Frank Portman - King Dork

I picked up a pen, intending to underline a suitably bizarre section, and maybe compose an off-the-wall message in code based upon it. I found, however, that the book was all marked up already. There was one underlined passage, near the beginning, that said that five-sided objects were evil and proposed measuring the Pentagon to figure out how many hippies it would take to make it less evil by forming a big, smelly circle around it. And in the margin someone, presumably a young, idealistic, right-on Little Big Tom, had pa-thetically written “Yes!” I kid you not. Well, there was nothing I could add—you can’t improve on perfection. I put my pen down, folded up the “killed by Tit?” printout, and placed it in 321

the book between the pages containing this Deep Thought.

That oughta confuse the hell out of them, I thought with in-calculable satisfaction. All we had to do now was wait.

I glanced over at Sam Hellerman, sleeping peacefully in the corner. Then I got up and went down to the basement and put the book near the bottom of one of the book boxes, feeling as though I were burying the sixties. Even though I guess I really wasn’t.

G R EAT B O OK, C HANG E D MY LI F E, YOU

KNOW

It’s rather ironic, wouldn’t you say, that things ended up arranging themselves so that I spent a considerable chunk of my sophomore year carrying around a copy of The Catcher in the Rye everywhere I went? In a sense, I suppose you could even say that The Catcher in the Rye changed my life, though I’m not about to commemorate that fact by joining a cult or anything.

It set in motion a process by which I learned so much about some stuff that I ended up not knowing anything at all about it. And it indirectly influenced the fact that my rock band accidentally brought down a perverted high school sexploita-tion empire and freed the little children from the devil-head predations of an evil associate principal. And it happened to coincide with my clumsy venture from pure fantasy to impure reality in the girl arena. Not bad for a sucky book you read only to suck up to teachers holding a gun to your head.

Look, it’s not even that bad of a book. I admit it. I can feel sorry for myself while pretending to be Holden Caulfield. I can. And I can see why the powers that be have decided to adopt it as their semiofficial alterna-bible. Things were really, really bad in the sixties. You were always getting kicked out 322

of your prep school, or getting into fights at your prep school, or getting marooned on deserted islands on the way to your fancy English boarding school. And when you finally got off the island, your “old man” was always on your “case,” and Vietnam just drove you crazy, plus you were constantly high on drugs and out of touch with reality and it was sometimes a little more difficult than it should have been to get everyone to admit how much better you were than everybody else.

It was rough. I get it. I really get it. Up with Holden. I’d have probably been the same way.

In the end, though, the attempt to save the world by forcing people to read The Catcher in the Rye and dressing casually and supporting public television and putting bumper stickers on Volvos and eating only weird expensive food and separat-ing your cans and bottles and doing tai chi and going to the farmer’s market and pronouncing Spanish words with a cartoon-character accent and calling actresses actors and making up your own religion and so forth—well, the world refused to be saved that way. Big surprise. On the other hand, no one could ever mistake Hillmont High School for a prep school, so at least you accomplished that. I mean, calling it a school involves the kind of generosity of spirit that in other circumstances might get you the Nobel Peace Prize nomina-tion or something. You stuck it to the old man, killed half of your brain cells, and dumbed down the educational system: you are the greatest generation.

Before all that character arc stuff happened, I might have been able to sing “all we are saying is make high school a little less sadistic” with a little more enthusiasm. Compared to Hillmont High School, Holden Caulfield’s prep school troubles seem like a sort of heaven on earth. But honestly, I’ve got my mind on other things. Girls and rock and roll, I mean.

Everything else is trivia.

323

OUTRO

How we live now:

Christmas break. Band practice. We Have Eaten All the Cake, me on guitar/vox, Spam L. Ermine on bass and domestic hygiene, Shinefield on drums, first album Slut Heaven.

Working on: “You Look Good on Drugs.”

Little Big Tom enters, tilts his head to one side, raises one eyebrow, does a quick, shallow knee bend, tilts his head to the other side, raises the phone he is carrying above his head, and brings it down, straightening his arm in one fluid motion, as though it’s a remote and he’s changing the channel. Or a phaser on stun.

“There a rock star in the house?”

I take the phone. “Oh, thank God,” I say, when I realize it is Celeste “Fiona” Fletcher. Because we’ve started saying that whenever we call each other.

Fake Fiona: “Trombone!”

Amanda: “Get off the phone. Get off the phone. Get off the phone.”

Mom: just about halfway visible from a certain angle, seated at the dining room table at the end of the hall in a cloud of cigarette smoke, staring into her drink. Looking sad and beautiful.

Little Big Tom, sighing: “Rock and roll . . .”

Sam Hellerman: staring ahead inscrutably, fingering bass strings. Saying nothing.

325

bandography

( A U G U S T – D E C E M B E R )

1. Easter Monday

2. Baby Batter

guitar: Guitar Guy

base and scientology: Sam Hellerman

third album: Odd and Even Number

3. The Plasma Nukes

guitar: Lithium Dan

bass and calligraphy: Little Pink Sambo

vox: The Worm

machine-gun drums: TBA

first album: Feelin’ Free with the Plasma Nukes 4. Tennis with Guitars

lead axe: Love Love

bass and rat-catching: The Prophet Samuel vocals, keys, bumping, grinding: Li’l Miss Debbie drummer: Beat-Beat

first album: Amphetamine Low

cover: white with the album title in tiny black type on the back. The band name does not appear anywhere on the outside packaging.

second album: Phantasmagoria, Gloria photo: a police dog licks a broken doll’s face.

327

5. Helmet Boy

guitar: Moe

bass and procrastination: Sambiguity

first album: Helmet Boy II

6. Liquid Malice

7. The Underpants Machine

guitar: Super-Moe

bass and bottle rockets: Sam Sam the Piper’s Son first album: We Will Bury You

8. The Stoned Marmadukes

guitar: Moe “Fingers” Henderson

bass and paleontology: Mr. Sam Hellerman first album: Right Lane Must Exit

9. Ray Bradbury’s Love-Camel

guitar: Moe-Moe

bass and calisthenics: Scammy Sammy

first album: Prepare to Die

10. Silent Nightmare

guitar: The Lord of Electricity

bass and gynecology: Samson

first album: Feel Me Fall

11. The Medieval Ages

guitar: St. Moe

bass and bodywork: Samber Waves of Grain first album: That Stupid Pope

328

12. The Sadly Mistaken

guitar: Moe Vittles

bass and landscaping: Sam “Noxious” Fumes first album: Kill the Boy Wonder

13. Oxford English

guitar: Moe Bilalabama

bass and lollygagging: Sam “the Cat” Hellerman first album: What Part of Suck Don’t You Understand?

14. Some Delicious Sky, aka SDS

treble and vocals: Squealie

thick bottom and industrial arts:

Sambidextrous