King Dork Approximately (37 page)

I noticed my mom and Amanda drift in and was disturbed to see my mom head straight for the donation boxes and start writing a check.

“Mom, don’t,” I said. But she shushed me, saying it was for a good cause, so … Well, I guess it was a good cause—that is, Sam Hellerman and, kind of, me.

Little Big Tom came in a bit later, easy to spot because he was accompanied by Flapjack, who was wearing cutoff overalls, big rubber boots, and an enormous cowboy hat. And if you think you have seen a weirder sight in your life than the two of them winking and shooting finger guns, I would humbly submit that you cannot possibly know what you’re talking about. I couldn’t resist responding by flashing them “the shocker,” because I’m mischievous and vulgar like that.

I was still in a melancholy mood, however, and I was having difficulty getting into the spirit of the affair. Sam Hellerman kept gliding past and saying things like “She’s just a chick” and “Plenty more out there, my man” that were meant to be encouraging and, I didn’t doubt, to take the focus of my agitation off him, but in fact, they were really just depressing. It wasn’t like I was going to see some Jeans Skirt Girl and walk up and kiss her. Some guys, including even Sam Hellerman, as I’d seen
with my own eyes, can do things like that, but I sure wasn’t one of them. I suppose I had this secret hope that I’d look up and see Pammelah Shumway and the Robot walk in and all would be forgiven and we could go outside and drink spiked fake Mountain Dew and talk nonsense like we used to do back in the beginning. But of course, practically nothing was less likely to occur, so I wasn’t genuinely hoping for it: rather, I was just imagining it in a “what if” and “wouldn’t that be weird” kind of way that would, just by coincidence, have been really nice too. I guess my fantasy from the
Halls of Innocence
night had never really ended, sad as that is to admit.

One person I did unexpectedly run into was my old secret girl … associate, Deanna Schumacher, whom I hadn’t seen since before Christmas vacation. Deanna Schumacher said she only had a minute to talk because her boyfriend and her dad were there, and it probably wouldn’t be good for my health to be seen talking to her. But she wanted to say hi, because, well, some things never change, I guess.

“I’m sorry this is so weird,” she said, like they all do, though she didn’t look all that sorry.

“Thanks,” I said.

“What happened to your forehead?”

“Tuba,” I said.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I remember. What happened to your nose?”

“Fist,” I said.

Now, during this conversation, I have to admit, I was pretty distracted by what Deanna Schumacher was wearing. And what I mean is, well, it’s not like I
wanted
to stand there staring at the great big penis embroidered in bright gold thread on the front of her short, navy-blue jeans skirt, but once I noticed that it was there, it was impossible to unnotice it. Trying not to look
at it with all my strength just seemed to make my eyes stray back to it against my will, with the result that I spent most of this brief exchange staring at Deanna Schumacher’s crotch with what I can only imagine was a fairly distraught expression on my face.

“Oh, Tom Tom,” she said wistfully, noticing my anguished gaze but clearly misinterpreting it. She raised her hand to touch my cheek and said, “I’m sorry, but it’s not going to happen.”

Well, as that made it quite clear she wasn’t going to invite me somewhere for some discreet oral sex like she might once have done, and as I certainly didn’t want to risk another “this the guy?” incident by prolonging the conversation, and as I was still haunted by her disturbing jeans penis, there didn’t seem to be much more to say.

“Say hi to your mom for me,” said Deanna Schumacher, flouncing away. Somehow, I’d known she was going to say that.

He could have found some old, weathered graph paper somewhere and used it for the code square, then folded it up and applied pressure for an extended period of time to make the creases look real, and possibly treated it with something like lemon juice to create the brownish age spots. He could have consulted a French teacher or other French speaker to help with the translation. He could have found out details about Tit and my dad by discreetly interviewing my mom.…

I shook these thoughts from my head, knowing there was no point in dwelling on them, and as I was doing so, I spotted the one and only Jeans Skirt Girl with a group of friends leaning against a wall at the back.

“Cinthya with a Y, X above the I?” I said.

She gave me the look that says: “The same.”

I could tell she was trying to place me, and I was about to reveal my identity with a suave “Tom Henderson, guitar and vox,” but before I could get it out she said:

“Oh, you’re the guy! The guy from the mall.”

Yes, I conceded. I was indeed the guy from the mall.

“Well, how did you like the show?” she said.

I was puzzled because the show hadn’t yet started, and as I was playing in the band it wouldn’t have been appropriate to say whether I’d liked my own show, but obviously she was talking about some other unspecified show. She said I’d sure looked surprised, and I realized the “show” she was referring to was one in which she was the costar, that is, the notorious incident where Sam Hellerman had brought weeks of dedicated fieldwork to completion with an unlikely kiss. So it had been a show?

Well, folks, I can smell a rat as well as most people, and this had the definite odor of some variation of the subfamily
Murinae
. So when I came across Sam Hellerman during one of his laps around the floor, I pulled him aside and said I’d bumped into Jeans Skirt Girl.

“Cinthya with a Y, X above the I?” he said. “Good, I’m glad she made it.”

I looked at Sam Hellerman with narrowed eyes, thinking about the Aladdin Arcade kiss in all its particulars.

“You gave her twenty bucks, didn’t you?” I said finally.

“Ten,” said Sam Hellerman.

Well, I might have known.

He had done it, he said, partly to impress me and to persuade me to give the tapes a try myself because he thought they could help me. But mostly it was a ploy to enhance his reputation by being seen kissing a girl above his status by other MHHS students. As my own experience had shown, this can
work, and it seemed to have worked for Sam Hellerman, if his evident popularity among the student body of MHHS was any indication. He had told Jeans Skirt Girl and her friends that he wanted to impress me and play a practical joke, and that he had made a bet that he wouldn’t be able to get a kiss in front of the arcade. It was kind of pathetic, it’s true, but I also had to acknowledge that on some level it had indeed taken genuine self-confidence and real social skills to pull it off. I couldn’t have done it.

Another group of girls walked by and called out “Sammy!” Sam Hellerman was looking sheepish, if not guilty, and I knew him well enough to make a pretty good guess as to why.

“Jesus, Hellerman,” I said. “You paid those girls ten bucks too?” I asked him how much money he had spent on artificial status enhancement through hired kisses.

“No more than a couple hundred,” said Sam Hellerman, adding that that was one reason we needed the concessions to do well.

“You’re never going to get a girlfriend that way, Hellerman,” I said. And he gave me the look that says “I know.”

Well, I didn’t know what to think. On the one hand, it was funny and maybe even almost cute, these antics meant to create the impression, but not the reality, that Sam Hellerman was a success with girls. On the other hand, it was genuinely reassuring to learn that the magic of the tapes hadn’t managed to bend the laws of nature in Sam Hellerman’s favor after all. I was back on the solid ground I knew so well, though it must be admitted, it was ground I pretty much hated.

But on that third hand growing out of my forehead, well, it went something like this: the arcade kiss was fake; the tapes were, if not fake, certainly not what they were cracked up to be; the Catcher Code was fake; love was fake; even the very
show at which all the fakeness was being revealed was itself fake. I felt pretty fake myself. Was anything real? Only Todd Dante’s fist and my own melancholy, as far as I could see. Beyond that, I just couldn’t say.

So how did the Stupid Eyeball set go, in the end? If you’re halfway intelligent and have been paying attention, I think you know the answer already. But if not, just imagine the worst show you can possibly imagine and then try to imagine it being around ten times worse.

One problem right off the bat was that my nose hadn’t yet completely healed from Todd Dante’s punch and my voice was sounding pretty strange, nasal and also not all that loud. Hearing it in the monitors freaked me out, and my singing was about as awful as singing ever gets.

However, the house was packed and the crowd was in a pretty good mood, ready for some actual entertainment after the sabotaged sets of the opening bands whose names I have now completely forgotten. (Sorry about that, dudes. You seemed like pretty nice guys.) I had figured we’d manage to do at least two songs before Shinefield would notice something was wrong that was systematic and engineered rather than the result of us just not being very good. Then it was anyone’s guess what he’d do. Be good-natured and continue the set? Storm off like Todd Panchowski had at the Hillmont High Battle of the Bands? Something in the middle?

In fact, Shinefield managed to last an impressive four and a half songs. This was partly because Sam Hellerman had told the sound guy to turn off the drum monitor so he’d have a
harder time hearing what we were doing; it was partly, perhaps, because he was high and didn’t have his wits about him; and possibly it was partly also because of his good nature and willingness to roll with things—always his best quality.

