King Dork Approximately (14 page)

On this particular day, Mr. Schtuppe was in a mood that he himself might have characterized as ebullient (“ay-byoo-LYE-ent”). He was one of the teachers taking early retirement, and he was clearly glorying in the prospect: you could practically see actual dollar signs spinning in his retirement-crazed eyes. At one point, I thought he might go so far as to do a little jig, which is a dance done by leprechauns, mainly. He didn’t, but he had a definite jig look about him, nonetheless. I could hardly blame the guy: “teaching” “English” to barely sentient (“sen-TEE-ant”) Hillmont “students” year after year must have seemed like a long, slow death sentence for which retirement with a lavish pension was an unexpectedly acceptable reprieve.

Even though there were no “Finals,” Mr. Schtuppe had to give us something to do, so he handed out sheets of paper and said “Write something” in the tone someone might use to say “Scram, will ya?”

As I may have mentioned before, Celeste Fletcher was in Mr. Schtuppe’s class as well. We sat together and wrote out phonetic mispronunciations of all the words we could think of. The likelihood was that these papers would simply be thrown in the trash as soon as we handed them in, like most assignments you do at Hillmont High School, but on the off chance that Mr. Schtuppe was actually going to read any of them, it seemed like a nice gesture, a way of showing him that, if nothing else, he had “reached” at least two of us.

“So,” said Celeste Fletcher at the end of the class. “I guess I’ll be seeing you at Queerview.”

“Really?” I said. I mean, I had already known she was one of the ones going to Clearview with me, but it was the “I’ll be
seeing you” part that seemed to offer more than it said. God, she smelled nice.

“Really,” she said, like it was nothing and like I was dumb for asking.

Damn. Shinefield was going to Mission Hills with Sam Hellerman, though he was planning to graduate early and apply to MIT. (Apparently he was some kind of math genius, somewhere in that fuzzy, stoned head of his.) But this whole Clearview thing wasn’t sounding too bad at all, in view of that “really”: just me and Fiona, alone in a strange new school with no competition and only each other to cling to for warmth and protection. It is in such situations that true affection can take root and grow.

As I leaned in for the customary goodbye hug—I don’t know how or when this became standard in our tiny social circle, but, hey, I’ll take it—she stiffened a bit like my mom has recently started doing with Little Big Tom.

“No ass-grabbio,” whispered Celeste Fletcher. Got it, Fiona, I conceded silently. Not in public. Our love, such as it was, would remain a closely guarded secret. That was the deal.

I didn’t know what to think, but that was pretty much par for the course, meaning that if my life were a golf course, not knowing what was really going on, particularly where girls were involved, was equivalent to the number of strokes ordinarily required to make it through to the end of the game and not lose embarrassingly. And that, my dear friends, is called optimism.

It seemed that whatever coolness Sam Hellerman and I had acquired from our band’s performance at the Battle of the Bands during the last term had mostly dissipated over Christmas vacation. While my centipede and my slightly weird shorter haircut attracted a few looks, people seemed to take little notice of me. Giving the occasional girl a “hey, remember me, I’m in a band” look had no effect at all, if you can believe that. Rock and roll is a proven aphrodisiac, if “aphrodisiac” is the one that makes everybody horny for you, but its effects are fleeting. You’re only as good as your last disastrous performance, and our l. d. p. was quickly fading from public memory.

Well, their minds—I’m referring to the public here—were understandably on other things. But as being seen to be in a rock and roll band was the key—the only key—to what success with girls we were ever likely to have, there was no time to lose: we had to jump-start our career, and fast. In other words, the time was ripe for a comeback.

With this in mind, we put everything we had into our first practice since Sam Hellerman came up with the “Fiona”/“Live Wire” gambit.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this yourself, but playing one song out loud while playing an entirely different song in secret in your head is pretty difficult. Both Sam Hellerman and I made a lot of mistakes, playing bits of “Fiona” out loud by accident, or, in my case, at least, thinking bits of “Live Wire” when I should have been think-playing “Fiona.”

Fortunately, the lyrics didn’t matter too much. I was singing into a cheap microphone plugged into a half-fried channel of the old Hillmont High Jazz Band Polytone amp that I was also using for the guitar. Sam Hellerman was plugged into this
amp as well, because he hadn’t yet replaced the Magnavox/Fender Bassman Frankenstein amp that had been wrecked at the Battle of the Bands. Point being, no one could hear what I was singing, not even me, and moreover, Shinefield didn’t seem to care, so I just sang the “Fiona” lyrics, with no one the wiser. However, Shinefield did notice when Sam Hellerman or I would slip into the “Fiona” chords too obviously. When that occurred, he would give us this perplexed yet good-natured “what just happened there?” look, which we would return with shrugs and what we hoped were smiles that said “Whoa, that was weird, but never mind, let us carry on, my good man, you’re doing just fine.”

Nevertheless, one thing was absolutely clear as soon as we did the first verse the first time: it sounded fucking great.

Like, I don’t even have words to describe how great it sounded, other than “fucking,” and I imagine even Sam Hellerman would have agreed. How great was it? Fucking great, that’s how great it was. Even while having to hold the two things in my head at the same time, I could feel the realness of the rock and roll shining through on the important half. It was louder. It was tighter. It was heavier. And that’s despite our terrible equipment—the worst rock and roll had ever seen. Half of it was just in my head, it’s true, but I could tell. I just could.

It was clear from Sam Hellerman’s trembling hands and wild eyes that he had felt it too. During one of Shinefield’s smoke breaks, Sam Hellerman quickly whispered his new plan: we would accidentally on purpose play one full verse and chorus of “Fiona” in the middle of doing “Live Wire” and pass it off as a mistake. If that worked and if Shinefield went along with it, we would, at the very end, during the run-through-the-set-one-last-time part, simply play “Fiona” all the way through,
come what may. That was risky, but as Sam Hellerman said, now that we had tasted the sweet fruit of true rock and roll, we could never go back to the way it had been, to the bitter herbs of everything just being lame and kind of stupid. I’m paraphrasing. Anyway, either it worked or it didn’t.

We got the perplexed, smiley look from Shinefield during the one-verse “mistake” experiment, but it was easily shrugged off. The final full “Fiona,” however, was harder to pull off, to say the least.

“What the hell just happened?” he said after it was over. But he was laughing. This is probably the one situation where having a stoned drummer can actually help rather than hinder you. “Wow, that was weird!” he continued, starting to emit a chuckle that verged, if ever so slightly, on out-and-out giggling. “What was that?” It turns out there are more ways to express “What just happened?” than we ever knew, and Shinefield ran through them all, laughing harder and harder all the time, saying we were crazy and asking what had gotten into us.

We started laughing too, saying we didn’t know, that it sure was weird, wasn’t it? But all the while we were looking at each other, gloating. The full “Fiona” had ruled, exceeding every expectation. How much had it ruled? Well, put it this way: it was nearly impossible to believe it was us playing it and not some real band.

Our two pairs of eyes met through the haze and over the semi-stoned what-just-happened laughing and babbling. Come on, the eyes were saying. Feel the noise.

So rock and roll was back and, with any luck, here to stay, and it felt pretty good. We had a difficult road ahead, however. Now that we were committed to it, we had to come up with a real list of other songs to tell Shinefield we were covering while playing our own songs to them in our heads. Then we would have to practice them relentlessly on our own, till playing them became something we didn’t have to think about and it would thus be easier to switch “modes” at will. Sam Hellerman said he’d make Shinefield a tape of the final list, and since his dad’s turntable had a vari-speed slide on it, he could even alter the tempos to some of the songs to match ours better, to a very slight degree, anyway.

Now, not that I’m one to talk here, but I could see the clear signs of delusions of grandeur beginning to display themselves in Sam Hellerman’s shining eyes. You have to understand, we’d been used to sucking so bad and so hard for our entire rock and roll lives that the prospect of participating in something that did anything other than suck, or that sucked even just a bit less than usual, was simply intoxicating.

“The publicity campaign starts now,” he said. “But what’s the name going to be? We need a name to stick with for at least a little while.”

This was hard. We’d already gone through three band names since I Hate This Jar, and I was particularly fond of the current one, Buddy of Christ. At the same time, the idea of sticking with one band for any extended length of time felt extraordinarily oppressive, and it was something we’d never been able to manage before.

“How long does publicity last?” I said.

“Long as it takes” was the reply.

That could be a long, long time, I thought.

We spent the next four hours saying names at each other and rejecting them.

