King Dork Approximately (21 page)

“Spreading it around, I see,” said Little Big Tom. “The little one, the female … robot?” He raised an eyebrow. “I think she likes you.”

But that is a conversation I was just not going to have with Little Big Tom. As for the note, well, I don’t know what to say about it. I mean, it pretty much had to be seen to be believed.

“The thing I don’t understand,” Amanda was saying while we were trying to choke down some of Little Big Tom’s vegan slop, “is that you
love
the eighties. Aren’t you always saying everything sucks now and it was way better back in the good old days before CDs and solid transvestites and the alligator snares?”

She was responding to my complaints about Clearview High School and its strange existence as an alternate
Grease
sound track/fifties dimension, symbolized by the jackets. She was a little confused, though: to her, anything more than a few years old was “eighties,” and she had evidently absorbed my complaints about solid-state transistors and the awful gated reverb sound of eighties snare drums.

“The
music
,” I said. “The rock and roll of the fifties was great, obviously. I’m not complaining about that.” Of course the music was great. And the movies and books, too. And the less content-free educational system and the less advanced, less brutal Normalism. And the cars. And, like, bathing beauties or
whatever. And
Brown v. Board of Education
, that was pretty cool. The hats weren’t too bad. But
not
the jackets and the school spirit and all that stuff.

But I suppose Amanda had a point, in a way. Because maybe you couldn’t have had rock and roll in the first place if you didn’t have all that as the background: you know, all that “Gee whiz, we’re going steady at the soda fountain, Potsie” and “Well, golly, Peggy Ann, our team is just swell this year, I really hope you can come to the game and watch me score the winning points.” There could even be, possibly, a connection between the non-sucky educational system they used to have, the one that actually taught you stuff, and the weird school spirit society that contained it, though if so, Clearview had managed to retain or re-create the second with no noticeable effect on the absence of the first.

But those battles had been fought long ago, and I didn’t see why we had to relive them. You can appreciate the music without taking it literally. For example, digging the Beach Boys without necessarily being true to your school is totally possible, and preferable. Basically, Sam Phillips recorded Bill Haley, Johnny Cash, and all those other Memphis guys; Chuck Berry played the top two strings; Elvis appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
above the waist; the Beatles made all the girls squirm by singing about wanting to hold their “hands”; Ray Davies got lost in a sunset; Pete Townshend smashed his guitar; Brian Wilson heard magic in his head and made it come out of a studio; the Rolling Stones urinated on a garage door; and then (skipping a bit) you’ve got Joey Levine and Chapman-Chinn and Mott the Hoople and Iggy and the Runaways and KISS and the Pink Fairies and Rick Nielsen and Jonathan Richman and Johnny Ramone and Lemmy and the Young brothers and Cook and Jones and Pete Shelley and Feargal Sharkey and Rob
Halford … and Foghat. You get what I’m saying. It didn’t happen in a vacuum, but it did happen, and now here we are in the aftermath. I see no need to try to re-create the conditions that made it necessary to invent rock and roll in the first place, and I certainly see no earthly reason why we should have to go to school in those conditions. Our forefathers fought and died so we wouldn’t have to, is kind of how I thought about it.

But Amanda had finished her slop and was on her way out before I could get much of this across. At least I believe I managed to explain that the eighties were not the fifties. I mean, I couldn’t have her going around saying I liked the eighties. The eighties were crap, a terrible time to be alive, as far as I could tell.

“Don’t you want to watch
Revenge of the Nerds
with me?” I called out, because I’d checked it out of the library, along with a few other materials, as part of my quest to understand Clearview High School a little better and to be able to spot the dangerous normal people with greater accuracy. Amanda’s empty chair was an eloquent answer. She had been sitting next to me and conversing, it’s true, but mainly, as it turned out, she was only in it for the slop.

“Great slop … chief,” I said, turning to Little Big Tom, but before he could respond, my mom had drifted in and he did a kind of insta-fade into the background, resuming the walking-on-eggshells posture he had developed in the face of the recent marital strife at 507 Cedarview Circle, Hillmont, CA 94033.

