Read Online King Dork Approximately by Frank Portman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Frank Portman
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while Clearview’s horrors were yet to be discovered. Better the devil you know than the one you don’t, they say, but when all’s said and done, it’s still the devil you’re talking about. The devil is bad.
I had no illusions. Closing Hillmont High would do nothing whatsoever to change the senseless, sadistic structure of society and the universe, and I had no doubt that Clearview was crawling with normal people every bit as vicious as those we had known in … the other place. But Sam Hellerman and I were pretty good at navigating the beast-infested seas of normalcy, and Sam Hellerman was actually a genius. With his hand on the tiller of our ramshackle skiff, I had no doubt we’d manage. Plus, no Mr. Schtuppe. No Ms. Rambo. No Mr. Donnelly. In a way, Mr. Teone had given us a great and precious gift. The only possible improvement would have been if the buildings were to be razed, the earth salted, and all the psychotic normal perpetrators led away in chains. But let not the horrible be the enemy of the slightly less than terrible, if I have that saying right. Any way you sliced it, there were definitely pros, no doubt about it.
Now, those of you from the future who have already seen
Halls of Innocence
will be surprised to learn that Hillmont High was closed down. At the end of the program, Jake dashes up the school steps and says, “It’s great to be back,” and there’s afreeze-frame on his enormous toothy smile, over which there’s a caption that says:
Mr. Cabal fled and has evaded capture.
He is still at large.
Well, of course, no one, not even the worst normal person ever to walk the earth, had ever or would ever actually be glad to be at Hillmont High School, let alone smile at the thought. But the bit about “Mr. Cabal” is true. He was still at large. And that worried me. It worried me a lot.
I didn’t get a chance to speak to Sam Hellerman about the letter and our Clearview strategy till the day after the day after Christmas. When I arrived at Toby’s Record Hut on El Camino to meet him, he was already there looking through the New Arrivals bins.
One of the few great things about the times we live in is that the normal people of the world have recently reached the misguided conclusion that compact discs are better than vinyl LPs. They’re wrong about this, of course, as they are about almost everything. All the great rock and roll recordings were made on analog equipment, and they were specifically engineered to sound right when reproduced on vinyl. Plus, the CDs of those recordings have often been remastered to try to make them match the awful sounds of our contemporary recordings. (For example, go listen to the CD of COC 39105: I promise it will hurt your ears. And not in a good way.) Unless you want, for some reason I can’t fathom, to listen to the terrible stuff they’re putting out now, you’re way better off just putting on the damn Stones record.
But the normal people don’t realize this, and they’ve beenbuying their dumb CDs, getting rid of their record players, and discarding their vinyl LPs for years and years now. Result: used vinyl is everywhere, and there has never been a cheaper time to acquire it. You can walk into a place like Toby’s with fifteen dollars and come out with six great albums stupidly abandoned by their original normal owners. Sometimes they even leave them out on the street in milk crates. I picked up the entire Alice Cooper catalog on Vista View Terrace Avenue just the other week. Morons.
People from the future: you should have been there. People from now: now’s your chance. You can bet it won’t last forever.
Sam Hellerman had his headphones on, as he always did lately, but he was still flicking through the records calling out albums and their ridiculously low prices, and putting the good ones aside.
“BS 2607, three fifty,” he said. “S CBS 82000, four fifty. ASF 2512, one dollar …”
Now, you’ve probably noticed this thing we’ve
I had no illusions. Closing Hillmont High would do nothing whatsoever to change the senseless, sadistic structure of society and the universe, and I had no doubt that Clearview was crawling with normal people every bit as vicious as those we had known in … the other place. But Sam Hellerman and I were pretty good at navigating the beast-infested seas of normalcy, and Sam Hellerman was actually a genius. With his hand on the tiller of our ramshackle skiff, I had no doubt we’d manage. Plus, no Mr. Schtuppe. No Ms. Rambo. No Mr. Donnelly. In a way, Mr. Teone had given us a great and precious gift. The only possible improvement would have been if the buildings were to be razed, the earth salted, and all the psychotic normal perpetrators led away in chains. But let not the horrible be the enemy of the slightly less than terrible, if I have that saying right. Any way you sliced it, there were definitely pros, no doubt about it.
Now, those of you from the future who have already seen
Halls of Innocence
will be surprised to learn that Hillmont High was closed down. At the end of the program, Jake dashes up the school steps and says, “It’s great to be back,” and there’s afreeze-frame on his enormous toothy smile, over which there’s a caption that says:
Mr. Cabal fled and has evaded capture.
He is still at large.
Well, of course, no one, not even the worst normal person ever to walk the earth, had ever or would ever actually be glad to be at Hillmont High School, let alone smile at the thought. But the bit about “Mr. Cabal” is true. He was still at large. And that worried me. It worried me a lot.
I didn’t get a chance to speak to Sam Hellerman about the letter and our Clearview strategy till the day after the day after Christmas. When I arrived at Toby’s Record Hut on El Camino to meet him, he was already there looking through the New Arrivals bins.
One of the few great things about the times we live in is that the normal people of the world have recently reached the misguided conclusion that compact discs are better than vinyl LPs. They’re wrong about this, of course, as they are about almost everything. All the great rock and roll recordings were made on analog equipment, and they were specifically engineered to sound right when reproduced on vinyl. Plus, the CDs of those recordings have often been remastered to try to make them match the awful sounds of our contemporary recordings. (For example, go listen to the CD of COC 39105: I promise it will hurt your ears. And not in a good way.) Unless you want, for some reason I can’t fathom, to listen to the terrible stuff they’re putting out now, you’re way better off just putting on the damn Stones record.
But the normal people don’t realize this, and they’ve beenbuying their dumb CDs, getting rid of their record players, and discarding their vinyl LPs for years and years now. Result: used vinyl is everywhere, and there has never been a cheaper time to acquire it. You can walk into a place like Toby’s with fifteen dollars and come out with six great albums stupidly abandoned by their original normal owners. Sometimes they even leave them out on the street in milk crates. I picked up the entire Alice Cooper catalog on Vista View Terrace Avenue just the other week. Morons.
People from the future: you should have been there. People from now: now’s your chance. You can bet it won’t last forever.
Sam Hellerman had his headphones on, as he always did lately, but he was still flicking through the records calling out albums and their ridiculously low prices, and putting the good ones aside.
“BS 2607, three fifty,” he said. “S CBS 82000, four fifty. ASF 2512, one dollar …”
Now, you’ve probably noticed this thing we’ve
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