King Dork Approximately

by Frank Portman

  Something had to be done, and fast. I reached up to turn the volume knob down and said:

  “Have you ever noticed how jeans have a little diagram of a penis embroidered on the front in gold thread?”

  Sam Hellerman and Little Big Tom looked at me uncomprehendingly, and then we all looked down at our own individual embroidered penis diagrams. Then we looked up at each other. And the pronounced awkwardness that had seemed just a moment ago like it could not possibly get any worse magically deepened into a vibrantly more vivid shade of awkward. It was enough, like a slap across the face to a hysterical person about to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. We were effectively, mercifully, moving on to the next scene, and not a moment too soon. Well, golden embroidered jeans penis: at least you’re good for something.

  “Rock and roll,” said Little Big Tom in that resigned way of his, rising to his feet and backing toward the door. He rumpled my hair on the way out, the most despondent hair rumpling of his career.

  “You know,” he said mournfully, pausing in the doorway, “I’m sure you can get this stuff on CD. Clear you out some space in here. Bonus tracks too.”

  We looked back at him more in pity than in anger.

  “What the heck was that?” Sam Hellerman said.

  “That,” my eyes said, “is what happens when the wall comes down.”

  Sam Hellerman gave me the look that says “For the love of God and all that is holy, pray never, ever mention the embroidered jeans penis again in my presence.” You know the look I’m talking about. And I knew he had a point.

  “You have to admit,” I said nevertheless, in words, “that it puts Jeans Skirt Girl’s jeans skirt in a different light.”

  Sam Hellerman was silent. I guess he didn’t have to admit it after all.

  At any rate, it was clear there would be no more beat mining for the rest of the night. Little Big Tom’s reckless behavior had rendered the entire site unsafe; the mine was closed pending the adoption of further safety measures, such as locking the door.

  A MANACLED PLACE

  “Be right back, Hellerman,” I said, hating to leave the matter of the tape hanging but feeling I had no choice. I dashed out the door, brushing past Little Big Tom’s trudging, slope-shouldered figure in the hallway. He didn’t even ask me where the fire was. This is getting critical, I thought.

  Amanda and an unfamiliar girl were sitting on the floor of her room when I burst in, hard at work gluing glitter and maybe rhinestones and leaves and God knows what else to little boxes.

  “Don’t you knock?” said Amanda with studied petulance, if s. p. means what I think it probably has to mean.

  “This has got to stop,” I said, knocking on the inside of the door sarcastically. “He just spent the last hour playing air drums to Judas Priest. He thinks the world is a manacled place. A manacled place!” And I sounded only half as hysterical as I actually was.

  “My stupid brother,” Amanda half whispered in response to her friend’s wide-eyed, questioning look. “What are you talking about?” she continued, to me. “Sam?” Then to the girl: “Sam’s the other ‘nice-looking boy’ I was telling you about.”

  Say what you will about Amanda, but whatever her flaws, she’s very good at conveying italics with her voice, and here she even managed to convey the quotation marks within the italics. Damn, she’s good.

  “No, no, not Sam Hellerman. Big Tom,” I said, and waited for her to whisper “My mom’s so-called husband” before resuming: “His moping around is seriously cutting into my private time, and he’s only getting worse.”

  “I don’t know what you expect me to do about it,” said Amanda. “It’s his own fault.” Her friend’s eyes widened further as she added: “There was underwear in his gym bag.” To me, she said, “I bet it’s someone from the theater group. And she’s super young, I bet, and I bet he’s taking advantage of her.”

  I waved this away. Seriously, what female, young, old, or otherwise, would be interested enough in Little Big Tom to allow herself to be in any kind of position to be taken advantage of by him? I mean, well, except our mom, obviously, but she’s a unique case. She won’t eat certain tomatoes if she senses that they may have holes in their auras, which should tell you just about all you need to know about her judgment when it comes to whom to allow herself to be taken advantage of by.

