King Dork Approximately

by Frank Portman

  “Here’s to ya,” said the Robot, handing me the bottle and another note. Here’s to me indeed, I said to myself, taking a big swallow and putting the note in my bulging pocket with the day’s others.

  I couldn’t believe she was going to make me read all of these, for no grade or credit. That certainly wasn’t the Clearview way.

  HOT UNDERWEAR

  Little Big Tom’s motel was down on the northeast edge of Hillmont by the railroad tracks. It was an easy bike ride from my house after I’d dropped off my trombone and changed out of the stupid Badger shirt. But it was still raining and it started to rain harder on the way, so, well, much as I hate to do it, I feel I must tell you that to get an accurate picture of this fateful bike ride, you have to know that I wound up putting on the orange beret, because it was all I had. With my old hooded army coat, the rain would have been no problem. This thought, in turn, brought to mind my unfulfilled lawsuit dreams, so by the time I arrived at the El Capitano Motor Lodge, not only was I looking ridiculous in a soggy orange beret, but I was in a pretty foul mood as well.

  “Thanks for the CDs,” I said, when Little Big Tom opened the door to my knock, words I’d never believed I’d utter.

  “Come on in,” said Little Big Tom, smiling widely, obviously glad to see me. “Wring out your hat and stay awhile!”

  Now, Little Big Tom was still a bit of a mess, it’s true, but not nearly as big a mess as I’d expected him to be. I wouldn’t want to say he was his old self again, not by any means, but he did have, it seemed to me, if only to a slight degree, just a little of that old spark, the Little Big Tom Classic that I’d learned how easy it was to miss. I suppose after weeks of fretting and bracing himself for the “I need space” blow to fall, it might have been something of a relief when it finally came. And maybe he was finding that hell wasn’t such a bad place to be. I sometimes had a glimmer of that feeling with regard to Celeste Fletcher, when I realized she was irrevocably lost to normality and that I might as well face it and move on. There’s a kind of freedom in failure, once you truly grasp that the cause is lost.

  On the other hand, though, this wasn’t me and Celeste Fletcher we were talking about here. It was my mom and Little Big Tom. And whatever else you might say about my mom, she was certainly not “lost to normality.” Far from it. And Little Big Tom, the bounding, slobbering, gray golden retriever whose fondest dream, I knew, was to return to the good old days of wandering from room to room with a tennis ball in his mouth spouting inane aphorisms and nuzzling everyone’s tears away? I had to think there was still some hope there, despite any underwear that may or may not have been found in that notorious gym bag of his.

  “Had dinner yet?” he asked, patting the spot on the bed next to him where he wanted me to sit. “I’ve got a hot plate and a microwave: tacos and pumpkin chai, what a growing boy needs.”

  Soon we were eating these semidisgusting microwaved vegetarian tacos and drinking this weird tea out of paper cups that said “El Capitano” on them in slanted script.

  “I hear you guys won a big game today,” said Little Big Tom.

  Oh, for God’s sake. I gave him the look that says “Yes, thank God ‘we’ won, now I can die happy.”

  “At this rate,” he continued, “you’ll make the quarterfinals before you know it.”

  Something snapped.

  “Look,” I said. “Stop trying to make me be normal. I’m not normal. I’m never going to be normal and I don’t want to be normal. I don’t care about the quarterfinals or the sock hop or the, like, jackets, or the ‘spirit’ thing the school spirit the pep spirit or whatever, or the, you know, junior prom or the … the junior varsity … or the senior varsity or any, really, any variety of varsity whatsoever.”

  I was sputtering and I knew I sounded hysterical. Plus, saying this many words in a row out loud was a rarity, and my doing it had shocked us both. Little Big Tom was taken aback, clearly worried that at this rate I’d be flipping tables and kicking puppies in no time.

  “Sorry,” I said, deflating myself with a sigh. “It’s just been a rough day.”

  Little Big Tom nodded sympathetically and put an encouraging arm around my shoulder.

