Frank Portman - King Dork

Now that we had laid the groundwork, all we had to do was try to convince Todd Panchowski to show up to some practices for a change. Sam Hellerman said he’d get right on it.

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A WE I R D, WE I R D TH I NG

I was scheduled to visit Dr. Hexstrom’s office every Tuesday for the foreseeable future. In our second session, during Spirit Week, she continued to talk to me about books and my dad’s teenage library, never even bringing up the suicide thing. Or rather, I talked about the books. Strangely, I was doing most of the talking. Usually my role in a conversation is just to stare at the other person till they lose track of what they’re trying to say and eventually give up. But with Dr. Hexstrom, it was almost like these roles were reversed. Sometimes her facial expressions would communicate things like “oh, come off it,” or “I see what you’re getting at,” or “I have no idea what you’re talking about right now.” Other times her face would be like that of a blank, unreadable mannequin head.

I wasn’t used to this role, and I was embarrassed by how I sounded when I tried to speak like that. In my head, my thoughts always sound so good and persuasive and witty and well constructed, even when I’m confused about something.

I can be addled, or totally lost, or even feeling crazy, but I usually have at least some confidence in my ability to describe the confusion, even if I don’t have any idea what the hell I’m doing. Out loud, though, it’s a mess. I sound like way more of an idiot than I like to think I am. I’m worse than Little Big Tom. It was only because I liked and trusted Dr.

Hexstrom so much that I could handle the humiliation—I would have run from the room screaming if anybody else had been there.

Anyway, as I explained to Dr. Hexstrom during our second ride on the funky mental-health express, the main guy in The Doors of Perception really is an ass. At one point, he picks up The Tibetan Book of the Dead, opens it at random, and finds great significance in this quotation: “O nobly born, let not thy 195

mind be distracted.” Mmm, deep. I guess if you’re on drugs all the time, and if you’re confident that everyone will be all impressed by the fact that you’re o. d. all the t., and if you make sure you get in at least one mention of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, you can get away with scribbling down any old thing, and pretending it’s a book. And everyone will just go along with it. Or it was like that in the sixties, anyway. The Doors of Perception guy is a Little Big Tom type, only much less loveable. You get lost in one of his convoluted sentences and you may never find your way back again: just light a signal fire with a couple of otherwise unattested adverbs and hope the rescue squad notices you and sends in a helicopter to fly you out. The book is short, but it took what seemed like several lifetimes to be over, and when it finally was over I felt as though I had just been informed that I didn’t have terminal cancer after all. There was another “book” in the same volume called Heaven and Hell, but I was confident that this guy would have nothing to teach me about hell that I had not already directly experienced while slogging through The Doors of Perception, so I decided to give it a miss.

The Seven Storey Mountain started off slow, but at least you could tell it was about something real, not just some poseur showing off. The main reason I started reading it was to see if I could figure out if there was a reason why the funeral card and the book shared the same scriptural quotation. So far I couldn’t tell about that, but the book was strangely absorb-ing. It reminded me of Slan, a bit. It’s about this weird, slightly freaky kid whose mom is dead and whose dad is this crazy artist. He reminded me a little of me, too, to be honest. Well, he’s not quite as freaky as me or the slan kid, maybe, but I could tell his true freakiness was scheduled to come out later, since he drops a lot of hints right from the beginning that he’s going to end up becoming a monk at the end. That sort of 196

blows the suspense, though maybe the excitement is all in how he ends up getting there—the best stories are sometimes like that.

I hadn’t even known they still had monks outside of D

and D, kung fu movies, and heavy metal albums. But I have this weird interest in priests and churches and that sort of thing because the seventh-grade aptitude test and my derogatory nickname set me up for it. I don’t know if it has occurred to you, but I couldn’t help thinking that maybe the dim but well-intentioned social engineer who had designed that aptitude test had read The Seven Storey Mountain and incorpo-rated it into the test, so that when I answered questions indicating that I was a weird, slightly freaky kid with one parent missing like this slanlike monk-to-be character, the test said “ding! Clergy!”

If that’s the case, I bet the Seven Storey Mountain guy never dreamed that his book would set in motion a process that fifty years later would cause a fourteen-year-old rock and roller in suburban California to have as his derogatory nickname an abbreviation for Child Molester. Or maybe he knew all along that that’s what would happen. And wrote the book anyway, the bastard.

So I had to explain to Dr. Hexstrom about Chi-Mo in order to talk about my Seven Storey Mountain theory. I could tell she didn’t believe me at first, but then I could tell she did. She seemed pretty taken aback by it. I can see why. It’s a weird, weird thing.

NATU R E’S MARVE LS

We had known it was coming, and eventually it did, the day after my second Dr. Hexstrom session. To pay us back for 197

skipping boxing to discuss Deanna Schumacher at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway, Mr. Donnelly decided to subject Sam Hellerman and me to this thing they call a “grudge match.”

That’s when they put two best friends in the ring of subhuman PE students. There’s this theory that such fights will be especially vicious and entertaining because of the fighters’

long history with each other and because they’re more likely to react with indignation when attacked by one another.

“Grudge match” doesn’t seem like the most appropriate term for it, but that’s what they call it, being psychopathic semiliterates with vocabularies that are, let’s face it, not all that powerful.

This is the sort of thing that gets everyone really excited around here. The girls took time off from Rape Prevention to crowd around and watch. The normal guys in the class even pushed pause on their “who you callin’ faggot, homo?” tape loop. Which rarely happens: this was a big occasion. Mr.

Donnelly cranked up his facial hue till he was approximately the color of ketchup and opened the proceedings in the usual way: he made us touch our gloves together, bellowed “Don’t bleed till you’re hit, Hellerman! I mean it!” and trotted backward to the corner of the mat. Then he shouted, as he always does: “Commence!”

Well, it was a dumb idea, of course, because everyone knew that bleeding before he was hit was precisely what Sam Hellerman intended to do, and that I wasn’t going to hit him anyway. In other words, there wasn’t destined to be much dork-on-dork drama, and the crowd was going to be disappointed. But in fact Sam Hellerman just stood there for a long while, staring at me. I shot him a puzzled look, and everyone shifted a little uncomfortably, as mystified as I was. I was almost starting to wonder if something had snapped inside his brain and he really intended to go through with “boxing” me, 198

but then I realized what he was up to. He was trying to stall as long as possible, knowing that once he and his spontaneously bloody nose had finally pushed off to the nurse’s office, I might still have to face another opponent. I doubted he’d be able to stall long enough, but I appreciated the ges-ture. I focused my mind on my own nose as though it were Fiona-Deanna’s candle, but try as I might, I just couldn’t make the blood flow Hellerman style—that’s why I don’t call myself a hypnotizer.