It turned out to be a lot more confusing and disorienting to play the switcherooed versions of these songs in the auditorium setting than it had been in Shinefield’s basement. But “Fiona” to the drums of “Live Wire” still sounded more or less like an actual, if shaky, song, as did “Down with the Universe” to the drums of “Cat Scratch Fever.” With “King Dork Approximately” (also to the drums of “Cat Scratch Fever”) things were basically still on track, but getting ragged. I noticed Celeste Fletcher drifting into the venue halfway through that song, which kind of jumbled me up and made me make some mistakes. I was glad she got to hear some of it, though, somehow.

By the time we got to “Cinthya with a Y,” it had finally begun to sink into Shinefield’s dope-fuzzed, good-natured brain that this whole set had been a deception, and possibly even a joke at his expense. And on “Caring, Healing, Understanding” he did some sabotage himself by returning to his old abhorrent technique for the duration of the song, making it almost incomprehensible, and then he threw his sticks down, walking into the crowd. Maybe we should have kidnapped his family after all.

Now, Sam Hellerman remembers it differently. He claims that Shinefield was okay with playing the songs and was even smiling while it was happening. But then he saw Celeste Fletcher in the audience and decided that being in closer proximity to Celeste Fletcher was more important to him than continuing to play the set. Either way: drummers, right?

At any rate, we were stuck onstage without a drummer, and with a restless crowd already booing because the last song had
sucked so bad. And because we’re us, despite this thoroughly predictable state of affairs, we found we had absolutely no plan whatsoever.

Sam Hellerman tried to appease them by reminding them why they were there in the first place, saying, “Come on, people, let me hear you say it: recycling! Can I get a ‘recycling’?” And while there was indeed a surprisingly responsive “recycling” chant, pandering to their rabid love of recycling wasn’t going to hold this crowd’s interest forever.

My next decision was a pretty bad one, in retrospect. But I felt I had to make some noise, and the only nonband noise I was capable of creating was “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian.” This I attempted to play. But as bad as my feeble attempt at Irish novelty ragtime blues fingerpicking had sounded through my cigarette-box amp in my room, that was nothing compared to how bad it sounded coming through a heavily distorted Marshall JCM 900 and a kind of crappy feedback-prone PA system, with my fingers hyperclumsified by stress and nervousness. The look on Flapjack’s face, as I glimpsed it in the crowd, was really something, and I stopped abruptly as soon as I saw it. It had only been a few seconds, but the damage had been done. We were officially sucking even worse than the mediocre sabotaged bands that had gone before us.

It was at this point that things got really strange.

Sam Hellerman tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around to see that Little Big Tom had climbed onstage and was heading toward the drum kit. I could see what was happening, almost in slow motion, but I was paralyzed and powerless to stop it. By the time I got control of my faculties, Little Big Tom was already seated at the drums. And by the time I finally found enough voice to scream “Nooooo!” it was too late.

“Well, boys,” said Little Big Tom. “ ‘Screeching for Vengeance’?”
And no sooner had he said that than the stick click count-in was upon us and I pretty much had to join in if I didn’t want to be a dick. In other words, there we were, Stupid Eyeball, the future of rock and roll, the Great Masturbator on guitar and quiet nasal vox, Sam Hellerman on bass and suit and tie, and Little Big Tom, yes, Little Big Tom, on drums and inept parenting. Covering Judas Priest’s “Screaming for Vengeance.”

Now, I wish I could tell you that Little Big Tom turned out to be this great drummer, and that his stepping in at the last minute saved the day and rescued the set. I wish I could tell you that I was able to sing like Rob Halford. I wish I could tell you that the song we played sounded anything remotely like “Screaming for Vengeance.” I wish I could tell you that it sounded like anything in particular. And I wish I could tell you that it sounded even vaguely like a song.

But in fact, as you can probably surmise from the way I have framed this tender chain of wishes, it just didn’t happen that way. Little Big Tom’s drumming, such as it was, was not simply abhorrent. It was, rather, incomprehensible, like drumming from another dimension where they have a different kind of math and a different concept of time. Or maybe he was just hitting as hard as he could at random, hoping something useful would come out. Playing the drums is harder than most people think. You can’t just sit down at the drum kit for the first time, hit stuff, and hope it comes out all right, as in finger painting or making soup. But that, it seems, was precisely what Little Big Tom was doing. It was the same approach he took to making a big pot of vegetarian slop. And actually, “slop” is as good a way of describing his drumming as anything else.