Frank Portman - King Dork

Her answer amounted to a no, which didn’t surprise me.

But for the life of me I really, really couldn’t fill in the so.

“Baby, don’t even talk to me about Christmas right now,”

she said. “More people commit suicide on Christmas than on any other day of the year. So . . .”

TH E E NTI R E CONTE NTS OF MY RO OM

“Hey, chief,” said Little Big Tom. “We’d like a word with you.

If you’ve got a minute.”

It was the Thursday evening of the first post-Fiona week.

I followed Little Big Tom into the kitchen, puzzled and a bit apprehensive. He only called me chief when it was serious or when he was nervous about something. He had this grim expression, like he wasn’t even trying to look cheerful the way he usually does. I figured they must have found out that I went to the party in Clearview instead of Sam Hellerman’s house on Friday night, but boy was I wrong. Well, I mean, I guess they had found out about the party, indirectly, but that wasn’t the main issue.

My mom had on her Picasso Guernica- print shorts, cowboy boots, a red and white checked halter, and a polka-dot 97

scarf worn like a headband, and was leaning against the counter smoking one of her Virginia Slimses. You’ve come a long way, baby, I thought. It was shocking to think how much she wasn’t even kidding.

Little Big Tom started to caress his Little Gray Mustache at the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, as though he were trying to stretch it out to get that extra droop that used to drive the ladies crazy in Vermont in the seventies.

There was an uncomfortable pause while we all looked at the kitchen table. A whole lot of my stuff was spread out, neatly arranged in little piles. Some books. Some records and CDs. Some random martial arts materials. My Talons of Rage fantasy blades that I got from Ninja Warehouse, which had been used as a D and D prop long ago and were now purely decorative. Some of my old role-playing military strategy games, and some board games, including Risk and Stratego.

Some of my dad’s stuff: videos of Clint Eastwood movies and war movies. Tora! Tora! Tora! The Enforcer. Patton. The bowie knife he gave me for Christmas the year before he died. My army coat. Jane’s Military Small Arms of the 20th Century and the Tanks and Combat Vehicles Recognition Guide.

A couple of my notebooks. (Uh-oh.) My “Kill ’em All and Let God Sort ’em Out” T-shirt. And a big stack of my weapons-and-tactics magazines, fanned out like cards on a blackjack table.

“What is this shit?” said Little Big Tom, eventually.

“The entire contents of my room?” I said.

Well, it wasn’t quite everything, but that was essentially the correct answer. See, in real life parents raid their children’s rooms and confiscate the porno magazines and drugs; in the back-assward world of Partner and Mrs. Progressive at 98

507 Cedarview Circle, they leave the porn alone and confiscate everything else.

There was another bumpy stretch of awkwardness, during which all you could hear was the rhythm of my mom’s sucked-and-blown Virginia Slims 120s. Short, hissing intake.

Pause. Long, exasperated release. It sounded like a factory in a cartoon, or in an educational film on how they make steel tools. Ordinarily, it can be very soothing.

“Why,” Little Big Tom finally said, “do you feel the need to read this garbage?”

Why, I thought, do you feel the need to try to impersonate Jimmy Buffett and wear shorts and sandals with black socks and eat tofu loaf on Thanksgiving? Some questions have no answers.

“I don’t know what to say. Your mother and I hoped to set an example so you would respect and share our values.”

Now that was funny. I just looked at him. The look that says: “what are you, high?”

Then he said something that totally threw me.

“It’s very important to have respect for women.”

I stared at him.

Well, now I’m going to skip ahead to the part where I ended up figuring out what the hell Little Big Tom was getting at.

It was hard to piece together because very little of what he was saying made much sense, but here’s my best guess as to what had happened. Little Big Tom, making his rounds, had overheard the conversation about the Fiona Deal and had found it disturbing. He hadn’t liked the way Sam Hellerman had referred to Fiona (I hadn’t, either, though I doubt we had exactly the same reasons). I don’t know how 99

much of the rest of the conversation he heard, but if he missed anything, he could have read all about it in my notebook. I’m ashamed to say that one of my notebooks contained, among other embarrassing items, some tortured “letters to Fiona”

I had scribbled out during a stretch of maudlin, sleepless nights. And I’m sure he wasn’t thrilled about the lyrics to

“She Likes It When I Pinch Her Hard.” And many of my other songs, I’m sure, like “Gooey Glasses.”

He must have read the notebook. Otherwise, how would he have reached the conclusion that my “relationship” with

“my girlfriend” was undermining his generation’s sacred achievement of the institution of easygoing touchy-feely ouchless deodorant-optional crunchy-granola Hair– sound track butterflies-and-unicorns sexuality?

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. After overhearing the conversation, and in the throes of a full-blown paranoid, sex-obsessed, politically correct midlife-crisis meltdown, he had decided to search my room for evidence of more disturbing-ness and had basically freaked out over what he’d found.

He was much, much more bothered by the war stuff, the magazines, the nunchakus, the “Kill ’em All” shirt, and the Stratego than he had been by the cock tease conversation.

And there’s where he made his mistake. He tried to combine two discussions, the one where you tell your stepson it isn’t nice to call girls bitches and the one where you express your inner turmoil over the fact that being into war and weapons betrays the deeply held values of the generation that stopped the Vietnam War. The result was incoherence, confusion, and the least successful attempt at Family Conflict Resolution since the White Album told Charles Manson to give the world a big hug.

For Little Big Tom, these issues were like two sides of the 100

same coin. He could jump from Stratego to Respect for Women without realizing he had changed topics, but he was the only one who had any idea what he was talking about.

Even my mom, smoking in the corner, seemed confused.

I’m just speculating here as to his state of mind, but I think he looked at everything in my room, along with his very mistaken imaginative reconstruction of my “relationship” with

“my girlfriend,” as a kind of personal attack on him and his fabulous generation. And he saw everything in my world only as it related to his own self-image and personal style, which he held in pretty high regard. He wasn’t too interested in hearing where he had things wrong, either. The theory confirmed his suspicions and he liked it that way. My first make-out session was all about him. So were the Talons of Rage fantasy blades.

And so was Stratego from Milton Bradley. Plus, I think he was embarrassed, worried that some of his PC friends might see me wearing the wrong shirt or something.

His version of my life was pretty hilarious, at any rate. I wasn’t treating “my girlfriend” with enough respect. I didn’t understand how sex was spiritual as well as physical. “My friends” and I were in a “space” of negativity and aggression, which wasn’t healthy. The music he had confiscated was mostly metal, since those were the album covers and song titles that fed into his theory. But he left the Rolling Stones alone: see, they stopped the Vietnam war, too.