Frank Portman - King Dork

You can get away with stuff like that in AP, as long as you can write a couple of sentences afterward explaining how your class cutting is analogous to marching from Selma to Montgomery. I’m sure the teachers kind of expected it and enjoyed the free period, too.

I was on my own for my “protest.” Sam Hellerman hadn’t made it into Humanities, so he was stuck in normal social studies, copying God only knows what from some inane text-book, no doubt.

I decided to go off on my own to read Brighton Rock, which I was beginning to think was the best book ever written. I was getting to the end and I was excited to find out what was going to happen. So I went out to a deserted part of the school grounds, the slope behind the outfield of the baseball diamond, and lay on the grass to read. It was damp, but a pale sun was out, and I had on my waterproof all-weather army coat, so it didn’t faze me.

One thing I did while I was reading was pause every now and then and turn back to the inside front cover to look at the

“CEH 1965.” Then I would try to imagine what the circumstances were when my dad had read it. Listening to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “Help Me, Rhonda” on the radio? Riding the streetcar wearing neat but rumpled midsixties student-type clothes, with older men 106

in suits with skinny ties and women wearing gloves and little hats? At the dinner table, with my I Love Lucy grandma hitting him on the head and telling him to cut it out already? In the few photos I had seen of him from that time, he looked kind of Beach Boys–collegiate, so that was how I pictured him, with a little button-down short-sleeved shirt, floods, and Brian Wilson hair, sitting on the curb waiting for the bus, Brighton Rock open on his knees. It was kind of fun to do that.

It was all bullshit, too. But in spite of myself, I had this feeling like I was getting to know him in a way I never had. I would get to a good part and I’d think, where was he and what was he doing when he read it? What did he think about the fact that Pinkie said he didn’t believe in anything yet was totally convinced he was damned? That kind of thing.

It wasn’t only the story but the physical object that did something to me. Just being aware that I was holding it made me feel kind of—what? Spooky? Reverent? If I started to think about it, I’d get kind of dizzy sometimes, and start to have this ringing in my ears, and I felt almost like my mind was spinning, rising backwards toward the sky. Maybe I am crazy, I thought. For real, I mean, not as a ploy.

The lunch bell rang, but I was pretty into the story, so I stayed where I was and continued reading.

Before too long I was down to the last few pages, and it was really exciting and suspenseful. I was feeling spacey because of the spooky thing I mentioned before (and maybe even more than usual because there were a lot of priests and so forth in the book and that always adds to the spookiness).

And then a shadow suddenly fell on the page. I saw an elongated shadow head and shoulders on the grass in front of me and felt the presence of someone behind me. Then, and this was all in just a second, not how long it’s taking me to describe it, I saw some stuff splashing on the page, though first 107

I think I heard the sound of it hitting the page, which was very, very loud in my ears.

“The fuck?” I said, and turned around. It was Paul Krebs, one of Matt Lynch’s pals and as psychotic a normal person as ever there was, pouring Coke out of a can onto my book and giggling like a simian maniac.

Now, this all happened in a split second, like I said. Paul Krebs was up there on the crest of the slope giggling, doing this little taunting dance, like a boxer or something. My ears were ringing so loudly I couldn’t hear much else, and I was seeing little multicolored blobs that started small but expanded to obscure my field of vision slightly before they dissipated and new ones would take their place. Little circles of green, yellow, and red. A liquid kaleidoscope. I got up and he kind of danced away from me, still giggling and yammering. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I started to chase him, and somehow, I don’t know how, I managed to trip him and pull his legs upward so that he fell down on to the rough gravel path. He must have hit his head pretty hard on one of the bigger rocks that lined the pathway, because there was a tremendous amount of blood seeping from a cut near his hairline. I had fallen in a big patch of mud in the process. I scrambled to get up, sliding around a bit, but he was just lying there blubbering and bloody.

I grabbed his hair and smashed his head into the gravel as hard as I could. Then I stepped on his neck and said, “I will kill you.”

And we both knew I totally meant it.

While I had been chasing him, I had still had Brighton Rock in my hand, but I had dropped it when the whole head-smashing thing was happening. It was lying open on the path, with little splotches and splatters of Paul Krebs’s blood on it, reflecting the sun, shining on the page. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking, stupidly, maybe this is how The Catcher in the Rye, CEH 1960, got bloodstains on it.

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My first impulse was to run like hell in some random direction, but for some reason, instead, I sat down very deliberately on a big stone over on the other side of the path and read the last couple of blood-spattered pages of Brighton Rock, tuning out the sound of Paul Krebs’s gentle moaning. Then I paused and stared off into space. It was a great ending, the best ending of anything, book or movie, I’d ever experienced. Then I closed the book reverently and walked back toward the campus, because I needed to get myself cleaned up and fifth period was about to start and I didn’t see any reason to be late.

P OD H I P P I E S

It was a day or two after I accidentally beat up Paul Krebs that two very, very surprising things happened.

The first was that Pierre Butterfly Cameroon, the diminutive, flute-playing, hippie-parent-stunted, relentlessly picked-on PBC, my brother in dorkdom, started “going with” Renée

“Née-Née” Tagliafero. For real. I mean, eating together, having third parties deliver notes to each other, and spending lunch period walking in a circle around the perimeter of Center Court, just like all the normal freshman and sophomore couples did. (I’ve never really understood why couples do the joined-at-the-hip lunchtime laps. They stop doing it junior year because once you’re a junior you can leave during lunch and go to the Burger King instead.) Now, when I say that Pierre Butterfly Cameroon is my brother in dorkdom, I mean that we are both at roughly the same low level of the social structure. The Untouchable level.

I don’t mean brotherhood in any other sense. I mean, I don’t know him. Hanging out with each other would just make us both look even more pathetic. Sam Hellerman is kind of 109

friendly with him, as he is with everybody who isn’t a dangerous normal psychotic. I’m more of a loner. Still, if I’m the king of hearts in the dork deck, PBC is definitely one of the other kings.

But Pierre Butterfly Cameroon was no longer Untouchable, or so it appeared from where I was sitting when I first saw them walk by. Née-Née Tagliafero was touching him quite frequently, in fact. They looked weird as a couple because he was not much more than half her height. But more than that: such things just didn’t happen. It was inconceivable.

Née-Née Tagliafero was pretty and popular, with no handicaps or defects except, perhaps, for a very slight mustache, which she was able to bleach into insignificance. And she had pretty big breasts, too, which counted for a lot. I’d never seen her picked on by anyone. She had a kind of punky hair and thrift-store clothes thing going on, but that was fashion rather than true alienation, like it always is. I mean, she was definitely one of “them,” that is to say, mostly normal, not actually one of society’s unwanted. I would classify her as subnormal/drama. She’d had several normal boyfriends before.