My mom was wearing a big, fuzzy, black and purple striped sweater that came halfway down to her knees, with a shiny belt of enormous sequins around her waist and a—was it a cape? Yeah, it was a kind of cape, nearly floor-length and made of some dark velvetlike fabric, thrown back around her shoulders
and secured at her throat with the biggest sequin of them all. She was Super Mom. Or a wicked queen.

She stood before me, balanced her cigarette on the edge of the table, and took my hands in hers.

“Baby,” she said, after a lengthy pause during which she looked into my eyes with unnerving earnestness. “Tom told me about today, and I just want you to know, I am … we are … so,
so
proud of you. I know you’ve had a tough time at the new school, but it’s just so nice that you’ve been able to make some … normal friends, nice, normal friends at last.…”

Oh, for God’s sake. You’d think a lifetime of embarrassing parental moments would exhaust your embarrassment capacity at some point, but if so, it was a point I hadn’t yet reached. I was conscious of a hot sensation in my face, and my centipede began to twitch up a storm. Why does talking about girls out loud in the presence of parents make you so embarrassed? And these weren’t even particularly noteworthy ones, just some girls from “pep band” who randomly happened to get pulled in by Little Big Tom’s largely indiscriminate tractor beam. But you can’t help your physical reactions, inconvenient as they may be. Your physical reactions just happen, like in the truck with Little Big Tom and … Oh, God.

I felt, somehow, that it was expected that I say a few words, a kind of acceptance speech, so I said:

“I don’t know.” And added, with my eyes, “This is indeed a great day for us all.”

My mom made it clear that if I needed anything in order to cultivate and nurture these tender shoots of a budding, non-unacceptable social life, I had only to ask. This was a little bit different than the standard spiel that goes: “I’m surprised to learn that you’re not gay, though if you were gay, I’d be
totally pleased and into it that you are, no judgments here.” Partly, it was directed against Sam Hellerman, who they both thought was a bit of an odd duck, if I have that expression right. (They’re not wrong about that, I concede, but still, I must ask, what business is it of theirs what kind of duck Sam Hellerman is? Oh yeah, it’s not their business at all.)

Sam Hellerman aside, though, I guess Little Big Tom’s report to my mom had left the impression that here could be seen my first dainty steps into normalcy, a prospect that pleased her for some reason. But seriously, if my mom, as currently constituted, were reverse-aged to fifteen years old and tossed into a tank fully stocked with normal people, what did she think would happen? The tank’s waters would churn red with her blood within a few seconds, that’s what. They’d make short work of Little Big Tom as well. I felt like shouting at them: “Hey! Parental units. Don’t you get it?
You’re not normal
!” I wouldn’t wish the shark tank of Normalcy on them, no matter how irritating they may be, and it was pretty galling that a stint in that tank was their fondest wish for me.

In other words, my parents’ sense of normalcy was in desperate need of recalibration. Pam Something and the Female Robot (to use Little Big Tom’s memorably mistaken term) might not have matched Sam Hellerman’s abnormality, it’s true—who could?—but no one would describe them as normal, though Pam S. could maybe pass for near normal with a bit of a makeover. It was a stretch, though, is what I’m saying.

But Little Big Tom wasn’t done with me yet. After my mom had said “Night, puppy” and drifted off with a heavy emission of exhaust and a bit of a shoulder squeeze, he zoomed in and took his place in the chair formerly occupied by my sister.

“Revenge of the Nerds,”
he said, riffling through my library
materials. “Good flick. Not quite reality, though, is it?” Well, I thought, you tell me. I’d assumed not, until I’d darkened Clearview High’s doorstep, but now, as I’ve explained, I wasn’t so sure.

“You know, sport,” he continued, “I think you just might find that the modern age does have something to offer, if you know where, and
how
, to look.” He scooted his chair toward me, getting dangerously close to unsolicited back rub proximity, and as his voice was taking on that therapy tone, I thought it prudent to scoot my chair away from him just as quickly. He had evidently heard my conversation with Amanda and had some wisdom to impart about not living in the past, hanging on to your dreams, and having an open mind but only about certain prearranged topics.

“If you keep an open mind, you just might find that you have more in common with people than you think.” Unable to execute any massage plans he may have had, Little Big Tom resorted instead to a rather gruesome wink. “And it never hurts to try a new thing every now and then. I think you’ll find the results could surprise you.”

