I know it doesn’t make much sense, but somehow the puzzle of my dad’s teenage library and the mystery about his death had become connected in my mind. I would decipher part of a cryptic notation in Catcher, CEH 1960, or be struck by something in Brighton Rock, CEH 1965, and it would somehow feel like I’d gotten somewhere on the “accident” issue, too. At weird moments, like that night, I’d also have this crazy sense that the other puzzles in my life, like Fiona and Sam Hellerman’s increasingly odd behavior, were somehow connected to my dad and The Catcher in the Rye as well. I mean, they all got muddled together sometimes.

I’d always wondered why the police, at least to judge from the newspaper articles, appear to have put so little into the investigation of my dad’s death; usually when a cop is killed, they turn the world upside down to see justice done.

Maybe it was obvious to them that it hadn’t been a murder, and the newspaper had just played up the ambiguity. They hadn’t found the car that hit him, which was weird, too. Or possibly they had found it, and it just hadn’t been thought newsworthy? I wished there was someone I could ask about it, but I wouldn’t have known where to begin. The reporters who wrote the articles? Hmm. I would also have given quite a lot to know what he had been working on when the “accident” happened. I’m sure that played a role in the investigation, but if it had ever been mentioned publicly, I had missed 112

it. I even dared to try to ask my mom once, but all she did was cry. And what was Fiona doing tonight? And what the hell was up with Sam Hellerman anyway?

But what this all had to do with tits, back rubs, and dry cleaning, I hadn’t the barest clue.

I’m a bad detective, though, really. I let my emotions and prejudices dictate what I choose to investigate, rather than trying to look at the whole picture with an objective eye. I hadn’t looked at A Separate Peace and Lord of the Flies very carefully because they hadn’t been obviously marked up and pummeled like Catcher, CEH 1960, but mostly because I had something personal against them. And because of that I had missed something pretty important.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers had ended, and Rosemary’s Baby had begun. I put on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and turned to look at my dad’s books on my desk. I was reaching for The Journal of Albion Moonlight, CEH 1966, which I had decided would be next on the agenda of my one-man book club, when I accidentally knocked the stack of books to the floor.

A Separate Peace, CEH 1962, fell in such a way that it was open under the bed, and when I went to retrieve it, I noticed a slip of paper that had fallen out. It was half a sheet of graph paper that had itself been folded in half. On the inside of the folded paper was this weird clump of letters, neatly written in the graph paper’s squares in dark blue ink: q

f f q g a r f q q f a s u

x q d f q j g u q y e u m d

q y u m V e q x x u m d q z

g r j g m g f e m H q d h u

g e m e x u m f q P o q e q

q z a y m d u m x q v f q d

u a e d q u t F Y g h u m V

113

And on the other side, in black, and hardly less weird: Mon cher monsieur,

The bastard is dead. Thrown into the

fire. Long live Justice and the

American Way.

Regards,

Tit

So Tit was a person? “Tit lib friday”—an appointment at the library with Tit? And someone was dead? And it had something to do with Superman?

The note was dated 6/31, but the six was heavily and awkwardly inked and clearly had originally been a five.

My first thought, influenced no doubt by having been watching Rosemary’s Baby with a Black Sabbath sound track, was that the little parallelogram of letters might be a magic charm or spell of some sort. And maybe “thrown into the fire” alluded to the burning of witches or something like that?

Or perhaps the charm was an element of some kind of death spell, a spell that had apparently worked, if the reference to the “dead bastard” was any indication. You send this magic parallelogram to someone, innocently disguised as an ordinary note, and soon after seeing it, the person dies. Except that that would mean that my dad would have been the one who died. But of course he had died, only not for thirty years or so. Maybe he’d received the note as a kid but hadn’t actually looked at the evil parallelogram till six years ago. Or the death spell had a built-in delay, a kind of long fuse.

And now I had seen it, too. I started to calculate, wondering how long I had. . . .

I got a little creeped out. Then I realized that was nuts.

Getting a grip, I looked at it again. Perhaps it was the 114

kind of puzzle where you search for words and circle them.

But all I could find were things like “fux” and “yum,” and none of them were even in a straight line like they’re supposed to be. There was “mmmmm” running diagonally from the upper left to the lower right. All that stuff reminded me of Fiona somehow. But that was the only intelligible thing about it.

It didn’t take me too long, though, to realize that it was probably a code. Then it took about twenty minutes of staring at the note and thinking about the CEH library to develop what I thought was a pretty good theory about what sort of code it was, and how it might work. But several solid hours of scribbling yielded only gibberish. Either I was totally on the wrong track or I was missing something. I even swallowed a bit of my pride and phoned Sam Hellerman to see if he had any ideas. But there was no answer at Hellerman Manor.

I eventually had to admit defeat. I closed my notebook and settled into an uneasy, half-asleep night of fretting about Tit, the dead bastard, zombies, pod-hippies, Halloween, witchcraft, my dad, my mom, murder, Sam Hellerman, Mia Farrow, Little Big Tom, Amanda, Black Sabbath, Paul Krebs, Roman Polanski, Anton and Zena LaVey, Matt Lynch, Nostradamus, Mrs. Teneb, Superman, Dr. Dee, Elvish, Klingon, Brighton Rock, Fiona, and Jane Gallagher. It was exhausting. When I finally dropped off, I had a dream that I solved the code and that the revealed message suddenly made it clear how it all fit together perfectly as part of a single story that explained everything. But when I woke up, I couldn’t remember what it was.

Ordinarily, I’d have immediately run, not walked, to Sam Hellerman with Tit’s mysterious note. He hadn’t been too in-115

terested in my dad’s teen library when I’d told him about it.

He only liked science fiction and fantasy. Basically, if a book didn’t have a map of somewhere other than earth in it, he couldn’t see the use. He had a point, but then, he didn’t have a mysteriously deceased dad to investigate. I had tried to tell him how great Brighton Rock was, but he had just rolled his eyes.

Tit’s note would have been right up his alley, though, and I’m sure he would have been able to help. He’s a clever guy.

However, things were a bit strained between us because of the Fiona situation, and because of—well, something was going on with Sam Hellerman, something hidden from me. It wasn’t just that he was being a dick about Fiona and hanging out with hippies. He was also acting weird toward me in general, kind of distant and secretive.

Calling him had been my first impulse upon finding the note. But of course, he had been out. Later, when I asked him where he had been, he said, “Visiting my grandma,” which I didn’t believe for a minute.

A thought struck me.

“Hey,” I said. “If you ever happened to be somewhere like another party or something and you happened to see Fiona there, you’d—you’d tell me, right?”

He just looked at me like I was the most pathetic creature he had ever seen. Which was well within the realm of possibility, especially since Sam Hellerman didn’t get out much.

He was also evasive when I probed for the story behind the new Hellerman/drama hippie nexus.

The first thing he said was “I didn’t expect a sort of Spanish Inquisition.”

“Nobody,” I said blankly, “expects the Spanish Inquisition,” supplying the required response but continuing to stare 116

at him as though to say “there is a time for quoting Monty Python and a time for choosing another path.”

Then he said: “trust me, you don’t want to know.” Then, after watching me continue to stare at him for some time, he cleared his throat and claimed that, actually, he was considering going out for drama and trying out for The Music Man.

I allowed my expression to change from “your feeble attempt at false jocularity will never succeed in changing this subject” to “who exactly is this moron and why is his Sam Hellerman impression so laughable and unconvincing?” He finally said, lamely: “There is a thing called hanging. It’s not a big deal.” And he asked me what my problem was, though I don’t think he expected me to answer. He added that it

“probably won’t be for much longer anyway.” Which sounded pretty fucking weird to me, but he clammed up after that, and no amount of eye-rolling, sarcasm, or even long, steady, unblinking stares would induce him to say any more.

Look, I never said it was a “big deal.” Just that it was unusual. And the more he tried to make it sound usual, the more unusual it seemed. That’s all I was saying.

We were more or less civil to each other, and still spent a lot of time together working on the band (the Medieval Ages, me on guitar, Samber Waves of Grain on bass and bodywork, first album That Stupid Pope. ) And we were still alphabetical-order friends, and that’s forever. But there were now some topics that were more or less off-limits, and that made me feel self-conscious about bringing up other matters. Rock and roll was okay, but not too much else. Plus, for the first time since the Order of the Alphabet had brought us together back when we were little kids, I was on my own for lunch.

I have to admit, though, that apart from all that, I kind of wanted to keep Tit’s note to myself. Even though it was little 117

more than nonsense, the fact that only I knew about it made it the most intimate thing connecting me and my dad.

Similarly, and rather selfishly, I hadn’t told Amanda about the CEH library, even though I knew she would have been pretty interested in it. I had no clue what the coded message might be, but I had developed this absurd idea that if I did decode it, it would turn out to be a kind of message to me. I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone else to know what that message was. I wasn’t even all that sure I wanted to know it myself.

While it remained unsolved, it retained boundless promise.

Solving it could only disappoint. On the other hand, you can’t just leave an unsolved code kicking around in your life.

LOU R E E D

It was in the midst of all the pod-hippie business that Sam Hellerman’s bass finally arrived. I had to admit, it was sweet. It almost looked like a copy of a Fender Jazz Bass, but it was made in Korea and the fine craftsmen in the Korean bass sweatshop had put their own collective individual stamp on it. And by that I mean the name on the oddly rectangular head stock was not

“Fender Jazz Bass” but rather “Apex Dominator 2.”

He didn’t have an amp yet, but we figured out how to plug it in to the back of the Magnavox stereo console in my living room so the sound would come out of the speakers.

It sounded kind of distant and rumbly and fuzzy, but sort of cool, too. Famous recording engineers and producers spend millions of dollars experimenting with effects and overloading preamps and poking holes in speakers with pencils and even pouring foreign substances over circuitry to achieve the sort of thing Sam Hellerman could accomplish just by being too cheap to buy an amp. We are geniuses.

118

He looked cool with it, too. He had it slung so low around his neck that it hung well below his knees, and in order to reach the G string he kind of had to dislocate his right shoulder a little. He appeared to be in considerable pain. Like I said, way cool.

We had just finished working on the band’s signature tune, “Losers Like You,” which goes:

Catcher in the Rye is for losers

Losers, losers,

Catcher in the Rye is for losers

Losers like you

(The Sadly Mistaken, Moe Vittles on guitar, Sam

“Noxious” Fumes on bass and landscaping, band name spelled out in bullet holes on the side of a family station wagon, first album Kill the Boy Wonder. ) It sounded a lot better with bass instead of clarinet, I’ll tell you that right now.

We were playing the next tune when Little Big Tom popped in.

“Nice!” he said. “Lou Reed, right? ‘Sweet Jane.’ ”

“No,” Sam Hellerman said. “ ‘My Baby Who Art in Heaven.’ An original.”

Little Big Tom tilted his head in that birdlike way he has and said, “Hmm. I thought it might have been Lou Reed.”

Then he tilted his whole body from one slight angle to the other by raising first the left foot, then the right, but keeping the rest of his body stiff, and stuck his lower lip out slightly while bringing his chin firmly downward, as though to say “I have just performed this little dance to celebrate the fact that I believe we’ve accomplished a great deal with this illuminating discussion.”

119

Then he said, “Rock on!” and flitted out.

Sam Hellerman and I looked at each other for a while with the same thought, though he was the one who said it first:

“You know, ‘My Baby Who Art in Heaven’ does sound an awful lot like ‘Sweet Jane.’ ”

“Fuck,” I said.

Sam Hellerman couldn’t believe I wasn’t more pissed off at Little Big Tom for snooping in my room and confiscating all that stuff. I mean, I was pissed off, but not enough to go crazy about it. I was embarrassed about the notebook and resolved to take steps to protect my data more carefully in the future, but practically, it meant nothing. The magazines had already served their purpose. And as it happened, I had another “Kill ’em All” T-shirt as a backup. I didn’t even care too much about the confiscated records: I was at the point in my creative life where listening to other people’s music was just a distraction from my own stuff, and what he confiscated was mostly lame crap anyways. And believe it or not, I was finding I could get along just fine without the Talons of Rage fantasy blades. Just knowing the Talons of Rage fantasy blades existed, somewhere out there, was enough for me. I guess I was growing up.

But the real reason I wasn’t more pissed off is that I’m a sentimental fool, and I couldn’t stop feeling sorry for myself while pretending to be Little Big Tom. I could understand why he and, well, anybody, might be freaked out by me and the Talons of Rage fantasy blades and all the other Guns ’n’

Chi-Mo paraphernalia. Though I still think Stratego is pushing it.

When you stare at people, saying nothing for long periods of time while they try to think of ways to fill in the space, and they know they don’t get you at all, they can get a little 120

tense, and sometimes how tense they get is proportional to how likely they judge it to be that you might have access to some kind of dangerous weapon. I developed the method to use on Matt Lynch. Little Big Tom just got swept up in the net by accident, a dolphin with the tuna. That had never been my intention.

I think it may have been the image of him as an uncomfortable, flailing, sitcom dad substitute caught in a net suspended from a crane on the port side of a Japanese fishing boat that made me decide to make a peace offering.

I took out a sheet of paper and wrote:

Dear Big Tom,

My magazines are not a cry for help.

They were only a tool to help deter a

bully. They are not needed now anyway.

I don’t have a girlfriend. Fiona is

an imaginary girl.

I’m glad you stopped the Vietnam War.

Peace and Love,

Thomas Charles Henderson

P.S. ban the bomb

And I left the note on the keyboard of his Mac.

My life hadn’t had a lot of content till this year. And now that it suddenly had some content, it was being turned upside down and slowly shaken, so that everything got a little mixed up with everything else.

As this process continued after the Fiona party, this weird thing started happening.

Whenever I would try to make a word my slave, that is, when I would use a word from 30 Days to a More Powerful 121

Vocabulary, a little image of Mr. Schtuppe’s head would pop up in my mind. Like, I’d say “obsequious” and suddenly I’d see a little shiny pink devil-head with lots of ear hair pop up really quickly, spin around, and pop back down again.

I was pretty sure that the little pop-up devil-head was trying to prompt me to mispronounce the word. I rarely ended up mispronouncing them, as it happened, because when you get right down to it, it’s kind of hard to mispronounce most words. You have to work at it. How would you mispronounce “obsequious,” for example? I guess it would be awb-seh -cue- ee-us. But I had to think about it far too long. I mean, I couldn’t do it intuitively so that it would flow the way it probably would coming from Mr. Schtuppe.

He is a master of his craft and I had a lot to learn. But that’s why we have public education, isn’t it?

I N TH E S HAD OW OF TH E KN IG HT

The Hillmont High School drama hippies always spend lunch period on this little patch of lawn on the northeast corner of Center Court, over by the Hillmont Knight. The Hillmont Knight is this huge god-awful sculpture made of scrap metal and old auto parts, welded together in what is supposed to be the shape of a knight, which is the Hillmont High School team mascot thing. If you squint and use your imagination, you can just about see how it’s supposed to look like a knight, though it’s kind of a stretch. The funniest thing about it, though, is that on what is supposed to be the knight’s shield, in welded-on letters cut from license plates and old metal signs, it says:

122

P R E S E NTATE D TO H H S

BY TH E C LA S S O F ’9 4

Presentated. A more fitting symbol of Hillmont High School would be difficult to imagine.

So the drama hippies sit in the shade of the Hillmont Knight, leaning against its rusty “legs” or just lying on the grass in the general area. Sometimes they hang their coats on it or do something really funny like put a hat on it. And that’s where Sam Hellerman had been when I observed him that first day, “hanging,” as he put it, just a little to the left of the Hillmont Knight.

Now, here’s something I’ve noticed about girls, after years of careful observation. They tend to sort themselves into groups of three. There’s the hottest one, who is the boss.

She dominates and controls the second-hottest one, who is the sidekick and second-in-command, and she instructs her in the art of clothes and sexiness. Then there’s a third one, usually chubby or freakishly tall and skinny or otherwise af-flicted, whom #1 and #2 both boss around. #3 is a sort of gopher, doormat, punching bag, object of loving condescension, and project for improvement rolled into one.

It’s more complicated than it is for guys, where there’s a much clearer line between victim and oppressor, and you always know which one you are, and the victims and oppressors never mingle or feign fraternity. In Girl World, #3 is truly friends with #1 and #2, and they do, in fact, enjoy hanging out together. #1 and #2 will help #3 with makeup and clothes, pretending that that will make a difference, and if either of the dominant girls have a boyfriend, they will try to set up #3 with the least attractive of the boyfriend’s friends, though everybody really knows that that, like so many of 123

their other #3-related activities, is a (devil-head) charade.

Because even though they’re sincere about being kind and helpful, there is an undercurrent of (devil-head) malevolence.

#1 and #2 love #3, but they’re also conscious of how much hotter they are than she is, and they like rubbing it in. #3 resents it deep down but goes along with it because she likes being in a group of friends, which would not otherwise be possible. Eventually, though, the bitterness begins to slip out bit by bit, and #1 and #2 decide #3 is a bitch and that they hate her and end up (devil-head) ostracizing her and replac-ing her with a new #3. Why don’t the #3s all team up and form an anti-1-2 front? I don’t know: they just don’t.

Anyhow, it happened that the #2 in the subgroup of drama people Sam Hellerman had started hanging out with was Née-Née Tagliafero, the girl who was supposedly going with Pierre Butterfly Cameroon. The #1 in that group was Celeste Fletcher, who was, as drama girls go, pretty much at the top level of sexiness. And the #3 was Yasmynne Schmick, who was very short and whose body shape was almost perfectly spherical. She had a slight black-velvety goth thing going on. Sometimes it’s hard to draw the line between goth and fake hippie, I’ve found.

In fact, this trio, though definitely in drama and thus associated with the whole fake-hippie pretense, was among the least extreme, most tasteful trios of drama girls. They could pass for nonhippies if they wanted to—maybe their hearts weren’t completely in it, though they did listen to that awful jam music. They were on the (devil-head) periphery of the fake-hippie drama movement.

Man, I’ve got to do something about that devil-head situation. Maybe there’s some kind of drug they can give you for it.

Anyhow, the Celeste Fletcher trio was closely associated 124

with the Syndie Duffy trio, which was closer to the center of the drama establishment. Syndie Duffy was quite mean, for a drama hippie. They also had a much looser association, through Née-Née Tagliafero, I imagine, with the Lorra Jaffe group, who were thoroughly normal and thus quite psychotic. It was the #2 of the Lorra Jaffe group who had tried to pull a Make-out/Fake-out on me recently in PE, if I’m not mistaken.

At the lunchtime be-in, Sam Hellerman had been sitting in the shadow of the Knight, roughly in between the Celeste Fletcher and Syndie Duffy trios, and had appeared to be talking to both. I would have given quite a bit to know what the hell they had been discussing. But Sam Hellerman wasn’t talking.

Sam Hellerman had said I was welcome to “hang” on the lawn during lunch period with him on the drama people’s turf if I wanted. I’m sure he said it with solid confidence that I wouldn’t take him up on it. Yet I did in fact give it a shot on the following day, more in the spirit of field research than from a sincere desire to be one with the earth.

It was a weird scene, man. Celeste Fletcher was lying on her stomach on the grass facing away from us, raising her head every now and again to tell Yasmynne Schmick to fetch this or that, or to draw subtle attention to Yasmynne Schmick’s weight, height, or skin condition with less-than-convincing compassion. Syndie Duffy was lying nearby, with her head in her scruff-grunge knit-cap boyfriend’s lap. The boyfriend was half asleep, leaning back between the Hillmont Knight’s legs, and Syndie Duffy was sucking idly on his fingers. You could tell her group’s #3 was on the way out because whenever the #3 would try to say something, Syndie Duffy would roll her eyes or, with a great show of aggrava-125

tion, remove the boyfriend’s fingers from her mouth and tell her not to be stupid before putting them back in. That’s normal 1-on-3 behavior, perhaps, but there was something about the way she was saying it that made it clear it was pretty much all over.

