Frank Portman - King Dork

Or maybe I could just develop the school uniform fetish myself, so she wouldn’t even have to do the fake Fiona thing. I’m sure she’d appreciate that, with her busy schedule and so forth. And you know, once I articulated that thought, I was pretty sure I already had started to develop the school uniform fetish. This was promising.

I M B EC I LE!

Knowing her true identity and where she went to school put the whole Fiona Deal, which had now become the Deanna Schumacher Deal, in a new light. Instead of blindly obsessing and trying to spot her at random, I now knew where to start looking, and it felt like waking up in a new and better world.

Sam Hellerman had said I could keep the IHA-SV yearbook—

one of his CHS friends had stolen it from an older sister who 169

went there, and didn’t care too much about getting it back.

I made a note of the name, Wendee Foot, etched in gold lettering on the cover, just in case I needed to contact her for further information. The messages this girl’s friends had scribbled in it were pretty hilarious, and that was diverting for at least a while, but other than the photo Sam Hellerman had pointed out, I couldn’t find any information on Deanna Schumacher in the yearbook. She wasn’t on any teams or in any clubs, not even drama, as Sam Hellerman had indicated.

Well, she could have joined this year, I supposed. She didn’t even appear to have been in the group class picture—at least, I didn’t recognize her if she was.

Once I was back home, just to see, I looked up

“Schumacher” in the phone book. No listing. Well, that would have been too easy. I clipped out the little black-and-white photo and put it on my desk, trying to decide if it would be too sad to start carrying it in my wallet. I know, I suck. But you have to give me a break. It was all I had.

I spent the Saturday after the Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway meeting staring at Deanna Schumacher’s photo, moping, and playing the guitar. The next day was Halloween, and I spent that day doing pretty much the same thing.

When it began to get dark, I broke down and dialed up Sam Hellerman, but he was out. Maybe he was at another CHS party and hadn’t invited me this time because he didn’t want to risk another Fiona-Deanna fiasco? In fact, I didn’t actually believe that Sam Hellerman had gone to a Halloween party, though it was funny to speculate on what kind of goofy-ass costume he would have worn. A month before, I’d have said it was weird that Sam Hellerman hadn’t been home, that he was always at home when he wasn’t here, but 170

now I just didn’t know. At this point it was weird no matter where Sam Hellerman was.

Amanda was out trick-or-treating with her friends. It was a transitional time for her, the last year when trick-or-treating was appropriate, and the first year when all the girls switched from being cats or pumpkins to dressing up as hookers or French maids or slutty celebrities. Little Big Tom had been freaked out by her hoochie mama costume. “Everyone’s a ho for Halloween!” she had shouted, and then she had stormed out, slamming the door. Now, that, I thought, is one hell of a song title. I was looking forward to eavesdropping on the family discussion where LBT tried to explain how her Halloween costume was all about disrespect for women and Vietnam, but I knew I would have to wait.

I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I retreated to my room and turned the TV on. Channel two was playing horror movies all night, and Evil Dead II had just started. I put on Rattus Norvegicus, turned the TV sound down, sat down on my bed, and tried to think of something to do.

I turned to the CEH books, which I had arranged on my desk in a row against the wall, and thought about where to go next with the reading list. I had given it my best shot, but in the end I couldn’t make it through The Journal of Albion Moonlight. I think the most likely explanation for its existence is that some typesetter wanted to demonstrate all the different typefaces and font sizes and layouts his fancy printing press could do. Back in the days before computers, it must have been pretty impressive. As a story, though, it was a waste of three hundred and thirteen pages. And it told me nothing about my dad. If he went around pretending he was into it, I’d have to say he was one (devil-head) pretentious bastard of a kid. But maybe he tried to read it and didn’t get 171

it and gave up on it in frustration just like me. That’s how I’d prefer it to have been, but there was no way to know.

I had had an easier time with Siddhartha, CEH 1964. It’s about this freaky Buddha-wannabe kid, a sort of George Harrison type who wanders the earth looking for enlighten-ment or whatever. Everybody in the book is all impressed with him, kind of like how the Catcher Cult people just love that Holden Caulfield to pieces. Personally, I couldn’t really see the attraction, but the book wasn’t bad. If Catcher in the Rye were a kung fu movie, and HC went up to a mountain to learn some paradoxical truths and some martial arts techniques named after animals from an eccentric old monk, then you’d pretty much have Siddhartha. Except they leave out the part where he flies through the air beating up ninjas and finally kills the guy who murdered his family when he was a little kid in the flashback at the beginning: maybe that’s in Siddhartha II. There were several passages that my dad had marked by drawing lines on the outer margin in pencil, sometimes with question marks and once with a kind of emphatic exclamation point. It made me think of my dad as an intense, yet deep and sensitive, guy.

One corner of a page of Siddhartha, CEH 1964, had been folded over to mark the place, which happened to be the best scene in the book, where this sexy girl named Kamala kisses the main guy to reward him for reciting a poem about how hot she is. It reminded me of how Fiona-Deanna had made out with me because she was impressed with my powerful vocabulary, and somehow that felt encouraging. It gave me a feeling of everything coming together.

But there was also, at the top of one page, a spot where the word “help” had been written heavily in pen over and over, so that it had almost pierced through the paper and etched the word into several pages below it. That seemed 172

kind of desperate looking and sad, especially as it contrasted starkly with the serene tone of the book itself. In any other situation, this would have struck me as unremarkable. I’d done the same sort of thing countless times in my notebooks.

But because it had been written by my dad, however long ago, it was simply excruciating to look at. I would never know what had caused him that kind of distress, though I suppose he had found comfort in Siddhartha, which was yet another thing I probably would never quite understand all the way. I shook the thought out of my head.

Well, at least Siddhartha was short, which was the way to go when choosing books from the CEH library. I decided the next one would be Slan, CEH 1965, which was short as well.

Evil Dead II had ended, and channel two was about fifteen minutes into Blood on Satan’s Claw. I let the last couple of songs on Pink Flag play out, and then put on Black Rose. I carefully replaced Siddhartha in its slot amongst the other books, feeling a bit solemn as I always did when handling them. Then I stood there staring at them for a while.

Something was bugging me. Something about the books . . .

Many of the titles would make great band names. I had always thought that one of the best potential band names among them was La Peste, CEH 1965, a book I hadn’t even considered trying to read because it was in French, and I was pretty sure it would be too tough for me, despite my mastery of the present tense and telling time in the twenty-four-hour system. But obviously, my dad had been able to read French all right, if this had been among his books. I couldn’t imagine reading a whole book in French. The educational system must have been quite a bit better back then, I thought, before they decided to adopt the collage ’n’ Catcher curriculum.