King Dork (24 page)

Panchowski on drums, percussion, acoustic and semiacoustic drums, cymbals, tambourines, cowbells, chimes, gongs, toms, shaker eggs, bongos, stick clicks, wood blocks, percussion, percussion and more percussion. First album
Our Drummer Is
Kind of Full of Himself.

I looked at him dubiously. How could we ever get on it?

You had to submit an audition tape to this group of normal students supervised by Mr. Teone. A tape of us actually playing, I was pretty sure, would automatically disqualify us, maybe even permanently, from playing anywhere, even with

a more sympathetic panel of judges. Anyway, it sounded like a Festival of Insufferable Tedium and Aggravation to me. Did we even want to get in on it?

“We do,” said Sam Hellerman, “and we can.” And he

181

gave me that “leave it to me” look. So I figured he had

a plan.

At the time, I found it difficult to see how any good could come of such a thing. And as it turns out, I guess I was mostly right.

DR. H EXSTROM

My first “therapy” appointment was also during that first

week of November. My mom insisted on driving me there,

even though I wanted to ride my bike. That was to make sure I wouldn’t duck out, which was a valid concern. She checked me in with the receptionist but didn’t stick around to see the shrink with me—maybe that was against the rules or something.

The psychiatrist was Dr. Judith Hexstrom. My plan had

been to give her the old freaky-youth-genius treatment and try to unnerve her with silence and unreadable facial expressions. I was thinking maybe if I could convince her I was legitimately crazy I could at least get some medication that I could give to Sam Hellerman for a Christmas present. It

didn’t work out that way, though.

For one thing, to my surprise, I kind of liked Dr.

Hexstrom. She wasn’t young or pretty, but there was some-

thing about her face that I liked, even though it was my considered opinion that her whole profession wasn’t much more than a shameless racket. And she was by far the most intelligent adult I’d ever talked to.

Here’s how sharp Dr. Hexstrom was: I happened to men-

tion Mr. Teone’s “naked day of zombies” comment, as an ex-

ample of his bizarre behavior and of how weird normal

people can be. “Pretty strange, huh?” I said.

182

“Not really. If you were wearing that shirt.”

I looked down at my T-shirt, then raised my head and

gave her the look that says “how so?”

Dr. Hexstrom said: “
Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet.
It’s Latin for ‘Kill them all, and God will know his own.’ From the Middle Ages, the Crusades.”

Damn. I
had
been wearing my “Kill ’em All” shirt that day, and he had made me turn it inside out. And Dr.

Hexstrom’s phrase did sound kind of like what Mr. Teone

had said, allowing for his speech impediment. It made more sense than “day of suicide-osity,” anyway, though I’d still classify it as a bizarre episode, especially with all that laughing.

I looked at Dr. Hexstrom, and my look said: “how the

hell did you figure that out?”

Then, when she didn’t respond, I said, out loud, if I re-

member correctly: “How the hell did you figure that out?”

“It’s well known,” she said imperiously.

It’s well known. Not by me it wasn’t. I’m not sure she was able to pick it up, but I gave her the look that said: “well, la-di-da.”

I had expected Dr. Hexstrom to plunge into the suicide

thing right away, but instead, the first thing she said was,

“That’s an unusual book.”

She was talking about
The Doors of Perception,
CEH 1966.

I know I said that the next CEH book on the reading list was
Slan.
I had started it, and it was pretty cool. It was about this freaky kid whose dad is dead. He and his mom are members

of a mutant alien species called slans that have telepathic powers because of tendrils on their heads, which they try to disguise by hiding them in their hair-dos. But the normal

people still pursue them and try to exterminate them. They got the dad already when the main slan was a little kid, and 183

they get the mom, too, right at the beginning of the book. I could totally relate.

But there had been a change in plans since I solved the

Catcher
code and gained a new interest in underlining, so I put
Slan
aside temporarily. Only two of the books had a whole lot of actual underlining:
The Doors of Perception
and
The Naked and the Dead. The Naked and the Dead
was the one that had been inscribed only CH with no date, so I wasn’t

even sure it belonged with the others. However, it was the one where the markings had seemed the most codelike.

