King Dork Approximately (23 page)

For guys at Clearview, status seemed to be mostly a matter of size, though as at Hillmont, being especially cruel or dumb
could raise your stock considerably in the eyes of the normal masses. Behavior mattered, much more than it did for girls. Being cool, funny, or especially mean or violent could bump your stats way up. So could having a nice car, or, a car. If you ranked them by size, however, you’d still get a broadly accurate picture of where everyone stood, though you’d have to filter out the fat guys and some of the freakishly tall, beanpole-geek types, obviously. Not too different from Hillmont, in other words, with this difference: pretty much every dude above the normalcy cutoff was some kind of sports guy, and the entire student body, all the way down the scale, was solidly in favor of them. Hillmont High, as an institution, if it stood for anything, stood for raw, naked, senseless brutality; at Clearview you had a more refined version, a kind of institutional sports cruelty, supported by everyone, even its victims, with improbable, unfathomable enthusiasm. I mean, look at the Female Robot: what did a girl like that, well outside the main scale of normalcy, possibly think she could achieve with her embrace of a status quo that sought only to demean and marginalize her? I would never get that.

Celeste Fletcher, on the other hand, had a lot to work with. All she had had to do, evidently, was to signal her willingness to join the system by securing the jacket of one of the larger boys and then just waltz right into her place near the top. Even Shinefield couldn’t cut it up there, much less Sam Hellerman or I.

In any case, I needn’t have worried about Todd Dante’s jacket having a damaging effect on the Phil Rudd experiment. Quite the contrary. Shinefield, thinking of Celeste Fletcher and the jacket, had never hit the snare harder or more solidly. And it was ironic, and, I felt, rather poignant that unbeknownst to
him, the song he was playing with such decisiveness was in fact about Celeste Fletcher, in her guise as the sexy, imaginary fake-mod girl Fiona. It gave the song a whole new energy.

“I don’t get it, though, Hellerman,” I said, when we were on our own afterward. And what I meant was, it was kind of strange how he was doling out Machiavellian advice on the best way for Shinefield to win back the affections of a girl he himself, it seemed, still had the hots for. I kind of felt that way myself. If it worked out as Sam Hellerman predicted it would, and that seemed possible if not probable, I wasn’t sure I felt all that warmly about the idea of Shinefield “having” Fiona “for life” if he “still wanted her.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Sam Hellerman. “He’ll never actually manage to do it. Hardly anyone can.”

It turned out that Sam Hellerman already had a fully formed position on
Pride and Prejudice
, almost even before I brought the subject up. Of course females perceive it as a romantic story, he said, because that’s what they think they’re supposed to like and what they feel good about liking, but what they’re really responding to, on an unconscious level, is the money. Nothing has changed since the days of Greedie Olde Englande: females still seek the highest-status males, and money equals status, and always will. But since mating is largely a mechanical process based on behavioral cues and smell, a little knowledge can turn this state of affairs to your advantage. If you mimic the conduct and attitude of a wealthy or powerful person, even if you’re not wealthy or powerful yourself, women will find themselves drawn to you without quite knowing why because
they’re programmed to respond to those cues. Also, it helps if you smell a little funky. (Well, there was one mystery solved, anyhow: the Case of Sam Hellerman and the Increasingly Infrequent Showers.)

“That’s why they find just being in a band to be such a turn-on,” he added. Because on some unconscious level guys in bands remind them of real rock stars who are rich and culturally powerful, and their bodies respond accordingly without their even being aware of it.

But, I objected, if that were true, we could just as easily get girls by mimicking smelly computer programmers or unusually aromatic investment bankers.

His response startled me.

“I don’t know, Henderson,” it ran. “Have you ever worn a suit and tie to school? You’d be surprised at the response.”

“You’re not seriously trying to tell me,” my look said, “that you wear a suit to school?”

I could almost picture it, in fact. But being a suit wearer was even worse than being a book reader, or it seemed like it would be. I mean, I’d never actually seen it done before. Sam Hellerman’s only response was to give me the look that says “I have so much to teach you, little lamb.” You know the one I mean.

