King Dork Approximately (27 page)

Flapjack didn’t sing the song in an Irish accent like Little Big Tom had, but it sounded just as great as an instrumental as “Maple Leaf Rag” had, and he did a whole new set of crazy, inventive, unexpected embellishments on it.

I wanted to be able to do that more than anything in the world, except maybe going back in time to ramone the young Jane Birkin. Or to ramone Celeste Fletcher right here in our own time. Or basically to ramone pretty much anyone. But what I’m saying is, I wanted it.

When Flapjack was finished with “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian,” he paused, then handed the guitar to me.

“Play,” he said, just before his voice dissolved into a series of scary coughs.

If it’s possible for a person to be shaking and petrified at the same time, well, that person was me. I knew I couldn’t get out of playing. This guy outweighed me by hundreds of pounds. So with trembling hands I played my own horrible attempt at “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian.” And it was bad, though Naomi sounded pretty nice even through the badness. When I finished playing my lame-ass version of the song, hardly recognizable as a song, really, Flapjack stared at me for a long, unnerving stretch.

“One finger was good enough for Travis,” he finally said. “One finger was good enough for Broonzy. So one finger is good enough for you.”

He was commenting on the fact that I’d rigidly positioned
my index, middle, and ring fingers on each of the top three strings, like my Chet Atkins book advised.

“Atkins,” said Flapjack, when I tried to explain, “is a pipsqueak.”

Then he took the guitar back and showed me, playing very slowly, how you could do the thumb picking and the finger roll with mostly just the index finger and thumb. He said not one additional word during this, but he was a way better teacher than Little Big Tom. I still couldn’t play it, but at least I kind of got what you were supposed to do a little bit better.

Flapjack handed the guitar back to me, gave Little Big Tom the three-fingered Jerry Garcia salute, and tramped out amid another cascade of coughs.

“Flapjack,” said Little Big Tom.

Apparently Flapjack not only was a buddy of Little Big Tom’s, but also had been some kind of famous hippie guitar guy way back when. Little Big Tom was acting starstruck, to be honest, and seemed vaguely distressed that I hadn’t heard of him. He said Flapjack had told him he’d be willing to show me a thing or two if I ever wanted to come visit him on his houseboat in Fenton City. I could tell this was supposed to be a big honor, so I did my best to nod reverently. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to meet Flapjack again, but I was in awe of his playing and grateful for what he’d taught me.

As for Naomi, it, or she, was Little Big Tom’s guitar from when he was a kid. Part of why he had taken so long is that he’d had to go to his storage space in Santa Carla to retrieve it. It was of the type known as a “parlor guitar,” the kind that a lot of old blues guys played; whenever anyone tried to play ragtime music on a guitar back in the eighteen hundreds or whenever, they would have done it on something like Naomi.
It looked, and sounded, about as cool as I could have imagined, even in my clumsy ham hands. Little Big Tom was going to let me borrow it to learn on, he said, but he made me promise to look after it.

“She’s always been my baby,” he said creepily.

Little Big Tom had provided me with my Melody Maker, too, if you’ll remember from my previous explanations. He was a dependable guitar supplier, if nothing else. The thing I’ve learned is, when people give you guitars all the time, it’s pretty hard to hate them actively. You try it.

Before I tell you the other significant thing that was buried deep in one of the Female Robot’s letters, I have to relate the surprising events that transpired when I went to meet Sam Hellerman at the Salthaven mall a day or so after Naomi day.

“Happy birthday,” Sam Hellerman said, handing me a sloppily wrapped gift that was obviously an LP. KSBS 2021, he said it was, and he made me try to guess its secret identity before letting me open it. I couldn’t guess, of course, but it turned out to be the Flamin’ Groovies’
Flamingo
, the 1971 repress without the gatefold cover and with the pink labels. Still pretty nice, though.

Sam Hellerman hadn’t told me why we were meeting at the mall, but it became painfully obvious when we settled down on a bench near the mall entrance across the corridor from the Aladdin Arcade and he got out his notebook and put on his headphones without another word. More fieldwork: we were remaining ineffectually aloof once again.

