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PRAISE FOR KING DORK
★ “Original, heartfelt, and sparkling with wit and intelligence.
This novel will linger long in readers’ memories.”
— School Library Journal, Starred
★ “A biting and witty high-school satire.”— Kirkus Reviews, Starred
★ “Tom’s narration is piercingly satirical and acidly witty.”
— The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, Starred
“A modern and arguably better (yes, I said it) version of the J. D. Salinger staple.”
— American Way
“There is a lot to love about this book: King Dork is smart, funny, occasionally raunchy and refreshingly clear about what it’s like to be in high school.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
“I love this book as much as I hated high school, and that’s some of the highest praise I can possibly give.”
—Bookslut.com
“This is the funniest, freshest, most original book of any kind that I have read in a very long time. It’s so damn good that I’m just happy there are people like Frank Portman writing books. Period.”
—Megan McCafferty, author of Sloppy Firsts, Second Helpings, and Charmed Thirds
“Basically, if you are a human being with even a vague grasp of the English language, King Dork will rock your world.”
—John Green, author of Looking for Alaska, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book
“Frank Portman . . . proves to be a born storyteller in this hilarious coming-of-age novel.”
— Chicago Sun-Times
“Loaded with sharp and offbeat humor.”
— USA Today
“The author’s biting humor and skillful connection of events will keep pages turning.”
— Publishers Weekly
“King Dork is well and away the best YA book I’ve read this year.
. . . It’s inventive and sexy, it’s fun to read and provides endless food for thought—everything I want from a book.”
—Melvin Burgess, author of Doing It and Smack
“Portman . . . scores with a debut novel that’s funny, sharp, and spot-on at portraying a teen who sees musical stardom as more attainable than scoring with a girl.”
— Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“King Dork is unique: a detective-story ode to hormones, teenage bands, and the books they make you read in high school. Hilarious, unflinching, and surprising from start to finish.”
—Ned Vizzini, author of Be More Chill
“Just the thing for those snarky teens.”
— People
“The ironically self-crowned dork narrator is a terrific guide through the scary world of high school.”
—E! Online
“Channeling the wisdom of a cynical rock sophisticate through the voice of a self-conscious fourteen-year-old misfit, Frank Portman has created a winning post-punk Hardy Boy equal.”
—Ira Robbins, www.TrouserPress.com
“King Dork reads like the diary of the funniest kid in school. . . .
Through Tom, Frank Portman brings to life the realities of high school and a dork’s triumph through sheer personality. His book is more like The Catcher in the Rye than Tom would ever admit.”
—MySpace Books
“King Dork is a funny, pointed poke in the eye to the bloated Catcher in the Rye cult, and also a fine alienated teen novel in its own right.”
—Neal Pollack, author of Never Mind
the Pollacks: A Rock and Roll Novel
MORE PRAISE FOR KING DORK
“A funny, intelligent, inspiring, can’t-even-put-it-down-when-I-go-to-the-bathroom story. Seriously, I vowed to only write about this well-publicized book after I read it myself, and I’m happy to report that it’s worth the hype.”
—Whitney Matheson in USA Today’s Pop Candy
“This pitch-perfect mixture of Veronica Mars and Freaks and Geeks exudes realistic, self-aware teen angst on every page, and should be a permanent addition to libraries alongside Brighton Rock, A Separate Peace . . . and even Catcher.”
— The Oregonian
“The magic of King Dork lies in its cutting satire and narrative voice. It smartly skewers just about every aspect of the educational system. For readers who have suffered through a pep rally, detention or English class, Portman’s arrival is cause for regal glee.”
— The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
“In his book King Dork, Frank Portman takes on the high-school coming-of-age story with enough music what-for to satisfy the most ardent of music snobs. He also cuts to pieces Catcher in the Rye, a job you might not have known needed to be done.”
— SF Weekly
King
Dork
D E L A C O RT E P R E S S
THAN K S TO:
My editor, Krista Marino, and everyone at Delacorte Press; my agent, Steven Malk;
plus Belle, Matil, Chris Appelgren, Paul Caringella, Shauna Cross, Joanna Hatzopoulos, Marion Henderson, Amanda Jenkins, Bobby Jordan, Tristin Laughter, Rebekah Leslie, Beth Lisick, Paige O’Donoghue, Christine Portman, and Ethan Stoller.
Published by Delacorte Press
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc.
New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2006 by Frank Portman
Interior illustrations copyright © 2006 by Daniel Chang All rights reserved.
Delacorte Press and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.randomhouse.com/teens
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
www.randomhouse.com/teachers
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this work as follows: Portman, Frank.
King Dork / Frank Portman.
p. cm.
Summary: High school loser Tom Henderson discovers that “The Catcher in the Rye” may hold the clues to the many mysteries in his life.
[1. Identity—
Fiction. 2. Fathers—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.P8373Ki 2006
[Fic]—dc22
2005012556
eISBN: 978-0-375-89070-3
v1.0
And afterwards, in radiant garments dressed With sound of flutes and laughing of glad lips, A pomp of all the passions passed along
All the night through; till the white phantom ships Of dawn sailed in. Whereat I said this song,
“Of all sweet passions Shame is loveliest.”
—Lord Alfred Douglas
intro
It started with a book. If I hadn’t discovered it when and how I did, everything would have turned out differently. But because of it the first semester of sophomore year at Hillmont High School ended up way more interesting and eventful and weird than it was ever supposed to be.
It’s actually kind of a complicated story, involving at least half a dozen mysteries, plus dead people, naked people, fake people, teen sex, weird sex, drugs, ESP, Satanism, books, blood, Bubblegum, guitars, monks, faith, love, witchcraft, the Bible, girls, a war, a secret code, a head injury, the Crusades, some crimes, mispronunciation skills, a mystery woman, a devil-head, a blow job, and rock and roll. It pretty much destroyed the world as I had known it up to that point. And I’m not even exaggerating all that much. I swear to God.
I found the book by accident, in a sense. It was in one of the many boxes of books in the basement, in storage in case we ever got more shelves, or perhaps to be sold or given away at some point. The reason I say by accident “in a sense”
is because the book I found was exactly the book I had been looking for. But I had been looking for just any old copy of it, rather than the specific copy I ended up finding, which I hadn’t even known existed. And which was something else, and which ended up opening the craziest can of worms . . .
1
August
KI NG D OR K
They call me King Dork.
Well, let me put it another way: no one ever actually calls me King Dork. It’s how I refer to myself in my head, a silent protest and an acknowledgment of reality at the same time. I don’t command a nerd army, or preside over a realm of the socially ill-equipped. I’m small for my age, young for my grade, uncomfortable in most situations, nearsighted, skinny, awkward, and nervous. And no good at sports. So Dork is accurate. The King part is pure sarcasm, though: there’s nothing special or ultimate about me. I’m generic. It’s more like I’m one of the kings in a pack of crazy, backward playing cards, designed for a game where anyone who gets me automatically loses the hand. I mean, everything beats me, even twos and threes.
I suppose I fit the traditional mold of the brainy, freaky, oddball kid who reads too much, so bright that his genius is sometimes mistaken for just being retarded. I know a lot of trivia, and I often use words that sound made-up but that actually turn out to be in the dictionary, to everyone’s surprise—but I can never quite manage to keep my shoes tied or figure out anything to say if someone addresses me directly. I play it up.
It’s all I’ve got going for me, and if a guy can manage to leave the impression that his awkwardness arises from some kind of deep or complicated soul, why not go for it? But, I admit, most of the time, I walk around here feeling like a total idiot.
Most people in the world outside my head know me as Moe, even though my real name is Tom. Moe isn’t a normal nickname. It’s more like an abbreviation, short for Chi-Mo.
And even that’s an abbreviation for something else.
Often, when people hear “Chi-Mo” they’ll smile and say,
“Hippie parents?” I never know what to say to that because 5
yes, my folks are more hippie than not, but no, that’s not where the name comes from.
Chi-Mo is derogatory, though you wouldn’t necessarily know that unless you heard the story behind it. Yet even those who don’t know the specific story can sense its dark origins, which is why it has held on for so long. They get a kick out of it without really knowing why. Maybe they notice me wincing when I hear them say it, but I don’t know: there are all sorts of reasons I could be wincing. Life is a wince-a-thon.
There’s a list of around thirty or forty supposedly insulting things that people have called me that I know about, past and present, and a lot of them are way worse than Moe.
Some are classic and logical, like Hender-pig, Hender-fag, or Hender-fuck. Some are based on jokes or convoluted theories of offensiveness that are so retarded no one could ever hope to understand them. Like Sheepie. Figure that one out and you win a prize. As for Chi-Mo, it goes all the way back to the seventh grade, and it wouldn’t even be worth mentioning except for the fact that this particular nickname ended up playing an unexpectedly prominent role in the weird stuff that happened toward the end of this school term. So, you know, I thought I’d mention it.
Mr. Teone, the associate principal for the ninth and tenth grades, always refers to Sam Hellerman as Peggy. I guess he’s trying to imply that Sam Hellerman looks like a girl. Well, okay, so maybe Sam Hellerman does look a little like a girl in a certain way, but that’s not the point.
In fact, Mr. Teone happens to have a huge rear end and pretty prominent man boobs, and looks way more like a lady than Sam Hellerman ever could unless he were to gain around two hundred pounds and start a course of hormone therapy. Clearly, he’s trying to draw attention away from his 6
own nontraditionally gendered form factor by focusing on the alleged femininity of another. Though why he decided to pick on Sam Hellerman as part of his personal battle against his own body image remains a mystery.
I’m just glad it’s not me who gets called Peggy, because who needs it?
There’s always a bit of suspense about the particular way in which a given school year will get off to a bad start.
This year, it was an evil omen, like when druids observe an owl against the moon in the first hour of Samhain and conclude that a grim doom awaits the harvest. That kind of thing can set the tone for the rest of the year. What I’m getting at is, the first living creature Sam Hellerman and I encountered when we penetrated the school grounds on the first day of school was none other than Mr. Teone.
The sky seemed suddenly to darken.
We were walking past the faculty parking, and he was seated in his beat-up ’93 Geo Prizm, struggling to force his supersized body through the open car door. We hurried past, but he noticed us just as he finally squeezed through. He stood by the car, panting heavily from the effort and trying to tuck his shirt into his pants so that it would stay in for longer than a few seconds.
“Good morning, Peggy,” he said to Sam Hellerman. “So you decided to risk another year.” He turned to me and bellowed: “Henderson!” Then he did this big theatrical salute and waddled away, laughing to himself.
He always calls me by my last name and he always salutes. Clearly, mocking me and Sam Hellerman is more important than the preservation of his own dignity. He seems to consider it to be part of his job. Which tells you just about 7
everything you need to know about Hillmont High School society.
It could be worse. Mr. Donnelly, PE teacher and sadist supreme, along with his jabbering horde of young sports troglodytes-in-training, never bother with Moe or Peggy, and they don’t salute. They prefer to say “pussy” and hit you on the ear with a cupped palm. According to an article called
“Physical Interrogation Techniques” in one of my magazines ( Today’s Mercenary), this can cause damage to the eardrum and even death when applied accurately. But Mr. Donnelly and his minions are not in it for the accuracy. They operate on pure, mean-spirited, status-conscious instinct, which usually isn’t very well thought out. Lucky for me they’re so poorly trained, or I’d be in big trouble.
But there’s no point fretting about what people call you.
Enough ill will can turn anything into an attack. Even your own actual name.
“I think he’s making fun of your army coat,” said Sam Hellerman as we headed inside. Maybe that was it. I admit, I did look a little silly in the coat, especially since I hardly ever took it off, even in the hottest weather. I couldn’t take it off, for reasons I’ll get to in a bit.
I know Sam Hellerman because he was the guy right before me in alphabetical order from the fourth through eighth grades. You spend that much time standing next to somebody, you start to get used to each other.
He’s the closest thing I have to a friend, and he’s an all-right guy. I don’t know if he realizes that I don’t bring much to the table, friendship-wise. I let him do most of the talking.
I usually don’t have a comment.
“There’s no possibility of life on other planets in this solar system,” he’ll say.
8
Silence.
“Well, let me rephrase that. There’s no possibility of carbon-based life on other planets in this solar system.”
“Really?” I’ll say, after a few beats.
“Oh, yeah,” he’ll say. “No chance.”
He always has lots to say. He can manage for both of us.
We spend a lot of time over each other’s houses watching TV
and playing games. There’s a running argument about whose house is harder to take. Mine is goofy and resembles an insane asylum; his is silent and grim and forbidding, and bears every indication of having been built on an ancient Indian burial ground. We both have a point, but he usually wins and comes to my house because I’ve got a TV in my room and he doesn’t. TV can really take the edge off. Plus, he has a taste for prescription tranquilizers, and my mom is his main unwitting supplier.
Sam Hellerman and I are in a band. I mean, we have a name and a logo, and the basic design for the first three or four album covers. We change the name a lot, though. A typical band lasts around two weeks, and some don’t even last long enough for us to finish designing the logo, let alone the album covers.
When we arrived at school that first day, right at the end of August, the name was Easter Monday. But Easter Monday only lasted from first period through lunch, when Sam Hellerman took out his notebook in the cafeteria and said,
“Easter Monday is kind of gay. How about Baby Batter?”
I nodded. I was never that wild about Easter Monday, to tell you the truth. Baby Batter was way better. By the end of lunch, Sam Hellerman had already made a rough sketch of the logo, which was Gothic lettering inside the loops of an in-finity symbol. That’s the great thing about being in a band: you always have a new logo to work on.
9
“When I get my bass,” Sam Hellerman said, pointing to another sketch he had been working on, “I’m going to spray-paint ‘baby’ on it. Then you can spray-paint ‘batter’ on your guitar, and as long as we stay on our sides of the stage, we won’t need a banner when we play on TV.”
I didn’t even bother to point out that by the time we got instruments and were in a position to worry about what to paint on them for TV appearances, the name Baby Batter would be long gone. This was for notebook purposes only.
I decided my Baby Batter stage name would be Guitar Guy, which Sam Hellerman carefully wrote down for the first album credits. He said he hadn’t decided on a stage name yet, but he wanted to be credited as playing “base and Scientology.” That Sam Hellerman. He’s kind of brilliant in his way.
“Know any drummers?” he asked as the bell rang, as he always does. Of course, I didn’t. I don’t know anyone apart from Sam Hellerman.
TH E CATCHER CU LT
So that’s how the school year began, with Easter Monday fading into Baby Batter. I like to think of those first few weeks as the Baby Batter Weeks. Nothing much happened—or rather, quite a lot of stuff was happening, as it turns out, but I wouldn’t find out about any of it till later. So for me, the Baby Batter Weeks were characterized by a false sense of—
well, not security. More like familiarity or monotony. The familiar monotony of standard, generic High School Hell, which somehow manages to be horrifying and tedious at the same time. We attended our inane, pointless classes, in between which we did our best to dodge random attempts on 10
our lives and dignity by our psychopathic social superiors.
After school, we worked on our band, played games, and watched TV. Just like the previous year. There was no indication that anything would be any different.
Now, when I say our classes were inane and pointless, I really mean i. and p., and in the fullest sense. Actually, you know what? Before I continue, I should probably explain a few things about Hillmont High School, because your school might be different.
Hillmont is hard socially, but the “education” part is shockingly easy. That goes by the official name of Academics.
It is mystifying how they manage to say that with a straight face, because as a school, HHS is more or less a joke. Which can’t be entirely accidental. I guess they want to tone down the content so that no one gets too good at any particular thing, so as not to make anyone else look bad.
Assignments typically involve copying a page or two from some book or other. Sometimes you have a “research paper,” which means that the book you copy out of is the Encyclopaedia Britannica. You’re graded on punctuality, being able to sit still, and sucking up. In class you have group discussions about whatever it is you’re alleged to be studying, where you try to share with the class your answer to the question: how does it make you feel?
Okay, so that part isn’t easy for me. I don’t like to talk much.
But you do get some credit for being quiet and nondisruptive, and my papers are usually neat enough that the teacher will write something like “Good format!” on them.
It is possible, however, to avoid this sort of class alto-gether by getting into Advanced Placement classes.
(Technically, “Advanced Placement” refers to classes for which it is claimed you can receive “college credit”—which is beyond hilarious—but in practice all the nonbonehead classes 11
end up getting called AP.) AP is like a different world. You don’t have to do anything at all, not a single blessed thing but show up, and you always get an A no matter what. Well, you end up making a lot of collages, and dressing in costumes and putting on irritating little skits, but that’s about it. Plus, they invented a whole new imaginary grade, which they still call an A, but which counts as more than an A from a regular class. What a racket.
This is the one place in the high school multi-verse where eccentricity can be an asset. The AP teachers survey the class through their Catcher in the Rye glasses and . . .
Oh, wait: I should mention that The Catcher in the Rye is this book from the fifties. It is every teacher’s favorite book.
The main guy is a kind of misfit kid superhero named Holden Caulfield. For teachers, he is the ultimate guy, a real dream-boat. They love him to pieces. They all want to have sex with him, and with the book’s author, too, and they’d probably even try to do it with the book itself if they could figure out a way to go about it. It changed their lives when they were young. As kids, they carried it with them everywhere they went. They solemnly resolved that, when they grew up, they would dedicate their lives to spreading The Word.
It’s kind of like a cult.
They live for making you read it. When you do read it you can feel them all standing behind you in a semicircle wearing black robes with hoods, holding candles. They’re chanting “Holden, Holden, Holden . . .” And they’re looking over your shoulder with these expectant smiles, wishing they were the ones discovering the earth-shattering joys of The Catcher in the Rye for the very first time.
Too late, man. I mean, I’ve been around the Catcher in the Rye block. I’ve been forced to read it like three hundred times, and don’t tell anyone but I think it sucks.
12
Good luck avoiding it, though. If you can make it to pu-berty without already having become a Catcher in the Rye ca-sualty you’re a better man than I, and I’d love to know your secret. It’s too late for me, but the Future Children of America will thank you.
So the AP teachers examine the class through their Catcher glasses. The most Holden-y kid wins. Dispute the premise of every assignment and try to look troubled and intense, yet with a certain quiet dignity. You’ll be a shoo-in.
Everybody wins, though, really, in AP Land.
But watch out. When all the little Holdens leave the building, it’s open season again. Those who can’t shed or disguise their Catcher- approved eccentricities will be noticed by all the psychopathic normal people and hunted down like dogs. The Catcher Cult sets ’em up, and the psychotic normal people knock ’em right back down. What a world.
“Did you get in any APs?” Sam Hellerman had asked on the way to school that first day. He hadn’t gotten in any APs.
Whether or not you end up in AP is mostly a matter of luck, though the right kind of sucking up can increase your odds a bit. So considering that I put zero effort into it, I didn’t do too badly in the AP lottery. I got into AP social studies and French; that left me with regular English and math; and I also had PE and band. “Advanced” French is mainly notable for the fact that no one in the class has the barest prayer of reading, speaking, or understanding the French language, despite having studied it for several years. AP social studies is just like normal social studies, except the assignments are easier and you get to watch movies. Plus they like to call AP social studies “Humanities.” Ahem. . . . Pardon me while I spit out this water and laugh uncontrollably for the next twenty minutes or so. This year, “Humanities” began with Foods of 13
the World. The basic idea there is that someone brings in a different type of ethnic food every day. And the class celebrates cultural diversity by eating it. Day one was pineapple and ham, like they have in Hawaii! We were gifted and advanced, all right. And soon we would know how to have a snack in all fifty states.
I suspected regular English was going to be a drag, though, and I wasn’t wrong. AP teachers tend to be younger, more enthusiastic, and in premeltdown mode. They are almost always committed members of the Catcher Cult, and easy to manipulate. The regular classes, on the other hand, are usually taught by elderly, bitter robots who gave up long ago and who are just biding their time praying for it all to be over. Getting in touch with your inner Holden is totally use-less if you wind up in a class taught by one of the bitter robots. You will not compute. Or if you do compute, the bitter robots will only hate you for it.
I didn’t get into AP English because my tryout essay last year was too complex for the robots to grasp. So I ended up in regular, nonadvanced English, run by the ultimate bitter robot, Mr. Schtuppe.
“I don’t give out As like popcorn,” said Mr. Schtuppe on that first day. “Neatness counts.
“Cultivate the virtue of brevity,” he continued. “There will be no speaking out of turn. No shenanigans. No chewing gum: of any kind.
“Shoes and shirts must be worn. There will be no shorts, bell-bottom trousers, or open-toed ladies’ footwear. No tube tops, halter tops, or sports attire. Rule number one, if the teacher is wrong see rule number two. Rule number two, ah . . .
if you are tardy, the only excuse that will be accepted is a death in the family, and if that death is your own—mmmm, no, if you die, then that death is, ah, accepted as excusable, mmm . . .”
14
Mr. Schtuppe’s introductory lecture was not only morbid, but had a few glitches, as well.
It is like his bald robot head contained a buggy chunk of code that selected random stuff from some collective pool of things teachers have said since around 1932, strung them together in no particular order in a new temporary text document, and fed this document through the speech simulator unit as is. And sometimes there was some corruption in the file, so you’d get things like “my way or the freeway.” And of course, all the girls in the class were in fact wearing halter tops, and practically every guy had on some kind of “sports attire.” You can’t have a dress code for just one class. It was nonsense. There must have been a time long ago, in the seventies, I’d guess, when he had been in a position to impose a dress code, and he kept it as part of the introductory speech because—who knows? Maybe he just liked saying “open-toed ladies’ footwear.”
Mr. Schtuppe was still droning on about forbidden footwear when the bell rang. He stopped midsentence (he had just said “In case of ”) and sat down, staring at his desk with what appeared to be unseeing eyes as the kids filed out.
I had a feeling that everyone in that room was thinking pretty much the same thing: it was going to be a long year.
H IG H SC HO OL I S TH E P E NALTY F OR
TRAN SG R E S S ION S YET TO B E S P EC I F I E D
Despite the ominous beginning, the first day of school had been refreshingly uneventful and easy to take. So, after weighing our options, we decided to go back and do it all over again the following day.
I had been curious about how Mr. Schtuppe would 15
launch day two of English for the Not Particularly Gifted, and I was pleased to note that he stood up at the beginning of the class period and simply resumed in midsentence where he had left off the day before.
“Fire proceed to the exit in an orderly fashion,” he said.
“No talking.” While part of me was a bit envious of the AP
English students, who were at that moment probably watching a movie or eating cookies or something, I was mainly just fascinated to watch my own educational train wreck in progress.
Mr. Schtuppe had a certain charm, if you looked at the situation in the right spirit. He liked to call the girls gutter-snipes and the guys “you filthy animals,” and he would say it with this weird smile that made him look like, I don’t know, the devil or something. A shiny pink devil with a lot of ear hair.
First on the program in Mr. Schtuppe’s class, when the introduction had finally ended, was a book called 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. “In 30 days, you will learn how to make words your slaves.”
This book is a big list of fancy-pants words, and our job as self-improvement vocabularists was to prove we knew what they meant by saying them aloud and using them in sentences.
Mr. Schtuppe’s unique twist on this was that he managed to mispronounce around half of them.
“The first word is ‘bête noire,’ ” he said. But he pronounced it “bait noir-ay,” with the emphasis on the “ay.”
“Bait noir-ay,” we said in unison.
“Excellent. Now, class, listen carefully: magnaminious . . .”
(We would have to wait till the end of the alphabet before we witnessed Mr. Schtuppe’s finest hour. That would be “wanton,” which he pronounced like “won ton.” The deli-16
cious Chinese dumpling often served in soup at the Pacific Rim’s finest eating establishments. That’s why Sam Hellerman and I will sometimes refer to a sexy girl as a Won Ton Woman.)
Of course, if I had known how important mispronunciation skills would prove to be in my sex life and in the events that followed, I probably would have paid more attention.
But I spent most of the class in my own zone, thinking about the lyrics of Roxy Music’s “She Sells” and writing out a track list for Baby Batter’s third album, Odd and Even Number.
Note to self: one of these days, my next band is definitely going to be Beat Noir-ay. First album: Talk Won Ton to Me, You Crazy Asian Superstar. Lots of wok solos.
But getting back to Hillmont:
I used to get beat up and hassled a fair amount in elementary and junior high school, but not so much these days. In part, that’s because the normal people of the world, as they mature and become more sophisticated, naturally begin to discover that psychological torture is in the end more satisfying, and easier to get away with, than the application of brute force; and, in part, or so I like to think, it’s because of a special technique I developed last year.
What I mean is, actual balls-out physical attacks, where one guy wins and the other gets beaten to a quivering bloody sock monkey, are rare, though they do happen. It’s usually more subtle than that. They’ll try to trip you as you go by in the hallway; or they’ll throw little rolled-up balls of gum at the back of your head in homeroom; or they’ll write stuff on your locker, or squirt substances like mustard, milk, or worse through your locker’s slats; or they’ll superglue your gym locker shut so you can’t get to your street clothes. None of 17
these techniques is all that devastating alone; but repeated endlessly and in tandem, they can build up and start to drive you a bit insane. The basic idea is to wear you down with day-to-day social exclusionary exercises, and the repetition of mind-numbingly similar minor pranks and indignities. It’s all about ritual abuse, mental and emotional stress, psychological torture, and humiliation. They really are a great bunch of guys.
The best way to handle such situations is to stare straight ahead and act like you don’t notice or care. Unless you happen to have some serious equalizing firepower. Which I don’t.
My dad always used to say “Fight back,” but that’s not realistic. Even if you could successfully pretend to be some kind of bad dude there would still be something like eighteen hundred of them and only one of you. On TV, people in that situation claim that they know karate and that their hands are registered as lethal weapons and then they do this yelpy kung fu dance. Someone cues the laugh track and the tension is relieved. Then there’s a commercial, and they don’t show the part where Matt Lynch rides his skateboard on the guy’s face.
No thanks.
The only way to get Matt Lynch to leave you alone, if you can’t actually take him out, is to introduce an element of uncertainty into his slow-moving, gummed-up “mind.” It turns out Matt Lynch has a fear of uncertainty and the irra-tional. Raising such doubts is not as hard as you might think, though it took me quite a while to figure that one out.
At the beginning of the school year, all the psychotic normal people are mainly concerned with their own affairs, and even the minor irritants and pranks I’ve described can get off to a slow start. Which is why that first week went by without incident. Well, almost.
18
September
TH E WE E KE N D STARTS NOW
I say almost because on Friday, at the last possible moment, there was what I guess you’d call an incident. I was in my own world, thinking about Baby Batter, planning my stage banter (“Hey, we’re Baby Batter, and this one’s called ‘Up Your Face.’ Un, deux, trois, quatre . . . ”) on my way out at the end of the day when I bumped into Mr. Teone. Literally, I mean: there’s quite a lot of Mr. Teone, and it’s pretty easy to crash into him if you’re not watching where you’re going. It happens all the time. In this instance I must have been going along at a fair clip, because I bounced so hard off his expan-sive trampoline-y stomach that I almost lost my balance and fell backward. Mr. Teone stood there smirking. No salute this time. Just a weird smile, if that’s what it was.
“Henderson,” he said, in that mush-mouthed, nasal way he has, stopping me with his hand on my shoulder. He pulled his head back and squinted one eye as he looked at me. Not a pretty sight.
I said nothing, looked up at him warily. What now?
“Say hi to your dad for me.”
I gave him one of my “whatever, freak” looks, disengaged, and shuffled off to the northwest exit.
See, that almost sounds like an okay thing to say, if you don’t know that my dad is actually dead. But now that you know that, what do you think? I would certainly pardon your French if you were to reply that he’s totally fucked up.
There’s no other way to put it.
This was just a few days before the anniversary of my dad’s “accident,” which had me in a somber mood, despite all the Baby Batter excitement. At moments like these, it’s hard to tell whether you’re being too paranoid or just paranoid enough. It sure felt like they were all in it together, all the 21
psychotic normal students along with their buffoonish mascot, Mr. Teone. It’s like they sit around all day trying to come up with ways to get to me. Some of the experiments are ill-conceived from the beginning; some are so moronic they wouldn’t trouble a retarded monkey; some have promise but go astray. But every now and again there’s one that lands.
This one had a kind of subtle brilliance.
In fact, I do talk to my dad, in my head, sometimes. Not that I think he hears me, not really. But I kind of pretend that I do think he’s listening, and would be dispensing advice and comfort if only there were a way for the human ear to pick up the signal.
Telling him that Mr. Teone said hi just ain’t gonna happen, though.
I was feeling kind of weird. When the subject of my dad comes up, particularly when it’s unexpected or sudden, I feel funny, kind of disoriented and light-headed. And there’s a strange pressure in my chest, like I’m recovering from being punched in the stomach. Mr. Teone’s remark had rattled me. Can’t they leave you alone for even one week? In fact, I don’t think they can. It’s in the school district bylaws.
Sam Hellerman was waiting for me by the oak tree across from the baseball backstop, which was our usual afterschool meeting point (unless somebody was already there “smoking out”—then we would meet a little farther down, near the track). We couldn’t think of anything to do, so we went over my house.
Friday is my mom’s half-day, so she was already home from work, leaning against the kitchen counter with her afternoon highball in her hand, smoking and staring blankly at the wall. She was wearing a shortish, vibrantly colored floral-22
print dress over white flared slacks, with big clunky boots.
And a turban. Yes, a turban.
“Far out, Mom,” I said as we walked by, but she was lost in thought and didn’t react.
Sam Hellerman followed me into my room. I put on Highway to Hell.
“The weekend starts now?” he said. I did the devil hand sign and said “Party.”
“Mom says to turn down the teen rebellion,” yelled my sister, Amanda, pounding on the door. “She can’t hear herself think.”
Bon Scott was singing “Walk All Over You.” I reached over and turned the volume up.
“What’s her problem again?” asked Sam Hellerman.
“Oh, she’s at that awkward age.” Amanda was twelve and was going through changes. It was like she had a supply of different personalities, a brood of alternate Amandas that she was trying out. You never knew which one you were going to get.
“No,” said Sam Hellerman. “I meant your mom.”
“She’s at an awkward age, too,” I said.
I was only half kidding.
Sometimes I accuse my mom of being a hippie, though that’s an exaggeration. She just likes to think of herself as more sensitive and virtuous and free-spirited than thou. If that dream leads her down some puzzling or slightly embarrassing avenues in a variety of neighborhoods, it’s not the world’s biggest tragedy. “I’m a very spiritual person,” she likes to say, for instance. Like when she’s explaining how she hates religion and all those who practice it. Well, okay, if it makes you feel better, Carol. She’s really about as spiritual as my gym shorts, but I love her anyway.
23
I think she might have unintentionally bumped up her own groovy-ometer just a bit after my dad died. Her eye for fashion certainly went through a strange and magical transformation around that time. I think the technical term is cataracts.
Well, we all went a little bananas. That’s to be expected.
My dad was more down-to-earth. He was with her on a lot of the touchy-feely save-society-and-admire-African-art stuff, I’m pretty sure. But he didn’t overdo it. Plus, he worked for the police, so he couldn’t be frivolous about absolutely everything. He liked war and action movies, which hurt my mom’s feelings. And he loved motorcycles, which I think she thought was daring and hot. I think he found her beautiful and quirky and goofy and charming, kind of how I do when I step back. Somehow, you always end up forgiving her for being totally crazy.
Basically, she is a traditional suburban mom with a thin veneer of yesterday’s counterculture not too securely fastened to the outside. It’s not a good idea to kick the scenery too hard, but if you hold very still and view it all through a squint and from a certain angle, you can just about get a glimpse of how she likes to see herself, and it’s actually very sweet. She was quite a bit younger than my dad was when they got married and she had me when she was super young, so she’s still quite pretty. By the way.
My dad was married to another lady before he got divorced and married my mom. I know nothing at all about my dad’s first wife, except that she lives in Europe somewhere and her name is Melanie. And that my mom hates her guts, even after all these years. She calls her Smellanie, and says she’s getting a migraine if anyone ever brings her up. And believe me, you don’t want to be around Migraine Mom. I strongly recommend avoiding that subject.
24
T
* * *
he current man in my mom’s life, technically my stepfather, is a full-on hippie, though. There’s just no getting around it. He’d say “former hippie” probably, but that’s too fine a distinction in my book.
Our official legal relationship is pretty recent, though he’s been around for quite a while. I don’t know why they decided to get married all of a sudden. They went away for the weekend to see Neil Young in Big Sur and somehow came back married. They still refer to each other as partners, though, rather than husband-wife. “Have you met my partner, Carol?”
Like they’re lawyers who work at the same law firm, or cops who share a squad car. Or cowboys in the Wild West.
“Howdy, pardner.”
Unfortunately, Carol’s dogie-wranglin’ varmint-lickin’
yella-bellied pardner’s name happens to be Tom also. Just my luck.
He has tried to establish the system where I call him Big Tom and he calls me Little Dude. So that any observers (like, say, if someone had planted a spy cam in the TV room) could tell us apart. See, you can’t have two Toms in the same room.
It would be too confusing for the viewer. Well, he can call me what he likes, but I hardly ever say anything at all, so it never comes up from my end. He’s the one who calls himself Big Tom. Which is funny because he’s very small for a full-grown man. The spy cam doesn’t lie: Big Tom is little.
Little Big Tom can be annoying, but I eventually got used to him. Amanda, on the other hand, has never accepted his legitimacy. She spent the whole first year of the “partnership”
sobbing. (So did my mom, come to think of it, but that’s not the same thing: my mom spends a great deal of time crying regardless of who happens to be married to whom. Odds are she’s crying right now. I’ll bet you anything.) These days, 25
Amanda contents herself with methodically running through all the possible ways to give him the cold shoulder, one after another. No amount of bribery or family-counseling gim-mickry ever manages to charm her, though he continually tries. It just makes her angrier. She gets pretty excited when my mom and Little Big Tom have an argument, because she’s always imagining that this will finally be the one that leads to their getting divorced. It never is, though. It’s weird to watch the situation unfold: you never know who to root for.
One time I said “Get a haircut, hippie” to Little Big Tom, because I’d heard him mention that that’s what people used to say to him in Vermont where he’s from. He thought that was hilarious, and actually seemed quite excited that I’d said anything at all to him, since that doesn’t often happen.
He raised his beer and put an awkward arm around my shoulder, and I tried not to stiffen up too noticeably. Then he pushed the mute button on the remote, turned to me, and said, “Kid, you’re all right.” There was a long silence. Then he took his arm away, de-muted, and sighed heavily. Well, the Giants were down by two.
“Kid, you’re all right.” How sad is that? What an ass. For a moment, though, I felt a surge of—what? I don’t know the word for it. It’s like when you feel lonely, but for someone else. I don’t know how to say it. Like you feel sorry for yourself, but it’s somebody else’s situation that makes you feel like that. Not feeling sorry for someone in the usual condescend-ing way, like when you feel bad if you run over an animal or when a midget can’t reach a shelf. More like you suddenly find yourself pretending to be the other person without meaning to, and feeling lonely while playing the role of the other person in your head. I guess, well . . . you could do it with an animal, too.
26
But let’s be clear. In no way should this Special Moment undermine our central thesis, which I will always stand squarely behind: Little Big Tom should get a haircut.
Seriously. That ponytail has got to go.
When Highway to Hell was over, we put on Desolation Boulevard and started to roll stats for “War in the Pacific.” Sam Hellerman was playing the Japanese. At around “No You Don’t,” Little Big Tom came in and stood in the doorway. He nodded as though listening to the music; then he said, “How about we go easy on the decibels for a while? Your mom’s trying to rest.”
I stared at him until he did a little decisive frown-nod and flitted out. Then I reached over and turned the volume up a notch.
Little Big Tom is a pretty nice guy, actually, and it’s not fair that I’m so unaccommodating.
He means well. He likes to walk around making little helpful comments.
“Now, don’t fill up on milk,” he’ll say if he thinks someone is drinking too much milk. Or he’ll say, “Ladies and gen-tlemen, welcome to the homework hour!” if he thinks there’s not enough homework going on at any given time. “Let’s put some light on the subject,” he always says whenever he turns on a light.
He also likes to dispense words of encouragement when he’s making his rounds. Like, Amanda will be working on this plaster cast of her hand for art class, and he’ll come in and say, “nice hand.”
Once, Little Big Tom stuck his head in the door while I was trying to play “Brown Sugar” on the guitar.
“Bar chords,” he said. “Rock and roll.”
27
Little Big Tom wasn’t actually saying that my halting ren-dition of “Brown Sugar” was rock and roll. No one would have said that.
He likes to say “rock and roll” all the time, but what he usually means by it is “way to go!” or “let’s get this show on the road!” or “this is a fantastic vegetarian sausage!” Like, he figures out how to set the clock on the VCR and he’ll say
“rock and roll!” Or he’ll say “rock and roll!” when everyone finally gets in the car after he’s been waiting for a while.
Sometimes he’ll even say it quietly and sarcastically when something goes wrong. Once he knocked over my mom’s art supply shelf. He bent down to pick everything up, whispered
“Rock and roll,” and sighed deeply.
I’m a bit rough on Little Big Tom, I know, but I’m nothing compared to Amanda. She can hardly bear to be in the same room with him, and she says even less to him than I do.
That time he said “nice hand,” for example? Her reaction was to pick up the half-finished hand, drop it in the garbage, and walk out of the room without a word. I don’t know if it hurt his feelings quite as much as she was hoping it would, but he sure didn’t enjoy it, if the strained tone of his whispered
“Rock and roll” was any indication.
We had just reached “7 Screaming Diz-busters” on Tyranny and Mutation and things had begun to turn around for the Allies in “War in the Pacific” when Little Big Tom stuck his head through the door and said “Chow time!” What he meant was that he had fixed some vegetarian slop with lentils and bean-curd lumps and weird-tasting fake cheese, and that we were welcome to have a crack at choking some of it down. So Sam Hellerman hightailed it out of there.
Lucky bastard.
28
TH E B IG MAR B LE F I LI NG CAB I N ET
My family goes to the cemetery to visit my dad’s grave every year on September 6, which is the anniversary of his death.
This year, it happened to fall on Labor Day, so we were off school.
We call it a grave, but it’s really this big building on the cemetery grounds with stacks and stacks of dead people in drawers, like a big marble filing cabinet. My dad is in powder form in a little vase inside one of the sealed filing cabinet drawers. It says “Charles Evan Henderson” and “Peace” on the outside of his drawer. There’s also the seal of the Santa Carla Police Department, and a little cup you can put flowers in.
As usual, my mom put flowers in the cup, and we all stood there looking at the cup with the flowers on the filing cabinet drawer. It always feels awkward. There’s nothing to say. We just stand in a clump, looking up. My mom and Amanda cry, quietly. I feel sad. But for some reason it doesn’t make me cry. There may be something wrong with me there.
My mom gets mad at me for not crying, like it shows that I don’t care or wish to show respect. It’s not like that. I got in big trouble once for bringing a book with me on one of these visits. It wasn’t even on purpose. I just automatically take whatever book I’m reading with me everywhere I go without thinking. But it really hurt her feelings and she wouldn’t speak to me for two weeks after that.
When I get nervous or worried about something, I do this weird thing with my ears. They start to itch way on the inside and I have this urge to move them back and forth on the outside, trying to relieve the itch. My jaw gets involved also. It can make my whole face look funny and kind of 29
warped and disturbing; plus my glasses go a little crooked.
Once I start doing it, I can never stop it on purpose. If it stops on its own, because I get distracted or just calm down, and I notice that it has stopped, I’ll be relieved for a second, but that will remind me about it and I’ll start doing it again. The more I try to control it, the more out of control it gets. It’s a real problem.
Standing by my dad’s grave with my mom and Amanda is the classic situation for the ear thing. I just get more and more nervous and twitchy. This year, my ears were going like crazy, maybe even more than usual. I was drenched with sweat, too. I tried biting the inside of my cheek really hard to give myself some other irritant to focus on. That sometimes works, but this time I couldn’t bite hard enough to have an impact, even though I could taste a lot of blood in my mouth.
As I stood there, not exactly trying to cry but imagining how much of a relief it might be if for some reason I did, I couldn’t help thinking of Mr. Teone’s mockery. Hi, I thought sarcastically in the general direction of my dad’s drawer. The big marble filing cabinet is the one place I never feel like my dad can hear me talking, though. It just feels empty and lonely and stressful. Definitely not my favorite place.
WE ALL DI E D I N A P LAN E C RAS H
I’m regretting how sloppy I’ve been with my notebooks, now that I’m trying to go back and remember exactly when everything happened. I mean, I write down all our bands, which ends up being a kind of record of events, but I hardly ever put any dates in there, and even though it was only a few months ago, the timeline seems a little fuzzy. My best recollection is 30
that it was around the middle of September, three weeks or so into the school year, when the Baby Batter Weeks officially ended. And when Sam Hellerman came up with a strange and unexpected proposition.
The band broke up in the customary way. That is, one day, when I met Sam Hellerman at the corner of Crestview and Hillmont Avenue on my way to school as usual, he started to whistle the first line of “Sweet Home Alabama.”
Which told me that he wanted to change the name of the band again. That’s because we had our own words to that line: “We all died in a plane crash,” which was how all our bands ended. I could see his point. Baby Batter had been a great band, but it was time to move on.
We worked out the details of the new band on the way to school. The Plasma Nukes.
Logo: an intercontinental ballistic missile with a broken-in-half heart dripping blood on the side. “Plasma” super-imposed in fancy cursive and “Nukes” underneath in retro computer bubble writing.
Credits:
Guitar: Lithium Dan
Bass and Calligraphy: Little Pink Sambo
Vox: The Worm
Machine-gun Drums: TBA
First Album: Feelin’ Free with the Plasma Nukes.
Album cover: a woman’s high-heel shoe on a chessboard, with blood dripping out of it (front). Band members’ heads in jars on shelf (back).
I was Lithium Dan and I played in a cage. Little Pink Sambo was Sam Hellerman. And we just made up the lead vocalist. The drummer was imaginary, too, but for the record, TBA is pronounced like tuba.
31
* * *
As for Sam Hellerman’s bizarre proposition, it went a little like this:
“There’s . . . this . . . this . . . sort of party . . . um . . . thing I heard about,” he said.
Pause. “Really?”
“Wanna go?”
I gave him a “yeah, right” look. Then I realized he was serious. I stared at him. Sam Hellerman and I weren’t the kind of guys who got invited to parties. The last party I had attended had had cake and streamers and a magician-clown. I was five. And I was pretty sure that if I ever did go to a high school party I wouldn’t be any more comfortable than I was then. But it was immaterial because there was more chance of gumdrops falling from the sky and all God’s crystal unicorns overthrowing the government and dancing on the White House lawn than there was of anyone at Hillmont High letting me or Sam Hellerman into any of their precious parties. It just wasn’t gonna happen.
But Sam Hellerman had some old friends who’d gone from McKinley Intermediate to CHS rather than Hillmont.
Maybe they hadn’t grasped how risky it would be to be seen hanging around with him. Or maybe, for some bizarre reason, they didn’t care all that much. They do things differently in Clearview. It’s like a whole other culture.
At any rate, Sam Hellerman was planning to attend this party, which was being held in a couple of weeks at the house of some CHS kid whose parents were going to be out of town. I could come along, too, if I wanted. In fact, he was kind of insistent. He really wanted me to go. I had a “let’s play it by ear” attitude, but he was having none of that: he wanted a solid commitment.
“So,” he said, “you’re definitely coming, right?”
32
It’s strange to think what a different type of sophomore year I would have ended up having if I had refused, as I almost did, or if, in the event, I had tried to wiggle out of it in some way, which would have been very much in character for me. But for some reason, I said okay. He made me promise to honor that okay, too. I gave him a look but agreed.
Maybe he was nervous and needed moral support. No one would know me, so I felt pretty safe saying yes. Plus I’d only experienced this situation in movie and commercial form. I wanted to see what life was like on the other side. Of Broadway Plaza Terrace Camino, that is.
30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary didn’t take anywhere near thirty whole days in Mr. Schtuppe’s English class.
So once we reached “weltschmerz,” we immediately started over again with “abortive.”
Eventually, though, time was up, and the vocabulary section was over. I think we stopped the second go-through at around “dipsomania.”
Now it was time to start the reading.
I was bummed, but not terribly surprised, to see Mr.
Schtuppe writing The Catcher in the . . . on the board. There really is no other book they ever want you to read. I had my own copy. It’s standard school equipment.
Everyone is required to carry a copy at all times. Hall monitors stop you on your way to class and won’t let you pass unless you show them your valid Catcher in the Rye. The Salinger Boys kick your ass and you get expelled if you’re caught wandering in the halls without one. Okay, that’s an exaggeration.
We don’t actually have hall monitors at our school. But otherwise, that’s pretty much mostly almost exactly how it is.
Anyway, I opened my backpack and pulled out my Catcher.
33
Now, the AP English teachers would have smiled an
“aha, one of us” smile and said a silent prayer of thanks to the nonconformist gods. Or they might even have taken me aside to tell me the fond story of how they used to carry around a copy of that book with them everywhere when they were young and how it helped them through troubled times and how their door is always open if I ever need to talk.
But Mr. Schtuppe didn’t have that level of interest. He was waiting to die. Why should he care about instilling a sense of tame rebelliousness in the above-average students? I got two extra credit points for having my own book. But then I got three minus credit points for writing “Beat Noir-ay rules ok” on my desk.
Once again Mr. Schtuppe had his own approach to teaching the joys of literature. The first assignment was to copy out chapter one, highlight the words with three or more syllables, define them, and use them in sentences.
I just sat there staring at page one, wondering if it was even possible to mispronounce “autobiography.”
TH E S P ORTI NG LI F E
PE is probably the most unpleasant fifty minutes of a person’s day-to-day life at HHS. For one thing, they force you to wear this brutal outfit consisting of these gay little blue and white George Michael shorts and a reversible T-shirt that says
“Boogie Knights.” There are many danger zones, but two of the most dangerous are: at the beginning when you take off your street clothes to put on the gay little blue and white shorts and the reversible Boogie Knights T-shirt, and at the end when you take off the g. l. b. & w. shorts and the r. B. K. T. and attempt to put your regular clothes back on.
34
There are a few seconds there when you are essentially naked, standing among a bunch of big, mean normal guys who hate you just for existing and who are constantly asking each other “who you callin’ faggot, homo?” (It’s a call-and-response game, the response being: “I ain’t no homo. Who you callin’ homo, faggot?” This is a self-sustaining loop that can literally go on for hours if uninterrupted.) As a rule, they are so absorbed in this game and assorted homoerotic horse-play amongst themselves that they barely notice you. But if your timing is such that you end up being naked at the same moment that they are partially or fully clothed, and one of them happens to notice you, you can be in big trouble. All the usual high school tortures can come into play here, but being naked while they are happening makes them all much worse. Plus there’s something about the PE situation that makes a certain type of socially well-situated psychopath unable to resist issuing threats about how his plans for beating you up include the ambition to stick various things up your butt. Which can be pretty disturbing. Yay, team. What a great bunch of guys.
It’s a little foretaste of our fine prison system, I suppose.
And it doesn’t take much. The lesson is clear: unless you happen to be one of those guys, and if you don’t particularly want to be beaten senseless and raped with a foreign object by one of them eventually, stay as far away from sports as you possibly can. I mean, prison.
So around midweek, the Plasma Nukes (that is, Sam Hellerman and I) were walking away from PE class, on our way to “Brunch,” which is what they call the seventeen-minute gap between second and third period. We were feeling pretty good about PE. I mean, we had timed everything well and hadn’t had any nasty run-ins with any normal psy-35
chopaths while we happened to be naked. You get one of those days every now and then. It’s like finding a twenty-dollar bill in a library book.
So great was the general feeling of relief that I hardly minded when Mr. Teone, waddling by on his way into Area C, yelled, “Henderson!” and saluted with what seemed like a determined attempt to set a new standard in the field of sarcastic greetings and with the air of a man who believed he was auditioning for Head Idiot and really had a shot at it this time. True, Sam Hellerman winced like he always does when Mr. Teone said “Miss Peggy!” But I could tell even Sam Hellerman was feeling relatively carefree as well. We had made it through PE. We were high on life.
But then something happened.
Sam Hellerman had this funny little hat he got at the St.
Vincent de Paul. No one else had a hat like that, which may have been why Sam Hellerman liked it so much. Maybe he liked to imagine people saying to themselves as he walked by,
“There goes that fellow with the unusual hat.” He loved the hat. He wore it all the time. But I knew that hat was trouble the minute I saw it.
And so it proved to be. We were walking past a group of jabbering half-human/half-beast student replicants when a smaller subgroup of what seemed like angry orangutan people broke away and started running toward us, shrieking in that way they have: “Oof, oof, oof !”
As they rushed by, one of them snatched Sam Hellerman’s hat and knocked him into the gravel walkway.
Holding the hat aloft, they disappeared into the nearest boys’
bathroom. Well, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what they were planning to do with the hat in the boys’ bathroom. But Sam Hellerman had to check. After the orangutan people 36
had burst out and clambered off in search of other victims, he trudged into the bathroom. Then he trudged out again looking hopeless and miserable. The hat was beyond help. He just left it in there.
The look on Sam Hellerman’s face was enough to tell me that he was thinking of a Rolling Stones song, either
“Mother’s Little Helper” or “Sister Morphine.” He had already begun counting the minutes till school was out. As I think I’ve mentioned, Sam Hellerman knows where my mom keeps her Vicodin, which is one reason he always wants to come over my house. In fact, he doesn’t really do it all that often, but when he’s feeling especially depressed, or in the aftermath of a major tragedy like the unjust loss of a favorite hat, he’ll head straight to my mom’s night-table drawer and take some of the pills with a tall glass of bourbon that he swipes from her entertaining area. Then he’ll fall asleep and wake up after a while with a headache and maybe have to throw up. It can’t be too pleasant, but he keeps at it nonethe-less. I can relate to wanting to go away for a while, though that method is really not for me.
Sam Hellerman is as low as I am on the high school social totem pole, which is as low as you can get if you can go to the bathroom by yourself and don’t need machinery to get from one place to another. But it’s worse for him, in a way, because until high school he actually had a sort of social life.
I can merely fantasize about what I might be missing. He has experienced it firsthand.
What I mean is, he had quite a few friends in junior high, and he had enough status that he could theoretically walk into a room without everybody laughing or throwing things at him or threatening to kick his ass and so on. Theoretically.
37
I mean, he could hang out with normal people and be reasonably certain that the whole thing wasn’t part of somebody’s master plan that would end up with the joke being on him.
And he was just at the level where he could talk to a girl or even ask a girl to “go” with him and the very idea wouldn’t automatically have struck everyone as totally outrageous and hilarious.
In fact, he even had a sort of girlfriend for a brief time, Serenah Tillotsen. They used to smoke and make out behind the scout house sometimes, until she suddenly started dressing sexier and realized that dumping Sam Hellerman would be more of a move up in the world than not dumping Sam Hellerman. That sucked, but all in all he still had it pretty good.
In high school, though, everyone suddenly seemed to realize that Sam Hellerman probably wasn’t going to grow any taller, and had kind of weird hair and a funny walk, and really didn’t have anything to offer that couldn’t be acquired much more cheaply and efficiently from someone else. The market, which had once rewarded him slightly for being the same height as the average eighth grader, had now determined that his services were needed elsewhere, and so he ended up at the bottom of the totem pole and at my house every now and then palming Vicodins and swallowing them with some bourbon from Carol’s entertaining area.
In teen movies, there is often a guy like Sam Hellerman who is a minor but important member of the “in” group. A glasses-wearing cutup, kind of outrageous, whose sarcastic comments and goofy antics are accepted and appreciated by the others in the group, though they tend to receive his bits of dialogue with a degree of eye-rolling. Sure, he’s the second one to get his chest ripped open by the masked psycho with 38
the garden implement (right after the sluttiest girl in the group has her throat slit while starting to take her clothes off ). But he had his moment.
That’s how it was for Sam Hellerman. His moment was over.
So I met Sam Hellerman at the oak tree, and we walked to my house. He assembled his materials, consumed them, came into my room, and lay down on the floor. I let him slip into the void, and put on Quadrophenia. Even though Sam Hellerman was there, after a fashion, I was alone with my thoughts.
After Quadrophenia, I put on The Who by Numbers and thought rather intently about the lyrics to “Slip Kid.” I don’t want to take any Vicodin for the same reason that I try never to sit with my back to a door.
M S. RAM B O
PE had started with Track, which basically means you go around the track without stopping for the whole period.
You’re supposed to run most of the time, though you can take periodic breaks where you walk till you’re ready to start running again. Of course, Sam Hellerman and I took full advantage of this loophole and walked most of the time, talking about this and that, like, say, whether the Count Bishops or Slade had had more influence on the sound of the first wave of British punk rock. Every now and then, Mr. Donnelly would notice and would yell something like “Come on, girls!
Stop playing with your lip gloss!” By which he meant, though it’s not all that easy to explain why he chose those particular words, that we were walking too much and that he wanted 39
to see some “hustle.” We would then jog sarcastically for a few minutes till his attention turned elsewhere, and then resume our discussion at a more leisurely pace.
After the Track segment was over, near the end of the Plasma Nukes week, we moved on to Tennis. Tennis is kind of a riot. You’re supposed to hit the ball with the racket so that it lands in the space between the white lines 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 lands in 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 scis-sor 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 had 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?”
40
New band name: T * * *
ennis with Guitars
Logo: name printed phonetically as from a dictionary Love Love: lead axe
The Prophet Samuel: bass and rat-catching Li’l Miss Debbie: vocals, keys, bumping, grinding First Album: Amphetamine Low. Cover is white with the album title in tiny black type on the back. The band name does not appear anywhere on the outside packaging.
Second Album: Phantasmagoria, Gloria. Cover photo: a police dog licks a broken doll’s face.
Band wears white shorts, shirts, and sweater vests, except for Li’l Miss Debbie, the girl singer. She wears a tiny nurse’s uniform with big black boots. Instead of guitar solos, I use my guitar to hit tennis balls into the crowd. With a delay on it, this makes a really cool sound when the ball bounces off the strings.
Debbie and the Prophet Samuel are married but have an open polyamorous relationship. Band is on semipermanent hiatus because I’m always in Europe getting my blood changed.
Oh, and the drummer is a drum machine called Beat-Beat. Because we kind of had to face the fact that we probably never would end up finding a drummer.
TH E ACC I DE NT
My mom tends to refer to my dad’s death as “the accident.”
It’s true in a way, since that’s what you call it when one car crashes into another car, but it’s also misleading.
I bought into the idea that he had been killed in an ordinary car crash for several years. But gradually I started to pick up on little hints that it wasn’t quite that straightforward. The biggest hint was that my mom and other adults always spoke 41
so carefully about the subject and avoided giving details, even ordinary ones like where it happened and who was in the other car, and if they were drunk, and whether anyone else had been killed. I can see the logic of doing that around a little kid, but as I got older they continued to do it, in pretty much the same way. When details were provided, they were often con-tradictory. They acted exactly like people do in movies when they’re hiding something, and I gradually became convinced that it wasn’t an act and that I wasn’t imagining it.
The other thing my mom says about my dad’s death is that he was killed in the line of duty, protecting people. I can see why she liked to think of it, or for it to be thought of, that way. It kind of contradicted the “accident” theory, though.
There may have been a grain of truth in it, even so, but, like the accident story, it wasn’t straightforward. My dad was a detective working on narcotics and vice cases for the Santa Carla police, and he certainly did do a lot of protecting people in a sense. But that’s not how he died, either.
It wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks—some of them, anyway—
once I decided I wanted to. I was able to read about it in old newspapers on microfilm at the public library. After I read them, I continued to pretend I didn’t know what had happened. My mom pretended it was plausible that I wouldn’t have found out. We have a lot of those arrangements in my family.
My dad had been parked on the shoulder of the Sky Vista frontage road late one night. A car had rammed him on the driver side and driven away. He had died from unspecified injuries related to the impact. It was either homicide or manslaughter. That is, he may have been deliberately murdered, or the fact that he died in the crash may have been the inadvertent result of a random accident. They never found the car that hit him, or the driver. The assumption seems to 42
have been that it was a random fatal hit-and-run rather than a deliberate homicide.
But there were unanswered questions hovering over the newspaper articles, much like there were when my mom talked about “the accident.” Trying to read between the lines in both situations, you really got the impression that there was a lot of information that was being held back, glossed over, hidden, or buried. I had lived with the uncertainty for six years now, with the strange realization that the more I found out, the more uncertain everything seemed to be. And I admit, even as part of me wanted to know, another part couldn’t stand to think about it.
WAG B O G
There’s this kid, Bobby Duboyce, who has some kind of skull disease and has to wear this football helmet at all times. The little white chin strap is always fastened because if the helmet comes off and he hits his head it could be very serious. Even though there are ear holes in it, he still has a hard time hearing people, so he’s always saying “what?” or “what’s that?”
He also has this problem where he is always tired, and he tends to fall asleep at random times. He often spends his time in class asleep, sometimes drooling, sometimes not, with his big helmet resting sideways on the desk. The teachers leave him alone. They don’t dare throw an eraser at his big helmet-head because they’re afraid his parents will sue their ass.