There were some dudes a bit farther down, engaged in a philosophical debate about how high they were now as opposed to how high they were going to get at some future point in time. Everyone over by me was idly watching Née-Née Tagliafero and Pierre Butterfly Cameroon make their rounds, and talking amongst themselves about male and female actors, getting high, The Music Man, how LPs sound better than CDs (which I actually agree with), and (did I mention?) getting high. And about Bobby Duboyce, the helmet guy, who, it was claimed, had been seen making out with some unspecified, and grossly implausible, girl in the football-field bleachers. (I was skeptical. Is it even physically possible to do that with a helmet head? But of course I mental-noted the grim fact that, for the sake of argument, even narcoleptic helmet boy was more of a hit with the ladies than I was and filed it away for use in some future flight of self-pity.) I sat next to Sam Hellerman, cross-legged in my army coat, in silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say. The only time anyone acknowledged my presence was when Yasmynne Schmick, for some reason, asked me what I played in the band. “Guitar,” I said. Except that I said a few ums and uhs beforehand, stammered a bit during, and had a little coughing fit afterward. I was jumpy. I was doing the ear thing.

For some reason, I felt kind of warmly towards Yasmynne Schmick, maybe because of sympathy for her role in life, which really wasn’t her fault. But I couldn’t talk to these people. My one line in the whole scene, and I had flubbed it.

126

As for Sam Hellerman, he said not one word the entire time, and no one said anything to him. He just sat there staring at Celeste Fletcher with a faintly stupid expression. He did manage to leave the impression, though, that he was drooling on the inside.

So it was obvious. I guess. Sam Hellerman had the hots for Celeste Fletcher, and for some reason she had decided to tolerate his presence and to allow him to subject her ass to the Hellerman eye-ray treatment for thirty minutes each day.

I couldn’t blame him for that: it’s a nice ass, and I have to admit I was giving it the relatively less dramatic Chi-Mo treatment myself. What she got out of the deal was harder to fathom. It was clear, though, that his deep and tender feelings for her ass were not reciprocated. As to why she decided to tolerate his (devil-head) parasitic presence, who knows?

Maybe she was just one of those people who likes having a large (devil-head) entourage and she felt she needed another extra to make the crowd scene look more believable. Maybe her ass needed the positive reinforcement.

All I knew was, Sam Hellerman was no more a genuine participant in the lunch period Grooviness on the Green than I was. Celeste Fletcher hadn’t even looked back at him the entire time. It made zero sense.

WE CO OL?

I was a little surprised that so much time went by without Little Big Tom acknowledging my peace and love note. It wasn’t like him. I’d sent him notes like that before when there had been equally explosive substitute-father/son trouble in the past, and he always responded in some way. Like putting 127

a little Post-it on my door that said “We’re cool.” Plus, Little Big Tom was almost immediately back to his old self once the conflict had wound down.

I had pretty much decided to pick up the pieces and move on with my life in that particular area when there was a knock on my door that turned out to have come from Little Big Tom’s Celtic knot ’n’ serpent wedding ring. That was unusual. I mean, that’s how he always knocked on things, but when he had something to say to me he would usually just stick his head in and out without warning.

He walked in carrying the weapons-and-tactics magazines in a stack on one upturned palm, like a waiter with a platter of hors d’oeuvres.

He set them down on my dresser and said:

“We cool?” One eyebrow was raised, and his head was tilted and his neck was trained in such a way that he almost looked like he had turned into a question mark for a moment.

“Well,” I said, drawing out the word in an exaggerated fashion and making a little motion with my hands as though I were physically weighing whether we were cool or not—

mime isn’t my strong suit, but, see, I was trying to communicate with Little Big Tom in his own language. Finally, I made a “well, what do you know?” face and said, “We are cool.”

He said he had overreacted and was sorry, especially for reading my notebook, but he used way more words than necessary to get that across, and before he was finished he was starting to get a little flustered. I was trying to look at him neutrally while he talked, but the more neutral I tried to look, the less comfortable he seemed to get. Finally, after two half-finished word clumps that were more like automobile accidents than sentences, he gave up trying to get in touch with his feelings and said, in a more familiar tone:

“Some of the things you said the other day have been rat-128

tling around in the old brain box. Young men always think they know everything and that old men know nothing, and old men always think the same thing. But maybe the answer could be somewhere in between.”

Mmm, deep.

That’s what I thought, but what I said was “We’re cool, Big Tom.” Then I added, uncharacteristically, but because I knew he’d like it: “You’re not even that old.” I’m shameless.

He looked at me, still expecting something.

I held up two fingers at about shoulder level in a peace sign with what I hoped was the right attitude, slightly sardonic but good-natured.

His mouth crinkled just a bit at the left corner, and he did this little sniffy laugh while shaking his head. Then he rumpled my hair, which was the real sign that he was more or less satisfied with how things had concluded.

“Rock and roll,” he said as he went out, sighing just a bit, I think.

LADI E S’ WE E K?

I was starting to lose track of all of the mysteries. There was Tit’s code and the cryptic notes and documents associated with my dad’s teen library. There was my adult dad’s death.

There was Sam Hellerman’s unusual behavior. And above all, there was Fiona. I still had the sense that somehow all the puzzles were related and could solve each other if only one were to come undone. I also had the sense that that was crazy. At any rate, I thought about Fiona practically constantly, both as a context within which to experience my horniness and as a puzzle piece. I decided to write down everything I knew about her, imagining that it might be 129

useful one day if I ever gathered my possessions in a satchel, kissed my mom good-bye, and set off on a perilous journey to track her down and discover her secret. Like a hard-boiled detective. Or a hobbit.

I hardly knew anything about Fiona. I sure wished I had paid more attention to what she had been saying while I was ogling her like a sex maniac.

To summarize what I came up with:

Fiona was most likely a junior. She was in drama, acted in plays, made costumes and her own clothes, and was kind of hung up on vocabulary-level feminism but not in any way that mattered practically. She was interested in the occult and the paranormal, though in fact she had no psychokinetic or supernatural powers. She was nearsighted. She liked the Who. She had a boyfriend who was not at the party but who had friends who were. She wouldn’t go past second base with anonymous strangers in dark basements; or, the party had coincided with her period (ladies’ week, as my mom calls it).

She liked to smoke pot.

If she went to CHS, she was known by a name other than Fiona, and dressed and behaved so differently from how she had been at the party that no one who would have seen her at school recognized the description. But most likely she didn’t go to CHS. I had assumed she did because she had been at a party with lots of CHS kids, and having the Who shirt and being in drama had made it seem like she had to be one of the CHS drama mods. But that wasn’t necessarily the case. She could go to another high school but know some of the CHS drama mods well enough that she would be invited to their parties.

In fact, the Who shirt was the only definite mod-related thing about her, so maybe she wasn’t even a real fake mod at all. Maybe the drama people at her high school were all on 130

some other trip (though I don’t know what—crochet-core?) and the Who shirt was just random, or worn because she knew she’d be hanging out with CHS drama mods on that particular evening.

There was another reason I had assumed she went to CHS, though. Something in the back of my mind that had been bugging me, though I didn’t consciously realize what it was at first: somehow she had known I was from Hellmont.

I had instinctively assumed that she had reached that conclusion because she didn’t recognize me from school at CHS, which would have made it obvious. Most kids from Hillmont went to Hillmont High, though a small chunk, from the hills, mostly, went to CHS. No Clearview or Clearview Heights kids ever went to Hillmont, that I knew of—CHS was a much bigger school, and had kids from several towns. What I’m getting at is: if Fiona didn’t go to CHS herself, it wouldn’t have been at all obvious that I was from Hillmont. I mean, even if she knew a lot of CHS kids, she couldn’t have been positive that she could identify every one, especially a random dweeby one, if she didn’t go there. She would have assumed I went to CHS, like almost all of the kids at the party, right? She would have said “How’s tricks in Queerview?” And I would have said “Homoerotic.” And the pop-up devil-he—oh wait, that was before the devil-head started popping up. Those were simpler times.

Now, maybe she had just guessed right, or had mentioned Hillmont randomly. Maybe not, though. But I couldn’t figure out how or why she would have known anything about me. Man, maybe she was psychic after all.

So where did you go if you lived in Salthaven but you didn’t go to CHS? OMH (Old Mission Hills) possibly. I didn’t know a whole lot about the school system out there. I was going to have to do some research. Or maybe she wasn’t 131

even from Salthaven or Salthaven Vista. Sooner or later, thinking about all this, everything started to go in circles and I had to take a break.

In my fantasy, Fiona is still a mod, a real one, and she and I are living in a grimy, sweaty gray underground flat in Carnaby Street, London, listening to “Substitute” on a little gramophone. I’m standing in the doorway in a parka and she’s on a couch in a houndstooth miniskirt and go-go boots.

We’re both crying, but I can tell by how she’s looking at me through the tears that she wants it. The time, I mean . . .

I woke up the next morning feeling pretty stupid about all that “Fiona must have known who I was all along” crap. Who was I, Miss Marple? Sam Hellerman, please assemble all the guests in the drawing room, and you might want to take the precaution of bringing along your revolver. I rather suspect there may be trouble. Does that mean you have cracked the case, Aunt Jane? Oh my, yes. I have known for some time.

People can be very, very cruel. . . .

There was really only one blindingly obvious conclusion here: I was starting to lose my marbles.

I wondered how long this part was going to last. I mean, mooning over the mystery woman, wondering who she was, where she was, what she was doing and with whom, and why she was doing it, walking around feeling like I’d just been punched in the stomach. I was starting to get a little tired of it. Don’t get me wrong. I still enjoyed thinking about expressing my horniness in the context of the mystery woman. I did it all the time. And I still tended to feel fairly lovey-dovey and soppy and emotional when I thought of her, imagining what it might be like to be going out with Fiona and doing sweet, ordinary boyfriend-girlfriend things like going to the library 132

and making out, or going to the movies and making out, or ridiculing normal people at the mall. And making out.

Actually, you know what? I’m still not all that clear on what’s involved in doing sweet, ordinary boyfriend-girlfriend things. I just assume it’s a lot of making out and groping in public, sex in cars, blow jobs in public restrooms, going to movies, eating at restaurants, listening to the radio, arguing about trivia, and—what else? Do you help each other with your homework? Play Scrabble, build models, buy food at the grocery store and cook it for each other, meet at the Rec.

Center or at the beach for a game of volleyball with her Nair-commercial friends? Does she ask you which dress makes her look fatter, like Carol does with Little Big Tom? Does she throw a stapler at you and stop talking to you for days when you can’t figure out the right answer? Do you share your secrets and deepest fears with one another, or are those subjects still just as weird and awkward and best not brought up, maybe even especially to someone to whom you are constantly, incessantly, relentlessly giving the time?

I only mention it because I have this idea, a dream, really, that part of what it would mean is that the boyfriend is in this little club with the girlfriend where when one is hurt or troubled or being assailed by the cruelties of the world, the other decides not to be on the side of the world, but to join forces with the other member of the club against the world, even if it’s frowned upon, even if it’s a doomed scenario, even if the world is definitely gonna win. Like you’re allies. The last rem-nant of your people. A Sex Alliance Against Society. But maybe I have it all wrong. It does sound like a quaint, far-fetched idea, now that I’ve put it in words. And also overly dramatic, if something can be o. d. and q. at the same time.

Nevertheless, Fiona was like that in my mind. What does 133

it have to do with “having sex,” as Sam Hellerman might put it if he were in a particularly dainty mood? I’m not all that sure. But I know it’s related somehow.

Having made out with Fiona that one time made the issue seem more real. But that was an illusion. There wasn’t any difference at all between the idea of being in a Sex Alliance Against Society with Fiona and the idea of being in one with Kyrsten Blakeney. Both notions were remote, impossible, out of the question, preposterous. Both girls were, with regard to me, equally imaginary.

And I was sure, as sure as I was that C. S. Lewis invented Narnia, that neither of them would, in the unlikely event that the option were ever to come up, fail to choose the world. Of course not. I probably wouldn’t, either, if the world would have me.

MAKI NG AM E N DS

It wasn’t till a couple days after Little Big Tom and I got in touch with our feelings on the occasion of his apologizing for the Stratego Sex Incident that I happened to glance at the stack of deconfiscated weapons-and-tactics magazines on my dresser.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but Little Big Tom had put a Post-it on the top magazine. It said “look in the closet.” I frowned and slid open the closet door and, well, maybe you guessed it already, but I was totally thrown: there was a guitar case in there with a Post-it on it that said “Merry Christmas in advance.”

Damn. Little Big Tom had trouble expressing himself in spoken words, but he was a master of concise communication in Post-it form.

134

I pulled out the guitar case and opened it. There was a great electric guitar in it. I mean, fucking great. Gibson.

Melody Maker. Midsixties. Kind of beat-up. The coolest thing I’ve ever seen or touched with my hands that wasn’t at-tached to someone named Fiona. There was yet another Post-it on the headstock that said “you’re on your own for the amp.”

Okay, so that might have been one Post-it too many.

Even the master of the Post-it communications revolution can overdo it sometimes. But damn. How had he known that that was pretty much my ultimate fantasy guitar? I had no idea. Oh wait, yes I did. Because he had read my notebook.

Little Big Tom had done everything wrong and had broken a great many well-established, TV-dramatized, “Dear Abby”–certified rules about parental conduct with regard to respecting people’s privacy whenever drugs are not involved, but I’ve got to say that in the all-important stage known as Making Amends by Trying to Purchase Affection and Trust with Extravagant Gifts, he had really come through.

Maybe it’s just the lust for worldly possessions talking, but I think this may have been the first time in my life I was this unsuccessful when I tried to make everything disappear in a cloud of cynicism. I admit, I got a little choked up.

I made a silent vow not to ridicule him without his being aware of it for at least a week.

Having the new guitar made me want to play better, to sort of do it justice, and I started to practice a lot more. Little Big Tom had bought it from a friend of his who had been in some old blues-country-jam band and who now had a guitar repair place, which was the reason it was set up so well and played so easily. According to my mom, Little Big Tom had been planning to get me an electric guitar for Christmas even 135

before the Stratego Sex Incident. He had found out from my notebook that I lusted after a Melody Maker and had felt so bad about the snooping that he had decided to expedite matters and try to scare one up.

This was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me, and I couldn’t forget it. I let a lot of prime opportunities for LBT ridicule slide right by because of it. I knew Little Big Tom could tell that the gift had worked and that I was more positively disposed toward him, because he increased the frequency of his trademark pop-in comments. That was the downside. It was annoying. On the other hand, I didn’t mind too much. Why not let him have his fun, too?

Once when I was playing, he stuck his head in and said,

“Spanking the plank?” I stared at him. “Uh, no,” I finally said, since as I mentioned I was trying to be nice.

But it turns out I was wrong. I had been s-ing the p. S-ing the p. used to be a right-on, far-out, with-it expression for playing the guitar, supposedly. I guess when Little Big Tom was a kid, he and his friends used to go around saying “hey, you wanna get together and spank the plank tonight?” and they would be talking about having some kind of opium-den Timothy Leary country-blues-folk-bluegrass-Afro-Caribbean jam session wearing leather vests and velvet pants in an incense-y room that had one poster of Che Guevara and another of Frank Zappa sitting on a toilet, and beads instead of a door.

Supposedly, they also used to call a guitar a “piece of wood,” as in “hey, that’s a great piece of wood you got there.”

You know, it’s almost like they want you to get the wrong idea when they say stuff like that, but knowing Little Big Tom, I’m pretty sure there was nothing going on at these jam sessions but soft drugs, hard-to-follow conversations, and terrible music.

136

N

* * *

either Sam Hellerman nor I had an amp yet, but we continued to practice using the living room Magnavox stereo console. Sam Hellerman figured out how to plug us both in, so he was in the left speaker and I was in the right. He seemed a little put out, strangely. I think he was beginning to see the enormous fake wood–paneled stereo console as his trademark gear and didn’t like me horning in on it. He wanted to be the only one to say “yeah, I like to use the Magnavox Astro-Sonic hi-fi stereo console” to Guitar Player magazine when they interviewed him about his signature thin, burbly, distorted bass sound. “We never expected Oxford English, Moe Bilalabama on guitar, me on bass and lollygagging, first album What Part of Suck Don’t You Understand? to be such a big success,” he’d say. “But in all modesty, I’d have to say it’s that Magnavox magic that always seals the deal. . . .”

In reality, though, Oxford English was off to a pretty terrible start. I mean, the guitar sounded awful through the Magna-V. And it was so hard to distinguish between the bass and guitar that neither of us could tell for sure what we were playing. It was a mess.

Here’s how bad it was. We were doing “Don’t Play Yahtzee with My Heart.” Little Big Tom stuck his head in, tilt-stared at us for a moment as though searching for the right words, gave up, and pulled his head back out. Essentially he had said, in body language, “let’s pretend this pop-in never happened, shall we?” If you can’t even get a resigned “rock and roll” out of LBT, you’re in trouble.

I tried running the guitar through this distortion box I got at Musicville at the mall. The Overlord II. That was a mistake. There was a squeal, and then there was: silence. And I think maybe a smell like smoky toast, though that may have 137

been from something else: it always smells kind of weird around here. The Magnavox was dead.

It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.

TH E STAR-S PANG LE D BAN N E R

S U B STITUTION C I P H E R

Now let me try to explain my thinking about the Tit’s weird code-parallelogram.

Sam Hellerman and I used to have this code hobby. It began in sixth grade, continued sporadically through junior high, and had even hung on slightly through some of ninth grade, though by that time we were mostly just going through the motions. It was time-consuming and tedious, and, more importantly, we didn’t have anything of interest to be all secretive about.

There were different methods, but one we had used pretty frequently was the Star-Spangled Banner Substitution Cipher.

What you did was, you chose two words at random from the

“Star-Spangled Banner” lyrics. The first letter of the first word would be your “in” character, and the last letter of the second word would be your “out” character. So say your words were

“dawn’s” and “stripes.” You’d write out the alphabet starting with “D” from “dawn’s,” adding the “A,” “B,” and “C” at the end; and underneath these letters, you’d write it out again, but this time beginning with “S,” the last letter of “stripes.” Like this: D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C

S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R

You substituted the letters in the second line for the first line’s letters in your original text. So in the SSBSC dawn’s/stripes 138

cipher, ZNGHITC QAPZTCTN XH RWPGPRITGXOTS

QN GTRTHHTH PCS HWTAITGTS WDAADLH would

mean “Kyrsten Blakeney is characterized by recesses and sheltered hollows.”

All the recipient would need to know to decipher the message was where the alphabet began on each of the two lines. The way we used to do it was by number. “Dawn’s” is the eighth word in the SSB, and “stripes” is the twenty-third word. So the key to the Kyrsten Blakeney message would be SSB-F8-L23. We used “The Star-Spangled Banner” because we both knew the first twenty-six words of the lyrics by heart. The “F” and “L” stood for first and last, because sometimes we would vary what letters we would use, so we could have L/F or F/F, or even midword letters that we would identify by Roman numerals: SSB-8iii-23iv. It could get pretty complicated.

Even though the letters of the coded portion of Tit’s note were arranged in a neat little parallelogram rather than in one line like normal text, I was pretty sure it was some sort of cipher.