Soon, as if on cue, Jeans Skirt Girl came along, wearing not a jeans skirt this time, but rather a kind of dress thing, which, because of the golden jeans penis, was a bit of a relief. (She would always be Jeans Skirt Girl to me, though, whatever she wore.) She was with two other girls, pretty normal, they all seemed.

Now, the Aladdin Arcade had seen better days, but it was still a social hangout for the kids of Slut Heaven and the surrounding areas, and a lot of them tended to congregate outside of it because if the management noticed you weren’t actually playing, they would kick you out till you were ready to play again. It was to this congregation of kicked-out kids, loitering in the mall corridor, that Jeans Skirt Girl and her friends were headed.

Sam Hellerman explained, patiently enough, a little more about Jeans Skirt Girl after I snatched the headphones off his head and told him I would refuse to give them back till he provided some answers to my pointed questions. She was a student at Mission Hills High School. Sam Hellerman had picked her out of last year’s MHHS yearbook as his fieldwork subject once he’d learned he would be attending that school. He had certainly done his research on her. His algorithm had told him that by the time he turned sixteen and the sands of his father’s ultimatum ran out, her WHR would be just about ideal; she also was the child of parents who had had an acrimonious divorce when she was a little girl, which for some reason, according to Sam Hellerman, made her more likely to be receptive to being “got” and “kept” by a guy like Sam Hellerman. And she had been raised Catholic, which also apparently made her more likely to be r. to being g. and k. by a guy like S. H. Make of it what you will. I didn’t make much of it, I can tell you that.

Now, I had been on quite a few of these stakeouts by this point, though never one at this mall. If I’d known that that was what this was going to be, I’d have brought a book. Currently, I was reading this one called
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
, pretending that my dad had read it, and it was going pretty well, though it had a distinct
Crying of Lot 49
–ishness about it. It made me feel just slightly disoriented, another example of that Salvador Dalí feeling I’ve mentioned. Actually, maybe it was a good thing I didn’t have that particular book with me on this stakeout: if I had been at all disoriented and Salvador-y during what happened next, I wouldn’t have known whether to trust my own eyes when they took it in.

Because, as I was saying, the usual pattern for Jeans Skirt Girl fieldwork was, we’d show up and watch her while pretending not to watch her, with Sam Hellerman listening to his tapes and taking notes and the occasional photo till she left, when we would pack up and head home in a state, in my case, at least, of embarrassed self-loathing. But this time, around fifteen minutes in, to my astonishment, Sam Hellerman suddenly yanked off his headphones, handed them to me, and stood up.

“I’m going in,” he said.

As you know, I like to think I have a pretty powerful vocabulary. But how does one go about describing the degree of astonishment that comes with witnessing the most flabbergasting, mind-scrambling thing the world has ever seen? The word hasn’t been invented. I must invent one. “Lulguayvian” is the one I have chosen. Because what happened next was way beyond astonishing, so lulguayvian that even “lulguayvian” doesn’t quite come close to getting it across. Hyperlulguayvian, that’s better.

So imagine, my friends, my hyperlulguayvia when I watched Sam Hellerman stride boldly across the corridor toward the
Aladdin Arcade, stumbling once, and then, smoothing down his hair, walk straight up to Jeans Skirt Girl. Imagine the thoroughly hyperlulguayvian spectacle of Sam Hellerman actually engaging Jeans Skirt Girl in conversation, during which she begins to smile and laugh. Well, my skeptical friends, maybe you’re like me, and Jeans Skirt Girl laughing at Sam Hellerman might not strike you as being quite as lulguayvian as advertised. I’m with you, believe me. Fair enough.

But imagine my hyperlulguayvianicity, dear reader, when I saw Sam Hellerman lean in and actually kiss Jeans Skirt Girl. On the mouth. With her arms around his slump-shouldered Hellermanian back, and his hands gently, almost gallantly, I would say, around her tender 0.736 WHR. Now, understand me: it wasn’t quite “making out.” I wouldn’t go that far. There was no face licking, no lip biting that I could see, maybe even no tongue. And no discernible ass-grabbio. It might not even have merited a Clearview High PDA chant, though, then again, it might have. Still, it was perhaps the most stunning case of lulguayvia I’d ever experienced in a career of pretty significant lulguayvian episodes.

