King Dork (36 page)

about everything except beat me with a bag of oranges. And maybe they did that, too, for all I know.

The whole thing could then be blamed on Mark

McAlistair’s gloveless punches. That was the plan, anyway, as near as I could figure. At any rate, Mark McAlistair was toast, and was headed to some sort of facility for delinquents that would be even harder to take than Hillmont. I felt a little sorry for him, as he was only a pawn. But he should have

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known better than to sign up with a pack of depraved normal people, who didn’t care whom they sold out as long as it

meant a chance at a couple more drops of nerd blood.

Savages.

So I ended up with a concussion and some skull fractures,

and I had to spend the next few days in a hospital so I

wouldn’t fall asleep and die. I didn’t die and life went on, but for a while there I wasn’t around to observe much of it. It takes more than a blow from a brass instrument to kill King Dork, apparently. Who knew?

It turned out I needed surgery because of some nerve

damage. I was told that the surgeon was very good, but that there was a possibility that I was going to have some permanent numb spots on my scalp. That didn’t seem so bad,

though part of me wished there was some way that I could

have some numb spots
inside
my head as well as outside.

They supplied that on a temporary basis, anyway, which was nice. For a while there, I had feared that Hillmont was going to end up with another helmet guy on its hands, but fortunately it wasn’t going to come to that.

I have no recollection of the operation. Afterward, they

moved me to a recovery room on a different floor, which I

shared with this guy named Mr. Aquino. We were separated

by a curtain: my side was by the window, while he had the

door side. I don’t know what was wrong with him, but what-

ever it was, it resulted in a steady stream of moaning from his side of the curtain. After I got used to it, I took it in stride and didn’t really notice it anymore. But when anyone approached the door, the volume would increase, and if someone actually entered our room, he would break into a kind of hysterical wheezing. It was like an alarm system. When Mr. Aquino

“went off,” I knew someone was about to enter, which was

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useful. I always had a few seconds to compose myself before entertaining guests.

More people came through that door and over to my

side than you might imagine. My recollection is fuzzy, partly because of deluxe pain medication that would have quite literally made Sam Hellerman drool and partly because the

whole situation was so disorienting. I gradually learned what had happened at Hillmont High in the aftermath of the

Festival of Lights by piecing together accounts from various sources. But now I can’t quite recall which parts were explained by visitors, which parts I read about in the paper or saw on TV, and which parts I figured out afterward by putting two and two together.

The school ended up banning the Chi-Mos zine, which

only made it more sought after, of course: Sam Hellerman

had added a sticker that said “Banned in Hillmont” and had been able to raise the price to three dollars. Some of the punky kids, Sam Hellerman said, had even started showing

up to school with “Chi-Mos” written in Wite-Out on their

jackets and bags. We were famous.

Mr. Teone had left for lunch on Monday and never came

back. After he had been missing for two days, they entered his house to investigate and found—

Well, let me describe how I first heard about it, in a fuzzy hospital conversation with Sam Hellerman. He had just told me about the mysterious disappearance of Mr. Teone and

about how the cops had searched his house. Then he fell

silent, lost in thought.

“What’s on your mind, Hellerman?” I said, after a while.

“Oh. I was just thinking about whether Budgie really was

a part of the new wave of British heavy metal.”

“Really?” I said. What the hell was he talking about? Of

course
Budgie was a part of the new wave of British heavy 277

metal. The question was, what were we doing talking about

who may or may not have been a part of the NWOBHM at

a time like this? “Now, in the case of Ethel the Frog . . . ,” he began. He was just toying with me, though.

“I suppose you want to hear about Tit’s Satanic Empire?”

Which of course, as I immediately realized, was exactly

what I wanted to hear about, though I hadn’t been able to

find the words.

What the police had found at Mr. Teone’s house was ev-

idence of this high school–oriented pornography operation.

Much of it had been removed or destroyed, but what was left supposedly included a large number of videos of Hillmont

High School students from the past ten years, ramoning each other like crazy and doing God only knows what else.

As usual, Sam Hellerman seemed to know more about the

situation, especially at that early stage, than the newspapers, the TV, or anyone else. But word got around pretty quickly, even though the details were murky. As always seems to happen whenever anything scandalous occurs in Hillmont, a

group of parents and community leaders had decided that it all had to do with a powerful Satanic cult. Satanists, they believed, were turning Hillmont teens into mixed-up zombies

and using them in their pornographic rituals. Parents were already taking their kids to be deprogrammed and hypnotized

by therapists who specialized in recovering buried memories of Satanist porn-abuse. Mr. Teone had been smart to skip

town; by the end of the week, there would be enough

recovered-memory evidence to convict him several times

over even without the videotapes. Now, I’d be the last person to deny a Teone-Satan resemblance, but that part of it seemed pretty far-fetched to me. I mean, a real Satanic conspiracy could probably have come up with someone better than Mr.

Teone to handle the teen porn angle.

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Anyway, Mr. Teone had been selling and trading the pic-

tures and videos to similar operations overseas, which made it a very serious offense. His method appeared to be to recruit accomplices from within the student body, who would help

to sign up friends and younger siblings to act in the videos; then, when the accomplices had graduated, the younger kids would “move up” and become the recruiters. He managed to

keep everybody on board through a combination of rewards,

punishments, perks, and intimidation; supposedly he even

had a profit-sharing scheme for the “senior” student associates. They had really been raking it in, too, by all accounts. I thought of Mr. Teone’s afterschool programs—it sure gave a new meaning to the word “gifted,” not to mention “talented.”

Once again, I found myself wondering whether Sam

Hellerman knew even more than he was telling about the

whole situation. It wouldn’t have surprised me one bit.

