King Dork Approximately (24 page)

“Pan down,” it said. “I want bush. Let’s see some bush.”

Well, sir. This was tough. Because, face it: any way you slice it, it was hilarious. On the other hand, it was just about the least dignified and saddest interruption of a Little Big Tom heartfelt declaration as is possible to imagine. No, wait, that’s actually pretty much the same hand.

I quickly pressed the mute button, though the movie continued to play between Little Big Tom’s legs: we’d tried “pause” once before, with disastrous results, after all. Little Big Tom sighed and had that look about him, the one that says “The moment has passed.” But he soldiered on.

“Your mom,” he said, “and I …” He paused. Amanda retained her grip on my arm, but this was getting excruciating, even for her, I would bet. “Your mom just needs some space,” he concluded.

“We still love each other,” said my mom, in a kind of monotone, as if her mind were far, far away. “Just in a different way. So …”

Now, this sounded like quite a bit more than simply “needing space,” especially if you didn’t know what “needing space” really means, and it seemed to hit Little Big Tom like a slap in the face. “Space: the final frontier,” he seemed to be saying with his eyes. Where no one can hear you scream.

Little Big Tom explained the rest with a pained expression. He would be moving into a motel “for a little while.” He wanted us to know that we could talk to him any time and he wanted to make sure, just in case, that we really, really understood that neither of us was to blame and that we shouldn’t feel guilty.

Then he said something I’d heard from him many times before, but never in such a weary tone, or with such huge implications.

“Everything happens for a reason,” he said as the jocks between his legs ran silently back into the locker room, clutching their burning crotches.

Sam Hellerman showed me the flyer he had been working on. It looked like this:

Well, I don’t know about you, but I had questions.

“A benefit concert for recycling?” I said, first off.

“People love recycling,” said Sam Hellerman. “People would kill their
puppies
if they thought it would help recycling.”

Well, it’s true: people do love recycling. And Sam Hellerman added that holding the show as a benefit would mean that we didn’t have to pay the other bands, which would help the bottom line quite a bit. This led to Question 1 (b), which I had to get out of the way before charging on to Question 2.

“What are the other bands?”

“Working on that,” said Sam Hellerman.

Which was fair enough. But then Question 2 was upon us:

“Why the question mark after our band name?”

Answer: it turned out that Sam Hellerman’s crank-call publicity campaign had been all too successful, and he suspected that the lady at the Salthaven Recreation Center, where he hoped to be able to hold the show, had recognized his voice and had grown weary of the band name, becoming inexplicably irate every time she heard it. Therefore, he thought it would probably be prudent to consider changing the name after all.

“But what about the publicity?” I said, thinking primarily of my lawsuit, on which we had made little progress.

“There are other ways,” said Sam Hellerman darkly.

This led to Question 3:

“The International Ted Nugent Center for the Promotion of Recycling?”

I asked Question 3 with a Little Big Tom–style raised eyebrow.

“That’s just the name of my production company,” said Sam Hellerman, adding that the words “Ted” and “Nugent” were in there for creative purposes, and also as a way of explaining
to Shinefield, if the subject ever came up again, why we wanted him to play “Cat Scratch Fever” three times in the set.

“Is that,” I said, broaching Question 4, “you know, legal?”

Sam Hellerman waved this away. It wasn’t like Ted Nugent or Mountain Dew were going to find out about the show and come looking for us, his look said, and we certainly couldn’t be hunted down and killed by Recycling itself. I guess he had a point. Then he gave me the look that says “And if Ted Nugent or Mountain Dew do sue us, well, that’s publicity that money can’t buy.”

Okay, then. I was convinced, all my questions satisfactorily answered.

Sam Hellerman had to hide the flyer under his shirt when Shinefield came back into the basement more suddenly then we’d expected. We both felt it would be better to present him with the flyer and the plans for the show only when all the details had been sorted out.

“I was just wrestling with a skunk,” he said, and started laughing. Then he said: “Oh. Yellow.”

Because while he had been out skunk-wrestling, a girl had arrived and was sitting in Celeste Fletcher’s former spot in the big, grubby vinyl beanbag in the corner, looking kind of hard to miss with her shorts and cowboy boots and legs and breasts and everything.

I introduced them to her: “This is Shinefield. And you know Sam Hellerman.” The girl emitted a slight sigh, the usual way, the universal sign, really, of conceding one’s acquaintance with Sam Hellerman.

“Are you going to play my song, sweetie?” she said. I winced with a weird combination of embarrassment and a kind of perverse, guilty pride. But of course I said “Yes.”

But I’ve got to back up quite a bit to explain how and why what was going on here was going on.

I suppose I should start with Roberta the Female Robot’s note. Well, “note” is really an inadequate way to describe it. Missive. Epistle. Dispatch. Disquisition. Monograph. Just going through my powerful vocabulary here, trying to come up with a suitable term, but there really, really isn’t one. For one thing, it was
long
, six whole binder pages of close handwritten text, both sides. For another, it was vibrant, with what I’d estimate to be around a dozen different colors running into each other at the points where she had switched pens. For a third thing, the right edge of the last three pages was stained a mysterious dark brownish color, making a substantial number of the words, mainly those written in yellow, practically indecipherable. And for a fourth, but by no means final, thing, it was … My powerful vocabulary is failing me once again here, but I’ll just put it out there nonetheless.

