King Dork Approximately (29 page)

But you know my philosophy. Oh, you don’t? It’s called the Hey, I’ll Take It philosophy, and it goes like this: “Hey, I’ll take it.” I’d stumbled into Pammelah Shumway, and right or wrong, I was going to roll with it.

Having a girl with large breasts on your team comes with all sorts of benefits, one of which I’ll illustrate by explaining what happened when Shinefield, hearing Pammelah ask about “her song,” began to look puzzled and perturbed, being under the impression, precarious though it may have been, that we were practicing only covers in the run up to the Mountain Dew show. And what happened was this: nothing. He was too distracted to notice much of anything in any way that mattered. Never underestimate the power of loveliness. It can move mountains, or at least make you forget that there was a mountain there in the first place, which is just as good. Maybe better.

Sam Hellerman motioned to me to start the strum intro of “King Dork Strikes Again” and directed Shinefield to play “Cat Scratch Fever.”

Well, I wasn’t finished with the lyrics, but it sounded pretty decent, though maybe on the quick side, tempo-wise. As for my girlfriend, she seemed to like the idea of there being a song about her. But it was clear that, for whatever reason, she just didn’t get it—the music, the song, just rock and roll in general. She would smile, but her basic attitude seemed to be one of total bewilderment with a tinge of, let’s face it, boredom. She had one of those car phones you carry with you everywhere, though mercifully she didn’t wear it in a holster like Sam Hellerman, and she kept going out to take calls while we were practicing. I tried not to be offended, but, you know, this was my rock and roll we were talking about here, and I was singing a song that I was pretending was about her, though of course, outwardly it still sounded like “Cat Scratch Fever.” But she could at least turn the phone off and give it some attention, it seemed to me.

The Robot showed up later, having come straight from her cross-country race or whatever it was, still dressed in her orange and white Badger running gear. She had a big bottle of iced tea, which turned out actually to contain bourbon, and when the girls began to pass it back and forth, my girlfriend loosened up quite a bit. She liked the way I looked with a guitar, I could tell—once she’d had a few drinks, anyway.

And what about Naomi? Well, Naomi, Bert Jansch, Blind Blake, Big Bill Broonzy, O’Brien, and I were getting along just great. I still couldn’t play to save my life, and listening to Big Bill Broonzy made me kind of embarrassed that I’d ever tried to call myself a guitar player. My attempts to play like Blind Blake
were an absolute fiasco. I even tried blindfolding myself while trying to do “Diddie Wa Diddie” just to see if it would help. (It didn’t.) But sighin’, cryin’, and tryin’ to learn to play “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian” wasn’t going
all
that badly, even if it wasn’t quite … flyin’. And even my own little songs were nice to play on Naomi—they had a warm, “real” feel to them that my cigarette-box amp just couldn’t equal. I even found I had some success willing “King Dork Strikes Again” to be about Pammelah Shumway instead of Celeste Fletcher. After all, my real girlfriend was a lot nicer than my old fake imaginary girlfriend, but that didn’t mean it was any easier to explain stuff. Quite the contrary, really.

My girlfriend. It sounded so strange to say it. It still sounds strange to say it, as you will surely hear if you go back to the beginning of this paragraph, pretend you’re me, and read the first sentence of it out loud.

At home, very little had changed since Little Big Tom had moved to the El Capitano Motor Lodge. My mom had been going out more, always saying she was headed “to therapy,” but with my mom, the difference between her being out and not being out could be difficult to spot. Amanda and I wound up eating more delivered pizza and frozen food, which some people would complain about, I guess, but it’s safe to say that such people are coming from a place of never having experienced Little Big Tom’s big pots of vegetarian slop.

I visited Little Big Tom from time to time, when I could. It was almost unbearably depressing in that motel room, but he was always so relieved to see me when he opened the door that I felt I just couldn’t deprive him of what seemed like the sole bright spot in his otherwise grim existence. He seemed to spend most of his time actually in the room, typing away on his laptop. When I asked what he was writing he said:

“Memoirs.”

Well, that sure sounds like an interesting “read.” You can’t make this stuff up, you really can’t.

Of course I had gone straight to Amanda with the news about the Case of Little Big Tom and the Nonexistent Gym Bag.

Her reaction had been “Well, of course he’d say that.” But she hadn’t seen the unquestionably genuine look of utter confusion on Little Big Tom’s face when I brought it up.

Let’s find this gym bag, I thought, and rummaged through the dark, silent house, till at last I located, in the master bedroom closet, a duffel bag that contained, in each of two side pockets, a pair of ladies’ panties, one pink and the other powder blue. Kind of strange, I remarked to Amanda, that Little
Big Tom hadn’t taken his gym bag with him to the El Capitano Motor Lodge. And even stranger, I continued, that Little Big Tom’s gym bag happened to have a Santa Carla Police Department seal on it and closely resembled our dad’s old police bag.

To my mind, this pretty much wrapped up the case of the hot underwear in the gym bag. Whatever the interparental-unit conflict may have been about, the underwear in the bag was completely irrelevant to it.

