King Dork Approximately (30 page)

So, if you don’t know what “the shocker” is, I didn’t either. I don’t ask about everything, but this one I had to ask. And when the Robot told me what it was, with that impish little nose crinkle, I mean, you know, I talk a good game, but I’m really a tender soul deep down, and honestly I found “the shocker” a bit, well, shocking. Plus, I like to be the most vulgar person in the room—that’s well known—and I hated being upstaged.

“You know ‘the shocker,’ ” the Robot said. She held up her hand with the ring finger folded down. Now I’d been seeing the Clearview kids, especially the girls, doing this hand sign all over the place ever since I’d started there, and, silly me, I thought it was the Jerry Garcia salute that they got slightly wrong. (Basically Jerry Garcia had his middle finger chopped off with an ax, so hippies sometimes salute each other this way. If you’ll remember, Flapjack did it to Little Big Tom.) But no. The Robot continued: “ ‘Two in the pink, one in the stink’?” Then she scampered away laughing like a crazy person. It took me till halfway through fourth period to get it, and I imagine my perturbed expression in reaction to getting it lasted semifrozen pretty much throughout the rest of the day.

And also no, I didn’t, as it happens, do “the shocker” on Pammelah Shumway. As you shall see.

Ramoning makes the world go round, everyone knows that.

But have you noticed how in movies and TV and books, the girls never seem to be as interested in ramoning as the guys? You know what I mean: the guy tries to put his arm around the girl casually and gradually inch his hand toward her breast and she realizes and takes the hand off her chest and puts it back on her shoulder with a kind of “behave yourself, Buster” attitude? Or, as in
Happy Days
, the guys are trying to learn how to unhook the girls’ bras behind their backs so they can get them off before the girls notice, and once the girls notice they get mad and say they’re not “that kind of a girl”? Or maybe it’s not so old-fashioned as in
Happy Days
, but more modern: nevertheless, the girl is still trying not to “give it away” and the guy has to try to get around her defenses, and it’s like, by doing it with her he’s kind of taking advantage of her, regardless of whether she’s into it?

Well, I don’t have a lot of experience with girls, maybe, but in what experience I have had, that just has never been my, you know, experience. True, it’s difficult and certainly rare to get to the point where they like you enough or are interested enough in you to want to make out with you, as Sam Hellerman’s tapes and the clear need for them indicate. But however you get there, if you do manage to get there, my experience has been that girls tend to be, like, just as into it as you are. In fact, usually more so. And they get mad if you don’t or can’t keep up with them. I never had to resort to skullduggery to unhook Deanna Schumacher’s bra. Basically, a girl likes you, the bra comes off. Pretty simple. So I have always thought of the whole notion of the reluctant female ramoner as some kind of myth, or maybe it’s the way it used to be long, long ago, from when people were weird and uptight
about sex in a whole different way than the way we are w. and u. about it now. Another weird jacket-varsity-type thing, in other words.

But here’s the point: Pammelah Shumway was exactly like that, just like in
Happy Days
. She really liked kissing, it’s true. And she really liked my hands on her while we were doing it, and she would grope me too, often and with great enthusiasm. But when I tried to do the next thing, like go down her pants or up her shirt or whatever, she would take my hand with her hand and put it back where it was before. Or she would say “Don’t do that,” and I would of course recoil and feel mortified, thinking “Oh no, what have I done wrong?”, but then she would start kissing me again, like the “don’t do that” never happened.

The weirdest part, though, was she would do all of this with this kind of seductive attitude, posing in a sexy way and saying sexy things like “Can I interest you in some of the merchandise?” She wasn’t shy at all. But she seemed to want to keep her clothes on at all costs.

So, for example, we would be kissing and rubbing on each other and saying things like “Oh baby” like you do, and she would lean into me and say, “Mm, feels like you have something special for me there.” So I don’t know about you, but to me that made it seem very much like the time for the blow job part to begin had begun. It was exactly the sort of thing Deanna Schumacher would say right before pouncing, if you know what I mean. So I would lean back, like you do, but unlike Deanna Schumacher, Pammelah would shake her head and say, “I’m not doing that,” with a little grimace. The first time, I stupidly thought she meant that undoing my pants was the thing she wouldn’t do, for some reason, so I started to undo my belt buckle and she shook her head again, making it pretty
clear that I should just buckle the belt right back up. Well, okay. I did.

“So,” I said. “What should we do, then?”

And she leaned back and winked and pushed her breasts out and said: “I don’t know. What did you have in mind?”

Well, you know, it was pretty obvious what I’d had in mind. And of course I didn’t want her to do it if she didn’t want to. I mean, obviously, I
did
, but I wasn’t going to press the issue. And if you’ve managed to pick up on how shy and unconfident I am in general as a person, you’ll probably understand that I’m not exaggerating when I say that I really didn’t. Press the issue, that is. Actually, the whole ramoning thing had started to terrify me in a way it never quite had before. I did indeed have “something special” for Pammelah Shumway. Why didn’t she want it, exactly? Was there something wrong with it, some defect she could feel through my pants that I wasn’t even aware was a defect? When you have something special like that, it doesn’t take much to give you a complex about it, and I was well on my way to developing one.

Now, I realize that everyone’s different. And sometimes you have to work up to things, I know that. And I was patient as can be, with the patience born of self-loathing and sheer terror, which is the best, most effective kind of patience there is. But over time it became pretty clear that no matter how much making out we did, no clothes were ever coming off and no actual ramoning, by even the most generous definition, was going to happen.

The point here is … well, no, the main point is the lack of ramoning, let’s be honest. But the other main point, if you didn’t get it, is this: here was yet another example of the fifties-varsity-oh-gee-Penelope-Anne-did-you-really-get-pinned-let’s-get-burgers-down-at-the-sock-hop-jacket phenomenon at
Clearview High School, if “phenomenon” means what I think it means. In other words, just call me Potsie, I guess. I hear the Hooper twins neck on the first date. I mean, they’re, like, fast, daddy-o.

If you’ll remember from my previous explanations, I once imagined that being part of a couple would be like forming a Sex Alliance Against Society, the two of you against the world, ramoning away, and facing the terrors and predations of society at large with a great big “Fuck you, world, we have each other and we don’t need you anymore.” I have to say, “going” with Pammelah Shumway fell a bit short of this ideal. But I’ve never been too big on idealism. It was what it was, and I was willing to work with it.

The thing is—and you can believe me or not, I don’t really care—I didn’t mind the ramonelessness all that much, once I had grasped the situation. Until things started to get out of hand a little later, I was still having fun. I could always take a shower and think about Fiona if anything ever got to be too much for me. And it was definitely a fun novelty having a girlfriend, even without the ramoning. At first.

Pride and Prejudice
aside, the thing I liked best, I think, about the books I was pretending my dad had read was also the thing I liked least about them.
The Crying of Lot 49
and
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
and even
Dune
each depicted a world where nothing made sense, and the main guy is utterly confused and disoriented and tries, largely without success, to figure everything out, to make some sense out of the mess he has found himself in.
Unfortunately, the reader is also confused about what’s going on, and I often found myself pretty lost, and maybe a little paranoid as well, suspecting that my own world, as confusing as it is, might have yet another layer of sinister confusingness to it that I hadn’t yet taken enough drugs to perceive.

That said, I could really relate to these characters, and despite their crazy features—the replicants, the sand worms, the W.A.S.T.E. baskets—their worlds still looked a lot more like mine than, say, the quaint, old-timey version of New York City presented in
The Catcher in the Rye
. I suppose Holden Caulfield is a bit confused about who he is and where he is and so forth, but it occurs to me that one of the reasons I have had such a hard time being all in love with his story like everyone else—besides the fact that they make you read the dumb book over and over and try to force you to like it—is that his confusion just isn’t state-of-the-art enough for me.

Because
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
is way more how I felt about Clearview High School than anything J. D. Salinger ever dreamed up. (Salinger is the
Catcher in the Rye
guy, a very bad person who has caused the world untold misery.) In a way, I
am
like Jason Taverner, waking up with no identity in a mysterious hotel room, not knowing how much of the parasitic life form my girlfriend infected me with is still in my system, and the world outside is a scary police state where I don’t know any of the rules. Although I guess I knew the rules, really. They were the rules of
Happy Days
and
Revenge of the Nerds
. I just didn’t want to accept it.

I was telling Roberta the Female Robot about
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
. Well, I was trying to explain it but failing, and she was looking at me with appropriate puzzlement.

“That’s really in the book?” she said, all agog, if “agog” means what I think it means.

I assured her that yes, yes it was. I’m certain her only exposure to literature of any kind was to books you got credit for reading, meaning, basically, highlights from the books on Mrs. Pizzaballa’s list:
The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, Lord of the Flies, The Grapes of Wrath, The Scarlet Letter
, and possibly
A Tale of Two Cities
. So it’s not surprising that
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
was something of a shock to her. It had been to me, even after reading all those real, noncredit books in my dad’s library.

The Robot said it all sounded warped and surreal, like Salvador Dalí.

“Who?” I said.

“Salvador Dalí,” she said.

“Who?” I said, trying to narrow it down.

That was when she told me who Salvador Dalí was.

“Oh, that Salvador Dalí,” I said.

So that was two things the Robot had known about that I hadn’t, the other being “the shocker.” What else was in this girl’s head? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

I had heard from Pammelah Shumway a little bit about Roberta the F. R.’s rough childhood, her troubled home life, her brother’s overdose, her suicide attempt, her occasional and continuing self-destructive behavior. It was strange because, other than the little bits of darkness that would pop up from within the dense text of her letters, she was such a cheerful, sunny little goofball. It kind of made you wonder about what might be lurking inside all the other cheerful, sunny people in the world who don’t write letters. Maybe Little Big Tom’s memoirs would be worth reading after all. I mean, you never know, do you?

“She’s never had a boyfriend,” Pammelah had said, “and I’ve known her since kindergarten and I’ve only ever been to
her house twice. Do you think your friend Sam would like her? Maybe he should ask her to go. But oh my God, Thomas, does that girl ever like to drink!”

Well, there was that, it’s true: the Robot always had a can or a bottle with the original contents poured out and replaced with some kind of alcohol, apparently stolen from her parents’ liquor cabinet and from other peoples’ parents as well. She never seemed drunk, though, at least not to me, which was surprising, because with her being so little you’d think it would have affected her a whole lot more. Pammelah Shumway, though a bit of a drinker herself, like every kid at Clearview, nevertheless had to take care of the Robot sometimes when she would get too sloppy. I’d had the same kind of relationship with Sam Hellerman for years, though he preferred his pills. In a way, I guess, the Robot was Pammelah Shumway’s Sam Hellerman, the vulnerable mastermind. Lord, what kind of tapes was
she
listening to? It was a strange thought.

Raising the issue of “fixing up” the Robot and Sam Hellerman was a well-known girl move that you may remember from my previous explanations, though of course Sam Hellerman had his hands full with Jeans Skirt Girl (and God only knows what else) over at Mission Hills. It wasn’t going to happen. But though it wasn’t something I particularly noticed at the time, her raising it at all reflected something about how she felt about the Robot, in that it was basically, in a subtle backhanded way, intended as an insult to Sam Hellerman. Which wasn’t very nice, when you think about it, to either of them.