King Dork Approximately (25 page)

It was CDs. Ugh. Best-ofs. I know, ugh. Good stuff, though, all fingerstyle guys—Bert Jansch, who’s the guy Jimmy Page stole all the Led Zeppelin acoustic instrumental arrangements from; another dude named Big Bill Broonzy; and perhaps best of all, Blind Blake, who was to become something like my idol in the months to come, though at that time I hadn’t heard of him yet. What is it about these blind guys that gives them the improbable superhuman power to play guitars like pianos? Something beyond nature, without a doubt (disproving atheism conclusively, if you ask me). Little Big Tom seemed to know his stuff, I reluctantly conceded. The sight of the familiar yellow Post-it note, LBT’s preferred form of communication, caused a brief welling-up of sentiment, not so much for what was written on it, but because of the bittersweet recollection of all the other Post-its he’d left me over the years. This one said: “Let your fingers do the walking!!!—Big Tom. P.S. Come see me sometime.”

I winced at the notion of coming to see him. It was the least I could do, but man, how awkward would it be to visit your mom’s estranged husband in his motel room? I almost wished he hadn’t given me the CDs, but not really.

This is what my life had become:

I already had a stockpile of several unread notes from the Robot kicking around, set aside for when I had time to catch up on my reading, so I simply added this to the pile. Being acquainted with her was a big job. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to matter to her whether or not I did the reading.

I would say that of all the indignities associated with being in the Clearview High School “pep band,” and there were many, the absolute worst one was that they made you wear the little outfit all through the school day on the days when you were supposed to play at the games. And yet, while the school spirit at Clearview was just about the most irritating thing in the world, it also functioned as a useful protective force field. Being in the band certainly marked you as a second-class citizen compared to actually being a sports psycho, but because you were part of the general project of promoting the Badgers and celebrating the breathtaking awesomeness of the fact that guys wearing gay little shiny orange shorts were pretty good at prancing around and playing with balls, everyone left you alone. There seemed to be no dissenters, no misfits, no one who wasn’t with the program. Except me, semi-secretly, and some of the other Hillmont refugees, though most of them had by this time learned that the easiest way to assimilate was to pretend to be just as enraptured by the Spirit as everybody else. If I had shown up at Hillmont High wearing white pants and a
beret, they’d have been scraping my remains off Center Court within seconds. But at Clearview, I was serving the designs of the normal psychos, so I was golden, protected by the Spirit.

Because now that I’d been there long enough, I’d seen a bit of what happened to people of the second tier and lower who were not protected by the Spirit at Clearview, and though it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it had been at Hillmont, it wasn’t pretty. Since it wasn’t happening to me personally I didn’t feel it nearly as keenly, but the normal psychos preyed on the defenseless at Clearview High just as they do anywhere else.

I don’t know if you recall from my previous explanations, but there’s this narcoleptic kid named Bobby Duboyce who has to wear a helmet all the time to protect his soft skull. At Hillmont the normal kids knew just what to do with a Helmet Boy: they would wait till he was asleep and then descend upon him and write obscenities on his helmet, or do things like roll him in the mud or carry him to strange allegedly amusing locations so that when he woke up he would be in a state of confusion, embarrassment, or terror. And they’d do it right out in the open, under the approving, or at least willfully oblivious, eyes of the teachers and administrators. Now, as one of the Hillmont refugees, he no longer has to worry about that kind of public humiliation. Instead, the normal Clearview guys, and even some of the girls, I believe, just randomly, and with a kind of cheerful attitude, subtly knock him on top of the helmet throughout the day with their books or knuckles as they walk by. That’s all. I’m sure it’s irritating, but I guess it’s the sort of thing you get used to after a while. His parents probably think it “builds character.” It’s not nice, but for a guy like Bobby Duboyce it must have felt kind of like winning the lottery.

Or there’s this chubby Asian kid named Pang. He’s kind
of weird, but he isn’t harming anyone. When I take over the world, I’ll institute a strict policy of leaving the fat kids, and maybe especially Pang, alone: he’ll get a free pass to sit wherever he wants just being himself, unharassed. But till then, the normal psychos at Clearview High will have their fun with him, and the way they do that is to make him run back and forth all around the Quad and down the hallways till he is about to collapse from exhaustion. “Pang, give me a dollar,” one of them will say, and when he produces it, they send him running across the Quad to give it to another subhuman psychotic normal goon, who promptly sends him running off in the other direction. They make the game last throughout the school day, and they say things like “Come on, work off some of that blubber.” It’s in the interest of physical fitness, after all, so I guess it’s just fine; even good for him, maybe. I hate physical fitness myself, but there are those who swear by it.

I mean, thank God it’s not me. But maybe, I found myself thinking, it’s not such a bad thing for the normal people to have these relatively benign ways of letting off steam, considering the damage they could do otherwise. When I take power, I’m going to be the best, sanest dictator ever, protecting not just the fat, but the gay, the shy, the short, the freakishly tall, the redheaded, the handicapped, the smart, the spastic, the meek, the cheese makers, the stutterers, the mumblers, and the readers. I’ll even protect the sporty and the normal in my beneficence, if b. means what I think it means. But everyone has to leave everyone else alone, and the instant they start hassling anyone, for any reason, the penalty is instant vaporization by my roving surveillance robots. Thanks for playing. Problem solved. But till then? Well, Clearview isn’t exactly nice, but it sure could be a whole lot worse.

Even though I couldn’t do anything about the white pants, I
buttoned my jeans jacket all the way up to hide the dumb shirt and put the beret in my pocket for most of the day, because even after all this, I still had some standards left.

Now, one of the other terrible things about Clearview High is that they don’t have open campus for lunch. That means that, unlike at Hillmont, every single student has to eat lunch either in the cafeteria building or in the grass in the middle of the Quad. Basically you’re on display at all times, and it’s hard to find a private space of your own of any kind. I think the technical term for the thing I’m describing is a “panopticon,” which is a kind of prison where you’re being constantly watched, exposed to your jailers one hundred percent of the time. I was sitting with the “pep band” in our panopticon on the grass at lunch, beretless, my tiny gesture of rebellion in full view. And when Principal T-Dog walked by and pointed at me, saying “Where’s your Badger beret, soldier?” and tried to make me high-five him, and actually stood there till I put the beret on
and
high-fived him, and then led the band and assorted onlookers in a little round of applause at my expense—well, that’s about as low as low gets in the First World.

“We have to support our Badger men,” said Pammelah Something, scrunching down her own beret.

It was possibly the weirdest thing I’d ever heard anyone say out loud in my entire sorry life.

About the game and “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” and “On, Wisconsin!”, the less said the better. The whole time I was conscious of little more than my shame and Celeste Fletcher’s jacketed presence in the bleachers. It was bad enough to be seen in such a state by people I didn’t know, but when it came to Fiona … I’ll just say I was almost crying literal tears of humiliation and leave it at that. I’ll tell you what, Sam Hellerman’s escape
hatch, that is, a couple of illicitly acquired tranquilizers swallowed with a large glass of bourbon, wasn’t looking too bad. For the first time, I felt I understood.

“We” won, by the way. By which I mean, the Clearview normal psychos had managed to throw their little ball through the hoop more often than the normal psychos from whatever the hell the other high school was called. It was indeed a great day for America.

Everyone was happy, anyway. As the triumphant Clearview student body tramped off to celebrate, setting things on fire and beating up orphans or whatever they do to express joy and pride, we band people stayed behind to gloat amongst ourselves, congratulating each other on a job well done supporting our Badger men.

Pammelah and the Robot and the always fetching Blossom van Kinkle were sharing a big energy drink bottle that turned out to contain red wine.

They started to sing:

Now, okay,
that
was pretty funny. Because they were mocking everything they believed in. Plus: balls. I honestly hadn’t thought they had it in them, so to speak.

“Here’s to ya,” said the Robot, handing me the bottle and another note. Here’s to me indeed, I said to myself, taking a big swallow and putting the note in my bulging pocket with the day’s others.

