Frank Portman - King Dork

I braced myself and brought the cigarettes out, lighter on top of cigarette pack in a neat little stack, just like I’d been doing since I was a kid. My mom said the same thing she always says: “Thanks, baby, you’re so sweet.”

The Annoying Laugh Club has only two members, my mom and Mrs. Teneb, and both of them were smoking and drinking iced tea at the patio table. Mrs. Teneb is one of my mom’s friends from way back, maybe even all the way back to high school, and she’s also friends with Little Big Tom. My 46

mom has a laugh like a car alarm. Mrs. Teneb has a laugh like a long scream and she says “frickin’ ” a lot. I stood there for a few minutes watching them smoke and drink iced tea, trying to figure out what they were laughing about, which is pretty much impossible most of the time.

At one point Little Big Tom stuck his head through the door at that funny angle he always sticks his head through the door at. It almost looks like the rest of his body hidden behind the wall next to the door is sideways, too.

“Take the Nestea plunge!” he said, and went back upstairs. He was working on his grant proposal.

Mrs. Teneb and Little Big Tom know each other from the Renaissance Faire and the Community Theater, where they do plays and such. Mrs. Teneb is a woman, but she likes to call herself an actor. Not an actress like you might expect her to say.

“ ‘Actress’ is sexist and diminutive,” she’ll say, if she thinks you’re thinking it’s a little weird that she’s saying she’s an actor.

Carol and Little Big Tom always call her an actor, too, but for some reason Little Big Tom didn’t like it so much one time when I referred to him as an actress. He likes to think he has no hangups, but that’s kind of gendercentric and un-progressive of him, don’t you think?

I’ll say one thing, though: whether he’s an actor or an actress, he sure is diminutive.

B O OKWOR M I NG

I could still hear the annoying laughter after I entered the house and proceeded down to the basement. I had realized on the way home that I had left my Catcher in the Rye in my 47

locker, and I needed it for one of Mr. Schtuppe’s brain-dead assignments. (“Define the following words and use them in sentences, noting the page on which they occur: linoleum, hospitality, corridor, canasta, janitor, conscientious, phony, lagoon, incognito, brassiere, burlesque, psychic, brassy, intox-icating, verification, jitterbug . . .”) I knew there had to be another copy of that book somewhere in this house. There are copies of that book lying around everywhere.

I soon found one, in one of the many ragged boxes of random books that were stored down there. It was very old, very beaten-up, not a paperback but not exactly a hardcover book, either—it was like a hardback but with a slightly flimsy cover, and it was almost as small as a paperback. The title on the spine had been rubbed off, but was legible on the front cover, which was only hanging on by a few threads. Some of the little bunches of pages were loose. The whole thing was falling apart. It had once been held together by a rubber band, which had now disintegrated, though pieces of dried-up rubber band still stuck to the outside.

I flipped through it idly on my way upstairs. It was really banged up. There was some underlining, some illegible scribbles, and a lot of weird stains. The dedication, To My Mother , had been scribbled out and someone had written “tit lib friday” in blue ink on the title page. Heh, I thought, now there’s a band name for you. I suddenly realized that, since it wasn’t the same edition my class was using, the page numbers wouldn’t match up, and I almost tossed it back onto the book pile. But then I saw what was written on the inside front cover, and I stopped dead with my foot on the fourth step of the basement stairs, the assignment forgotten.

It said “CEH 1960.” Now, CEH stood for Charles Evan Henderson. So this had been my dad’s copy of The Catcher in the Rye when he was (doing the math), um, twelve. My God, 48

I thought: my dad had been one of those people who had carried Catcher with him everywhere when he was a kid. He had been a member of the Catcher Cult.

I don’t know why it came as such a surprise. My dad was from the Catcher generation. I guess I just never thought of him as the type. Little Big Tom had given me the “ Catcher changed my life” speech, of course; I’d have been surprised if he hadn’t. But I can’t remember my dad ever mentioning any books. I was only eight when he died, though, so maybe he thought I wasn’t quite old enough to be initiated into the Holden Caulfield Mysteries.

I didn’t much like the idea of his having been a Catcher Cult guy, but I guess I found it more fascinating than distressing.

Anyway, I sat down on the steps to examine the book more carefully. I don’t know what I was looking for. It suddenly hit me that I didn’t know that much about my dad as a person, despite the fact that I would have said, if ever asked, that we had been very close. You can feel you’re close to someone you hardly know; people do all the time. But I had never realized that this had been the case with regard to my dad, and I found that it freaked me out a bit. You don’t think of your parents as actual people when you’re a little kid because you don’t need to, I guess, and his half of the father-son relationship had been prematurely frozen at the son-at-eight stage. Mine had continued to develop as a one-sided thing, but we had missed out on quite a bit, and I guess to a degree I still saw him through eight-year-old eyes, though I knew that was a pretty silly thing to do.

For those reasons, there was something spooky about simply holding the book in my hands. I felt dizzy. And I don’t know—a little crazy somehow. I realized that I was crying.

Not just with slightly moistened eyes, like I was used to, and 49

not over-the-top racked-by-sobs bawling à la Amanda either.

Just large, silent tears pouring out of my eyes, landing in the open book in my lap, so subtle I hadn’t even noticed them till I saw the fuzzy dark circles they made on the page when they started to absorb into the paper. Some stuff dripped out of my nose and landed on the book, too. Revolting. I shook the thoughts out of my head, in that way I have, and forced myself to get a grip and get back to examining the book.

There wasn’t a whole lot of information, though. Besides

“CEH 1960” and “tit lib friday,” there were a few other scribbled words I couldn’t make out, a lot of numbers, and what looked like part of a date: 3/something/63. The day was smudged and faded and stained and impossible to make out; the month was also not too clear, but it did seem like it probably was a three. No significance to that date jumped out at me, though by my calculations he would have been about my age in March of 1963. The stains could have been anything: food, coffee, wine, beer, blood. Blood? Uh, yeah. Calm down, now, Columbo. The first body hasn’t even turned up yet.

There was only one underlined passage, as it turns out. It was the scene where this girl called Jane Gallagher gives Holden Caulfield a back rub at the movies. Why would he have underlined that particular paragraph and no other? It didn’t seem quotable or inspiring or meaningful in any way, just more blather in Holden Caulfield’s annoying Leave It to Beaver lingo. But that was my instinctive anti -Catcher bias talking. I made what felt like a physical effort to keep my mind open. I didn’t get it now, but maybe there was something to it that I was missing. If the back rub scene had been important enough to my 1960 dad that he had underlined it, there had to be a reason.