Frank Portman - King Dork

So I guess I ended up having a slight change of attitude about that CHS party. I mean, I was kind of looking forward to it, suddenly. It had disaster written all over it, but really, how much worse could anything get?

59

TITS, BAC K RU B S, AN D DRY C LEAN I NG

I had, of course, brought all the CEH books up to my room right after I found them at the beginning of that week. I had cased out the Catcher pretty thoroughly, but it wasn’t till the Thursday just before the party that I got around to examining the rest of them closely as a set. Sam Hellerman had had to skip band practice to do something with his parents (an obligation I wouldn’t wish on a dog—his parents are no pic-nic). I was on my own. So I put on Rocket to Russia and began to go through them.

A couple of the books were familiar from school as Catcher in the Rye alternates or runners-up. That is, if Catcher is for any reason unable to perform its official duties, they make you read one of the other ones instead. There was A Separate Peace, which is about this irritating guy who keeps trying to make this other irritating guy fall and break his leg until he finally does and ends up dying. And there was Lord of the Flies, which is kind of like Hillmont High School meets Gilligan’s Island, except that the goons in charge are prissy English schoolboys instead of normal red-blooded American alpha psychopaths.

There was one pretty cool one, though: Brighton Rock.

Reading books can be a lot of fun when they’re not the same ones that they make you read over and over and over till you want to shoot yourself. Brighton Rock seemed pretty interesting. I opened it and read the first couple of pages. But knowing it was my dad’s book gave me a weird feeling that kept distracting me from the story, so I didn’t get too far.

Really, though, I was less interested in reading the books than I was in examining them for physical evidence. The Catcher in the Rye, CEH 1960, was the most beat up and had had the most things written and spilled in it. The others were 60

in better shape, though some had stuff written in them as well, mostly little check marks and lines drawn next to paragraphs at the margin, with an occasional note. Someone had written “Beatles” and the word “wow,” as well as the word

“HELP,” and had drawn what looked like a mushroom cloud on the inside back cover of The Crying of Lot 49, CEH 1967.

Hilarious. The Seven Storey Mountain, CEH 1963, had a business card from a dry cleaner stuck between the pages, and also another little card, which appeared to be from the funeral service of someone named Timothy J. Anderson. What that told me was that my dad used to bring his books with him in inappropriate situations, like the funeral of a family member or friend, just like my mom gets mad at me for doing. And that he may have been into the midperiod Beatles and had a fine sense of irony, as well as things that occasionally needed to be dry-cleaned. Hey, I’m a regular Encyclopedia Brown.

I still couldn’t make out a lot of what was scribbled in the Catcher. In addition to underlining the Jane Gallagher back rub passage, my dad seemed to have used it as a sort of all-purpose notebook and scribble pad, jotting down this and that inside the covers and on random pages. Which makes sense if it’s something you’re always carrying around, I guess. I use the white rubber parts of my shoes for the same purpose. A lot of the scribbles looked like they might be dates, and maybe some of them were phone numbers, though I don’t know—they didn’t look like phone numbers to me. There was never much more than the numbers, either.

I could understand if they were phone numbers, which you sometimes just write down when someone tells them to you for temporary purposes. I’ve got some phone numbers on my shoes that I have no idea what they are. But why would you write down dates with no identifying information, 61

like an appointment or something? A date alone is meaningless.

Some of the pages were missing, but I doubted there was any significance to that. The book was in such bad shape I’m sure pieces of it were scattered to the far reaches of the universe by now. The scribbles that looked like words were mostly illegible and incomprehensible, but, absurdly, of the ones I could kind of make out, the word “tit” seemed to crop up a lot. What the . . . ? All in all, there were four of them, including the “tit lib friday” on the inside front cover. One of the other books, Slan, CEH 1965, had some string in it that appeared to have been used as a bookmark and had a scrawled note that said (I think) something “4 tit” something something. Four-Tit Something Something. Great band name. Not much use in any other way.

In the end, the results of this phase of the investigation were pretty negligible. But I did know one thing: whatever my dad had been up to between the ages of twelve and eighteen, it had somehow involved tits, back rubs, and dry cleaning.

62

October

TH E TE E N WITHOUT A FAC E

For some reason, I didn’t want Little Big Tom and Carol to know I was going to a party, though it would probably have thrilled them to imagine that this could be the start of my finally trying to socialize with other kids. They’re worried about me in that respect. While being thrilled, though, they still would have teased me about it. I think the same thing that makes them worry about my lack of socialization would also make them uncomfortable about any attempts at reme-dial socialization that I might try. My mom would have looked at me dubiously and asked if I was planning to dance with anybody. Little Big Tom would have said something like “the girls better watch out!” or “looking good!” I just couldn’t face it.

So I said I was going over to Sam Hellerman’s house to play D and D. There hadn’t been a late-night D and D session in my world for some time, but they had no way of knowing that. Carol and LBT were watching a pledge drive on PBS anyway and had no idea something out of the ordinary was going on. Amanda knew, but she wouldn’t tell because there were things she didn’t want me to tell about that she was intending to do. She had teased me almost as relentlessly as I had feared my mom would, but in the end we had worked it all out.

“Call if you need a ride home,” said Little Big Tom. “I’ve got a set of wheels!”

It only took around thirty-five minutes to walk to the party, but once you get to Clearview Heights it feels like a different world. It looks pretty much the same as Hillmont, but somehow you get the feeling that there’s an invisible wall between the two towns and that you’re on the good side of it all of a sudden. There was a good chance that no one would 65

have any idea who I was over there. I was the teen without a face. There are worse feelings.

We got to the door of the party house and just walked straight in. No one tried to kick us out. Outstanding.

There were a lot of normal people there. But quite a few of the ones other than them seemed to be CHS drama people, which was good.

Normal people freak me out, but I’m not scared of drama people. There are some at Hillmont, of course. They’re all right, but they tend to be a bit faux hippie and into “jam bands” and the Grateful Dead and Neil Young, so they remind me of my folks a little too much, and they always seem to be trying too hard to be wacky. The real reason I don’t like them, though, is that I know they will never let me into their club. I wouldn’t particularly like to be a fourteen-year-old hippie re-vivalist with embroidered jeans listening to the Dead and playing Man in Auditorium in Our Town by Thornton Wilder.