King Dork (6 page)

I can merely fantasize about what I might be missing. He has experienced it firsthand.

What I mean is, he had quite a few friends in junior high, and he had enough status that he could theoretically walk

into a room without everybody laughing or throwing things

at him or threatening to kick his ass and so on. Theoretically.

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I mean, he could hang out with normal people and be rea-

sonably certain that the whole thing wasn’t part of some-

body’s master plan that would end up with the joke being

on him.

And he was just at the level where he could talk to a girl or even ask a girl to “go” with him and the very idea wouldn’t automatically have struck everyone as totally outrageous and hilarious.

In fact, he even had a sort of girlfriend for a brief time, Serenah Tillotsen. They used to smoke and make out behind

the scout house sometimes, until she suddenly started dressing sexier and realized that dumping Sam Hellerman would be

more of a move up in the world than not dumping Sam

Hellerman. That sucked, but all in all he still had it pretty good.

In high school, though, everyone suddenly seemed to re-

alize that Sam Hellerman probably wasn’t going to grow any taller, and had kind of weird hair and a funny walk, and really didn’t have anything to offer that couldn’t be acquired much more cheaply and efficiently from someone else. The market, which had once rewarded him slightly for being the same

height as the average eighth grader, had now determined that his services were needed elsewhere, and so he ended up at

the bottom of the totem pole and at my house every now and then palming Vicodins and swallowing them with some

bourbon from Carol’s entertaining area.

In teen movies, there is often a guy like Sam Hellerman

who is a minor but important member of the “in” group. A

glasses-wearing cutup, kind of outrageous, whose sarcastic comments and goofy antics are accepted and appreciated by

the others in the group, though they tend to receive his bits of dialogue with a degree of eye-rolling. Sure, he’s the second one to get his chest ripped open by the masked psycho with 38

the garden implement (right after the sluttiest girl in the group has her throat slit while starting to take her clothes off ). But he had his moment.

That’s how it was for Sam Hellerman. His moment

was over.

So I met Sam Hellerman at the oak tree, and we walked

to my house. He assembled his materials, consumed them,

came into my room, and lay down on the floor. I let him slip into the void, and put on
Quadrophenia.
Even though Sam Hellerman was there, after a fashion, I was alone with my

thoughts.

After
Quadrophenia,
I put on
The Who by Numbers
and thought rather intently about the lyrics to “Slip Kid.” I don’t want to take any Vicodin for the same reason that I try never to sit with my back to a door.

M S. RAM B O

PE had started with Track, which basically means you go

around the track without stopping for the whole period.

You’re supposed to run most of the time, though you can

take periodic breaks where you walk till you’re ready to start running again. Of course, Sam Hellerman and I took full advantage of this loophole and walked most of the time, talking about this and that, like, say, whether the Count Bishops or Slade had had more influence on the sound of the first wave of British punk rock. Every now and then, Mr. Donnelly

would notice and would yell something like “Come on, girls!

Stop playing with your lip gloss!” By which he meant, though it’s not all that easy to explain why he chose those particular words, that we were walking too much and that he wanted

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to see some “hustle.” We would then jog sarcastically for a few minutes till his attention turned elsewhere, and then resume our discussion at a more leisurely pace.

After the Track segment was over, near the end of the

Plasma Nukes week, we moved on to Tennis. Tennis is kind

of a riot. You’re supposed to hit the ball with the racket so that it lands in the space between the white lines on the other side of the net and bounces. Then you hit it back if it somehow manages to get hit back in your direction in such a way that it lands and bounces in the space between the white lines on your side of the net.

No one is very good at this. But I have as much chance

of performing this operation as a jar of wet gravel would have of calculating pi to a hundred places.

Sam Hellerman is the same way.

So here’s our Tennis technique. We hit the ball as hard as we can so it flies over the fence and lands in the bushes outside the tennis area. Then we spend the rest of the period

“looking for the ball.”

One day we were goofing off, holding the tennis rackets

like guitars and practicing duckwalks and windmills and scis-sor jumps. I suck at this also, of course, but Sam Hellerman is surprisingly good.

The PE teacher in charge of tennis-related activities is

named Ms. Rimbaud, which is pronounced Miz Rambo. She

looks a little like a frog. If she were actually a frog, she would be highly prized as a source of arrow poison by the natives of South America because of her rich red color.

She noticed our arena-rock tennis-racket antics and ran

over to confront us. I don’t think I had ever seen a human face turn quite that vibrant a shade of red.

“How would you like it,” she said, “if we all came out here and started playing tennis with guitars?”

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New band name: T * * *

ennis with Guitars

Logo: name printed phonetically as from a dictionary

Love Love: lead axe

The Prophet Samuel: bass and rat-catching

Li’l Miss Debbie: vocals, keys, bumping, grinding

First Album:
Amphetamine Low.
Cover is white with the album title in tiny black type on the back. The band name

does not appear anywhere on the outside packaging.

Second Album:
Phantasmagoria, Gloria.
Cover photo: a police dog licks a broken doll’s face.

Band wears white shorts, shirts, and sweater vests, except for Li’l Miss Debbie, the girl singer. She wears a tiny nurse’s uniform with big black boots. Instead of guitar solos, I use my guitar to hit tennis balls into the crowd. With a delay on it, this makes a really cool sound when the ball bounces off the strings.

Debbie and the Prophet Samuel are married but have an open polyamorous relationship. Band is on semipermanent hiatus

because I’m always in Europe getting my blood changed.

Oh, and the drummer is a drum machine called Beat-

Beat. Because we kind of had to face the fact that we probably never would end up finding a drummer.

TH E ACC I DE NT

My mom tends to refer to my dad’s death as “the accident.”