I still felt that the principle of Survival of the Cruelest and Dumbest offered a better explanation for who wanted to mate with whom in this stupid universe of ours, but Sam Hellerman delivered his analysis with such offhand confidence that it was hard not to be swayed by it at least a little. It was exactly how someone who actually knew what he was talking about might speak about the thing he knew about, and I suppose the fact that it worked on me to some small degree on that basis alone was a kind of confirmation of the general point he was making,
though just speaking for myself, the smell wasn’t helping in any way.

When defeated by “O’Brien Is Trying to Learn to Talk Hawaiian,” I would usually shift to working on my own stuff, and it was around this time, after a particularly finger-busting “O’Brien” session, that I began to come up with a tune I thought showed a bit of promise. It went:

My mom, fulfilling the Little Big Tom role in a surprise, unbilled cameo, heard me singing the chorus and materialized in my bedroom doorway, nodding.

“I like it,” she said, expelling a lungful of exhaust in an admiring manner. “Oh, Tom, baby, that’s really, really beautiful.”

I couldn’t think what she was getting at, as this was not her sarcastic voice.

“People forget that the universe is what connects us all,” she continued, making it clearer. “We’re all part of it, so we better be good to each other if we want our planet to survive. I’m down with the universe too, so …”

She kissed me on the forehead and retreated, a barely perceptible, decidedly atypical spring in her step. Because of course, there’s another sense of saying “down with” something that means almost the opposite of the other meaning. My mom speaks so infrequently that it’s easy to forget sometimes that she’s such a hippie, and also, evidently, a bit more “street” than I’d ever have given her credit for.

I was glad I was able to cheer her up, however slightly and under whatever false pretenses, but it did make me wonder if, to avoid confusion, I should change the title, which I was reluctant to do.

Not that “Death to the Universe” didn’t have a nice ring to it.

“That’s a nice-looking boy,” Amanda would say, each time one of the “nerds” in
Revenge of the Nerds
came on-screen. Basically, you could tell them by their glasses; by their calm, if often bizarre, demeanor; by their intelligence; by their bumbling behavior in social situations; and by the hatred of them that lurked in the hearts of society at large. So that part was true-to-life enough. Sam Hellerman and I have most of that. Still, it hadn’t taken long for “that’s a nice-looking boy” to get on my nerves. Their snorting laughs were annoying too, and had no basis in reality as far as my experience goes, but these laughs were made even more annoying by the fact that Amanda quickly figured out the snort-laugh technique and kept doing it along with them, looking at me meaningfully.

“Stop being so normal,” I said, but she gave me the look that says “This shall I never do” and hit me with a couch cushion.

The nerds in the movie were basically your usual collection of misfits with the misfit characteristics exaggerated and played up for laughs, but it wasn’t too hard to see me and Sam Hellerman in there somewhere. The normal people were the “jocks,” represented by this football fraternity, along with their pretty but mean girlfriends: again, it was exaggerated, but nevertheless not all that far from the Clearview High reality.
And they had the jackets. What was missing was any depiction of the neutral population, much larger at Clearview than it had been at Hillmont: that is, the people who hadn’t yet been sorted into their respective normal and victim piles, who walked among the normal in a state of limbo waiting to be identified by squawking, finger-pointing normal zombies. Like me, so far.

The worst thing about the movie, though, is that it could well have been written by Dr. Elizabeth Gary. The “nerds” and other misfits all seemed to come precounseled and prebrain-washed: their response to their own abuse and torture was simply to try as hard as they could to “beat them at their own game,” which meant, in essence, participating in the normal people’s ludicrous institutions and activities and trying to “win.” And what winning meant was “fitting in.” In other words, losing. At one point one of the nerds said they should just blow up the football guys’ house in retaliation for some gross indignity. That was rejected in the script by the fitter-inners, but in my opinion, it would have made for a far better, more satisfying film. In fact, as I watched it, I imagined this better ending in my head, and much like thinking “Fiona” while outwardly playing “Live Wire,” it kind of worked.

Now, unless you count the recent family awards ceremony for being seen with two girls who appeared to be slightly less eccentric than Sam Hellerman, there hadn’t been a good, full-blown classic Henderson-Tucci family discussion in quite some time.

I mean, there was the time when Little Big Tom found the Jerusalem Bible I had checked out of the library (to help research a quote related to the Catcher Code) and got all worried that I was turning into a dangerous religious nut.

“We just feel,” he had said, with my mom nodding beside him, “that this kind of … material is not such a good influence on your sister.” And, he’d added, if I felt the need for spiritual fulfillment there were lots of other, less damaging self-help options available, like yoga, the Landmark Forum, or this great book called
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
.

“I’ve known a lot of guys,” he had said, “who fell into the Jesus thing because they were lost in their lives. You may think Christ is the answer, but it’s a heavy trip. A
very
heavy trip.” He managed to leave the impression, with his frowning eyes and face, that this was a “trip” that didn’t tend to turn out so well.

I was able to promise him that I had no intention of taking such a “trip,” no matter how bad things got.

“I have found everything I require,” I said, “in Satanism,” deftly managing to reassure him in the least reassuring way possible. I’m still pretty proud of that one.

And then there was the time, briefly alluded to earlier, when they wanted to let me know that if I was gay, it was totally okay and they would love me and respect me and my choices because it’s who you are inside that matters; but if I did happen to be gay, just for the sake of argument, it would be most convenient for them if I would “come out” before their couples retreat the following month, because there were resources available and they knew several couples in a similar situation with whom it might be useful to compare notes about effective strategies for making me feel accepted, boosting my self-esteem, and helping me deal with the terrible but unfortunately very real social opprobrium, if “opprobrium” means what I’m pretty sure it means.

Anyway, if you think I didn’t respond to that one by saying “Thanks, but I have found everything I require in Satanism,”
well, you don’t know me as well as you probably thought you did.

So yeah, as you can imagine, we were due for a family discussion. And as it happens, when it came, it came during
Revenge of the Nerds
.

I heard my mom come in through the back door while
Revenge of the Nerds
played on. I heard her lighting a cigarette on the stove, and then I heard the first heavy exhalation of smoke, always the loudest one, it seems. Then I heard the characteristic sounds of my mom fixing a drink in the kitchen, and then the clink of her ice moving closer and closer down the hallway till we could see her standing in the living room doorway, with Little Big Tom bringing up the rear, as the saying goes, looking grim and serious.

“I think the nerds can wait,” said Little Big Tom, taking up the remote and pressing pause. And fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the frozen frame he had happened to stop on was a close-up of one of the naked sorority girls in one of the hidden spy-cam scenes. Moreover, fortunately or unfortunately, Little Big Tom just happened to lean back, half sitting on the TV, little realizing that between his splayed legs, just under his embroidered golden jeans penis, could be seen a picture of a blonde kind of cupping her slightly weird-looking, though still inherently interesting, naked breasts.

Amanda and I looked at one another. It was distracting, to say the least.

My mom took a drag on her cigarette and clinked her ice, signaling to Little Big Tom to get on with it.

“Now,” said Little Big Tom. “Now …” It was the therapy voice but with a little something extra, something that reminded me of something. “The first thing,” he continued,
“that we want you to understand is that none of this is your fault.”

Amanda’s hand gripped my forearm excitedly. There was suddenly not much suspense over where this was going.

“Your mom and I care about you both very much.” His voice sounded strained and frayed, almost breaking just a little. The thing it reminded me of was Shinefield’s voice when telling me about Celeste Fletcher’s final phone call to him. Amanda’s hand clenched tighter. “And that is never going to change, no matter what happens. I will always—”

Now, it was at this point that the naked sorority girl between Little Big Tom’s legs sprang back into action, the pause button’s duration period having expired, and a voice from the TV interrupted him.