiona and Celeste Fletcher in different costumes and

makeup. It’ll be hard to pull off in movie form. But it worked in real life. I swear to God.

Anyway, there I was at Mercy Hospital in Santa Carla, on

the other side of the curtain from the moaning Mr. Aquino, around ninety percent convinced that I was staring at the girl of my dreams, who just happened to have my name scribbled