It’s true in a way, since that’s what you call it when one car crashes into another car, but it’s also misleading.

I bought into the idea that he had been killed in an ordi-

nary car crash for several years. But gradually I started to pick up on little hints that it wasn’t quite that straightforward. The biggest hint was that my mom and other adults always spoke 41

so carefully about the subject and avoided giving details, even ordinary ones like where it happened and who was in the

other car, and if they were drunk, and whether anyone else had been killed. I can see the logic of doing that around a little kid, but as I got older they continued to do it, in pretty much the same way. When details were provided, they were often con-tradictory. They acted exactly like people do in movies when they’re hiding something, and I gradually became convinced that it wasn’t an act and that I wasn’t imagining it.

The other thing my mom says about my dad’s death is

that he was killed in the line of duty, protecting people. I can see why she liked to think of it, or for it to be thought of, that way. It kind of contradicted the “accident” theory, though.

There may have been a grain of truth in it, even so, but, like the accident story, it wasn’t straightforward. My dad was a detective working on narcotics and vice cases for the Santa Carla police, and he certainly did do a lot of protecting people in a sense. But that’s not how he died, either.

It wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks—some of them, anyway—

once I decided I wanted to. I was able to read about it in old newspapers on microfilm at the public library. After I read them, I continued to pretend I didn’t know what had happened. My mom pretended it was plausible that I wouldn’t

have found out. We have a lot of those arrangements in my

family.

My dad had been parked on the shoulder of the Sky Vista

frontage road late one night. A car had rammed him on the

driver side and driven away. He had died from unspecified

injuries related to the impact. It was either homicide or

manslaughter. That is, he may have been deliberately mur-

dered, or the fact that he died in the crash may have been the inadvertent result of a random accident. They never found

the car that hit him, or the driver. The assumption seems to 42

have been that it was a random fatal hit-and-run rather than a deliberate homicide.

But there were unanswered questions hovering over the

newspaper articles, much like there were when my mom

talked about “the accident.” Trying to read between the lines in both situations, you really got the impression that there was a lot of information that was being held back, glossed over, hidden, or buried. I had lived with the uncertainty for six years now, with the strange realization that the more I found out, the more uncertain everything seemed to be. And I admit, even as part of me wanted to know, another part

couldn’t stand to think about it.

WAG B O G

There’s this kid, Bobby Duboyce, who has some kind of skull disease and has to wear this football helmet at all times. The little white chin strap is always fastened because if the helmet comes off and he hits his head it could be very serious. Even though there are ear holes in it, he still has a hard time hearing people, so he’s always saying “what?” or “what’s that?”

He also has this problem where he is always tired, and he

tends to fall asleep at random times. He often spends his time in class asleep, sometimes drooling, sometimes not, with his big helmet resting sideways on the desk. The teachers leave him alone. They don’t dare throw an eraser at his big helmet-head because they’re afraid his parents will sue their ass.

When he falls asleep in Center Court at lunch, though, it

can get ugly. Hillmont High’s finest will come up to him and gently write things on his helmet with a permanent marker, like “pussy helmet head” and “I am a fag” and “my mom’s a

twat.” The gentleness is so they don’t wake him up before

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they’re done. His parents keep having to buy him new hel-

mets, which they can’t be too pleased about. Maybe they

have some kind of deal with the helmet people, and a big

supply of backup helmets in the garage. He always has a new one the day after, on those occasions when the fine young

men and ladies of Hillmont High School’s upper crust have

decided to indulge in a little lighthearted helmet play.

We (Tennis with Guitars) were on our way to the cafete-

ria when we saw Bobby Duboyce passed out on the center

lawn and realized that our social superiors had developed a new tactic. Some guys from the Honors Society were pouring Coke into one of Bobby Duboyce’s helmet’s ear holes to see how long it would take him to wake up. Then, when he did

wake up, one of them pinned the helmet to the ground and

another continued pouring the Coke, presumably to see how

long it would take him to start crying. Which was almost immediately. Then they scampered back to their girlfriends, who had been waiting for them by the lockers, and kissed them

and grabbed their butts. Ah, young love. Mr. Teone was standing in front of his office door, smiling broadly. Figures.

Sam Hellerman said, “WAGBOG.”

Which stands for “what a great bunch of guys.”

I mention this because that’s when we decided to change

the band name to Helmet Boy, with me on guitar, Sambiguity on bass and procrastination. First album:
Helmet Boy II.

The bell rang. We watched Bobby Duboyce pick himself

up and slink off to the boys’ bathroom near Area B. Sam

Hellerman said, “Wait a sec,” and ran after him, either because he had to go to the bathroom himself, or more proba-

bly because he wanted to check to see if Bobby Duboyce was all right. Sam Hellerman is like that: he likes to keep tabs on 44

everybody who can’t beat him up. After the coast is clear, of course. I was standing by my locker, waiting for Sam

Hellerman to return so we could continue on to Band, when

I saw Mr. Teone lumbering toward me. Bummer.

Now, Mr. Teone is kind of like the Little Big Tom of

Hillmont High School, in that his main job seems to be to

walk around making strange comments. With LBT, though,

the comments seem more or less good-natured. Mr. Teone’s

comments always seem to have an undercurrent of malice.

And often, they make no sense at all.

He takes some cues from the sociopathic normal stu-

dents, in fact. For example, my glasses are always slipping down on my nose, and somewhere along the line I developed

the habit of pushing them back up with the palm of my hand, so that the palm slides up my nose and kind of hits my forehead between the eyes. And ever since I can remember, kids have mocked me by mimicking this motion whenever they

see me coming. It’s not a big deal. But there’s something

weird about seeing an adult do it, especially one who is supposed to be in charge of something. When Mr. Teone isn’t