King Dork Approximately (35 page)

My mom picked me up from the hospital and was as sympathetic as she had it in her to be, but she kept shaking her head and saying “Oh, Tom” in a way that seemed to express puzzlement as to why I kept getting myself into such situations, as though it were some kind of choice on my part.

Amanda took one look at me when I came in the door and said:

“What a nice-looking boy.”

Todd Dante and I were to receive the same punishment, I was told: two days’ suspension, but it was stressed that it was
a much worse penalty for him because it would cause him to miss a game. They hoped I was proud of myself, they seemed to imply. This one, I had to say, really didn’t feel like it was my fault. But Clearview High School, like Hillmont High before it, had a policy of “zero tolerance for violence.” Think about that. If you are not laughing your head off at the very thought of it, well, my friend, you have either failed to grasp something essential about the meaning of the word “tolerance,” or perhaps you have grasped it all too well.

Sam Hellerman called to make sure I was going to be recovered enough to play the Mountain Dew show, which was coming up in a little over a week. Well, of course I was going to play the show. The show must go on, and if anything, I’d look even cooler onstage with a banged-up face. Sam Hellerman seemed to admire my derring-do, if “derring-do” means—well, okay, I don’t even know what the hell “derring-do” is supposed to mean, but whatever I had when I said I’d play the show with or without a broken nose, Sam Hellerman seemed to admire it.

I told him about a song I was working on about Jeans Skirt Girl and sang it to him over the phone:

“We must,” Sam Hellerman said, “do this song. We must.”

I was kind of proud of it, to tell you the truth. (On the lyric sheet, I was planning simply to spell the names, so it would go “Jenni, Lysa, Gwladys, Kymm.…”) But I warned him that it was yet another “Cat Scratch Fever” tune, and we already had three in the set. Four would really be pushing it, even for all the Mountain Dew in the world. But Sam Hellerman was willing, finally, to ditch “Sadistic Masochism” for it. That’s how much Sam Hellerman cared for Cinthya with a Y, X above the I.

Sam Hellerman had informed me that he had nailed down the venue and the lineup for the show. It was going to be at the Slut Heaven Rec Center, and we were playing with a couple of bands from Mission Hills High.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “They’re terrible.” Which was a relief. It simply wouldn’t do to be upstaged at our own show.

He also said that the name the Reptilians, cool as it was, didn’t look right printed out, so he had made an executive decision, and basically, he was sorry not to have told me sooner, but the name of the band for the show was now irrevocably going to be Stupid Eyeball, because it was already on the flyer.

“Stupid Eyeball,” I repeated.

“Yes,” said Sam Hellerman.

“That’s the name?”

“Yes,” said Sam Hellerman.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause.

“Fair enough,” I said. We’d had way worse names than Stupid Eyeball. Stupid Eyeball was actually one of the better ones, to be honest.

Returning to my room, feeling like I had nothing left to lose, I picked up Naomi, and something happened. Remember how Little Big Tom told me that if I kept trying, eventually I would find that I suddenly could play the fingerstyle pattern? Well, that’s exactly what I found. For once. Maybe being punched in the face had granted me the spirit of the Irish Ragtime Blues. They do call it the school of hard knocks, after all, and I’d been knocked pretty hard.

I spent the rest of the night playing “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian” over and over, till my fingers were killing me. It wasn’t rock and roll, but it was enough.

I entered Clearview High School on my first day after the Todd Dante incident and saw before me a changed world. Being punched and publicly humiliated by Todd Dante had cost me pretty much every perk I had enjoyed in my former position as a neutral pep band member with a pretty girlfriend. The Spirit had abandoned me, offering no more protection. And the magical veil of the gentler, less dangerous Clearview social structure had been abruptly torn away.

Where once I had seen a puzzling array of relatively benign “school spirit”
Happy Days
tolerance with only an occasional or hidden undercurrent of senseless brutality, I now beheld a view that reminded me strongly of the Hillmont High School I had left behind. There was Pang running for dear life, terrified out of his skull, trying to please the jeering president of the student body; and there was Bobby Duboyce getting a good, solid helmet thumping from the girls of the varsity field hockey
team; there again was Yasmynne Schmick being taunted about her weight and pushed around by a semicircle of normal girls. And there were half a dozen other scenes straight out of Hieronymus Bosch that I’d simply never noticed at Clearview. It’s really true that you’re oblivious to the suffering of others till it happens to you. Think about that next time you’re feeling strong and confident and in command of the situation. Someone out there is crying the tears you’ve managed to avoid, and it’s only luck that prevents you from having to join in.

Walking through the halls myself, I was pushed, tripped, jeered at, and hair-gummed. In PE someone tried to close my gym locker with my head in it. And remember Bill Henderson, the normal jacket guy I knew alphabetical-orderically? Well, it turns out he wasn’t at all averse to calling another Henderson “Hender-queer” if the feeling moved him.

My secret was out. I was back on the bottom. King Dork strikes again.

Well, I said. I’m back.

I had prepared a little speech for Pammelah in my head, a final attempt to explain, as kindly and as gently and as positively as possible, that I just couldn’t be her boyfriend anymore and that I was truly sorry. But I needn’t have bothered. Her interest in being my girlfriend had been strained more to the breaking point than I had known by my antiprom activism and had vanished completely as soon as I had been exposed as King Dork by Todd Dante’s Fist of Revealing.

