King Dork by Frank Portman Page B

vegetables so that one day they might be able to film a margarine commercial there.) I heard him whistling a tune I recognized from my own
    record collection: “My Baby Loves Lovin’ ” by White Plains, originally recorded as a demo in their previous incarnation as the arguably superior Flowerpot Men. It is the perfect pop song, more or less. I had just been playing it pretty loudly the previous day. So—here I was, influencing Little Big Tom with an unjustly rejected gem from his own era. Kinda neat.
    So I went over and started singing “My Baby Loves
    Lovin’ ” and doing this little Greg Brady/Jackson Five
    dance—well, not a dance, exactly. It’s more like genuflecting and using your knees to move your whole body up and down
    while smiling like an idiot. There is simply no bait that Little Big Tom will leave on the hook. He broke into a big smile as well and faced me and started singing “My Baby Loves
    Lovin’ ” and doing the Greg Brady/Jackson Five genuflect
    dance, too, though I suspect he may not have been aware
    that it was the G.B./J.F. g. d. So there we were, rising and descending, facing each other, singing “My Baby Loves Lovin’.”
    Amanda came through the back door, stared for a few sec-
    onds, and then turned on her heel and walked back in. I really couldn’t blame her.
    It got old quickly. But Little Big Tom was having such a
    great time that I hated to pull the plug, so I continued doing it for a while, looking at him with a frozen yet fading smile that gained and lost altitude while I tried to figure out a way 85
    to end the baby-loves-love-a-thon gracefully. He couldn’t
    take a hint, though. Finally, I just had to say:
    “Hey, you know: I’ve got some things to do.”
    Probably not the best way to handle it, but I was desper-
    ate. I went into the house, hearing his trademark sigh and eventually his sledgehammer-on-concrete sound.
    WOM E N G ETTI NG I N TH E WAY
    Maybe it was more or less predictable that the whole Fiona situation would eventually start to affect the band. It’s well known that that has been the downfall of all the great bands of the world: women getting in the way.
    Sam Hellerman had a weird attitude. At first I thought he
    was mad at me for leaving the party without him, but it turns out he didn’t care about that at all. It was Fiona.
    When I told him what had happened, at our first post-
    Fiona band practice—and then told him again, presumably so he could pay attention once he realized I hadn’t been making it up—he said: “Fucking bitch.”
    Now, you have to understand something about Sam
    Hellerman. He never swears. I don’t swear much, either, out loud, but that’s mostly because I never say more than a couple of words at a time. I keep it to myself, but in my head, I’m like a late-night cable comedy special. Everyone would be
    shocked if they had access to a transcript from my head. I don’t know about Sam Hellerman’s head’s transcript, but he talks out loud all the time, and as he’s talking you can almost see him struggling to avoid saying swear words. Like, he’ll always say have sex instead of fuck, or boobies instead of tits.
    The first works sometimes, though it can sound awkward;
    the second is pretty much inexcusable and reflects poorly on 86
    him. Once he said crotch instead of nuts when he was de-
    scribing where Matt Lynch had been trying to kick him dur-
    ing a recess scuffle. That alone was good for a couple more beatings. I think his parents are Seventh-Day 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