King Dork (3 page)

It’s kind of like a cult.

They live for making you read it. When you do read it

you can feel them all standing behind you in a semicircle

wearing black robes with hoods, holding candles. They’re

chanting “Holden, Holden, Holden . . .” And they’re looking over your shoulder with these expectant smiles, wishing they were the ones discovering the earth-shattering joys of
The
Catcher in the Rye
for the very first time.

Too late, man. I mean, I’ve been around the
Catcher in the
Rye
block. I’ve been forced to read it like three hundred times, and don’t tell anyone but I think it sucks.

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Good luck avoiding it, though. If you can make it to pu-

berty without already having become a
Catcher in the Rye
ca-sualty you’re a better man than I, and I’d love to know your secret. It’s too late for me, but the Future Children of America will thank you.

So the AP teachers examine the class through their

Catcher
glasses. The most Holden-y kid wins. Dispute the premise of every assignment and try to look troubled and intense, yet with a certain quiet dignity. You’ll be a shoo-in.

Everybody wins, though, really, in AP Land.

But watch out. When all the little Holdens leave the

building, it’s open season again. Those who can’t shed or disguise their
Catcher-
approved eccentricities will be noticed by all the psychopathic normal people and hunted down like

dogs. The
Catcher
Cult sets ’em up, and the psychotic normal people knock ’em right back down. What a world.

“Did you get in any APs?” Sam Hellerman had asked on

the way to school that first day. He hadn’t gotten in any APs.

Whether or not you end up in AP is mostly a matter of

luck, though the right kind of sucking up can increase your odds a bit. So considering that I put zero effort into it, I didn’t do too badly in the AP lottery. I got into AP social studies and French; that left me with regular English and math; and I also had PE and band. “Advanced” French is mainly notable for the fact that no one in the class has the barest prayer of reading, speaking, or understanding the French language, despite having studied it for several years. AP social studies is just like normal social studies, except the assignments are easier and you get to watch movies. Plus they like to call AP social studies “Humanities.” Ahem. . . . Pardon me while I spit out this water and laugh uncontrollably for the next twenty minutes or so. This year, “Humanities” began with Foods of 13

the World. The basic idea there is that someone brings in a different type of ethnic food every day. And the class celebrates cultural diversity by eating it. Day one was pineapple and ham, like they have in Hawaii! We were gifted and advanced, all right. And soon we would know how to have a

snack in all fifty states.

I suspected regular English was going to be a drag,

though, and I wasn’t wrong. AP teachers tend to be younger, more enthusiastic, and in premeltdown mode. They are almost always committed members of the
Catcher
Cult, and easy to manipulate. The regular classes, on the other hand, are usually taught by elderly, bitter robots who gave up long ago and who are just biding their time praying for it all to be over. Getting in touch with your inner Holden is totally use-less if you wind up in a class taught by one of the bitter robots. You will not compute. Or if you do compute, the bitter robots will only hate you for it.

I didn’t get into AP English because my tryout essay last

year was too complex for the robots to grasp. So I ended up in regular, nonadvanced English, run by the ultimate bitter robot, Mr. Schtuppe.

“I don’t give out As like popcorn,” said Mr. Schtuppe on

that first day. “Neatness counts.

“Cultivate the virtue of brevity,” he continued. “There will be no speaking out of turn. No shenanigans. No chewing

gum:
of any kind.

“Shoes and shirts must be worn. There will be no shorts,

bell-bottom trousers, or open-toed ladies’ footwear. No tube tops, halter tops, or sports attire. Rule number one, if the teacher is wrong see rule number two. Rule number two, ah . . .

if you are tardy, the only excuse that will be accepted is a death in the family, and if that death is your own—mmmm, no, if you die, then that death is, ah, accepted as excusable, mmm . . .”

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Mr. Schtuppe’s introductory lecture was not only morbid,

but had a few glitches, as well.

It is like his bald robot head contained a buggy chunk of

code that selected random stuff from some collective pool of things teachers have said since around 1932, strung them together in no particular order in a new temporary text document, and fed this document through the speech simulator

unit as is. And sometimes there was some corruption in the file, so you’d get things like “my way or the freeway.” And of course, all the girls in the class were in fact wearing halter tops, and practically every guy had on some kind of “sports attire.” You can’t have a dress code for just one class. It was nonsense. There must have been a time long ago, in the seventies, I’d guess, when he
had
been in a position to impose a dress code, and he kept it as part of the introductory speech because—who knows? Maybe he just liked saying “open-toed

ladies’ footwear.”

Mr. Schtuppe was still droning on about forbidden

footwear when the bell rang. He stopped midsentence (he

had just said “In case of ”) and sat down, staring at his desk with what appeared to be unseeing eyes as the kids filed out.

I had a feeling that everyone in that room was thinking pretty much the same thing: it was going to be a long year.

H IG H SC HO OL I S TH E P E NALTY F OR

TRAN SG R E S S ION S YET TO B E S P EC I F I E D

Despite the ominous beginning, the first day of school had been refreshingly uneventful and easy to take. So, after

weighing our options, we decided to go back and do it all

over again the following day.

I had been curious about how Mr. Schtuppe would

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launch day two of English for the Not Particularly Gifted, and I was pleased to note that he stood up at the beginning of the class period and simply resumed in midsentence where he

had left off the day before.

“Fire proceed to the exit in an orderly fashion,” he said.

“No talking.” While part of me was a bit envious of the AP

English students, who were at that moment probably watch-

ing a movie or eating cookies or something, I was mainly just fascinated to watch my own educational train wreck in

progress.