  “I hear ya, chief,” he said. “I hear ya. I guess it’s going around. But you know what I think? I think it wouldn’t hurt to give people a chance sometimes. Sure, it can be a little silly, the things people do, the things they say. But it’s all just a means of communication, and that’s important in life. Underneath it all, they’re just people. And I think you’ll find—”

  “Jesus,” I said drawing a breath and reinflating, cutting him off. Because I couldn’t let this stand either. “Just … no. Stop telling me what you think I’ll find. You don’t know what I’ll find. Everything you always think I’ll find is not remotely anywhere near what I actually find, ever. You have no idea what I’m capable of finding. And if you knew the kind of stuff I do … find …”

  Well, I ran out of steam there and deflated again, trying and failing to summon the words to express the idea that if he knew what was really in this little head of mine he’d probably be shocked out of his complacent, cheerful, therapy-hippie “brain box.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s been a rough week.”

  Which didn’t work nearly as well as it had the first time I’d said it moments before. Little Big Tom was looking heartbreakingly wounded.

  “Seriously,” I said. “I’m sorry … chief. I do appreciate the advice.”

  And I ventured to attempt a little encouraging tap-squeeze on his shoulder like the ones he does. I wouldn’t say it perked him up, exactly, but he looked at me with this combination smile and frown and nodded, as though to say: “Hey, we’ve both been there.”

  “How’s your mom?” he said, in a mournful tone that instantly persuaded me he hadn’t found getting used to the Final Frontier nearly as easy as I’d imagined.

  “Okay” was all I could say.

  “I miss you guys,” he said, still mournful. “I miss her.” Man, this conversation was getting difficult. Little Big Tom explained how he was trying to keep the lines of communication open and making sure he was always available to work things through but that my mom hadn’t been returning his messages and didn’t seem to want to talk. Well, there’s a surprise, I thought. When had she ever “wanted to talk” in her life?

  I wasn’t sure how much more of this weird conversation I could take. I mean, he should have been commiserating with a bartender or a rabbi (of yoga or whatever, not Christianity, obviously) or, like, writing a letter to an advice columnist. But not me. I’m the chick’s son, remember? The sympathetic expression I was trying to hold on my face began to harden and I was worried that soon it would simply shatter and clatter to the floor.

  “Look … chief,” I said. I couldn’t believe I was going to do this. I chose my words with care and delicacy.

  “Radio silence,” I said. “That’s the only possible way to salvage a relationship with a woman who says she needs space. I’m serious. No calls, no messages, no contact whatsoever. Give her time to figure out that she misses you and make her wonder what you’re up to. Then, when …” I paused and took a breath. “When,” I resumed, “she’s feeling sad and vulnerable just like you are right now, wait for her to come to you begging for comfort, reassurance, and attention, which she probably will. At that point, it’s up to you how to proceed.”

  Now, I had never, ever in my life seen, on any face that I could recall, and certainly never on Little Big Tom’s face, the expression with which he looked at me after I had delivered this Hellermanian sermon. It was actually a rapid series of expressions, as though his face were a chameleon that had happened to find itself sitting on the lens of a giant kaleidoscope operated by a kid with ADHD. And now I knew there were two things, at least, that could reduce a man like Little Big Tom to speechlessness, the other, of course, being Y2K.

  I pushed on, though, not really sure why I was doing it.

  “But it’s
not really about the underwear,” I said. “Is it?”

  Oh man, that ADHD kid was really spinning the kaleidoscope like crazy now.

  “Underwear,” Little Big Tom repeated, sounding mystified and, I don’t know, shell-shocked. “Underwear … What are you talking about, underwear?”

  “I mean, the panties in your gym bag,” I said. “You know.”

  “Gym bag,” said Little Big Tom, in a dumbfounded manner. “I don’t even have a gym bag.” Well, now that he mentioned it, I’d never actually seen him with a gym bag, and the idea of him going to a gym was pretty outlandish.

  “You mean,” I said, in a “let me get this straight” tone, “that this whole thing with my mom isn’t because she found”—I quoted Amanda—“ ‘hot underwear’ in your gym bag?”

  The kaleidoscope stopped spinning and just kind of snapped into place, and the chameleon expression it landed on was easy to read this time. “Are you,” it ran, “out of your freakin’ mind?”

  My look said, in return: “Yes, evidently, sorry I brought it up.”

  Little Big Tom wouldn’t tell me what it really was about, however. Which was fine with me. I didn’t want to know.

  “Radio silence,” I repeated, channeling Sam Hellerman again. “It’s the only way.” I had no basis for Sam Hellerman’s confidence, but I just knew, like how you know the sky is blue, that it was true, that it would work. Well, it’s frequently blue. And I wanted it to work.

  All in all, it was probably the weirdest Little Big Tom conversation of my life, and that sure is saying something.

  He gave me a lift home after it was all over and dropped me off down the block so my mom wouldn’t see the truck and feel awkward.

  “You know, kemosabe,” said Little Big Tom, pretty generously, I thought, considering the content and tenor of our previous conversation, if “tenor” means what I think it does, “you’re a good guy, a good person, underneath it all.”

  Underneath it all, yes. Underneath it all, we’re all just people.

  NAOMI

  Now, if you’ve had enough of Little Big Tom at this point, I can’t say I’d blame you, but, if so, I’m sorry to inform you that something else happened with Little Big Tom at the El Capitano Motor Lodge that night that I have to tell you about.

  It was after we had kind of, somehow, with our eyes, reached an unspoken gentleman’s agreement to forget the “hot underwear” conversation had ever occurred, with the important corollary that neither of us would ever bring up the topic of “hot underwear” again, no matter what, “hot underwear” now having become a forbidden term, like “mailman” or “actress” or “Eskimo”; but obviously, it was before he dropped me off at home, when we were still in his motel room.

  And it started like this:

  “I think you’ll find—” Little Big Tom began, then corrected himself, making me feel a bit guilty: “I think you’ll like Big Bill Broonzy. He’s the best there was.” Such statements from a guy like Little Big Tom always raise my skeptical hackles, if hackles can be skeptical, and actually, what are hackles, exactly? But in this case, looking at the CD, I had no doubt he was right. I could tell just by looking at the guy and the way he was holding his weird little guitar that it was going to be something extraordinary.

  Little Big Tom asked me how the fingerpicking was going, and I admitted that it was not going well at all, and that no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get my fingers to “roll” in such a way that it sounded like anything at all, and that the more I worked on it, the worse it seemed to get. I asked him if he’d ever noticed this phenomenon, that the harder you try the worse you do, adding that it seemed to apply to pretty much everything there was in the world: guitar, women … well, guitar and women, anyway, and that’s a lot.

  Little Big Tom didn’t answer, thinking what appeared to be deep, faraway thoughts.

  “Well, chief,” he said, after a good stretch of this, standing up suddenly. “I think it’s time you met Naomi.”

  He told me to “wait here” and dashed out the door. Then I heard his truck start up, followed by the sound of the Little Big Tom mobile skidding off through puddles, bound for God knows where.

  Naomi. Maybe I was going to lose my virginity to a plump, merry, blushing, gregarious, ample-bosomed, redheaded lady after all, except her name was going to be Naomi instead of Griselda. That was pretty unlikely, I admit, but it was the least unlikely explanation I could come up with. I’d be okay with that, I decided.

  I waited in Little Big Tom’s motel room for quite some time. There was nothing of interest on the television. I’d had all the weird tea and semiedible tacos I could stand. I considered taking a shower, but I wasn’t sure how long it would be before Little Big Tom returned and I sure didn’t want him walking in on that. The seconds turned into minutes, and the minutes turned into larger sets of minutes, and these larger sets of minutes eventually gathered steam and turned into what seemed like forever.

  So basically, what I’m saying is that there was pretty much literally nothing else to do, other than pull out Roberta the Female Robot’s letters and get to work on my reading assignment. And this I did.

  It was rough going, as I’d known it would be. But now that I was actually reading rather than skimming, I realized that, buried deep inside them, among the items in the inane, seemingly endless lists of every single thing she had done or thought during whatever period of time it was that she was writing them, there were some really … I don’t want to say interesting things. Striking? Alarming? Flabbergasting? Something like that. There were strange bits, is what I’m saying, and there turned out to be a lot of them.

