King Dork (4 page)

There’s no other way to put it.

This was just a few days before the anniversary of my

dad’s “accident,” which had me in a somber mood, despite all the Baby Batter excitement. At moments like these, it’s hard to tell whether you’re being too paranoid or just paranoid enough. It sure felt like they were all in it together, all the 21

psychotic normal students along with their buffoonish mas-

cot, Mr. Teone. It’s like they sit around all day trying to come up with ways to get to me. Some of the experiments are ill-conceived from the beginning; some are so moronic they

wouldn’t trouble a retarded monkey; some have promise but

go astray. But every now and again there’s one that lands.

This one had a kind of subtle brilliance.

In fact, I do talk to my dad, in my head, sometimes. Not

that I think he hears me, not really. But I kind of pretend that I do think he’s listening, and would be dispensing advice and comfort if only there were a way for the human ear to pick up the signal.

Telling him that Mr. Teone said hi just ain’t gonna hap-

pen, though.

I was feeling kind of weird. When the subject of my

dad comes up, particularly when it’s unexpected or sudden, I feel funny, kind of disoriented and light-headed. And

there’s a strange pressure in my chest, like I’m recovering from being punched in the stomach. Mr. Teone’s remark

had rattled me. Can’t they leave you alone for even one

week? In fact, I don’t think they can. It’s in the school district bylaws.

Sam Hellerman was waiting for me by the oak tree across

from the baseball backstop, which was our usual afterschool meeting point (unless somebody was already there “smoking

out”—then we would meet a little farther down, near the

track). We couldn’t think of anything to do, so we went over my house.

Friday is my mom’s half-day, so she was already home

from work, leaning against the kitchen counter with her afternoon highball in her hand, smoking and staring blankly at the wall. She was wearing a shortish, vibrantly colored floral-22

print dress over white flared slacks, with big clunky boots.

And a turban. Yes, a turban.

“Far out, Mom,” I said as we walked by, but she was lost

in thought and didn’t react.

Sam Hellerman followed me into my room. I put on

Highway to Hell.

“The weekend starts now?” he said. I did the devil hand

sign and said “Party.”

“Mom says to turn down the teen rebellion,” yelled my

sister, Amanda, pounding on the door. “She can’t hear herself think.”

Bon Scott was singing “Walk All Over You.” I reached

over and turned the volume up.

“What’s her problem again?” asked Sam Hellerman.

“Oh, she’s at that awkward age.” Amanda was twelve and

was going through changes. It was like she had a supply of different personalities, a brood of alternate Amandas that she was trying out. You never knew which one you were going to get.

“No,” said Sam Hellerman. “I meant your mom.”

“She’s at an awkward age, too,” I said.

I was only half kidding.

Sometimes I accuse my mom of being a hippie, though

that’s an exaggeration. She just likes to think of herself as more sensitive and virtuous and free-spirited than thou. If that dream leads her down some puzzling or slightly embarrassing avenues in a variety of neighborhoods, it’s not the world’s biggest tragedy. “I’m a very spiritual person,” she likes to say, for instance. Like when she’s explaining how she hates religion and all those who practice it. Well, okay, if it makes you feel better, Carol. She’s really about as spiritual as my gym shorts, but I love her anyway.

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I think she might have unintentionally bumped up her

own groovy-ometer just a bit after my dad died. Her eye for fashion certainly went through a strange and magical transformation around that time. I think the technical term is

cataracts.

Well, we all went a little bananas. That’s to be expected.

My dad was more down-to-earth. He was with her on a

lot of the touchy-feely save-society-and-admire-African-art stuff, I’m pretty sure. But he didn’t overdo it. Plus, he worked for the police, so he couldn’t be frivolous about absolutely everything. He liked war and action movies, which hurt my

mom’s feelings. And he loved motorcycles, which I think she thought was daring and hot. I think he found her beautiful and quirky and goofy and charming, kind of how I do when

I step back. Somehow, you always end up forgiving her for

being totally crazy.

