King Dork

Eventually, we settled on Balls Deep, Comrade Gal-hammer on guitar, Our Dear Leader on bass and embroidery, the Lonely Dissident on Real Fancy and Important Percussion, first album We Control the Horizontal. We were going for a kind of communist guerilla/seventies porn vibe. If we had had the time or ability we would have grown mustaches and chest hair. That wasn’t possible, but we did have big medallions and little blue Chinese hats with red stars on them from the surplus store, and these huge white shoulder holsters that looked great with the black mechanic’s jumpsuits 193

we got from the St. Vincent de Paul. I swiped Little Big Tom’s Che Guevara T-shirt, which looked pretty cool when I un-zipped the jumpsuit down to Che’s cute little chin and positioned my medallion over his nose.

Amanda, who has a lot of artistic talent, even painted us a big banner, following Sam Hellerman’s specifications, though I think she put a lot of herself into it, too. It was very seventies, with some silhouetted figures in educational kama sutra poses along the bottom, and a big AK-47 on either side.

“You’ll never get away with this,” she said, and I supposed she was probably right. It did look great, though.

Sam Hellerman’s idea for the audition tape was simple: just make a tape of a real, harmless band and put our name on it. Well, not our full name. We were going to be B.D. till the day of the show. We ended up putting some of Little Big Tom’s bland elevator rock on the tape.

I felt bad because Little Big Tom came in while we were making the tape and was like over the moon because he thought we were interested in his music. We had to humor him and listen to him deliver around six hundred speeches about fusion and the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Chicano and Latino influences on pretentious jazzy pseudorock. I think it was probably the happiest I’d ever seen him. And I also felt bad about the fact that after he left we kind of made fun of the funny way he said Latino, like he was the Frito Bandito or something. I felt bad, but I did it anyway, because I’m only human. I was ashamed of myself and depressed afterward, though, which is human, too, I guess. Being human is an excuse for just about everything, but it also kind of sucks in a way.

Now that we had laid the groundwork, all we had to do was try to convince Todd Panchowski to show up to some practices for a change. Sam Hellerman said he’d get right on it.

194

A WE I R D, WE I R D TH I NG

I was scheduled to visit Dr. Hexstrom’s office every Tuesday for the foreseeable future. In our second session, during Spirit Week, she continued to talk to me about books and my dad’s teenage library, never even bringing up the suicide thing. Or rather, I talked about the books. Strangely, I was doing most of the talking. Usually my role in a conversation is just to stare at the other person till they lose track of what they’re trying to say and eventually give up. But with Dr. Hexstrom, it was almost like these roles were reversed. Sometimes her facial expressions would communicate things like “oh, come off it,” or “I see what you’re getting at,” or “I have no idea what you’re talking about right now.” Other times her face would be like that of a blank, unreadable mannequin head.

I wasn’t used to this role, and I was embarrassed by how I sounded when I tried to speak like that. In my head, my thoughts always sound so good and persuasive and witty and well constructed, even when I’m confused about something.

I can be addled, or totally lost, or even feeling crazy, but I usually have at least some confidence in my ability to describe the confusion, even if I don’t have any idea what the hell I’m doing. Out loud, though, it’s a mess. I sound like way more of an idiot than I like to think I am. I’m worse than Little Big Tom. It was only because I liked and trusted Dr.

Hexstrom so much that I could handle the humiliation—I would have run from the room screaming if anybody else had been there.

Anyway, as I explained to Dr. Hexstrom during our second ride on the funky mental-health express, the main guy in The Doors of Perception really is an ass. At one point, he picks up The Tibetan Book of the Dead, opens it at random, and finds great significance in this quotation: “O nobly born, let not thy 195

mind be distracted.” Mmm, deep. I guess if you’re on drugs all the time, and if you’re confident that everyone will be all impressed by the fact that you’re o. d. all the t., and if you make sure you get in at least one mention of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, you can get away with scribbling down any old thing, and pretending it’s a book. And everyone will just go along with it. Or it was like that in the sixties, anyway. The Doors of Perception guy is a Little Big Tom type, only much less loveable. You get lost in one of his convoluted sentences and you may never find your way back again: just light a signal fire with a couple of otherwise unattested adverbs and hope the rescue squad notices you and sends in a helicopter to fly you out. The book is short, but it took what seemed like several lifetimes to be over, and when it finally was over I felt as though I had just been informed that I didn’t have terminal cancer after all. There was another “book” in the same volume called Heaven and Hell, but I was confident that this guy would have nothing to teach me about hell that I had not already directly experienced while slogging through The Doors of Perception, so I decided to give it a miss.

The Seven Storey Mountain started off slow, but at least you could tell it was about something real, not just some poseur showing off. The main reason I started reading it was to see if I could figure out if there was a reason why the funeral card and the book shared the same scriptural quotation. So far I couldn’t tell about that, but the book was strangely absorb-ing. It reminded me of Slan, a bit. It’s about this weird, slightly freaky kid whose mom is dead and whose dad is this crazy artist. He reminded me a little of me, too, to be honest. Well, he’s not quite as freaky as me or the slan kid, maybe, but I could tell his true freakiness was scheduled to come out later, since he drops a lot of hints right from the beginning that he’s going to end up becoming a monk at the end. That sort of 196

blows the suspense, though maybe the excitement is all in how he ends up getting there—the best stories are sometimes like that.

I hadn’t even known they still had monks outside of D

and D, kung fu movies, and heavy metal albums. But I have this weird interest in priests and churches and that sort of thing because the seventh-grade aptitude test and my derogatory nickname set me up for it. I don’t know if it has occurred to you, but I couldn’t help thinking that maybe the dim but well-intentioned social engineer who had designed that aptitude test had read The Seven Storey Mountain and incorpo-rated it into the test, so that when I answered questions indicating that I was a weird, slightly freaky kid with one parent missing like this slanlike monk-to-be character, the test said “ding! Clergy!”

If that’s the case, I bet the Seven Storey Mountain guy never dreamed that his book