King Dork Approximately

by Frank Portman

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, Thomas,” said the Robot. “You never know anything, do you?”

  Well, what can I say? You’ve seen movies and read books. You had to have known pretty much all along that I was going to end up with the Robot.

  And I’m sure you’re wondering, so I’ll tell you: we did go to the girls’ restroom at the Slut Heaven Rec Center park, the one with the broken lock, and we did things there. And here’s why I tend to think, as I said in the beginning, that in that smelly restroom I lost my virginity, while she didn’t. Because we tried, really tried. But it didn’t quite work. How can I put this delicately enough that I’ll be allowed to say it in this censorious totalitarian society of ours? I had something special for her, but it was something that she wasn’t quite able to receive comfortably.

  The point is, though, that she was very into it happening, believe me, even though it didn’t wind up happening. It would have happened. And I think that should pretty much count. Don’t you?

  But there are other things you can do, as you may know, and we did some of them. And if you’re wondering if one of these was “the shocker,” you can just keep on wondering. Some things are private. As it turns out.

  KING DORK APPROXIMATELY

  So eventually we wound up in this little clearing for picnics, side by side on the bench with our backs to the table part, trading sips from a big water jug filled with peppermint schnapps.

  The Robot liked me, obviously, but still didn’t understand me, which is the usual state of affairs when someone likes me. If, I mean.

  “Why are you so mad at everything all the time?” she was saying. “Like school and basketball and pep band and prom, and, like, the government, and CDs, and the …” She paused to summon the proper degree of sarcasm before saying, “…‘structure of the universe.’ You’re even mad at jackets. How can someone be mad at a jacket? It’s just a jacket. Why can’t you just do normal things like regular people and not worry about it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. But I knew. It was just hard to explain. I asked her if she really wanted me to try to explain, because it could take a while, and she shook the bottle and gave me the look that says “We’ve got all night here, boy burger.”

  So I readied myself to deliver, for the fifth time, my carefully prepared, and by now quite well-rehearsed, presentation on the sadistic structure of the universe and the scourge of Normalism. I didn’t have my document file with me, and I wasn’t sure what I’d say about the Catcher Code now that I knew its true source, but I was pretty sure I could wing it on that.

  Then, however, I thought of Flapjack, with his chicken leg, his cowboy hat, and the bloody spot on his arm where he had extracted the surveillance dart, and I decided I really had to do it a different way this time.

  I took a breath. I wasn’t sure she was going to understand it, and I was even less sure she was going to like it. But she had asked for it, and, for some reason, I found I really wanted to do it.

  “They call me King Dork,” I said slowly, choosing my words carefully. “Well, let me put it another way: no one ever actually calls me King Dork. It’s how I refer to myself in my head, a silent protest and an acknowledgment of reality at the same time.…”

  I told her the whole thing, as best I could, as she nestled into me and the light from the nearby streetlamps flickered and filtered down through the wind-shaken trees. And when the schnapps was all gone and she had finally passed out, I took out my notebook and started to write out the rest, the first letter, strangely, that I’d ever actually written to her, thinking I’d go as far as I could get before dawn, and then thinking, well, maybe one day, I’d get to the end.

  EPILOGUE

  We were sitting on the grassy slope in the right field of Hillmont High School’s old baseball diamond, approximately the same place where I had accidentally beaten up Paul Krebs all those many months ago. She had wanted to see.

  “Here,” I said. “I want to show you something else.” And she pantomimed as though she thought I was going to unbuckle my belt and she looked with huge eyes and made this motion with her hands like she was peering through curtains.

  “No, not that,” I said.

  I extracted Naomi from her case. I had intended to play one of my fractured love songs, “King Dork Approximately” or even “I Wanna Ramone You.” But for some reason, instead, I started to play and sing “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian.”