When he falls asleep in Center Court at lunch, though, it can get ugly. Hillmont High’s finest will come up to him and gently write things on his helmet with a permanent marker, like “pussy helmet head” and “I am a fag” and “my mom’s a twat.” The gentleness is so they don’t wake him up before 43
they’re done. His parents keep having to buy him new helmets, which they can’t be too pleased about. Maybe they have some kind of deal with the helmet people, and a big supply of backup helmets in the garage. He always has a new one the day after, on those occasions when the fine young men and ladies of Hillmont High School’s upper crust have decided to indulge in a little lighthearted helmet play.
We (Tennis with Guitars) were on our way to the cafeteria when we saw Bobby Duboyce passed out on the center lawn and realized that our social superiors had developed a new tactic. Some guys from the Honors Society were pouring Coke into one of Bobby Duboyce’s helmet’s ear holes to see how long it would take him to wake up. Then, when he did wake up, one of them pinned the helmet to the ground and another continued pouring the Coke, presumably to see how long it would take him to start crying. Which was almost immediately. Then they scampered back to their girlfriends, who had been waiting for them by the lockers, and kissed them and grabbed their butts. Ah, young love. Mr. Teone was standing in front of his office door, smiling broadly. Figures.
Sam Hellerman said, “WAGBOG.”
Which stands for “what a great bunch of guys.”
I mention this because that’s when we decided to change the band name to Helmet Boy, with me on guitar, Sambiguity on bass and procrastination. First album: Helmet Boy II.
The bell rang. We watched Bobby Duboyce pick himself up and slink off to the boys’ bathroom near Area B. Sam Hellerman said, “Wait a sec,” and ran after him, either because he had to go to the bathroom himself, or more probably because he wanted to check to see if Bobby Duboyce was all right. Sam Hellerman is like that: he likes to keep tabs on 44
everybody who can’t beat him up. After the coast is clear, of course. I was standing by my locker, waiting for Sam Hellerman to return so we could continue on to Band, when I saw Mr. Teone lumbering toward me. Bummer.
Now, Mr. Teone is kind of like the Little Big Tom of Hillmont High School, in that his main job seems to be to walk around making strange comments. With LBT, though, the comments seem more or less good-natured. Mr. Teone’s comments always seem to have an undercurrent of malice.
And often, they make no sense at all.
He takes some cues from the sociopathic normal students, in fact. For example, my glasses are always slipping down on my nose, and somewhere along the line I developed the habit of pushing them back up with the palm of my hand, so that the palm slides up my nose and kind of hits my forehead between the eyes. And ever since I can remember, kids have mocked me by mimicking this motion whenever they see me coming. It’s not a big deal. But there’s something weird about seeing an adult do it, especially one who is supposed to be in charge of something. When Mr. Teone isn’t doing the Henderson-salute routine, he’s doing the nose-forehead slide. And after he has done it, his face will contort into a grotesque parody of a smile, as though to say “ain’t I something?” I call that psychopathic-moronic.
By the time Mr. Teone reached me, he was out of breath and sweating like a pig, but that didn’t stop him from doing the Chi-Mo nose-forehead slide.
“Naked day of zombies,” said Mr. Teone. “Day of suicide-osity.”
And then he started giggling like a maniac. I am often at a loss for words, it’s true, but at this moment, I felt the loss particularly keenly. What the hell? Maybe I hadn’t heard him 45
right—his funny, nasal, syllable-swallowing way of speaking often made it hard to understand him. He wasn’t inclined to explain, though.
He made me turn my T-shirt inside out because it had a skull on it, and I guess they had passed some kind of antiskull policy since the last time I’d worn it. I don’t look very good without a shirt, so standing there with my army coat between my knees, naked from the waist up while I clumsily reversed the shirt, was pretty embarrassing. Everyone was staring at me. Mr. Teone was staring, too, and laughing and kind of trembling. Pretty creepy.
Sam Hellerman didn’t show up at the oak tree after school that day. It was kind of weird. I waited for a while.
Then I couldn’t think of anything to do, so I just went home.
As soon as I opened the front door, I heard my mom call out from the back patio in the voice she always uses to ask me to fetch her lighter and cigarettes. I didn’t really hear how she phrased it but the tone was enough to tell me what she wanted.
And from the sounds coming from the patio, I could tell that I was about to walk in on a meeting of the Annoying Laugh Club.
I braced myself and brought the cigarettes out, lighter on top of cigarette pack in a neat little stack, just like I’d been doing since I was a kid. My mom said the same thing she always says: “Thanks, baby, you’re so sweet.”
The Annoying Laugh Club has only two members, my mom and Mrs. Teneb, and both of them were smoking and drinking iced tea at the patio table. Mrs. Teneb is one of my mom’s friends from way back, maybe even all the way back to high school, and she’s also friends with Little Big Tom. My 46
mom has a laugh like a car alarm. Mrs. Teneb has a laugh like a long scream and she says “frickin’ ” a lot. I stood there for a few minutes watching them smoke and drink iced tea, trying to figure out what they were laughing about, which is pretty much impossible most of the time.
At one point Little Big Tom stuck his head through the door at that funny angle he always sticks his head through the door at. It almost looks like the rest of his body hidden behind the wall next to the door is sideways, too.
“Take the Nestea plunge!” he said, and went back upstairs. He was working on his grant proposal.
Mrs. Teneb and Little Big Tom know each other from the Renaissance Faire and the Community Theater, where they do plays and such. Mrs. Teneb is a woman, but she likes to call herself an actor. Not an actress like you might expect her to say.
“ ‘Actress’ is sexist and diminutive,” she’ll say, if she thinks you’re thinking it’s a little weird that she’s saying she’s an actor.
Carol and Little Big Tom always call her an actor, too, but for some reason Little Big Tom didn’t like it so much one time when I referred to him as an actress. He likes to think he has no hangups, but that’s kind of gendercentric and un-progressive of him, don’t you think?
I’ll say one thing, though: whether he’s an actor or an actress, he sure is diminutive.
B O OKWOR M I NG
I could still hear the annoying laughter after I entered the house and proceeded down to the basement. I had realized on the way home that I had left my Catcher in the Rye in my 47
locker, and I needed it for one of Mr. Schtuppe’s brain-dead assignments. (“Define the following words and use them in sentences, noting the page on which they occur: linoleum, hospitality, corridor, canasta, janitor, conscientious, phony, lagoon, incognito, brassiere, burlesque, psychic, brassy, intox-icating, verification, jitterbug . . .”) I knew there had to be another copy of that book somewhere in this house. There are copies of that book lying around everywhere.
I soon found one, in one of the many ragged boxes of random books that were stored down there. It was very old, very beaten-up, not a paperback but not exactly a hardcover book, either—it was like a hardback but with a slightly flimsy cover, and it was almost as small as a paperback. The title on the spine had been rubbed off, but was legible on the front cover, which was only hanging on by a few threads. Some of the little bunches of pages were loose. The whole thing was falling apart. It had once been held together by a rubber band, which had now disintegrated, though pieces of dried-up rubber band still stuck to the outside.
I flipped through it idly on my way upstairs. It was really banged up. There was some underlining, some illegible scribbles, and a lot of weird stains. The dedication, To My Mother, had been scribbled out and someone had written “tit lib friday” in blue ink on the title page. Heh, I thought, now there’s a band name for you. I suddenly realized that, since it wasn’t the same edition my class was using, the page numbers wouldn’t match up, and I almost tossed it back onto the book pile. But then I saw what was written on the inside front cover, and I stopped dead with my foot on the fourth step of the basement stairs, the assignment forgotten.
It said “CEH 1960.” Now, CEH stood for Charles Evan Henderson. So this had been my dad’s copy of The Catcher in the Rye when he was (doing the math), um, twelve. My God, 48
I thought: my dad had been one of those people who had carried Catcher with him everywhere when he was a kid. He had been a member of the Catcher Cult.
I don’t know why it came as such a surprise. My dad was from the Catcher generation. I guess I just never thought of him as the type. Little Big Tom had given me the “Catcher changed my life” speech, of course; I’d have been surprised if he hadn’t. But I can’t remember my dad ever mentioning any books. I was only eight when he died, though, so maybe he thought I wasn’t quite old enough to be initiated into the Holden Caulfield Mysteries.
I didn’t much like the idea of his having been a Catcher Cult guy, but I guess I found it more fascinating than distressing.
Anyway, I sat down on the steps to examine the book more carefully. I don’t know what I was looking for. It suddenly hit me that I didn’t know that much about my dad as a person, despite the fact that I would have said, if ever asked, that we had been very close. You can feel you’re close to someone you hardly know; people do all the time. But I had never realized that this had been the case with regard to my dad, and I found that it freaked me out a bit. You don’t think of your parents as actual people when you’re a little kid because you don’t need to, I guess, and his half of the father-son relationship had been prematurely frozen at the son-at-eight stage. Mine had continued to develop as a one-sided thing, but we had missed out on quite a bit, and I guess to a degree I still saw him through eight-year-old eyes, though I knew that was a pretty silly thing to do.
For those reasons, there was something spooky about simply holding the book in my hands. I felt dizzy. And I don’t know—a little crazy somehow. I realized that I was crying.
Not just with slightly moistened eyes, like I was used to, and 49
not over-the-top racked-by-sobs bawling à la Amanda either.
Just large, silent tears pouring out of my eyes, landing in the open book in my lap, so subtle I hadn’t even noticed them till I saw the fuzzy dark circles they made on the page when they started to absorb into the paper. Some stuff dripped out of my nose and landed on the book, too. Revolting. I shook the thoughts out of my head, in that way I have, and forced myself to get a grip and get back to examining the book.
There wasn’t a whole lot of information, though. Besides
“CEH 1960” and “tit lib friday,” there were a few other scribbled words I couldn’t make out, a lot of numbers, and what looked like part of a date: 3/something/63. The day was smudged and faded and stained and impossible to make out; the month was also not too clear, but it did seem like it probably was a three. No significance to that date jumped out at me, though by my calculations he would have been about my age in March of 1963. The stains could have been anything: food, coffee, wine, beer, blood. Blood? Uh, yeah. Calm down, now, Columbo. The first body hasn’t even turned up yet.
There was only one underlined passage, as it turns out. It was the scene where this girl called Jane Gallagher gives Holden Caulfield a back rub at the movies. Why would he have underlined that particular paragraph and no other? It didn’t seem quotable or inspiring or meaningful in any way, just more blather in Holden Caulfield’s annoying Leave It to Beaver lingo. But that was my instinctive anti -Catcher bias talking. I made what felt like a physical effort to keep my mind open. I didn’t get it now, but maybe there was something to it that I was missing. If the back rub scene had been important enough to my 1960 dad that he had underlined it, there had to be a reason.
Then something else hit me: maybe there were other CEH books down there. I scrambled back to the box area 50
and spent the rest of the day going through them all, book by book, setting aside those marked CEH. It took around three and a half hours. By the end, there was very little light coming through the window on the aboveground downhill side of the basement wall, and I had twelve CEH books, including the Catcher. They had been inscribed between 1960 and 1967, when my dad would have been 18 or so. There was also another one that I wasn’t sure about, inscribed only
“CH” with no date. It looked like the same handwriting, but it was hard to tell.
They sat in a little stack on the basement floor, a crooked, dusty treasure.
Little Big Tom came down and noticed me pawing through the books. He flipped on the light and said, “How about a little light on the subject?”
Then he said, “It’s a classic!” And of course I knew without glancing up that he was tilting to one side and looking at The Catcher in the Rye when he said it.
LOVE, F OR WANT OF A B ETTE R WOR D
It seems as if I am always horny.
That’s bad because the chances that I will ever get to express that horniness in the context of a fulfilling relationship with an actual other person have always seemed pretty slim.
It’s a thing you have to live with. In fact, before October 1 of this year, I had never even touched a girl in “that way.” And even then—but I’ll explain all that soon enough.
In youth-oriented movies and books, the guy like me often has a huge crush on a specific blond cheerleader who doesn’t know he exists and would never stoop to talking to him. Or maybe she is kind of mean to him even though she’s 51
friends with him and asks him for advice on how to get the football guy to make out with her, which drives him crazy, and so forth. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely that guy. But there isn’t any one particular girl that fits that formula, and the idea that someone like that would ever be friendly with me in any sense, even as a device to dramatize my own pain and loneliness, is rather preposterous.
But of course I do have this mousy but cute female sidekick who has been right under my nose all along, only I won’t realize how great she is till I’ve learned a few painful lessons about commitment and responsibility and what’s important in life.
Just kidding; I don’t have one of those, either. Pretty much all the girls in school are cruel and unattainable, and the great majority are also beautiful and sexy and desirable in at least some way. None are at all interested in or available to me, and why would they be? When I dream of how it would be if I were suddenly transformed into the kind of guy that does not repulse the females of our species, I don’t necessarily think of any particular girl. Pick any one; it doesn’t matter.
This whole topic is so in the realm of pure theory that we might as well call her x. Or rather xi, “i” denoting “imaginary.”
Conceivable in theory, but unrecorded by history and impossible in nature. An imaginary girl.
If it makes it easier to visualize, though, let’s say xi is, hmm, how about Kyrsten Blakeney? She’s blond and wears really short skirts. I don’t know if she’s actually a cheerleader, but she looks the part. Real foxy. Looks great poolside, chewing on an eraser, leaning over to buckle her shoe, riding a bike, eating a banana. Looks great paying a late fine at the library, taking out the recycling, buying a newspaper, playing with dogs, whatever. Nice rack. Sagittarius. Birthstone: yellow topaz.
52
I find myself thinking of how I’d like to express my horniness in the context of Kyrsten Blakeney fairly often. So does practically everybody who has ever seen her—students, teachers, janitorial staff, etc.
In all the movies and books, the guy like me is totally in love with Kyrsten Blakeney and only Kyrsten Blakeney. If you forget the quaint adherence to monogamy in the realm of pure ideas, and depending on how much you want to quib-ble over fine shades of meaning in the word “love,” that’s pretty accurate and true to life. And it would be quite true, in the strictest sense, to say she is not aware of my existence.
Which is a mercy: I can’t see that I would have anything to gain from her knowledge of my existence.
In real life, I admire her from afar and quietly celebrate her beauty, just as I would do if I were playing my character in the finest, most typical teen movie or young-adult novel our civilization has to offer.
In this movie, Kyrsten Blakeney somehow discovers my hidden depths, decides she likes my eyes, smells my phero-mones, and goes crazy for my body. She decides to risk everything and shock God and country by becoming the girlfriend of a nameless, sad-sack dork like me. Society is aghast. Parents and teachers wonder where they went wrong. The president declares martial law. Meanwhile, Kyrsten and I make out in the gym at the homecoming dance while everyone stands around in a shocked, silent circle. Then she gets up on the stage and delivers this great speech to the student body, condemning them for their superficiality, insensitivity, and racism (because maybe in the movie I could be black or Filipino or Native American and handicapped, too). And when she’s finished, after a panoramic shot of the stunned, silent crowd, one person starts to clap slowly. Soon another starts to clap. Before long, they’re all clapping. They raise me 53
up on their shoulders and ride me around the gymnasium shouting, “Chi-Mo! Chi-Mo! Chi-Mo!” just like they used to in junior high, except now they mean it in a positive sense.
And my dad comes back from the dead and smiles at me from the bleachers and kisses my mom on the cheek. And as the throng hands me a check for a hundred thousand dollars and carries me out the door to my brand-new car, you hear the voice of my back-from-the-dead father saying, “I’m proud of you, boy. . . .” Kyrsten and I start driving off to Vegas to get married. She gives me a blow job on the highway under the steering wheel and kisses me on the mouth and says, “Chi-Mo, you better get used to this, because from now on you’re stuck with me. . . .”
Okay, I got a little carried away there. Take it up to right after the speech to the student body, and change me back into a white, suburban, typically abled, clever, if angry, yet somehow almost loveable mixed-up kind of weird guy.
Slightly more believable.
King Dork to wed Homecoming Princess. News at eleven. It’s a nice thought, and it turns up all the time in movies and books. The one minor problem is that in reality, it never happens. I don’t mean rarely or hardly ever. I mean it has never even come within the ball park of being even slightly close to almost happening in the whole history of high school, since the beginning of time.
Not even once.
It turns up in all those books and movies for the same reason that parents and teachers want you to read The Catcher in the Rye all the time. It’s the world as they would like it to be. It’s the fantasy that the short end of the stick somehow comes with hidden benefits that only people outside the situation can see. The fantasy that the nonentity in 54
the background is secretly the main guy who has his revenge in the end. It’s a nice thought. But it’s bogus, man. Total crap.
TOYS I N TH E ATTIC
That CHS party was just around the corner, and I was starting to dread it a little. I mean, what good could possibly come of such a thing? Still, I didn’t want to let Sam Hellerman down.
And anyway, I had more important things on my mind. Because it was starting to dawn on me: the band wasn’t going anywhere.
We really needed to take it to the next level. Sure, we had great band names and stage names and album titles, and I could play bar chords, though it would sometimes take me a little too long to switch between the E and the A one. Sam Hellerman still didn’t have his bass, but I was getting tired of waiting.
Don’t get me wrong: Liquid Malice was and is a great, great name. But without songs that are as great, it would never amount to much.
So I decided I would write some songs and we would get together to rehearse them, even if we didn’t completely have our shit together.
One thing I learned right away. It’s way easier to think up names and album covers than to write the actual songs to plug into them. I wrote this song called “Kyrsten Blakeney’s a Total Fox” only to realize that what I’d done was basically rewrite “Christine Sixteen” with new, suckier lyrics. There just aren’t any words that rhyme with Blakeney. Kyrsten does rhyme with “thirstin’,” and I was sort of proud of that one, but the fact remains that my first song set the band back several stages all on its own.
I was starting to sketch out the lyrics for a new song with 55
the tentative title “Advanced Placement Is a Scam” when Sam Hellerman finally came over. He had his clarinet and a book of Aerosmith for Reed Instruments.
He had a good point. We could start with Aerosmith and work our way up to our own tunes.
I played the chords on my guitar and Sam Hellerman played the melody line on the clarinet. It didn’t sound too bad.
Little Big Tom poked his head in and said, “Dream on!”
which I thought was a little mean.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that I had so much trouble writing songs. They always say, “Write what you know.” And that was the problem: I didn’t know anything.
The following morning, Sam Hellerman dropped something on my desk in homeroom. It was the “Thinking of Suicide?” pamphlet from the Student Resource Area. (They have a whole wall of poorly written, amusingly illustrated pamphlets to help students sort through their problems. The titles are always in the form of a question, like “Pregnant?” or
“Drugs and/or Alcohol Addiction or STD?” “Thinking of Suicide?” is our favorite, though.)
“Oh, Ralphie,” I said, because sometimes we call each other Ralphie. “Is it that obvious?”
This was a running joke between Sam Hellerman and me.
He would pick up one of the suicide pamphlets and bring it over and I’d say, “how did you know?” And he’d say something like “killing yourself is a cry for help, you know.” And I’d say, “but isn’t death just a part of life?” “Yeah,” he’d say,
“it’s usually the last part.” It passes the time.
But this time around, my mind wasn’t on the hilarious banter. Instead, I was looking at the extremely familiar cover of the pamphlet as though seeing it for the first time.
“Thinking of Suicide?” has this great drawing of a retro girl in 56
a sweater and a short plaid skirt with her calves apart and her knees together and her stack of schoolbooks falling out of her arms. The expression on her face is supposed to be anguished, but she has her mouth open as though in surprise and to me she has always looked pretty sexy. Her glasses are on the floor near one of her clumsily drawn Mary Janes, which seems kind of sexy, too, for some reason. Glasses have always turned me on. It’s one of my favorite pictures, and we had already used it for several album covers (most recently for the Underpants Machine, me on guitar, Sam Sam the Piper’s Son on bass and bottle rockets, first album We Will Bury You. ) What I was thinking, though, for the first time was, this would make a pretty good song. All I had to do was give the girl a name and feel sorry for myself while pretending to be her. And figure out some lyrics and chords and stuff. It was worth a shot, anyway.
I was distracted for the rest of the day, wishing I had my guitar with me so I could play around with suicide song ideas.
It was frustrating. On the other hand, it did give me something interesting to think about while Mr. Schtuppe was trying to teach us how to mispronounce words from Catcher in the Rye.
But then my world was plunged into darkness.
We were in PE sitting in the lanai, boys on one side and girls on the other, listening to some lady give a speech on what she called Rape Prevention, but what was really more like a list of dating dos and don’ts. Do be passive and tentative at all times. Don’t try to persuade anyone to do anything or not to do anything, nor allow yourself to be persuaded to do anything or not to do anything of any kind at any time under any circumstances. Do recoil from human contact at the first sign of discomfort or awkwardness. Don’t go out with anyone anywhere if there’s a slight chance that drugs or alcohol will be or 57
have ever been consumed by anyone in the vicinity. Realistic stuff like that. And remember, girls, if a boy does something you don’t like, you can always poke him in the eyes with your index and middle fingers, thrusting upward under glasses if necessary.
I noticed some of the girls laughing and pointing my way, plus making these little pained grimaces. I knew that I had to be the person they were pointing and laughing and grimac-ing at. I just didn’t know specifically why.
Later that day in Band, Scott Erdman, who is kind of going out with Molli Miklazewski, one of the girls in that PE
period, told me that she had told him that they were laughing because they thought they could see my balls. That’s totally believable, because, as I’ve explained, they force you to wear these extremely small blue and white George Michael shorts in PE, and not only do they make you look completely gay but they’re not very effective at fulfilling the minimum requirement for a below-the-waist garment as I see it, which is, if nothing else, to cover the genitals. I guess it works out okay for George Michael, but for me it was far from ideal: if you sit a certain way, like Indian style in the lanai, there’s always a chance that something will peek out, and I guess that’s what happened.
Not only that, but Scott Erdman said that Molli Miklazewski specifically made a point of saying that it’s not seeing just anyone’s balls per se that grossed them all out.
The girls in her circle, she wanted to emphasize, quite enjoy seeing someone’s balls in many situations. Sometimes they see a person’s balls and throw a big party in the spirit of reverent and enthusiastic ball admiration. Whether it’s gross and makes them want to throw up or not is all dependent on whose balls they are. Now, maybe she was saying this in part just to make sure Scott Erdman knew that she felt okay about 58
his balls, but the message was clear. The entire second-period sophomore girls’ PE class thought my balls were uniquely and supremely beneath contempt. Great.
Never mind about the date-rape prevention from this end, Ms. Rimbaud. I got you covered. There will be no dating, school district approved or not, going on in the general vicinity of my balls for a long, long time.
But the Lord never closes a door without opening a window, and on the bright side, it could have been much, much worse, as this would have been the perfect opportunity for someone to propose a groundbreakingly embarrassing new nickname. But fortunately, just at the point when the discussion in the band room would have reached the all-important nickname development stage, in walked Pierre Butterfly Cameroon.
Needless to say, Pierre Butterfly Cameroon is cursed with one of the worst names ever misguidedly foisted upon a poor, defenseless kid by adoring, clueless, hippie parents. He’s also the shortest kid in school (another wonderful gift from the Whole Earth Mom and Dad: stunted growth owing to a protein-free vegan diet in his formative years). Plus, he had been insane enough back in elementary school to have chosen to play the flute rather than some more gender-appropriate instrument, so when he walked in someone lifted him by the legs of his jeans and shook him upside down till he fell out of his pants and hit his head on a saxophone case and lay there crying in his underwear and everyone started chanting, “Get a belt! Get a belt!” So my balls were forgotten in the excitement. Like I said, doors and windows.
So I guess I ended up having a slight change of attitude about that CHS party. I mean, I was kind of looking forward to it, suddenly. It had disaster written all over it, but really, how much worse could anything get?
59
TITS, BAC K RU B S, AN D DRY C LEAN I NG
I had, of course, brought all the CEH books up to my room right after I found them at the beginning of that week. I had cased out the Catcher pretty thoroughly, but it wasn’t till the Thursday just before the party that I got around to examining the rest of them closely as a set. Sam Hellerman had had to skip band practice to do something with his parents (an obligation I wouldn’t wish on a dog—his parents are no pic-nic). I was on my own. So I put on Rocket to Russia and began to go through them.
A couple of the books were familiar from school as Catcher in the Rye alternates or runners-up. That is, if Catcher is for any reason unable to perform its official duties, they make you read one of the other ones instead. There was A Separate Peace, which is about this irritating guy who keeps trying to make this other irritating guy fall and break his leg until he finally does and ends up dying. And there was Lord of the Flies, which is kind of like Hillmont High School meets Gilligan’s Island, except that the goons in charge are prissy English schoolboys instead of normal red-blooded American alpha psychopaths.
There was one pretty cool one, though: Brighton Rock.
Reading books can be a lot of fun when they’re not the same ones that they make you read over and over and over till you want to shoot yourself. Brighton Rock seemed pretty interesting. I opened it and read the first couple of pages. But knowing it was my dad’s book gave me a weird feeling that kept distracting me from the story, so I didn’t get too far.
Really, though, I was less interested in reading the books than I was in examining them for physical evidence. The Catcher in the Rye, CEH 1960, was the most beat up and had had the most things written and spilled in it. The others were 60
in better shape, though some had stuff written in them as well, mostly little check marks and lines drawn next to paragraphs at the margin, with an occasional note. Someone had written “Beatles” and the word “wow,” as well as the word
“HELP,” and had drawn what looked like a mushroom cloud on the inside back cover of The Crying of Lot 49, CEH 1967.
Hilarious. The Seven Storey Mountain, CEH 1963, had a business card from a dry cleaner stuck between the pages, and also another little card, which appeared to be from the funeral service of someone named Timothy J. Anderson. What that told me was that my dad used to bring his books with him in inappropriate situations, like the funeral of a family member or friend, just like my mom gets mad at me for doing. And that he may have been into the midperiod Beatles and had a fine sense of irony, as well as things that occasionally needed to be dry-cleaned. Hey, I’m a regular Encyclopedia Brown.
I still couldn’t make out a lot of what was scribbled in the Catcher. In addition to underlining the Jane Gallagher back rub passage, my dad seemed to have used it as a sort of all-purpose notebook and scribble pad, jotting down this and that inside the covers and on random pages. Which makes sense if it’s something you’re always carrying around, I guess. I use the white rubber parts of my shoes for the same purpose. A lot of the scribbles looked like they might be dates, and maybe some of them were phone numbers, though I don’t know—they didn’t look like phone numbers to me. There was never much more than the numbers, either.
I could understand if they were phone numbers, which you sometimes just write down when someone tells them to you for temporary purposes. I’ve got some phone numbers on my shoes that I have no idea what they are. But why would you write down dates with no identifying information, 61
like an appointment or something? A date alone is meaningless.
Some of the pages were missing, but I doubted there was any significance to that. The book was in such bad shape I’m sure pieces of it were scattered to the far reaches of the universe by now. The scribbles that looked like words were mostly illegible and incomprehensible, but, absurdly, of the ones I could kind of make out, the word “tit” seemed to crop up a lot. What the . . . ? All in all, there were four of them, including the “tit lib friday” on the inside front cover. One of the other books, Slan, CEH 1965, had some string in it that appeared to have been used as a bookmark and had a scrawled note that said (I think) something “4 tit” something something. Four-Tit Something Something. Great band name. Not much use in any other way.
In the end, the results of this phase of the investigation were pretty negligible. But I did know one thing: whatever my dad had been up to between the ages of twelve and eighteen, it had somehow involved tits, back rubs, and dry cleaning.
62
October
TH E TE E N WITHOUT A FAC E
For some reason, I didn’t want Little Big Tom and Carol to know I was going to a party, though it would probably have thrilled them to imagine that this could be the start of my finally trying to socialize with other kids. They’re worried about me in that respect. While being thrilled, though, they still would have teased me about it. I think the same thing that makes them worry about my lack of socialization would also make them uncomfortable about any attempts at reme-dial socialization that I might try. My mom would have looked at me dubiously and asked if I was planning to dance with anybody. Little Big Tom would have said something like “the girls better watch out!” or “looking good!” I just couldn’t face it.
So I said I was going over to Sam Hellerman’s house to play D and D. There hadn’t been a late-night D and D session in my world for some time, but they had no way of knowing that. Carol and LBT were watching a pledge drive on PBS anyway and had no idea something out of the ordinary was going on. Amanda knew, but she wouldn’t tell because there were things she didn’t want me to tell about that she was intending to do. She had teased me almost as relentlessly as I had feared my mom would, but in the end we had worked it all out.
“Call if you need a ride home,” said Little Big Tom. “I’ve got a set of wheels!”
It only took around thirty-five minutes to walk to the party, but once you get to Clearview Heights it feels like a different world. It looks pretty much the same as Hillmont, but somehow you get the feeling that there’s an invisible wall between the two towns and that you’re on the good side of it all of a sudden. There was a good chance that no one would 65
have any idea who I was over there. I was the teen without a face. There are worse feelings.
We got to the door of the party house and just walked straight in. No one tried to kick us out. Outstanding.
There were a lot of normal people there. But quite a few of the ones other than them seemed to be CHS drama people, which was good.
Normal people freak me out, but I’m not scared of drama people. There are some at Hillmont, of course. They’re all right, but they tend to be a bit faux hippie and into “jam bands” and the Grateful Dead and Neil Young, so they remind me of my folks a little too much, and they always seem to be trying too hard to be wacky. The real reason I don’t like them, though, is that I know they will never let me into their club. I wouldn’t particularly like to be a fourteen-year-old hippie re-vivalist with embroidered jeans listening to the Dead and playing Man in Auditorium in Our Town by Thornton Wilder.
But the fact that they wouldn’t accept me even if I did want to be a f.-y.-o. h. r. with e. j. listening to the D. and playing M. i. A.
in O. T. by T. W. rubs me the wrong way.
There is, however, one thing I can guarantee: no drama person has ever beaten anyone up.
The CHS drama people seemed similar to their Hillmont counterparts, but they were faux mod rather than faux hippie, and that’s a vast, vast improvement. It seems to me if you are going to express your individuality by adopting the costumes and accessories of a long-vanished youth subculture, you’re better off with mod. At least you get some cool-looking boots and short skirts out of the deal, and the music is a whole lot better.
Sam Hellerman stood in line for the keg, then came back and handed me this big red plastic cup of beer.
66
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“Put cup to mouth at slight angle. Swallow contents.
Repeat,” he said, demonstrating. But he knew what I meant. He recommended trying to “act normal” (yeah right) and mentioned that there was a TV room downstairs if all else failed.
Then he went off to talk to some of those old friends who, for whatever reason, still felt they could afford to be seen talking to him.
Clearview really was Freedom.
The music on the stereo was all Small Faces and the Who and the Kinks and the Jam. Not too shabby. The mod thing was a bit much, though. There was a guy running around wearing a British flag as a cape, and several people were speaking in unconvincing English accents. They, and their hilarious asymmetrical haircuts, were trying too hard. But that’s the thing: trying at all is trying too hard. I granted them an indulgence on account of the fine, fine music and gave them absolution for their lapses in taste. I was in a generous mood.
I slouched around quietly, checking everything out, trying to stay away from situations that might erupt into a sudden ridicule/torture session and blow my cover.
Despite the civilizing influence of the unusually numer-ous drama people, there were a lot of these situations brew-ing. I mean: clumps of normal guys horsing around and asking each other “Who you lookin’ at, homo?” And gaggles of normal girls, any one of whom might suddenly decide it would be fun to put her arm around you and pretend to be hitting on you to see what you would do, with everyone laughing at you the whole time.
That is one of life’s most trying and irritating situations.
Sam Hellerman and I have given it a catchy name: the Make-out/Fake-out. I don’t know if it has a real name. The object of the game isn’t actually to make you think they’re sincere 67
and go for it, which no one would be stupid enough to think, but just to watch you squirm and see how you’ll try to get out of it. You can’t win. You might as well just bite down and break open the cyanide capsule concealed in your false front tooth. If you’ve got one of those. It was fresh in my mind because there had just recently been a Make-out/Fake-out attempt on my dignity during PE class, and I could still feel the pain of having no cyanide capsule to make it all go away.
The danger zones were easy to avoid, though. Steer clear of the schools of sharks and flesh-eating piranhas. Avoid the sirens. Drift toward the playful mod dolphins, who are so busy being entranced with their own wonderfulness that they don’t even notice your ungainly boat paddling in their midst. “It’s quite a lagoon you’ve got here,” I said, to no one in particular.
Eventually, I drifted into a little basement room down some stairs at the end of the hall. This was presumably the TV room Sam Hellerman had mentioned. It was quite dark, and almost totally empty. There was a turned-off TV and a sofa, and on the sofa was this girl. She was staring intently at a candle that was burning on top of the TV and holding the smoking stub of a joint in a mall head-shop roach clip. You know, with feathers dangling from it, and I think maybe a pentagram or an ankh.
She didn’t have a full-on mod costume, but I could tell she was one of the funky CHS drama people because she had a Maximum R & B T-shirt underneath a crazy-looking denim and—what? Yarn?—yeah, it was a yarn ’n’ denim jacket that looked homemade. She had on this black soft cap that looked kind of military. And these little black glasses. I was pretty sure she was older than me, a junior maybe. The Who shirt was tiny and didn’t go down all the way and her belly looked really good, what I could see of it. I mean really good.
68
She waved me over and said, “I’m trying to make the candle go out with the power of my mind.”
I walked over, unsure of what to do. She said I should sit down and help her. Concentrate, she said. I sat down next to her and stared at the candle. It didn’t go out.
“You call yourself a hypnotizer?” she said after a while.
No. I’m quite certain I had never said I was a hypnotizer. I hadn’t said anything. Part of me was off in the corner thinking, Maybe these are my people? Eccentric and funny and weird with good taste in music and off-the-wall hobbies, I mean. Another part of me realized that I was so self-conscious that I wasn’t exactly radiating Good Eccentric around here. But the biggest part of me was just staring at her bare stomach, which was, like, the nicest thing I’d ever seen in person, though I was trying to do it kind of sideways, hoping she wouldn’t notice. She didn’t seem like she was in much of a noticing mood, to be honest.
She asked me if I wanted the roach. Now, the thing I said sounds really stupid and goofy, but I know from having watched people smoke pot all my life that it’s the thing you say. I still felt like a big ass saying it, though.
“I’m cool.”
Never in the history of the world had there been a less accurate statement.
She shrugged and popped the roach in her mouth—
reminding me, weirdly, of my mom—and grabbed my half-filled cup and drank it all in one long swallow.
“Fiona,” she said after a lengthy grimace. “I’m in drama.
I’m an actor and I also do costume. What’s your story?”
Wow, a female actor. Just like Mrs. Teneb. I guess she could tell my jumpy brain was mulling over the concept of the female actor, because she quickly added, in a slightly lecturing tone: “We don’t say actress. Everyone is an actor. It’s unisex.” Then she said, carefully, “Actress is diminutive.”
69
Well, okay. Not that I didn’t love how she said “diminutive”: with great care and delicacy and solemnity and attention to detail, the way you lean two cards together on a new level of a card house.
But I still had to tell her my “story.” What was my story, exactly?
“I’m in a band,” I said.
“Yeah? What are you called and where are your gigs?”
“The Stoned Marmadukes,” I said, making a mental note to make sure to tell Sam Hellerman the new band name so our stories would be straight. Me on guitar, him on bass and paleontology, first album Right Lane Must Exit. Then, out loud and rather lamely, I said, “We’re working on some, um, on some . . .” Gigs. As if.
But Fiona had already lost interest in that topic. She was scanning the room to see if there might be anyone else around to liven up the conversation. There was no one, so she started talking, in a distant way, about something or other. But I was getting the feeling that she had started to realize what she was dealing with here and had reached the conclusion that my fitness as a participant in any future spooky telekinesis experiments was in serious question.
I sat there while she spoke, trying not to make it too obvious how intently I was examining her, which I totally just couldn’t help doing. She had some really tight jeans on, and black boots. Shiny boots of leather. She mentioned how she was making all the costumes for some play she was in. She always ended up doing the costumes, she said, because she was such a good seamstress.
“You mean seamster,” I said.
She paused, and said, as though talking to herself, “Mmm, that’s interesting.” Then she stared at me. The candlelight made her glasses glisten when she moved her head. At times 70
they looked almost like they were made of liquid. I suddenly noticed that she looked a little sad, or so it seemed to me, but maybe she was just stoned and sleepy. Maybe I was just imagining the sadness for my own purposes—I always think girls are prettier when they’re crying.
Now, Hillmont is known as Hellmont, or less commonly as Swillmont. And most of the people at the party went to CHS, so I’d have guessed they probably lived either in Clearview or Clearview Heights. Queerview. So that’s why Fiona said, “How are things in Hellmont?” And that’s why I said, in response, “Diabolical.”
She seemed to spring to life. A bit. I mean, she acted as though she thought that was pretty funny. I was sitting there in silence trying to decide whether she was being sarcastic or not. Well, she was at least a little stoned. But I gotta say, her giggling like that in response to my powerful vocabulary, THC-enhanced and sarcastic or not, was pretty fucking charming.
She was hitting my arm. I guess she had said something while I had been in my own world trying to psychoanalyze her, mesmerized by her belly, which her T-shirt had been designed to reveal, but maybe not quite as much as was being revealed now that she was all stretched out on the couch, and which I couldn’t stop staring at. I mean, it was almost physically impossible to pry my eyes away from it. I did, though, which made a ripping sound, like Velcro.
I went: “?”
“Getting a good look, hand-jive?”
I drew back, mortified. But she was just kidding around, still laughing and hitting my arm.
“Slut heaven,” she said. “Do slut heaven.”
Now I was really confused. I think I may have said,
“Um . . . ,” and half smiled so it would look like I knew what 71
was going on while I tried to figure out what was going on.
She grabbed my head on either side, put her face very close to mine, and said, slowly and deliberately, the way you talk to a retarded person or an ESL student:
“How. Are. Things. In. Slut. Heaven?”
It took me a beat, but I realized: she must be from Salthaven, or possibly Salthaven Vista, not Clearview Heights. Duh. I’d never heard that name for Salthaven, but it was a pretty good one, and this time my half-smile was at least semigenuine.
But she was still nudging me.
“Slut heaven, going once, going twice . . .”
“Um, concupiscent?” I said.
See, I was a little slow, but I guess we had established the foundations of a game where she asked how things were in a town, and I responded with the appropriate word from 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. She shrieked and clapped her hands theatrically and gave me this admiring sort of smile that I had never, ever seen anyone direct my way before. I swear to God, she did, and it didn’t even seem very sarcastic.
The beauty of this moment was slightly tarnished by the fact that in the back of my mind I was thinking of Mr.
Schtuppe and how he might mispronounce “concupiscent.” In fact, I’m not totally sure I didn’t mispronounce it. But I’ve got to say that I hadn’t previously grasped the true benefits of making words your slaves. Fiona was an unusual girl, though, not like any of the Hillmont High girls I’d observed. For one thing, what might cause an ordinary person to recoil, or at best make a mental note never to play Scrabble with you, seemed to make her horny. Well, that and all the beer and marijuana. I hadn’t realized I had one, but this was my kind of woman.
72
So now we come to the weirdest part. I swear to God this is exactly what happened.
Fiona grabbed my wrist and moved my hand over to her belly so that my palm was on her stomach just to the right of her belly button and my fingers draped over her hip. I want to say I almost felt a physical electric-y shock from the feeling of her bare skin. It was so surprising. I knew I was supposed to kiss her, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it exactly.
She scrunched up to me like she was trying to smell my shoulder and I leaned down and we started to rub our faces on each other in the general mouth area. She made this quiet “mmm” sound and started pushing her tongue all the way in my mouth and sort of swirling it in a circle.
Counterclockwise. I started to do that, too, after a fashion, but I knew she could tell I didn’t know what I was doing. I was in a clumsy, mentally deficient daze. I started to slide the tips of my fingers downwards just underneath the waistband of her jeans, so it was jeans-fingertips-underwear-skin with one fingertip poking slightly underneath the underwear layer, but she squirmed and said, all mumbly because she had her mouth full: “Uh, no, mmm, baby . . .” Uh-oh, I thought, I blew it, I wasn’t supposed to do that yet or at all and the whole make-out scene was officially over, but then she said in a kind of whispery voice, “My tits, my tits.” I started to move my hand up the other way and reached her left breast underneath her shirt. I had never touched a breast before. She seemed to shiver a little when I touched it. Somehow, I don’t know how, I knew that she wanted me to start pinching her nipple, and then, when I had started squeezing it and rolling it between my thumb and forefinger and she started saying
“mmm” again and breathing a little laboriously I knew that she wanted me to squeeze it a whole lot harder. I was really digging into it with my nails, and twisting it back and forth 73
while still keeping up with the tongue rotation thing as best I could. Her breathing sounded more like wheezing than breathing. I don’t know about the Frenching, but somehow I knew that I was doing the nipple thing right, how she wanted me to be doing it. Though it must have kind of hurt. Then suddenly her head fell back and she leaned away from me.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a whisper. She was still breathing a bit strangely and she didn’t look sorry. She looked—how?
Conspiratorial? “Look, I can’t do anything with you because my boyfriend’s friends are all here. In fact, we really shouldn’t be sitting here like this.”
I didn’t know what I should say.
She suddenly leaned in and bit me on the neck right above the shoulder, and hopped off the couch and zoomed out. I didn’t know what to do.
Eventually I got up and went upstairs and back into the hallway. I scanned the clumps of drama mods, but I didn’t expect her to be there. She had clearly intended to flee the scene of the crime and was already gone. As I walked through the house tunneling through the little clusters of drunk and stoned kids and to the front door and down the walk and into the street and on my way home, I was really glad I had my army coat, which is long enough to cover up the front of my pants.
Otherwise, I might never have made it out of there.
SON, YOU GOT A BAD APTITU DE
Now, I’ve been avoiding this part, because I find the whole thing a little embarrassing, but I figure I might as well get it over with. I mean the Chi-Mo story.
Back in seventh grade they gave everyone this multiple-74
choice test to determine what you were supposed to be when you grow up. The way it worked was, certain combinations of multiple-choice answers would point to, say, Medicine, meaning you should try to be a doctor. Or you would get Law, meaning you were going to be a lawyer. There was Business, and The Arts, and both kinds of Technology, Food and Computer. Some kids got Athletics, even though it seems like the wrong type of test to determine something like that, and quite a few got one called Counseling and Social Work. Which sounds like wishful thinking on the part of the counselors and social workers who designed the test, but never mind.
Everyone got two results, so you’d have something to fall back on if the other one didn’t work out. No one took it that seriously, but it was supposed to be kind of fun to see what you ended up with. Answer some touchy-feely questions, sit back, and watch the machine reveal your future.
Somehow, I ended up with Medicine (which was normal) and Clergy. Which was not. Clergy was bizarre. I was the only one to get Clergy. What the hell were they doing saying “Clergy” to a seventh grader? My future had never seemed to have much going for it, but this was a dark avenue no one had yet considered. It freaked me out.
There was a Peer Interaction and Response Segment where everyone was comparing answers, and someone saw mine.
“Clergy!”
Most of the kids in the room hadn’t even heard the word before. I played dumb, didn’t say anything. That can make some situations go away, but not all.
Eventually, though, they figured it out and someone said
“Father Tom!” That wouldn’t have been too bad, as nicknames go, though it still would have been pretty weird for a seventh grader. But then someone said: “child molester!”
Then everyone started saying “child molester.” That was 75
shortened to Chi-Mo. And that got shortened to Moe. Or I guess maybe it’s technically spelled Mo’.
The process only took around fifteen minutes, ending when Mr. Bianchi threw an eraser at someone and said “settle down” to signal the beginning of the Pause and Reflect Segment. But by the end of that fifteen minutes I was officially Moe, or Chi-Mo, or sometimes Mo-Ped, and that’s the way it was ever since.
So there you have it. My nickname is an abbreviation for
“child molester,” or just “molester,” whether the people who use it know it or not. As I was saying before, it’s just about the poorest excuse for an insult anyone could imagine. It doesn’t even make sense. Still, anyone who calls me Moe, even when they may mean no harm, is a potential enemy.
That’s just the way it is.
Another thing I’ve got to explain, and now is as good a time as any, is how I’ve got this reputation as a Guns and Ammo guy. Otherwise, some of the stuff that happened in the week or so following the party will be kind of hard to understand.
It started as a matter of necessity, more or less a ploy. I ended up getting kind of into it in spite of myself, I admit, but for the most part it’s still just a means to an end.
The whole thing goes back to early ninth grade, and it started with this one specific incident at the beginning of the year. Matt Lynch and his friends, who had been hassling me as a sort of hobby ever since I can remember, had stopped me as I was coming out of the boys’ bathroom and pushed me back inside.
“Why do you look like a wet rat?” Matt Lynch said, while his friends stood behind him blocking the door.
The question, like all the others of its type, didn’t have an answer. But he would keep asking it over and over to watch 76
you squirm and to see what you would do. Then he’d get tired of that and move on to the conclusion: beating you senseless, or as senseless as he had time for or thought he could get away with.
Biff Bang Pow. In the stomach, in the ribs or head after they trip you over. Maybe stomping on the knees or wrist.
And finally maybe letting a slow, thin string of spit fall down on your face, if they were in the mood for worrying about presentation. You know, like a garnish.
After I had finished vomiting in the toilet stall and cleaning myself up as best I could, I started to ask myself: how can a person prevent Matt Lynch and his retarded subhuman sidekicks from asking you why you look like a wet rat all the time? I knew the answer had to lie not in trying to apply superior force, which wouldn’t have been practical, but rather in figuring out how to mess with his mind.
My idea, which had sounded far-fetched at first, ended up working better than I could have hoped. I started to wear an army coat from the surplus store, and to carry around magazines like Today’s Mercenary, Soldier of Fortune, and International Gun. I’d mention my interest in guns and military hardware and urban warfare techniques at strategic moments when I knew I’d be overheard by people who would mention it to other people who would mention it. And I practiced what I hoped was a wild-eyed, crazy look in the mirror (just the eyes—everything else frozen) till I could do it without thinking. It would have looked better without the glasses, I admit, but unfortunately, I needed them to see. In the beginning, I put on a big pentagram pendant as well, but that was overkill and made me look like a moron, so I ended up ditching the pentagram and just concentrating on the military stuff.
People started to look at me funny. I mean, on the rare occasions that people noticed me at all, they started to look at me 77
in a slightly different funny way than the funny way they used to look at me when I wasn’t trying so hard to induce them to look at me funny. I was still a nonentity. But I believe I managed to introduce enough uncertainty about my stability into the equation to give at least some would-be harassers pause when they might otherwise have pushed me back into the boys’ bathroom without a second thought.
What I learned was this: people like to pick on people of lower status whom they believe they understand. But if something freaks them out enough, it can plant seeds of self-doubt, and sometimes that can be enough to inhibit action, even when you present no real threat to them. Some people are more easily rattled than others, and everyone has a different threshold. But it sure seemed like Matt Lynch’s personal self-doubt threshold was such that his self-confidence started to erode involuntarily when confronted with the guns and ammo trip. I had accidentally stumbled on his number. I lucked out.
There are a lot of factors in the situation, and the gun-freak act may have been only one of them. All I know is that when I started to wear the army coat and carry Today’s Mercenary under my arm and talk about precision sights and shot group training methods and cordite and so on, Matt Lynch seemed to lose interest in trying to push me into bathrooms and beat me up.
Though I’m sure he still participated avidly in the anonymous locker exploits and gum throwing and derogatory Chi-Mo graf-fiti and so forth. He’s only human. In a manner of speaking.
DAZ E D AN D OB S E S S E D
I couldn’t stop thinking about Fiona and her mysterious ways. I could still feel her teeth marks on my neck, from the inside and from the outside. I began to notice this distant, yet 78
somehow intense, constricted feeling in my chest whenever I thought of her, which was—well, a lot.
I don’t want to leave the impression that I was obsessed with Fiona, walking around in a Fiona-addled daze. The reason I don’t want to leave that impression is because it would be pathetic. But I don’t know who I’m trying to fool here: of course I was dazed and obsessed.
The Fiona couch episode had been the most successful interaction with a female in my life, surpassing many of my least plausible dreams. A case could be made that it had been my only genuine interaction with a nonrelated female ever, the previous ones having taken place in my head as pure fantasy or in the real world where I had been an object of amusement rather than a true participant.
How could I not be obsessed? It was the most significant event in my life so far. By far.
But there was a lot about it I didn’t get. She was a mystery. I’m not going to go into all the different angles from which I tried to examine the Case of the Disappearing Fake-Mod Girl. But the central, most important question was: why had Fiona decided to kiss on me and everything, when no previous girl I’d ever come in contact with would have been caught dead in that situation?
I came up with six points, or topics for discussion, which I present in ascending order of validity (one being the most valid) along with some of my notes.
Six: She was impressed with the band.
True, she hadn’t seemed too interested. But when I first mentioned the Stoned Marmadukes she said, “Yeah?” and there was something about that “yeah” that seemed a little more fascinated than other “yeah’s” I had experienced in my life. Dubious, yet possible.
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Five: She was captivated by my masterful command of the English language.
By my count, I had said no more than twenty-one words to her, and that’s only if you count “um.” And my first bit of dialogue had been nothing less retarded than “I’m cool.” But clearly my ability to make words my slaves had had some comedic effect. And girls dig guys who can make them laugh.
At least, they do according to scripts written by TV and film comedy writers. Likely, but not necessarily crucial.
Four: She had no idea who I was, and hadn’t figured out that I was an Untouchable.
Lack of accurate information had to have been a factor. And anonymity. I only knew her first name and she didn’t know any of my names. But was that enough? The mere fact that my reputation had not preceded me? Could I have come off as some kind of Cool Dude when disassociated from Chi-Mo, the dork, the myth, the legend? Hardly. I still radiated me-ness, I’m sure.
Relevant, but insufficient.
Three: Fiona prefers dorks.
I’ve heard that there are girls with this fetish. It’s a complicated matter that I don’t completely understand, but I’d guess it mainly applies to girls who for one reason or another can’t do any better and who persuade themselves that settling for a degree of dorkiness is better than nothing. Are there any girls as hot-looking as Fiona in this category? No way. But maybe her instinctive alterna-ness (in her capacity as a CHS drama mod) made her more tolerant of dorkiness, less repelled by it, even when it radiated from the anonymous King of the Superdorks.
Two: She knew no one was watching.
This one almost goes without saying.
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One: She was totally high.
Well, obviously.
M R. JAN I SC H’S U N DE RG ROU N D B U N KE R
I was mulling over some of these points in Geometry that Monday when I felt an eraser hit me on the forehead.
“Somewhere else you’d rather be, Thomas Charles Henderson?” said Mr. Janisch. He always calls people by their full names as they appear on the roll sheet. Just to be a dick.
“No, of course not, Mr. Janisch. Copying these problems and their proofs from the front and back sections of this book respectively is the realization of a lifelong dream.”
Of course, I didn’t really say that.
What I did was: I gave him a look that was intended to convey the impression that I had been contemplating the mysteries of the world of Pure Geometry and that I had been on the verge of discovering an Important Truth that would have been a boon to humanity and would also have had considerable commercial value had my concentration not been shattered by his supremely ill-timed, inappropriate, and possibly actionable eraser assault.
But at the same time, I was in no mood for Mr. Janisch’s foolishness, so I’m not surprised that my look may also have managed to convey the sentiment “No duh, Einstein.”
Six of one, half dozen of the other, really.
The punishment for this sort of low-level insubordination is usually that you are made to copy out something, typically a dictionary page, onto a sheet of notepaper. This is no big deal. There is little difference between this penalty and the other assignments they give you as part of your “academic”
work. The only difference is the thing you’re copying. A 81
dictionary page is preferable to a chapter from The Catcher in the Rye, even, because, well, at least the chances are good that it will be a page you’ve never copied before and that’s special.
Mr. Janisch, for reasons known only to him, likes to make you fill a page of notepaper, front and back, with zeros, in groups of three like this: 000,000,000, etc. The weird part is that he seems genuinely pleased when you hand him the finished page of zeros. It’s like he gets caught up in the excitement and forgets that it’s supposed to be a disciplinary measure. My theory is that he saves these pages in a series of black binders in a specially designed rebar-and-concrete lead-lined underground bunker. When the bomb drops, or on Judgment Day, or by the time he retires and goes underground to plot his revenge, he’ll have thousands of binders filled with millions upon millions of zeros. Then he’ll add a one to the beginning and suddenly he’ll be in sole possession of the world’s largest number in manuscript form. Or I guess it’d be even better to add a nine. Then he can laugh mania-cally and die happy.
Whatever gets you through the night, big fella.
Anyway, that was my punishment this time. I enjoy it, actually. It’s mindless, routine, repetitive, familiar, and no more pointless than anything else they make you do in school. The hand moves automatically; the pen goes circle-circle-circle-tic, circle-circle-circle-tic, a soothing rhythm; and the mind is free to wander. I started trying to think up some lyrics to
“Trying Not to Believe (It’s Over).”
TH E F LOWE R P OT M E N
One thing that was slightly freaking me out was the thought that even though I felt I couldn’t be more different than the 82
CHS people at the party, we did seem to like a lot of the same music. Because I love the Who. But I’m not a fake mod like the dolphins at the party. Not at all. I don’t dress up like anything. True, I did let my hair grow a little longer and started to wear flared jeans over the summer when I got more into seventies bands and stuff, as a sort of tribute to their fine work; and I’ve got the army coat, though that’s more of a practical tool than a fashion statement. But I don’t “dress punk,” or mod or metal or goth or garage or rockabilly or anything. I don’t wake up every morning and put on a music-genre-oriented youth-culture Halloween costume—that’s what I’m saying.
My tastes do tend to be a bit retro, though. I’m really into the Who, the Kinks, the Merseyside/British Invasion sort of thing. And like I said, I also like a lot of seventies stuff, which I find myself listening to more and more often. 1975 was a great year for rock and roll, and don’t believe anyone who tells you different. But I can find something to appreciate about most pop music—it’s all part of rock and roll history, which I’m trying to know everything about. I have a pretty big record collection of mostly old stuff, and I’m totally proud of how schizophrenic it is. I even kind of like Wishbone Ash.
And I’m not even exaggerating all that much. But for some reason I’m not necessarily too interested in very much of what was recorded after I was born. And, as a matter of prin-ciple, I don’t dig whatever mindless, soulless crap all the normal people are into at any given time, because what would be the point of that?
My personal ultimate in art rock will probably always be, well, either the Who or the Sweet. Or Foghat. But I’m also really into Bubblegum, and that’s probably what confuses people most.
Bubblegum is this music they had in the seventies, created and marketed for little kids, and, apparently, not taken 83
very seriously by anyone involved. But it somehow ended up being brilliant by accident without anyone realizing. I love that. I have a pretty big collection of Bubblegum records.
Now, I admit, maybe I got into it at first because it was so clearly the opposite of what everyone else liked. But whatever: it’s some of the best rock and roll music there ever was.
I think normal people think it sounds corny or wimpy, not realizing that there would have been no Ramones without
“Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” But I’m quite confident that when we’re all dead, history will clearly conclude that my retro rock revival was years ahead of everybody else’s retro rock revival.
Sometimes, when I’m trying to cheer up Little Big Tom by finding some interest we can temporarily pretend to share, I’ll ask him about the music of the sixties and seventies, which was his era. Back then, he and all his friends didn’t pay attention to most of my favorite music from the time. They thought it was childish, not serious, meaningful music like, say, Led Zeppelin. Now, Led Zeppelin is all right (good drums and guitar, anyway, though that singer should have been silenced or muzzled or something—frankly, I prefer it in Yardbird form to be honest). But Little Big Tom’s example of how serious and important and adult it all was? “Stairway to Heaven.” I kid you not. Don’t get me wrong: I like hobbits and unicorns and wizards and hemp ice cream as much as the next guy. And I suppose it’s the antimaterialist message that seemed so sophisticated and meaningful to those guys—
no one does antimaterialism better than multigazillionaire rock stars. But my view is that there’s something seriously wrong with a subculture that would prefer “Stairway to Heaven” to “Wig Wam Bam.” Come on: go listen to “Wig Wam Bam” and tell me I’m wrong.
I was thinking about all this, and kind of counting the 84
ways in which the Sweet ruled Led Zeppelin’s relatively sorry ass, when I returned home from the first post-Fiona school day. On my way in through the patio, I noticed Little Big Tom using a sledgehammer to break big pieces of concrete into little pieces that would fit in his wheelbarrow. (He was trying to turn the backyard into Spaceship Earth by reversing the paving process and planting ferns and vegetables so that one day they might be able to film a margarine commercial there.) I heard him whistling a tune I recognized from my own record collection: “My Baby Loves Lovin’ ” by White Plains, originally recorded as a demo in their previous incarnation as the arguably superior Flowerpot Men. It is the perfect pop song, more or less. I had just been playing it pretty loudly the previous day. So—here I was, influencing Little Big Tom with an unjustly rejected gem from his own era. Kinda neat.
So I went over and started singing “My Baby Loves Lovin’ ” and doing this little Greg Brady/Jackson Five dance—well, not a dance, exactly. It’s more like genuflecting and using your knees to move your whole body up and down while smiling like an idiot. There is simply no bait that Little Big Tom will leave on the hook. He broke into a big smile as well and faced me and started singing “My Baby Loves Lovin’ ” and doing the Greg Brady/Jackson Five genuflect dance, too, though I suspect he may not have been aware that it was the G.B./J.F. g. d. So there we were, rising and descending, facing each other, singing “My Baby Loves Lovin’.”
Amanda came through the back door, stared for a few seconds, and then turned on her heel and walked back in. I really couldn’t blame her.
It got old quickly. But Little Big Tom was having such a great time that I hated to pull the plug, so I continued doing it for a while, looking at him with a frozen yet fading smile that gained and lost altitude while I tried to figure out a way 85
to end the baby-loves-love-a-thon gracefully. He couldn’t take a hint, though. Finally, I just had to say:
“Hey, you know: I’ve got some things to do.”
Probably not the best way to handle it, but I was desperate. I went into the house, hearing his trademark sigh and eventually his sledgehammer-on-concrete sound.
WOM E N G ETTI NG I N TH E WAY
Maybe it was more or less predictable that the whole Fiona situation would eventually start to affect the band. It’s well known that that has been the downfall of all the great bands of the world: women getting in the way.
Sam Hellerman had a weird attitude. At first I thought he was mad at me for leaving the party without him, but it turns out he didn’t care about that at all. It was Fiona.
When I told him what had happened, at our first post-Fiona band practice—and then told him again, presumably so he could pay attention once he realized I hadn’t been making it up—he said: “Fucking bitch.”
Now, you have to understand something about Sam Hellerman. He never swears. I don’t swear much, either, out loud, but that’s mostly because I never say more than a couple of words at a time. I keep it to myself, but in my head, I’m like a late-night cable comedy special. Everyone would be shocked if they had access to a transcript from my head. I don’t know about Sam Hellerman’s head’s transcript, but he talks out loud all the time, and as he’s talking you can almost see him struggling to avoid saying swear words. Like, he’ll always say have sex instead of fuck, or boobies instead of tits.
The first works sometimes, though it can sound awkward; the second is pretty much inexcusable and reflects poorly on 86
him. Once he said crotch instead of nuts when he was describing where Matt Lynch had been trying to kick him during a recess scuffle. That alone was good for a couple more beatings. I think his parents are Seventh-Day Adventists or Mormons or something like that.
That was part of the reason Serenah Tillotsen had to break up with him. Not the having Mormon parents. The swearing thing, I mean. To be dateable at the time, you had to excel in at least two of the following four areas: swearing, bullying, smoking, sports. And to go out with a girl who dressed as slutty as Serenah Tillotsen you probably had to have mastered at least three, and even that might have been pushing it. Sam Hellerman had the smoking down, but he was a disaster at all the others.
Sam Hellerman’s swearing thing had already affected the band a bit, but so far only in a good way. He objected to the song “Normal People Are Fucked Up” in favor of the alternate version “People Who Are Normal People Are the Most Retarded People in the World,” which turned out to be a much, much better song.
So it was shocking to hear those words come out of his mouth. He was taking the whole thing pretty seriously. Now I admit, I may have slightly exaggerated when I told him the story. Just a little, in that I may have managed to imply that things with Fiona might have gone a little further than they actually had. But even considering that, it was still just a stoned teen party grope-a-thon any way you sliced it. He should have been happy for me. Maybe he was jealous; I guess I would have been.
In any case, that’s so not how I saw the situation: for me, Fiona was not, literally or in any other sense, a “fucking bitch.” I had nothing but esteem and admiration for her and her sinful ways. And I had a kind of high-minded reverence 87
for her memory. Sure, there was much I felt remorseful and embarrassed about, and I had had absolutely no luck trying to figure out a way to understand her confusing behavior. But I blamed all the awkwardness and most of my current predicament on my own deficiencies, and I was quite sure I was right about that. So was I bitter and hate filled at the thought that that had probably been my one opportunity to participate in a make-out session in this lifetime? Sure. But I could hardly blame the one girl who had been sporting enough to give me a shot at it: it just made me hate everyone else even more, which automatically made me love Fiona more by comparison. See? It’s all a matter of proper hate calibration. You have to take a balanced view.
I haltingly asked Sam Hellerman if he could ask his CHS
friends about her, try to find out, um, I wasn’t sure exactly what. But could he ask around, find out what her deal was, in some way?
“Her deal?” said Sam Hellerman. He said “deal” mockingly, and did that thing where you put your hands up on either side in front of you palms out and wiggle your fingers sarcastically.
Sometimes it just means “ooh, I’m scared.” But sometimes it means, “the word that I am now quoting back at you is so absurd that the human voice alone is insufficient to convey the appropriate level of sarcasm, and therefore I must use my hands as well, as they used to do in the days of the silent cin-ema and in vaudeville where they had to make sure that everyone way in the back who couldn’t hear the dialogue would still get the point that the person being addressed is a total ass.”
It was in this sense that Sam Hellerman did the sarcastic hands thing on this particular occasion. I thought it was a bit over the top, frankly.
“Her deal?” he repeated. “You mean, other than the whole cock tease thing?” Again with the swearing.
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Yeah, that’s what I meant, Hellerman. Thanks for breaking it down. I really didn’t get his attitude. So I just stared at him.
But I almost forgot to mention how the Fiona Deal was affecting the band like I said. (See what I mean? Making out with Fiona really seems to have poked permanent holes in my brain that I can feel even now. Plus, well, you don’t know about it yet—it happens toward the end of the year and I’ll explain it all when it comes up because I’m really trying to describe things in the order that they happened—but I’m still recovering from this massive head injury I got from this attempt on my life. What I’m saying is, for a variety of reasons, the Fiona Deal among them, my thinking tends to be a little fuzzy these days.)
Anyway, it wasn’t just that the Fiona Deal made Sam Hellerman act like a total dick. It had to do with the songs.
Sam Hellerman tended to like the topical songs the best.
He liked “Mr. Teone and His Lady Butt,” and “Matt Lynch Must Be Stopped (from Spawning and Generating Ungodly Offspring).” Political stuff like that. But he would tolerate the personal, sensitive tunes, too, even though I sometimes wondered whether he thought they were too corny. He liked
“World War B” and would even tolerate “I’m Only a Page of Zeros but You Are the One,” for example.
But somehow he could tell what “Trying Not to Believe (It’s Over)” was about, and it was way too Fiona oriented for his taste.
“We’re not doing that one,” he said.
Well, the difference between the ones we were “doing”
and the ones we were not “doing” was not easy to spot, as most of them didn’t yet have many or any lyrics, and very few of them had repeatable music yet. Even the ones with words 89
and music were—well, I’d play them on the guitar and mum-ble the words I had and say “mmm-mmm-mmm” for the ones I didn’t have and Sam Hellerman would play random notes on his clarinet.
What I’m saying is, I’m not sure the set list matters enough to take personally at this stage in a band’s career.
Luckily, I realized what was going on soon enough to refrain from telling him about “My Fiona” or “I’m Still Not Done Loving You, Mama.” He would have hit the roof. If it’s possible to hit the roof in the spirit of utter contempt and condescension.
I had wanted to keep the Stoned Marmadukes going for a little longer, mostly as a tribute to the band I said I was in during my one conversation with her. And also because of this very unrealistic line of thinking that went: were we to keep the name long enough that we would still have it when we finally got instruments and learned to play them, and were we to have a “gig,” and were that still to be our name even then, and were she somehow to find out about it, well, then she might remember me and my powerful vocabulary and decide to show up or something. (Rock legend in the making: “Who is this mysterious Fiona that Moe ‘Fingers’
Henderson puts on the guest list every night?” “No one knows. But she never shows up.” “And Moe is alone and silent with his mysterious pain?” “Yeah, that’s right.”) Now, even I could see how pathetic that was. But it was also kind of random and off-the-wall. Sam Hellerman was starting to develop a nose for the Fiona-related, though, and he could sniff out the vaguest hints of it. And he sure didn’t like how things were smelling lately at 507 Cedarview Circle, Hillmont, CA.
“Here’s an idea,” he said. “The Fionas. You on guitar and Fiona-phone, plus Sammy ‘I Heart Fiona’ on bass and Fiona 90
Reconstruction Therapy, first album F-I-O-N-A! What’s That Spell? I Can’t Hear You! Fiona! Fiona! Yay, team! ”
Hmm, I thought . . . but I knew he wasn’t being serious.
He was kind of funny even when he was being a dick, though, I’ll say that for him. I’ll admit also that he may have had just a teensy-weensy point. But it still left something to be desired attitudinally from my point of view.
“The. Name. Is. Ray. Bradbury’s. Love-Camel,” he said firmly, before walking out and slamming the door.
Then he had to come back because he had forgotten to take his clarinet case with him.
He left again silently. But two seconds later he came back again, stuck his head through the door LBT style, and said very quickly: “Ray Bradbury’s Love-Camel, you on guitar, Scammy Sammy on bass and calisthenics, first album Prepare to Die. ”
Which made me feel a bit better.
JAN E GALLAG H E R AN D AMAN DA
H E N DE RSON
Meanwhile, I still didn’t quite know what to make of the CEH library. I had all but given up trying to interpret the scribbles, the dates, the whole tits/back rubs/dry cleaning puzzle. There was a story there, presumably, or at least an explanation, but there just wasn’t enough information available to figure out what it was. It was lost in the past, for good, probably.
Still, I had developed this crazy idea that by reading the books my dad had read at my age, I could get to know him better retroactively. Maybe reading his books would provide some insight into his character, an indication of the kind of 91
person he had been and the sorts of things he had been interested in and had thought about. Now, in one way, this insight was something I desperately wanted. In another way, though, I wasn’t sure I wanted it badly enough to go through the ordeal of reading A Separate Peace again. I had been forced to read it last year and had found it to be among the most annoying of all of the state-mandated novels about disaffected East Coast prep school juveniles. Was anything worth that?
On the other hand, Brighton Rock looked promising. I decided to start there and save A Separate Peace for last.
Of course, while I was reading Brighton Rock on my own and rereading Catcher in the Fucking Rye for the zillionth time for Mr. Schtuppe’s class, I was also obsessing about Fiona.
This turned out to be a pretty weird setup. Mr. Schtuppe would mispronounce something from Catcher, and it would spur cascades of competing thoughts of my dad’s teenage years and of the mystery girl’s breasts at the same time.
Particularly when the subject was sex, which turns up quite a lot in Catcher in the Rye, though it tends to be expressed rather quaintly. And particularly when the girl being talked about was Jane Gallagher, because of the underlined Jane Gallagher back rub passage in my dad’s Catcher.
Mr. Schtuppe’s tests were always true-false or multiple choice, except for the last question, which was an essay question. An essay question is a multiple-choice question with the multiple choices left off, and three wide-spaced lines where you’re supposed to write the answer.
On one of the tests, the essay question was “What was the cause of Holden’s fight with Stradlater on page 43?” By some entirely characteristic oversight, the identical question had also appeared above in the multiple-choice part of the same test. The answer to the m-c version was (b) Jane Gallagher. The answer Mr. Schtuppe was looking for in the 92
essay question version was Jane Gallagher without the (b), or possibly something like “the cause of Holden’s fight with Stradlater on page 43 was Jane Gallagher.”
The real answer is that Holden Caulfield had the hots for this girl, Jane Gallagher, though he was too scared to try anything. And he was worried that his roommate might have hooked up with her before he got the chance to. But in the quaint world of Catcher in the Rye, the phrase they use for fucking is “giving her the time.” I kid you not. Giving her the time. Another one is “crumby,” which is how they spell crummy, but which you can tell from the context really means fucked-up. Seriously. It’s like this thing was written by Sam Hellerman or something.
Actually, it’s kind of cute.
Just to amuse myself, instead of writing “Jane Gallagher”
in the essay-question space like I was supposed to, I wrote: Jane Gallagher had wanted to know
what time it was, but for some reason
Holden Caulfield hadn’t wanted Stradlater to tell her. When Stradlater refused to
tell Holden Caulfield whether or not he
had told Jane Gallagher what time it
was, Holden Caulfield became enraged and attacked him in a fit of horological
savagery, possibly because he was
mentally ill and hated anyone but him
knowing what time it was.
I thought I’d get the question wrong, but when Mr.
Schtuppe handed back my test, I got a hundred. The name Jane Gallagher had been circled and the circle had been checked. I guess he only needed to read the first two words.
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I was sad for a few minutes that my brilliant humor had gone unappreciated, but then I got over it.
Now, everybody’s favorite guy, Holden Caulfield, has a younger sister named Phoebe. I’ve never found her very believable. She’s way too sweet and loving and Holden-o-centric. She’s nothing like my sister, Amanda, that’s for sure.
On the other hand, if Phoebe Caulfield had had a crazy mom, a dead father, a goofball stepfather, and a King Dork brother, and if she had grown up in blank, characterless Hillmont instead of rich, atmosphere-laden, fancy-pants Manhattan, who knows how she might have turned out?
Also, HC makes no secret of the fact that he is a patho-logical liar, so the real Phoebe may not have been all she was cracked up to be. (Some might say I’m one to talk, but I’m really not a p. l. like HC. I’m more of an exaggerator than a liar, really, and unlike Mr. Wonderful, I don’t do it as a sick compulsion or a recreational activity.)
Amanda is hard to peg, though. She has many modes, some of which seem to be battling for supremacy over the others. There’s her Harriet the Spy mode, where she’s kind of a grumpy, introverted oddball, constantly scribbling and drawing weird stuff on these notepads that she won’t let anyone see.
And then there’s the budding bitch-princess mode, where she and her friends seem to be going through training exercises to prepare for when they finally emerge as full-fledged sado-psychopathic normal girls. She’s a pretty girl, and all indica-tions are that, when she grows up just a little more, she’ll be a knockout. The thing is, she’s way too intelligent, and—what?
individualistic?—to pull off the normal mode very convincingly for too long. And I’m not kidding about the intelligence: she doesn’t always express it perfectly in words, but she’s supersmart, 94
and in a sort of deep-thinking philosophical way that is nothing like my clever and glib but shallow preoccupation with sex and trivia. Sometimes she’ll say these simple yet unexpectedly true things that make me want to consider giving away all my worldly possessions, taking a vow of celibacy, and devoting my life to studying at her feet. But then she’ll spoil it by doing the nose-forehead slide or mimicking my walk. Honestly, I find her clumsy attempts at normalcy more cute than insulting, but you know: it does kill the Yoda mood.
I do wonder if she’ll make it as a normal person in the end—though simple hotness can make up for a lot of other deficiencies, it’s true. The worry is that she’ll have to over-compensate by being even meaner and more psychotic than usual in order to draw attention away from her Harriet the Spy–ness and pass as normal psychotic. If that’s what she ends up wanting to do with her life.
Protonormal Amanda doesn’t seem to think too highly of me and isn’t too fun to be around. I prefer the HtS Amanda, because I can relate to her better. We don’t interact much, but generally we get along okay.
There’s one more Amanda mode I have to mention, the mode she assumes whenever anything has to do with our dad. In those situations, she suddenly turns into a Phoebe-like little girl. She’ll cry, and sniffle, and reach out to hug me.
Sometimes she’ll put her arms around my neck and squeeze so tightly that it seems as though her little arms could make permanent indentations. She doesn’t have anyone else to talk to about him. My mom is crazy and best avoided, and she hates Little Big Tom, so I guess I’m it. In fact, though, we never actually do much talking. We just hold on to each other and cry. Well, she does.
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F I LLI NG I N TH E SO
My mom has this funny habit of ending practically all of her sentences like this: “[ Random sentence]. So . . .”
There’s another part that comes after the so, but it’s either so obvious that it’s not necessary to say it, or she doesn’t quite know what it is and gives up trying to figure it out.
“I’ve got to get to work early tomorrow. So . . .” That means “I’ve got to get to work early tomorrow. So I’m going to bed early and I don’t want anyone making too much noise.” Or possibly: “ . . . so I’m taking this big glass of bourbon into the bedroom and I do not wish to be disturbed and I’m seriously considering giving you the silent treatment for the next couple of weeks starting now.”
More interesting, and sometimes more disturbing, are the mysterious ones where you can’t figure out exactly what’s supposed to come after the “so.”
“Elaine [old lady down the street] said she’s sorry she decided to have children after all and wishes she had spent the money on herself instead. So . . .”
“When I was growing up, they didn’t expect you to go to college. High school was enough. So . . .”
“Well, they do say if you ignore something, it goes away on its own in ninety percent of all cases. So . . .”
I bring this up because of the following: Sam Hellerman had somehow talked his parents into giving him an advance on his Christmas present and had mail-ordered a bass from the Guitarville catalog. Now I needed to get my act together and get an electric guitar. I was currently playing my dad’s old nylon-string folk guitar, which I cher-ished because of my respect for him but which really wasn’t the right tool for heavy rock. If Silent Nightmare (me on gui-96
tar, Samson on bass and gynecology, first album Feel Me Fall) was ever going to get off the ground, we needed pro gear.
Somehow, I couldn’t see the Christmas present advance concept being comprehensible to Carol Henderson-Tucci, but I figured it was worth a shot.
I brought it up with a great deal of subtlety, mentioning that Sam Hellerman’s parents had given him a bass as an early Christmas present and that it had been very easy to order it from the Guitarville catalog. I let my voice trail off.
Her answer amounted to a no, which didn’t surprise me.
But for the life of me I really, really couldn’t fill in the so.
“Baby, don’t even talk to me about Christmas right now,”
she said. “More people commit suicide on Christmas than on any other day of the year. So . . .”
TH E E NTI R E CONTE NTS OF MY RO OM
“Hey, chief,” said Little Big Tom. “We’d like a word with you.
If you’ve got a minute.”
It was the Thursday evening of the first post-Fiona week.
I followed Little Big Tom into the kitchen, puzzled and a bit apprehensive. He only called me chief when it was serious or when he was nervous about something. He had this grim expression, like he wasn’t even trying to look cheerful the way he usually does. I figured they must have found out that I went to the party in Clearview instead of Sam Hellerman’s house on Friday night, but boy was I wrong. Well, I mean, I guess they had found out about the party, indirectly, but that wasn’t the main issue.
My mom had on her Picasso Guernica- print shorts, cowboy boots, a red and white checked halter, and a polka-dot 97
scarf worn like a headband, and was leaning against the counter smoking one of her Virginia Slimses. You’ve come a long way, baby, I thought. It was shocking to think how much she wasn’t even kidding.
Little Big Tom started to caress his Little Gray Mustache at the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, as though he were trying to stretch it out to get that extra droop that used to drive the ladies crazy in Vermont in the seventies.
There was an uncomfortable pause while we all looked at the kitchen table. A whole lot of my stuff was spread out, neatly arranged in little piles. Some books. Some records and CDs. Some random martial arts materials. My Talons of Rage fantasy blades that I got from Ninja Warehouse, which had been used as a D and D prop long ago and were now purely decorative. Some of my old role-playing military strategy games, and some board games, including Risk and Stratego.
Some of my dad’s stuff: videos of Clint Eastwood movies and war movies. Tora! Tora! Tora! The Enforcer. Patton. The bowie knife he gave me for Christmas the year before he died. My army coat. Jane’s Military Small Arms of the 20th Century and the Tanks and Combat Vehicles Recognition Guide.
A couple of my notebooks. (Uh-oh.) My “Kill ’em All and Let God Sort ’em Out” T-shirt. And a big stack of my weapons-and-tactics magazines, fanned out like cards on a blackjack table.
“What is this shit?” said Little Big Tom, eventually.
“The entire contents of my room?” I said.
Well, it wasn’t quite everything, but that was essentially the correct answer. See, in real life parents raid their children’s rooms and confiscate the porno magazines and drugs; in the back-assward world of Partner and Mrs. Progressive at 98
507 Cedarview Circle, they leave the porn alone and confiscate everything else.
There was another bumpy stretch of awkwardness, during which all you could hear was the rhythm of my mom’s sucked-and-blown Virginia Slims 120s. Short, hissing intake.
Pause. Long, exasperated release. It sounded like a factory in a cartoon, or in an educational film on how they make steel tools. Ordinarily, it can be very soothing.
“Why,” Little Big Tom finally said, “do you feel the need to read this garbage?”
Why, I thought, do you feel the need to try to impersonate Jimmy Buffett and wear shorts and sandals with black socks and eat tofu loaf on Thanksgiving? Some questions have no answers.
“I don’t know what to say. Your mother and I hoped to set an example so you would respect and share our values.”
Now that was funny. I just looked at him. The look that says: “what are you, high?”
Then he said something that totally threw me.
“It’s very important to have respect for women.”
I stared at him.
Well, now I’m going to skip ahead to the part where I ended up figuring out what the hell Little Big Tom was getting at.
It was hard to piece together because very little of what he was saying made much sense, but here’s my best guess as to what had happened. Little Big Tom, making his rounds, had overheard the conversation about the Fiona Deal and had found it disturbing. He hadn’t liked the way Sam Hellerman had referred to Fiona (I hadn’t, either, though I doubt we had exactly the same reasons). I don’t know how 99
much of the rest of the conversation he heard, but if he missed anything, he could have read all about it in my notebook. I’m ashamed to say that one of my notebooks contained, among other embarrassing items, some tortured “letters to Fiona”
I had scribbled out during a stretch of maudlin, sleepless nights. And I’m sure he wasn’t thrilled about the lyrics to
“She Likes It When I Pinch Her Hard.” And many of my other songs, I’m sure, like “Gooey Glasses.”
He must have read the notebook. Otherwise, how would he have reached the conclusion that my “relationship” with
“my girlfriend” was undermining his generation’s sacred achievement of the institution of easygoing touchy-feely ouchless deodorant-optional crunchy-granola Hair– sound track butterflies-and-unicorns sexuality?
But I’m getting ahead of myself here. After overhearing the conversation, and in the throes of a full-blown paranoid, sex-obsessed, politically correct midlife-crisis meltdown, he had decided to search my room for evidence of more disturbing-ness and had basically freaked out over what he’d found.
He was much, much more bothered by the war stuff, the magazines, the nunchakus, the “Kill ’em All” shirt, and the Stratego than he had been by the cock tease conversation.
And there’s where he made his mistake. He tried to combine two discussions, the one where you tell your stepson it isn’t nice to call girls bitches and the one where you express your inner turmoil over the fact that being into war and weapons betrays the deeply held values of the generation that stopped the Vietnam War. The result was incoherence, confusion, and the least successful attempt at Family Conflict Resolution since the White Album told Charles Manson to give the world a big hug.
For Little Big Tom, these issues were like two sides of the 100
same coin. He could jump from Stratego to Respect for Women without realizing he had changed topics, but he was the only one who had any idea what he was talking about.
Even my mom, smoking in the corner, seemed confused.
I’m just speculating here as to his state of mind, but I think he looked at everything in my room, along with his very mistaken imaginative reconstruction of my “relationship” with
“my girlfriend,” as a kind of personal attack on him and his fabulous generation. And he saw everything in my world only as it related to his own self-image and personal style, which he held in pretty high regard. He wasn’t too interested in hearing where he had things wrong, either. The theory confirmed his suspicions and he liked it that way. My first make-out session was all about him. So were the Talons of Rage fantasy blades.
And so was Stratego from Milton Bradley. Plus, I think he was embarrassed, worried that some of his PC friends might see me wearing the wrong shirt or something.
His version of my life was pretty hilarious, at any rate. I wasn’t treating “my girlfriend” with enough respect. I didn’t understand how sex was spiritual as well as physical. “My friends” and I were in a “space” of negativity and aggression, which wasn’t healthy. The music he had confiscated was mostly metal, since those were the album covers and song titles that fed into his theory. But he left the Rolling Stones alone: see, they stopped the Vietnam war, too.
All the references to “my friends” threw me at first. Had he really failed to notice that I had no friends other than Sam Hellerman? Then it hit me that he was assuming that some of the band members in the Sam ’n’ Moe bands I’d written about in my notebook were actually real people. (What tipped me off: he mentioned a Debbie, and I was like “who’s Debbie,”
until I realized he was talking about Li’l Miss Debbie, the imaginary nurse-slut vocalist of Tennis with Guitars. It’s a 101
good thing he didn’t realize that some of “my friends” were really me: it might have turned his mind into a pretzel.) All this from Stratego and a few fantasy blades? Un. Real.
At one point my mom chimed in: “Baby, all we’re saying is you have to try to find harmony between your masculine and your feminine natures.” I heard a tremendous guffaw from Amanda in the other room. Thanks for that, Mom. I knew I’d be hearing about my feminine nature from Amanda, and till the end of time.
The one bit of reality in the whole scene did come from my mom, however, though it was the kind of connection to reality that reveals an even deeper disconnection from it.
“Are you having trouble with the kids in school?” she asked.
Bingo. Well spotted. Give the lady a cookie. But on the other hand, how could anyone who knew me or anything about me even have to ask that question? The mind reels.
The whole sorry affair wrapped up like this: we wheeled and dealed for the stuff. Little Big Tom kept the magazines, the “Kill ’em All” shirt, some of the albums, and the throwing stars, nunchakus, and decorative weapons (all except for the bowie knife, which I was allowed to keep for sentimental reasons). I got the books, the coat, most of the videos, the notebooks, some of the albums, and the games. He agreed to respect my privacy and I to respect his values from that point forward. If you’re thinking that that sounds like a joke, well, you’re right, but one of the unspoken terms of the truce was that we couldn’t actually laugh at it till we were out of the room.
My mom said, “Baby, if you ever need to talk, we’re always here.” I gave her a little “right back at ya, babe” salute.
102
Little Big Tom, under the impression that he had achieved something by accusing me of being criminally insane and taking half my stuff, rumpled my hair and said,
“Growing up is rough for everybody. Even old geezers like me. I’d like to think I’m not above learning a thing or two myself sometimes.” That was supposed to be self-deprecating and lighthearted and philosophical and tension relieving.
Hey, I’ll take it. Anything’s better than getting in touch with your feelings in show trial form.
I knew he had fully snapped back to his old self when he turned his head slightly sideways, handed me my notebook, and said, “Some righteous tunes in there! Very creative!” I thought I heard him sighing heavily as I walked out, but of course, that was normal too.
TH E H E LLE R MAN EYE-RAY TR EATM E NT
There’s a scene in movies and situation comedies where the main kid starts to be “interested in girls” and the dad is supposed to take the kid aside and give him a lecture that used to be called “the birds and the bees” but is now usually referred to as “the sex talk.” The dad doesn’t want to do it and has to be goaded into it by the mom. If there’s no dad, the mom finds some dad substitute to do it. The dad or replace-ment dad module is nervous and dances around the subject and uses funny euphemisms and analogies, and the joke is that the kid is already very knowledgeable, a thirteen-year-old Hugh Hefner or Prince. Sometimes the kid will even be shown in an armchair wearing pajamas and a robe and smoking a pipe while the dad figure is squirming. And the live stu-dio audience laughs and laughs.
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It hadn’t occurred to me, but when I told Sam Hellerman about Little Big Tom’s Stratego Sex Inquisition, he pointed it out: I had just been a participant in the most retarded version of the sitcom sex talk the world had ever seen.
So maybe my mom had heard the cock tease discussion and had told LBT 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.
Meanwhile, Sam Hellerman still seemed bent out of shape about my Fiona obsession. And I still couldn’t figure out why. It seemed like more than just being bored by the subject, which I tended to go on about: that I would have understood. Was it related to his Serenah Tillotsen experience, in which he had felt the rejection so keenly that any description of a less than totally available and compliant female would push mysterious buttons and automatically send him into a blind fury at the injustice of love and those who snatch it from the mouths of the needy? And would ignite a fiery desire for revenge on behalf of all unfortunate lonely hearts, or at least on behalf of those lonely hearts he happened to be in bands with? That sounded pretty good. Maybe so. But I had to wonder if he knew something he wasn’t telling.
So why didn’t I just ask him if he knew something he wasn’t telling?
Not a bad idea.
“Do you know something you’re not telling?” I asked.
I suspected that this was just the kind of question that would send Sam Hellerman into another furious spasm of over-the-top sarcasm, and I wasn’t wrong. He no longer needed to resort to words. He just stared at me with bugged-out eyes that he appeared to be trying to spin in opposite di-104
rections. I believe his line of thinking went something like this: maybe if I stare at this creature long enough with these supersarcastic eyes, his head tentacles will eventually retract into his head, his back tentacles will retract into his back, his leg tentacles will shrivel up and drop off, and the external lung in the polyp on the side of his neck will burst, depriving the alien brain pod of needed oxygen and forcing the mother ship to relinquish control of the mind and body, after which the host organism will come out of its coma, rub its eyes, and say, “who’s this Fiona everybody’s always talking about, anyway?”
Well, it was worth a shot. Maybe Sam Hellerman didn’t know more than he was telling after all. All I knew was, I was feeling a little feeble and vulnerable after that intense Hellerman eye-ray treatment. It’s a killer.
In fact, however, despite Sam Hellerman’s persistent bad attitude about a certain faux-mod seamster who had one breast that had experienced just a little less of this life than the other, he was still my friend by alphabetical-order relationship, and that means something.
So, to my surprise, it turned out that he had asked his CHS friends about her for me.
But none of them knew a drama mod named Fiona. In fact, as far as anyone could tell, there was no one named Fiona in the CHS student body at all. There were, of course, many hot brunettes with sexy stomachs, but that wasn’t much help. And no one recognized the most unusual feature, the funky homemade denim and yarn jacket.
But what about the little black glasses? That should nar-row it down. Hot b. with s. s. and l. b. g.?
“I’m sorry, man,” said Sam Hellerman, because we had started to say man recently. “She doesn’t exist.”
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P ROTE ST SOM ETH I NG
They had managed to make Foods of the World in
“Humanities” last several weeks. We were well into October, on the Monday following Little Big Tom’s Sex/Stratego cam-paign, when we finally left the gifted and talented snacking behind and moved on to the Turbulent Sixties. The first assignment was, I kid you not, “protest something.” So of course, the entire class just didn’t show up the following day.
You can get away with stuff like that in AP, as long as you can write a couple of sentences afterward explaining how your class cutting is analogous to marching from Selma to Montgomery. I’m sure the teachers kind of expected it and enjoyed the free period, too.
I was on my own for my “protest.” Sam Hellerman hadn’t made it into Humanities, so he was stuck in normal social studies, copying God only knows what from some inane text-book, no doubt.
I decided to go off on my own to read Brighton Rock, which I was beginning to think was the best book ever written. I was getting to the end and I was excited to find out what was going to happen. So I went out to a deserted part of the school grounds, the slope behind the outfield of the baseball diamond, and lay on the grass to read. It was damp, but a pale sun was out, and I had on my waterproof all-weather army coat, so it didn’t faze me.
One thing I did while I was reading was pause every now and then and turn back to the inside front cover to look at the
“CEH 1965.” Then I would try to imagine what the circumstances were when my dad had read it. Listening to “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “Help Me, Rhonda” on the radio? Riding the streetcar wearing neat but rumpled midsixties student-type clothes, with older men 106
in suits with skinny ties and women wearing gloves and little hats? At the dinner table, with my I Love Lucy grandma hitting him on the head and telling him to cut it out already? In the few photos I had seen of him from that time, he looked kind of Beach Boys–collegiate, so that was how I pictured him, with a little button-down short-sleeved shirt, floods, and Brian Wilson hair, sitting on the curb waiting for the bus, Brighton Rock open on his knees. It was kind of fun to do that.
It was all bullshit, too. But in spite of myself, I had this feeling like I was getting to know him in a way I never had. I would get to a good part and I’d think, where was he and what was he doing when he read it? What did he think about the fact that Pinkie said he didn’t believe in anything yet was totally convinced he was damned? That kind of thing.
It wasn’t only the story but the physical object that did something to me. Just being aware that I was holding it made me feel kind of—what? Spooky? Reverent? If I started to think about it, I’d get kind of dizzy sometimes, and start to have this ringing in my ears, and I felt almost like my mind was spinning, rising backwards toward the sky. Maybe I am crazy, I thought. For real, I mean, not as a ploy.
The lunch bell rang, but I was pretty into the story, so I stayed where I was and continued reading.
Before too long I was down to the last few pages, and it was really exciting and suspenseful. I was feeling spacey because of the spooky thing I mentioned before (and maybe even more than usual because there were a lot of priests and so forth in the book and that always adds to the spookiness).
And then a shadow suddenly fell on the page. I saw an elongated shadow head and shoulders on the grass in front of me and felt the presence of someone behind me. Then, and this was all in just a second, not how long it’s taking me to describe it, I saw some stuff splashing on the page, though first 107
I think I heard the sound of it hitting the page, which was very, very loud in my ears.
“The fuck?” I said, and turned around. It was Paul Krebs, one of Matt Lynch’s pals and as psychotic a normal person as ever there was, pouring Coke out of a can onto my book and giggling like a simian maniac.
Now, this all happened in a split second, like I said. Paul Krebs was up there on the crest of the slope giggling, doing this little taunting dance, like a boxer or something. My ears were ringing so loudly I couldn’t hear much else, and I was seeing little multicolored blobs that started small but expanded to obscure my field of vision slightly before they dissipated and new ones would take their place. Little circles of green, yellow, and red. A liquid kaleidoscope. I got up and he kind of danced away from me, still giggling and yammering. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I started to chase him, and somehow, I don’t know how, I managed to trip him and pull his legs upward so that he fell down on to the rough gravel path. He must have hit his head pretty hard on one of the bigger rocks that lined the pathway, because there was a tremendous amount of blood seeping from a cut near his hairline. I had fallen in a big patch of mud in the process. I scrambled to get up, sliding around a bit, but he was just lying there blubbering and bloody.
I grabbed his hair and smashed his head into the gravel as hard as I could. Then I stepped on his neck and said, “I will kill you.”
And we both knew I totally meant it.
While I had been chasing him, I had still had Brighton Rock in my hand, but I had dropped it when the whole head-smashing thing was happening. It was lying open on the path, with little splotches and splatters of Paul Krebs’s blood on it, reflecting the sun, shining on the page. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking, stupidly, maybe this is how The Catcher in the Rye, CEH 1960, got bloodstains on it.
108
My first impulse was to run like hell in some random direction, but for some reason, instead, I sat down very deliberately on a big stone over on the other side of the path and read the last couple of blood-spattered pages of Brighton Rock, tuning out the sound of Paul Krebs’s gentle moaning. Then I paused and stared off into space. It was a great ending, the best ending of anything, book or movie, I’d ever experienced. Then I closed the book reverently and walked back toward the campus, because I needed to get myself cleaned up and fifth period was about to start and I didn’t see any reason to be late.
P OD H I P P I E S
It was a day or two after I accidentally beat up Paul Krebs that two very, very surprising things happened.
The first was that Pierre Butterfly Cameroon, the diminutive, flute-playing, hippie-parent-stunted, relentlessly picked-on PBC, my brother in dorkdom, started “going with” Renée
“Née-Née” Tagliafero. For real. I mean, eating together, having third parties deliver notes to each other, and spending lunch period walking in a circle around the perimeter of Center Court, just like all the normal freshman and sophomore couples did. (I’ve never really understood why couples do the joined-at-the-hip lunchtime laps. They stop doing it junior year because once you’re a junior you can leave during lunch and go to the Burger King instead.) Now, when I say that Pierre Butterfly Cameroon is my brother in dorkdom, I mean that we are both at roughly the same low level of the social structure. The Untouchable level.
I don’t mean brotherhood in any other sense. I mean, I don’t know him. Hanging out with each other would just make us both look even more pathetic. Sam Hellerman is kind of 109
friendly with him, as he is with everybody who isn’t a dangerous normal psychotic. I’m more of a loner. Still, if I’m the king of hearts in the dork deck, PBC is definitely one of the other kings.
But Pierre Butterfly Cameroon was no longer Untouchable, or so it appeared from where I was sitting when I first saw them walk by. Née-Née Tagliafero was touching him quite frequently, in fact. They looked weird as a couple because he was not much more than half her height. But more than that: such things just didn’t happen. It was inconceivable.
Née-Née Tagliafero was pretty and popular, with no handicaps or defects except, perhaps, for a very slight mustache, which she was able to bleach into insignificance. And she had pretty big breasts, too, which counted for a lot. I’d never seen her picked on by anyone. She had a kind of punky hair and thrift-store clothes thing going on, but that was fashion rather than true alienation, like it always is. I mean, she was definitely one of “them,” that is to say, mostly normal, not actually one of society’s unwanted. I would classify her as subnormal/drama. She’d had several normal boyfriends before.
What the hell was going on around here? It was mind-boggling.
The other thing that happened was hardly less surprising.
Sam Hellerman suddenly started hanging out with the Hillmont High fake-hippie drama crowd. I swear to God.
This came without warning. I walked out of fourth period expecting our paths to converge at around locker number 414, as usual, and to continue on to our usual lunch-period routine of eating at the cafeteria and trying to remain unob-trusive and unharassed till the bell rang. But I walked past locker number 414, and he wasn’t there. I backtracked, looked around, and finally saw him sitting on the lawn near the drama hippies. No, not near —with them. I can’t remember 110
ever having been so surprised. He must have known I’d be looking for him, of course. I tried to get his attention, but he deliberately avoided looking up to the exit of building C and locker number 414, where he had to have known I’d be.
God only knows what they were talking about. He didn’t seem to be doing much talking, but it was hard to tell.
Somehow I couldn’t see him actually becoming a faux-hippie drama person himself—that would be too bizarre. But how would I know? Maybe that’s how it always begins: you sit with them on the lawn during lunch; then, later that night, a pod grows under your bed with a little fake-hippie version of you inside; then the fake-hippie you hatches, kills the original you, and takes your place. Before you know it you’re embroidering your jeans, singing “Casey Jones,” smoking pot from a pipe you made out of an apple, and playing Motel the Tailor in the class production of Fiddler on the Roof.
Could that really happen to Sam Hellerman? Ordinarily I’d have said no, but after witnessing the courtship rituals of Pierre Butterfly Cameroon and Née-Née Tagliafero, I had to admit that my sense of what did and what did not constitute a believable thread in the fabric of reality suddenly didn’t seem very adequate.
I wasn’t about to barge in on that groovy Happening, I can tell you that. Instead, I went on alone to the cafeteria, semidazed, with a lot on my mind.
TH E BAD DETECTIVE
Channel two was showing two horror movies back to back every Wednesday and Sunday night for the whole month of October. I was in my room brooding over this and that—Fiona, my dad’s library, Paul Krebs, and the whole weird Sam 111
Hellerman pod-hippie situation that had erupted earlier that day. Strangely enough, the first movie on channel two that night was Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which has pretty much the same pod-oriented story line. It almost made me feel as though I was on the right track with the pod-hippie theory. I put on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and turned the TV
volume almost all the way down, watching the movie while listening to the music, and thinking things over.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
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