Frank Portman - King Dork

I had never been a participant in one of these secret meetings, but I had walked in on them. When someone walks in, Mr. Teone abruptly ends the meeting and growls something like “keep your nose clean!” Then he’ll zoom out, but as he leaves he’ll say to the interloper: “that goes double for you, Henderson!” Well, he only says Henderson if the interloper happens to be me or someone else with my last name.

Obviously.

But for the first time, I wasn’t the interloper. I was the main guy.

“Well, well, Henderson,” he said, standing a couple of urinals over from me, “you and your stunt you boys pulled has a great deal of folks around here pretty steamed.”

I gave him a look that said: “well, if I interpret your tortured, semiliterate syntax correctly, my only comment is that all great artists are misunderstood in their own time.”

He stepped away from his urinal, which was kind of scary, but it turned out he was fully dressed and buttoned up. Thank 259

God. I gave up trying to pee and buttoned up as well. I can’t do that with anyone else in the room, especially Mr. Teone.

He was holding his reading glasses to one eye and squinting at a copy of Sam Hellerman’s song zine.

“Chi-Mos,” he said slowly, but he pronounced it, Schtuppe fashion, “chee moss.” “Mind telling me what that’s supposed to mean?”

Now, I had been in many ironic situations before, but none of them had quite prepared me for this. I mean, here was a leading figure in the normal hierarchy, a high-ranking official representative of the Perpetrator Nation, asking me to explain the meaning of the derogatory name foisted upon me by their own sadistic test several years ago and used against me as a weapon by their lower-ranking minions ever since. I snorted. How quickly we forget.

“It’s the plural of ‘chy moe,’ ” I said, correcting his pronunciation. “It stands for ‘child molester.’ ”

He continued to squint at me. “Where are you getting this stuff ?” he said.

I stared at him with a serious look, the look that says only a (devil-head) philistine asks an artist where he gets his ideas.

Then I laughed a little, because, you know, sometimes I crack myself up.

“Now listen to me,” he said suddenly, his red face a match for that of any PE teacher, his voice a (devil-head) histrionic stage whisper. He tapped the zine with his finger. “This crap . . .” He trailed off. “I don’t know who you think you’re dealing with, but watch your step, Henderson. Keep your nose clean!” Well, I could understand why he didn’t like the lyrics to “Mr. Hitler, Mr. Stalin, Mr. Teone,” but this was a bit over-the-top. He was still whispering, but it was loud, kind of like yell-whispering. His face was throbbing red, and drops of sweat were spattering from it in all directions. Yuck.

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Enter the interloper, who happened to be Syndie Duffy’s floppy fake-hippie boyfriend.

“You remember what I said,” said Mr. Teone. “Don’t be an a-hole.” And then, as he stormed out: “And that goes double for you, Shinefield!”

“Dude,” said Shinefield, after Mr. Teone left. “Radical show!”

Pause. “Really?”

“Insane,” he said, which I took to mean “yes, really.” Then he added: “What did Teone want?”

“He was just advising me not to be an a-hole.”

“Yeah,” said Shinefield. “Me too.”

I felt a strange sense of well-being. Here was the only conversation I’d ever had in the boys’ bathroom that hadn’t consisted of introductory remarks to an eventual attempt on my life. In fact, I was trying to think of another conversation I’d had anywhere with anyone other than Sam Hellerman or Dr.

Hexstrom that hadn’t been at my expense, but I was drawing a blank. So this is what it’s like, I thought. Going to the bathroom would never be the same again. As I was soon to learn, though, suddenly becoming a quasi celebrity doesn’t necessarily mean that attempts on your life cease to occur: they just tend to move to venues other than the boys’ bathroom. Still, it was progress, any way you sliced it.

“Rock on, Chi-Mo!” Shinefield called out as I left, and I didn’t really mind the nickname all that much.

A DR. H EXSTROM-ECTOMY

When I got home from school that day, Little Big Tom took me aside and told me that my mom had had a falling-out with Dr. Hexstrom and that they were looking for another therapist for me. I’d expected this. My guess was that they 261

wouldn’t actually get around to finding another doctor, and that that would be the end of the experiment in Chi-Mo modification unless I did something major like set something on fire or killed somebody.

A little later on, I talked to Amanda, who said that as far as she knew, suicide prevention hadn’t even been the main thing on Mom’s mind with the psychiatrist plan; she had just been hoping Dr. Hexstrom would give me some pills and set me on the road to being more normal and maybe then I’d go out for sports or something. But in their meeting, Dr.

Hexstrom had told her that she was the problem, not me, and suggested that she come in with me for some family-type counseling, because she needed help. My mom fired her on the spot. Well, good old Dr. Hexstrom. Not that I would have gone along with the family counseling thing. That sounded like a nightmare. I was going to miss talking to her, but oh well. Maybe it’s my destiny to remain a non-normal, unmedicated and uncorrected eccentric with no one interesting to talk to. It would figure.

“Did you know Dad killed himself?” I asked, after a brief struggle to remain silent. To my surprise, for once she didn’t give me the look that says “you’re as dumb as a freeze-dried coffee crystal.”

“That’s what she thinks,” she said. “I don’t know. She thinks a lot of weird things.”

“She told Dr. Hexstrom he left a note.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ve looked for that note. There is no note.”

So while my mom had been telling me a story about how my dad had died in a car accident, she was also telling Amanda a story about how he had killed himself. Or more probably, she was just being her crazy self, oblivious to both of us, and we had sensibly assumed that whatever she was 262

implying had to be wrong. It’s just that Amanda and I had accidentally drawn different conclusions about which fake story was being implied. Who knows who was right?

Amanda had started to cry a little. I felt bad for bringing it up, as I’d known I would.

“I don’t care how it happened,” she said. “I just wish it didn’t happen.”

She had the right idea, of course. I put my arm around her kind of awkwardly, and she put hers around my neck and squeezed really hard, still sobbing. I almost joined in, even though she was doing enough crying for both of us. All the reasoning and investigating in the world were never going to bring him back. Part of me still wanted everything to make sense, but the biggest part of me realized that Amanda was right and that that was an impossibly high standard.

I S TH E R E LATION S H I P STI LL I MAG I NARY

I F YOU CAN MAKE EAC H OTH E R C RY?

On Saturday afternoon, the day after the Festival of Lights, I walked into the kitchen to find my mom waiting for me with that familiar family-discussion look on her face. Little Big Tom wasn’t there, though, which was pretty weird: he lives for family discussions. I expected we were going to be talking about psychiatry and suicide and sports, that sort of thing, and I braced myself. But she wasn’t looking all that disturbed or crazy—she was more like bemusedly exasperated, if I read her body language correctly. You never could tell with her, though.

“I’ve been on the phone with Marjorie Blakeney all morning,” she said. “Kyrsten was very upset by your little poetry booklet. Everyone has been teasing her. She locked her-263