And what about the Robot? Well, if I had expected things to go on as before with the Robot—the letters, the goofy conversation, the secret, conspiratorial sips of vodka from emptied-out Evian bottles—then I was in for a rude surprise. Because the Robot seemed to have become just as hostile as everyone
else, or if not absolutely hostile, at least aggressively distant and totally uninterested in anything I had to say.

“Thanks, goodbye,” she would say coldly before scampering off. Or when she had to be in my presence somewhere, like in homeroom or Band, she would just refuse to look at me. I was invisible, untouchable, hated and despised, the wretched of the earth. Even Blossom van Kinkle, always my backup plan and once so unapologetically flirtatious and seemingly entranced by the Regency Period eloquence of my eyes, responded to my silent plea for sympathy with hard, cold indifference. And, predictably perhaps, it was at just about this precise point, as it dawned on me that there would be no further letters from the Robot nor sly winks from Blossom van Kinkle, that my dumb brain decided to start missing Pammelah Shumway. Stupid emotions. They’re no help at all, are they?

I always say I just want to be left alone, and I basically do, but I have to admit, this pretty much sucked.

So now I was in the same boat as Little Big Tom, exiled from the world I had known and loved, or at least rolled with. And I was also in the same boat as Amanda, wandering around the empty house with an idle phone-baby, pushing away the idea that my empty world was largely of my own making, but knowing deep down that, had I wanted to, I could probably have managed to sustain a status quo that, while unacceptable, had certainly felt a lot better than the alternative I was experiencing now. And I was also in the same boat as my mom, because … well, okay, you know what? I honestly don’t have any earthly idea what kind of boat my mom is in, ever. But what I’m saying is, there were an awful lot of boats floating around my house, and I was somehow in most of them.

At least I had my rock and roll. For maybe the first time,
though, I wasn’t all that sure it was going to be enough. “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian” was my only refuge, though it also seemed to level a kind of accusation at me. I mean, why
couldn’t
I just try to learn to talk Hawaiian, so to speak, instead of remaining clumsily silent and just hoping people would somehow get me, and then despising them when they didn’t? I’m a hard guy to get. And I make myself even harder to get by refusing to learn the rules and follow them even slightly. I mean, it’s because I hate the rules and I think they’re stupid, obviously. And, don’t get me wrong, they are. But conducting myself that way, I had to admit, had left me with not a friend to my name except for Little Big Tom and Sam Hellerman. And in a way, Sam Hellerman had been learning and following rules from his dad’s tapes and was pretty much leaving me in the dust. I’d ridiculed those rules, and look where it had gotten me. Mrs. Pizzaballa had had the solution all along, if only I had been perceptive enough to see it and humble enough to accept it: find out what is expected of you and do it with no nonsense. It would have worked with my girlfriend, with school, with life. And now it was too late.

I was even deprived of one of my favorite jokes at Sam Hellerman’s expense when I pointed to his cell phone and asked, at a practice, whether he’d had any calls. Sam Hellerman had checked his phone and pushed several buttons as though scanning through a multitude of possibilities. “Oh, wait,” he had said. “I need to get this one.” And he had hurried outside to talk privately to whoever it was, Cinthya with a Y, X above the I, or someone else equally more interesting than the nobody I and Shinefield were getting calls from. Man, we’d had some fucking morose practices, I can tell you, despite Sam Hellerman’s bouncing off the walls and chirping like a, well,
like the kind of bird that chirps a lot, an owl or a vulture or some damn thing.

If you’ve never experienced mopey, melancholy Chi-Mo before, you’re lucky, and I’ll spare you any more of the gruesome details. Just picture day after day of me being hassled and ostracized at school and feeling resentful and sorry for myself at home, with joyless band practices in between. And I didn’t even have Little Big Tom to amuse me with inept efforts to cheer me up or give me advice. You know you’re low when you find yourself wishing your hippie stepfather would pop his head through the door and say “This is the first day of the rest of your life,” but then again, I was low, man. I mean, I was practically subterranean.

Now, “Queen Jane Approximately” is a song from Bob Dylan’s CS 9189 album. A lot of people will tell you that this song is a harsh put-down of a frivolous, superficial person, and maybe it is, but I’ve always seen the main point of it to be something else: basically, he’s telling this girl who has this complicated life of hustle and bustle and who lives in a world of her own making that once she has finally exhausted all other possibilities, she should come see him and they can just sit there not worrying about talking or figuring anything out. Whether or not that’s true about the song, it’s always been something I’ve wanted someone to say to me. Leave everything behind, and don’t worry about trying to explain anything or engineer anything or account for yourself. Don’t ruin it by saying anything. Don’t try at all. Just come here and look out the window with me and see what happens.

I guess no one’s good at that. I’m sure not. But thinking about it in my morose mood and everything, well, it’s embarrassing to
admit, and whatever you do, don’t tell Sam Hellerman because it pretty much breaks every rule he ever laid down, but I was just going nuts and almost without even thinking I snatched Amanda’s phone-baby out of her hand, locked myself in the bathroom, and dialed Pammelah Shumway, not knowing what I was going to say. And when she answered, what I said was that I missed her. And when she started to laugh and said I was amazing—or maybe it was “unbelievable”—I for some reason said maybe I could go to the “prom” with her after all. And when she laughed again and hung up on me, I wrote some more of the song I’d been calling “King Dork Strikes Again” but decided to retitle it “King Dork Approximately” because of Dylan and Queen Jane and because honestly, I didn’t feel I even knew who I wanted to be anymore, but King Dork was the closest I’d ever come to specifying an identity. And because I’ve only ever been able to sort of feel anything and kind of know what I think about it.

The bridge went: