Book Report: King Dork

Frank Portman may not be known to Gentle Readers as Dr. Frank of The Mr. T Experience. I don’t think I would have recognized his name myself. My own collection of early nineties pop-punk is pretty limited. Mostly because I still have all the old punk if I feel like listening to it. I mean, why put in the work to find out whether I would rather have a Pansy Division album or a The Donnas album when I’ve got five Ramones albums and an Operation Ivy album and all that ska-core I hardly ever listen to? Ever since I officially owned more good music than I have time to listen to, which was I think in 1995 or 1996, it’s been very hard for me to pick up new bands.

Anyway, I did have a punk-pop sampler called Forward ’Til Death, which among several good (and several lousy) tracks had a really good song from the Mr. T Experience called “King Dork”: I’m King Dork and I want you to be my que-e-e-e-e-e-een, yeah-ah!” You can download it from Mr. Portman’s page, but be cautious on the album front. He indicates that the song is from ... and the women who love them, but it was not on the original EP, but only on the special edition CD. So if you are one of those people—yes, you—who still occasionally picks up early nineties pop-punk EPs from Disc Diggers, well, then, you probably are already familiar with the Mr. T Experience, and I have nothing to teach you. And, yes, Disc Diggers closed. Wah.

Where was I?

Oh, right. Mr. Portman recently wrote a YA novel also called King Dork, just so every time I saw a review or reference to it, I would get the song caught in my head for hours, curse him. I hadn’t realized it would be shelved under YA, actually, and I’m still a bit surprised that it is shelved there, because it has more cocksucking than most YA novels I have read, but it is clearly a novel for teenagers in the way that Catcher in the Rye is a novel for teenagers, meaning that it is sufficiently transgressive and inappropriate that there is some chance a teenager might actually enjoy reading it.

Mr. Portman brings up Catcher in the Rye himself. It plays a rather prominent role in the book, actually, which is kind of clever, I think. Actually, the whole book is rather clever. It’s well put together, entertainingly rather than annoying referential, and generally good. It’s got flaws, including the total absence of the internet or mobile phones in an affluent California suburb in 200-. In fact, there is a substantial sense in which it’s set in the mid-eighties, actually. I think that there are references that make it clear that it’s 200-, but there wasn’t really anything that made YHB think things are sure different from when I was in high school.

As for the portrayal of high school, I get that the nerd/geek/loser protagonist is, in fact, shown to be wrong about his impression that the entire focus of high school society is on humiliating and persecuting him and the others in his position. But I found myself, while reading and recognizing, wondering if there was a good book written about what it’s like to be one of the normal high schoolers. You know, reasonably popular, perhaps playing a sport or two, getting decent grades that are about what his parents expect, and participating in the culture as an insider. Perhaps there really aren’t any people like that. I was a nerd, myself, and although I was never offered physical violence and managed to avoid the worst humiliations (in part through becoming a drama nerd, an accepted role Mr. Portman’s hero refers to as subnormal, not really part of the culture but not singled out for abuse, either) I still haven’t the faintest idea what life was like for the majority of people in my classes. Surely we can’t all have been outsiders.

But then, perhaps it’s only the outsiders who write the books and the punk songs.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.