The subject of who had been involved was of course a big

topic of conversation at school. The Hillmont student body was now divided into two groups: those who desperately

wanted to see those tapes and those who claimed they

wanted to see the tapes but were secretly hoping the tapes would never leak out because they were in some of them. I

also had an inkling of which of the two groups Kyrsten

Blakeney probably belonged to, and I felt a bit sad for her.

And also just a bit interested, though I know this doesn’t reflect particularly well on me, in viewing her tapes, just for my own personal information.

I glanced up at Sam Hellerman, and I knew that if any-

one could manage to get hold of them, he could, and I was

pretty sure he was thinking something similar. If he didn’t already have a complete set, numbered and cross-referenced

and neatly displayed in a little cabinet over at Hellerman Manor. You never knew with that guy.

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I suddenly had a weird thought. What if Mr. Teone and

company had wanted to make a “Hot Girls Do Geeks” video

series for the specialized European fetish market? It wouldn’t have been hard to do with the cooperation of certain key

people and some hidden cameras and so forth.

So I asked: “Was Dud Chart part of Tit’s Satanic Empire,

too?”

Sam Hellerman looked startled and kind of peeved, as he

usually did when the subject of Dud Chart came up.

“Oh, no,” he said. “No—they had nothing to do with each

other.”

I wasn’t totally sure I believed him, though. I never am.

According to Sam Hellerman, one of Mr. Teone’s most

trusted minions had been Matt Lynch, who had started at the bottom, recruited by his older brother, and had gradually

moved up in the organization. I hated to admit it, but Matt Lynch’s promotion to Hillmont High Satanic Pornography

Monitor (after his brother had graduated) had occurred

around the time I had adopted my gun-freak strategy of Matt Lynch deterrence. Maybe he hadn’t been fazed by the gun

stuff after all, as I had thought, but had just had other things on his mind by that point. All I knew was, if I had endured Little Big Tom’s devil-head sanctimony
and
worn that blessed army coat through the whole hot spring and summer

of ninth grade for nothing, I was pissed.

It wasn’t too hard to figure out what had happened in the

aftermath of the Chi-Mos performance. Mr. Teone had

jumped to the conclusion that the name “Chi-Mo” was a ref-

erence to him and his questionable activities. The content of some of the songs seemed to confirm his suspicions. If he had just ignored it, the matter would certainly have gone away and no one would ever have known. But he had read the

280

band’s performance and the zine as a threat to him. In those circumstances, my note about “materials among my deceased

father’s effects” must have seemed a bit like a blackmail message, implying, perhaps, that my dad had had some informa-

tion on him that I had had access to. I never did figure out what my dad had been working on when he had been killed,

but it was just conceivable that it might have had something to do with his old friend Tit. Even if it didn’t, though, Mr.

Teone’s association with my dad went back quite a long way, and it was likely that CEH had known some potentially damaging information that I theoretically could have uncovered.

Mr. Teone had tried to intimidate me in the boys’ bath-

room a couple of times, and had maybe even organized the

brass instrument attack to drive the message home, but the note had pushed him over the edge and he decided to skip

town rather than risk being caught. He was still missing. The speculation was that he had left the country, or that he was being hidden in a secret lair by his fellow porn-Satanists.

At any rate, there went any possibility of Uncle Tony’s

big surprise party or an illuminating heart-to-heart at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway. Maybe I wasn’t descended from

kings after all. Rats.

It was all over the papers and the news, of course. There

was, however, no mention as yet of the fact that the chain of events that had exposed and toppled Tit’s Satanic Empire

had begun with the performance of a sucky high school rock band. Nor was it noted that Mr. Teone’s flight had been

sparked by his narcissistic assumption that a tenth grader’s derogatory nickname could only be a veiled reference to him, rather than the result of a faulty aptitude test that equated introversion, social anxiety, and depression with a spiritual vocation. It was quite a story, though. Sam Hellerman was already planning how, once we had a recording of Teone songs 281

available in stores, we would sell our story and make a million dollars.

C H I-MOS AR E R EAL RO C K AN D ROLL

My mom had come to visit at the hospital briefly during one of my most out-of-it phases. I hardly remember it, but I know I asked her to bring me the CEH library. She had passed the task along to Little Big Tom.

So Mr. Aquino started moaning, then wheezing, and

then—well, in a way this was one of the bigger surprises of the whole affair. Little Big Tom and Amanda walked in together, and they seemed to be getting along pretty well. It’s not like they came in holding hands and skipping or anything. But

Amanda was acting civil toward him, almost friendly, which was quite something. I mean, her eyes were rolling less than usual, and you’d be surprised at what a difference a small thing like that can make. She even pretended to laugh, just a little, when he said “Calling Dr. Howard!” Now, I have no

idea why that was supposed to be funny, but you could tell by the look on his face that it was supposed to be a riot. I had never seen Amanda humor LBT like that. As for him, he was

clearly in fake-dad heaven. Say what you will about Little Big Tom: it doesn’t take much. And a hospital visit can really help pull a fake family together.

One thing about being in the hospital: people always feel

they should bring you something when they visit. Amanda

brought in this impressive series of drawings illustrating the Chi-Mos story, kind of like the Bayeux Tapestry, except instead of William the Conqueror and the Pope and so forth,

the main characters were me, Sam Hellerman, and Mr.

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Teone, whom she had drawn as a kind of effeminate Satan.

The last one depicted a wailing Mr. Teone being crushed under huge granite letters that spelled “Chi-Mos Are Real Rock and Roll!”

The drawings were childlike and brilliant, almost like real art. I totally wanted to use them for the first Chi-Mos album.

Actually we had already tentatively changed the name to the Elephants of Style, me on guitar, Sam Enchanted Evening on bass and animal husbandry, first album
Devil Warship.
Well, there was plenty of time to talk about it. I kissed Amanda on the forehead when she leaned over. She said: “You’re the