When the kiss was over, Sam Hellerman trotted back to our bench while Jeans Skirt Girl and her friends waved goodbye and giggled, and there was scattered (sarcastic?) clapping from the other kids standing around. But Sam Hellerman was holding a slip of paper in his hand like a trophy—her phone number, I had to guess.

“Wave to them,” he whispered. I was still staring, frozen, unable to control my movements. He reached out like he was going to lift my arm up and make me wave it, but I managed in the end to execute a feeble wave of my own with what I imagine must have been a pretty weird-looking, thoroughly befuddled half smile. Sam Hellerman smirked and did a much
more confident-looking salute-wave, gathered his stuff, and led me to the door. I was still in a daze, mouth open, walking in slow motion. The world had suddenly ceased to operate by the laws of nature that I had known and trusted all my life. The thought throbbed in my bewildered brain: this can’t be happening. But it was.

When we had emerged from the mall and were safely out of range of Jeans Skirt Girl and her friends, Sam Hellerman stopped and turned to me, an expression on his face that clearly said: “Well?”

“Gimme those tapes,” I growled.

I am strong. I am confident. I am in command of the situation. I am respected by my colleagues at work or school. Women like and admire me.…

See, it just wasn’t true. I was trying, but honestly, I never felt less s., c., and in c. of the s., much less r. by my c. at w. or s. Maybe you had to have a genius-level lack of self-awareness like Sam Hellerman to will yourself into the kind of idiocy that would allow your brain to permit you to believe it enough for these accursed tapes to work.

“What is it?” said Roberta the Female Robot, plopping down next to me on the Quad lawn at lunch and noticing my headphones. “Is it …
‘rock ’n’ roll
’?” She made this balancing gesture with her hands when she said “rock ’n’ roll,” like she was surfing. She and Little Big Tom had a bit in common, it had to be admitted, in their capacity as mimes.

“No, and you wouldn’t be interested,” I said, quickly taking the headphones off. The Female Robot shrugged. One thing
that was nice about her was she never pressed or pried when someone didn’t want her to ask about something. She just moved on to the next topic, which, for her, could be anything: tables, eyebrows, the weird texture of spaghetti, who invented mayonnaise, how cars look like they have faces, why we have snaps, how gross feet are, daisies, kittens, suicide, self-harm.…

I looked at her intently.

“Are you … all right?” I said. She hadn’t been in homeroom today, and it was the first time I’d seen her since discovering the unlikely but fairly worrying darkness lurking in the depths of her scattered little soul.

“Yeah,” she said, in an offhand way. “What?”

Haltingly, I explained that I’d been reading her letters and that she seemed a bit … troubled.

“Oh, that,” she said, waving it away. “That’s just letters. Jeez, you sound like my mom! I overslept today and she thought I’d taken pills—not I, said the Roberta!”

She leaned in farther, with a conspiratorial nod. “But what,” she whispered, “did you think about the Pammelah thing?” Her face communicated a pretty good face version of a question mark, her lower teeth up against her upper lip slightly and her eyes narrowed.

Well, see, that’s the other aspect of the letters that I haven’t gotten around to mentioning yet. Throughout them there had been lots of mentions of her sax-playing friend “Pammelah,” mostly in the form of questions to me: did I think she was pretty, did I think she was nice, did I think she was sexy, did I like her eyes, did I like her hair, did I like her butt? (I kid you not: “… can we say, thumbs up to Pammelah’s butt? I think we can!! I’m sure you’ll agree Mr. Thomas boy burger. I wish I had a good juicy butt but my butt’s a late bloomer. But (!!!!) you like it don’t you? ←P’s butt. Best in the west! Why don’t
birds have hands?…”) Maybe you see where this is heading, though I didn’t till I did my Robot homework in Little Big Tom’s motel room. But after all these hints, some of which were quite strong indeed, the latest note began:

There followed several drawings of hearts in different colors, and what looked like what I believed she would have probably called boobs, though they might have been infinity symbols with dots in them. Then: