Frank Portman - King Dork

“Later” and hung up.

Life feels a little easier when you don’t have to make your own schedule. I didn’t have to worry about calling Deanna Schumacher till Thursday, which was a relief. Wednesday, Celeste Fletcher’s “safe” day, was right around the corner, though. I was due to be released Thursday, so that meant I’d have to call from the pay phone in the hall. Even though I didn’t find calling Celeste Fletcher quite as scary as calling Deanna Schumacher, I was still pretty nervous about it.

Maybe you never get used to calling girls on the phone.

I stalled and avoided it for a while, but eventually I got up the nerve to go out to the hall and call from the pay phone.

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“Oh, thank God!” she said, when she realized it was me.

I kid you not. “Oh, thank God.” Could anyone be so happy to hear from me that they would spontaneously burst into a prayer of thanks? Sounds dubious, I know. She said she hadn’t been sure I would call her, showing just how little she really understood me and what I was all about. That was okay—I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of her being able to understand me that easily anyway.

Our phone conversation was quite long, considering that my half of it was on a pay phone in the hallway of a hospital floor surrounded by angry fellow convalescents who thought I was taking too long and didn’t much like what they were hearing me say. It resembled the phone-side scene at the Henderson-Tucci household a bit, in other words, and it was not the first time I’d noted similarities between my house and a sanitarium, I can tell you that.

I knew there was one thing we would have to cover eventually, so I got it out of the way near the beginning. I assured her I wasn’t going to tell anyone about us or our activities, past, present, or (and here I knew I was taking an optimistic leap) future. We’d just pretend we hardly knew each other.

Okay? She sounded relieved that she didn’t have to figure out a way to bring it up, as I’d known she would.

“Because it would be really bad if my boyfriend found out,” she said.

I took a stab. “Shinefield?”

“Him too.” She laughed, a little nervously maybe. I wasn’t sure who her actual real official boyfriend was, but it seemed safest just to adopt a blanket policy of nondisclosure that would cover him along with everyone else. Make things simpler. How had she explained the smudged breastographs, I wondered? Well, I was sure she had it all figured out. She had 300

that air. “And, um, you might not want to mention anything to Sam, either.”

Way ahead of you, babe. Not that I thought she was still messing around with Sam Hellerman, too. Did I? Was she?

She was a busy girl, but I sincerely hoped not.

“Or Yasmynne.”

Okay, this was getting weird. But I didn’t want to kill the

“Oh, thank God” vibe, so I let it slide. “Don’t worry, Fiona.

No one will find out.”

“Stop calling me Fiona,” she said.

“Okay, if you stop calling me Trombone.” Because she had started to call me Trombone somewhere during the conversation. But that was a deal she couldn’t or wouldn’t make, so I guess Fiona was back on the menu in at least a limited way. Plus, for obvious reasons the word “trombone” would now forever bring to mind her breasts, or one of them, anyway. So I suddenly found I kind of liked hearing the word

“trombone.”

With the nondisclosure agreement out of the way, the rest went pretty well.

“For the record,” she said, “I never thought you belonged on the dude chart.”

Dude chart? Now, that was hard to interpret. In a variety of ways, that statement went against everything I had understood about Dud Chart, the Sisterhood, and Celeste Fletcher’s role in the whole thing. Or at least, it seemed to give the game slightly different implications. Had Sam Hellerman gotten it a bit wrong, or contrived that I should get it a bit wrong? But wait: why didn’t I belong on it, if it was a “dude chart” rather than a “dud chart”? What was she trying to say? Who fucking knows? Nevertheless, even though I didn’t quite understand it, it was just about the nicest thing 301

anyone had ever said to me. I think. So I said thanks and left it at that. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

On the other hand, “dude chart” may just have been a playful mispronunciation. See, one thing I learned from the conversation really blew me away—and this is so typical of me it’s not even funny: Celeste Fletcher was actually in Mr.

Schtuppe’s English class, and was something of a champion mispronouncer in her own right. I had been too devil-head oblivious even to notice. So while I was obsessing over the mystery girl, the mystery girl had been right under my nose, and we had been reading about Jane Gallagher and mispronouncing the same words from Catcher in the Rye all along without my realizing it. Hell God damn. So that’s why, when it was finally time to wrap it up, I asked her how things were in Old Nocturnal Emission Hills.

“Libidinous,” she said, but she pronounced it so it rhymed with “shyness.” She was the real deal. A slan chick with a great rack, a devious nature, and a powerful vocabulary. Not bad at all. I think I’m in love, I thought, whatever I might have meant by that.

ALWAYS TH E QU I ET ON E S

In movies and books there’s this thing called a character arc, where the main guy is supposed to change and grow and become a better person and learn something about himself.

Essentially, there’s supposed to be this part right at the end where he says: “And as for me, well, I learned the most valuable lesson of all.” Now, if I were the main guy in a movie, I’d have the most retarded character arc anyone ever heard of. I didn’t learn anything. What’s the opposite of learning something? I mean, I knew stuff at the beginning that I don’t know 302

anymore. Bits of my life simply disappeared. I’m more confused than I ever was before, and that’s really saying something.

But if you’re expecting that touchy-feely “you have touched me, I have grown” character arc stuff, here it is.

Because, well, as for me, I have learned the most valuable lesson of all.

As I originally described the King Dork card game, a player automatically loses if he gets a king in his hand. Now I see that it’s a little more complicated. You can bluff and fake your way out of getting kicked out of the game. In other words, if you play in such a way that no one knows you have any kings, you stay in. I still need to work out the details, because somehow there also has to be a way that two or more players, like, say, Deanna Schumacher and Celeste Fletcher, can hold the same king card at the same time without realizing it. And maybe some way for the queens to masquerade as each other or something. Anyway, I don’t know how you win. Maybe no one ever wins, and you just keep accumulat-ing cards and bluffing about them till everyone dies and is forgotten.

I don’t know how it is if you’re a normal guy with one special girl who is your official girlfriend in the approving sight of God and country. Nice work if you can get it, but it’s just not available to everyone. So this only applies if you’re the schlumpy King Dork type whom girls don’t tend to want to associate with in public if they can help it. But here it is, the lesson:

If you’re in a band, even an extremely sucky band, girls, even semihot ones like Celeste Fletcher and Deanna Schumacher, will totally mess around with you and give you blow jobs and so forth, provided you can assure them that no one will ever find out about it. Start a band. Or go around 303

saying you’re in a band, which is, let’s face it, pretty much the same thing. The quality of your life can only improve.