Frank Portman - King Dork

It’s really about—well, it’s like this: boy meets girl, girl shows skin and wiggles, boy gives girl money or fabulous prizes, girl bends over, boy and girl invade each other’s personal space, 155

resulting in the propagation of the species and/or a big, sloppy mess. That’s what “Glad All Over” is about, a tale as old as time.

Sam Hellerman was more direct.

“You have a crush on Jesus,” he said. “But Jesus doesn’t know you exist. Is that it?”

Well, no, that wasn’t Todd Panchowski’s point, although I think there may have been a grain of truth in it concerning what the Fellowship people might have had in mind when they decided to co-opt that particular song for their youth recruitment purposes. There’s something weird and sexual about the way some people talk about God—have you noticed?

Those comments could have cost us our drummer right there, but in the end I don’t think Todd Panchowski fully understood what we were saying. How can I put this? Todd Panchowski was not exactly a genius. But we didn’t need him for textual analysis of the lyrics of pop-rock standards. We needed him to hit things with sticks in a vaguely rhythmic pattern that more or less accompanied our songs, and that was something he could do. Pretty much.

So we did “Glad All Over,” just to humor him, and if I was thinking of Kyrsten Blakeney’s ass instead of the face of Jesus when I sang it, well, he’d never have to know. In fact, the notion that he was sitting there thinking of the f. o. J.

while I was thinking about being glad all over this or that female was amusing enough to make me crack up more than a few times. I don’t know why I got such a kick out of that.

Todd Panchowski also wasn’t into how often we changed the band name. He thought we should just pick a name and stick with it. He didn’t understand that we were still searching, and that the habit of a lifetime of fantasy rocking dies hard.

“What’s the name of the band again?” he said, after our second practice.

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“Occult Blood,” said Sam Hellerman, “Mopey Mo on guitar and vox, me on bass and teleology, you on drums, first album Pentagrampa. ”

“Well, first of all,” said Todd Panchowski, “I play percussion instruments, not ‘drums.’ ” Second of all, he added, he didn’t want to jam with a band with the word “occult” in it.

There was some Fellowship rule against it. So he happened to be wearing an I, Cannibal T-shirt depicting a skeletal grim reaper cutting off a nun’s head with his scythe. Maybe they hadn’t given him the “be nice to nuns” talk yet.

It didn’t matter because halfway through the practice I had already decided that the new band name was going to be The Mordor Apes, Mithril-hound on guitar, Li’l Sauron on bass and necrology, Dim Todd on drums-oops-I-mean-percussion and stupefaction, first album Elven Tail.

MY P O OR I N E PT PAR E NTAL U N ITS

It seemed as though the smoke from the Sex-Vietnam-Stratego Incident had only just cleared when out of the blue I got called into the kitchen for another family conference. It was the Thursday before Halloween, not too long after our second practice with Todd Panchowski. I passed Amanda on my way in, and she gave me the look that said “you’ll never get out of this one, boy.” Dear God, what now?

This time my mom was officiating rather than Little Big Tom, though he was hovering in the background. She looked terrible. Her hair was all wild, like it was when she was going through one of her crazy episodes. She was smoking with tremendous ferocity even for her. She looked up at me through her hair with this unreadable but distressed expression on her face. What on earth was wrong?

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We stared at each other.

Finally she said, her voice distant and depressed sounding, though also with a little sob, “A lot of kids your age are experimenting with drugs.”

I went: “?”

And I’ll tell you why I went “?” The first thing my mom did every single morning was to reach to the bedside table for her weed. She couldn’t function without it, like some people are with coffee. And even now she had her afternoon low-ball, bourbon and soda, no ice, in her hand. And coursing through her veins at this and any given time was a constant stream of about a dozen orally administered tranquilizers and psychotropics and God knows what else—Xanax, Prozac, lith-ium, Vicodin, Halcion, you name it. The irony was that I was the only person in that room, and probably the only member of the Hillmont High student body, who wasn’t experimenting with anything. Other than love, literature, rock and roll, and cryptography, I mean.

The notion of these teen drug “experiments” always cracks me up. Like they’re in a secret laboratory conducting research on a government grant. As opposed to being in a public lavatory doing lines of crank and holding some poor bastard’s head in the toilet till he drowns or till the bell rings, whichever comes first. Well, in a way that’s on a government grant, too. What a world we’ve got here.

My assumption was, of course, that my mom had finally noticed that Sam Hellerman had been raiding her Vicodin supply and had assumed that I was the culprit. Now, if that had been the case, here’s what would have happened: I would have looked up and seen Little Big Tom tilting to one side and holding, maybe even rattling, a half-empty medicine bottle, with a concerned yet wry expression. In fact, though, when I looked up, it turned out that Little Big Tom was hold-158

ing not a bottle, but rather a piece of paper and a little booklet.

It was my lyric sheet to “Thinking of Suicide?” and a copy of the school pamphlet of the same name. I had stupidly left the lyric sheet out after band practice. We had broken out the pamphlet as a visual aid to try to explain to Todd Panchowski why the song was cool. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out, but never mind about that.

My poor inept parental units. Once again, their opening line wasn’t the topic sentence, and everyone ended up confused. They were trying to have the suicide talk and somehow got it mixed up with the drug talk.

TH I N KI NG OF S U IC I DE?

You can put your straightjacket away I don’t plan to kill myself today

Maybe tomorrow, maybe not at all

I’m not ready to make that call

But don’t assume that I’m all right

I won’t be with my baby tonight

There’s no baby, there’s nothing there What baby? I don’t care—

Thinking of Suicide? Yeah, that’s right.

It’s a Thinking of Suicide Saturday night It’s not funny but it’s true

I think about suicide when I think about you So put your E back where you got it from I don’t plan on going to the prom

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I know I add up to a figure of fun

But I don’t want to be the only one

And there’s only one of me

And no one else that I can see

And I’m so tired of trying to

Make believe I’m not dying to, so—

Thinking of Suicide? Yes, I am.

Thinking of Suicide? Hell, goddamn.

It’s not funny, but it’s free

Do you think about suicide when you think about me?

And if I’m suddenly gone

Then you’ll know what’s been going on I’m always thinking

And I never do anything

But,

Thinking of Suicide? Yeah, that’s right Thinking of Suicide with all my might I have got a history of

Thinking of Suicide when I think about love.