Frank Portman - King Dork

Now, you have to understand: my day-to-day life was kind of weird at that time. I was constantly in this frantic, anxious state, all wound up. I was doing the ear thing more often than not, and I was hardly sleeping at all. I was spending most of my time thinking furiously about real or imagined mysteries, many of which, I suspected, could well have no solution. I spent a couple of hours every night working on the Catcher code when I was supposed to be doing homework. It would always end in failure, and with my throwing some object across the room in frustration.

Meanwhile, I was having no better luck with the CEH

reading list. Brighton Rock was beyond doubt the best book I had ever read, but I sure didn’t know what to make of The Journal of Albion Moonlight. I spent a lot of time “reading” it, but I never seemed to get anywhere. I couldn’t tell you what it was about or what happened in it if my life depended on it. It’s like this thing was written by a crazy person. Even the printing was crazy, sometimes tiny, sometimes huge, and sometimes the sentences and even the words themselves were all out of order.

There was almost half a page with nothing but the word

“look!” repeated over and over again. I don’t know anything about the guy, but whoever he was, I hope he got help.

I was also struggling with the songs for the new band (the Nancy Wheelers, me on guitar, Sam Hellerman on bass and Ouija board, first album: Margaret? It’s God. Please Shut Up. ) I could never get the songs to come out how I wanted. I’d have a great idea for this brilliant tune where the lyrics and the melody and the sounds and the arrangement would all complement each other and resolve into a perfect three-minute encapsulation of a true experience that would play with the 165

listeners’ emotions while simultaneously crushing their skulls.

I would start speculating about how it was only a matter of time before they awarded me the Nobel Prize for Rock and Roll, once word of it got round to Sweden. But then I’d actually try to play it or write down the lyrics and it would totally suck.

Finally, there was the Fiona Deal. Fiona seemed more and more distant. I’d spent quite a bit of time riding my bike around various neighborhoods and school areas, scanning all the girls for any who looked even vaguely Fiona-esque. I got nowhere. Eventually, I just dropped it.

I still thought about “giving her the time,” of course. But she had faded into the background, almost to the point where she was more or less equivalent to all the other imaginary girls whose images I used as masturbatory props. She was as distant as a movie star. Fiona Schmiona. Maybe she went to OMH, maybe she had known who I was, maybe she had been a real fake drama mod, maybe not. Maybe everything she had said was a lie. Maybe I had imagined her. Or maybe she was madly in love with me, and was wandering the earth pining away but could never reveal herself because the Illuminati had kidnapped her parents and had sworn to kill them and detonate a nuclear device they had hidden at Disneyland if she ever made herself known. She was doing it for the children. All of these scenarios were equally plausible.

And I have to say I was starting to think I didn’t really care too much anymore. That was my attitude.

In view of this, I was floored by what Sam Hellerman said when he finally got to the point.

“I found Fiona.”

I dropped my coffee cup.

* * *

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“She gave you a phony name,” said Sam Hellerman, once I had regained my (devil-head) composure and he had stopped laughing—for which I couldn’t blame him: I hadn’t planned it that way, but the momentary failure of my cup-holding abilities had asserted itself with near-perfect comedic timing.

“Her real name is Deanna,” he continued. “And she’s a little weird.”

He reached into his backpack and pulled out a large red book, which turned out to be last year’s yearbook from Immaculate Heart Academy in Salthaven Vista. He opened it to a folded-over page and pointed to a black-and-white picture. There she was: Deanna Schumacher. As I was silently kicking myself for not having considered the Catholic school option as a possible Fiona habitat, he told me what he knew.

Deanna Schumacher was the girlfriend of this guy named Dave, who was a CHS fake mod. She had probably made out with me to make him jealous, which was something she was known for doing. She was not a fake mod herself, but rather a generic Catholic schoolgirl, though she was in drama at IHA-SV. She was a little bit psycho and was always doing head trips on her friends and boyfriend. Oh yeah, and by the way: this Dave guy was looking for me and wanted to kick my ass.

She was no longer even in the area. She had moved to Miami with her family just the week before, when her father had suddenly and mysteriously been transferred.

“Miami,” I said dubiously. “Florida.”

“Or near there,” said Sam Hellerman.

I looked at the black-and-white yearbook photo of a dark-haired girl with glasses. She did look a little psycho. The glasses looked about right, though they weren’t exactly the 167

same—but people can have different glasses, of course, from year to year. All things considered, she looked quite a bit like the Fiona I remembered, though I don’t know if I’d have recognized her if she hadn’t been pointed out. My memory of Fiona was idealized and faulty, shaped by the fake fake mod costume and my own fantasies, as I had to acknowledge. In a Catholic schoolgirl uniform she wouldn’t, in a sense, have been the same girl. I felt as though I would have been able to pick her belly out of a lineup and to identify what Sam Hellerman would have called her left boobie by touch alone, but maybe not. Girls all have the same parts, basically, and so much of how they look depends on the attitude, expecta-tions, and obsessions of those who are looking at them.

The moving away to Florida part sounded very fake, of course. Maybe Sam Hellerman was just trying to help me “let go” with a little white lie that removed all doubt about her lack of availability. And I appreciated it, I guess. Fiona wasn’t real. Whatever. Like I could keep track of all the imaginary girls in my life.

But, see, the truth is, I couldn’t quite let go of the idea of Fiona even now that I knew she was fake. Even fake Fiona had a hold on me. I kind of lied about how it was all pure imaginary sex, and how I had stopped daydreaming about a Sex Alliance Against Society with her, even though she was now even more imaginary than she had been before Sam Hellerman showed me the IHA-SV yearbook.

I didn’t believe that Miami story for one second, of course. That was just Sam Hellerman trying to be clever and stage-manage my pain, like he does from time to time. He’s a born facilitator.

She still lived in Salthaven or Salthaven Vista and went to 168

Immaculate Heart Academy, Slut Heaven. Of course she did.

Except her name was Deanna now instead of Fiona.

Okay. Could there be a future for Deanna Schumacher and me? Well, no. But was it worth continuing to obsess over her anyway? Why the hell not? You know, I could track her down and she would fall for me and break up with her boyfriend and we could go away together. Deanna Schumacher and me, I mean, not me and the boyfriend. And maybe she could even dress up as Fiona for me from time to time. When you think about it, it wouldn’t be too different from how grown-up wives dress up in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms for their husbands, except in Deanna Schumacher’s case she’d be in her Catholic schoolgirl uniform to begin with and would have to take it off in order to put on the Fiona costume and then put it on again when we were done pleasing each other.