  And it’s strange. That song was written by a couple of guys in 1916, and they meant it to be strictly comedy. But the way it came out when I did it, it was way more “personal” than any of my own songs. Because I really “got” O’Brien. He’s there trying to communicate with this girl, and they don’t speak the same language, and all he can do is fake it as best he can, making a complete mess of it, but keeping at it till by some crazy miracle it gets across, this simple, simple thing that is still weirdly hard to explain.

  For once, I didn’t make too many mistakes.

  She was laughing and got up to do a little dance with hula hand movements, and when the song was finished she clapped twice and plopped on the ground next to me.

  “You didn’t tell me you knew how to play real music,” she said. And then I think she somehow saw in my face that I had meant the song sincerely in a way that probably very few people who have played “O’Brien Is tryin’ to Learn to Talk Hawaiian” ever have, and her eyes widened.

  It was a nice moment.

  “So,” I said, thinking about Queen Jane and her window. “This is kind of a nice moment. And I propose that we just sit here for a while and look at the trees and not ruin it by saying something stupid.”

  “Too late,” she said.

  GLOSSARY

  AC/DC: It could be argued that the first half-dozen AC/DC albums represent rock and roll in its purest form. It’s just a guitar sound, a drumbeat, and a snarl, but anything beyond that is hokum anyway. It could be argued.

  ADHD: Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. If you have this and you’re an artist people give you the benefit of the doubt, but if you’re a kid they will try to drug you out of it, along with whatever personality you may have left. (The drug they give you for it, though, is essentially speed, so try to have fun with that, at least.)

  Alice Cooper: Originally, Alice Cooper was the name of a band whose singer coincidentally was also named Alice, but later on this guy adopted the name Alice Cooper as his own name when he went solo. I think a similar sort of thing happened with George Eliot, though none of her concept albums about nightmares, violence, and rock star excess are known to have survived.

  Altamont: In 1969, the Rolling Stones decided to hold a free concert for a quarter of a million people at the Altamont Speedway in Northern California, and to hire the Hell’s Angels to provide security, paying them with beer. What could go wrong? The resulting disaster has become a metaphor for the futility of all human endeavor.

  ambivalent: a fancy-pants word for not being able to decide whether you mean “I don’t know” in the negative or in the affirmative sense.

  amiable: see jaunty.

  aphorism: a wise saying, to be written on the bathroom wall or recited to those in need in lieu of providing them any useful assistance.

  aphrodisiac: any substance, real or metaphorical, that makes its target inexplicably and compulsively horny. (People like me and, I must assume, you are immune to its effects, as we come that way out of the box.)

  Archie comics/The Archies: I don’t know too much about Archie comics (they seem to be a sort of comic-book/jacket-varsity-type thing). But the Archies, a fake rock band put together to provide the music for the fictional band depicted in the cartoon spin-off TV series, and featuring the talents of Andy Kim and the Cuff Links’ Ron Dante, among others, is one of a handful of things that redeem the sixties. It must have been great to live in their bubblegum world of genius songs, negligible student-on-student violence, and girls in short skirts. Much better than
your favorite supposedly real band, whatever that may be.

  arteriosclerosis: an imaginary disease that is, in the end, little more than an antipizza conspiracy.

  arthropod: The Arthropods, the Tom-ipede on guitar and vox, the Sam-ipede on bass, the Shine-ipede on drugs, first album Just Look at All These Legs. Okay, that wasn’t one of our real bands, but it should have been, if only so I’d have something to say about the phylum Arthropoda that doesn’t involve doing any actual research. Playing guitar in a centipede costume seems like it would be quite challenging, but the beauty of the imaginary notebook band is, if you can dream it you can be it, and basically I rule at this.

  art rock: Art rock should have been the death of rock and roll, but somehow it wasn’t. Evidently, not being killed by the Doors only makes you stronger. Who knew?

  Chet Atkins: not, in fact, a pipsqueak, unless an alternate definition of “pipsqueak” happens to be “the most accomplished guitarist of his generation and century.”

  banal: The proper mispronunciation of this word rhymes with “anal.” The correct pronunciation rhymes with “canal.” An extremely useful word, because while no one actually has any idea what it means, everyone understands that it is bad. Their imaginations will fill in their own insult, probably far worse than anything you could devise, with no further effort required on your part, which is the true power of a powerful vocabulary.

