King Dork Approximately (15 page)

Mr. Teone had done more than just set up cameras, and he hadn’t acted alone. He had sold his illicit videos on the underground market and had recruited like-minded normal students to help with the operation by setting up their classmates to be unwitting stars of the videos, and enforcing the silence and cooperation of the student body and administration by means of violence, subterfuge, and intimidation. To the extent that this silent cooperation amounted to participation, the conspiracy went right to the top, which was why I ultimately named the United States of America in my indictment.

Underlying it all was the sadistic structure of society and its organizing principle of Normalism, reflecting in turn the sadistic, essentially evil structure of reality itself, i.e., the Survival of the Cruelest and the Dumbest at the Expense of the Nice, the Decent, and the Moderately Intelligent. But I couldn’t very well indict the universe. Or could I? No, I had to draw the line somewhere, and for the purposes of my lawsuit, I had elected to draw the line at the United States of America. The universe could wait.

“You don’t really know what a lawsuit is, do you?” was Sam Hellerman’s response after I had given him this brief outline of my plans.

“Well, no,” I replied to the response, after a brief pause. “I guess I don’t.” But, my eyes implored,
you
do. Or failing that, somebody does. “That’s why I’m asking.”

Sam Hellerman did seem to know a bit about lawsuits, as I had anticipated, but he was hardly encouraging. I guess I’d thought of it like a court version of a citizen’s arrest, where people do something to you and you catch them, take them to
court, get to tell your story about how bad what they did was, and get lots of money from them, and then they go to jail.

“So let me get this straight,” said Sam Hellerman, simply for the sake of reveling in my absurdity rather than from any true desire to get anything straight. “You want to do a citizen’s arrest on the United States of America.” Well, yes, I did. After all, it was largely their fault.

Sam Hellerman wasn’t even sure I could file anything or sue anyone without a parent or guardian doing it on my behalf. They look at your age on the form, and if you’re not at least eighteen, they throw it away without reading it, just like they do with your assignments at school. And according to Sam Hellerman, you can’t bring a lawsuit against someone just because he’s a bad person. If they ever caught Mr. Teone, it’s possible I could be a witness or give some evidence in the criminal trial, and maybe even get money in a separate action if I could prove I had been injured. Which wouldn’t present much of a problem. But to hear Sam Hellerman tell it, the opportunity to put my centipede on the stand was not likely to come about. As there were no criminal charges against the school, or against anyone but Mr. Teone himself, there would be no trial unless they caught Mr. Teone, who was probably safely in South America by now, living as a gentleman farmer with a new identity, protected by former Nazis and the Venezuelan government and other bad guys like that.

Such was Sam Hellerman’s view. He really made it seem like it wasn’t worth doing at all. Moreover, I got the impression that he didn’t particularly care for the idea of my doing it. Well, his mind was on other matters, like Jeans Skirt Girl and the publicity for the Teenage Brainwashers, it’s true.

But the most disheartening thing of all was Sam Hellerman’s dismissive attitude toward the Catcher Code. This was
galling, because my General Theory of the Universe as it applied to Mr. Teone and the Catcher Code was largely based on the analysis of Sam Hellerman himself, presented in the immediate aftermath of my hospitalization. In fact, I had been hoping for a little more clarification from him on certain points that were still extremely fuzzy and confusing. But as I said, he just waved it all away.

“Forget about this,” he said, jabbing a disdainful finger at the Catcher Code and the assorted secondary documents I had neatly assembled in a binder, some of which he himself had produced in his Sherlock Hellerman phase. “It’s all circumstantial. It doesn’t prove anything.”

Well, that’s not what you said when you explained it all to me just a month ago, counselor, I said in my head. But what I said, in words, was: “Well.”

I snatched the polyethylened Catcher Code square and secured it in my jacket pocket, because it looked as if Sam Hellerman might grab hold of it and tear it to pieces before my eyes. Such was his newfound disdain for the Catcher Code. But the Catcher Code meant a lot to me. The least I could do was ensure that it be treated with the reverence it deserved.

“Bathed lately?” I asked in words, when my wrinkled nose and raised eyebrow proved unequal to the task of posing the question in a way Sam Hellerman could understand.

His aroma was particularly biting on this day, and it was interfering with my powers of concentration.

Sam Hellerman raised his arm and sniffed his armpit, nodding as though satisfied with the results. I suppose that was a kind of answer. Sam Hellerman came with several drawbacks, obviously, and here was yet another, and by no means the worst of them, was how I chose to look at it. You take your geniuses as you find them.

Of course I wanted a second opinion on the legal matter. It took over an hour of pleading and cajoling along with a bit of outright whining to persuade Sam Hellerman to allow me to present the matter to his father. After all, Herr Hellerman was an actual lawyer. Moreover, as the story of
The Secrets of Women Revealed
had seemed to indicate, he had once been one of us. He might have clawed his way into normalcy, but he certainly hadn’t been normal at our age. Perhaps there was still, buried in that dark, villainous, normal shell, a spark of humanity that could be kindled into a generous, helpful flame. Sam Hellerman wasn’t buying it, but one of many important lessons I’d learned from Amanda is that the easiest way to get people to do what you want is to make them feel that just about anything would be a relief if only you would shut up for five minutes. And though I am certainly no great talker, this I endeavored to do, with, as it happened, complete success.

“All right, all right,” said Sam Hellerman at last, in the tone that I imagine the bullied boys of yesteryear used to use when saying uncle. He coughed and suppressed a shudder. “It won’t be nice, though. He’s not a nice guy. He can melt the skin from your face with a single glance.” But I was undeterred. If I wound up with a bit of melted face skin, so be it, was my attitude.