“Would I be all that far off in speculating, mademoiselle,” I said, going all Hercule Poirot on her ass, “that it was you, Amanda Henderson, who planted the underwear in this bag, under the mistaken impression that it belonged to the suspect, with the intention of ensnaring
le Grand Tom
in a clever plot to force his vacation of the premises? Is it not that that is the case?” Or words to that effect. My Belgian accent rules, have I ever mentioned that?

Amanda looked back at me with a serene expression, as though to say “I couldn’t possibly comment, and even if I did, what does it matter? It worked, didn’t it?”

I gave her the look that says “No, it didn’t.”

Her response look of “Oh yeah? Then where is he?” was quickly followed by one that said, if I’m not mistaken, “You’re such an asshole.”

Amanda’s gloating didn’t fool me: I could tell she wasn’t a hundred percent pleased with how things were turning out around here. I mean, how could she be? A weird impulse made me ask if she’d like to come with me to visit Little Big Tom at the motel sometime, but her exaggerated eye roll seemed to be a “No, I’d rather drink lighter fluid.”

I had to leave it at that. Little Big Tom could sing its praises all he wanted, but “communication” isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be, and quite often it gets you precisely nowhere.

Basically, with Little Big Tom gone and my mom either away or hardly present, and Amanda pretending to be pleased with herself but trudging around from room to room with her phone-baby like a patient in a mental hospital, this house was pretty much dead. All I had left were my records, Naomi, my lawsuit files, and my research project on the jacket-fifties-varsity version of normalcy on display at Clearview High School. This last project had stalled a bit as I’d learned more about Clearview firsthand, but when there was nothing else to do, I would sometimes return to it.

One of those cable channels that feature blocks of reruns of old TV shows had
Happy Days
, which is this program from the seventies about the fifties concerning a teenage guy, his family and friends, and this character called Fonzie, who is a “hood” with a heart of gold. Basically, it is pretty much in line with the central fallacy presented in
Halls of Innocence:
the normal kids, jacket-varsity people one and all, are the good guys, whereas, in reality, this combination of decent and normal is so rare that it might as well not exist. So either the show is lying, and off-screen Richie and Potsie are spending most of their time persecuting the weak and asking each other “Who you calling homo, faggot? Who you calling faggot, homo?” or they’re the off-screen victims of actual normal people who just don’t make it onto the main show. Neither Richie nor Potsie would have lasted even one day at Hillmont High School, I can tell you that, and I doubt they’d have fared much better in the subtler but still senseless and brutal Clearview environment—not for long, anyway.

Potsie did kind of remind me of a larger, less bespectacled, better-looking Sam Hellerman. He was always coming up with schemes that landed Richie in trouble, and showing him how
to do things like surreptitiously undo bras and practice kissing by making out with bathroom stalls and stuff like that. He’s not half the evil genius Sam Hellerman is, and frankly, I think the show would have benefited from a bit more evil as well as a bit more reality. But you know, it’s just a show. When they would get into scrapes, Richie would always be rescued by Fonzie, who was a motorcycle-riding juvenile delinquent in a leather jacket, except he looks about forty-five. At the end, Richie would learn a valuable lesson, and Fonzie would comb his hair and say “Hey.”

Point being, in real life, there ain’t no Fonzie.

But here, let me tell you about sex.

Got your attention there, didn’t I? Good old sex. You can’t beat it.

First, though, I should mention that the Female Robot’s letters didn’t stop coming when I became Pammelah Shumway’s boyfriend. On the contrary, their frequency increased, to sometimes as many as three a day. Pammelah sent me notes too, but hers were, as Gandalf said of the lesser rings, mere essays in the craft. The Robot’s, on the other hand: they were perilous.

As pointless and random as the Robot’s letters were, she had a style all her own and, I’d venture to say, a kind of warped way with words. Pammelah’s vocabulary was not very powerful at all, and moreover, it didn’t seem like her heart was in it. But the Robot certainly picked up the slack. Her letters were now filled with detailed notes on Pammelah’s thoughts and state of mind as well as her own, plus many, many questions. Was I
mad at Pamm, did I like her shoes today, did I know that she said I was a good kisser, didn’t I think her skin was pretty, was I going to “molest” her after school in the band room today, did I know that she liked my arms and that she wanted me to take her to the girls bathroom at the Slut Heaven Rec Center and do terrible things to her.… The Pammelah of the Robot’s letters sounded quite a bit more interesting than the one presented by Pammelah herself. I wondered about that Pammelah. She sounded fun. The real Pammelah never said any of that stuff to me. I had only the Robot’s word, though I had no real cause to doubt it, that she had actually said any of it at all.

It was, however, a convenient aid to managing my “relationship.” A Robot letter would inform me in homeroom what Pammelah was mad about, and by second period I could take action to correct it; by fourth period, I would learn from another Robot missive whether the action I had taken had been successful. It beat the hell out of Try to Guess What I’m Mad About. I couldn’t help thinking how unfortunate it was that there wasn’t a robot in Little Big Tom and my mom’s marriage. It can be a real labor-saving device.

Now, one of the things I’d always liked about the Robot was her unapologetic vulgarity. Especially in context with all the stuff about kittens and socks and candy, it was arresting and kind of unexpectedly charming. At least, I thought so. Well, this increased both in intensity and frequency now that I was her best friend’s boyfriend. The mentions of Pammelah and me got sexier and sexier. I’ll give you one example: