Frank Portman - King Dork

Say you’re a kid in this field of rye. You try to find a quiet place where you can be by yourself, to invent a code based on “The Star-Spangled Banner,” or to design the first four album covers of your next band, or to write a song about a sad girl, or to read a book once owned by your deceased father.

Or just to stare off into space and be alone with your thoughts. But pretty soon someone comes along and starts throwing gum in your hair, and gluing gay porn to your helmet, and urinating on your funny little hat from the St.

Vincent de Paul, and hiring a psychiatrist to squeeze the individuality out of you, and making you box till first blood, and pouring Coke on your book, and beating you senseless in the boys’ bathroom, and ridiculing your balls, and holding you upside down till you fall out of your pants, and publicly charting your sexual unattractiveness, and confiscating your Stratego, and forcing you to read and copy out pages from 246

the same three books over and over and over. So you think, who needs it? You get up and start walking. And just when you think you’ve found the edge of the field and are about to emerge from Rye Hell, this AP teacher or baby-boomer parent dressed as a beloved literary character scoops you up and throws you back into the pit of vipers. I mean, the field of rye.

Sound good? I’m sorry, but I’m rooting for the kids and hoping they get out while they can. And as for you, Holden, old son: if you happen to meet my body coming through the rye, I’d really appreciate it if you’d just stand aside and get out of my fucking way.

HOW NORMAL PEOPLE TRIED TO KILL ROCK

AND ROLL, AND HOW ROCK AND ROLL

CAME BACK TO BITE THEM ON THE ASS

When the day of the show arrived, I was pretty surprised at how many other rock bands there turned out to be at Hillmont. We were on last out of four bands, according to the schedule. Everyone who was in the Festival of Lights was allowed to take third period off as well, to set up. So there we were in the auditorium standing around checking each other out while the three sullen drummers were off to the side, grumbling and swearing under their breath about how no one was helping them set up, and mumbling that they played percussion, not just drums. There were three rather than four disgruntled percussionists because Todd Panchowski was in two of the bands, ours and Alter of Blood. Actually, to judge from the retarded flyers they had made, their official name appeared to be Alter of Blood (Formally Black Leviticus). I supposed they were Christian metal, though they could have been just plain old metal. Hard to tell sometimes.

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It was easy to tell, though, who was in either Alter of Blood or Karmageddon, as they were the heavy-metal stoner types. By process of elimination, I guessed that the remaining band, Radio Free Atlantis, had to be made up of one stoner drummer, two goths, and two normal people. Everyone had better amps than us in terms of quality, but Sam Hellerman had them all beat in terms of coolness. He had purchased an old and extremely large nonfunctional Magnavox hi-fi stereo cabinet from the St. Vincent de Paul for twenty bucks and had replaced the insides with the electronics and speakers from the Fender Bassman. Okay, so Sam Hellerman and I were the only ones there who realized how cool it was.

We’re used to it. One day they’ll wake up and realize that we were right about everything all along. Now, though, they were just standing there laughing at my guitar, which was, unbeknownst to them, by far the coolest and most valuable thing in the room. But I admit: it certainly didn’t have uber-super-mega-quadruple-distortion pickups like everybody else’s guitar.

The hippie-ish drama teacher (Mr. Malkoe, but he wanted you to call him Chet) was in charge, because it was

“his” auditorium we would potentially be trashing. The third-period drama class, those who were still there, including Celeste Fletcher, Syndie Duffy, and assorted boyfriends and minions, were all sitting in the back, laughing and “getting high,” I suppose. “Chet” had an easygoing manner on the outside, but inside he was an auditorium Nazi. He immediately confiscated our Balls Deep banner, just as Amanda had predicted. I tried all the usual tricks (calling him “man,” saying I was glad he stopped the Vietnam War, flashing him the peace sign). But despite his obvious admiration for Little Big Tom’s Che Guevara shirt, he had pretty much seen it all and positively would not be sweet-talked out of his fascist freedom-248

of-expression-crushing banner ban. So the banner was history. He also forbade everyone from setting anything on fire.

I saw a little light grow and die in Sam Hellerman’s eyes: even if he hadn’t been intending to set anything on fire before, he certainly was indignant at the prohibition now. “What might have been,” his eyes seemed to say.

“Wait till the revolution comes,” he whispered. “Chet Guevara will be the first against the wall.” And I could see his point, Matt Lynch notwithstanding.

Only Radio Free Atlantis, the first band, got to sound-check, which they finished doing just as the small chunk of the Hillmont High School student body that hadn’t decided to skip the “festival” and take off began to filter in. I was impressed with how RFA sounded. And when I say impressed, I mean that in the sense of “extremely bummed out.” How come we couldn’t sound like that? Maybe it was all in the PA.

So they started playing for real, and as I said, sonically it was relatively awesome, much better than any sound we were ever able to produce in my living room. The bass player (one of the goths) was even pretty good. They couldn’t play together very well, but it’s not like we could, either. I wasn’t sure what they were going for. At first I thought they were doing a kind of Cocksparrer/Sham 69 sort of football-chant punk rock. Then, to my even greater surprise, I figured out that they were going for a Smiths-y kind of thing. In fact, I soon realized that their whole set list was made up of punky Smiths and Cure and Joy Division covers, though many were so ineptly executed that it was hard to tell without a great deal of structural analysis. I don’t know if the punkiness was intentional or not, which is a common enough situation.

Now, the irony was that the singer was Dennis Trela, who was among the most sadistic alpha psychos the normal world 249

had to offer. In other words, he was a major player in the nation of perpetrators: he and his evil superbitch girlfriend had been responsible for half of the suicide attempts, nervous breakdowns, and eating disorders in the greater Bay Area. It’s guys like Dennis Trela who made the Smiths and the Cure and Joy Division necessary in the first place. I had thought normal people and that sort of music were mutually exclusive, but I guess I was wrong. It’s a funny world.

The nonband acts were scheduled to go on during the setup times, so while Karmageddon were setting up, this guy named Ben was doing an extremely ill-advised tap-dancing routine to “Singin’ in the Rain.” My guess is that he had lost a bet. But you just can’t tap-dance in front of an auditorium full of normal people and expect them not to take the bait. I heard this sound that was at once familiar and strange, the sound of around a hundred people pretending to cough and saying the word “homo” at the same time. There was also some loud fag-oriented heckling, chanting, and whatnot, which the crowd continued for some time after Ben left the stage. Fortunately, when you have amps and so forth, you can drown out the heckling. That’s what I was counting on. But hell, Ben got more of a response than Radio Free Atlantis had. You could look at it that way.

Both of the other bands were Black Sabbath–y, whether they realized it or not. Alter of Blood did their Christian Black Sabbath songs at normal slow speed, while Karmageddon sped their evil Black Sabbath songs up to a blur, so that they sounded like a malfunctioning piece of machinery. Both lead singers were trying as hard as they could to impersonate the Cookie Monster, and both guitarists played variations on