There was a long silence. This gave way to another, even longer silence.

“You’re going in too, right?” I said, just making sure.

Sam Hellerman looked at me, startled. He hadn’t considered that to be part of the deal. But he reluctantly and shudderingly agreed. Ultimately, it seemed, Sam Hellerman would do anything to help out a pal. Even talk to his own father. That meant a lot.

There were several more long, uneasy silences, till we finally heard Herr Hellerman’s car snap, crackle, and pop its way onto the gravel of the Hellerman Manor driveway. Sam Hellerman recommended we give him twenty minutes to settle in with his predinner martini before attempting to solicit an audience with him.

“Make it thirty,” I said, blanching slightly and mindful of my mom’s own after-work cocktail schedule.

In response to Sam Hellerman’s discreet knock, we were invited into Herr Hellerman’s study. Herr Hellerman was at his large, unnaturally tidy desk, a martini glass before him in its center. He waved us forward, and then made a “have a seat” gesture.

“Now,” said Herr Hellerman pleasantly enough. “What can I do for you young men?”

“Tom has a, a legal question matter, sir, a legal legal, a legal …” That was the best Sam Hellerman could do under the circumstances. My heart went out to him.

Herr Hellerman turned his skin-melting eyes on me.

I stood up and gave him a brief summary of my lawsuit plan, with some nervousness but thankfully no stuttering. I displayed my centipede and my documents, including the Catcher Code square, and read the list of indictments as clearly and as distinctly as I could, beginning with conspiracy and ending with crimes against humanity. I realized halfway through the reading of this list that I didn’t have a specific question. I just wanted it to happen somehow.

“So,” I ended a bit lamely, reseating myself. “What do you, you know, think, and whatever?”

Remember that string of uneasy silences I referred to just moments ago, when we were waiting for Herr Hellerman to
arrive? Well, that was nothing compared to the uneasiness of the silence that followed the delivery of my comprehensive indictment of Normalism in the thoroughly unsettling presence of Herr Heinrich Hellerman, Esq. Sam Hellerman was twitching. I was willing my face not to melt, long ago having failed in my initial resolution to retain eye contact with Herr Hellerman, surely the most unnerving entity I’d ever encountered at such close range.

His eyes behind their steel-rimmed spectacles darted methodically from one of us to the other, back and forth, lingering longer each time.

Finally, he spoke.

“Get out of here,” he said.

Well, you can bet we got out of there, scrambling over our chairs and each other and whimpering like drowning kittens, I mean, like drowning kittens seem like they might have whimpered if I’d ever drowned any.

“Satisfied?” said Sam Hellerman when we had fled to safety, his voice sounding almost “Crimson and Clover”–y, that is to say, shaky.

Well, “satisfied” wasn’t exactly the word, but for better or worse, I did have my second opinion. “Get out of here” says it all, really. And if nothing else was clear in this notoriously murky world, it was this: Herr Heinrich Hellerman had no concealed spark of humanity waiting to be kindled into a flame of warmth and generosity; he was, on the contrary, normal through and through. It was a bit sad, but mostly simply alarming, because if it could happen to Little Hitler Hiney Hellerman, it could happen to anyone. Even us.

Queerview High School. It’s harder to describe than I expected it to be. In some ways it’s quite different from Hellmont High, but in other ways it’s not too different at all. One thing I can say without reservation is that, for whatever reason, Clearview is not in as advanced a state of degeneration as Hillmont was, probably because Hillmont’s s. of d. was very advanced indeed, leaving the degeneration of all other regional high schools in the dust.

In Hillmont’s final phase, during which I attended it, the benign façade of the traditional American high school had long since fallen away. All the niceties—the clubs, the activities, the sports, the school customs and institutions, and most especially the “classes”—stood brutish and naked, revealed as nothing more than an organized schedule of feeble pretexts for harassment, hazing, and other senseless savagery. Even the highest-ranking normal people didn’t bother with the euphemisms and pretty lies anymore, and the teachers and administrators gave them no more than the most cursory lip service. Where once the “Math Club,” say, was claimed with a straight face to be a gathering of the mathematically inclined that by pure coincidence happened to attract the brutal attention of the occasional bully or hopped-up delinquent, now it was simply known as a convenient corral, clearly labeled and scheduled, where the most defenseless members of the student body would be herded for the convenience of any normal psychotic who might like to practice his skills upon them. And if the aforementioned normal psycho might wish, on a given day, to incorporate a bit of bizarre homoerotic sexual humiliation into his routine, he had only to consult his class schedule and pay a visit to the boys’ locker room, once, it was claimed, merely an
innocent place for showering, but now revealed as little more than a corral similar to the “Math Club,” except that everybody in it is, by order of the state, naked as well as helpless.

But at Clearview, well, they still pretended that the Math Club was actually a math club, and that the showers were really there for people to take showers in. This appeared to be true from top to bottom, throughout the school. The teachers still pretended they were there to teach people things, the drama department actually put on plays, and the marching band, so it was rumored, really marched. At Hillmont no one, and I mean absolutely no one, not the principals or the teachers or the students of any rank, not even the “athletes” themselves, cared to any degree at all about the football team or the football games, and you could say the same about the “cheerleading” or the “career counseling” or the “dances” or whatever they happened to label each successive pretext for preying on the defenseless and smoking dope. But in the halls of Clearview, on the contrary and to my genuine surprise, there was everywhere a frankly nauseating miasma, if “miasma” means what I think it does, of “school spirit.”