Frank Portman - King Dork

Mr. Teone had left for lunch on Monday and never came back. After he had been missing for two days, they entered his house to investigate and found—

Well, let me describe how I first heard about it, in a fuzzy hospital conversation with Sam Hellerman. He had just told me about the mysterious disappearance of Mr. Teone and about how the cops had searched his house. Then he fell silent, lost in thought.

“What’s on your mind, Hellerman?” I said, after a while.

“Oh. I was just thinking about whether Budgie really was a part of the new wave of British heavy metal.”

“Really?” I said. What the hell was he talking about? Of course Budgie was a part of the new wave of British heavy 277

metal. The question was, what were we doing talking about who may or may not have been a part of the NWOBHM at a time like this? “Now, in the case of Ethel the Frog . . . ,” he began. He was just toying with me, though.

“I suppose you want to hear about Tit’s Satanic Empire?”

Which of course, as I immediately realized, was exactly what I wanted to hear about, though I hadn’t been able to find the words.

What the police had found at Mr. Teone’s house was evidence of this high school–oriented pornography operation.

Much of it had been removed or destroyed, but what was left supposedly included a large number of videos of Hillmont High School students from the past ten years, ramoning each other like crazy and doing God only knows what else.

As usual, Sam Hellerman seemed to know more about the situation, especially at that early stage, than the newspapers, the TV, or anyone else. But word got around pretty quickly, even though the details were murky. As always seems to happen whenever anything scandalous occurs in Hillmont, a group of parents and community leaders had decided that it all had to do with a powerful Satanic cult. Satanists, they believed, were turning Hillmont teens into mixed-up zombies and using them in their pornographic rituals. Parents were already taking their kids to be deprogrammed and hypnotized by therapists who specialized in recovering buried memories of Satanist porn-abuse. Mr. Teone had been smart to skip town; by the end of the week, there would be enough recovered-memory evidence to convict him several times over even without the videotapes. Now, I’d be the last person to deny a Teone-Satan resemblance, but that part of it seemed pretty far-fetched to me. I mean, a real Satanic conspiracy could probably have come up with someone better than Mr.

Teone to handle the teen porn angle.

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Anyway, Mr. Teone had been selling and trading the pictures and videos to similar operations overseas, which made it a very serious offense. His method appeared to be to recruit accomplices from within the student body, who would help to sign up friends and younger siblings to act in the videos; then, when the accomplices had graduated, the younger kids would “move up” and become the recruiters. He managed to keep everybody on board through a combination of rewards, punishments, perks, and intimidation; supposedly he even had a profit-sharing scheme for the “senior” student associates. They had really been raking it in, too, by all accounts. I thought of Mr. Teone’s afterschool programs—it sure gave a new meaning to the word “gifted,” not to mention “talented.”

Once again, I found myself wondering whether Sam Hellerman knew even more than he was telling about the whole situation. It wouldn’t have surprised me one bit.

The subject of who had been involved was of course a big topic of conversation at school. The Hillmont student body was now divided into two groups: those who desperately wanted to see those tapes and those who claimed they wanted to see the tapes but were secretly hoping the tapes would never leak out because they were in some of them. I also had an inkling of which of the two groups Kyrsten Blakeney probably belonged to, and I felt a bit sad for her.

And also just a bit interested, though I know this doesn’t reflect particularly well on me, in viewing her tapes, just for my own personal information.

I glanced up at Sam Hellerman, and I knew that if anyone could manage to get hold of them, he could, and I was pretty sure he was thinking something similar. If he didn’t already have a complete set, numbered and cross-referenced and neatly displayed in a little cabinet over at Hellerman Manor. You never knew with that guy.

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I suddenly had a weird thought. What if Mr. Teone and company had wanted to make a “Hot Girls Do Geeks” video series for the specialized European fetish market? It wouldn’t have been hard to do with the cooperation of certain key people and some hidden cameras and so forth.

So I asked: “Was Dud Chart part of Tit’s Satanic Empire, too?”

Sam Hellerman looked startled and kind of peeved, as he usually did when the subject of Dud Chart came up.

“Oh, no,” he said. “No—they had nothing to do with each other.”

I wasn’t totally sure I believed him, though. I never am.

According to Sam Hellerman, one of Mr. Teone’s most trusted minions had been Matt Lynch, who had started at the bottom, recruited by his older brother, and had gradually moved up in the organization. I hated to admit it, but Matt Lynch’s promotion to Hillmont High Satanic Pornography Monitor (after his brother had graduated) had occurred around the time I had adopted my gun-freak strategy of Matt Lynch deterrence. Maybe he hadn’t been fazed by the gun stuff after all, as I had thought, but had just had other things on his mind by that point. All I knew was, if I had endured Little Big Tom’s devil-head sanctimony and worn that blessed army coat through the whole hot spring and summer of ninth grade for nothing, I was pissed.

It wasn’t too hard to figure out what had happened in the aftermath of the Chi-Mos performance. Mr. Teone had jumped to the conclusion that the name “Chi-Mo” was a reference to him and his questionable activities. The content of some of the songs seemed to confirm his suspicions. If he had just ignored it, the matter would certainly have gone away and no one would ever have known. But he had read the 280

band’s performance and the zine as a threat to him. In those circumstances, my note about “materials among my deceased father’s effects” must have seemed a bit like a blackmail message, implying, perhaps, that my dad had had some information on him that I had had access to. I never did figure out what my dad had been working on when he had been killed, but it was just conceivable that it might have had something to do with his old friend Tit. Even if it didn’t, though, Mr.

Teone’s association with my dad went back quite a long way, and it was likely that CEH had known some potentially damaging information that I theoretically could have uncovered.

Mr. Teone had tried to intimidate me in the boys’ bathroom a couple of times, and had maybe even organized the brass instrument attack to drive the message home, but the note had pushed him over the edge and he decided to skip town rather than risk being caught. He was still missing. The speculation was that he had left the country, or that he was being hidden in a secret lair by his fellow porn-Satanists.

At any rate, there went any possibility of Uncle Tony’s big surprise party or an illuminating heart-to-heart at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway. Maybe I wasn’t descended from kings after all. Rats.

It was all over the papers and the news, of course. There was, however, no mention as yet of the fact that the chain of events that had exposed and toppled Tit’s Satanic Empire had begun with the performance of a sucky high school rock band. Nor was it noted that Mr. Teone’s flight had been sparked by his narcissistic assumption that a tenth grader’s derogatory nickname could only be a veiled reference to him, rather than the result of a faulty aptitude test that equated introversion, social anxiety, and depression with a spiritual vocation. It was quite a story, though. Sam Hellerman was already planning how, once we had a recording of Teone songs 281