King Dork Approximately (16 page)

This is why, in my first homeroom period as a Clearview student, the girl seated in front of me (the person in the Sam Hellerman position, alphabetically speaking) said, first thing:

“How does it feel to be a badger?”

I was stumped, mystified, and, what’s the other one, with the “f”? Flummoxed. I think that’s it. I was stumped, mystified, and flummoxed. And my s. m. and f. status must have been visible on my face, because she shook her head in an “oh, what’s to become of us?” way and pointed to her shirt, which said “Clearview Badgers” in big cursive letters and had, near the right shoulder, a little puffy image of what I supposed was a badger, which is evidently some kind of animal.

I’ll tell you what I replied, but stop for a moment and think about this. This was just a regular person, not normal to any great degree, as far as I could tell, wearing a school shirt on the first day back at school, apparently of her own free will. Not only that, but she went around referring to herself as a Badger with no sarcasm or mockery, and assumed that all the other students, even new ones from other schools, thought of themselves primarily as Badgers too. I was to learn that this bizarre behavior was quite usual at Clearview High School. At the orientation assembly later that day, at which our old friend Dr. Elizabeth Gary had given a repeat performance of her now familiar Caring, Healing, and Understanding speech, sans banners, of course, the principal of the school, one Dr. Tadich, affectionately (I kid you not) known among the student body as T-Dog (I kid you not), jogged onstage and bellowed “Helloooooooooooo, Badgers!” I kid you not. And unlike at Hillmont, where such a thing would never ever occur in any of its particulars by the wildest stretch of even the most vivid imagination, the student body erupted in thunderous applause, fervent cheering, whistling, and a deafening chant of “Badgers! Badgers! Badgers!…” I kept looking for the sarcasm and failing to find it. It was deeply unsettling, even while I had to acknowledge that I felt physically quite a bit safer. Hillmont may have been something of a concentration camp, it’s true. But this, this was Nuremberg.

Anyway, what I said to the badger girl was:

“I don’t know.”

Then, because Badger Girl seemed to expect more from me, I added: “How do
you
feel?”

“Great,” she said with disconcerting sincerity. She actually meant she was feeling, literally, great. About “being a Badger.”

“We’ve got a great team this year,” she continued, “and
we’re going to really kick some saint ass.” Well, after a bit more of me being s. m. and f., it was revealed: she was referring to the Mission Hills Saints, Clearview’s “rivals.” I resisted the urge to invite her down to the soda fountain for a malted and to tell her to make sure to bring Skippy, Squirt, and the Big Moose along because later we were all going to the sock hop and we were going to … you know.… It’s like the fifties, the way you’re being, don’t you get it? The fifties, like you’re all fifties, you know, zombies, for God’s sake. Doesn’t anyone realize what’s happening here?

Well, that’s one urge I’m glad I resisted, anyway.

I still couldn’t get my mind around the idea that anyone in the real actual world cared about this kind of thing. I mean, yes, you see it in movies and old TV shows, this “school spirit” and eagerness on the part of high school students to try to “fit in” by doing every single asinine thing that was expected of them, but I’d never expected to encounter it in real life. It was like I was talking to Marcia Brady without the short skirt and overall hotness. So right, this chick was some kind of school spirit sports girl. I’d never met one in the wild, but okay, I don’t get out much. I guess they exist, and I don’t care one way or the other. But I’m not kidding when I say she was not identifiably normal. She was a bit nerdy, a bit freckly, a bit small, a bit spindly, a bit patches-on-the-backpack-y. If any of the normal person’s standard-issue cruelty and hostility lurked within, she certainly kept it well hidden. They’d have made mincemeat of her at Hillmont High, just chewed her up and spit out the bones and danced around them in gleeful abandon before leaving them scattered in the grass on Center Court as a grim reminder: BEWARE OF THE NORMAL GIRLS. But here she was, seemingly unminced.

She said her name was Roberta Halloran.

“Ah,” I said. “The female Robert.”

“Oh,” she said, after a pause, and I thought I’d possibly offended her. But then: “Yes, the female Robert. I
am
the female Robert!”

I gave her the look that says “Settle down, now,” and I told her my name too, when prompted.

“I had a cat named Thomas,” said the Female Robert.

And at that point there really didn’t seem to be much more to say.

It had been a deeply disturbing exchange, in its way, but I suppose I had also passed a sort of test. Strange as they were, these Queerviewians, it was possible to walk among them. I had a brief flash of an alternative future, one in which I would learn their ways, feign enthusiasm for their customs, and thus manage to make it through the next two and a half years unscathed and in one piece. Every time I was hassled by normal people, I would shout “Badger! Badger! Badger!” and they would leave me alone. I would, in essence, become a Badger, hiding my true self deep, deep inside. I doubted I could pull it off, what with having a personality of my own and hating everything they stood for and all, but it was beginning to seem like the least worst option.

“Yay, school. Yay, sports,” I said to myself, trying it out. I had to admit, it needed work.

Of course, I had no illusions. My inability to spot the normal people at Clearview didn’t mean they didn’t exist. It just meant that there were different cues, different identifying behaviors, and that I would have to identify them and try to evade the most threatening among them. I needed to learn the code.

My brief conversation with Roberta the Female Robert had been an eye-opener. If the world I’d glimpsed through her eyes
was indeed real, a world of school spirit and team rivalries and sincerely attended pep rallies and “varsity,” whatever that was, well, maybe the old representations of teenage life that I had always dismissed so casually might reflect reality as well. If this received wisdom, the validity of which I hadn’t even considered believing in just moments ago, was anything to go by, the most vicious normal people in this kind of environment would turn out to be the “jocks.” These “jocks” would mainly attack the “nerds.” The “hoods,” on the other hand, might be dangerous but frequently had hearts of gold and would defend a worthy “nerd” on occasion from the predations of the “jocks” if he be true of spirit. But surely it couldn’t be that simple, or that weird. I resolved to make a study of them, the major texts:
The Brady Bunch
, Archie comics,
Happy Days, Grease, Revenge of the Nerds, Carrie, Straw Dogs …
 I was sure there were others. I would have to do some serious research.

Sam Hellerman’s genius would have penetrated these mysteries without nearly as much trouble as I was probably going to have. And yet, though it was decidedly unpleasant to be out there on my own, my first day at Clearview persuaded me that I was in little immediate danger. There was sure to be senseless brutality lurking in hidden corners, s. b. that was possibly all the more brutal for its being hidden, but it was beginning to look like these hidden brutal corners would be easy to avoid. Moreover, as puzzling as these strange creatures and their unfamiliar ways were to me, it was a safe bet that I was just as puzzling to them. That is, whereas at Hillmont I had had “victim” written all over me, the Clearview normal people couldn’t read my cues. They were bound to figure me out eventually, but for the time being, I was golden.

You could see it throughout the school grounds. The Hillmont transfers in the student population were easily spotted,
the normal as well as the decent, stumbling in bewilderment, trying to figure out their place in the new pecking order. It amused me to no end, thinking how it would gradually dawn on the former Hillmont normal psychos that entering the top tier of sadistic tormenters in this brave new Clearview world would entail doing things like wearing gay little “letterman” jackets, going to pep rallies, calling each other Badgers, and learning to confine their student-on-student violence and psychological harassment to hidden, out-of-the-way nooks and crannies rather than carrying them out in plain sight under the approving eye of teachers and administrators. Slow-witted as they were, this bitter realization would no doubt take some time to hit them, but when it did, well, you know, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys.

Now, if you people from the future have spotted the fact that the Clearview High School I have described sounds and looks quite a bit like “Millmont High” from
Halls of Innocence
, well, good for you. It sure does. That’s what I’m saying: it was so obviously fake and ridiculous that you’d never believe it if you saw it on TV, and yet here it was in real life, and at the time it sure was hard to believe it wasn’t some kind of elaborate hoax.

