Frank Portman - King Dork

Sam Hellerman is as low as I am on the high school social totem pole, which is as low as you can get if you can go to the bathroom by yourself and don’t need machinery to get from one place to another. But it’s worse for him, in a way, because until high school he actually had a sort of social life.

I can merely fantasize about what I might be missing. He has experienced it firsthand.

What I mean is, he had quite a few friends in junior high, and he had enough status that he could theoretically walk into a room without everybody laughing or throwing things at him or threatening to kick his ass and so on. Theoretically.

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I mean, he could hang out with normal people and be reasonably certain that the whole thing wasn’t part of somebody’s master plan that would end up with the joke being on him.

And he was just at the level where he could talk to a girl or even ask a girl to “go” with him and the very idea wouldn’t automatically have struck everyone as totally outrageous and hilarious.

In fact, he even had a sort of girlfriend for a brief time, Serenah Tillotsen. They used to smoke and make out behind the scout house sometimes, until she suddenly started dressing sexier and realized that dumping Sam Hellerman would be more of a move up in the world than not dumping Sam Hellerman. That sucked, but all in all he still had it pretty good.

In high school, though, everyone suddenly seemed to realize that Sam Hellerman probably wasn’t going to grow any taller, and had kind of weird hair and a funny walk, and really didn’t have anything to offer that couldn’t be acquired much more cheaply and efficiently from someone else. The market, which had once rewarded him slightly for being the same height as the average eighth grader, had now determined that his services were needed elsewhere, and so he ended up at the bottom of the totem pole and at my house every now and then palming Vicodins and swallowing them with some bourbon from Carol’s entertaining area.

In teen movies, there is often a guy like Sam Hellerman who is a minor but important member of the “in” group. A glasses-wearing cutup, kind of outrageous, whose sarcastic comments and goofy antics are accepted and appreciated by the others in the group, though they tend to receive his bits of dialogue with a degree of eye-rolling. Sure, he’s the second one to get his chest ripped open by the masked psycho with 38

the garden implement (right after the sluttiest girl in the group has her throat slit while starting to take her clothes off ). But he had his moment.

That’s how it was for Sam Hellerman. His moment was over.

So I met Sam Hellerman at the oak tree, and we walked to my house. He assembled his materials, consumed them, came into my room, and lay down on the floor. I let him slip into the void, and put on Quadrophenia. Even though Sam Hellerman was there, after a fashion, I was alone with my thoughts.

After Quadrophenia, I put on The Who by Numbers and thought rather intently about the lyrics to “Slip Kid.” I don’t want to take any Vicodin for the same reason that I try never to sit with my back to a door.

M S. RAM B O

PE had started with Track, which basically means you go around the track without stopping for the whole period.

You’re supposed to run most of the time, though you can take periodic breaks where you walk till you’re ready to start running again. Of course, Sam Hellerman and I took full advantage of this loophole and walked most of the time, talking about this and that, like, say, whether the Count Bishops or Slade had had more influence on the sound of the first wave of British punk rock. Every now and then, Mr. Donnelly would notice and would yell something like “Come on, girls!

Stop playing with your lip gloss!” By which he meant, though it’s not all that easy to explain why he chose those particular words, that we were walking too much and that he wanted 39

to see some “hustle.” We would then jog sarcastically for a few minutes till his attention turned elsewhere, and then resume our discussion at a more leisurely pace.

After the Track segment was over, near the end of the Plasma Nukes week, we moved on to Tennis. Tennis is kind of a riot. You’re supposed to hit the ball with the racket so that it lands in the space between the white lines on the other side of the net and bounces. Then you hit it back if it somehow manages to get hit back in your direction in such a way that it lands and bounces in the space between the white lines on your side of the net.

No one is very good at this. But I have as much chance of performing this operation as a jar of wet gravel would have of calculating pi to a hundred places.

Sam Hellerman is the same way.

So here’s our Tennis technique. We hit the ball as hard as we can so it flies over the fence and lands in the bushes outside the tennis area. Then we spend the rest of the period

“looking for the ball.”

One day we were goofing off, holding the tennis rackets like guitars and practicing duckwalks and windmills and scis-sor jumps. I suck at this also, of course, but Sam Hellerman is surprisingly good.

The PE teacher in charge of tennis-related activities is named Ms. Rimbaud, which is pronounced Miz Rambo. She looks a little like a frog. If she were actually a frog, she would be highly prized as a source of arrow poison by the natives of South America because of her rich red color.

She noticed our arena-rock tennis-racket antics and ran over to confront us. I don’t think I had ever seen a human face turn quite that vibrant a shade of red.

“How would you like it,” she said, “if we all came out here and started playing tennis with guitars?”

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New band name: T * * *

ennis with Guitars

Logo: name printed phonetically as from a dictionary Love Love: lead axe

The Prophet Samuel: bass and rat-catching Li’l Miss Debbie: vocals, keys, bumping, grinding First Album: Amphetamine Low. Cover is 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. Cover photo: a police dog licks a broken doll’s face.

Band wears white shorts, shirts, and sweater vests, except for Li’l Miss Debbie, the girl singer. She wears a tiny nurse’s uniform with big black boots. Instead of guitar solos, I use my guitar to hit tennis balls into the crowd. With a delay on it, this makes a really cool sound when the ball bounces off the strings.

Debbie and the Prophet Samuel are married but have an open polyamorous relationship. Band is on semipermanent hiatus because I’m always in Europe getting my blood changed.

Oh, and the drummer is a drum machine called Beat-Beat. Because we kind of had to face the fact that we probably never would end up finding a drummer.

TH E ACC I DE NT

My mom tends to refer to my dad’s death as “the accident.”

It’s true in a way, since that’s what you call it when one car crashes into another car, but it’s also misleading.

I bought into the idea that he had been killed in an ordinary car crash for several years. But gradually I started to pick up on little hints that it wasn’t quite that straightforward. The biggest hint was that my mom and other adults always spoke 41

so carefully about the subject and avoided giving details, even ordinary ones like where it happened and who was in the other car, and if they were drunk, and whether anyone else had been killed. I can see the logic of doing that around a little kid, but as I got older they continued to do it, in pretty much the same way. When details were provided, they were often con-tradictory. They acted exactly like people do in movies when they’re hiding something, and I gradually became convinced that it wasn’t an act and that I wasn’t imagining it.