It is possible to solve a substitution cipher by trial and error, even without a key, but Tit’s message wasn’t long enough to gauge the frequency of commonly occurring letters like “E” or

“T,” which is how you usually begin. Plus, if I was right, he had broken his ordinary coded sentences into fourteen-character clumps, so you couldn’t even guess at common words like

“the” or “of,” though some of the double letters might have provided a clue. There was only one way to decipher it, practically speaking, and that was to discover the key. If it had been based on something they had memorized, like “The Star-Spangled Banner,” there was no hope of recovering it. For reasons I’ll get to in a second, however, I didn’t think it had been memorized.

In any case, there would likely have been some indication for the recipient of how the key should be applied, along the lines 139

of the SSB-F8-L23 notation I mentioned. My assumption was that it would be somewhere on the note itself.

At first I thought it might be in the body of the message, which was uncoded, but cryptic, and which indeed made almost as little sense as the cipher. But then I looked at the date. There are only thirty days in June, so the date 6/31

doesn’t exist. The original date, 5/31, does exist, of course.

Why had Tit scribbled out the five and written a six over it, changing a real date to an imaginary one?

Here was my idea on that:

What if my dad had underlined the passage in Catcher, CEH 1960, not because of his deep interest in back rubs, but as a decoding key? It would explain why only one seemingly random passage had been underlined. And if so, there would probably be something on the note that would indicate how the substitution worked, and the date seemed likely. Of course, even if the back rub passage had been a decoding key, it wouldn’t necessarily have been the one that had been used for this particular message. That was a long shot. Nevertheless, with the Star-Spangled Banner Substitution Cipher in mind, I got out the Catcher and started counting words, just to see. I tried a few possibilities, using 5 or 6 and 31, but they yielded only more gibberish.

Then I noticed something: counting letters instead of words, the fifth letter of the passage was “T” and so was the thirty-first. That wouldn’t have been any use for a substitution cipher, since the in and out letters would all have been the same. What if Tit had written “5/31” and then changed the five to a six when he realized the 5/31 combination wouldn’t work as a key? Sixth letter from the beginning was

“H,” and the thirty-first was “T. . . .”

Damn. It still didn’t work, not in any of the configurations I tried. Yet it seemed too much of a coincidence that Tit 140

would have happened to cross out a date that would not have worked as a key and replace it with one that would, if he hadn’t been working from that particular passage. And it explained why there was only one underlined passage, and perhaps also why there were all sorts of other mysterious pairs of numbers scribbled all over the Catcher. It was the perfect theory in all but one respect: it didn’t work. What was I missing?

TH E G I FTE D AN D TH E TALE NTE D

Meanwhile, though it seemed a bit much with everything else that was going on, I continued to attend my inane, pointless classes.

In Humanities we were still doing The Turbulent Sixties, working on the Peace Collage. There was this big pasteboard

“wall” on which you were supposed to glue things cut out from magazines that had to do with the sixties, or peace, or civil rights, or the women’s movement, or, well, just about anything at all, really. There was a lot of potential mischief afoot with all that glue, but I managed to avoid getting glued to anything for once.

In part, I believe, this had to do with the Paul Krebs Brighton Rock incident. I had been worried about the consequences of the episode, but only a little. Technically, I suppose I had beaten him up, though that had been entirely due to luck and randomness. I still thought of it like he had attacked and persecuted me as usual, even though I “won.”

One of the reasons it had been possible to knock him down, and probably the main reason he had given up so easily and resigned himself to whimpering in his own blood, was that he had not expected me to fight back. I never did. I never had. He wasn’t on his guard because he had assumed there 141

was no reason to be. He had been shocked out of his normal aggressive mode, and his mind had stalled trying to process the unfamiliar information and finally locked. Plus, I had smashed his head into the gravel very hard and it had to hurt.

I guess it was the combination of shock and gravel. And loss of blood.

I had been as surprised by my reaction as he had, but I’m not going to say I don’t know what came over me. What had come over me was that in six solid years of being harassed, abused, beaten, ridiculed, humiliated, dehumanized, and tortured by Paul Krebs and his fun-loving buddies, they hadn’t ever attacked something I really cared about till they poured Coke on my dad’s Brighton Rock. There was no way Paul Krebs could have known, but he had picked the wrong fucking book to pour Coke on. I flipped out. I went berserk. I wasn’t in control of myself, and he wasn’t ready for an attack by a flipped-out, berserk King Dork inflamed by the rage that only grief and (devil-head) filial piety can summon.

If the walkway had been concrete, or even asphalt, the blow to the head would have injured him seriously, maybe even killed him. Then I would have been in trouble. But I doubted it was that serious. The gravel would have absorbed and distributed the impact evenly. As I knew quite well from years of experience, head and scalp injuries bleed a lot and hurt like hell, but they always look worse than they are. The worst you usually have is a concussion, some messy clothes, and a lot of explaining to do. They are easily attributed to accidents. In fact, I have a solid, largely inaccurate, reputation as an absentminded, accident-prone klutz at the Henderson-Tucci HQ , owing to all the times I’ve said I’ve fallen off ledges or walked into walls or run into poles.

And I was pretty sure that that was what Paul Krebs would do, as well. I will always think of him as the guy I ac-142

cidentally beat up, but he would be rather eager to prevent the world at large from knowing him that way. It would hardly have been the first time he had come home from school all bloody, though the fact that this time it was his own blood would have been something of a novelty. But he would keep that part to himself. And he would hate me more than he ever had before, even if neither he nor I had believed such a thing to be possible. I knew I had to brace myself for some kind of retaliation from him and potentially from the other Matt Lynch minions as well, but I was sure it wouldn’t become a legal matter. That’s what I’m saying.

Anyway, despite that, word did get out around school a bit, somehow. No one said anything to me, but people were looking at me from a distance with a kind of awe. I mean, I was in shock about it myself. These things don’t happen, not usually. I imagine most people discounted it as a grossly implausible rumor. Sam Hellerman didn’t doubt me, but he said, and I knew he was right, that I would have to watch my back from now on. I was totally used to watching that, though.

It was a measure of just how sick Hillmont High School society is that smashing someone’s head to pulp in the gravel by the baseball diamond was such an unequivocal reputation enhancer. But so it was. It had worked for years for Matt Lynch and Paul Krebs and the other normals in their demi-human goon squad. Now, weirdly and in a way that wasn’t entirely welcome, it was temporarily working for me. (I had no illusions: the vital element of surprise was only destined to work the one time. But it had worked.)

So maybe that’s why no one tried to glue me to anything in Humanities while we were working on the Peace Collage.

Someone did, however, glue some stuff from a gay porn magazine on Bobby Duboyce’s helmet while he slept peacefully in his seat. Peace indeed.

143

As for Paul Krebs, I figured he still had a few concussions coming to him. I have heard, though, that if you fall asleep with a concussion you can die, so I was relieved when I learned that he was back in school a couple of days later. And not to be all Bad Seed and everything, but just to be on the safe side I got some new Converse All Stars from the Shoe Mart and threw the old, blood-spattered ones in the shop in-cinerator on my way back to school. Because you never know.

The day after I attended the lunchtime gathering around the Hillmont Knight, I noticed for the first time that Yasmynne Schmick was in my Advanced French class. She smiled and nodded a greeting as I walked in, which was definitely a new experience for me. I guess my failure to say “guitar” properly had formed a kind of loose bond between us.

Which was alarming, in a way. I mean, I wasn’t sure I wanted another friend: Sam Hellerman was about all I could handle.

She was wearing a tight-fitting purple velvety bodysuit and a lot of silver jewelry. She looked like an enormous Christmas ornament. She was actually pretty nice, though, for a drama goth pod-hippie; maybe the drama hippies weren’t all bad after all.

Now, I had started taking French in seventh grade, so this was my fourth year, and even I found it shocking to think how little French I actually knew after three-plus years. True, I knew quite a lot about Jean and Claude and how they go to the movies and eat beefsteak and fruit, and I could tell you all about their other fabulous adventures, though only in the present tense. I was a master of the present tense in French. I guess that is pretty advanced, when you think about it.

I felt a little sorry for the French teacher, Madame Jimenez-Macanally, not only because students would often 144

mispronounce her name so it sounded kind of nasty, but also because it must have been hard knowing deep down that whatever activities may have been going on in that class, the teaching and learning of the French language was not among them. Someone had hit on the idea of asking her to explain the complicated twenty-four-hour French system of telling time at the beginning of each class, just to see how long she would go along with it before cracking. She was determined not to crack, though: she explained the twenty-four-hour system every single day. Whether that was giving in or fighting back is hard to say: you could look at it either way.

The last fifteen minutes of Advanced French is called Advanced Conversation, where the students pair up for advanced, stimulating dialogue. Yasmynne Schmick approached me and said, as near as I could make out: “Le nez est bête.” The nose is a beast? A little puzzling. Then she switched to English:

“Renée is stupid,” she said. “You’re actually a pretty nice guy.”

Pause. “Really?” I had to assume she was talking about Née-Née Tagliafero. What the hell had they been saying about me?

Madame J.-M. frowned at us. We weren’t supposed to speak English in Advanced Conversation. So we continued in French:

“What time is it?” I asked.

“It is 11:05,” she replied.

“Thank you very much,” I said. “What a shame. If it pleases you, what do you call yourself?”

“I am sorry,” said Yasmynne Schmick. “I am hungry. The young girls wear a very pretty dress. They eat and play soc-cer with the mother and the fathers. My name is Yasmynne.

I am four years old.”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “The young people love to buy discs of 145

pop music for dancing and for holiday making.” I chose my words carefully. “They . . . they . . . my God: they eat bever-ages. It is true. My two friends Jean and Claude go to the cin-ema yesterday to view films. What a surprise. They eat. They are flowers.”

Yasmynne Schmick nodded. “Thank you very much. I am sorry.” Her face clouded over. “There is a match between two opposing teams at the stadium. It is true, is that not correct?

Therefore, my little friend,” she said quietly and with a sad smile, “all the world very much loves the automobile who calls himself a cat.”

“You are correct,” I said hopelessly. “I am enchanted. Our little green hat is orange on the head of this very interesting horse.”

“Would you like to sleep with me this evening?”

“Thank you, Mr. Roboto.”

It was kind of fun. That Yasmynne Schmick was all right.

Later that day, I was on my way to Band, running a little late, when something grabbed the back of my army coat, stopped me short, and almost pulled me to the ground. It turned out to be one of Mr. Teone’s large, rubbery hands. He was scratching his butt with the other one. Ugh.

“Henderson,” he said. “Henderson.”

There was something about the way he said my name that made it sound like a particularly nasty swear word. Wait a minute, I thought: you can’t call me that. It’s rude.

He told me that he was writing a book on gifted and talented young men and women, and that he’d like to give me an IQ test and interview me with a group of other kids after school on Friday. At his fucking house. I don’t think so.

“I can give you a ride in my ’93 Geo Prizm if you like,” he 146

said. He was always going on about his ’93 Geo Prizm, like it was some kind of cool car or something. What a moron. He reached into his sports-jacket pocket with the butt hand and pulled out this crumpled, grubby, curling fistful of papers.

Presumably, this was the IQ test. He poked me with it. And I recoiled in horror.

It was hilarious, though. I had serious doubts that Mr.

Teone could write his own name, much less compose a whole book. He had supposedly started out at Hillmont way back as a shop teacher, which I could well believe: he had that air. Then he got some kind of administrative credential and became a principal. So the man had some education. But from what I could tell, he was still more or less functionally illiterate. He looked down at the papers in his butt hand and started to laugh like a maniac.

“No pain, no gain!” he said. “No gain, no pain!” Way to sell your dopey afterschool program to a skeptical student body. Whatever, freak.

Mr. Teone’s afterschool Gifted and Talented program might have been of some use as an anecdote factory, but that was about it, and I felt I really didn’t need the anecdotes at that price. Not that I ever would seriously have considered participating in something like that, even if it hadn’t involved Hillmont High School’s most bizarre and unhygienic administrator. I didn’t need any more self-congratulatory self-esteem baths and collage-making bees in my life at the present moment. Sam Hellerman had attended one of Mr.

Teone’s ill-conceived afterschool activities last year, a sort of science fiction club. He never went back. He wouldn’t say much about it, except: “he’s a deeply weird man.” It hardly needed stating.

147

TH E LOR D RO C KS I N MYSTE R IOU S WAYS

Meanwhile, despite the multifaceted depravity of Hillmont High School, and personal mysteries various and extremely sundry, the band was trying to soldier on. It wasn’t easy. I wasn’t worried that I’d get in trouble for blowing up the Magnavox Astro-Sonic hi-fi console. It hadn’t been used for years and years. Lifting the lid had let loose an enormous cloud of dust. It was just a large piece of furniture from long ago that was used as a thing to put other things on, its original function forgotten. We hadn’t even been sure it would turn on.

However, that still left us with two-thirds of a band and nothing to plug in to. (Some Delicious Sky, aka SDS, Squealie on treble and vocals, Sambidextrous on thick bottom and industrial arts, band name squirted on a tanorexic female midriff in white toothpaste, first album Taste My Juice. ) Because I’m so brilliant, I had blown up the left channel on the stereo in my room, too. I was philosophical about it: after all, a lot of the records I like are in mono. But we were running out of consumer electronics products to abuse in the name of Rock and Art.

Till now, Sam Hellerman and I had done all of our band activities at my house because his parents, even though they were almost never home, came from Germany and were all weird and strict. They specifically disapproved of music, it seemed. How he had talked them into buying him a bass I will never know.

Actually, out of the vast universe of things Sam Hellerman’s parents frowned upon, the one they seemed to disapprove of most of all was Sam Hellerman himself. He had to take great care to hide what he did and anything he might be interested in, because if they ever found out about an activity or interest their first impulse was to ban it immediately.

148

By now so many things were prohibited in the Hellerman household that no one could keep track anymore, and a lot could slide by. Still, Sam Hellerman’s peace of mind required that he limit contact with his parents as much as possible, as each enthusiasm stomped upon by the Ministry of Stomping on Enthusiasms represented a tiny missing piece of Sam Hellerman’s soul that would probably never grow back. He didn’t know whether in reality it would be physically possible for German parent-vampires to suck the rock and roll completely out of the hearts of their defenseless offspring. But he didn’t want to be around to find out the hard way.

Nevertheless, Some Delicious Sky had nowhere else to go, for the moment. So we crept into the tomblike foyer of the Hellerman house, carrying our guitars, with a palpable feeling that we were up to no good.

The Hellermans didn’t have a Magnavox Astro-Sonic hi-fi console in their living room, but rather an extremely expensive-looking audio setup with all sorts of extra boxes that glowed purply blue. It was always on standby and was never used, as far as I know. Sam Hellerman wasn’t allowed to touch it, or even look at it. I suppressed an urge to kick the whole thing over as I tiptoed by, following Sam Hellerman down the hall and into his room.

Sam Hellerman ran the bass through his stereo. As for the guitar: there was this old electronic toy called a Speak-amatic, left over from remote childhood. When you pushed the buttons, it would play funny sound effects through a tiny speaker. It was shaped like a little cow in overalls, and the speaker was the cow’s mouth. When you pressed button #1, it would say: “Moo. What would you like to hear today?”

Sam Hellerman had somehow rigged up the Speak-a-matic cow so that I could plug my guitar into it and the sound would come out of the cow’s mouth. Well, it sort of did. The 149

sound was rotten and squilchy, and very, very quiet, but come on, how cool is it to be playing a ’65 Melody Maker through a souped-up Speak-a-matic cow mouth? That boy is a genius.

Yet I was starting to wonder if it was possible to fashion a crude band out of ordinary household materials. Without amps, I mean.

A couple of practices of that sort were more than enough to demonstrate that rock and roll, like nearly everything else on the planet, was not destined to flourish in the bowels of Hellerman Manor. We had to find another way, I thought.

And, as if directly in answer, Sam Hellerman revealed that he had a plan.

“You know,” he said, on the Friday of the second week of his mysterious pod-hippie-dom. “I don’t think we should go to the Pep Rally.”

I stared at him, with the look that said “Gee, ya think?”

Once a month, the school cancels the period after lunch so they can hold a lengthy Pep Rally in the gym. Sometimes, when it is judged that lunch plus one period is insufficient, they cancel the period before lunch, as well. I wasn’t into the idea of two or three solid hours of—what? To be honest, I’ve never been to a Pep Rally, and I don’t know what goes on at one. But I can’t imagine it’d be too pleasant. You’re supposed to go, but they don’t have any way to check, so for anyone not interested in upping their pep intake for the day it’s like a little vacation. You just take off. Sam Hellerman’s saying “I don’t think we should go to the Pep Rally” was like Sam Hellerman saying “You know, I don’t think we should use these big rusty nails to hammer our hands and feet to the floor today.”

This particular Rally promised to be especially gruesome, as it was billed as a “Cultural Awareness Pep Rally.” In a way, 150

it was nice to know that Hillmont’s assault on taste and decency was going strong—a predictable world is a manageable world. But that’s no reason to participate in the madness, if there’s a way to get out of it.

I was a little surprised that Sam Hellerman chose hanging out with me rather than Celeste Fletcher’s ass for the precious extended lunch break. But, as I said, Sam Hellerman had a plan, which for once did not involve any of Celeste Fletcher’s anatomical parts.

The solution to our amp problem had been under our noses all along, though it took Sam Hellerman’s genius to uncover the secret. Ages ago, when the school system had more money and everyone was trying a lot harder to create the impression that Hillmont High School was more than just a clean, well-lighted place for hazing, they used to have a Jazz Band. It is beyond my capabilities to imagine what sort of god-awful “jazz” the Hillmont High band students might have managed to emit in those odd moments when they weren’t otherwise occupied in student-on-student abuse. The Jazz Band program had been discontinued long ago, its terrors and cruelties lost in history. (One day they will discontinue all the programs, and that will be a fine day. A world without programs will be just as hard to take, maybe, but at least it will be more honest.)

Some of the Jazz Band paraphernalia remained, however, and it included a couple of amplifiers that were buried behind and underneath several layers of other band-related junk.

There was a Polytone twin guitar amp, and a Fender Bassman, which was actually a legitimately cool amp, though I gather from reading interviews with real rock guys that the cool way to use the Fender Bassman is as a guitar amp rather than a bass amp. Anyway, they were better than the nothing we had. And they were free. In a sense.

151

The band room was normally locked when not occupied, of course, but Sam Hellerman had a key to the main building because he had signed up for a practice room. And he had somehow temporarily rigged the band room door so it wouldn’t latch properly when Ms. Filuli, the band teacher, left the building. That boy is a criminal genius.

We had to burrow through quite a few layers, but it didn’t take long. The school was deserted; everyone was either at the Pep Rally or skipping the Pep Rally. So no one was there to notice when I picked up the Polytone and just walked out with it. No one even came to investigate when Sam Hellerman wheeled the creaky Fender out of the band room and into the hall, even though its wheels made a squealing sound like I imagine a five-year-old girl might make if someone hung her outside a window by the ankle. Preventing geeks from swiping decrepit school property wasn’t high on everybody’s list of priorities that day.

We replaced all the band room junk and jumbled and jos-tled it a bit so it looked pretty much as it had before, kind of like how you would trample on the dirt on top of a grave you didn’t want anyone to find out about. Hardly anyone even knew the amps were there in the first place, so we were pretty safe. We left the school grounds and took turns wheel-ing the Fender with the Polytone on top of it back to my house. I had an absurd feeling of (devil-head) euphoria, like we were on our way.

What finally made us get off our asses and solve the amp problem? Well, there had been another big development, bandwise. Sam Hellerman had taken some time off from his busy schedule of keeping tabs on Celeste Fletcher’s ass and had managed to scare up a drummer. An actual drummer. I kid you not. His name was Todd Panchowski, he had a drum 152

set, and for reasons that remain dark to this day, he hadn’t flinched at the idea of being in a band with Sam Hellerman and me. Well, actually, he took determined steps to make it clear that he wasn’t “in” the band, so maybe that was it.

There were other bands he was “in.” When he talked about our band (which when we met him was Arab Charger, me on guitar, The Fiend in Human Shape on bass and preventive dentistry, first album Blank Me ) he would always say we were “jamming,” which is less committed sounding than practicing or playing.

The Polytone didn’t sound too bad with the distortion box, the Overlord II. Much louder than the cow mouth. The Fender Bassman didn’t work when we first plugged it in, but that was just because the tubes were missing. Sam Hellerman had anticipated that and was ready with a new set of tubes that he got from the electronics store. I thought it sounded nice, though I think he was secretly pining for the thin, burbly, distorted Magnavox sound.

We plugged this cheesy microphone from Amanda’s mini-karaoke set into the Bassman’s second channel and taped it to a bamboo pole from Little Big Tom’s gardening supplies, and stood the pole up by sticking it in the red and green Christmas tree stand from the basement. It looked ex-otic. The mic squealed a bit, and it was kind of hard to get it so that we played all at the same time, but it was loud and we sounded—well, not exactly like a rock band. More like three different rock bands with one member each playing different songs at the same time. But we played “Surrender” and

“Cretin Hop,” “Fox on the Run,” and “Whole Lotta Rosie,”

sort of, and if our attempt to do my own song, “Wetness for the Prosecution,” sounded a bit more experimental than intended, it was still pretty cool in a Trout Mask Replica kind of way. Or so I kept telling myself.

153

This was all happening in the living room of my house.

Little Big Tom popped in at one point. He tilted and said something I couldn’t hear. We stopped and waited expectantly.

“Living room rock!” he said. I guess I had been hoping for a comment on the song, “I Pledge Allegiance to the Heart.”

But it was probably pretty hard to make out the lyrics. Plus the mic kept shocking me, so I was shying away from it and not putting a lot into the singing. Living Room Rock was pretty funny, though, and I made a note to self to use it for an album title or something someday. Actually, it was one of the best band names I’d ever heard. . . .

Now, Todd Panchowski was a Christian stoner. That is, he was a stoner who had joined a Christian youth group to deal with his inner turmoil and problems at home and to find guidance and a sense of community. There were a few of those around. The youth group was called the Fellowship. In my experience, despite the cheerful hobbit-evoking name and their (devil-head) ostensible ethical standards, the Fellowship people were just as sadistic and psychotic as any other normal people. Maybe they were nice to each other behind closed doors and reserved their hazing for people of other religions or something. I didn’t really know a lot about them.

I don’t want to get into the whole stoner classification system, but I should mention that practically every member of the Hillmont student body is technically a stoner, in that they all do various mild drugs continually and are pretty much always stoned to some degree. The difference is that the stoner stoners wear heavy metal T-shirts while doing it.

They tend to be nicer to be around than full-on normal people, though, because their ideology includes a self-perceived admiration for social misfits. That part is contrived and not very sincere, perhaps, but in fact they don’t hassle me nearly 154

as much as normal people do. I even get points for my ency-clopedic knowledge of firearms and rock and roll history. I’m not one of them, but they don’t actively seek to destroy me, and that’s a nice novelty.

One more thing: all the psychotic normal people are well aware that there is something weird about dismissing people as “stoners” when the stoners differ from themselves only in the kind of T-shirts they wear and in the diminished ferocity of their attacks on the defenseless. So they prefer to call stoners “burnouts.” But that’s a more appropriate term for teachers, if you ask me.

Todd Panchowski was not without his Fellowship-related quirks, as we soon learned when we started to play with him.

He was okay with playing our songs, and in fact didn’t seem to pay too much attention to the words or music. I guess he was so busy hitting things with sticks that he didn’t really have a thought to spare for the content. But there was one song he insisted that we do, and it was kind of an abomina-tion. I guess he had picked up the idea at the Fellowship meetings, where they do God only knows what. What he wanted to do was to play “Glad All Over.” (Not the Carl Perkins “Glad All Over.” The other one.) Now, I love “Glad All Over,” don’t get me wrong. But instead of singing “You make me feel glad all over,” like the Dave Clark Five or the Rezillos, he wanted it to go “He makes me feel glad all over.”

Like you’re singing it about Jesus instead of a hot girl, get it?

I tried to explain to him that “glad all over” had a double meaning, a code meaning, like “giving her the time,” and that the song wasn’t about how great you feel when you read Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians. Unless you’re weird.

It’s really about—well, it’s like this: boy meets girl, girl shows skin and wiggles, boy gives girl money or fabulous prizes, girl bends over, boy and girl invade each other’s personal space, 155

resulting in the propagation of the species and/or a big, sloppy mess. That’s what “Glad All Over” is about, a tale as old as time.

Sam Hellerman was more direct.

“You have a crush on Jesus,” he said. “But Jesus doesn’t know you exist. Is that it?”

Well, no, that wasn’t Todd Panchowski’s point, although I think there may have been a grain of truth in it concerning what the Fellowship people might have had in mind when they decided to co-opt that particular song for their youth recruitment purposes. There’s something weird and sexual about the way some people talk about God—have you noticed?

Those comments could have cost us our drummer right there, but in the end I don’t think Todd Panchowski fully understood what we were saying. How can I put this? Todd Panchowski was not exactly a genius. But we didn’t need him for textual analysis of the lyrics of pop-rock standards. We needed him to hit things with sticks in a vaguely rhythmic pattern that more or less accompanied our songs, and that was something he could do. Pretty much.

So we did “Glad All Over,” just to humor him, and if I was thinking of Kyrsten Blakeney’s ass instead of the face of Jesus when I sang it, well, he’d never have to know. In fact, the notion that he was sitting there thinking of the f. o. J.

while I was thinking about being glad all over this or that female was amusing enough to make me crack up more than a few times. I don’t know why I got such a kick out of that.

Todd Panchowski also wasn’t into how often we changed the band name. He thought we should just pick a name and stick with it. He didn’t understand that we were still searching, and that the habit of a lifetime of fantasy rocking dies hard.

“What’s the name of the band again?” he said, after our second practice.

156

“Occult Blood,” said Sam Hellerman, “Mopey Mo on guitar and vox, me on bass and teleology, you on drums, first album Pentagrampa.

“Well, first of all,” said Todd Panchowski, “I play percussion instruments, not ‘drums.’ ” Second of all, he added, he didn’t want to jam with a band with the word “occult” in it.

There was some Fellowship rule against it. So he happened to be wearing an I, Cannibal T-shirt depicting a skeletal grim reaper cutting off a nun’s head with his scythe. Maybe they hadn’t given him the “be nice to nuns” talk yet.

It didn’t matter because halfway through the practice I had already decided that the new band name was going to be The Mordor Apes, Mithril-hound on guitar, Li’l Sauron on bass and necrology, Dim Todd on drums-oops-I-mean-percussion and stupefaction, first album Elven Tail.

MY P O OR I N E PT PAR E NTAL U N ITS

It seemed as though the smoke from the Sex-Vietnam-Stratego Incident had only just cleared when out of the blue I got called into the kitchen for another family conference. It was the Thursday before Halloween, not too long after our second practice with Todd Panchowski. I passed Amanda on my way in, and she gave me the look that said “you’ll never get out of this one, boy.” Dear God, what now?

This time my mom was officiating rather than Little Big Tom, though he was hovering in the background. She looked terrible. Her hair was all wild, like it was when she was going through one of her crazy episodes. She was smoking with tremendous ferocity even for her. She looked up at me through her hair with this unreadable but distressed expression on her face. What on earth was wrong?

157

We stared at each other.

Finally she said, her voice distant and depressed sounding, though also with a little sob, “A lot of kids your age are experimenting with drugs.”

I went: “?”

And I’ll tell you why I went “?” The first thing my mom did every single morning was to reach to the bedside table for her weed. She couldn’t function without it, like some people are with coffee. And even now she had her afternoon low-ball, bourbon and soda, no ice, in her hand. And coursing through her veins at this and any given time was a constant stream of about a dozen orally administered tranquilizers and psychotropics and God knows what else—Xanax, Prozac, lith-ium, Vicodin, Halcion, you name it. The irony was that I was the only person in that room, and probably the only member of the Hillmont High student body, who wasn’t experimenting with anything. Other than love, literature, rock and roll, and cryptography, I mean.

The notion of these teen drug “experiments” always cracks me up. Like they’re in a secret laboratory conducting research on a government grant. As opposed to being in a public lavatory doing lines of crank and holding some poor bastard’s head in the toilet till he drowns or till the bell rings, whichever comes first. Well, in a way that’s on a government grant, too. What a world we’ve got here.

My assumption was, of course, that my mom had finally noticed that Sam Hellerman had been raiding her Vicodin supply and had assumed that I was the culprit. Now, if that had been the case, here’s what would have happened: I would have looked up and seen Little Big Tom tilting to one side and holding, maybe even rattling, a half-empty medicine bottle, with a concerned yet wry expression. In fact, though, when I looked up, it turned out that Little Big Tom was hold-158

ing not a bottle, but rather a piece of paper and a little booklet.

It was my lyric sheet to “Thinking of Suicide?” and a copy of the school pamphlet of the same name. I had stupidly left the lyric sheet out after band practice. We had broken out the pamphlet as a visual aid to try to explain to Todd Panchowski why the song was cool. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out, but never mind about that.

My poor inept parental units. Once again, their opening line wasn’t the topic sentence, and everyone ended up confused. They were trying to have the suicide talk and somehow got it mixed up with the drug talk.

TH I N KI NG OF S U IC I DE?

You can put your straightjacket away I don’t plan to kill myself today

Maybe tomorrow, maybe not at all

I’m not ready to make that call

But don’t assume that I’m all right

I won’t be with my baby tonight

There’s no baby, there’s nothing there What baby? I don’t care—

Thinking of Suicide? Yeah, that’s right.

It’s a Thinking of Suicide Saturday night It’s not funny but it’s true

I think about suicide when I think about you So put your E back where you got it from I don’t plan on going to the prom

159

I know I add up to a figure of fun

But I don’t want to be the only one

And there’s only one of me

And no one else that I can see

And I’m so tired of trying to

Make believe I’m not dying to, so—

Thinking of Suicide? Yes, I am.

Thinking of Suicide? Hell, goddamn.

It’s not funny, but it’s free

Do you think about suicide when you think about me?

And if I’m suddenly gone

Then you’ll know what’s been going on I’m always thinking

And I never do anything

But,

Thinking of Suicide? Yeah, that’s right Thinking of Suicide with all my might I have got a history of

Thinking of Suicide when I think about love.

Well, it was a bit better with the music. Not the music as played by me and Sam Hellerman and Todd Panchowski, which was pure (devil-head) cacophony. I mean how it sounded in my head. Maybe you’ll have to trust me on that.

Anyway, I just thought you should see what my mom had been reading when she flipped out. Plus I’m kind of proud of that song and I’m showing off a little, even though you have to sing “from” a little weird to make it sound like it 160

rhymes with “prom.” But actually, that’s kind of like my favorite part.

I totally couldn’t see what the big deal was. It’s a pretty ordinary topic. Not too shocking or unusual. They make a pamphlet about it, for Christ’s sake. In fact, it wasn’t even me in the song. The song had been inspired by the pamphlet girl, as I’ve explained; and as for those specific lyrics, I had in fact been feeling sorry for myself while pretending to be Yasmynne Schmick when I came up with most of them. But I couldn’t figure out a way to explain that to my mom and Little Big Tom without causing even more confusion.

When my mom is in crazy mode it’s just not possible to talk to her reasonably. Still, I gave it a shot, trying to make it as simple as possible.

“I’m not on drugs and I’m not going to kill myself,” I said.

And it was true. I really wasn’t. Though I couldn’t tell you why not.

No one knew what to say. Then Little Big Tom cleared his throat and filled in some of the background.

My own cleverness had tripped me up. Way back, I had needed to find an excuse for why I never spent much time at home, particularly after school. The real reason was that LBT

kind of freaked me out back then, and I felt so uncomfortable with the whole vibe of the Henderson-Tucci household that even the ghastly pall of Hellerman Manor seemed preferable to it. So I invented a series of clubs I was supposed to be in, plausible ones like the Chess Club, Rocketry Club, Monty Python Club, The Middle-earthlings, or the Trekster Gods, and sometimes crazy ones I would make up for my own amusement, like the Caulking and Stripping Club, or the Doorknob Appreciators Society, otherwise known as the Knob-heads. Not that they ever paid much attention to what the clubs were called. My brilliant humor, once again wasted.

161

Ironically, part of the reason I started hanging out at home more, in addition to the fact that we couldn’t do band activities at Sam Hellerman’s, was that I had started to warm up to Little Big Tom, even actually almost kind of liked being around him sometimes. But to them it looked like I had suddenly lost interest in all the clubs and afterschool activities.

That was a Danger Sign. Then they found the lyrics and pamphlet and that had tipped the whole thing over. I screwed up.

And now I was looking at a vast stretch of inept suicide-watch activity from the parental units for some time to come.

“You’re not going to like this, chief,” Little Big Tom began. What? What could they confiscate in this situation? I was all ears.

“We’d like you to see someone. Just to talk to you and help you work things out.”

Out of the three people in that room, there were two in serious need of psychiatric help, and I wasn’t one of them.

This point would have been lost on them, though, because between them they were already “seeing” a small army of counselors, therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, analysts, facilitators, and what have you. They thought that was man’s natural state. In fact, I was surprised they hadn’t tried to force me to go to a shrink long before this, if only in the spirit of trying to provide me with everything they hadn’t had as kids.

It was going to be a drag, of course, but as punishments go, I’d certainly had worse.

LI N DA’S PANCAKE S ON B ROADWAY

The following day, Sam Hellerman and I decided to skip PE.

The main reason was because we had just started boxing and sometimes that’s just too much to take. Sam Hellerman was 162

doing it mostly in solidarity with me. I mean, he didn’t really need to, as he had a special talent that made boxing easy for him. But also, he had said, somewhat mysteriously, that there was something important that we needed to discuss, and that he had something to show me. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. “Just wait,” was all he would say.

There’s pretty much nowhere to go in Hillmont except for this place called Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway. When all else fails, which is in fact quite often, Sam Hellerman and I end up going there to sit in a booth and drink coffee from these big plastic pitchers they refer to as bottomless cups.

So the state and the school district and the Hillmont school administrators had decided that Sam Hellerman and I would spend second period that day standing in a ring hitting each other, or getting hit by someone else, or watching somebody else hitting somebody else. But instead, at least for this one day, there we were, in a booth at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway, discussing this and that.

Actually, I should explain how PE boxing works. They don’t have a real ring. Instead, there’s a mat on the floor of the lanai, and everyone stands on the edge of the mat in a kind of human ring while the two poor kids who have to box each other stand in the middle. If one of the boxers gets too close to the human ring, the ring people in that particular area are supposed to shove him back toward the middle. I probably don’t have to mention that everybody has to wear the tiny George Michael shorts while this is all going on. It’s your basic nightmare.

While the boys are doing boxing, the girls are over on the other side of the lanai doing Rape Prevention, but they’ll always come over to watch if there’s an interesting matchup, making the whole thing even more embarrassing. There’s this pretense, never verbalized without a snicker, that they 163

have boxing to “teach you how to defend yourself.” But in reality, it’s just a way for a certain type of guy to be able to beat up on a certain other type of guy during class time as well as before and after school.

They’re required to stop the festivities at “first blood” (I kid you not, that’s the phrase they use). So your best strategy is to try to get hit in the nose and start bleeding as soon as you can and thus spare yourself the rest of the state-mandated beating. Sure, the PE teacher will then lead the class in a rousing chant of “pussy, pussy, pussy” at you, but they’re always saying that. Beats getting beat.

Sam Hellerman’s special boxing talent was that he got nosebleeds all the time. He was so good at it that he could pretty much start bleeding at will, through the power of his mind. Mr. Donnelly would put him in the ring and roar: “I’m warning you, Hellerman! If you start bleeding before you’re hit, there will be hell to pay!” But little Sam Hellerman would just stand there with an angelic look, bleeding away. Mr.

Donnelly would glower and yell and turn twenty-three shades of red, but he couldn’t touch Sam Hellerman because that would probably have been good for about three or four million dollars, by a conservative estimate. Sam Hellerman’s dad is a lawyer, as he makes sure to inform every PE teacher on the first day of class.

The best part, though, is when he leaves the ring to go to the nurse’s office and tries to get as much of his blood on as many PE goons and their stuff as he can. I’ll say it again: that Sam Hellerman is a genius.

Cutting class wasn’t so smart, really, as we’d pay for it later. But sometimes you need a mental health day.

I settled into my side of the booth and looked at Sam Hellerman expectantly. He was cagey, and only seemed to 164

want to talk about trivial matters rather than this big important thing about which he had called the meeting. Finally, I just came out and said, “What’s the story, Hellerman?”

Now, you have to understand: my day-to-day life was kind of weird at that time. I was constantly in this frantic, anxious state, all wound up. I was doing the ear thing more often than not, and I was hardly sleeping at all. I was spending most of my time thinking furiously about real or imagined mysteries, many of which, I suspected, could well have no solution. I spent a couple of hours every night working on the Catcher code when I was supposed to be doing homework. It would always end in failure, and with my throwing some object across the room in frustration.

Meanwhile, I was having no better luck with the CEH

reading list. Brighton Rock was beyond doubt the best book I had ever read, but I sure didn’t know what to make of The Journal of Albion Moonlight. I spent a lot of time “reading” it, but I never seemed to get anywhere. I couldn’t tell you what it was about or what happened in it if my life depended on it. It’s like this thing was written by a crazy person. Even the printing was crazy, sometimes tiny, sometimes huge, and sometimes the sentences and even the words themselves were all out of order.

There was almost half a page with nothing but the word

“look!” repeated over and over again. I don’t know anything about the guy, but whoever he was, I hope he got help.

I was also struggling with the songs for the new band (the Nancy Wheelers, me on guitar, Sam Hellerman on bass and Ouija board, first album: Margaret? It’s God. Please Shut Up. ) I could never get the songs to come out how I wanted. I’d have a great idea for this brilliant tune where the lyrics and the melody and the sounds and the arrangement would all complement each other and resolve into a perfect three-minute encapsulation of a true experience that would play with the 165

listeners’ emotions while simultaneously crushing their skulls.

I would start speculating about how it was only a matter of time before they awarded me the Nobel Prize for Rock and Roll, once word of it got round to Sweden. But then I’d actually try to play it or write down the lyrics and it would totally suck.

Finally, there was the Fiona Deal. Fiona seemed more and more distant. I’d spent quite a bit of time riding my bike around various neighborhoods and school areas, scanning all the girls for any who looked even vaguely Fiona-esque. I got nowhere. Eventually, I just dropped it.

I still thought about “giving her the time,” of course. But she had faded into the background, almost to the point where she was more or less equivalent to all the other imaginary girls whose images I used as masturbatory props. She was as distant as a movie star. Fiona Schmiona. Maybe she went to OMH, maybe she had known who I was, maybe she had been a real fake drama mod, maybe not. Maybe everything she had said was a lie. Maybe I had imagined her. Or maybe she was madly in love with me, and was wandering the earth pining away but could never reveal herself because the Illuminati had kidnapped her parents and had sworn to kill them and detonate a nuclear device they had hidden at Disneyland if she ever made herself known. She was doing it for the children. All of these scenarios were equally plausible.

