21 June 2005 KING DORK by Frank Portman (a.k.a. Dr. Frank), Random House/Delacorte, April 2006, Ages 14 and up, ISBN: 0-385-73291-0; Libr. ISBN: 0-385-90312-X

"Gas on the hillside, oil in the teacup

Watch all the chords of life lose their joy

Distortion becomes somehow pure in its wildness

The note that began all can also destroy."

--Pete Townsend, "Pure and Easy"

"Tennis is kind of a riot. You're supposed to hit the ball with the racket so that it lands in the space on the other side of the net and bounces. Then you hit it back if it somehow manages to get hit back in your direction in such a way that it lands and bounces in the space between the white lines on your side of the net.

"No one is very good at this. But I have as much chance of performing this operation as a jar of wet gravel would have of calculating pi to a hundred places.

"Sam Hellerman is the same way.

"So here's our Tennis technique. We hit the ball as hard as we can so it flies over the fence and out into the bushes outside the tennis area. Then we spend the rest of the period 'looking for the ball.'

"One day we were goofing off, holding the tennis rackets like guitars and practicing duckwalks and windmills and scissor jumps. I suck at this also, of course, but Sam Hellerman is surprisingly good.

"The PE teacher in charge of tennis-related activities is named Ms. Rimbaud, which is pronounced Miz Rambo. She looks a little like a frog. If she were actually a frog, she would be highly prized as a source of arrow poison by the natives of South America because of her rich red color.

"She noticed our arena-rock tennis-racket antics and ran over to confront us. I don't think I have ever seen a human face turn quite that vibrant a shade of red.

" 'How would you like it,' she said, 'if we all came out here and started playing tennis with guitars?'

"New band name: Tennis with Guitars."

Tenth graders Tom Henderson and Sam Hellerman are high school buddies, bandmates, and fellow victims of the sadistic caste and educational system at Hillmont High School. The two of them typically change their band's name every couple of weeks. Then they design a new logo and an album cover (if the latest name lasts long enough to do so).

But actually making the music is another story:

"I was also struggling with the songs for the new band (the Nancy Wheelers, me on guitar, Sam Hellerman on bass and Ouija board, first album: Margaret? It's God. Please Shut Up.) I could never get the songs to come out how I wanted them. I'd have a great idea for this brilliant tune where the lyrics and the melody and the sounds and the arrangement would all complement each other and resolve into a perfect three-minute encapsulation of a true experience that would play with the listeners' emotions while simultaneously crushing their skulls. I would start speculating about how it was only a matter of time before they awarded me the Nobel Prize for Rock and Roll, once word of it got round to Sweden. But then I'd actually try to play it or write down the lyrics and it would totally suck."

The antics of the duo in the context of their musical endeavors is but the catchy hook in a wild, high-decibel, dark and cynical yet frequently double-over-laughing teen anthem of a book about Holden Caufield, teen hormones, bullying, teachers and teaching styles, step-parents, clothing trends, female clique dynamics, the Great Bands (from back during my first extended adolescence), a stack of popular books from the Sixties, and the frequent, utter emptiness that results from coming of age with a flaky mother and without ever being able to once hear from your real dad what it was like for him to go through then what you're going through now.

The question of how well this concept album...err...book succeeds will be the subject of spirited discussion when it releases in Spring '06. The author is known to many as the singer/songwriter/guitarist for the East Bay pop-punk band MTX (The Mr. T Experience), but "Dr. Frank" had previously attended Berkeley where he wrote a thesis on "The History of the Concept of the Soul" prior to being accepted into Harvard's Ph.D. history program. The seemingly schizophrenic nature of Portman's biography spills over into KING DORK where scenes of the band's amusing permutations and Tom's adolescent lust play off the young man's dark broodings and search for hints about his dead father. Three-quarters of the way through the book I was still laughing out loud at least once every five to ten pages when I encounted a passage, in which Tom pulls together a bunch of philosophical threads in a rant set within the context of CATCHER IN THE RYE, that absolutely took my breath away. Throughout the book I frequently found myself online, looking up references and books and vocabulary words.

And yet KING DORK holds no tidy ending for those who demand such a thing. While there are certainly jaw-dropping surprises in store, the story's primary mystery is never fully solved, and following some extended musings we are simply led into a "bandography" followed by the most amusing glossary I have read in my life, containing such entries as:

"The Bible (the bibble): a big creepy book, the contents of which have influenced and formed the basis for much of the history and culture of Western civilization for thousands and thousands of years. Mention of this book is forbidden in public schools and in progressive right-thinking households, thus ensuring that substantial chunks of history and literature and the culture at large will be virtually incomprehensible to a sizable minority of the country's population. Highly prized by religious and other wrong-thinking people for these and other reasons."

"Black Sabbath (BLAY-ack suh-BAWTH): pentagrams, inverted crosses, capes, tights, drugs, de-tuned guitars, unlimited recording budgets--what could go wrong? The eighteenth-greatest rock and roll band of all time."

"epigraph (a-PIG-rape): an obscure quotation at the beginning of a book designed to make the author of the book seem smarter and more well-read than its readers. An epigraph that doesn't make the reader feel confused, small, worthless, and stupid is an epigraph that has failed. Therefore, the best epigraphs have no discernible relationship to the contents of the books they adorn."

"multiple personality disorder (em-py-DEE): A feminine courtship strategy."

The cover for KING DORK is absolutely brilliant--the traditional, plain-rust red CATCHER IN THE RYE cover I recall from a high school English class, has had the title and author mostly whited-out with "KING DORK" and "frank portman" scribbled in over the White-Out. A piece of the CATCHER cover is torn away, revealing hints of the KING DORK album cover.

What was inside that cover just spent the past few days seriously playing with my emotions and simultaneously doing a number on my skull. Watch for it next spring.

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com