“Thinking of Suicide?” girl from the pamphlet, which really pushed my buttons. But Deanna Schumacher didn’t seem too interested in discussing the matter any further at the moment.

222

Maybe “you’re very pretty” was laying it on too thick. It’s really hard to know.

She said she was going to have to run upstairs to brush her teeth. Straightening up the place for the next customer, I guess. “It was very nice seeing you again, Tom-Tom, after all these years,” she said, back in her well-mannered element.

“Say hello to your mother and sister for me. Maybe you could come by again sometime. . . .”

I was very, very proud of myself.

On the way home, I was singing “Glad All Over,” “My Baby Loves Lovin’,” and “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy,” at the top of my lungs as I rode through the near-deserted streets.

When I did “Fox on the Run,” I tried to sing the “I” loud enough that it would echo, “I . . . I . . . I . . . , ” just like on the record. And it kind of almost did.

TH E F O G OF DEAN NA

Believe it or not, it didn’t hit me till I woke up the next day that Deanna Schumacher was not only a confusing sex kitten I had never made out at a party with, but also the daughter of a man who had known my dad and worked with him in some capacity. In other words, he was a potential source of information about the circumstances surrounding his death. Somehow I knew it wouldn’t be easy to engage Deanna Schumacher on that topic—nothing was easy when it came to talking to her. But I resolved to give it a shot sometime, if I ever had the chance.

Here’s how I knew I was starting to fall for Deanna Schumacher: I began to take time off from trying to psychoanalyze her and from replaying the mental video of our “date”

and from splashing around in a pool of self-pity and instead 223

started writing love songs about her. “I Wanna Ramone You,”

for example:

I wanna ramone you

hier and ici.

I wanna ramone you

and aujourd’hui.

If your boyfriend’s been postponed

and if we won’t be chaperoned

and if you wanna get ramoned,

comment? come on, come on . . .

There’s more where that came from, but it should be enough to demonstrate: I am a Romantic Genius, and a Dreamer.

I was still scared to call her, though. In fact, it took me a couple of days to get up the nerve even to dial Holden Caulfield style—that is, with the intention of hanging up. Our secret date had been on Thursday, Veterans’ Day. I stalled on Friday. I took the weekend off. Then I took a deep breath on Monday and picked up the phone with steely determination.

I needn’t have bothered with the s. d., however. Her answering machine was full, and I couldn’t have left a message even if I tried. I hadn’t realized that it was possible for frustration and relief to come in the same box, but it did. Maybe her family had gone out of town for a long weekend. So who had been leaving all those messages on her machine? That thought drove me crazy and made me cry, though not quite literally.

She could have gone away with her boyfriend—Tim, was it?—instead of with her family. Or perhaps the boyfriend had 224

gone along on the family excursion. Maybe they were riding in the backseat of the family car surreptitiously groping each other underneath a blanket. Maybe they were ramoning right now. I was starting to feel a little jealous of Ted, or Dan, or whoever. In fact, I thought I might be starting to hate him. But I squelched that thought. There was no future in that line of thinking. And I was impressed with my own maturity for realizing it. The whole thing was very adult and sophisticated.

I had settled into a comfortable pattern of dialing and being informed by a robot voice that the machine was full, which I did several times a day, causing some turmoil in the household because Amanda thought of the phone as her exclusive property. So I dropped the phone in shock when, on Thursday evening, I heard not the robot voice, but the voice of my imaginary girlfriend saying “Didi’s phone, leave a message.” I picked the phone off the floor without being able to think of anything to say, but it was too late anyway, so I had to dial again, once the dial tone came back on. Then it was busy. In its own way, this unexpectedly retarded attempt to make a phone call was like a little Hitchcock film: all suspense and delayed gratification with plot twists and multiple false endings. I waited ten minutes and dialed again, and waited another ten minutes and dialed again, thinking that I would not be too surprised if it were answered by a mysterious German-accented voice asking me if I had the formula and telling me to wear a red carnation and come to the Oberausterplatz. But no. “Didi’s phone, leave a message.”

I took a deep breath. “This message is for Deanna Skoo—”

Deanna Schumacher picked up the phone, and she didn’t mention the Oberausterplatz.

“Jerk.”

225

I didn’t know what to say. Finally she said, “Hello? Hello?

Are you there?” I cleared my throat and said that I was there, and that I had been trying to call—

“Jerk,” she repeated, breaking in.

We were back where we started.

“I’ve been trying—”

“Whatever,” she broke in. “I don’t mess around with just anyone.” Now, how I was supposed to know that was a little unclear: it seemed to me, on the evidence, that her criteria in that regard were in fact rather broad. “I’m not used to being ignored,” she said, “and, in case you’re wondering, I don’t have any trouble getting dates.”

I’m sure you don’t, I thought. It’s the phone conversation afterward that you seem to have not quite gotten the hang of.

But I doubted this was the right answer, so what I said was:

“I’ve been trying—”

“Well, I’ve been away.”

“—to call—”

“What?” It struck me that despite all the “this is she” and

“say hello to your mother” stuff, she was a lot less polite on the phone than she was when she was offering to give you an illicit blow job in the fifteen minutes before her boyfriend arrived. Did she ever let anyone finish a sentence?

“I’ve-been-trying-to-call-you-but-your-machine-has-been-full,” I said as quickly as I could. And I almost got to

“your” before she broke in: “I’ve been away—are you deaf ?

My machine was full.” I was at a loss, and I almost hung up.

But then, her voice softened.

“I’m glad you called, Tom-Tom. I was beginning to think you had used and forgotten me.” Now there was a teasing tone. How many personalities did this girl have, anyway? I realized there would be no point trying to puzzle out how being unable to leave a message on someone’s answering ma-226

chine because they have been away from home for four days counts as ignoring them. Or why she was going all Fatal Attraction on me when I was the one who was supposed to pretend I didn’t exist for the preservation of her real-life serious nonimaginary relationship. We were in boy-girl world, or we sort of were, where logic is optional. I was learning a lot.

Really, I was just glad to hear her voice, even if I had no earthly idea what the things it was saying were intended to accomplish. Or rather, I liked hearing the nice voice. The mean voice was harder to take. But she also confusingly used the nice voice to tell me that her boyfriend was a very jealous, unstable person who had rage issues and that all she would have to do is tell him about me and I’d be dead almost instantaneously. Also to say: “If my father found out how you took advantage of me, he would bash your fucking head in and you’d go to jail for twenty years.” I doubted she was right about the specifics there, but I got her point. But then she laughed, as though she had only been kidding, and told me, in the softest, most feminine manner, that she was glad I called. At one point she got really quiet and said that sometimes she hates who she is and feels there’s no way out, and she sniffled like she was trying to hold back the tears. But just as I was starting to say I totally understood what that felt like, intending to offer some words of comfort and encouragement, she just started laughing.

“Are you okay?” I said, after a confused pause.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said with a kind of venom in her voice. “You’re the one who can’t take a joke.”

She had been making fun of my attempt at a cool and digni-fied (devil-head) demeanor, I guess.

Sam Hellerman had been wrong about Deanna Schumacher in every respect but one: she was kind of a psycho freak.

227

Now, what you have to understand is that the whole time, Amanda was standing in the doorway glowering at me and chanting “get off the phone, get off the phone” with ever-increasing volume. And Little Big Tom and Carol had crowded around to observe the novelty of clumsy little Chi-Mo trying to talk to a female. It was hard to concentrate, and I was nervous enough to begin with. So I can’t rely on my interpretations of Deanna Schumacher’s words or the awkward pauses between them or the tone of her voice. In warfare there’s a thing called the “fog of war” where everything around you is confusion and chaos and no one is able to see the big picture till it’s all over, and even then everyone has a different memory of it. It was like that. The Fog of Deanna.

Somehow, though, amid the confusion, it was established that she wasn’t being ignored, at least not by me, and that she didn’t really intend to go through with any orders for my execution, though I still got the impression that she was mad at me somehow. She kept saying “I’m glad you called,” though, which was a good sign. I truly had no idea what was going on, but it was beginning to dawn on me that having no idea what’s going on is a more or less defining part of the whole coupling process.

Somehow it became clear that no one in this situation would mind all that much if I were to visit again. At least, that was the conclusion I reached when she said that Mondays and Thursdays were best, as that was when her boyfriend worked late. Okay, I’m game. “Don’t disappoint me,” she added, which I knew was from a movie, but I forget which one. Then there was an operator-assisted emergency break-through on the phone from one of Amanda’s friends.

“I’ll have to call you back,” I said, and she said,

“Whatever, Tom-Tom,” in her pissed-off voice, and then she switched to the polite voice again and said, “Be sure to tell 228

your mother and sister hello from me.” I was going to say something like “Okay, then,” but she had already hung up.