  “There are a lot of sick people in this world,” said Amanda, more or less correctly interpreting the series of facial expressions and eye movements that reflected my train of thought. “Anyway,” she added, “it was hot underwear. I saw it.”

  My attention was temporarily thrown off course, because of the possibly decent band name. Hot Underwear: Jesus the Thong Burglar on guitar and vox, Hellerman Schmellerman on bass and vox, “Phil Rudd” on drums, first album Wet and Loaded. The album cover possibilities alone would … But I digress.

  I mean, okay, I don’t know what I thought I would accomplish by bursting into Amanda’s room like that. Amanda’s dislike for Little Big Tom was the stuff of legend, and she seemed pleased enough with the present situation, and her hopes for further disharmony were pretty obvious.

  “You know,” I said, changing tack, “he invaded our Judas Priest. He could invade you, too. Don’t you understand? The wall is coming down.” When she didn’t seem to understand the significance of the wall coming down, I added: “He could easily come in with pizza and sit down right there and start trying to help you … do whatever it is you’re doing.” I tried to make my eyes imply that it was only a matter of time.

  “It’s called letterboxing,” she said with the same studied petulance I described above. But I believe I detected a slight weakening in her resistance. Surely even Amanda preferred a Little Big Tom who issued inane comments only from within his own clearly defined territory. “Maybe there is something I can do after all,” she said thoughtfully.

  That was a lot more than I’d expected from her. All I wanted was a return to the unsatisfactory situation that had existed before the even less satisfactory situation that had superseded it. How was that too much to ask?

  WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT, HELLERMAN?

  Despite Little Big Tom’s intrusion, we were off to a pretty good start with the beat mining. We had to keep reminding ourselves that we weren’t just picking our favorite songs or bands. Much of my favorite music, like, say, the Buddah Records flavor of bubblegum, was too quirky to be suitable for this purpose. And we had to stay away from good but busy drummers like Keith Moon and John Maher, no matter how great their drumming was in context and no matter how much we liked their bands.

  The crucial point in taking Shinefield to beat school against his will and without his knowledge was going to be to make sure the drumbeats we chose were clean, simple, and easily grasped. The arrangements also had to be straightforward; otherwise they would get in the way of our own arrangements of the songs we would really be playing in our heads while outwardly playing the other ones.

  Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy, Cheap Trick, Slade, the Undertones, even some KISS—all had stuff we could use. We could work with the Sweet, too (in their post–“Poppa Joe” phase) and with the Ramones as they appear on SRK 6063. We could use Motörhead for faster tunes. The Cook/Jones bands worked great: “Anarchy in the UK” was almost a perfect match for “Mr. Teone Killed My Dad.” To our surprise, no less than three of our songs could be overlaid almost seamlessly on “Cat Scratch Fever,” if you set aside the intro: “God Rot Your Bloody Soul,” “Meat Tenderizer,” and “Sadistic Masochism.”

  And of course, there was AC/DC’s Phil Rudd, the metaphysical ideal of the tamed drummer, if metaphysical means what I hope it does. The plan was to start with “Fiona”/“Live Wire” as a test and, if it worked, to move on from there.

  So there we were, still in my room, finishing off the last of Little Big Tom’s pizza, listening to PD 5537 in an attempt to restore some balance and sanity to our world. (I’ll save you having to go look it up, because I doubt you’d get that one: it’s t
he Pink Fairies, Kings of Oblivion.)

  I looked at Sam Hellerman. He was strong. He was confident. He was in command of the situation.

  “What are we going to do now?” he said.

  “You tell me,” I replied, pouncing catlike on his mouselike words. “You’re strong. You’re confident. Women like and admire you.” It was like I’d waited my whole life to say it, though I had just recently heard it for the first time. And it fairly came tumbling out of me. I guess in the excitement I hadn’t managed to articulate the individual words all too clearly. So Sam Hellerman gave me the look and says “The fuck?” except for Sam Hellerman it was more like “The heck?” and he didn’t react much at all other than that, so I knew he hadn’t quite understood me. So I repeated it more slowly, which got the desired result.

  If you’ve ever heard about a person’s face clouding over and suspected it to have been a mere figure of speech or the one that starts with “hyper-” that means an exaggeration, I can assure you that it is possible for a face to cloud over. I mean, actual tiny clouds moved in and began to engulf Sam Hellerman’s face in darkness, though his eyes retained an eerie, vaguely threatening glow behind them. I believe that at that moment, Sam Hellerman came as close as he has ever come to uttering what he still calls “the F-word.”

  “What the … fudge … darn … heck … hell …,” he said, like a Mormon with Tourette’s syndrome.

  “Okay, okay,” I said by way of apology. I gave him the look that says “Hey, if you don’t want people going through your things, you should consider not being so God-almighty mysterious about them all the time.” “I just had to know what was on the tape,” I added, switching my words to audio mode. “It was driving me nuts.”

  Sam Hellerman could see my point, it seemed. Plus, now that the preliminary invasion of privacy and subsequent ridicule was out of the way, he seemed to want to tell me what it was all about.

  “What’s it all about, Hellerman?” I said, egging him on.

  And Sam Hellerman began to relate the following tale.

  THE SECRETS OF WOMEN REVEALED

  Once upon a time, it went, there was a boy who had moved with his family to California from Munich, Germany. At the age of fifteen, he was a stranger in a strange land, misunderstood, mocked, and despised by his new peers. His English was good, because in places like Germany the schools actually teach you things and studying a foreign language means more than just memorizing how to say “I have a lovely box of red pencils” and “Emil, why are you so pale?” and eating snacks. But whereas the language was familiar, the culture was alien. He didn’t “fit in,” and his accent, glasses, and gaunt features, along with his interest in math and physics and his native intelligence, made him an obvious target for harassment by bullies of every stripe.

  Unfortunately for him, the first syllable of his first name sounded to American ears a bit like a familiar term for a person’s buttocks, and his country of origin was associated mainly with Nazis—particularly, at the time, with the bumbling prison camp guards depicted in a popular television situation comedy called Hogan’s Heroes. Accordingly, he was known, in the Hillmont High School Class of 1970, variously as Hiney, Hind Quarters, Shulztie, Das Nincompoop, Colonel Klink, Gay Hiney, Super Gay Nazi Hiney, and even, on occasion, Herr Hitler Hiney, or merely Hitler, a name particularly galling to him, considering what he understood to have been his socialist grandparents’ actual suffering during the Second World War. Along with subjecting him to the usual indignities—stuffing him in garbage cans, locking him in lockers, and all the rest—his classmates never passed up the opportunity to draw a mustache on any photograph of him that came their way, in class photos or in the yearbook, or even, on a few occasions, with indelible marker on his actual face.

  Now, this was in the late sixties, and teenage bullying wasn’t nearly as advanced as it is now. Still, he had had what for the time was a pretty rough experience of high school, and he came out of it hating humanity with a smoldering passion. As one does.

  Bullying aside, little Heinrich was, to his own surprise, largely disappointed in America. The America of his childhood dreams—the cowboys and Indians, the fast cars, the trash-talking jazzmen in smoky clubs, the well-dressed private detectives in their fedoras with attractive full-breasted females bringing them martinis and posing seductively, not to mention Hollywood, Playboy magazine, the space program, and the abundant candy—simply didn’t seem to exist, at least, not in a form that was readily available to a fifteen-year-old of German extraction in Hillmont, California, which, at the time, was even less of a real place than it is today.

  Most of all, he was disappointed in the women, or rather, not with the women per se, but with their lack of interest in cooperating with his ambition to couple with them. Instead, they ridiculed him, or almost worse, ignored him completely. So there was to be no “necking” in parked Chevrolets at “the Point,” no ass-grabbing slow dances at the “hop,” no “Wake Up Little Susie” scenarios at the local drive-in. No love of any kind, at least not for him. He was effectively invisible to those he wanted to be seen by, and at the same time all too identifiable as prey to those who wished to prey upon him.

  Thus far, it was a variation on a familiar story, a typical American adolescence, in fact. Most people, outside of a small group of the most severely normal, I suppose, will recognize it instantly and probably see themselves in it to some degree.

  But it was at this point that Sam Hellerman’s father (for it was he) discovered The Secrets of Women Revealed: A Guide to Getting (and Keeping) Girls through an ad in the back of a comic book, and it, according to the story, changed everything.

  The Secrets of Women Revealed was a set of ten cassettes with an accompanying book explaining how the most socially unsuccessful person could gain confidence, take control of his life, and get down to the serious business of picking up girls. One side of each tape consisted of general principles and step-by-step instructions, while the other side, a bit of which I had heard, was motivational, designed to penetrate the subconscious mind with confidence-building messages: the more you listened, the more penetration, apparently, which explained Sam Hellerman’s recent spate of continual headphoning.

  In any case, the teenage Herr Hellerman’s transformation, upon receipt of the tapes, was slow but dramatic. Before long he had acquired a circle of friends and another circle next to the first circle of admiring females vying for his attentions. No one drew a mustache on him again, ever. To this day, Herr Hellerman credits the tapes with his eventual success in life, from his triumphs with women to the career he has today as a sinister and filthy-rich lawyer.

  This was the tale told by Sam Hellerman. Well, actually, I filled most of it in, using my imagination and my powerful vocabulary. But the bottom line was that Herr Hellerman believed in the tapes and wanted to bestow their bounty upon his only heir when he came of age. So he duly presented them to Sam Hellerman on his fifteenth birthday.

  “Dzeez tapes are dzee zecret, viss respect to vimmen,” he had told Sam Hellerman in my imaginative reconstruction of the scene, holding the tapes above Sam Hellerman’s head and making him jump for them before handing them over. “Use dzem wery visely, young man, use dzem orphan, or dzere vill be dze most terrible consekvenciss, if I make myself cleah.…”

  And accordingly, Herr Hellerman had added an incentive: if, within a year of receipt of the tapes, Sam Hellerman had not managed to acquire a girlfriend, he was to be severely punished, grounded, deprived of a driver’s license for a period of not less than one year, and physically beaten, too, if I didn’t miss my guess.

  Sam Hellerman was currently at tape three, the second section of which was entitled “Standing Aloof,” which explained his Jeans Skirt Girl activities, if not the sense behind them. The idea, according to Sam Hellerman, was that girls, not used to being ignored, are intrigued and ultimately attracted to men who fail to adhere to the expected pattern of following them around like sad, eager puppies. Eventually the female in
question seeks reassurance that the ignorer is attracted to her to the degree to which she feels entitled. At that point, the man, that is to say, the Sam Heller-man in the ludicrous fantasy world we’re discussing here, having demonstrated that his status is high enough to afford him the luxury of ignoring her, can make a move to escalate the “relationship.”

  I repeated a previously raised objection, about how standing aloof from someone who isn’t aware of you isn’t logically possible. People want what they can’t have, it’s true, but not if they are unacquainted with its existence, and also, I regret to say, not if, in the event that they become acquainted with it, the thing they can’t have turns out to be Sam Hellerman. On the contrary, I’d imagine a person in such a situation would experience an overwhelming sense of relief.

  “If you think,” I said, in a combination of words and facial spasms, “that Jeans Skirt Girl is going to want to be your girlfriend just because you’ve been watching her from a bus stop under an umbrella but pretending not to, you’re more impressively retarded than I ever gave you credit for.”

  “Thanks,” said Sam Hellerman drily. But he stuck to his guns. “It’s a demonstration of status.”

  Yes, I thought. It is. But not in your favor.

  “And it will work,” he added, with that trademark Sam Hellerman assurance that in almost any other situation might have made me question the evidence of my own eyes and the validity of several deeply held beliefs. Not this time, however. This had disaster written all over it in great big flashing letters.