Frank Portman - King Dork

I’ll say one thing: Shinefield was a true fan. He couldn’t stop talking about the Chi-Mos and the Festival of Lights and the zine. He had started to call me Chi-Bro. I kid you not.

The girls didn’t pay too much attention to the band talk, but even they said some nice things, too. I mean, it was ridiculous. We had sucked, probably worse than any band that had ever played at any high school ever. But I guess running the associate principal out of town, even accidentally, counts for a lot.

Just being in a band counts, too. I’m convinced of that. By my calculations, girls find you around fifteen percent more attractive and worth their attention if you’re in a band than they do if you’re not. It works with subnormal/drama girls, anyway. And apparently, in a different way, of course, it can even work with your own ordinarily ill-tempered sister; it doesn’t appear to have much effect on your mom, though.

Fifteen percent may not sound like much, but it feels quite substantial when you start the game at close to zero.

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ventually they left, and Sam Hellerman gave me a “we’ll talk later” look as he followed Celeste Fletcher’s ass past the curtain and out the door. I tore open the first envelope.

It contained $240, my share of the proceeds from the song zine. On the twenty-dollar bill on top of the stack, he had written “Keep making me money, kid.” Which was from some movie, I’m pretty sure. Anyhow, it was kind of funny.

More money than I had ever had at one time. Liquid assets.

Which is not a bad band name if you think about it. Hey, we’re the Liquid Assets, and this one’s called “Pheromone City. . . .”

I would have been happy if the other envelope had contained more money, but it was a lot thinner, and I could tell by feeling it that inside were a few sheets of folded paper.

Documents, information of some kind. I slid my thumb through the flap.

STI LL NOT D ON E LOVI NG YOU, MAMA

Before I got a chance to see what was in Sam Hellerman’s second envelope, I heard Mr. Aquino begin to moan, and then to wheeze. I hurriedly shoved both envelopes back under my pillow. To my surprise, Celeste Fletcher came back in.

“They’re getting the car,” she said. “I was hoping I could get your autograph.”

I was surprised, to say the least. Or maybe it was here, rather than before, like I said, that I made the calculation that girls like you fifteen percent more when you’re in a band. Or no, it was right after that, when she handed me a Sharpie, and then, instead of offering the zine or a piece of paper for me to sign like I had expected, leaned over and pulled her shirt 287

down. She wanted me to sign her tits. I had heard of this before, but come on: how many ordinary guys in lousy high school rock bands ever land in this situation, let alone King Dork? It’s not supposed to happen. You know, thinking about it, it’s really more like at least twenty-five percent. What was I thinking? Maybe more like forty-four percent, actually. Give or take.

She was pretty demure and tasteful about it, but she also did it smoothly, as though she’d done it many times before. I mean, she pulled the neck of her scoopy T-shirt down and to the left but not low enough to expose the nipple, and simultaneously pushed the breast up from below with her palm, so that the top of it bulged out and up. My guess is that that’s not the sort of thing you do well the first time you try it. I don’t know if you can picture it, but trust me: it looked fucking amazing.

“Certainly,” I said, trying to act as though I had done this many times as well, though my shaking hands probably gave me away. I hadn’t touched too many breasts, you know. This was only number four, by my calculations.

So I leaned forward and wrote in a spidery hand: “Best wishes, Thomas Charles Henderson.”

She said thanks. But as she was turning to leave, she pulled her top out and glanced down and said, haltingly,

“Trombone Chablis Ampersand?” I guess my handwriting was even shakier than I thought. They didn’t cover breast autographs in third-grade penmanship, you see, though maybe they should have.

I explained that that was my real name, well, pretty close, anyway. Clearly, though, she knew me as Chi-Mo, and wanted my autograph because I was one of the Chi-Mos, and hey, I might as well face it, I was as much Chi-Mo as I was anything else. She wanted a Chi-Mo autograph, and who was I to deny 288

her? So she came back around with the unsheathed Sharpie and pulled her shirt down and pushed the other breast so that most of its northern hemisphere bulged out and up. This time I wrote, much more carefully: “Nice breast. CM.” Which made her laugh and seemed to please her well enough.

“Thanks,” she said.

“No problem,” I said. “But I’m not sure how long we’ll keep that name. What do you think of Sentient Beard?” (Me on guitar, Samerica the Beautiful on bass and upholstery, first album Off the Charts—Way Off. )

“Well, it’s better than the Stoned Mamelukes.”

I was on drugs, so I was a little slow, but not so slow that it didn’t click. I could think of only one way she would have known about the Stoned Marmadukes. I realize now that there may have in fact been other ways, especially if she had spent time hanging around with Sam Hellerman. But her reaction gave it away: she realized she had slipped up, and even made a kind of half-motion to cover her mouth, almost as though to stuff the words back in. It looked kind of melodramatic and theatrical, and only halfway unintentionally so, which was familiar, too. And that’s what clinched it, pretty much. Fiona. Celeste Fletcher was fake Fiona. Note the nice, Schtuppified deformation of Marmadukes, which actually was a vast improvement, and which was another clincher: that’s exactly the kind of joke the Fiona of my dim memory would have made while leaving you guessing as to whether it had been intentional or not. Or wait, it was me, not her, who would make that kind of joke; but those were jokes she could get, so presumably she could make them as well. So it wasn’t breast number four after all. We were back to breast number one, with whose nipple I had spent so many happy moments in my innocent youth.

Wait. Really? She totally didn’t look like Fiona, even 289

adjusting for the lack of the Fiona costume. Fantasy and reality sure can get in the way of each other, can’t they?

When people disguise themselves as other people in movies and no one in the movie is supposed to realize it, you usually don’t believe it for a minute. In real life, though, it’s not so easy to figure stuff out. I had only seen the original fake Fiona once, in the dark and while a little buzzed, and I hadn’t even known Celeste Fletcher or seen her up close at the time.

Plus, I had seen the Fiona’d-out Celeste Fletcher mostly from the front, whereas up till now, I’d only examined Celeste Fletcher playing herself from Sam Hellerman’s vantage point—that is, from behind. Even without the costume, and as a general rule, that’s a totally different look for a lady. Celeste Fletcher’s breasts even felt different from how I had remembered Fiona’s breasts feeling—but I had had a different focus at that time. I mean, I hadn’t had to worry about keeping my handwriting neat and steady. Not to get too philosophical on you here, but in different contexts, and depending on what you’re doing, the same rack can be totally different worlds.

Anyway, God help ’em if they ever try to make a movie out of this, with the same sexy teenaged actress playing both fake Fiona and Celeste Fletcher in different costumes and makeup. It’ll be hard to pull off in movie form. But it worked in real life. I swear to God.

Anyway, there I was at Mercy Hospital in Santa Carla, on the other side of the curtain from the moaning Mr. Aquino, around ninety percent convinced that I was staring at the girl of my dreams, who just happened to have my name scribbled all over her breasts in black Sharpie. What would you have done?