I couldn’t believe she was going to make me read all of
these, for no grade or credit. That certainly wasn’t the Clearview way.

Little Big Tom’s motel was down on the northeast edge of Hillmont by the railroad tracks. It was an easy bike ride from my house after I’d dropped off my trombone and changed out of the stupid Badger shirt. But it was still raining and it started to rain harder on the way, so, well, much as I hate to do it, I feel I must tell you that to get an accurate picture of this fateful bike ride, you have to know that I wound up putting on the orange beret, because it was all I had. With my old hooded army coat, the rain would have been no problem. This thought, in turn, brought to mind my unfulfilled lawsuit dreams, so by the time I arrived at the El Capitano Motor Lodge, not only was I looking ridiculous in a soggy orange beret, but I was in a pretty foul mood as well.

“Thanks for the CDs,” I said, when Little Big Tom opened the door to my knock, words I’d never believed I’d utter.

“Come on in,” said Little Big Tom, smiling widely, obviously glad to see me. “Wring out your hat and stay awhile!”

Now, Little Big Tom was still a bit of a mess, it’s true, but not nearly as big a mess as I’d expected him to be. I wouldn’t want to say he was his old self again, not by any means, but he did have, it seemed to me, if only to a slight degree, just a little of that old spark, the Little Big Tom Classic that I’d learned how easy it was to miss. I suppose after weeks of fretting and bracing himself for the “I need space” blow to fall, it might have been something of a relief when it finally came. And maybe he
was finding that hell wasn’t such a bad place to be. I sometimes had a glimmer of that feeling with regard to Celeste Fletcher, when I realized she was irrevocably lost to normality and that I might as well face it and move on. There’s a kind of freedom in failure, once you truly grasp that the cause is lost.

On the other hand, though, this wasn’t me and Celeste Fletcher we were talking about here. It was my mom and Little Big Tom. And whatever else you might say about my mom, she was certainly not “lost to normality.” Far from it. And Little Big Tom, the bounding, slobbering, gray golden retriever whose fondest dream, I knew, was to return to the good old days of wandering from room to room with a tennis ball in his mouth spouting inane aphorisms and nuzzling everyone’s tears away? I had to think there was still some hope there, despite any underwear that may or may not have been found in that notorious gym bag of his.

“Had dinner yet?” he asked, patting the spot on the bed next to him where he wanted me to sit. “I’ve got a hot plate and a microwave: tacos and pumpkin chai, what a growing boy needs.”

Soon we were eating these semidisgusting microwaved vegetarian tacos and drinking this weird tea out of paper cups that said “El Capitano” on them in slanted script.

“I hear you guys won a big game today,” said Little Big Tom.

Oh, for God’s sake. I gave him the look that says “Yes, thank God ‘we’ won, now I can die happy.”

“At this rate,” he continued, “you’ll make the quarterfinals before you know it.”

Something snapped.

“Look,” I said. “Stop trying to make me be normal. I’m not normal. I’m never going to be normal and I don’t want to be normal. I don’t care about the quarterfinals or the sock hop or
the, like, jackets, or the ‘spirit’ thing the school spirit the pep spirit or whatever, or the, you know, junior prom or the … the junior varsity … or the senior varsity or any, really, any variety of varsity whatsoever.”

I was sputtering and I knew I sounded hysterical. Plus, saying this many words in a row out loud was a rarity, and my doing it had shocked us both. Little Big Tom was taken aback, clearly worried that at this rate I’d be flipping tables and kicking puppies in no time.

“Sorry,” I said, deflating myself with a sigh. “It’s just been a rough day.”

Little Big Tom nodded sympathetically and put an encouraging arm around my shoulder.

“I hear ya, chief,” he said. “I hear ya. I guess it’s going around. But you know what I think? I think it wouldn’t hurt to give people a chance sometimes. Sure, it can be a little silly, the things people do, the things they say. But it’s all just a means of communication, and that’s important in life. Underneath it all, they’re just people. And I think you’ll find—”