And I have to say I was starting to think I didn’t really care too much anymore. That was my attitude.

In view of this, I was floored by what Sam Hellerman said when he finally got to the point.

“I found Fiona.”

I dropped my coffee cup.

* * *

166

“She gave you a phony name,” said Sam Hellerman, once I had regained my (devil-head) composure and he had stopped laughing—for which I couldn’t blame him: I hadn’t planned it that way, but the momentary failure of my cup-holding abilities had asserted itself with near-perfect comedic timing.

“Her real name is Deanna,” he continued. “And she’s a little weird.”

He reached into his backpack and pulled out a large red book, which turned out to be last year’s yearbook from Immaculate Heart Academy in Salthaven Vista. He opened it to a folded-over page and pointed to a black-and-white picture. There she was: Deanna Schumacher. As I was silently kicking myself for not having considered the Catholic school option as a possible Fiona habitat, he told me what he knew.

Deanna Schumacher was the girlfriend of this guy named Dave, who was a CHS fake mod. She had probably made out with me to make him jealous, which was something she was known for doing. She was not a fake mod herself, but rather a generic Catholic schoolgirl, though she was in drama at IHA-SV. She was a little bit psycho and was always doing head trips on her friends and boyfriend. Oh yeah, and by the way: this Dave guy was looking for me and wanted to kick my ass.

She was no longer even in the area. She had moved to Miami with her family just the week before, when her father had suddenly and mysteriously been transferred.

“Miami,” I said dubiously. “Florida.”

“Or near there,” said Sam Hellerman.

I looked at the black-and-white yearbook photo of a dark-haired girl with glasses. She did look a little psycho. The glasses looked about right, though they weren’t exactly the 167

same—but people can have different glasses, of course, from year to year. All things considered, she looked quite a bit like the Fiona I remembered, though I don’t know if I’d have recognized her if she hadn’t been pointed out. My memory of Fiona was idealized and faulty, shaped by the fake fake mod costume and my own fantasies, as I had to acknowledge. In a Catholic schoolgirl uniform she wouldn’t, in a sense, have been the same girl. I felt as though I would have been able to pick her belly out of a lineup and to identify what Sam Hellerman would have called her left boobie by touch alone, but maybe not. Girls all have the same parts, basically, and so much of how they look depends on the attitude, expecta-tions, and obsessions of those who are looking at them.

The moving away to Florida part sounded very fake, of course. Maybe Sam Hellerman was just trying to help me “let go” with a little white lie that removed all doubt about her lack of availability. And I appreciated it, I guess. Fiona wasn’t real. Whatever. Like I could keep track of all the imaginary girls in my life.

But, see, the truth is, I couldn’t quite let go of the idea of Fiona even now that I knew she was fake. Even fake Fiona had a hold on me. I kind of lied about how it was all pure imaginary sex, and how I had stopped daydreaming about a Sex Alliance Against Society with her, even though she was now even more imaginary than she had been before Sam Hellerman showed me the IHA-SV yearbook.

I didn’t believe that Miami story for one second, of course. That was just Sam Hellerman trying to be clever and stage-manage my pain, like he does from time to time. He’s a born facilitator.

She still lived in Salthaven or Salthaven Vista and went to 168

Immaculate Heart Academy, Slut Heaven. Of course she did.

Except her name was Deanna now instead of Fiona.

Okay. Could there be a future for Deanna Schumacher and me? Well, no. But was it worth continuing to obsess over her anyway? Why the hell not? You know, I could track her down and she would fall for me and break up with her boyfriend and we could go away together. Deanna Schumacher and me, I mean, not me and the boyfriend. And maybe she could even dress up as Fiona for me from time to time. When you think about it, it wouldn’t be too different from how grown-up wives dress up in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms for their husbands, except in Deanna Schumacher’s case she’d be in her Catholic schoolgirl uniform to begin with and would have to take it off in order to put on the Fiona costume and then put it on again when we were done pleasing each other.

Or maybe I could just develop the school uniform fetish myself, so she wouldn’t even have to do the fake Fiona thing. I’m sure she’d appreciate that, with her busy schedule and so forth. And you know, once I articulated that thought, I was pretty sure I already had started to develop the school uniform fetish. This was promising.

I M B EC I LE!

Knowing her true identity and where she went to school put the whole Fiona Deal, which had now become the Deanna Schumacher Deal, in a new light. Instead of blindly obsessing and trying to spot her at random, I now knew where to start looking, and it felt like waking up in a new and better world.

Sam Hellerman had said I could keep the IHA-SV yearbook—

one of his CHS friends had stolen it from an older sister who 169

went there, and didn’t care too much about getting it back.

I made a note of the name, Wendee Foot, etched in gold lettering on the cover, just in case I needed to contact her for further information. The messages this girl’s friends had scribbled in it were pretty hilarious, and that was diverting for at least a while, but other than the photo Sam Hellerman had pointed out, I couldn’t find any information on Deanna Schumacher in the yearbook. She wasn’t on any teams or in any clubs, not even drama, as Sam Hellerman had indicated.

Well, she could have joined this year, I supposed. She didn’t even appear to have been in the group class picture—at least, I didn’t recognize her if she was.

Once I was back home, just to see, I looked up

“Schumacher” in the phone book. No listing. Well, that would have been too easy. I clipped out the little black-and-white photo and put it on my desk, trying to decide if it would be too sad to start carrying it in my wallet. I know, I suck. But you have to give me a break. It was all I had.

I spent the Saturday after the Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway meeting staring at Deanna Schumacher’s photo, moping, and playing the guitar. The next day was Halloween, and I spent that day doing pretty much the same thing.

When it began to get dark, I broke down and dialed up Sam Hellerman, but he was out. Maybe he was at another CHS party and hadn’t invited me this time because he didn’t want to risk another Fiona-Deanna fiasco? In fact, I didn’t actually believe that Sam Hellerman had gone to a Halloween party, though it was funny to speculate on what kind of goofy-ass costume he would have worn. A month before, I’d have said it was weird that Sam Hellerman hadn’t been home, that he was always at home when he wasn’t here, but 170

now I just didn’t know. At this point it was weird no matter where Sam Hellerman was.

Amanda was out trick-or-treating with her friends. It was a transitional time for her, the last year when trick-or-treating was appropriate, and the first year when all the girls switched from being cats or pumpkins to dressing up as hookers or French maids or slutty celebrities. Little Big Tom had been freaked out by her hoochie mama costume. “Everyone’s a ho for Halloween!” she had shouted, and then she had stormed out, slamming the door. Now, that, I thought, is one hell of a song title. I was looking forward to eavesdropping on the family discussion where LBT tried to explain how her Halloween costume was all about disrespect for women and Vietnam, but I knew I would have to wait.

I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I retreated to my room and turned the TV on. Channel two was playing horror movies all night, and Evil Dead II had just started. I put on Rattus Norvegicus, turned the TV sound down, sat down on my bed, and tried to think of something to do.

I turned to the CEH books, which I had arranged on my desk in a row against the wall, and thought about where to go next with the reading list. I had given it my best shot, but in the end I couldn’t make it through The Journal of Albion Moonlight. I think the most likely explanation for its existence is that some typesetter wanted to demonstrate all the different typefaces and font sizes and layouts his fancy printing press could do. Back in the days before computers, it must have been pretty impressive. As a story, though, it was a waste of three hundred and thirteen pages. And it told me nothing about my dad. If he went around pretending he was into it, I’d have to say he was one (devil-head) pretentious bastard of a kid. But maybe he tried to read it and didn’t get 171

it and gave up on it in frustration just like me. That’s how I’d prefer it to have been, but there was no way to know.

I had had an easier time with Siddhartha, CEH 1964. It’s about this freaky Buddha-wannabe kid, a sort of George Harrison type who wanders the earth looking for enlighten-ment or whatever. Everybody in the book is all impressed with him, kind of like how the Catcher Cult people just love that Holden Caulfield to pieces. Personally, I couldn’t really see the attraction, but the book wasn’t bad. If Catcher in the Rye were a kung fu movie, and HC went up to a mountain to learn some paradoxical truths and some martial arts techniques named after animals from an eccentric old monk, then you’d pretty much have Siddhartha. Except they leave out the part where he flies through the air beating up ninjas and finally kills the guy who murdered his family when he was a little kid in the flashback at the beginning: maybe that’s in Siddhartha II. There were several passages that my dad had marked by drawing lines on the outer margin in pencil, sometimes with question marks and once with a kind of emphatic exclamation point. It made me think of my dad as an intense, yet deep and sensitive, guy.

One corner of a page of Siddhartha, CEH 1964, had been folded over to mark the place, which happened to be the best scene in the book, where this sexy girl named Kamala kisses the main guy to reward him for reciting a poem about how hot she is. It reminded me of how Fiona-Deanna had made out with me because she was impressed with my powerful vocabulary, and somehow that felt encouraging. It gave me a feeling of everything coming together.

But there was also, at the top of one page, a spot where the word “help” had been written heavily in pen over and over, so that it had almost pierced through the paper and etched the word into several pages below it. That seemed 172

kind of desperate looking and sad, especially as it contrasted starkly with the serene tone of the book itself. In any other situation, this would have struck me as unremarkable. I’d done the same sort of thing countless times in my notebooks.

But because it had been written by my dad, however long ago, it was simply excruciating to look at. I would never know what had caused him that kind of distress, though I suppose he had found comfort in Siddhartha, which was yet another thing I probably would never quite understand all the way. I shook the thought out of my head.

Well, at least Siddhartha was short, which was the way to go when choosing books from the CEH library. I decided the next one would be Slan, CEH 1965, which was short as well.

Evil Dead II had ended, and channel two was about fifteen minutes into Blood on Satan’s Claw. I let the last couple of songs on Pink Flag play out, and then put on Black Rose. I carefully replaced Siddhartha in its slot amongst the other books, feeling a bit solemn as I always did when handling them. Then I stood there staring at them for a while.

Something was bugging me. Something about the books . . .

Many of the titles would make great band names. I had always thought that one of the best potential band names among them was La Peste, CEH 1965, a book I hadn’t even considered trying to read because it was in French, and I was pretty sure it would be too tough for me, despite my mastery of the present tense and telling time in the twenty-four-hour system. But obviously, my dad had been able to read French all right, if this had been among his books. I couldn’t imagine reading a whole book in French. The educational system must have been quite a bit better back then, I thought, before they decided to adopt the collage ’n’ Catcher curriculum.

Now, if this were a murder mystery, and I were a weird Belgian guy with a big mustache, this is the point where I 173

would suddenly stop dead, drop my tiny glass of chocolate liqueur, and say something like “But no! But I have been an imbecile! Imbécile! ” And then you’d have to wait another fifty pages or so to find out exactly what the hell I had been talking about. But I won’t do that to you.

The salutation of Tit’s note had been mon cher monsieur,

“my dear sir” in French and kind of a standard French way to start a letter. I hadn’t thought too much about it before. But the thought that struck me while I was standing there in front of the books, looking at La Peste, CEH 1965, and listening to Thin Lizzy was: what if mon cher monsieur hadn’t been a real part of the note, but rather part of the key, like the scratched-out and corrected date?

Well, that was it. Tit had been very, very complicated about it, though and even with the key from the Catcher I almost didn’t realize I had cracked the code. But after a lengthy scribbling session, I pretty much had it. The salutation was indeed an indication to the recipient that the coded message would be in French. Tit had left out the punctuation and accents, regrouped the characters in strings of fourteen, and recopied the resulting coded message backward before arranging the fourteen-character clumps underneath each other—man, those boys must have had a lot of time on their hands.

It decoded to:

“J’ai vu MT hier soir et je l’ai ramonée sec. Détails à suivre.

Vas-tu aux funerailles? J’aimerais meiux être ligoté et fouetté.”

At first, though I recognized it as French, I wasn’t able to figure out exactly where all the accents and spaces and punctuation went, though it helped that the capital letters had remained in the code-parallelogram. The word mieux had been misspelled. As I’ve said, despite three-plus years of study, French wasn’t my strongest suit. But I was highly motivated.

174

In the end I had to ask Madame Jimenez-Macanally a few discreet questions at school the next day, but eventually I was able to punctuate and translate it.

The first line threw me a bit because of the verb ramoner, which I’d never seen before but which grabbed my attention as it would any Ramones fan. According to the dictionary, it literally means “to scrub out or vigorously clean a chimney.”

Here, though, it was clearly being used as a sexual metaphor.

To ramone someone dry, as Tit’s sentence had it, is to, well, you know—do I have to draw a diagram, folks? It couldn’t have had anything to do with the actual Ramones—unless that’s where they got their name or something?

Anyway, the whole thing translates, roughly, as:

“I saw MT last night and I ramoned her dry. Details to follow. Are you going to the funeral? I would rather be tied up and whipped.”

I learned more French translating those sentences with a dictionary and a grammar and a weird conversation with Madame Jimenez-Macanally than I had in three-plus years of Jean and Claude, I can tell you that.

175

November

TH E F E STIVAL OF LIG HTS

I can’t even begin to describe how hard it was to refrain from mentioning the Catcher code to Sam Hellerman on the way to school the next day.

He was in a buoyant mood when I met him at the usual corner. He wanted to discuss his new theory:

“Just think what a better world we would have,” he said,

“if David Bowie had never met Brian Eno. That was the worst tragedy of the twentieth century.”

“Really?” I said.

In fact, I disagreed rather strongly with this, but my mind was on other things, and, to be honest, Sam Hellerman was getting on my nerves. Who wanted to think about Eno and Bowie when there was a Deanna Schumacher and a Catcher code on the menu? I didn’t even bother trying to ask him where he had been on Halloween night: I knew he’d only lie, which would demean us both. Plus, I still had some questions to ask Madame Jimenez-Macanally about the French text before I could be totally sure what the message said, so I was preoccupied. I gave him the silent treatment for most of the way. But I doubt he noticed: it wasn’t too different from how things were when I was not giving him the silent treatment.

I found Madame Jimenez-Macanally in her classroom during Brunch and asked her my questions about accents, punctuation, funerals, ramoning, and being tied up and whipped. She had more questions about my questions than I thought necessary or polite, and she was giving me a peculiar look the whole time, but I ended up getting what I needed.

Then, when class started, I’d catch her staring at me from time to time with this mystified expression.

“Mack Anally has a crush on you,” said Yasmynne Schmick, noticing.

179

That was kind of funny, but I had other concerns.

Because Madame J.-M. and I were basically in the same mystified boat. The “solved” puzzle was still a puzzle. What the hell did it mean?

Now, the school calendar for November is dominated by this thing called “Homecoming.” I’m not all that clear on it, but I know it involves a football game, a “Rally,” and a dance, plus a slew of other pointless and embarrassing activities intended to promote the whole thing. It’s nothing to do with me. They always decorate the Hillmont Knight with flowers and blue and white ribbons. And this year, they had signs up everywhere trying to stoke excitement over Spirit Week:

“Come See the Spirit Towel!” Even if I knew what the hell the Spirit Towel was, I don’t think I’d tell you: I’m pretty sure we’re all better off not knowing.

I have my doubts as to whether even the full-on normal people cared very much about Homecoming or Spirit Week, to be honest. But definitely no one in my world (which I have to concede now included not only Sam Hellerman but also, by extension, the drama hippies) had the slightest interest in any of this stuff, other than to mock it. Yasmynne Schmick, who had by now become my regular Advanced Conversation partner, had said: “I can’t help it, Moe—I’m obsessed with the Spirit Towel.” Which I thought was pretty funny, actually.

But with the announcement of the Spirit Week activities came some more interesting and surprising news. The Hillmont powers that be, for reasons that remain unclear, had decided to hold a “Battle of the Bands” instead of a Pep Rally for December. Well, first they called it a Battle of the Bands, but someone objected to the word “Battle” as being too com-petitive. Which is hilarious, because “Battle” is far too gentle 180

a word to use to describe the game of survival of the most psychotic that is the soul and essence of Hillmont High School and that would have made Charles Darwin himself weep and wish he’d never invented a theory to elucidate it.

Some things are better left unelucidated, he would have said, and it would have been hard to disagree with him.

So anyway, they changed the name to “Convergence of the Bands,” and then to “Convergence!” because they didn’t want to restrict it to bands. Then, and why I’ll never know, they changed the name to “Festival of Lights.” But essentially we were looking at your basic high school talent show. It was going to happen during fourth period–lunch–fifth period at the end of the second week of December, six weeks away.

“Green Sabbath should totally try to get on this,” said Sam Hellerman, during one of his increasingly rare appearances in my presence instead of in the shadow of the Hillmont Knight and Celeste Fletcher’s ass. He was talking about Green Sabbath, of course, Monsignor Eco-druid on guitar, The Grim Recycler on bass and industrial sabotage, Todd “Percussion”

Panchowski on drums, percussion, acoustic and semiacoustic drums, cymbals, tambourines, cowbells, chimes, gongs, toms, shaker eggs, bongos, stick clicks, wood blocks, percussion, percussion and more percussion. First album Our Drummer Is Kind of Full of Himself.

I looked at him dubiously. How could we ever get on it?

You had to submit an audition tape to this group of normal students supervised by Mr. Teone. A tape of us actually playing, I was pretty sure, would automatically disqualify us, maybe even permanently, from playing anywhere, even with a more sympathetic panel of judges. Anyway, it sounded like a Festival of Insufferable Tedium and Aggravation to me. Did we even want to get in on it?

“We do,” said Sam Hellerman, “and we can.” And he 181

gave me that “leave it to me” look. So I figured he had a plan.

At the time, I found it difficult to see how any good could come of such a thing. And as it turns out, I guess I was mostly right.

DR. H EXSTROM

My first “therapy” appointment was also during that first week of November. My mom insisted on driving me there, even though I wanted to ride my bike. That was to make sure I wouldn’t duck out, which was a valid concern. She checked me in with the receptionist but didn’t stick around to see the shrink with me—maybe that was against the rules or something.

The psychiatrist was Dr. Judith Hexstrom. My plan had been to give her the old freaky-youth-genius treatment and try to unnerve her with silence and unreadable facial expressions. I was thinking maybe if I could convince her I was legitimately crazy I could at least get some medication that I could give to Sam Hellerman for a Christmas present. It didn’t work out that way, though.

For one thing, to my surprise, I kind of liked Dr.

Hexstrom. She wasn’t young or pretty, but there was something about her face that I liked, even though it was my considered opinion that her whole profession wasn’t much more than a shameless racket. And she was by far the most intelligent adult I’d ever talked to.

Here’s how sharp Dr. Hexstrom was: I happened to mention Mr. Teone’s “naked day of zombies” comment, as an example of his bizarre behavior and of how weird normal people can be. “Pretty strange, huh?” I said.

182

“Not really. If you were wearing that shirt.”

I looked down at my T-shirt, then raised my head and gave her the look that says “how so?”

Dr. Hexstrom said: “Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet. It’s Latin for ‘Kill them all, and God will know his own.’ From the Middle Ages, the Crusades.”

Damn. I had been wearing my “Kill ’em All” shirt that day, and he had made me turn it inside out. And Dr.

Hexstrom’s phrase did sound kind of like what Mr. Teone had said, allowing for his speech impediment. It made more sense than “day of suicide-osity,” anyway, though I’d still classify it as a bizarre episode, especially with all that laughing.

I looked at Dr. Hexstrom, and my look said: “how the hell did you figure that out?”

Then, when she didn’t respond, I said, out loud, if I remember correctly: “How the hell did you figure that out?”

“It’s well known,” she said imperiously.

It’s well known. Not by me it wasn’t. I’m not sure she was able to pick it up, but I gave her the look that said: “well, la-di-da.”

I had expected Dr. Hexstrom to plunge into the suicide thing right away, but instead, the first thing she said was,

“That’s an unusual book.”

She was talking about The Doors of Perception, CEH 1966.

I know I said that the next CEH book on the reading list was Slan. I had started it, and it was pretty cool. It was about this freaky kid whose dad is dead. He and his mom are members of a mutant alien species called slans that have telepathic powers because of tendrils on their heads, which they try to disguise by hiding them in their hair-dos. But the normal people still pursue them and try to exterminate them. They got the dad already when the main slan was a little kid, and 183

they get the mom, too, right at the beginning of the book. I could totally relate.

But there had been a change in plans since I solved the Catcher code and gained a new interest in underlining, so I put Slan aside temporarily. Only two of the books had a whole lot of actual underlining: The Doors of Perception and The Naked and the Dead. The Naked and the Dead was the one that had been inscribed only CH with no date, so I wasn’t even sure it belonged with the others. However, it was the one where the markings had seemed the most codelike.

There were individual words underlined, sometimes very in-significant ones like “of ” or “very”; some were circled and sometimes only parts of words were underlined or circled. If there was an encoded message in there, though, I couldn’t find it. And I had spent hours and hours trying.

I had originally shied away from this book because I was worried it had to do with the Grateful Dead and nudity, and, well, let me put it this way: if you can imagine a more alarming combination, your imagination is quite a bit better than mine. Then I realized it was about war, and it was more like naked people and dead people, two of my favorite subjects, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Now, this book was by a guy named Norman Mailer, and he was a piece of work. You know how Holden Caulfield said

“giving her the time?” Well it was the same with Norman Mailer. He said “fug.” I kid you not. Like “this is a fugging nightmare!” or “go fug yourself.” You know, it’s no wonder everyone was all crazy and weird in the sixties, if everything was being run by prissy grandma types like Holden Caulfield and Norman Mailer.

In the end I couldn’t take much of The Naked and the Dead, and I put it aside for later. It wasn’t like it was even a real CEH book anyway. I went for The Doors of Perception in-184

stead, because it had a lot of underlining, too, though admittedly it didn’t look very code-y.

The Doors of Perception is about this guy who takes a lot of drugs to try to see what it’s like to be a crazy person. It’s kind of interesting, but the guy is pretty full of himself and a bad writer, too. He seems to forget what he was going to say around halfway through many of his long, complicated sentences, and then he tries to cover it up by spattering the page with highfalutin words that I swear he just made up. 30 Days to a More Annoying Vocabulary. If Holden Caulfield were to read it, he’d say something like “Gee, Wally, that’s swell and junk, but I feel all crumby on account of how it’s so phony and all.”

Still, I got a kick out of watching the drug guy try to pretend he was doing his drugs for some noble purpose rather than just indulging himself and getting high and trying to show off how with-it he was. It’s cool if you want to do drugs, but if you go around claiming it’s like discovering Antarctica or curing cancer you’re not fooling anyone but yourself.

Believe it or not, that’s pretty much what Dr. Hexstrom and I talked about, and she even kind of seemed to see what I was getting at. She was the only adult I had ever met who was Catcher aware but not necessarily Catcher devoted. She said she thought HC needed medication, and we had a good laugh about that one. She was all right.

Dr. Hexstrom was very interested in the CEH reading list, which I hadn’t intended to tell her about, but somehow I couldn’t stop myself in the end. I didn’t mention Tit or the Catcher code, of course, but we did talk a lot about Brighton Rock and even a little about the guy I accidentally beat up (though I downplayed it a bit and left out most of the blood, in consideration of the sensibilities of my audience). It was nice to talk to someone about a book without being worried 185

that they would make you copy a page out of it, even though it probably wasn’t going to cure my unspecified mental problems and even though I very much doubted it would turn out to be worth a hundred and fifty bucks.

I think it was the most I’d ever spoken out loud in one sitting, and in spite of myself, I actually had a pretty good time.

In fact, we never made it to the suicide thing. It was just like on TV. She said, “I’m sorry but I’m afraid our time is up.” I doubt she was actually all that sorry, but I kind of was.

S I STE R HO OD I S P OWE R F U L

Remember how the world came loose from its hinges and the fabric of reality began to unravel thread by thread and the space-time continuum got all chopped up and out of order all of a sudden? Well, that was just a passing thing.

What I’m getting at is, after weeks of transgressions against the established norms of dating mandated by international law, Née-Née Tagliafero abruptly ditched Pierre Butterfly Cameroon, bringing to a close one of the most curious episodes in Hillmont High School history. She started going instead with an eminently normal slow-witted alpha sadist named Mike Moon, who promptly proceeded to beat the hell out of Pierre Butterfly Cameroon in the parking lot before first period, to the evident amusement of a small crowd of onlookers and with the apparent approval of sweet little Née-Née as well. Like I said, back to normal.

WAGBOG.

Sam Hellerman’s stint of spending every single lunch period with the drama hippies also abruptly ended on the same day: he met me at around locker 414, like in the old days, just as if the intervening weeks hadn’t even happened. And, you 186

know, maybe I should have spotted it sooner, but there were just too many coincidences in bloom in and around this particular patch of the Sam Hellerman garden.

We were in the cafeteria. I was staring at Sam Hellerman with the question on my face, and he knew what the question was without my having to say it out loud. His earlier evasiveness had evaporated, and he actually seemed in a pretty good mood, though I didn’t know why yet.

“There’s some stuff I haven’t told you,” he said, as though that were something I didn’t already know.

Then Sam Hellerman began to tell the following story: It seems that the Celeste Fletcher trio, along with the Syndie Duffy group and a few others as well, had this kind of club that they called the Sisterhood. (I know—I’m eye-rolling and gagging, too.) They had a lot of complicated activities and rules and procedures, but the one that concerned Sam Hellerman was this game called Dud Chart. Or, I guess it was more like a contest. The name comes from this board game for girls called Mystery Date, where you would open a door in the middle of the board and the guy behind it would either be a dream, meaning a Greg Brady–looking guy with big fluffy sideburns in a purple velvet tuxedo, or a dud, meaning a guy who pretty much looked like Sam Hellerman and me.

It was pretty kitschy retro popular. I think Mystery Date was even the theme of one of the proms last year.

In Dud Chart, they had this chart of all the dorky, nerdy guys in school, and the object was for each girl to score points on the chart by flirting with them or making out with them in various ways. Like you’d get a certain number of points for flirting, for kissing, for getting to different bases, or for walking around like Née-Née Tagliafero did with Pierre Butterfly Cameroon, which had had one of the highest point values because it was so public. But it all had to be in public 187

to some degree so it could be observed and documented.

Different guys had different point values: the less desirable the guy, the higher the score. It was originally supposed to be just flirting and making out, but like a lot of dare-type situations, the stakes escalated as the game went on.

“So basically,” I said, “you’re talking about an institution-alized Make-out/Fake-out.”

“Pretty much,” he said, a little curtly, and continued to explain the system.

I supposedly had a pretty high point value, mostly because of the now-famous PE Rape-Prevention balls incident, which had made a big splash. Bobby Duboyce was near the top, too, because of his helmet. But here’s where Sam Hellerman came in. Celeste Fletcher, hoping to gain unfair advantage over the other girls, had hired Sam Hellerman as a kind of consultant. He pretty much knew everyone on the chart, and had all sorts of information about them that might be useful, and might even, she thought, be able to help set some of them up. Sam Hellerman’s stipulation was that she use her influence to keep both him and me off the chart and out of the game, which she had somehow been able to do. I said a silent prayer of thanks: my life definitely didn’t need another formal humiliation ritual.

They had planned to do some kind of splashy announcement of the results at one of the pep rallies. I don’t know, maybe passing out a zine with all the scores, or posting the chart? That’s just a guess. It didn’t actually happen because before they could complete the game Syndie Duffy had had a big falling-out with Lorra Jaffe. I don’t know the details, but the whole Sisterhood had basically collapsed in a shambles of infighting and scheming against one another, and Dud Chart had been forgotten in the excitement. Lorra Jaffe had focused her energy on trying to destroy Syndie Duffy instead of win-188

ning the relatively inconsequential make-out-with-dorks contest, and everyone else had followed suit.

It’s pretty hard to keep these elaborate schemes going for too long, though they can sometimes coast along on their own for a while. Meanspiritedness is powerful. I have no doubt that Née-Née Tagliafero’s team would have won, though. The Pierre Butterfly Cameroon gambit had been so spectacular that it was still being talked about several towns down the strip months later.

In the end, the Dud Chart fiasco was an object lesson in how getting involved with normal people, if you’re not normal yourself, or even if you’re subnormal/drama, is always trouble.

You start by allowing your own world to be corrupted by their warped values, and then you gradually start using their sadistic methods and eventually end up adopting bits of their sick ideology. And even then, when you have become just like them, they will eventually turn on you anyway. Normal people are savage beasts. Even Sam Hellerman hadn’t been immune: he sold out his people, though the corruption thankfully hadn’t been deep enough to induce him to betray the sacred bonds of alphabetical order. It’s sad. I imagine some of those girls at least had been decent, nice people before they were infected with normalcy by exposure to Lorra Jaffe. Maybe not, though.

I was impressed by the deal Sam Hellerman had managed to get for his services as Celeste Fletcher’s Dork Consultant. Two full bottles of Percodan (from her dad’s pharmacy), a half-bottle of Valium (from her mom’s night table), twenty dollars, and a blow job. No way did I believe the blow job part at first, but he looked so serious and, um, pleased with himself while he was saying it that I even almost started to believe it. Or maybe I just wanted to believe that there were circumstances where it was conceivable that a 189

Sam Hellerman could get a blow job, even an insincere one, from a Celeste Fletcher. And if you are under the impression that I was not burning with envy over said insincere blow job, I can assure you that you are quite mistaken.

According to Sam Hellerman, anyway, Celeste Fletcher had been a Sister of her word despite the cancelled contest.

But she had held out till the end of the term of the deal before delivering the i. b. j. as a kind of final payment, which partly explained his searching looks in her direction out there on the lawn (he had been keeping an eye on his business interests, among other things) and his seeming indifference now that the transaction had been completed. On learning this, it occurred to me that oral sex would probably have been worth a lot of points in their game and that maybe Sam Hellerman had been in the running for the Make-out/Fake-out after all without his knowledge. Or maybe he had known, but they hadn’t known he’d known. Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s faking out whom in the battle of the sexes. It hardly matters, though. A blow job is a blow job. Or so I am given to understand.

The Hellerman/Fletcher eye-ray/ass phenomenon had been pretty spectacular, though, and I still wasn’t sure, so I asked one last question: was it all just business, or did he really have the hots for Celeste Fletcher?

“Henderson,” he said, as he does when he wants me to know he’s being serious, “I have the hots for everyone.”

I could see his point.

COI NC I DE NC E S WI LL D O THAT TO YOU

Meanwhile, it was time to reassess the Catcher code. There wasn’t any direct evidence that the note had in fact been ad-190

dressed to my dad, but it was a fair assumption. So my dad had had a friend, a Sam Hellerman–ish figure, named Tit, and they used to give each other coded notes. Probably there had been many, many other such notes, because such elaborate methods only develop over time, and not if you’re just dab-bling. Each of the scribbled dates in the Catcher had potentially been keys to notes that were now lost. The note preserved in A Separate Peace was, I was guessing, a tiny rem-nant of a vast body of other coded notes, like a dinosaur’s fos-silized rib. The more bones you find, the easier it is to imagine what the dinosaur might have looked like when it lived. If you only have the one rib, it’s harder, and the results will be sketchier. More notes would have made it easier to see the total picture of my dad and Tit and their world, but I only had the one note to go on. It was clear, though, that it was a pretty weird world.

I knew right off the bat that the picture was going to be distorted, but that didn’t prevent me from asking some questions. What kind of things did they encode? It appeared that they were in the habit of discussing more important, meaningful matters than Sam Hellerman and I ever had when we were playing our code games. Our coded messages were entirely trivial. For my dad and Tit, it was all about sexual con-quests and dead people, neither of which had ever figured prominently in my and Sam Hellerman’s lives, though I guess Sam Hellerman was showing some promise in the former category. Moreover, I got the impression that Tit and my dad weren’t doing it just for fun but because they really didn’t want anyone else to read what they were writing.

I could understand why the sexual stuff was coded: in the sixties, everybody was all uptight about sex, and I bet you would have got in trouble for writing about how you had ramoned someone. But there was something odd about the fact 191

that “the bastard is dead” had not been deemed worthy of being encoded, but “are you going to the funeral?” had been. Or maybe the bastard who was dead wasn’t the same dead guy they were having the funeral for? Or maybe “the bastard is dead” is some quotation, like the Superman reference, that I wasn’t aware of. It could have been sex again, though. The being tied up and whipped thing, I mean, though that’s just an expression, too, in a way.

Tit’s question, however, had an answer. I had no doubt that my dad had in fact gone to the funeral. The date on Timothy J. Anderson’s funeral card from The Seven Storey Mountain was March 13, 1963. It didn’t square with the date on the note, but of course that wasn’t a real date; and

“3/[something]/63” had been written in the Catcher. This pretty much had to be the funeral Tit had been asking about.

Funerals don’t come up that often in a fifteen-year-old’s life.

So Timothy J. Anderson was dead, whether or not he had been “the bastard,” and my dad had gone to the funeral.

He had had a book with him at the time, as always, and had put the memorial card in it, and maybe used it as a bookmark.

There wasn’t much information on the card, just the date, a generic-sounding quotation from the Bible, and the location: St. Mary Star of the Sea in San Francisco. The other card in The Seven Storey Mountain, from Happy Day Dry Cleaners with One-Hour Martinizing, had no date, of course, but it happened to be located in roughly the same neighborhood as the church, if I wasn’t mistaken. All that proved was that he attended the funeral and visited the dry cleaners in the same neighborhood during the period when he was reading The Seven Storey Mountain. I knew my dad had grown up in the city, but I didn’t know where—I note-to-selfed that I should find a way to ask my mom discreetly.

I hadn’t quite finished The Doors of Perception yet, but it 192

was clear that The Seven Storey Mountain was the book I should be reading, even though it looked kind of boring. I picked it up to flip through it and almost dropped it in surprise, because the title page had a quote from the Bible, and it was the same one that had been printed on Timothy J.

Anderson’s funeral card: “for I tell you that God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”

It kind of made me shiver like when you’re afraid of something spooky. Coincidences will do that to you.

TH E ART E N S E M B LE OF C H ICAGO

If we were really going to be in this Festival of Lights thing, we had our work cut out for us. We didn’t sound—what’s the word I’m looking for? “Good”? Yes, that’s the one: we didn’t sound good. We had grand ambitions but limited talent and finesse, and we had less than six weeks to get our act together.

Nevertheless, choosing the band name, stage names, credits, and first album title for your first performance during a midday talent exhibition in the high school auditorium are some of the most important decisions in a band’s career, and we gave them a great deal of thought.

Eventually, we settled on Balls Deep, Comrade Gal-hammer on guitar, Our Dear Leader on bass and embroidery, the Lonely Dissident on Real Fancy and Important Percussion, first album We Control the Horizontal. We were going for a kind of communist guerilla/seventies porn vibe. If we had had the time or ability we would have grown mustaches and chest hair. That wasn’t possible, but we did have big medallions and little blue Chinese hats with red stars on them from the surplus store, and these huge white shoulder holsters that looked great with the black mechanic’s jumpsuits 193

we got from the St. Vincent de Paul. I swiped Little Big Tom’s Che Guevara T-shirt, which looked pretty cool when I un-zipped the jumpsuit down to Che’s cute little chin and positioned my medallion over his nose.

Amanda, who has a lot of artistic talent, even painted us a big banner, following Sam Hellerman’s specifications, though I think she put a lot of herself into it, too. It was very seventies, with some silhouetted figures in educational kama sutra poses along the bottom, and a big AK-47 on either side.

“You’ll never get away with this,” she said, and I supposed she was probably right. It did look great, though.

Sam Hellerman’s idea for the audition tape was simple: just make a tape of a real, harmless band and put our name on it. Well, not our full name. We were going to be B.D. till the day of the show. We ended up putting some of Little Big Tom’s bland elevator rock on the tape.

I felt bad because Little Big Tom came in while we were making the tape and was like over the moon because he thought we were interested in his music. We had to humor him and listen to him deliver around six hundred speeches about fusion and the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Chicano and Latino influences on pretentious jazzy pseudorock. I think it was probably the happiest I’d ever seen him. And I also felt bad about the fact that after he left we kind of made fun of the funny way he said Latino, like he was the Frito Bandito or something. I felt bad, but I did it anyway, because I’m only human. I was ashamed of myself and depressed afterward, though, which is human, too, I guess. Being human is an excuse for just about everything, but it also kind of sucks in a way.

Now that we had laid the groundwork, all we had to do was try to convince Todd Panchowski to show up to some practices for a change. Sam Hellerman said he’d get right on it.

194

A WE I R D, WE I R D TH I NG

I was scheduled to visit Dr. Hexstrom’s office every Tuesday for the foreseeable future. In our second session, during Spirit Week, she continued to talk to me about books and my dad’s teenage library, never even bringing up the suicide thing. Or rather, I talked about the books. Strangely, I was doing most of the talking. Usually my role in a conversation is just to stare at the other person till they lose track of what they’re trying to say and eventually give up. But with Dr. Hexstrom, it was almost like these roles were reversed. Sometimes her facial expressions would communicate things like “oh, come off it,” or “I see what you’re getting at,” or “I have no idea what you’re talking about right now.” Other times her face would be like that of a blank, unreadable mannequin head.

I wasn’t used to this role, and I was embarrassed by how I sounded when I tried to speak like that. In my head, my thoughts always sound so good and persuasive and witty and well constructed, even when I’m confused about something.

I can be addled, or totally lost, or even feeling crazy, but I usually have at least some confidence in my ability to describe the confusion, even if I don’t have any idea what the hell I’m doing. Out loud, though, it’s a mess. I sound like way more of an idiot than I like to think I am. I’m worse than Little Big Tom. It was only because I liked and trusted Dr.

Hexstrom so much that I could handle the humiliation—I would have run from the room screaming if anybody else had been there.

Anyway, as I explained to Dr. Hexstrom during our second ride on the funky mental-health express, the main guy in The Doors of Perception really is an ass. At one point, he picks up The Tibetan Book of the Dead, opens it at random, and finds great significance in this quotation: “O nobly born, let not thy 195

mind be distracted.” Mmm, deep. I guess if you’re on drugs all the time, and if you’re confident that everyone will be all impressed by the fact that you’re o. d. all the t., and if you make sure you get in at least one mention of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, you can get away with scribbling down any old thing, and pretending it’s a book. And everyone will just go along with it. Or it was like that in the sixties, anyway. The Doors of Perception guy is a Little Big Tom type, only much less loveable. You get lost in one of his convoluted sentences and you may never find your way back again: just light a signal fire with a couple of otherwise unattested adverbs and hope the rescue squad notices you and sends in a helicopter to fly you out. The book is short, but it took what seemed like several lifetimes to be over, and when it finally was over I felt as though I had just been informed that I didn’t have terminal cancer after all. There was another “book” in the same volume called Heaven and Hell, but I was confident that this guy would have nothing to teach me about hell that I had not already directly experienced while slogging through The Doors of Perception, so I decided to give it a miss.