Any hopes I might have had that the Alphabet Gods would see fit, in their wisdom, to provide me with a suitable Sam Hellerman substitute for use during this Clearview ordeal were dashed on the rocks of homeroom’s roll call. As I explained, the person before me in alphabetical order—in the Sam Hellerman slot—was the Badger girl: nice enough, but hardly a genius. If I ever happened to need any advice on how to get “pumped” and “psyched” for the “game,” she’d be the one to consult. Otherwise, I couldn’t see how she’d be much use. The student behind me was a guy named Bill Henderson, no relation, and
he looked as slow-witted and normal as they come. He was wearing one of those “letterman” jackets that still looked like a costume to me, and had that typically normal air of vapid peevishness, which means always being pissed off for no reason, I think. But he made no threatening moves. It was like he was on hold, a subhuman psycho machine on standby, yet to be activated by headquarters. At least he couldn’t call me Hender-queer. But that was the best that could be said of him, I was sure.

Now, anyone who has followed my previous explanations might well be wondering: where are all the Clearview drama mods? Couldn’t I make friends with them?

It’s a good question. I wondered about it too. My experience at that Clearview party (the one where I met “Fiona”) had certainly left me with the impression that the drama people at this school were a mod subculture, much like the hippie subculture that had infested the Hillmont drama department. But I had been mistaken. That had been nothing more than a mod theme party, and in real life, the Clearview drama people looked and behaved just like all the other Clearview students. They were not, it seemed, particularly dangerous, but neither were they “my people,” as I’d dared to imagine all those months ago. Which should come as no surprise. My “people” are Sam Hellerman and … well, that’s pretty much it.

But even if the place had been crawling with mods, I don’t see how that would have helped. It wasn’t like I was going to sign up for drama and try out for plays. It wasn’t like I was going to walk up to the first asymmetrical haircut I saw and say, “Hey, you must like Northern Soul, am I right?”

I couldn’t expect a subculture to save me. In fact, it was extremely difficult to detect any subcultures within the Clearview
student body. To the untrained eye, these people all looked pretty much the same. And a large number of them, statistically speaking, would probably turn out to be mostly harmless. It was the harmful ones that were the worry, and those were maddeningly difficult to identify.

I only had one class (English) with Celeste Fletcher, but it was a doozy.

First off, there was the teacher’s name. Again, I had the impression that someone was “putting me on,” as Little Big Tom might say. I mean, if you tried as hard as you could and if your life depended on it, could you possibly come up with a better, less probable name for a teacher than Mrs. Pizzaballa? Mrs. Pizzaballa, I kid you not.

The other point in Mrs. Pizzaballa’s favor, as if the name weren’t enough, was a kind of, I don’t know, whimsical sense of humor that resulted in her delivering these deadpan clichés that had absolutely nothing to do with whatever they were supposed to be commenting on. They were not all that different from Little Big Tom’s weird little sayings, I guess, but in LBT’s case, at least it’s clear that he’s trying, on some level, to make what comes out of his mouth relate to reality. With Mrs. Pizzaballa, though, reality didn’t enter into it, not even slightly. She was a regular Salvador Dalí without the mustache—or mostly without it, anyway—her class a piece of performance art: a portrait of the artist as an absurdist educator.

For example, when the handouts Mrs. Pizzaballa was handing out slipped from her grasp and scattered all over the floor in front of her, she paused and said with a faraway look in her eyes: “Garbage in, garbage out.” And when this girl raised her hand and said she needed to go to the bathroom, Mrs. Pizzaballa said, “Famous last words.” And when the girl came
back, instead of saying “Everything come out all right?” as Little Big Tom might have said, Mrs. Pizzaballa simply shook her head and intoned a solemn “Michael, row your boat ashore.”

I couldn’t help thinking that Mrs. Pizzaballa and Little Big Tom should get together sometime. They’d certainly have some great conversations. Maybe if things didn’t work out between my mom and Little Big Tom, and if Mr. Pizzaballa were to meet with an unfortunate accident, I could introduce them. She could tell him she had an itchy trigger finger and he could counsel her about it.

Anyway, I took to Mrs. Pizzaballa almost instantly. I couldn’t say the same for her handout, a big annotated list of books with
Catcher in the Rye
at the top of it, followed by all the same other books they make you read in every single English class. I’d tell you what they were, but I’m sure you already know. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about having to do any homework for Mrs. Pizzaballa’s class: I had done it all before, many, many times.

As for my plans for huddling with Celeste Fletcher and bonding over shared new school anxiety, I had to admit, it wasn’t looking all that good.