  Here’s an example of what I mean:

  … I really like these socks, you know the ones? They have stripes and diamonds. And you know, I hate bandaids sometimes. I wasn’t feeling well enough to eat breakfast but then I had an apple. Yay apples! Nutrition. Now I have a question for you, my dear Thomas: what shows do you like? I bet you like Malcom in the Middle, it’s the best!! You remind me of the kid Malcom mostly but Pammelah says your cuter. (wink wink) Hey, she wants him, maybe you should get in there boy! JK!!! Do you ever feel like hurting yourself, like really bad? Sometimes its like, nobody cares about me and I almost don’t even really exist and when the last person forgets to notice me I might find out I’m actually dead. [unintelligible] [unintelligible] with a knife or something. Tra la la. Kittens are the best. Ah, bus drivers. They can be syko (sp?) don’t you think. I’m taking drivers ed but I just want a scooter not a car. I wonder what it would be like to be a shelf.…

  See? What was going on with this Robot? I mean, there was so much dark, disturbing stuff buried in there that it made my own idle morbidity seem like amateur hour. And I can’t even bring myself to quote the craziest stuff because it would feel like too much of a betrayal of confidence. You’ll just have to trust me that it was pretty extreme. I wasn’t sure what to do.

  There was also in the most recent letter something not at all like that but very extraordinary that was to have a big effect on this thing I’m telling and that I will get to shortly. But just as I had read the thing in question and begun to shake my head over it, I heard keys in the motel room door and saw Little Big Tom come through it, smiling.

  I looked up.

  “Tom Henderson,” he said. “Meet Naomi.”

  He threw the door open and stepped aside. And standing there, just outside the motel room door, dripping wet, was a grossly obese bald man with a fringe of orange hair ponytailed at the back, a big ZZ Top beard, and a grubby “Coke: It’s the real thing” T-shirt that barely covered his belly; and on that belly was resting the tiniest guitar I’d ever seen.

  Well, as it turned out, Naomi was the guitar, not the fat hippie. The hippie’s name, I was told, was Flapjack. The headstock of the guitar said NIOMA on it. It was all slowly becoming clear. Sort of.

  Flapjack entered the room and Little Big Tom closed the door behind him, smiling like a great big idiot and pointing to him as i
f to say “Flapjack and Naomi—pretty cool, right?” It was a look I’d know anywhere, that unholy Catcher in the Rye glow that lights up the eyes of authority figures whenever they manage to force you to stroke the nose of one of their cherished sacred cows. It is a look of aggressive enthusiasm, accompanied by a trembling, desperate smile reflecting an expectation that is almost by definition impossible to live up to. You know it when you see it. I’ve most often experienced it with Catcher, but I’ve also seen it done with Dylan, Apocalypse Now, even with the album that has the Blue Öyster Cult Godzilla drug poetry song about deodorant that I mentioned before. And now it was happening with Flapjack.

  Nothing triggers my fight-or-flight response like the Catcher look. However, as the only means of egress was at the moment being blocked by nearly four hundred immovable pounds of solid hippie, neither f. nor f. was remotely possible. And when you realize that “egress” is a fancy-pants word for “exit,” you’ll see my point, I’m sure. I was caught in a Flapjack trap, not to mention a hippie sandwich, and I had to make the best of it.

  Flapjack cleared his throat.

  “ ‘The Maple Leaf Rag’ ” he said, in a deep, reedy, emphysemic voice. And then he commenced what was easily the most amazing guitar playing I had ever seen in person. It was super fast and he did it pretty much perfect in every way, playing the main melody line and bass and backup rhythm plus all these crazy embellishments and harmonics, and at one point even reaching his right hand over to the tuning pegs to slide a note up and back down again with a little wrist flip and a wink. His fingers were a blur. It almost made me want to do a little dance or something, but of course I didn’t. I just stared.

  Little Big Tom was nodding at me with this “hey, what’d I tell ya” look, though in fact he hadn’t told me anything. But he had shown me something, and what it was, was magic.

  When “Maple Leaf Rag” was finished, Flapjack did this little salute-like downward nod. Then he raised his head and started to play again. And the song he played was “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian.”