Frank Portman - King Dork

I only mention it because I have this idea, a dream, really, that part of what it would mean is that the boyfriend is in this little club with the girlfriend where when one is hurt or troubled or being assailed by the cruelties of the world, the other decides not to be on the side of the world, but to join forces with the other member of the club against the world, even if it’s frowned upon, even if it’s a doomed scenario, even if the world is definitely gonna win. Like you’re allies. The last rem-nant of your people. A Sex Alliance Against Society. But maybe I have it all wrong. It does sound like a quaint, far-fetched idea, now that I’ve put it in words. And also overly dramatic, if something can be o. d. and q. at the same time.

Nevertheless, Fiona was like that in my mind. What does 133

it have to do with “having sex,” as Sam Hellerman might put it if he were in a particularly dainty mood? I’m not all that sure. But I know it’s related somehow.

Having made out with Fiona that one time made the issue seem more real. But that was an illusion. There wasn’t any difference at all between the idea of being in a Sex Alliance Against Society with Fiona and the idea of being in one with Kyrsten Blakeney. Both notions were remote, impossible, out of the question, preposterous. Both girls were, with regard to me, equally imaginary.

And I was sure, as sure as I was that C. S. Lewis invented Narnia, that neither of them would, in the unlikely event that the option were ever to come up, fail to choose the world. Of course not. I probably wouldn’t, either, if the world would have me.

MAKI NG AM E N DS

It wasn’t till a couple days after Little Big Tom and I got in touch with our feelings on the occasion of his apologizing for the Stratego Sex Incident that I happened to glance at the stack of deconfiscated weapons-and-tactics magazines on my dresser.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but Little Big Tom had put a Post-it on the top magazine. It said “look in the closet.” I frowned and slid open the closet door and, well, maybe you guessed it already, but I was totally thrown: there was a guitar case in there with a Post-it on it that said “Merry Christmas in advance.”

Damn. Little Big Tom had trouble expressing himself in spoken words, but he was a master of concise communication in Post-it form.

134

I pulled out the guitar case and opened it. There was a great electric guitar in it. I mean, fucking great. Gibson.

Melody Maker. Midsixties. Kind of beat-up. The coolest thing I’ve ever seen or touched with my hands that wasn’t at-tached to someone named Fiona. There was yet another Post-it on the headstock that said “you’re on your own for the amp.”

Okay, so that might have been one Post-it too many.

Even the master of the Post-it communications revolution can overdo it sometimes. But damn. How had he known that that was pretty much my ultimate fantasy guitar? I had no idea. Oh wait, yes I did. Because he had read my notebook.

Little Big Tom had done everything wrong and had broken a great many well-established, TV-dramatized, “Dear Abby”–certified rules about parental conduct with regard to respecting people’s privacy whenever drugs are not involved, but I’ve got to say that in the all-important stage known as Making Amends by Trying to Purchase Affection and Trust with Extravagant Gifts, he had really come through.

Maybe it’s just the lust for worldly possessions talking, but I think this may have been the first time in my life I was this unsuccessful when I tried to make everything disappear in a cloud of cynicism. I admit, I got a little choked up.

I made a silent vow not to ridicule him without his being aware of it for at least a week.

Having the new guitar made me want to play better, to sort of do it justice, and I started to practice a lot more. Little Big Tom had bought it from a friend of his who had been in some old blues-country-jam band and who now had a guitar repair place, which was the reason it was set up so well and played so easily. According to my mom, Little Big Tom had been planning to get me an electric guitar for Christmas even 135

before the Stratego Sex Incident. He had found out from my notebook that I lusted after a Melody Maker and had felt so bad about the snooping that he had decided to expedite matters and try to scare one up.

This was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me, and I couldn’t forget it. I let a lot of prime opportunities for LBT ridicule slide right by because of it. I knew Little Big Tom could tell that the gift had worked and that I was more positively disposed toward him, because he increased the frequency of his trademark pop-in comments. That was the downside. It was annoying. On the other hand, I didn’t mind too much. Why not let him have his fun, too?

Once when I was playing, he stuck his head in and said,

“Spanking the plank?” I stared at him. “Uh, no,” I finally said, since as I mentioned I was trying to be nice.

But it turns out I was wrong. I had been s-ing the p. S-ing the p. used to be a right-on, far-out, with-it expression for playing the guitar, supposedly. I guess when Little Big Tom was a kid, he and his friends used to go around saying “hey, you wanna get together and spank the plank tonight?” and they would be talking about having some kind of opium-den Timothy Leary country-blues-folk-bluegrass-Afro-Caribbean jam session wearing leather vests and velvet pants in an incense-y room that had one poster of Che Guevara and another of Frank Zappa sitting on a toilet, and beads instead of a door.

Supposedly, they also used to call a guitar a “piece of wood,” as in “hey, that’s a great piece of wood you got there.”

You know, it’s almost like they want you to get the wrong idea when they say stuff like that, but knowing Little Big Tom, I’m pretty sure there was nothing going on at these jam sessions but soft drugs, hard-to-follow conversations, and terrible music.

136

N

* * *

either Sam Hellerman nor I had an amp yet, but we continued to practice using the living room Magnavox stereo console. Sam Hellerman figured out how to plug us both in, so he was in the left speaker and I was in the right. He seemed a little put out, strangely. I think he was beginning to see the enormous fake wood–paneled stereo console as his trademark gear and didn’t like me horning in on it. He wanted to be the only one to say “yeah, I like to use the Magnavox Astro-Sonic hi-fi stereo console” to Guitar Player magazine when they interviewed him about his signature thin, burbly, distorted bass sound. “We never expected Oxford English, Moe Bilalabama on guitar, me on bass and lollygagging, first album What Part of Suck Don’t You Understand? to be such a big success,” he’d say. “But in all modesty, I’d have to say it’s that Magnavox magic that always seals the deal. . . .”

In reality, though, Oxford English was off to a pretty terrible start. I mean, the guitar sounded awful through the Magna-V. And it was so hard to distinguish between the bass and guitar that neither of us could tell for sure what we were playing. It was a mess.

Here’s how bad it was. We were doing “Don’t Play Yahtzee with My Heart.” Little Big Tom stuck his head in, tilt-stared at us for a moment as though searching for the right words, gave up, and pulled his head back out. Essentially he had said, in body language, “let’s pretend this pop-in never happened, shall we?” If you can’t even get a resigned “rock and roll” out of LBT, you’re in trouble.

I tried running the guitar through this distortion box I got at Musicville at the mall. The Overlord II. That was a mistake. There was a squeal, and then there was: silence. And I think maybe a smell like smoky toast, though that may have 137