The Seven Storey Mountain started off slow, but at least you could tell it was about something real, not just some poseur showing off. The main reason I started reading it was to see if I could figure out if there was a reason why the funeral card and the book shared the same scriptural quotation. So far I couldn’t tell about that, but the book was strangely absorb-ing. It reminded me of Slan, a bit. It’s about this weird, slightly freaky kid whose mom is dead and whose dad is this crazy artist. He reminded me a little of me, too, to be honest. Well, he’s not quite as freaky as me or the slan kid, maybe, but I could tell his true freakiness was scheduled to come out later, since he drops a lot of hints right from the beginning that he’s going to end up becoming a monk at the end. That sort of 196

blows the suspense, though maybe the excitement is all in how he ends up getting there—the best stories are sometimes like that.

I hadn’t even known they still had monks outside of D

and D, kung fu movies, and heavy metal albums. But I have this weird interest in priests and churches and that sort of thing because the seventh-grade aptitude test and my derogatory nickname set me up for it. I don’t know if it has occurred to you, but I couldn’t help thinking that maybe the dim but well-intentioned social engineer who had designed that aptitude test had read The Seven Storey Mountain and incorpo-rated it into the test, so that when I answered questions indicating that I was a weird, slightly freaky kid with one parent missing like this slanlike monk-to-be character, the test said “ding! Clergy!”

If that’s the case, I bet the Seven Storey Mountain guy never dreamed that his book would set in motion a process that fifty years later would cause a fourteen-year-old rock and roller in suburban California to have as his derogatory nickname an abbreviation for Child Molester. Or maybe he knew all along that that’s what would happen. And wrote the book anyway, the bastard.

So I had to explain to Dr. Hexstrom about Chi-Mo in order to talk about my Seven Storey Mountain theory. I could tell she didn’t believe me at first, but then I could tell she did. She seemed pretty taken aback by it. I can see why. It’s a weird, weird thing.

NATU R E’S MARVE LS

We had known it was coming, and eventually it did, the day after my second Dr. Hexstrom session. To pay us back for 197

skipping boxing to discuss Deanna Schumacher at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway, Mr. Donnelly decided to subject Sam Hellerman and me to this thing they call a “grudge match.”

That’s when they put two best friends in the ring of subhuman PE students. There’s this theory that such fights will be especially vicious and entertaining because of the fighters’

long history with each other and because they’re more likely to react with indignation when attacked by one another.

“Grudge match” doesn’t seem like the most appropriate term for it, but that’s what they call it, being psychopathic semiliterates with vocabularies that are, let’s face it, not all that powerful.

This is the sort of thing that gets everyone really excited around here. The girls took time off from Rape Prevention to crowd around and watch. The normal guys in the class even pushed pause on their “who you callin’ faggot, homo?” tape loop. Which rarely happens: this was a big occasion. Mr.

Donnelly cranked up his facial hue till he was approximately the color of ketchup and opened the proceedings in the usual way: he made us touch our gloves together, bellowed “Don’t bleed till you’re hit, Hellerman! I mean it!” and trotted backward to the corner of the mat. Then he shouted, as he always does: “Commence!”

Well, it was a dumb idea, of course, because everyone knew that bleeding before he was hit was precisely what Sam Hellerman intended to do, and that I wasn’t going to hit him anyway. In other words, there wasn’t destined to be much dork-on-dork drama, and the crowd was going to be disappointed. But in fact Sam Hellerman just stood there for a long while, staring at me. I shot him a puzzled look, and everyone shifted a little uncomfortably, as mystified as I was. I was almost starting to wonder if something had snapped inside his brain and he really intended to go through with “boxing” me, 198

but then I realized what he was up to. He was trying to stall as long as possible, knowing that once he and his spontaneously bloody nose had finally pushed off to the nurse’s office, I might still have to face another opponent. I doubted he’d be able to stall long enough, but I appreciated the ges-ture. I focused my mind on my own nose as though it were Fiona-Deanna’s candle, but try as I might, I just couldn’t make the blood flow Hellerman style—that’s why I don’t call myself a hypnotizer.

The crowd started the customary chant of “pussy, pussy, pussy,” though some were saying “kill, kill, kill,” which was ludicrously wishful thinking, under the circumstances. Some of them started trying to shove us farther into the ring toward each other. Mr. Donnelly, his face now throbbing and glow-ing and looking just a bit like a Lava lamp, was still shouting,

“Commence! Commence!”

It was at this point, amidst all the shoving, that someone successfully “pantsed” Sam Hellerman. That is to say, someone grabbed his gay little blue and white George Michael shorts by the hem of each leg and yanked them down, so that he was standing there with the g. l. b. & w. GMS’s around his ankles, looking extremely ludicrous, wearing nothing but his Boogie Knights T-shirt and his rather ill-fitting jockstrap. A wave of giggling from the Rape Prevention girls swept the room and shook the rafters. I was glad it wasn’t me they had pantsed, not least because of that whole ball-spotting thing, but my heart really went out to Sam Hellerman, especially since he had only been standing there in pantsing position in the first place out of kindness to me.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in Sam Hellerman’s situation, but if you have, you probably already know how difficult it is to pull up any gay little George Michael shorts that may happen to be resting on the floor around your an-199

kles while your hands are encased in boxing gloves. Try it if you don’t believe me. It’s very hard to get a grip. Sam Hellerman, poor guy, gave it a shot, though, exposing himself to even more indignity as he did so. That was enough for him: he looked up at Mr. Donnelly with a transcendent kind of hatred and opened the floodgates. He even leaned his head back so that the blood bubbled up from his nostrils like lava. Mount Hellerman. It was very impressive.

The crowd recoiled and seemed to hesitate between disappointment and disgust, finally settling on the surly, vapid bewilderment that is pretty much the normal person’s natural state. The vein just under the surface of Mr. Donnelly’s shiny burgundy forehead slithered like a shrink-wrapped lizard, and I almost thought he was going to say something like “curses, foiled again!” But he didn’t say c., f. a. Rather, he sputtered inarticulately and turned his attention to me, a snake eyeing a tasty rodent. Fortunately, I was saved once again through the agency of the solid, dependable Mount Hellerman, which even in the midst of a major eruption had the presence of mind to pull the fire alarm on the way out. It was at best a temporary reprieve, but it was almost worth whatever consequences lay ahead to have the opportunity to witness Mr. Donnelly’s face turn from a light burgundy to a hitherto unrecorded shade of deep magenta. One of nature’s marvels.

A B RO OD OF VI P E RS

One thing was certain: the mysteries and puzzles in my life were percolating with more oomph than they ever had previously. Yet I had the distinct impression that I wasn’t getting anywhere with them. At any rate, I now had two people to 200

investigate: Deanna Schumacher, the fake Fiona, and Timothy J. Anderson, the dead bastard. If he was the dead bastard. He probably was. How many dead people could there be in this thing?

Things were pretty much back to business-as-usual between Sam Hellerman and me since he had come clean on the Dud Chart situation. I had hesitated a bit out of lingering resentment, but after he got pantsed in boxing for my sake I relented and decided to let him in on the Catcher code, mostly because I was so pleased with myself for having cracked it and I couldn’t think of anyone other than Sam Hellerman who would be at all impressed by it. And he was impressed, though he claimed he would have easily spotted the French angle—maybe he would have, though I doubt it. I wasn’t planning to include him in the fake Fiona arm of the investigation, but he was totally on the Anderson case and insisted we go to the library the minute I showed him Tit’s note.

The first thing we did at the library was to use a concordance to look up the biblical quotation about stones and children and Abraham. Sam Hellerman knew how to do that because of his long years of experience as the son of weird German vampire religious fanatics, I guess. It was from Matthew 3:9.

The chapter was kind of hard to understand. John the Baptist is telling some authorities (he calls them a “brood of vipers”) that they aren’t as powerful as they think they are, I believe.

Sam Hellerman thought it was a more or less generic

“question authority” message. “Maybe they were trying to say that this Timothy J. Anderson was some kind of rebel.”

He had a point about the Q. A. theme, though it seemed to me there was also a warning of an impending swift and terrible revenge: it reminded me of the movie Carrie. J. the B.

201

was saying, in effect, “Okay, guys, just keep dumping buckets of pig blood on introverted girls at proms, and see what happens—you have no idea what you’re playing with here.”

I was doubtful that the actual meaning of the quote would have much to tell us about Timothy J. Anderson’s character, though. It could be a question authority message, but it could also be about the generic power of God, or about the difference between earthly and spiritual reality, you know, stones versus heaven, earth as opposed to air. It could be all of them at once, or none of them. I hadn’t read enough to be sure, but I think the Seven Story Mountain guy was getting at the rocks/air thing; plus maybe he was thinking of the stone walls of the monasteries and cathedrals of Europe, which had inspired him as a child and which, I assume, were intended to foreshadow his eventual monk-ization. Who knows? The SSM guy chose it for whatever reason he might have had; maybe Timothy J. Anderson or his survivors had chosen it because they were under the influence of that book, or maybe for some other unrelated reason. All I’m saying is that as far as the content goes, the epigraph and the epitaph might as well have said “Have a Nice Day” or “I Heart Cats”

for all the difference it would make. You can make something mean anything you want. And you can spend a great deal of time and effort choosing your words and allusions and quotations carefully and hardly anyone will even notice or get it anyway.

But, as usual, while I was giving myself this stern lecture on the meaninglessness of the data we’d just uncovered and how communication is pointless and we’re all doomed, Sam Hellerman was noticing the interesting part. I was jolted out of my daydream by the sound of his finger hitting the page of the Jerusalem Bible that lay open on the library table.

“Look,” he said in a library whisper.

202

I went “?” but I soon saw what he was getting at. Right after that quotation comes a kind of threat to the brood of vipers, a variation on the notion of clearing out dead wood:

“Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

If he is talking about the vipers, that’s kind of a mixed metaphor, if I’m not mistaken, but who am I to criticize John the Baptist on stylistic grounds? I’m sure it sounded very convincing at the time. You probably had to be there. Anyway, Tit, remember, had written in the uncoded part of his note:

“The bastard is dead. Thrown into the fire.”

That sounded like it could possibly be a reference to the biblical passage, though it could also be coincidental. I couldn’t decide. But if it was an allusion, this passage from the Bible arguably linked Tit, Timothy J. Anderson, my dad, and the Seven Storey Mountain guy. I wasn’t sure how, exactly, or what it meant. Maybe it was a common, standard quotation that was used all over the place, though. And maybe “thrown into the fire” was just something people in the sixties used to say whenever a bastard died. You never know.

The Bible passage brought to mind my first response to the note, the Rosemary’s Baby/ Black Sabbath–influenced idea that it had something to do with burning witches. Was there something in that after all? I mean, maybe Tit was implying that Timothy J. Anderson had been some kind of heretic, through a (devil-head) oblique and maybe ironic reference to a biblical text about burning trees and vipers and questioning authority? I really wished I knew more about history, religion, the Bible, witches, the sixties, and so forth. My Academic Achievements were second to none, yet somehow I instinctively knew I wasn’t going to solve this particular problem by making a collage or appreciating ethnic food or putting on a 203

skit. In fact, I felt severely handicapped by my lack of knowledge in general, which is not something that comes up very often in my day-to-day life. Or more likely it comes up all the time without my realizing it.

We had discovered something potentially meaningful, yet I didn’t get much satisfaction from it. Part of that was because solving one puzzle had simply opened a new set of puzzles, and vaguer ones at that, and I was more confused than ever.

But mostly, it was because the whole thing gave me an uncomfortable, creepy feeling. Tit’s note was creepy. The Bible passage was creepy. It wasn’t what I had been going for with this cute little hobby of trying to investigate my dad’s teenage life through clues he had inadvertently left behind. I looked down at all of our research materials spread out on the table: Catcher, CEH 1960; the note from Tit; The Seven Storey Mountain; the Jerusalem Bible; the concordance; my French dictionary; my various notebooks—I could almost see and feel them morph from charming-exhilarating-profound to sordid-depressing-pointless. For some reason the phrase “brood of vipers” kept echoing unpleasantly in my head. I had this idi-otic notion that the materials spread out on the table formed a kind of picture of the world, and that it wasn’t a picture I particularly cared for. And my dad’s role in this picture was maddeningly dim and indistinct.

I had once again been distracted from the investigation by my own fantasies and emotions. Not Sam Hellerman, though. He was a bespectacled teenage research machine, the dork Woodward and the geek Bernstein rolled into one diminutive, socially inferior package, loading the archives of the San Francisco Chronicle into the microfilm viewing machine.

I tried to shake the vipers out of my head. It seemed to 204

me that the way to approach the Seven Storey Mountain/

Timothy J. Anderson problem was not so much through trying to understand the meaning of the text itself but through thinking of the quotation as a kind of object, an accessory. I wear a “Kill ’em All” shirt and it pegs me as a Guns-and-Ammo guy, even if I don’t literally want everybody to get killed and sorted out by God. Sam Hellerman’s black high-tops put him in this category made up of the kind of people who wear Converse All Stars; and if you notice that I, too, am wearing black high-tops, you could conjecture that I might have more in common with Sam Hellerman than just shoes.

Perhaps, I thought, it’s the same way with quotations from the Bible as it is with shoes. So this freaky monk character has Matthew 3:9–11 on the title page of his book; Timothy J.

Anderson had it on his funeral card. Maybe Timothy J.

Anderson was a freaky monk, too. Clergy.

I had been thinking along these lines for a couple of days, since the Dr. Hexstrom session I described above, when I explained to her about how I ended up being called Chi-Mo.

Now, one thing you have to understand is that my conversations with Dr. Hexstrom involved very few spoken words. We had quickly reached the point where a great deal could be communicated through a series of facial expressions and meaningful looks. It would have looked a bit like telepa-thy to an outside observer, probably, though it wasn’t. We were like two slans, that Dr. Hexstrom and me.

She got the ball rolling, as usual, with a question: “So, in view of that, how do you feel about your father being Catholic?”

My look said “how do you mean, Catholic?”

She gave me a pretty complicated look, which basically meant “what part of Catholic don’t you understand?” but also implied “come, come, now, you’re a bright boy—surely such an obvious fact cannot have escaped you?”

205

Well, she was right, of course, as I realized when I thought about it. We had never gone to church as a family, that I could recall, and I don’t remember there being any talk of my dad’s going to church on his own, either. But my dad’s funeral had been in a Catholic church and he was buried in a Catholic cemetery, or rather in a Catholic marble filing cabinet for dead people. When I brought it up to Amanda later on, she looked at me as though I were as dumb as a bag of dry leaves and said of course he had been Catholic. She even knew the names of the Catholic schools he had attended: Queen of the Universe grammar school and MPB College Preparatory. That’s what I get for spending so much time in my own world. Humiliating ignorance of the obvious.

I guess I’d always figured my dad had had the same religious views as my mom. She thought organized religion was for unsophisticated simpletons. She wanted everyone to be

“free-thinking” instead. So she embraced “spirituality,” which pretty much meant whatever happened to turn up in the Body and Spirit section of her organic cooking magazines.

I’m not any religion myself, but for the record, I’m pretty sure I do believe in God. It’s just a feeling I have. I can’t prove it, but since when are you supposed to prove a feeling? God is the only situation where they expect you to do that.

(Though I have to say, the universe seems so flawlessly designed to be at my expense that I doubt it could be entirely accidental.) Even if I didn’t believe in God, though, I’d probably say I did just out of spite. To irritate people like my mom who think believing in God is tacky and beneath them.

They’re wrong about everything else; chances are they’re wrong about that, too. Plus, God embarrasses people. Which I totally enjoy.

Anyway, I couldn’t see how my mom could have handled it if my dad had been a full-on Catholic. She would have 206

spent so much time ridiculing him that there wouldn’t have been any time left to ask which dress made her look fatter.

Maybe, in fact, this method of avoiding that topic was the key to a successful marriage, but I couldn’t quite picture it.

I must have been looking puzzled, because Dr. Hexstrom’s face once again went: “you’re a bright boy—this is not really all that hard to get.” Then she added, in words, “many of those books are books Catholics used to read in the sixties.”

My look said: “Catcher and Slan and The Doors of Perception ? Surely not.”

Her look was once again complicated: “some of the books are books young people read in the sixties,” it said patiently, “some are books Catholics read in the sixties, and some are books sixties people read in the sixties. Ergo: your father was young and Catholic in the sixties.”

“Plus,” she added in words, “your mother told me.”

Well, that seemed like cheating, but there was no arguing with it. My inclined head said, with what I hoped was a touch of class: “Touché.”

So back to the library research session with Sam Hellerman: there I was thinking about all this Catholic stuff, my nickname, and the notion that the stones/Abraham quote might be something Catholic clergy tended to associate with themselves. And I had pretty much reached the conclusion—

in fact, I had little doubt—that what we were dealing with here was some kind of pedophile priest situation.

Timothy J. Anderson was a clergyman who had molested Tit and maybe others, maybe even my dad—a weird thought indeed. Tit and company had finally risen up to take some kind of elaborate revenge. Poisoned the Communion wine.

Pushed him out of a bell tower. The bastard was dead at last, thrown into the metaphorical fire, as such a man was surely going straight to hell. Tit had hated him so much that he 207

hadn’t even considered going to the funeral, but my dad had gone for some reason. To view the body, to make sure the b.

was d.? Did such things ever really happen? Presumably so: if it can be thought, it can be done.

So when Sam Hellerman called me over to the microfilm viewer, I was expecting to read an obituary from around 3/13/63 noting the death (under mysterious circumstances, perhaps) of someone by the name of Brother Timothy J.

Anderson.

“It’s a monk, right?” I said. “A dead monk. Possibly poisoned.”

Sam Hellerman stared at me.

“What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“Or a priest, a bishop, something like that.” I started to explain my theory, but he was already shaking his head.

Because here’s what he had found in the archives, or rather, what he hadn’t found: there was no obituary or death notice for anyone by the name of Timothy J. Anderson anywhere around that date.

“Priests,” he said, “are prominent members of the community. There’s no way a death like that wouldn’t be in the paper.”

I could see that he was probably right. Yet the card pretty clearly indicated a funeral in San Francisco at the time. Had the listing been suppressed because of the scandal? But if there had been a scandal, if the story was “out,” we’d have seen huge head-lines about “Altar Boy Avengers” or something. (Which is not a bad band name, as Sam Hellerman replied when I mentioned it.) Anyway, I’m pretty sure that sort of thing is usually dark and secret and behind the scenes and only comes out after everyone involved has had years of therapy and/or Alzheimer’s.

Nonetheless, Timothy J. Anderson, whoever he had been, had clearly lived and died somehow. There were pre-208

sumably official death records other than newspapers that could be checked somewhere, though the very thought filled me with fatigue and dread.

A moment earlier everything had seemed to fit together neatly, if distastefully. Now nothing fit, but the distastefulness remained. We tried looking up Timothy J. Anderson in every local reference book we could find: no result, not even close.

Well, we could call up all the Andersons in the phone book to ask if any of them knew a Timothy J. who had died in 1963. Yeah, right.

“I’m sorry, dude,” said Sam Hellerman, because we had started to say dude recently. “He doesn’t exist.”

CON N ECTION S

Tracking down Deanna-Fiona was going to be a snap compared to figuring out the deal with Timothy J. Anderson, and not just because she wasn’t dead. But the prospect filled me with terror because it would involve more speaking out loud than I liked even under normal circumstances, and these circumstances would not be normal. There were no listings for any Schumachers in Salthaven, Salthaven Vista, Old Mission Hills, Rancho Sans Souci, or any of the surrounding towns.

But every year Immaculate Heart Academy puts out a booklet called “Connections,” which has contact information for all the students. Hillmont has a similar thing, called “What’s the Buzz (Call a Knight!),” and as I realized after I had thought about it a bit, there was a pretty good chance that I already had a copy of last year’s edition of IHA-SV’s

“Connections” somewhere in my room.

Mrs. Teneb, my mom’s nondiminutive female actor friend, had a daughter who went there, and last year there had been 209

some talk of trying to stimulate my nonexistent social life by encouraging me to get in touch with some of the IHA-SV girls.

The pretense had been my imaginary Monty Python/Dr.

Who club and Susye Teneb’s hugely implausible claim that there was a group of geek girls who had a similar club at IHA-SV. No doubt that myth had its origin in some feeble practical joke attempt by Susye Teneb, but names had been underlined and the book solemnly received and eventually ignored, thrown in the corner with all the other junk in my room.

It took a while to dig it out, but when I did, there she was: Deanna Gabriella Schumacher, 1854 North del Norte Plaza Circle, Salthaven, with a phone number and everything. I had trouble whacking up the nerve to call, though, and I kept putting it off and making excuses for why it might be better to wait. Because this was really it. Make-or-break time for the Fiona-Deanna Deal. I wanted to know what would happen, but I was scared at the same time. The library research session had filled me with a kind of resolve, though, and I decided to give it a shot that night.

Holden Caulfield, when calling his various preppie girlfriends, would always say he planned to hang up if the parents answered. I told myself that’s what I’d do, too, even though I knew she would probably have her own phone. In the fifties, no one had their own goddam phone and all, as HC would have put it. In other words, modern communications technology and the higher standard of living had made things more convenient and less convenient at the same time.

I almost couldn’t bring myself to dial the numbers, I was so nervous, and I had no idea what I would say. I got an answering machine that said “Didi’s phone, leave me a message.” Hanging up on the machine was like Holden’s hanging up on Jane Gallagher’s highfalutin parents. I was doing okay in the grand tradition of calling up girls and not knowing 210

what to say and then hanging up without saying anything.

Mr. Schtuppe should give me extra credit or something.

The effort had taken a lot out of me, though. I was feeling a little faint and peaked. It was six-forty-five. I decided to try again in twenty minutes. I poured the rest of my Coke down the drain and poured some of my mom’s bourbon into the empty can. Because I needed some help, man.

The fourth time I tried Deanna Schumacher’s number, the answering machine message had been changed to “Look, asshole, I screen, so if you don’t leave a message there’s no way you’ll ever find out if I would have picked up.”

Off to a good start. So after the beep, I said, haltingly,

“This—this message is for Deanna Schumacher—” I pronounced it shoe-mocker. But the phone was suddenly picked up and a female voice said, “Skoo-macker.”

“Skoo-macker?” I repeated.

“Skoo-macker,” said the voice.

“Really?”

I realized the conversation was going nowhere, and I decided to suspend my disbelief about the whole Skoo-macker thing. She was the Schumacher expert around here. “This is she,” the voice was saying with charm-school precision.

“Who, may I ask, is calling?”

“Oh. This is, um um Tom Tom Henderson.” The “um um” is where I momentarily forgot who I was. I was starting to say, though with perhaps a bit less suavity than I had planned, that we had met at a party in Clearview Heights last month, when she broke in:

“Tom-Tom?” she said. “Is that Moe Henderson? Chi-Mo Henderson?”

That about covered it. So she had known who I was. Not surprising, if she knew Susye Teneb.

211

“Oh. Yes. We met at a party—”

“How nice to hear from you. What can I do for you, Tom-Tom?”

“Oh. Well, we met at a party—”

“What?” She was determined not to let me deliver the rest of my suave “we met at a party” speech. She was quite the conversationalist.

I decided to ignore her interruptions and charge ahead, so I explained that we-met-at-a-party-in-Clearview-Heights-last-month, and tried to make it quick so it would fit in the brief space before she burst out with another interruption. I just about managed it, too, and I think the information finally penetrated, because her next question was quite to the point.

“And?”

Well, that was a tough one. So many different things could follow that “and.” And, I don’t know if you remember, but we made out on the couch when a telekinesis experiment went awry. And you wouldn’t let me go down your pants, going “my tits, my tits” instead, and I was wondering whether that was because of ladies’ week or was there some other reason? And you asked about my band’s gigs, and, well, it just so happens that we’re playing at the Festival of Lights in a few weeks, maybe you’d like to cut class at IHA and come? And I look fondly upon the special moments your left breast and I spent together, and I’d welcome the chance to pick up where we left off and get to know the rest of you better. And, though I doubt it’s something people generally say about just anybody whose nipple they happen to maul in a dark room at this or that fake mod stoner party, I have this dream where we’re imaginary boyfriend-girlfriend in a Sex Alliance Against Society. . . .

None of those answers to “And?” would have fit into one of Deanna-Fiona’s pauses, I knew that, and most of them 212

would have come off weird over the phone. So I said, as quickly as I could:

“I think we have some some matters to discuss, but I’d rather not do it over the phone. Maybe we could get together some time at your convenience if that would be be copasetic.”

Devil-head. Boy, did I ever feel like an idiot.

“You’re so professional, ” she said, giggling. I’m not sure what she meant, exactly, though it sounded sarcastic. I guess she wasn’t stoned enough to be quite as amused by my virtu-oso devil-headedness as she had been at the party. Then she said: “Are you asking me out, Tom-Tom?”

Was I? “Oh,” I said. “Oh. Um. Well. I mean . . .”

“You know, I have a boyfriend.”

“Right. Dave.”

“Tim.”

“Tim?”

“Tim.”

“Really?”

“Really. I think I would know.”

I could sense that this fascinating conversation was draw -

ing to a close, and I was trying to figure out a way to slip in a quick “well, nice talking to you, bye now,” to make her hanging up on me seem a bit less embarrassing, when she said, to my astonishment:

“Well, maybe you’d better come over, then.”

WHAT HAP P E N S WH E N YOU N E E D TO

G ET TO S LUT H EAVE N AS QU IC KLY AS

P OS S I B LE B UT YOU CAN’T DR IVE YET

Deanna Skoo-macker’s directions to her house had been from the freeway, so she had assumed I’d be driving. I wish.

213

Salthaven is several towns away, near the bay, clear on the other side of Rancho Sans Souci. I figured I should give myself at least an hour to get there on my bike, just in case I got lost or something. So I said I had some things I had to do first, but that I could probably make it by around nine.

“Okay,” she had said, “but I turn into a pumpkin at ten-fifteen.”

Right. These modern girls and their mysterious ways.

Best not to ask. They’re either going to explain things or they’re not, is how I look at it.

Since the whole “Thinking of Suicide?” debacle, I was supposed to tell Little Big Tom and Carol where I was going every time I left the house. Maybe they thought I’d slip up and say “well, Mom, I’m off to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge—oops! I mean . . . ,” and then they’d know to withhold their permission and avert a great American tragedy. In fact, though, I was finding that playing D and D at Sam Hellerman’s house was all the excuse I ever needed.

“Slay an orc with a lightning bolt for me!” said Little Big Tom as I headed out the door.

Now, you’re going to think I’m nuts, but I spent quite a bit of time during the ride over to Salthaven thinking about Timothy J. Anderson and Tit. I mean, I was wild with anticipation over the reunion with the elusive fake Fiona; and I was still reeling from the surprising conclusion to my inept attempt at telephone communication. “You’d better come over, then.” Sounded pretty fucking promising. Great song title, too.

But while one part of my mind was picturing Deanna Schumacher naked, seminaked, outfitted in fake mod and schoolgirl fetish gear, tied to a pole, sitting on a motorcycle, and so forth, another part of my mind was trying to figure out why The Seven Storey Mountain, CEH 1963, had contained a 214

funeral memorial card for a funeral that didn’t appear to have occurred, for a person who didn’t appear to have existed.

If the card wasn’t a funeral card, I couldn’t think what else it might have been for. It was very much like the card for my dad’s funeral, except that it contained a lot less information and no photo. There was a cross on one side; the quotation, date, and location were centered on the other. It didn’t seem like very good printing, and the amateurishness was one of the reasons it looked so creepy and disturbing. But assuming it was for a funeral, why had there been nothing about it in the newspaper? The church would probably have a record of it somewhere, as would the city or county. I’m sure it was possible to track it down, if I had the energy and inclination.

Did I? I was starting to realize that Tit’s code and the mystery of Timothy J. Anderson, as exciting as it had seemed at first, had been distracting me from what I really hoped to learn from all this. I found I didn’t really care all that much about Timothy J. Anderson. What I really wanted was to get an idea of who my dad had been, the kinds of thoughts he had had, the kind of world he had inhabited, things that were still dark to me. I had started out with a simplistic, unquestioned caricature of my dad, the Charles Evan Henderson I had known as an eight-year-old. Now I didn’t even have that. Tit and Timothy J.

Anderson had crowded my dad out of the picture. I realized I had been looking at the memorial card as a kind of sign from beyond, which was pretty nutty. What had I been thinking?

Maybe there was no real message: kids do bizarre things and construct elaborate games to drive away the boredom.

Tit could very well have been playing some nonsensical game with no relation to actual reality, and I was just falling for it decades later, very much like how Little Big Tom misread the Talons of Rage fantasy blades, or how my mom had misread 215

“Thinking of Suicide?” It was weird to think that I was playing the role of the Clueless Adult from the Future, but maybe I kind of was.

The whole thing left me with an empty, lonely feeling. I did know one thing, however: I didn’t much like Tit. There was something nasty about his note and about the fact that he had taken such care to encipher part of it, and had a sort of—what? Gleeful? Yeah, a gleeful, flippant attitude, when the subject matter was pretty somber. And including the ramoning boast in the same breath as the reference to the funeral and to being tied up and whipped—well, this Tit was clearly a weird guy.

Then again, there was Deanna-Fiona’s sexy stomach and her “maybe you’d better come over, then” to look forward to and be nervous about. Why was I obsessing over Timothy J.

Anderson? Under the circumstances, it was a crazy thing to do. I got a bit lost in the (devil-head) labyrinth of plazas, ter-races, caminos, lanes, vistas, circles, and courts, but I finally made it to North del Norte Plaza Circle in Salthaven with nearly an hour to spare before Deanna/Fiona’s pumpkin meter was set to run out at ten-fifteen.

As directed, I “parked” before I reached the Schumacher residence (hiding my bike in some bushes a couple of houses down) and walked as quietly as I could down a path running alongside the house. When I reached the side door, I tapped lightly. And I was pretty freaked out by what I saw when the door opened.

F OX ON TH E RU N

I was in a kind of daze as I followed Deanna Schumacher through the door, down a dark hall and some stairs, and into 216

a basement bedroom. Because as soon as I saw her, I knew that this was not, in fact, the Fiona of the fake-mod party. She was much shorter, and kind of chunky, though not chunky in a bad way—she was actually pretty sexy and curvy, to be honest. My Fiona had been taller and much skinnier. Even allowing for the headiness of the moment and the mists of memory, there was just no way you would find anything like the Fiona stomach underneath Deanna Schumacher’s loose, untucked blouse. No way.

I just stood there in Deanna Schumacher’s room, not knowing what to say. Now, I feel safe in assuming that that’s what I would have done in any case. But if I had had my Fiona standing in front of me, it would have been a different type of speechlessness. How had this mistake, if mistake it had been, come about? Somehow all roads led to Sam Hellerman in that line of inquiry, and for some reason I wasn’t really in the mood for thinking about Sam Hellerman at the moment. So I examined Deanna Schumacher and tried to shift gears, in a dilemma I never imagined I’d have: what do you say to a girl you have never made out with at a party while she was in a fake-mod costume but who has neverthe-less invited you to a secret tryst in her bedroom without realizing that you thought she was someone else? We had not, as it turned out, met at a party. And we did not, accordingly, have any matters to discuss, like I had said. Not really.

She wasn’t wearing a school uniform like I had expected, but she did have on a pretty short skirt over bare legs and the loose blouse I mentioned. She was actually quite pretty, in a mousy/nerdy way (which I found I really liked). The glasses were sexy, and she somehow managed to keep her mouth slightly open at practically all times. It was just naturally that way, I guess. Naturally hot.

“Take off your coat and stay a while,” she said.

217

I threw my army coat on the floor, and then felt a bit embarrassed when she immediately scooped it up and put it on a chair.

She asked how my mom and Amanda were doing. The fact that she knew so much about me and my family would have been pretty spooky coming from the real fake Fiona, but coming from the fake fake Fiona it didn’t have the same effect. And while I had been walking in and planning my dialogue and checking out her legs and so forth, I had also put two and two together and realized that not only must she have known Susye Teneb, but also that there had been a Didi a grade ahead of me at McKinley Intermediate, and that this was probably her. She must have gone on to Immaculate Heart Academy rather than public high school, which happened sometimes, especially with delinquent or troubled girls. So her knowledge of the Henderson family and my nickname wasn’t all that surprising.

“I never got to say,” she said, suddenly very serious, “how sorry I was to hear about your father.” I was stunned, both by the unexpected condolences and by the even more unexpected grace with which she offered them. “My father was with the Santa Carla coroner’s office, and he speaks very highly of him.” Stunned. Again.

I still hadn’t said a word. She motioned me over to sit next to her on the ruffly, frilly bed.

“Thank you,” I said, meaning thanks for being sorry to hear about my dad, and also for letting me sit on her bed next to her. The silence that followed could be seen as respectful, excruciating, peaceful, tortured, uncomfortable, exciting, tense, or divine, depending on how you looked at it.

“What have you been up to, Tom-Tom?” she eventually said.

“I’m in a . . . band,” I said. “A band.” And even though the current band name, Balls Deep, had been fixed at least till af-218

ter the Festival of Lights, the habit of a lifetime asserted itself.

“Super Mega Plus,” I added. Me on guitar/vox; Sam Hell on bass, prevarication, and procuring young girls under false pretenses; Brain-Dead Panchowski on irregular timekeeping; first album A Woman Knows. But I didn’t say that last part.

“We’re playing at lunch lunch at Hillmont in a few weeks.”

“Lunch-lunch?” I was getting a little tired of that joke, to be honest. Then she said: “Tom-Tom the rock star. Look at you.” I’d rather you didn’t, actually. Then, I kid you not, she said: “You’re so cool.” Well, I mean: certainly not. I couldn’t sort out the sarcasm from the politeness from the sincerity.

There was a tiny bit of sincerity, I thought, wasn’t there?

Maybe not. Maybe it was all politeness. She was a very, very polite young thing. Even her mockery was kind of polite.

She grabbed my wrist to look at my watch, and I thought she was going to go all Dr. Hexstrom on me and say “I’m sorry but our time is up,” but then she suddenly turned around and straddled me and after shooting me an unreadable look leaned in and started to lick my lips. I was, again, taken aback, but I knew what to do. Or I thought I did. This time, the kissing part was going much better, but when I reached beneath her blouse and located her left breast just under the front of her bra and started to squeeze it Fiona style with my nails against my palm, so it went nails–upper nipple–bra-palm, she squirmed, and not in a good way. And when I tried it again, she twisted away a bit, and I paused and made a note to self: not all girls like the nipple thing. Check.

She hadn’t been too fazed, though, and she continued the kissing, which was a lot sloppier and—what? Wild? Yeah, wet and wild. Sloppier, wetter and wilder than it had been with Fiona, anyway. I hadn’t known there were so many variations.

So my right hand had been rebuffed, but I reached up 219

with the left and placed it neutrally yet with reverence on the other breast, which felt very nice. See, I figured I’d let the right one cool off for a while. I moved my rebuffed hand down to her thigh and then started sliding it up toward her butt, while we were both still slobbering on each other’s faces, her tongue ring clicking occasionally against my teeth.

Then, feeling no resistance, I slid my fingers up even farther.

I don’t even know how to describe what that felt like; there isn’t anything remotely like it to compare it to. Let’s just say it was really, really nice.

She leaned back and laughed just a bit with that open-mouth thing she did and said, “You really know your way around a girl.”

Now, I had to laugh at that, because it was so, so, so not true. Probably just more politeness. They grow ’em up sweet and well mannered in the Catholic church, I can tell you that right now.

What happened next was: she stopped kissing me, leaned back, snatched my wrist to look at my watch, and then looked at me. My return look said “what?” but I was prepared to be shown the door at any moment.

“I wouldn’t mind,” she said finally in a matter-of-fact tone, “giving you some head.” Well, I guess she could tell I wouldn’t mind it all that much either, because she added,

“Why don’t you get in the bed?” And she leaned over and pulled back the Holly Hobbie bedcover.

I scrambled back quickly, not knowing exactly how what was going to come next would end up coming, or even knowing what that would be with much specificity.

“With your pants on, huh?” she said. “Well, that’s different.”

Too late, I realized I had committed some horrible (devil-head) faux pas. I quickly got rid of my shoes and slithered out of my jeans and sat there in my U.S. Army shirt and white 220

BVDs leaning against Deanna Schumacher’s headboard. It had a horse on it. I looked pretty stupid, I’m sure, and I’m not surprised that Deanna Schumacher started snickering a little bit. “You’ve got to get some boxers,” she said.

What she did then was kind of weird, or I thought it was weird. She put her glasses on the pillow next to me, slid under the sheet, and put it over her shoulders like it was Superman’s cape or something; and then she moved the sheet so that it was over her head, too; and then she kind of swooped down and the official blow job part of the program began. I wasn’t really in a position to complain, but the sheet was kind of a bummer. I wanted to watch, to see what it looked like, as I had been fantasizing about this precise scenario since time immemorial and I was pretty interested in how the reality would match up to the pretend images and the porn. She clearly didn’t like being observed while she worked, however. She also wasn’t very into having a person’s hands on her head during this operation, even though I couldn’t help putting them there anyway, just a bit. That wasn’t a deal-breaking faux pas, though. I realized, with a bit of a shock, that even King Dork, the (devil-head) embodiment of the faux pas, hadn’t committed a deal-breaking faux pas the whole time. Maybe, in the end, there weren’t any deal-breaking faux pas in this situation. I didn’t have a lot of data at my disposal, you understand.

It was great. It really was. But I was also very aware of the ticking pumpkin-meter, and it made me nervous and distracted. Yeah, that was probably it.

At one point she leaned up, the sheet around her face like a—what’s it called? Babushka, I think. But she didn’t say

“matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match.” What she said, in a hurried whisper, was:

“We only have around ten minutes left, Tom-Tom.”

221

“Okay, okay,” I said. It was nice to get the reminder, though hearing her say it made me even more nervous.

However, I wasn’t going to let this one go. It was my big chance. I concentrated and replayed my memory of the episode with the real Fiona in my head, as I had done hundreds of times before, and it relaxed and excited me at the same time as it always did. We were back on the right track.

And it wasn’t long before I was feeling glad all over, believe me.

Then she emerged from her little sheet fort, leaned up, and pulled my hair back from my face so it was flat on top of my head, staring at me up close from above for what seemed like quite a while, despite the still-ticking clock. Then she said:

“My boyfriend gets off at ten, and he’s going to be here any minute, so you’re going to have to get out of here.

Don’t”—she paused—“Don’t, um, please don’t—” I could tell she wasn’t sure how to ask me not to tell anyone about what had just happened. It was the only time during the whole episode where she seemed less than perfectly composed and all-knowing.

My look said “oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Your secret is safe with me.” But she was no slan, so I added, out loud, “Don’t worry—I won’t tell anyone. Promise.” She smiled, and then leaned over and kissed me softly and lightly on the mouth. A hefty twenty-four words and a couple of urgent inarticulate spasms had escaped my lips during the whole affair, but I couldn’t help adding another four words in spite of myself. “You’re very pretty, Deanna.” And I meant it, too. I suddenly realized that she kind of reminded me of the

Загрузка...