I suppose what he was getting at was that maybe, if I were to change my whole personality and replace everything I like and am interested in with stuff that other people like and are interested in, well, then my life would be this wonderful picnic where I had lots in common with everyone and we would all skip merrily down the lane hand in hand. But what if I didn’t want to change my whole personality? Not that I liked it all that much, but at least it was mine. Inconvenient as it was at times, I kind of wanted to keep it. And to be honest, skipping merrily down the lane never held much appeal for me anyway.

“I just prefer Godzilla to deodorant,” I said.

Now, I meant this as a cryptic conversation ender. There
was no way Little Big Tom would have any clue what I meant by it, so what could he say in response? But I might as well explain it here.

See, okay: there was once this guy named Kurt who was in this really big popular rock band. A ways back he blew his head off with a shotgun, and it was really sad and everything, et cetera, et cetera. So his band’s big hit song was basically Blue Öyster Cult’s “Godzilla” with the lyrics replaced by this semicoherent, artsy drug poetry about deodorant. Now, it was a fine enough song, and believe me, miles and miles better than most of the other garbage that was popular at that time. Still, I mean, you’ve got to say, when it’s Godzilla vs. deodorant, Godzilla wins, right? Why would I deliberately choose to play the deodorant guy’s version, when there’s Blue Öyster Cult sitting right there on the turntable? The question answers itself. (Though it occurs to me now that it’s possible that the deodorant band might have been using a similar technique on its drummer that we were using on Shinefield, pretending they were playing “Godzilla” till the last second to trick him into playing a steady beat. If so, I’ll say this for them: it seems to have worked. Well done, guys.)

Or there’s this other big group that is pretty much dedicated to rearranging Beatles recordings into their own “new” songs. Again, it’s orders of magnitude better than most of what’s popular. Still, if I want the Beatles, first I go to the Beatles; then I go to all the legitimate Beatles imitators of the sixties and seventies; then I might sing “I Am the Walrus” in the shower or put on a Cheap Trick record or something. Only then, having exhausted all the other possibilities, would I resort to last year’s fake Beatles. The same can be said for all those fake punk bands with suburban guys whining about how hard it is to find a girlfriend. I mean, I get it, and I can obviously relate,
and I wish them all the luck in the world. I might even choose to listen to them now and again. But not when I have SA-7528, UAG 30159, SRK 6081, or SEEZ 1 on hand. Would you?

And that’s just the good stuff: the music most normal people like is simply beyond redemption, or comprehension. If you like that sort of thing, you deserve each other.

Anyway, Little Big Tom just gave me the old sympathetic yet taken aback “get a load of my oddball stepson” look and rumpled my hair. In other words, it worked as planned.

“How’s the song coming?” he asked, meaning how was I doing in my attempt to learn how to fingerpick the song about the Irish guy and the hula girl.

“ ‘O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian’?” I said. “Okay.”

Actually, it was going terrible. Even though I grasped the concept (your thumb has to do alternating bass notes with runs back and forth, while your other fingers “roll” in the spaces and play notes and partial chords), I couldn’t make it happen, no matter how hard I tried. My right hand was made for hitting, not plucking, and it didn’t look like I’d ever be able to instruct it to make the h. to p. transition. The Chet Atkins book I’d checked out of the library only made things worse by spelling out and comprehensively cataloguing all the things I would never have a prayer of doing. What guitar playing ability I did have seemed to erode with each page.

Perhaps sensing the frustration behind the word “okay” despite my efforts to mask it, Little Big Tom had one more bit of wisdom to impart.

“I think you’ll find,” he said, with lips slightly pursed, “that if you keep at it, there will be one moment where you suddenly realize you’re doing it without even thinking. That’s how it works in the old brain box.” Then he added, with a thumbs-up,
a nod, and that little clicking sound he makes with his tongue on his upper molars: “The human head: check it out.”

Well, that exhausted my daily ration of patience for hearing about things that Little Big Tom thought I would “find,” so I saluted him and sauntered off with my research materials. I was still embarrassed from before, and my centipede was still twitching, and I ached for Fiona, and I was still mystified and futilely angry about the whole jacket thing, and I still knew in my heart of hearts that I’d never, ever be able to play “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian”—but I had avoided an unsolicited back rub, and that’s what really matters.