Frank Portman - King Dork

Anyhow, it happened that the #2 in the subgroup of drama people Sam Hellerman had started hanging out with was Née-Née Tagliafero, the girl who was supposedly going with Pierre Butterfly Cameroon. The #1 in that group was Celeste Fletcher, who was, as drama girls go, pretty much at the top level of sexiness. And the #3 was Yasmynne Schmick, who was very short and whose body shape was almost perfectly spherical. She had a slight black-velvety goth thing going on. Sometimes it’s hard to draw the line between goth and fake hippie, I’ve found.

In fact, this trio, though definitely in drama and thus associated with the whole fake-hippie pretense, was among the least extreme, most tasteful trios of drama girls. They could pass for nonhippies if they wanted to—maybe their hearts weren’t completely in it, though they did listen to that awful jam music. They were on the (devil-head) periphery of the fake-hippie drama movement.

Man, I’ve got to do something about that devil-head situation. Maybe there’s some kind of drug they can give you for it.

Anyhow, the Celeste Fletcher trio was closely associated 124

with the Syndie Duffy trio, which was closer to the center of the drama establishment. Syndie Duffy was quite mean, for a drama hippie. They also had a much looser association, through Née-Née Tagliafero, I imagine, with the Lorra Jaffe group, who were thoroughly normal and thus quite psychotic. It was the #2 of the Lorra Jaffe group who had tried to pull a Make-out/Fake-out on me recently in PE, if I’m not mistaken.

At the lunchtime be-in, Sam Hellerman had been sitting in the shadow of the Knight, roughly in between the Celeste Fletcher and Syndie Duffy trios, and had appeared to be talking to both. I would have given quite a bit to know what the hell they had been discussing. But Sam Hellerman wasn’t talking.

Sam Hellerman had said I was welcome to “hang” on the lawn during lunch period with him on the drama people’s turf if I wanted. I’m sure he said it with solid confidence that I wouldn’t take him up on it. Yet I did in fact give it a shot on the following day, more in the spirit of field research than from a sincere desire to be one with the earth.

It was a weird scene, man. Celeste Fletcher was lying on her stomach on the grass facing away from us, raising her head every now and again to tell Yasmynne Schmick to fetch this or that, or to draw subtle attention to Yasmynne Schmick’s weight, height, or skin condition with less-than-convincing compassion. Syndie Duffy was lying nearby, with her head in her scruff-grunge knit-cap boyfriend’s lap. The boyfriend was half asleep, leaning back between the Hillmont Knight’s legs, and Syndie Duffy was sucking idly on his fingers. You could tell her group’s #3 was on the way out because whenever the #3 would try to say something, Syndie Duffy would roll her eyes or, with a great show of aggrava-125

tion, remove the boyfriend’s fingers from her mouth and tell her not to be stupid before putting them back in. That’s normal 1-on-3 behavior, perhaps, but there was something about the way she was saying it that made it clear it was pretty much all over.

There were some dudes a bit farther down, engaged in a philosophical debate about how high they were now as opposed to how high they were going to get at some future point in time. Everyone over by me was idly watching Née-Née Tagliafero and Pierre Butterfly Cameroon make their rounds, and talking amongst themselves about male and female actors, getting high, The Music Man, how LPs sound better than CDs (which I actually agree with), and (did I mention?) getting high. And about Bobby Duboyce, the helmet guy, who, it was claimed, had been seen making out with some unspecified, and grossly implausible, girl in the football-field bleachers. (I was skeptical. Is it even physically possible to do that with a helmet head? But of course I mental-noted the grim fact that, for the sake of argument, even narcoleptic helmet boy was more of a hit with the ladies than I was and filed it away for use in some future flight of self-pity.) I sat next to Sam Hellerman, cross-legged in my army coat, in silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say. The only time anyone acknowledged my presence was when Yasmynne Schmick, for some reason, asked me what I played in the band. “Guitar,” I said. Except that I said a few ums and uhs beforehand, stammered a bit during, and had a little coughing fit afterward. I was jumpy. I was doing the ear thing.

For some reason, I felt kind of warmly towards Yasmynne Schmick, maybe because of sympathy for her role in life, which really wasn’t her fault. But I couldn’t talk to these people. My one line in the whole scene, and I had flubbed it.

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As for Sam Hellerman, he said not one word the entire time, and no one said anything to him. He just sat there staring at Celeste Fletcher with a faintly stupid expression. He did manage to leave the impression, though, that he was drooling on the inside.

So it was obvious. I guess. Sam Hellerman had the hots for Celeste Fletcher, and for some reason she had decided to tolerate his presence and to allow him to subject her ass to the Hellerman eye-ray treatment for thirty minutes each day.

I couldn’t blame him for that: it’s a nice ass, and I have to admit I was giving it the relatively less dramatic Chi-Mo treatment myself. What she got out of the deal was harder to fathom. It was clear, though, that his deep and tender feelings for her ass were not reciprocated. As to why she decided to tolerate his (devil-head) parasitic presence, who knows?

Maybe she was just one of those people who likes having a large (devil-head) entourage and she felt she needed another extra to make the crowd scene look more believable. Maybe her ass needed the positive reinforcement.

All I knew was, Sam Hellerman was no more a genuine participant in the lunch period Grooviness on the Green than I was. Celeste Fletcher hadn’t even looked back at him the entire time. It made zero sense.

WE CO OL?

I was a little surprised that so much time went by without Little Big Tom acknowledging my peace and love note. It wasn’t like him. I’d sent him notes like that before when there had been equally explosive substitute-father/son trouble in the past, and he always responded in some way. Like putting 127

a little Post-it on my door that said “We’re cool.” Plus, Little Big Tom was almost immediately back to his old self once the conflict had wound down.

I had pretty much decided to pick up the pieces and move on with my life in that particular area when there was a knock on my door that turned out to have come from Little Big Tom’s Celtic knot ’n’ serpent wedding ring. That was unusual. I mean, that’s how he always knocked on things, but when he had something to say to me he would usually just stick his head in and out without warning.

He walked in carrying the weapons-and-tactics magazines in a stack on one upturned palm, like a waiter with a platter of hors d’oeuvres.

He set them down on my dresser and said:

“We cool?” One eyebrow was raised, and his head was tilted and his neck was trained in such a way that he almost looked like he had turned into a question mark for a moment.

“Well,” I said, drawing out the word in an exaggerated fashion and making a little motion with my hands as though I were physically weighing whether we were cool or not—

mime isn’t my strong suit, but, see, I was trying to communicate with Little Big Tom in his own language. Finally, I made a “well, what do you know?” face and said, “We are cool.”

He said he had overreacted and was sorry, especially for reading my notebook, but he used way more words than necessary to get that across, and before he was finished he was starting to get a little flustered. I was trying to look at him neutrally while he talked, but the more neutral I tried to look, the less comfortable he seemed to get. Finally, after two half-finished word clumps that were more like automobile accidents than sentences, he gave up trying to get in touch with his feelings and said, in a more familiar tone: