Frank Portman - King Dork

We were playing the next tune when Little Big Tom popped in.

“Nice!” he said. “Lou Reed, right? ‘Sweet Jane.’ ”

“No,” Sam Hellerman said. “ ‘My Baby Who Art in Heaven.’ An original.”

Little Big Tom tilted his head in that birdlike way he has and said, “Hmm. I thought it might have been Lou Reed.”

Then he tilted his whole body from one slight angle to the other by raising first the left foot, then the right, but keeping the rest of his body stiff, and stuck his lower lip out slightly while bringing his chin firmly downward, as though to say “I have just performed this little dance to celebrate the fact that I believe we’ve accomplished a great deal with this illuminating discussion.”

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Then he said, “Rock on!” and flitted out.

Sam Hellerman and I looked at each other for a while with the same thought, though he was the one who said it first:

“You know, ‘My Baby Who Art in Heaven’ does sound an awful lot like ‘Sweet Jane.’ ”

“Fuck,” I said.

Sam Hellerman couldn’t believe I wasn’t more pissed off at Little Big Tom for snooping in my room and confiscating all that stuff. I mean, I was pissed off, but not enough to go crazy about it. I was embarrassed about the notebook and resolved to take steps to protect my data more carefully in the future, but practically, it meant nothing. The magazines had already served their purpose. And as it happened, I had another “Kill ’em All” T-shirt as a backup. I didn’t even care too much about the confiscated records: I was at the point in my creative life where listening to other people’s music was just a distraction from my own stuff, and what he confiscated was mostly lame crap anyways. And believe it or not, I was finding I could get along just fine without the Talons of Rage fantasy blades. Just knowing the Talons of Rage fantasy blades existed, somewhere out there, was enough for me. I guess I was growing up.

But the real reason I wasn’t more pissed off is that I’m a sentimental fool, and I couldn’t stop feeling sorry for myself while pretending to be Little Big Tom. I could understand why he and, well, anybody, might be freaked out by me and the Talons of Rage fantasy blades and all the other Guns ’n’

Chi-Mo paraphernalia. Though I still think Stratego is pushing it.

When you stare at people, saying nothing for long periods of time while they try to think of ways to fill in the space, and they know they don’t get you at all, they can get a little 120

tense, and sometimes how tense they get is proportional to how likely they judge it to be that you might have access to some kind of dangerous weapon. I developed the method to use on Matt Lynch. Little Big Tom just got swept up in the net by accident, a dolphin with the tuna. That had never been my intention.

I think it may have been the image of him as an uncomfortable, flailing, sitcom dad substitute caught in a net suspended from a crane on the port side of a Japanese fishing boat that made me decide to make a peace offering.

I took out a sheet of paper and wrote:

Dear Big Tom,

My magazines are not a cry for help.

They were only a tool to help deter a

bully. They are not needed now anyway.

I don’t have a girlfriend. Fiona is

an imaginary girl.

I’m glad you stopped the Vietnam War.

Peace and Love,

Thomas Charles Henderson

P.S. ban the bomb

And I left the note on the keyboard of his Mac.

My life hadn’t had a lot of content till this year. And now that it suddenly had some content, it was being turned upside down and slowly shaken, so that everything got a little mixed up with everything else.

As this process continued after the Fiona party, this weird thing started happening.

Whenever I would try to make a word my slave, that is, when I would use a word from 30 Days to a More Powerful 121

Vocabulary, a little image of Mr. Schtuppe’s head would pop up in my mind. Like, I’d say “obsequious” and suddenly I’d see a little shiny pink devil-head with lots of ear hair pop up really quickly, spin around, and pop back down again.

I was pretty sure that the little pop-up devil-head was trying to prompt me to mispronounce the word. I rarely ended up mispronouncing them, as it happened, because when you get right down to it, it’s kind of hard to mispronounce most words. You have to work at it. How would you mispronounce “obsequious,” for example? I guess it would be awb-seh -cue- ee-us. But I had to think about it far too long. I mean, I couldn’t do it intuitively so that it would flow the way it probably would coming from Mr. Schtuppe.

He is a master of his craft and I had a lot to learn. But that’s why we have public education, isn’t it?

I N TH E S HAD OW OF TH E KN IG HT

The Hillmont High School drama hippies always spend lunch period on this little patch of lawn on the northeast corner of Center Court, over by the Hillmont Knight. The Hillmont Knight is this huge god-awful sculpture made of scrap metal and old auto parts, welded together in what is supposed to be the shape of a knight, which is the Hillmont High School team mascot thing. If you squint and use your imagination, you can just about see how it’s supposed to look like a knight, though it’s kind of a stretch. The funniest thing about it, though, is that on what is supposed to be the knight’s shield, in welded-on letters cut from license plates and old metal signs, it says:

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P R E S E NTATE D TO H H S

BY TH E C LA S S O F ’9 4

Presentated. A more fitting symbol of Hillmont High School would be difficult to imagine.

So the drama hippies sit in the shade of the Hillmont Knight, leaning against its rusty “legs” or just lying on the grass in the general area. Sometimes they hang their coats on it or do something really funny like put a hat on it. And that’s where Sam Hellerman had been when I observed him that first day, “hanging,” as he put it, just a little to the left of the Hillmont Knight.

Now, here’s something I’ve noticed about girls, after years of careful observation. They tend to sort themselves into groups of three. There’s the hottest one, who is the boss.

She dominates and controls the second-hottest one, who is the sidekick and second-in-command, and she instructs her in the art of clothes and sexiness. Then there’s a third one, usually chubby or freakishly tall and skinny or otherwise af-flicted, whom #1 and #2 both boss around. #3 is a sort of gopher, doormat, punching bag, object of loving condescension, and project for improvement rolled into one.

It’s more complicated than it is for guys, where there’s a much clearer line between victim and oppressor, and you always know which one you are, and the victims and oppressors never mingle or feign fraternity. In Girl World, #3 is truly friends with #1 and #2, and they do, in fact, enjoy hanging out together. #1 and #2 will help #3 with makeup and clothes, pretending that that will make a difference, and if either of the dominant girls have a boyfriend, they will try to set up #3 with the least attractive of the boyfriend’s friends, though everybody really knows that that, like so many of 123

their other #3-related activities, is a (devil-head) charade.

Because even though they’re sincere about being kind and helpful, there is an undercurrent of (devil-head) malevolence.

#1 and #2 love #3, but they’re also conscious of how much hotter they are than she is, and they like rubbing it in. #3 resents it deep down but goes along with it because she likes being in a group of friends, which would not otherwise be possible. Eventually, though, the bitterness begins to slip out bit by bit, and #1 and #2 decide #3 is a bitch and that they hate her and end up (devil-head) ostracizing her and replac-ing her with a new #3. Why don’t the #3s all team up and form an anti-1-2 front? I don’t know: they just don’t.