Frank Portman - King Dork

“Rock and roll,” and sighed deeply.

I’m a bit rough on Little Big Tom, I know, but I’m nothing compared to Amanda. She can hardly bear to be in the same room with him, and she says even less to him than I do.

That time he said “nice hand,” for example? Her reaction was to pick up the half-finished hand, drop it in the garbage, and walk out of the room without a word. I don’t know if it hurt his feelings quite as much as she was hoping it would, but he sure didn’t enjoy it, if the strained tone of his whispered

“Rock and roll” was any indication.

We had just reached “7 Screaming Diz-busters” on Tyranny and Mutation and things had begun to turn around for the Allies in “War in the Pacific” when Little Big Tom stuck his head through the door and said “Chow time!” What he meant was that he had fixed some vegetarian slop with lentils and bean-curd lumps and weird-tasting fake cheese, and that we were welcome to have a crack at choking some of it down. So Sam Hellerman hightailed it out of there.

Lucky bastard.

28

TH E B IG MAR B LE F I LI NG CAB I N ET

My family goes to the cemetery to visit my dad’s grave every year on September 6, which is the anniversary of his death.

This year, it happened to fall on Labor Day, so we were off school.

We call it a grave, but it’s really this big building on the cemetery grounds with stacks and stacks of dead people in drawers, like a big marble filing cabinet. My dad is in powder form in a little vase inside one of the sealed filing cabinet drawers. It says “Charles Evan Henderson” and “Peace” on the outside of his drawer. There’s also the seal of the Santa Carla Police Department, and a little cup you can put flowers in.

As usual, my mom put flowers in the cup, and we all stood there looking at the cup with the flowers on the filing cabinet drawer. It always feels awkward. There’s nothing to say. We just stand in a clump, looking up. My mom and Amanda cry, quietly. I feel sad. But for some reason it doesn’t make me cry. There may be something wrong with me there.

My mom gets mad at me for not crying, like it shows that I don’t care or wish to show respect. It’s not like that. I got in big trouble once for bringing a book with me on one of these visits. It wasn’t even on purpose. I just automatically take whatever book I’m reading with me everywhere I go without thinking. But it really hurt her feelings and she wouldn’t speak to me for two weeks after that.

When I get nervous or worried about something, I do this weird thing with my ears. They start to itch way on the inside and I have this urge to move them back and forth on the outside, trying to relieve the itch. My jaw gets involved also. It can make my whole face look funny and kind of 29

warped and disturbing; plus my glasses go a little crooked.

Once I start doing it, I can never stop it on purpose. If it stops on its own, because I get distracted or just calm down, and I notice that it has stopped, I’ll be relieved for a second, but that will remind me about it and I’ll start doing it again. The more I try to control it, the more out of control it gets. It’s a real problem.

Standing by my dad’s grave with my mom and Amanda is the classic situation for the ear thing. I just get more and more nervous and twitchy. This year, my ears were going like crazy, maybe even more than usual. I was drenched with sweat, too. I tried biting the inside of my cheek really hard to give myself some other irritant to focus on. That sometimes works, but this time I couldn’t bite hard enough to have an impact, even though I could taste a lot of blood in my mouth.

As I stood there, not exactly trying to cry but imagining how much of a relief it might be if for some reason I did, I couldn’t help thinking of Mr. Teone’s mockery. Hi, I thought sarcastically in the general direction of my dad’s drawer. The big marble filing cabinet is the one place I never feel like my dad can hear me talking, though. It just feels empty and lonely and stressful. Definitely not my favorite place.

WE ALL DI E D I N A P LAN E C RAS H

I’m regretting how sloppy I’ve been with my notebooks, now that I’m trying to go back and remember exactly when everything happened. I mean, I write down all our bands, which ends up being a kind of record of events, but I hardly ever put any dates in there, and even though it was only a few months ago, the timeline seems a little fuzzy. My best recollection is 30

that it was around the middle of September, three weeks or so into the school year, when the Baby Batter Weeks officially ended. And when Sam Hellerman came up with a strange and unexpected proposition.

The band broke up in the customary way. That is, one day, when I met Sam Hellerman at the corner of Crestview and Hillmont Avenue on my way to school as usual, he started to whistle the first line of “Sweet Home Alabama.”

Which told me that he wanted to change the name of the band again. That’s because we had our own words to that line: “We all died in a plane crash,” which was how all our bands ended. I could see his point. Baby Batter had been a great band, but it was time to move on.

We worked out the details of the new band on the way to school. The Plasma Nukes.

Logo: an intercontinental ballistic missile with a broken-in-half heart dripping blood on the side. “Plasma” super-imposed in fancy cursive and “Nukes” underneath in retro computer bubble writing.

Credits:

Guitar: Lithium Dan

Bass and Calligraphy: Little Pink Sambo

Vox: The Worm

Machine-gun Drums: TBA

First Album: Feelin’ Free with the Plasma Nukes.

Album cover: a woman’s high-heel shoe on a chessboard, with blood dripping out of it (front). Band members’ heads in jars on shelf (back).

I was Lithium Dan and I played in a cage. Little Pink Sambo was Sam Hellerman. And we just made up the lead vocalist. The drummer was imaginary, too, but for the record, TBA is pronounced like tuba.

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* * *

As for Sam Hellerman’s bizarre proposition, it went a little like this:

“There’s . . . this . . . this . . . sort of party . . . um . . . thing I heard about,” he said.

Pause. “Really?”

“Wanna go?”

I gave him a “yeah, right” look. Then I realized he was serious. I stared at him. Sam Hellerman and I weren’t the kind of guys who got invited to parties. The last party I had attended had had cake and streamers and a magician-clown. I was five. And I was pretty sure that if I ever did go to a high school party I wouldn’t be any more comfortable than I was then. But it was immaterial because there was more chance of gumdrops falling from the sky and all God’s crystal unicorns overthrowing the government and dancing on the White House lawn than there was of anyone at Hillmont High letting me or Sam Hellerman into any of their precious parties. It just wasn’t gonna happen.

But Sam Hellerman had some old friends who’d gone from McKinley Intermediate to CHS rather than Hillmont.

Maybe they hadn’t grasped how risky it would be to be seen hanging around with him. Or maybe, for some bizarre reason, they didn’t care all that much. They do things differently in Clearview. It’s like a whole other culture.

At any rate, Sam Hellerman was planning to attend this party, which was being held in a couple of weeks at the house of some CHS kid whose parents were going to be out of town. I could come along, too, if I wanted. In fact, he was kind of insistent. He really wanted me to go. I had a “let’s play it by ear” attitude, but he was having none of that: he wanted a solid commitment.

“So,” he said, “you’re definitely coming, right?”

32

It’s strange to think what a different type of sophomore year I would have ended up having if I had refused, as I almost did, or if, in the event, I had tried to wiggle out of it in some way, which would have been very much in character for me. But for some reason, I said okay. He made me promise to honor that okay, too. I gave him a look but agreed.