I know I said I was going to call her back, but I honestly didn’t know if I could take another one of those chats anytime soon. Amanda pounced on the phone as soon as I set it down. My mom was laughing and smoking, asking who I had been talking to in a teasing tone that was eerily similar to the one Deanna Schumacher had employed to ask if I had used and forgotten her. And she’s the one who claims not to want me to attempt suicide. I’ll never understand women, no matter whose mom they are.

Little Big Tom tilted his head and said, “Mojo working!”

I resolved to take the GED and emancipate myself as soon as possible, just so I could safely use the phone again.

But I think you have to be sixteen.

I ended up visiting Deanna Schumacher again the following week. It went pretty much the same way as before—a psychotic conversation, followed by making out, ending in a blow job. We had some more time left on the pumpkino-meter this time, so I decided to risk it:

“So your father’s a Santa Carla cop.”

“Peace officer,” she said absently. She was straightening up the room. “Or he was. Not anymore.”

“And he knew my dad, you said.”

“Yeah, I told you that already. Can’t you shut up about my father for five minutes?”

That was about all I had the strength for. Something about her tone told me I wasn’t going to get too far with this line of inquiry.

When we switched to other topics, things went better.

I mean, I learned some interesting things about Deanna Schumacher. She liked to talk about herself, though she 229

wasn’t all that interested in hearing a person’s comments in reaction to her statements, which seemed intended primarily for effect.

“One thing you have to understand about me,” she said,

“is that I’m totally into Stoli.” Ah, I thought—the relationship deepens. She also said at one point that she “likes girls” even though she was mostly into guys.

“Is that a Suzi Quatro–Joan Jett kind of thing?” I said. She had no idea what I was talking about, but I had a feeling she didn’t really care what I had to say on that or any other matter. It was just part of her general method of trying to overwhelm me with confusing data and erratic moods and to keep me just a little off-kilter at all times. It was working, too.

I never had any idea what she was thinking, whether she was glad to hear from me, whether she had lost interest in me, or anything. The Fog of Deanna was exhausting.

The coming Thursday was Thanksgiving, and I knew I couldn’t call or visit on that day, which worried me a little.

How was I going to make it through a whole week without any contact? I was already walking around with that punched-in-the-stomach feeling almost all the time, unable to eat or do much of anything, and I knew it would only get worse.

Then something happened that made even the Fog of Deanna look comparatively easy to navigate.

P OI NT-B LAN K AT YOU R OWN R I S K

It was my fourth session with Dr. Hexstrom, the day after my second Deanna Schumacher experience.

I have to admit, my interest in The Seven Storey Mountain was dwindling. It was pretty slow going, and I already knew the ending, which is that the guy ends up deciding there’s 230

more to life than fast times and goes into a monastery. Plus, there’s this part where he starts heaping praise on the Doors of Perception guy, so I was kind of disappointed in him. It’s weird how all these guys seemed to know each other. There was even a quote on the cover of The Seven Storey Mountain from the Brighton Rock guy, saying something like “the best way to read this book is with a pencil,” whatever that might mean. It must have to do with their all being weird Catholics.

But maybe there was more to that guy than The Doors of Perception indicated. I made a promise-to-self to try one of his other books—maybe they weren’t all poorly written, self-important, desperately trendy drug memoirs. Not that I had much time for that at the moment: what with the Timothy J.

Anderson investigation, band practices, learning to mispronounce vocabulary words from Catcher in the Rye, psychoanalyzing Sam Hellerman, being on the receiving end of secret sheet-covered Catholic-schoolgirl blow jobs and of inept parental suicide prevention schemes—well, I was a busy man these days. So I set The Seven Storey Mountain aside with The Naked and the Dead to finish later, and boldly started on La Peste, CEH 1965. But it took me around two hours to translate the first page, and even then I wasn’t too clear on most of it, so I put that aside, too, and decided to pick up Slan where I had left off, where the freaky slan kid wakes up to find he’s been chained to a bed by this creepy old lady. In a way, Slan was a lot like The Seven Storey Mountain or Siddhartha with all the religious stuff taken out. Same basic idea. Kind of an improvement, if you ask me.

Now, as much as I enjoyed discussing slans and monks and drugs with Dr. Hexstrom, I wanted to try to steer things in a different direction for this session. Basically, I just decided to point-blank her on some questions I was tired of wondering when we were going to get to. And because I knew that 231

a Hexstrom could be kind of hard to steer sometimes, I wrote them down on a sheet of paper and handed it to her when I walked in.

a) When are you going to get it over

with and put me on medication so that my brain chemistry will match everybody

else’s brain chemistry and there will be no reason for further strife and

unpleasantness and we can all die happy?

b) Why do you think my mom freaked out

over my song about how Yasmynne Schmick

hadn’t decided whether to commit suicide just yet? When are we going to get

around to discussing that? And what did

you think of the song? Not bad, huh?

c) Do they have to put a notice in the

paper when someone dies, or is it

optional?

I hadn’t meant to put (c) there, but I wrote it without thinking and decided in the end not to cross it out. I almost added another question, too, for my own personal information, about what base oral sex counts as, but thought it might be better not to get into it. As for (c), though, maybe Dr.

Hexstrom would have some ideas.

She did, though she gave me a funny, Jimenez-Macanally–esque look and wanted to know why I was asking. I showed her the Timothy J. Anderson card and told her how we couldn’t find any funeral notice in the paper on or around that date.

232

“I don’t think you have to put a death notice in the paper unless there’s some legal reason,” she said, “such as if there’s no will. I’m not a lawyer, so don’t quote me. But a funeral notice or obituary is usually done to make sure that everyone who might be interested knows and can make plans to attend.”

“So if you didn’t list it in the paper, it would be because you didn’t want anyone to know it was happening and didn’t want anyone to attend? Because you wanted to keep it quiet?”

She gave me the look that said: “don’t be so melodramatic.”

“Or maybe,” she added aloud, “because you couldn’t afford to pay for an announcement.” Well, the card did look a bit on the cheap side. Or perhaps the whole thing had just slipped their minds. You can forget to do a lot of things when someone dies.

She gave me a look that said: “why are you so interested in this Timothy J. Anderson anyway?” I told her that the card had been in one of my dad’s books and then gave her the look that said: “I feel like I don’t know anything about my father or who he was or what he was like, and I’m grasping for any clue, no matter how trivial or far-fetched or even delu-sional.” Well, it was true.

She eyed the card dubiously. “Why are you so sure it’s from a funeral?” she asked.

Because it looked a bit like my dad’s funeral card. And because of Tit’s note, of course, but I was keeping Tit’s note to myself, so I couldn’t mention that. Dr. Hexstrom said she didn’t quite know what to make of the card. Usually, she said, they put more information on them, like the dates of birth and death. The single date was hard to interpret. She also pointed out something about the card that I hadn’t noticed, which was that the left edge didn’t look quite the same as the 233

other edges. It had a slightly different color and was perhaps less evenly cut. I could see what she was getting at, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before. Once it was drawn to my attention, however, it really did look like it had been cut off, like it had originally been the front face of a folded-over card. What had been on the other side? Presumably more information, like the dates of birth and death and so forth. And what had happened to it?

She added that they also make cards like that for memorial services or masses that could be held long after the death or funeral, sometimes years later, and that cards of that kind can commemorate other important events that may not even be deaths. I hadn’t realized any of that. So even if it was for a funeral, it was possible that Timothy J. Anderson died earlier, maybe even much earlier than 3/13/63, and that we hadn’t searched early enough for the obituary. Tit’s note had mentioned a funeral, but the date was fake, and it could have been from any time. And it may not have even been a funeral. In which case, Timothy J. Anderson was not the dead bastard.

If not, who the hell was the d. b.? Man, these (devil-head) retrospective investigations into a deceased parent’s personal effects can suck the life right out of you. My brain was starting to hurt. I sighed heavily, and so did Dr. Hexstrom, just a bit, unless I’m mistaken.

“Now (a),” she said evenly, pointing to the note. “I’m still not sure you need that kind of medication.” And I was sure she was right: the kind of medication I would need was not a straightforward issue, and it might take years to figure out.

Maybe that medication hasn’t even been invented yet. Well, let me know when you’ve got it. I’ll be right here.

Then she pointed to (b) and said she had found the suicide song very interesting. I resisted the urge to ask which part she liked best. Maybe we could cover that later. For now, 234

I really wanted to know about my mom’s freak-out. Had she said anything to Dr. Hexstrom to indicate where the hell she had been coming from, or why this, out of all the Chi-Mo freakiness over the last four to six years, had been the thing that finally spurred her to send me to a shrink?

Dr. Hexstrom said nothing but gave me a familiar look, the one that says: “come on, Tom, you know better than to play innocent—you know perfectly well what’s going on here.”

So we were back in slan mode, were we? Okay.

I gave her the look that said: “the fuck?” And her look said: “I’ll ignore the rude choice of words, as you’re clearly under some type of strain, but you can stop pretending you don’t know.”

“What?” my look said. “What? What do I know that I’m pretending not to know?” Except I must have said that last part out loud, because she coughed and said, in words:

“You’re pretending you don’t know that your father committed suicide.”

“The fuck?” I said, out loud I think, standing up. It was a car wreck, murder or manslaughter. The San Francisco Chronicle had said so. My ears were ringing and I was feeling dizzy and seeing the weird liquid kaleidoscope like when I had accidentally beaten up Paul Krebs. Part of me was wondering whether I was going to end up accidentally beating up Dr.

Hexstrom, too, when the liquid kaleidoscope swallowed the rest of my mind and I kind of lost track of things.

I knew I hadn’t been unconscious for long, because when I came to there was still time on the clock. I had fallen back into the chair, and it was possible that my blackout had been so brief that Dr. Hexstrom hadn’t realized it had even happened. I could tell she was taken aback by my reaction, 235

though, blackout or no. We stared at each other, trying to work out who knew what, who was mistaken about what, and who was lying about what. I concluded she really believed that my dad had killed himself, and had also believed that I had known, and that she was shocked to learn that the idea came as such a spectacular surprise to me.

Was she right? Well, that was really two questions.

Question one: was she right that I ought to have known about the supposed suicide, or that I did know but was pretending not to know? Lying to myself ? I’ve learned I should never be too sure about such things. I hadn’t known about the Catholic thing, though I should have—it was obvious enough that even Amanda had known all about it. If I were to ask Amanda about the suicide thing (which I would never in a million years do, but still), would she look at me like I was dumb as a cup of melting ice and say “no duh?” Well, I can’t speak for Amanda, but a quick, ruthless self-examination indicated that my ignorance was genuine. I truly had not “known” about the suicide, nor even considered it as a possibility.

The second question was, was the suicide story itself true? It didn’t seem possible. I had read all about it in the paper, and even though there had been details missing, the car crash had definitely happened. If my dad had killed himself, he would have had to have done it in the car before the hit-and-run. How likely was that? Maybe someone had intended to murder him and just hadn’t realized that the guy in the car was already dead by his own hand? Or someone had known he had killed himself and had crashed into the car to make it seem like an accident? Or my dad had deliberately placed himself in a position where he knew he’d be crashed into, as a roundabout suicide method? That sounded really crazy. I realized I should probably go back and read those articles again: since I did the research at age ten, I’d had four whole 236

years of being disappointed by my fellow man and having this and that illusion shattered, which had resulted in a firmer, or at least less inaccurate, grasp of reality, presumably.

Maybe I’d read things differently now.

Of course, everything Dr. Hexstrom knew about me and my family history came from my mom and from me, filtered through her own (admittedly impressive) knowledge of the world and corrected by her equally impressive powers of de-duction. I had exaggerated and left out details and tried to make myself look better and/or worse than I actually was all over the place for various personal reasons. Her view of my world based on my account was wildly inaccurate, except in those areas where her own common sense corrected the picture. But she hadn’t gotten the suicide thing from me. So either my mom had lied to her deliberately for some unfath-omable reason, or my mom genuinely believed, rightly or wrongly, that the suicide story was true. Since it was the better explanation for her freak-out over the song, I had to conclude that the latter was the case. She liked to exaggerate and fabricate things for melodramatic purposes, but she wouldn’t do that to someone to whom she was paying a hundred and fifty dollars an hour to cure her son of individuality. Would she?

These thoughts took a lot less time to think than it just took to describe them. When I finally spoke, I was almost incoherent. The questions I was able to get out were, how did my mom know about this when everyone else seemed to think it had been a hit-and-run, and why had Dr. Hexstrom believed her, a known liar.

“She said he left a note,” said Dr. Hexstrom, but then seemed to think better of continuing. “I need to speak to your mother about this. And our time is up.”

She wouldn’t let me leave on my own, though. She in-237

sisted on calling Little Big Tom to pick me up. I spent the ride home in a daze, thinking about my dad’s alleged suicide note and how I’d have to do some Little Big Tom–style snooping to try to locate it amidst Carol’s stuff. If it really existed.

A B ETTE R C LAS S OF LI E

I was starting to wonder how anybody knows anything at all about anything. All sources are suspect.

Even if I were to find this supposed suicide note, chances were it would be inconclusive, too. “Dear Honey, I have decided to end it all,” it would say, and there would be no proof that he was talking about his life as opposed to eating red meat or subscribing to TV Guide. On the other hand, I suppose a wife would know. One thing I knew: asking her about it would serve no purpose. God help Dr. Hexstrom if she really planned to go through with trying to talk to her about it. I was sure the good doctor had encountered quite a few crazy people in her day, but my mom was in a category all her own.

I was starting to realize the extent of the problem here: everyone is always lying to each other, and even when they’re trying to tell the truth, it can still be misleading or wrong. In fact, it almost always is wrong from at least one angle. I mean, in a way, the truth is really just a better class of lie.

And then there was Fiona. She was still at large, whoever she was. The Deanna Schumacher episode, pleasant and mind-blowing as it was, hadn’t changed that. Sam Hellerman had stated categorically that Fiona was Deanna Schumacher dressed up as a fake mod, which was plausible, but which 238

hadn’t been the case. He could have simply been mistaken, misled by his CHS friends. On the other hand, it was possible that he had known and had been lying, for obscure reasons of his own. Had he been trying to help me get over my Fiona-related pain and longing by providing me with a fake fake Fiona to focus on, feeling fairly certain I wouldn’t end up putting his story to the test by tracking her down and going over to her house for some illicit oral sex? (A safe assumption: I still couldn’t quite believe it myself.) Or maybe Sam “the Matchmaker” Hellerman had known all along that I would follow up on the Deanna Schumacher lead and had intended for us to get together? Maybe the Deanna Schumacher blow job had been a gift from Sam Hellerman unto me, in return for my years of faithful service to the Hermetic Order of the Alphabet. Maybe Deanna Schumacher had been in on the scheme, as well.

All I knew was that Sam Hellerman always had something up his sleeve. He had a plan for the band. He had a plan for me. He had a plan for everybody, and he would only let you in on what he felt you needed to know.

I suppressed the urge to point-blank him on it as I had done with Dr. Hexstrom. He would come up with an explanation that would be just as plausible as the others (in other words, just barely—but I would want to believe). Or he would refuse to say anything and subject me to the dread power of his overwhelming, wordless sarcasm. Fearing more Hellerman eye-ray treatment than I felt I could handle in my confused and enfeebled state, I decided to hold off on the point-blanking, at least till after the Festival of Lights. We still had a lot of work to do to get the band ready for the show, and, as I had learned the hard way when the whole Fiona business began, a disgruntled, sarcasm-soaked Hellerman is in many 239

ways worse than no Hellerman at all. I had to keep the band together at least till the show, which was only two weeks away. I was grateful to the school schedule for providing me with a reason to postpone my decisions for just a bit longer.

That’s all a man ever really wants, in any case.

240

December

TH E RODE NT ROLE

The first two weeks of December were a bit surreal and went by in a kind of blur. Mr. Schtuppe was trying to time Catcher in the Rye so that we finished the reading and brain-dead assignments on the last day before the Christmas break began on the twentieth. We were already almost to the end, so the reading had slowed to a crawl. I imagine we copied down and used in sentences and mispronounced practically every word in the book several times, including “the” and “and.” I spent a lot of time, in and out of class, engaged in an unspoken stream of questions that, if spoken aloud, would have been totally incomprehensible to anyone but me: “What’s the deal with Tit? Who was MT? Did Tit really ramone MT?

And what about the Dead Bastard?” On and on.

As for Deanna Schumacher, she and I were engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse, with me in the rodent role.

We were okay when we weren’t talking, but practically every conversation was more or less a train wreck. The hardest part for me was her cold-and-distant routine, which she could turn on and off at will. It drove me crazy not to know what she was thinking about me, and there was never any point in asking—that would only spark a contemptuous kind of laughter. I knew the proper strategy was to act just as indifferent as she did, to try to keep her guessing, as well. But it was beyond my capabilities. I always broke down and revealed my anxiety in the end. Then she would pounce.