  The Beatles: They had sex with lots and lots of young girls. Then they turned into hippies.

  benefit: A “benefit” is a show, the proceeds from which the promoters or organizers pretend will be given to a specified charity or cause, thus avoiding the obligation of having to pay any of the bands. This scam works every time, because bands tend to be generous of spirit, desperate for shows, dumb, or all of the above.

  The Bible: The first five chapters are great, but then it goes off in all kinds of different directions and gets really bogged down in the middle. It’s like the author, God, couldn’t figure out where He was going with it and decided to throw all His ideas in there indiscriminately in the hope that something coherent would emerge. And, like many writers who don’t know how to end their books, He tacks on a predictable, though in this case unexpectedly satisfying, apocalyptic ending. Better on re-reading, when you can see all the foreshadowing.

  Ambrose Bierce: an American journalist who taught the world that nothing matters. In 1914 he was swallowed by Mexico and never heard from again.

  Jane Birkin: You can hear her … shall we say, enjoying herself and saying “I love you” over and over in French on this Serge Gainsbourg record called Je t’aime … moi non plus. If listening to this does not make you fall in love with her at least a little, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Serge’s response to her heavily breathed “I love yous” is to say “Moi non plus,” which basically means “me neither.” Now, that’s a cool guy. And this record is as good as French stuff gets. The flip rules too. Playing it loud will probably embarrass your parents. (Which is funny because it’s as old as they are, most likely.)

  Blind Blake: Of all the guys who ever tried to play the guitar like a piano, he did it best. The idea of playing like that without being able to see the neck is, of course, a bit mind-boggling, but in a way it’s even more impressive that he was able to change his strings. Think about it. Like I said, there has to be a God.

  Blue Öyster Cult: University art and poetry projects rarely turn into top-selling show business attractions, and when it does happen it’s bound to be something pretty unusual and/or awful. But the soft white underbelly of Stony Brook University produced some of the strangest sounds and visions you’ll ever experience, though you’ll need to dig deeper than “The Reaper” to find them.

  Humphrey Bogart: True, he was short, but he made up for it by standing on a crate and having an enormous head.

  Hieronymus Bosch: a Dutch painter whose exhaustive documentation of high school in fifteenth-century Europe shows that some things never change.

  Marcia Brady: If only all girls dressed like this.

  Brighton Rock: I’ve said it before, but I will reiterate: this is the best book ever written. Good job, Graham. (Also a song by Queen. Good job, Brian.)

  Big Bill Broonzy: It’s the heavy thumb thumping that does it, so simple yet weirdly difficult to do so it sounds like anything but a mess when regular people try it. Every guitar player’s favorite guitar player, which tells you something.

  The Brady Bunch: So fake it’s real, so stupid it’s profound. Cable TV schedules reruns of this ancient show round the clock so people will know what it’s like to feel their own brains disintegrate chunk by chunk in real time. The end point of this process is Nirvana.

  Brown v. Board of Education: On occasion, the normal psychotics in charge of the world will allow something to transpire that is broadly admirable. Hardly ever, but it has happened.

  Lenny Bruce: The way I heard it, the government had him murdered to prevent people from hearing swearwords in comedy clubs. How’d that work out for you, government?

  bubblegum: If you think you can write a better song than “Chewy Chewy,” you’re very welcome to try. But you can’t.

  Buddah Records: the label that gave the world the Ohio Express, 1910 Fruitgum Company, and the Lemon Pipers and allowed the genius of Joey Levine to burst forth into the world, its wonders to bestow.