There were individual words underlined, sometimes very in-

significant ones like “of ” or “very”; some were circled and sometimes only parts of words were underlined or circled. If there was an encoded message in there, though, I couldn’t

find it. And I had spent hours and hours trying.

I had originally shied away from this book because I was

worried it had to do with the Grateful Dead and nudity, and, well, let me put it this way: if you can imagine a more alarming combination, your imagination is quite a bit better than mine. Then I realized it was about war, and it was more like naked people and dead people, two of my favorite subjects, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Now, this book was by a guy named Norman Mailer, and

he was a piece of work. You know how Holden Caulfield said

“giving her the time?” Well it was the same with Norman

Mailer. He said “fug.” I kid you not. Like “this is a fugging nightmare!” or “go fug yourself.” You know, it’s no wonder everyone was all crazy and weird in the sixties, if everything was being run by prissy grandma types like Holden Caulfield and Norman Mailer.

In the end I couldn’t take much of
The Naked and the

Dead,
and I put it aside for later. It wasn’t like it was even a real CEH book anyway. I went for
The Doors of Perception
in-184

stead, because it had a lot of underlining, too, though admittedly it didn’t look very code-y.

The Doors of Perception
is about this guy who takes a lot of drugs to try to see what it’s like to be a crazy person. It’s kind of interesting, but the guy is pretty full of himself and a bad writer, too. He seems to forget what he was going to say

around halfway through many of his long, complicated sen-

tences, and then he tries to cover it up by spattering the page with highfalutin words that I swear he just made up.
30 Days
to a More Annoying Vocabulary.
If Holden Caulfield were to read it, he’d say something like “Gee, Wally, that’s swell and junk, but I feel all crumby on account of how it’s so phony and all.”

Still, I got a kick out of watching the drug guy try to pretend he was doing his drugs for some noble purpose rather

than just indulging himself and getting high and trying to show off how with-it he was. It’s cool if you want to do drugs, but if you go around claiming it’s like discovering Antarctica or curing cancer you’re not fooling anyone but yourself.

Believe it or not, that’s pretty much what Dr. Hexstrom

and I talked about, and she even kind of seemed to see what I was getting at. She was the only adult I had ever met who was
Catcher
aware but not necessarily
Catcher
devoted. She said she thought HC needed medication, and we had a good

laugh about that one. She was all right.

Dr. Hexstrom was very interested in the CEH reading

list, which I hadn’t intended to tell her about, but somehow I couldn’t stop myself in the end. I didn’t mention Tit or the
Catcher
code, of course, but we did talk a lot about
Brighton
Rock
and even a little about the guy I accidentally beat up (though I downplayed it a bit and left out most of the blood, in consideration of the sensibilities of my audience). It was nice to talk to someone about a book without being worried 185

that they would make you copy a page out of it, even though it probably wasn’t going to cure my unspecified mental problems and even though I very much doubted it would turn out to be worth a hundred and fifty bucks.

I think it was the most I’d ever spoken out loud in one sitting, and in spite of myself, I actually had a pretty good time.

In fact, we never made it to the suicide thing. It was just like on TV. She said, “I’m sorry but I’m afraid our time is up.” I doubt she was actually all that sorry, but I kind of was.

S I STE R HO OD I S P OWE R F U L

Remember how the world came loose from its hinges and

the fabric of reality began to unravel thread by thread and the space-time continuum got all chopped up and out of order all of a sudden? Well, that was just a passing thing.

What I’m getting at is, after weeks of transgressions

against the established norms of dating mandated by inter-

national law, Née-Née Tagliafero abruptly ditched Pierre

Butterfly Cameroon, bringing to a close one of the most curious episodes in Hillmont High School history. She started going instead with an eminently normal slow-witted alpha

sadist named Mike Moon, who promptly proceeded to beat

the hell out of Pierre Butterfly Cameroon in the parking lot before first period, to the evident amusement of a small

crowd of onlookers and with the apparent approval of

sweet little Née-Née as well. Like I said, back to normal.

WAGBOG.

Sam Hellerman’s stint of spending every single lunch pe-

riod with the drama hippies also abruptly ended on the same day: he met me at around locker 414, like in the old days, just as if the intervening weeks hadn’t even happened. And, you 186

know, maybe I should have spotted it sooner, but there were just too many coincidences in bloom in and around this particular patch of the Sam Hellerman garden.

We were in the cafeteria. I was staring at Sam Hellerman

with the question on my face, and he knew what the ques-

tion was without my having to say it out loud. His earlier evasiveness had evaporated, and he actually seemed in a pretty good mood, though I didn’t know why yet.

“There’s some stuff I haven’t told you,” he said, as though that were something I didn’t already know.

Then Sam Hellerman began to tell the following story:

It seems that the Celeste Fletcher trio, along with the

Syndie Duffy group and a few others as well, had this kind of club that they called the Sisterhood. (I know—I’m eye-rolling and gagging, too.) They had a lot of complicated activities and rules and procedures, but the one that concerned Sam

Hellerman was this game called Dud Chart. Or, I guess it was more like a contest. The name comes from this board game

for girls called Mystery Date, where you would open a door in the middle of the board and the guy behind it would either be a dream, meaning a Greg Brady–looking guy with big

fluffy sideburns in a purple velvet tuxedo, or a dud, meaning a guy who pretty much looked like Sam Hellerman and me.

It was pretty kitschy retro popular. I think Mystery Date was even the theme of one of the proms last year.

In Dud Chart, they had this chart of all the dorky, nerdy

guys in school, and the object was for each girl to score

points on the chart by flirting with them or making out with them in various ways. Like you’d get a certain number of

points for flirting, for kissing, for getting to different bases, or for walking around like Née-Née Tagliafero did with Pierre Butterfly Cameroon, which had had one of the highest point values because it was so public. But it all had to be in public 187

to some degree so it could be observed and documented.

Different guys had different point values: the less desirable the guy, the higher the score. It was originally supposed to be just flirting and making out, but like a lot of dare-type situations, the stakes escalated as the game went on.

“So basically,” I said, “you’re talking about an institution-alized Make-out/Fake-out.”

“Pretty much,” he said, a little curtly, and continued to explain the system.

I supposedly had a pretty high point value, mostly be-

cause of the now-famous PE Rape-Prevention balls incident, which had made a big splash. Bobby Duboyce was near the

top, too, because of his helmet. But here’s where Sam

Hellerman came in. Celeste Fletcher, hoping to gain unfair advantage over the other girls, had hired Sam Hellerman as a kind of consultant. He pretty much knew everyone on the

chart, and had all sorts of information about them that might be useful, and might even, she thought, be able to help set some of them up. Sam Hellerman’s stipulation was that she

use her influence to keep both him and me off the chart and out of the game, which she had somehow been able to do. I

said a silent prayer of thanks: my life definitely didn’t need another formal humiliation ritual.

They had planned to do some kind of splashy announce-

ment of the results at one of the pep rallies. I don’t know, maybe passing out a zine with all the scores, or posting the chart? That’s just a guess. It didn’t actually happen because before they could complete the game Syndie Duffy had had

a big falling-out with Lorra Jaffe. I don’t know the details, but the whole Sisterhood had basically collapsed in a shambles of infighting and scheming against one another, and Dud Chart had been forgotten in the excitement. Lorra Jaffe had focused her energy on trying to destroy Syndie Duffy instead of win-188

ning the relatively inconsequential make-out-with-dorks contest, and everyone else had followed suit.

It’s pretty hard to keep these elaborate schemes going for too long, though they can sometimes coast along on their

own for a while. Meanspiritedness is powerful. I have no