Mr. Schtuppe had a certain charm, if you looked at the

situation in the right spirit. He liked to call the girls gutter-snipes and the guys “you filthy animals,” and he would say it with this weird smile that made him look like, I don’t

know, the devil or something. A shiny pink devil with a lot of ear hair.

First on the program in Mr. Schtuppe’s class, when the

introduction had finally ended, was a book called
30 Days to
a More Powerful Vocabulary.
“In 30 days, you will learn how to make words your slaves.”

This book is a big list of fancy-pants words, and our job

as self-improvement vocabularists was to prove we knew

what they meant by saying them aloud and using them in

sentences.

Mr. Schtuppe’s unique twist on this was that he managed

to mispronounce around half of them.

“The first word is ‘bête noire,’ ” he said. But he pro-

nounced it “bait noir-ay,” with the emphasis on the “ay.”

“Bait noir-ay,” we said in unison.

“Excellent. Now, class, listen carefully: magnaminious . . .”

(We would have to wait till the end of the alphabet be-

fore we witnessed Mr. Schtuppe’s finest hour. That would

be “wanton,” which he pronounced like “won ton.” The deli-

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cious Chinese dumpling often served in soup at the Pacific Rim’s finest eating establishments. That’s why Sam

Hellerman and I will sometimes refer to a sexy girl as a Won Ton Woman.)

Of course, if I had known how important mispronuncia-

tion skills would prove to be in my sex life and in the events that followed, I probably would have paid more attention.

But I spent most of the class in my own zone, thinking about the lyrics of Roxy Music’s “She Sells” and writing out a track list for Baby Batter’s third album,
Odd and Even Number.

Note to self: one of these days, my next band is definitely going to be Beat Noir-ay. First album:
Talk Won Ton to Me, You
Crazy Asian Superstar.
Lots of wok solos.

But getting back to Hillmont:

I used to get beat up and hassled a fair amount in elemen-

tary and junior high school, but not so much these days. In part, that’s because the normal people of the world, as they mature and become more sophisticated, naturally begin to

discover that psychological torture is in the end more satisfying, and easier to get away with, than the application of brute force; and, in part, or so I like to think, it’s because of a special technique I developed last year.

What I mean is, actual balls-out physical attacks, where

one guy wins and the other gets beaten to a quivering bloody sock monkey, are rare, though they do happen. It’s usually more subtle than that. They’ll try to trip you as you go by in the hallway; or they’ll throw little rolled-up balls of gum at the back of your head in homeroom; or they’ll write stuff on your locker, or squirt substances like mustard, milk, or worse through your locker’s slats; or they’ll superglue your gym locker shut so you can’t get to your street clothes. None of 17

these techniques is all that devastating alone; but repeated endlessly and in tandem, they can build up and start to drive you a bit insane. The basic idea is to wear you down with

day-to-day social exclusionary exercises, and the repetition of mind-numbingly similar minor pranks and indignities. It’s all about ritual abuse, mental and emotional stress, psychological torture, and humiliation. They really are a great bunch of guys.

The best way to handle such situations is to stare straight ahead and act like you don’t notice or care. Unless you happen to have some serious equalizing firepower. Which I don’t.

My dad always used to say “Fight back,” but that’s not re-

alistic. Even if you could successfully pretend to be some kind of bad dude there would still be something like eighteen hundred of them and only one of you. On TV, people in that situation claim that they know karate and that their hands are registered as lethal weapons and then they do this yelpy kung fu dance. Someone cues the laugh track and the tension is relieved. Then there’s a commercial, and they don’t show the part where Matt Lynch rides his skateboard on the guy’s face.

No thanks.

The only way to get Matt Lynch to leave you alone, if

you can’t actually take him out, is to introduce an element of uncertainty into his slow-moving, gummed-up “mind.” It

turns out Matt Lynch has a fear of uncertainty and the irra-tional. Raising such doubts is not as hard as you might think, though it took me quite a while to figure that one out.

At the beginning of the school year, all the psychotic normal people are mainly concerned with their own affairs, and even the minor irritants and pranks I’ve described can get off to a slow start. Which is why that first week went by without incident. Well, almost.

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September

TH E WE E KE N D STARTS NOW

I say almost because on Friday, at the last possible moment, there was what I guess you’d call an incident. I was in my own world, thinking about Baby Batter, planning my stage

banter (“Hey, we’re Baby Batter, and this one’s called ‘Up Your Face.’
Un, deux, trois, quatre . . .
”) on my way out at the end of the day when I bumped into Mr. Teone. Literally, I

mean: there’s quite a lot of Mr. Teone, and it’s pretty easy to crash into him if you’re not watching where you’re going. It happens all the time. In this instance I must have been going along at a fair clip, because I bounced so hard off his expan-sive trampoline-y stomach that I almost lost my balance and fell backward. Mr. Teone stood there smirking. No salute this time. Just a weird smile, if that’s what it was.

“Henderson,” he said, in that mush-mouthed, nasal way

he has, stopping me with his hand on my shoulder. He pulled his head back and squinted one eye as he looked at me. Not a pretty sight.

I said nothing, looked up at him warily. What now?

“Say hi to your dad for me.”

I gave him one of my “whatever, freak” looks, disengaged,

and shuffled off to the northwest exit.

See, that almost sounds like an okay thing to say, if you

don’t know that my dad is actually dead. But now that you

know that, what do you think? I would certainly pardon your French if you were to reply that he’s totally fucked up.