  Bye Bye Birdie: Say what you will about the merits of this Clearview High School–meets–Elvis satire, but that Ann-Margaret sure was a cutie, demonstrating if nothing else that ramonability is timeless.

  cacophony: literally a bad sound, and a good band name.

  cakewalk: My understanding is that this was originally an actual walking dance where whoever was best at it would win a literal cake. Now it means something that is trivially easy, like falling out of bed. So where’s my cake, then?

  camaraderie: If you can contrive to leave the impression that you are on someone’s team, he or she will be far less likely to plot your destruction, at least at first.

  Carrie: film, 1976. I love it when a movie has a happy ending. The best film ever made about high school.

  Cheap Trick: George Harrison believed that when the spirit left the Beatles it flew around a bit and finally settled down to animate Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which started up around the time of the Beatles’ demise. The last episode of Monty Python was broadcast in December of 1974. Cheap Trick recorded their first demo in early ’75. You do the math.

  comeuppance: On occasion, though very rarely, what goes around does actually wind up coming around. When it does, they call it a comeuppance, though a better word for it might be “comearoundance.”

  Cook/Jones: an honest snare and around a thousand guitars. That’s how you make nice-sounding records.

  Salvador Dalí: “I don’t do drugs,” he said. “I am drugs.” One of history’s all-time weirdos, fortunate to have lived in ancient times before society figured out how to use the school system to bully and bore the weirdness out of everyone with ruthless efficiency.

  decent: the opposite of normal. The decent are the customary victims of the normal, though the normal also prey upon each other. While there is some debate as to whether normal people are born or made, I personally believe we all begin life decent; some of us, the majority, then gradually begin to turn normal when corrupted by exposure to the greater normal world. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to work the other way: there is not one known case of a normal person reversing course and turning decent. The superior intelligence of the decent confers a slight advantage over the comparatively slow-witted normal people in certain circumstances, but is no match overall for their senseless savagery and cruelty, not to mention the force of their sheer numbers. Remaining decent in a normal world is one of modern life’s most grueling and disheartening challenges.

  Philip K. Dick: His dark, goofy vision of a squalid, dysfuntional future of drugs, mass psychosis, space-time confusion, and unreliable identity put him solidly ahead of his
time as a writer and, moreover, has been steadily coming true. His books were published as science fiction but became gradually weirder, with the later ones resembling religious texts. They broke the mold with this guy.

  double entendre: As Robert Plant and the French were well aware, you know, sometimes words have two meanings, one of which is likely to be filthy.

  Elmyr de Hory: the most gifted art forger of his generation, the subject of a film by Orson Welles (fat era). Saw the movie. Wanted to be him. Knew I couldn’t. Such is life.

  eons and eons: Use this phrase when you don’t feel like looking up exactly how long ago something was.

  The Doors: Look, of course they have redeeming features. “Touch Me” isn’t bad, for instance. But as for what they represent, see, I’m a guy who likes “Yummy Yummy Yummy” more than just about anything. And when Joey Levine squares off against the “Lizard King,” I know who I want to win. Intellectual pretensions, “spirituality,” and half-assed literary allusions only get in the way of the rock and roll, which in essence is about nothing more and nothing less than wanting to ramone the cute chick in biology, and driving really fast. Focus, people.

  et cetera: Latin for “or whatever.” Often abbreviated “ect.,” which alludes to “ectoplasm,” a viscous substance that comes out of a medium’s body during a séance, which derives from the Latin word for sitting, which is what I’m doing right now while writing this down, eating a sandwich, listening to Mott the Hoople (KC 32425). Or whatever.

  Etch A Sketch: It can take well over an hour to use this device’s two knobs to write even the simplest obscenity, by which time the moment has usually passed, a severe drawback. There’s a better way. It’s called a Sharpie.

  euphemism: Euphemisms have a bad reputation because people use them to avoid speaking plainly about what they’re really talking about, but on a deeper level pretty much everything is a euphemism, since reality is so much worse than the fantasy world we like to pretend we live in. The best way to use euphemisms is to preface them with the words “shall we say,” a brief pause, a raised eyebrow, and possibly even a wink, just to make it clear that you know you’re not fooling anyone.