“Caring Healing Understanding?” said Sam Hellerman. “We’ve already got the banners.” True to his note to self, Sam Hellerman had managed to swipe the Hillmont High brainwashing banners: they were rolled up neatly in his closet.

“Not much of a band name, though,” I said glumly. I had my standards.

Sam Hellerman suggested simply the Understanding, first album
Caring Healing
, but with pictures of bloody dismembered corpses on the album cover. Which wasn’t bad, but also wasn’t quite as exciting as you’d want a name that was going to last as long as several weeks to be. Plus, to make it sound like it was as cool as it was, you’d have to take the time to explain the album cover, losing the vital element of surprise. We needed something with a less complex path to greatness.

“Adolf Oliver Nipples?” Sam Hellerman suggested, which was obviously as great as band names come, but unfortunately, as I had to remind him, we’d already used it. You can’t repeat band names: that way lies madness.

I thought of Dr. Elizabeth Gary. There were possibilities in there somewhere: Dr. Elizabeth. Therapy Bomb. The Grief Counselors. The Therapy Counselors from the Planet Stupid, first album
Healed, Feeled, and Congealed
. Or was that almost
too
good?

“How about,” I said at last, “the Teenage Brainwashers.”

It was less bad than all the others. So Teenage Brainwashers it was.

I was over at Sam Hellerman’s house because I believed it was the best place to explain my ideas concerning lawsuits, the sadistic structure of reality, and my General Theory of the Universe. It seemed like a bad idea to discuss such matters when Little Big Tom was liable to break in at any moment saying “Let’s hear some more of that Jesus Proust, boys.”

I had been building what I thought was a pretty good comprehensive case against Matt Lynch, Paul Krebs, Mark McAllister, Rich Zim, Mr. Teone, Mr. Donnelly, the Hillmont High School administration and student body, the Santa Carla Unified School District, the State of California, and the United States of America for conspiracy, murder, grievous assault, violent misuse of a public school band instrument with intent to maim or kill, educational malpractice, extortion, censorship, racketeering, obscenity, torture, discrimination, civil rights violations, human rights violations, and crimes against humanity.

Now, as my friends looking back from the future mists of time will know,
Halls of Innocence
barely scratched the surface of the greater conspiracy I’ve tried to outline here. According to
Halls of Innocence
, all “Mr. Cabal” did was put a few pinhole cameras in the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms and walk around saying disturbing things like “Get to class, young lady—I’ll be seeing you later!” Not that that isn’t accurate, or disturbing enough on its own, but it’s the stuff beneath the surface that truly matters in the case.

My apologies to those who already know all this from my previous extremely clear and easy-to-follow explanations. I know I’ve been over it before and you’re all saying, “Yes, yes,
we know all that, you’ve already made it abundantly clear and presented the case with utter and complete persuasiveness and coherence, so why bother to rehash it now?” Hey, I said I was sorry, didn’t I?

Anyway, for those who have missed my p. e.’s: the key to the whole sick, twisted affair was the Catcher Code, a creepy encoded square of slanted text, in backwards French, that reveals the remote origins of Mr. “Cabal” Teone’s criminality, as well as his connection to my dad, going back to when they were both students at Most Precious Blood College Preparatory in San Francisco in the sixties. As the code and its associated materials indicate, the young Mr. Teone, known at the time by the acronym Tit, had already been involved in creepy perverted skullduggery at that school. (“Skullduggery” means illicit or underhanded activity. It doesn’t necessarily have to involve digging up any actual skulls, but it could, and in the case of Mr. Teone, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it did.)

For reasons not yet clear, Mr. Teone had also arranged for the fake suicide of a fellow student named Timothy J. Anderson, otherwise known as the Dead Bastard. Later on, when the grown-up Mr. Teone had become the assistant principal at Hillmont High School, he returned to his old perverted tricks. But my dad, now a police detective, had known too much, and Mr. Teone had murdered him, staging the murder as a fake suicide just as he had done with the Dead Bastard so many years before. Then, when the songs we played at the Battle of the Bands seemed to indicate that I knew too much as well, Mr. Teone tried to have me killed too, delegating the task to a group of ultra-normal teenage subhuman replicant thugs. How he would have made a tuba wound seem self-inflicted had this attempt on my life been successful, I cannot say, but I’m confident he would have managed it: Mr. Teone’s depravity and
ingenuity had few limits, if d. and i. mean what I must assume they mean.