King Dork by Frank Portman Read Free Book Online Page A

with Guitars
    Logo: name printed phonetically as from a dictionary
    Love Love: lead axe
    The Prophet Samuel: bass and rat-catching
    Li’l Miss Debbie: vocals, keys, bumping, grinding
    First Album: Amphetamine Low. Cover is white with the album title in tiny black type on the back. The band name
    does not appear anywhere on the outside packaging.
    Second Album: Phantasmagoria, Gloria. Cover photo: a police dog licks a broken doll’s face.
    Band wears white shorts, shirts, and sweater vests, except for Li’l Miss Debbie, the girl singer. She wears a tiny nurse’s uniform with big black boots. Instead of guitar solos, I use my guitar to hit tennis balls into the crowd. With a delay on it, this makes a really cool sound when the ball bounces off the strings.
    Debbie and the Prophet Samuel are married but have an open polyamorous relationship. Band is on semipermanent hiatus
    because I’m always in Europe getting my blood changed.
    Oh, and the drummer is a drum machine called Beat-
    Beat. Because we kind of had to face the fact that we probably never would end up finding a drummer.
    TH E ACC I DE NT
    My mom tends to refer to my dad’s death as “the accident.”
    It’s true in a way, since that’s what you call it when one car crashes into another car, but it’s also misleading.
    I bought into the idea that he had been killed in an ordi-
    nary car crash for several years. But gradually I started to pick up on little hints that it wasn’t quite that straightforward. The biggest hint was that my mom and other adults always spoke 41
    so carefully about the subject and avoided giving details, even ordinary ones like where it happened and who was in the
    other car, and if they were drunk, and whether anyone else had been killed. I can see the logic of doing that around a little kid, but as I got older they continued to do it, in pretty much the same way. When details were provided, they were often con-tradictory. They acted exactly like people do in movies when they’re hiding something, and I gradually became convinced that it wasn’t an act and that I wasn’t imagining it.
    The other thing my mom says about my dad’s death is
    that he was killed in the line of duty, protecting people. I can see why she liked to think of it, or for it to be thought of, that way. It kind of contradicted the “accident” theory, though.
    There may have been a grain of truth in it, even so, but, like the accident story, it wasn’t straightforward. My dad was a detective working on narcotics and vice cases for the Santa Carla police, and he certainly did do a lot of protecting people in a sense. But that’s not how he died, either.
    It wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks—some of them, anyway—
    once I decided I wanted to. I was able to read about it in old newspapers on microfilm at the public library. After I read them, I continued to pretend I didn’t know what had happened. My mom pretended it was plausible that I wouldn’t
    have found out. We have a lot of those arrangements in my
    family.
    My dad had been parked on the shoulder of the Sky Vista
    frontage road late one night. A car had rammed him on the
    driver side and driven away. He had died from unspecified
    injuries related to the impact. It was either homicide or
    manslaughter. That is, he may have been deliberately mur-
    dered, or the fact that he died in the crash may have been the inadvertent result of a random accident. They never found
    the car that hit him, or the driver. The assumption seems to 42
    have been that it was a random fatal hit-and-run rather than a deliberate homicide.
    But there were unanswered questions hovering over the
    newspaper articles, much like there were when my mom
    talked about “the accident.” Trying to read between the lines in both situations, you really got the impression that there was a lot of information that was being held back, glossed over, hidden, or buried. I had lived with the uncertainty for six years now, with the strange