For a fourth thing, it was: just incredibly boring.

it began.

Now, if you think that’s maybe a little charming, I’d probably have agreed with you up till about halfway down the second page, but, trust me, eventually this type of thing overstays its welcome. I skimmed much of it, scanning for some indication that there was actual information or a message of any import, but honestly, there was none. I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this: the Female Robot had just pretty much written whatever happened to be in her head, ripped the
pages out, folded them into a tight little square, and handed it in at the end of the day.

So maybe you spotted the one bit where it was revealed how Pam Something spelled her name. Pammelah. I present that without comment.

And I sure didn’t know what to make of, or do with, Roberta the Female Robot’s letter. I took out a sheet of paper and wrote: “Dear Robot, look how small I’m writing …,” but that’s about as far as I got and I soon gave up trying.

I’d expected I’d have to say something about the note, or at least excuse the fact that I hadn’t written a detailed account of every single moment of my entire night in response, when I saw her in homeroom the next day. But the subject didn’t come up because she simply handed me a new tightly folded packet—an even longer letter, to judge from the heft of it.

“Thanks?” I said.

“De nada”
was her reply.

Why couldn’t I just play the damn song? I’d been doing everything right, growing the fingernails on my right hand so they could pluck the strings more effectively and practicing for hour upon tedious hour, but “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian” was still refusing to come through my fingers. In fact, I seemed to get worse at it the more I practiced doing it, which shouldn’t have surprised me too much. After all, it is an axiom that forms a powerful thesis among the many theses of my General Theory of the Universe, as I have outlined above: the harder you try, the worse it gets. Nevertheless, lots of hippies could do it. What was their secret? Drugs?

The Henderson-Tucci household without the Tucci was a pretty sad place to be. My mom was the same as ever; that is,
a silent, barely present presence in her vibrant clothes, coming home from work and drifting from room to room with her bourbon on the rocks and cigarette, lost in thought, or at any rate, lost in something. But I, for one, found I missed the Little Big Tom pop-ins quite a bit. I mean, silly and annoying as they could be, they did keep things moving. Without them, and without the sights and sounds of Little Big Tom making his rounds, monitoring each room with doglike diligence, everything felt empty, stagnant, boarded up, like the soul had gone out of the building. And quiet, so quiet you could hear yourself think, which is never a good thing.

I may be projecting here, but I kind of had the impression that Amanda might have been missing him too, in her own way. Of course she was outwardly exultant. Ever since my mom had brought Little Big Tom home with her so long ago, Amanda had had no dearer wish than to see that situation reversed. But she can’t have enjoyed the emptiness and silence, not really, and there were even times when I believed I saw as much in her hunched shoulders, occasional sighs, and aimless wandering of the grounds with her phone-baby dangling all but neglected from its antenna in her seemingly weary hand.

I’ll say one thing: whatever it had meant, if my mom had really wanted space, she had it now. Nothing but, in fact.

Your humble narrator turned fifteen on a cold, wet day in January, wearing an orange beret, white pants, and an orange and white shirt that said “Badger Power,” prancing around and
playing “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” on the trombone in front of a crowd of school-spirit-addled, bloodthirsty normal people.

Okay, other stuff happened on that day too, but I’d say that’s a pretty bad way to start off such an important year, wouldn’t you? An ill omen. When once upon a time a father might have taken his just-come-of-age son out to teach him to shoot guns or drive a car, to get drunk, or to lose his virginity at a local brothel to a plump, merry, blushing, gregarious, ample-bosomed, redheaded lady named Big Griselda, there I was, fatherless twice over, holding a trombone above my head, doing a gay little dance, and playing a “pep band” arrangement of what has to be one of the worst songs ever devised by man. “Streetlights people.” The corrosive idiocy of it all was going to leave permanent scars on my soul, and I could almost feel it happening in real time.

I’m not a big birthday guy, so it didn’t bug me too much that my mom and Amanda hadn’t remembered it. They had their minds on other things; plus, I was spared the awkwardness of having to respond to whatever half-assed commemoration they would have thrown together at the last second by saying “Oh, you shouldn’t have” or something like that. Once again, though, I missed the nonsensical words of wisdom Little Big Tom would undoubtedly have assembled to mark the occasion: I missed having the opportunity to roll my eyes at them, anyway. We both used to enjoy that, probably.

As it turned out, Little Big Tom had slipped a birthday present into my backpack—no idea how he had managed that. Had he been secretly returning to the house at 507 Cedarview Circle in the small hours, roaming the all but empty rooms like a silent, ghostly caretaker, placing a birthday present here, a vegan cheeseburger there, guarding his former domain, vowing
to return one day? It was a disturbing yet strangely comforting thought.