Free King Dork by Frank Portman Page A

so I didn’t get too far.
    Really, though, I was less interested in reading the books than I was in examining them for physical evidence. The Catcher in the Rye, CEH 1960, was the most beat up and had had the most things written and spilled in it. The others were 60
    in better shape, though some had stuff written in them as
    well, mostly little check marks and lines drawn next to paragraphs at the margin, with an occasional note. Someone had written “Beatles” and the word “wow,” as well as the word
    “HELP,” and had drawn what looked like a mushroom cloud
    on the inside back cover of The Crying of Lot 49, CEH 1967.
    Hilarious. The Seven Storey Mountain, CEH 1963, had a business card from a dry cleaner stuck between the pages, and
    also another little card, which appeared to be from the funeral service of someone named Timothy J. Anderson. What
    that told me was that my dad used to bring his books with
    him in inappropriate situations, like the funeral of a family member or friend, just like my mom gets mad at me for
    doing. And that he may have been into the midperiod
    Beatles and had a fine sense of irony, as well as things that occasionally needed to be dry-cleaned. Hey, I’m a regular
    Encyclopedia Brown.
    I still couldn’t make out a lot of what was scribbled in
    the Catcher. In addition to underlining the Jane Gallagher back rub passage, my dad seemed to have used it as a sort
    of all-purpose notebook and scribble pad, jotting down this and that inside the covers and on random pages. Which
    makes sense if it’s something you’re always carrying around, I guess. I use the white rubber parts of my shoes for the
    same purpose. A lot of the scribbles looked like they might be dates, and maybe some of them were phone numbers,
    though I don’t know—they didn’t look like phone numbers
    to me. There was never much more than the numbers, either.
    I could understand if they were phone numbers, which you
    sometimes just write down when someone tells them to
    you for temporary purposes. I’ve got some phone numbers
    on my shoes that I have no idea what they are. But why
    would you write down dates with no identifying information, 61
    like an appointment or something? A date alone is mean-
    ingless.
    Some of the pages were missing, but I doubted there was
    any significance to that. The book was in such bad shape I’m sure pieces of it were scattered to the far reaches of the universe by now. The scribbles that looked like words were
    mostly illegible and incomprehensible, but, absurdly, of the ones I could kind of make out, the word “tit” seemed to crop up a lot. What the . . . ? All in all, there were four of them, including the “tit lib friday” on the inside front cover. One of the other books, Slan, CEH 1965, had some string in it that appeared to have been used as a bookmark and had a
    scrawled note that said (I think) something “4 tit” something something. Four-Tit Something Something. Great band
    name. Not much use in any other way.
    In the end, the results of this phase of the investigation were pretty negligible. But I did know one thing: whatever my dad had been up to between the ages of twelve and eighteen, it had somehow involved tits, back rubs, and dry cleaning.
    62

    October
    TH E TE E N WITHOUT A FAC E
    For some reason, I didn’t want Little Big Tom and Carol to know I was going to a party, though it would probably have thrilled them to imagine that this could be the start of my finally trying to socialize with other kids. They’re worried about me in that respect. While being thrilled, though, they still would have teased me about it. I think the same thing that makes them worry about my lack of socialization would also make them uncomfortable about any attempts at reme-dial socialization that I might try. My mom would have
    looked at me dubiously and asked if I was planning to dance with anybody. Little Big Tom would have said something
    like “the girls better watch out!” or