Author: Frank Portman
Audience: High school to adult
In a Nutshell: Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, Catcher in the Rye, and the mystery of a dead father
Tom Henderson has one friend, Sam Hellerman, by way of alphabetical order seating, and a nickname, Chi-Mo, he prefers not to explain. He and Sam Hellerman have a band together, although they have no drummer, no instruments, have never performed, and change the band name about once a week (there's even an index devoted to tracking all the names). Nevertheless, they practice nearly every day after school. Hillmont High School is your basic teenage nightmare: subhuman popular kids, teachers ranging from indifferent to vindictive, and a social ladder on which Tom may actually exist below the bottom rung, if that's possible. In one predictable bit of torture, he'll be reading The Catcher in the Rye again this year. He doesn't understand the cult following surrounding that book, but when he discovers a well-worn copy among his dad's things, he's shocked to discover that his dad, who died when he was young, was a member of the Catcher Cult, too. A series of cryptic notes in the book lead Tom to believe there is a code hidden by his father, and he obsessively tries to figure it out.
Add also life with his spaced-out mother, bitter sister, and well-meaning but parentally-challenged stepfather, a mystery girl he gets to second base with at a party and now can't find again, and the spinning devil-head that looks like his English teacher that pops up whenever he uses a vocab word, just to name a few of his issues.
Without getting into all the insanity, I'll just say that this is a very funny book, definitely for older readers. There's language, groping, a bit of drug use, and fairly regular blow jobs. So now I've either warned you, or sent you running for the library. The author, Frank Portman, is apparently known as "Dr. Frank" of the Mr. T Experience, and if I knew anything about old-school West Coast punk, that might mean something to me.
I leave you with a quote from one of my favorite episodes in the book: the Stratego Sex Inquisition:
"I had just been a participant in the most retarded version of the sitcom sex talk the world had ever seen... Maybe my mom...had told LBT [stepfather] he had to talk to me about sex. He was reluctant but couldn't refuse. And in the course of his research he got sidetracked by Stratego and-boom! My sexual awakening was suddenly all about Vietnam."
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