Frank Portman - King Dork

All I knew was that Sam Hellerman always had something up his sleeve. He had a plan for the band. He had a plan for me. He had a plan for everybody, and he would only let you in on what he felt you needed to know.

I suppressed the urge to point-blank him on it as I had done with Dr. Hexstrom. He would come up with an explanation that would be just as plausible as the others (in other words, just barely—but I would want to believe). Or he would refuse to say anything and subject me to the dread power of his overwhelming, wordless sarcasm. Fearing more Hellerman eye-ray treatment than I felt I could handle in my confused and enfeebled state, I decided to hold off on the point-blanking, at least till after the Festival of Lights. We still had a lot of work to do to get the band ready for the show, and, as I had learned the hard way when the whole Fiona business began, a disgruntled, sarcasm-soaked Hellerman is in many 239

ways worse than no Hellerman at all. I had to keep the band together at least till the show, which was only two weeks away. I was grateful to the school schedule for providing me with a reason to postpone my decisions for just a bit longer.

That’s all a man ever really wants, in any case.

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December

TH E RODE NT ROLE

The first two weeks of December were a bit surreal and went by in a kind of blur. Mr. Schtuppe was trying to time Catcher in the Rye so that we finished the reading and brain-dead assignments on the last day before the Christmas break began on the twentieth. We were already almost to the end, so the reading had slowed to a crawl. I imagine we copied down and used in sentences and mispronounced practically every word in the book several times, including “the” and “and.” I spent a lot of time, in and out of class, engaged in an unspoken stream of questions that, if spoken aloud, would have been totally incomprehensible to anyone but me: “What’s the deal with Tit? Who was MT? Did Tit really ramone MT?

And what about the Dead Bastard?” On and on.

As for Deanna Schumacher, she and I were engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse, with me in the rodent role.

We were okay when we weren’t talking, but practically every conversation was more or less a train wreck. The hardest part for me was her cold-and-distant routine, which she could turn on and off at will. It drove me crazy not to know what she was thinking about me, and there was never any point in asking—that would only spark a contemptuous kind of laughter. I knew the proper strategy was to act just as indifferent as she did, to try to keep her guessing, as well. But it was beyond my capabilities. I always broke down and revealed my anxiety in the end. Then she would pounce.

My third visit to her house, on the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend, had gone pretty much like the previous episodes. She telephoned shortly after I got home, and I was all excited because that was the first time that had happened, until I heard what she said.

“You know, this really isn’t working out for me. So, be 243

seeing you in all those old familiar places.” And she hung up.

I tried to call back, but her phone was off the hook. Anyway, she would have been with her boyfriend by that time anyway. The bastard.

I spent the rest of the night in a kind of agony, saying to myself over and over, “Don’t call, don’t call, don’t call. . . .”

Then when I would finally break down and call, it was busy anyway. Johnny Thunders was singing “You Can’t Put Your Arm Around a Memory” on the stereo, or rather, I guess I should call it a mono, since it still had one blown channel: for the first time, I really felt I understood what he was getting at.

The next day I was a zombie. I felt the estrangement physically, as though sharp objects were embedded in my chest, slicing me up, and, not coincidentally, making me feel like a total idiot as well. Then when I got home from school, there was a note from Amanda on my door: “phone call, some chick, said don’t worry and everything will be OK.”

I was suddenly ecstatic, till I realized that “everything will be OK” could be read in different ways. And I wasn’t sure I would be all that pleased if things were Deanna Schumacher’s version of okay.

Of course, I had other things to obsess over besides Deanna Schumacher and Timothy J. Anderson. There were just too many explanations for my dad’s death floating around. It couldn’t possibly have been murder and an accident and suicide. Any scenario I could come up with to explain why people seemed to think it could was preposterous.

I didn’t have much to go on, but if the deeply engraved “help”

in Siddhartha, CEH 1964, was any indication, my dad had had something of a history of feeling overwhelmed and desperate. Most kids do. But I guess it can continue when they grow up. The Crying of Lot 49 also had the word “help” written on it. I had thought it referred to the Beatles song, but if 244

it was the same kind of help as the Siddhartha one, maybe there was a pattern there. It didn’t square with my memory of him, but if he had been a habitually depressed person, my mom would have known. Perhaps this knowledge and an ambiguously phrased note had convinced my mom that it had been suicide despite the evidence to the contrary. It certainly wouldn’t have been the only time my mom had believed something illogical or unsupported by the facts. On the other hand, she could just have been lying. I really couldn’t say.

We had been working pretty hard to get the band ready for the Festival of Lights. We weren’t sounding too bad. It was still pretty rough, but in our better moments, we sounded kind of like Buddy Holly meets Thin Lizzy with a punk rock sensibility and a slight psychedelic edge, like UFO playing Velvet Underground songs or something. Or so I told myself.

When I said as much to Sam Hellerman, he sniffed and told me I was “trippin’.” Well, at least we were getting better at playing at the same time as each other for most of the song, which was a big improvement.

RYE H E LL

The title of The Catcher in the Rye comes from a misquoted poem by Robert Burns, which Holden Caulfield elaborates into a mystical fantasy about saving children from falling off a cliff. There are all these kids playing in a field of rye, and he stands guard ready to catch them if they stray from the field.

A lot of people have found this to be a very moving metaphor for the experience of growing up, or anxiety about the loss of innocence, or the Mysterious Dance of Life. Or any random thing, really.

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To use HC’s own terminology, it has always seemed pretty goddam phony and all to me. Fantasies about Jane Gallagher’s preppie ass? Check—even I have those. Fantasies about twisting yourself into a tortured symbol of the precious authenticity of youth? I don’t think so. It’s the kind of thing you’d make up to impress an AP teacher. And the AP teachers are duly impressed with it, of course. Suckers.

The brilliance of it, though, is that the people in the Catcher Cult manage to see themselves as everybody in the scenario all at once. They’re the cute, virtuous kids playing in the rye, and they’re also the troubled misfit adolescent who dreams of preserving the kids’ innocence by force and who turns out to have been right all along. And they’re also the grown-up moralistic busybody with the kid-sized butterfly net who is charged with keeping all the kids on the premises, no matter what. Somehow, they don’t realize you can’t root for them all.