King Dork

Adventists or Mormons or something like that.

That was part of the reason Serenah Tillotsen had to break up with him. Not the having Mormon parents. The swearing thing, I mean. To be dateable at the time, you had to excel in at least two of the following four areas: swearing, bullying, smoking, sports. And to go out with a girl who dressed as slutty as Serenah Tillotsen you probably had to have mastered at least three, and even that might have been pushing it. Sam Hellerman had the smoking down, but he was a disaster at all the others.

Sam Hellerman’s swearing thing had already affected the band a bit, but so far only in a good way. He objected to the song “Normal People Are Fucked Up” in favor of the alternate version “People Who Are Normal People Are the Most Retarded People in the World,” which turned out to be a much, much better song.

So it was shocking to hear those words come out of his mouth. He was taking the whole thing pretty seriously. Now I admit, I may have slightly exaggerated when I told him the story. Just a little, in that I may have managed to imply that things with Fiona might have gone a little further than they actually had. But even considering that, it was still just a stoned teen party grope-a-thon any way you sliced it. He should have been happy for me. Maybe he was jealous; I guess I would have been.

In any case, that’s so not how I saw the situation: for me, Fiona was not, literally or in any other sense, a “fucking bitch.” I had nothing but esteem and admiration for her and her sinful ways. And I had a kind of high- minded reverence 87

for her memory. Sure, there was much I felt remorseful and embarrassed about, and I had had absolutely no luck trying to figure out a way to understand her confusing behavior. But I blamed all the awkwardness and most of my current predicament on my own deficiencies, and I was quite sure I was right about that. So was I bitter and hate filled at the thought that that had probably been my one opportunity to participate in a make-out session in this lifetime? Sure. But I could hardly blame the one girl who had been sporting enough to give me a shot at it: it just made me hate everyone else even more, which automatically made me love Fiona more by comparison. See? It’s all a matter of proper hate calibration. You have to take a balanced view.

I haltingly asked Sam Hellerman if he could ask his CHS

friends about her, try to find out, um, I wasn’t sure exactly what. But could he ask around, find out what her deal was, in some way?

“Her deal?” said Sam Hellerman. He said “deal” mockingly, and did that thing where you put your hands up on either side in front of you palms out and wiggle your fingers sarcastically.

Sometimes it just means “ooh, I’m scared.” But sometimes it means, “the word that I am now quoting back at you is so absurd that the human voice alone is insufficient to convey the appropriate level of sarcasm, and therefore I must use my hands as well, as they used to do in the days of the silent cin-ema and in vaudeville where they had to make sure that everyone way in the back who couldn’t hear the dialogue would still get the point that the person being addressed is a total ass.”

It was in this sense that Sam Hellerman did the sarcastic hands thing on this particular occasion. I thought it was a bit over the top, frankly.

“Her deal?” he repeated. “You mean, other than the whole cock tease thing?” Again with the swearing.

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Yeah, that’s what I meant, Hellerman. Thanks for breaking it down. I really didn’t get his attitude. So I just stared at him.

But I almost forgot to mention how the Fiona Deal was affecting the band like I said. (See what I mean? Making out with Fiona really seems to have poked permanent holes in my brain that I can feel even now. Plus, well, you don’t know about it yet—it happens toward the end of the year and I’ll explain it all when it comes up because I’m really trying to describe things in the order that they happened—but I’m still recovering from this massive head injury I got from this attempt on my life. What I’m saying is, for a variety of reasons, the Fiona Deal among them, my thinking tends to be a little fuzzy these days.)

Anyway, it wasn’t just that the Fiona Deal made Sam Hellerman act like a total dick. It had to do with the songs.

Sam Hellerman tended to like the topical songs the best.

He liked “Mr. Teone and His Lady Butt,” and “Matt Lynch Must Be Stopped (from Spawning and Generating Ungodly Offspring).” Political stuff like that. But he would tolerate the personal, sensitive tunes, too, even though I sometimes wondered whether he thought they were too corny. He liked

“World War B” and would even tolerate “I’m Only a Page of Zeros but You Are the One,” for example.

But somehow he could tell what “Trying Not to Believe (It’s Over)” was about, and it was way too Fiona oriented for his taste.

“We’re not doing that one,” he said.

Well, the difference between the ones we were “doing”

and the ones we were not “doing” was not easy to spot, as most of them didn’t yet have many or any lyrics, and very few of them had repeatable music yet. Even the ones with words 89

and music were—well, I’d play them on the guitar and mum-ble the words I had and say “mmm-mmm-mmm” for the ones I didn’t have and Sam Hellerman would play random notes on his clarinet.

What I’m saying is, I’m not sure the set list matters enough to take personally at this stage in a band’s career.

Luckily, I realized what was going on soon enough to refrain from telling him about “My Fiona” or “I’m Still Not Done Loving You, Mama.” He would have hit the roof. If it’s possible to hit the roof in the spirit of utter contempt and condescension.

I had wanted to keep the Stoned Marmadukes going for a little longer, mostly as a tribute to the band I said I was in during my one conversation with her. And also because of this very unrealistic line of thinking that went: were we to keep the name long enough that we would still have it when we finally got instruments and learned to play them, and were we to have a “gig,” and were that still to be our name even then, and were she somehow to find out about it, well, then she might remember me and my powerful vocabulary and decide to show up or something. (Rock legend in the making: “Who is this mysterious Fiona that Moe ‘Fingers’