Basically, she is a traditional suburban mom with a thin

veneer of yesterday’s counterculture not too securely fastened to the outside. It’s not a good idea to kick the scenery too hard, but if you hold very still and view it all through a squint and from a certain angle, you can just about get a glimpse of how she likes to see herself, and it’s actually very sweet. She was quite a bit younger than my dad was when they got married and she had me when she was super young, so she’s still quite pretty. By the way.

My dad was married to another lady before he got di-

vorced and married my mom. I know nothing at all about my

dad’s first wife, except that she lives in Europe somewhere and her name is Melanie. And that my mom hates her guts,

even after all these years. She calls her Smellanie, and says she’s getting a migraine if anyone ever brings her up. And believe me, you don’t want to be around Migraine Mom. I

strongly recommend avoiding that subject.

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T

* * *

father, is a
full-on
hippie, though. There’s just no getting around it. He’d say “former hippie” probably, but that’s too fine a distinction in my book.

Our official legal relationship is pretty recent, though he’s been around for quite a while. I don’t know why they decided to get married all of a sudden. They went away for the weekend to see Neil Young in Big Sur and somehow came back

married. They still refer to each other as partners, though, rather than husband-wife. “Have you met my partner, Carol?”

Like they’re lawyers who work at the same law firm, or cops who share a squad car. Or cowboys in the Wild West.

“Howdy, pardner.”

Unfortunately, Carol’s dogie-wranglin’ varmint-lickin’

yella-bellied pardner’s name happens to be Tom also. Just

my luck.

He has tried to establish the system where I call him Big

Tom and he calls me Little Dude. So that any observers (like, say, if someone had planted a spy cam in the TV room) could tell us apart. See, you can’t have two Toms in the same room.

It would be too confusing for the viewer. Well, he can call me what he likes, but I hardly ever say anything at all, so it never comes up from my end. He’s the one who calls himself Big

Tom. Which is funny because he’s very small for a full-grown man. The spy cam doesn’t lie: Big Tom is little.

Little Big Tom can be annoying, but I eventually got used

to him. Amanda, on the other hand, has never accepted his

legitimacy. She spent the whole first year of the “partnership”

sobbing. (So did my mom, come to think of it, but that’s not the same thing: my mom spends a great deal of time crying

regardless of who happens to be married to whom. Odds are

she’s crying right now. I’ll bet you anything.) These days, 25

Amanda contents herself with methodically running through

all the possible ways to give him the cold shoulder, one after another. No amount of bribery or family-counseling gim-mickry ever manages to charm her, though he continually

tries. It just makes her angrier. She gets pretty excited when my mom and Little Big Tom have an argument, because she’s

always imagining that this will finally be the one that leads to their getting divorced. It never is, though. It’s weird to watch the situation unfold: you never know who to root for.

One time I said “Get a haircut, hippie” to Little Big Tom, because I’d heard him mention that that’s what people used to say to him in Vermont where he’s from. He thought that

was hilarious, and actually seemed quite excited that I’d said anything at all to him, since that doesn’t often happen.

He raised his beer and put an awkward arm around my

shoulder, and I tried not to stiffen up too noticeably. Then he pushed the mute button on the remote, turned to me, and

said, “Kid, you’re all right.” There was a long silence. Then he took his arm away, de-muted, and sighed heavily. Well, the Giants were down by two.

“Kid, you’re all right.” How sad is that? What an ass. For a moment, though, I felt a surge of—what? I don’t know the word for it. It’s like when you feel lonely, but for someone else. I don’t know how to say it. Like you feel sorry for yourself, but it’s somebody else’s situation that makes you feel like that. Not feeling sorry for someone in the usual condescend-ing way, like when you feel bad if you run over an animal or when a midget can’t reach a shelf. More like you suddenly

find yourself pretending to be the other person without

meaning to, and feeling lonely while playing the role of the other person in your head. I guess, well . . . you could do it with an animal, too.

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But let’s be clear. In no way should this Special Moment

undermine our central thesis, which I will always stand

squarely behind: Little Big Tom should get a haircut.

Seriously. That ponytail has got to go.

When
Highway to Hell
was over, we put on
Desolation
Boulevard
and started to roll stats for “War in the Pacific.” Sam Hellerman was playing the Japanese. At around “No You

Don’t,” Little Big Tom came in and stood in the doorway. He nodded as though listening to the music; then he said, “How about we go easy on the decibels for a while? Your mom’s

trying to rest.”

I stared at him until he did a little decisive frown-nod and flitted out. Then I reached over and turned the volume up a notch.

Little Big Tom is a pretty nice guy, actually, and it’s not fair that I’m so unaccommodating.

He means well. He likes to walk around making little

helpful comments.

“Now, don’t fill up on milk,” he’ll say if he thinks some-

one is drinking too much milk. Or he’ll say, “Ladies and gen-tlemen, welcome to the homework hour!” if he thinks there’s not enough homework going on at any given time. “Let’s put some light on the subject,” he always says whenever he turns on a light.

He also likes to dispense words of encouragement when

he’s making his rounds. Like, Amanda will be working on

this plaster cast of her hand for art class, and he’ll come in and say, “nice hand.”

Once, Little Big Tom stuck his head in the door while I

was trying to play “Brown Sugar” on the guitar.

“Bar chords,” he said. “Rock and roll.”

27

Little Big Tom wasn’t actually saying that my halting ren-

dition of “Brown Sugar” was rock and roll. No one would

have said that.

He likes to say “rock and roll” all the time, but what he

usually means by it is “way to go!” or “let’s get this show on the road!” or “this is a fantastic vegetarian sausage!” Like, he figures out how to set the clock on the VCR and he’ll say

“rock and roll!” Or he’ll say “rock and roll!” when everyone finally gets in the car after he’s been waiting for a while.

Sometimes he’ll even say it quietly and sarcastically when something goes wrong. Once he knocked over my mom’s art

supply shelf. He bent down to pick everything up, whispered

“Rock and roll,” and sighed deeply.

I’m a bit rough on Little Big Tom, I know, but I’m noth-

ing compared to Amanda. She can hardly bear to be in the

same room with him, and she says even less to him than I do.

That time he said “nice hand,” for example? Her reaction was to pick up the half-finished hand, drop it in the garbage, and walk out of the room without a word. I don’t know if it hurt his feelings quite as much as she was hoping it would, but he sure didn’t enjoy it, if the strained tone of his whispered

“Rock and roll” was any indication.

We had just reached “7 Screaming Diz-busters” on

Tyranny and Mutation
and things had begun to turn around for the Allies in “War in the Pacific” when Little Big Tom stuck his head through the door and said “Chow time!” What he meant was that he had fixed some vegetarian slop with

lentils and bean-curd lumps and weird-tasting fake cheese, and that we were welcome to have a crack at choking some

of it down. So Sam Hellerman hightailed it out of there.

Lucky bastard.

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TH E B IG MAR B LE F I LI NG CAB I N ET

My family goes to the cemetery to visit my dad’s grave every year on September 6, which is the anniversary of his death.

This year, it happened to fall on Labor Day, so we were off school.

We call it a grave, but it’s really this big building on the cemetery grounds with stacks and stacks of dead people in

drawers, like a big marble filing cabinet. My dad is in powder form in a little vase inside one of the sealed filing cabinet drawers. It says “Charles Evan Henderson” and “Peace” on

the outside of his drawer. There’s also the seal of the Santa Carla Police Department, and a little cup you can put flowers in.

As usual, my mom put flowers in the cup, and we all

stood there looking at the cup with the flowers on the filing cabinet drawer. It always feels awkward. There’s nothing to say. We just stand in a clump, looking up. My mom and

Amanda cry, quietly. I feel sad. But for some reason it doesn’t make me cry. There may be something wrong with me there.

My mom gets mad at me for not crying, like it shows that I don’t care or wish to show respect. It’s not like that. I got in big trouble once for bringing a book with me on one of these visits. It wasn’t even on purpose. I just automatically take whatever book I’m reading with me everywhere I go without