The Revenge of the Dork

By Joel Stein

Frank Portman had to grow up. The punk pop band he founded in the '80s--the Mr. T Experience--had the kind of long-term niche success that leads to self-doubt and massive credit-card debt. Plus, the band had fallen apart. Portman, 42, was on the verge of becoming that old guy working at a record store. And record stores don't much exist anymore.

Luckily, one of his fans grew up to be a book agent who specializes in young-adult novels. So when Steven Malk, 33, used his job as an excuse to talk to Dr. Frank, as Portman is known, after a show, he was surprised when Dr. Frank said yes, sure, he would write a novel for teenage boys. That novel, King Dork, is far more successful than all the songs Portman has ever written put together. Already in its sixth printing, it has been showered with positive reviews. Will Ferrell's film company just bought the film rights, and, per society's new semiotics of success, coolly disaffected kids are obscurely celebrating the book's catchphrase by wearing SAM HELLERMAN IS A GENIUS T shirts.

Although the thought of Johnny Rotten writing the next Catcher in the Rye seems weird, Portman is punk's best-educated tone-deaf singer. An excellent student at Berkeley, he deferred a Ph.D. program in history at Harvard to play in a Bay Area punk band. Not only that, but he knew the teen genre because in high school he worked as a children's librarian, and as part of the job he downed all the young-adult classics. The Mr. T Experience's teen anthems were surprisingly literary: a breakup song, Checkers Speech, is based on Nixon's television address, and Institutionalized Misogyny name-checks Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. Another ditty neatly summed up male teenage sexual frustration with the song title Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend.

Portman argues that simply writing rock songs made him uniquely qualified to write a book for both teens and adults, a literary Gilmore Girls. "Rock 'n' roll is teenage music. But you don't stop listening to the Who when you're 20," he says. "Our entire popular culture's about high school. It's this thing that most people suffered through terribly or like to think they did." His impossibly brilliant 14-year-old character, when taking a break from getting beaten up and riddling through confused if well-meaning lectures from his righteous Bay Area stepfather, works on his rock band, which exists only in his mind: "The Nancy Wheelers, [with] me on guitar, Sam Hellerman on bass and Ouija board, first album: Margaret? It's God. Please Shut Up."

Still, writing a novel is not like writing songs, and it took Portman a while to adjust. Beverly Horowitz, publisher of Bantam Delacorte Dell's young-readers division, said he had to do a lot of revisions to clarify and simplify his manuscript. "Frank was able to come to understand that there's a difference between writing a novel and music," she says. "You can't stand next to it and say, 'This is what I meant in Chapter 2.'"

Even after the cutting and streamlining, the book is deeply nuanced--a teen novel in the way that Mark Twain wrote teen novels. Or J.D. Salinger. In fact, the punk conceit of King Dork is that the main character rails against "the cult of Catcher in the Rye." The cover of King Dork is a faux red Catcher cover, with the title and Salinger's name erased and replaced by Portman's. "I always felt a lot of people might have been faking the adulation of it, to impress their parents or their teachers," says Portman. Plus, he knew that writing about a disaffected, sensitive young man with father issues would invite comparison. "So I said, 'What if the character made it a symbol for everything that is wrong in the world?' I thought it would be funny."

So did Will Ferrell. Chris Henchy, a writer and producer who works at Ferrell's production company, said it bought the film rights to King Dork because of the darkly comedic way Portman captured how hard high school is. "There's nothing funnier than biking to your first sexual experience," Henchy says. "Do you know how far you will ride on your bike for your first sexual experience? There is no answer. Because you will just continue to go." And the video clip that Portman, experienced at self-promoting from years in an indie band, put on YouTube to publicize his book helped Ferrell's company see it as a film. But not a film for teens, says Ferrell's writing partner Adam McKay. "I wouldn't want my 14-year-old reading King Dork," he says. "It's pretty severe."

Portman is already deep into his next teen novel, which takes place in the same location as King Dork--a fictionalized version of the Bay Area town he grew up in. This one centers on a group of girls who are obsessed with fortune telling. So Portman has put aside his lifelong dream of rock stardom. "I'm focusing on books right now," he says. "It's a much better gig."