My third visit to her house, on the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend, had gone pretty much like the previous episodes. She telephoned shortly after I got home, and I was all excited because that was the first time that had happened, until I heard what she said.

“You know, this really isn’t working out for me. So, be 243

seeing you in all those old familiar places.” And she hung up.

I tried to call back, but her phone was off the hook. Anyway, she would have been with her boyfriend by that time anyway. The bastard.

I spent the rest of the night in a kind of agony, saying to myself over and over, “Don’t call, don’t call, don’t call. . . .”

Then when I would finally break down and call, it was busy anyway. Johnny Thunders was singing “You Can’t Put Your Arm Around a Memory” on the stereo, or rather, I guess I should call it a mono, since it still had one blown channel: for the first time, I really felt I understood what he was getting at.

The next day I was a zombie. I felt the estrangement physically, as though sharp objects were embedded in my chest, slicing me up, and, not coincidentally, making me feel like a total idiot as well. Then when I got home from school, there was a note from Amanda on my door: “phone call, some chick, said don’t worry and everything will be OK.”

I was suddenly ecstatic, till I realized that “everything will be OK” could be read in different ways. And I wasn’t sure I would be all that pleased if things were Deanna Schumacher’s version of okay.

Of course, I had other things to obsess over besides Deanna Schumacher and Timothy J. Anderson. There were just too many explanations for my dad’s death floating around. It couldn’t possibly have been murder and an accident and suicide. Any scenario I could come up with to explain why people seemed to think it could was preposterous.

I didn’t have much to go on, but if the deeply engraved “help”

in Siddhartha, CEH 1964, was any indication, my dad had had something of a history of feeling overwhelmed and desperate. Most kids do. But I guess it can continue when they grow up. The Crying of Lot 49 also had the word “help” written on it. I had thought it referred to the Beatles song, but if 244

it was the same kind of help as the Siddhartha one, maybe there was a pattern there. It didn’t square with my memory of him, but if he had been a habitually depressed person, my mom would have known. Perhaps this knowledge and an ambiguously phrased note had convinced my mom that it had been suicide despite the evidence to the contrary. It certainly wouldn’t have been the only time my mom had believed something illogical or unsupported by the facts. On the other hand, she could just have been lying. I really couldn’t say.

We had been working pretty hard to get the band ready for the Festival of Lights. We weren’t sounding too bad. It was still pretty rough, but in our better moments, we sounded kind of like Buddy Holly meets Thin Lizzy with a punk rock sensibility and a slight psychedelic edge, like UFO playing Velvet Underground songs or something. Or so I told myself.

When I said as much to Sam Hellerman, he sniffed and told me I was “trippin’.” Well, at least we were getting better at playing at the same time as each other for most of the song, which was a big improvement.

RYE H E LL

The title of The Catcher in the Rye comes from a misquoted poem by Robert Burns, which Holden Caulfield elaborates into a mystical fantasy about saving children from falling off a cliff. There are all these kids playing in a field of rye, and he stands guard ready to catch them if they stray from the field.

A lot of people have found this to be a very moving metaphor for the experience of growing up, or anxiety about the loss of innocence, or the Mysterious Dance of Life. Or any random thing, really.

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To use HC’s own terminology, it has always seemed pretty goddam phony and all to me. Fantasies about Jane Gallagher’s preppie ass? Check—even I have those. Fantasies about twisting yourself into a tortured symbol of the precious authenticity of youth? I don’t think so. It’s the kind of thing you’d make up to impress an AP teacher. And the AP teachers are duly impressed with it, of course. Suckers.

The brilliance of it, though, is that the people in the Catcher Cult manage to see themselves as everybody in the scenario all at once. They’re the cute, virtuous kids playing in the rye, and they’re also the troubled misfit adolescent who dreams of preserving the kids’ innocence by force and who turns out to have been right all along. And they’re also the grown-up moralistic busybody with the kid-sized butterfly net who is charged with keeping all the kids on the premises, no matter what. Somehow, they don’t realize you can’t root for them all.

Say you’re a kid in this field of rye. You try to find a quiet place where you can be by yourself, to invent a code based on “The Star-Spangled Banner,” or to design the first four album covers of your next band, or to write a song about a sad girl, or to read a book once owned by your deceased father.

Or just to stare off into space and be alone with your thoughts. But pretty soon someone comes along and starts throwing gum in your hair, and gluing gay porn to your helmet, and urinating on your funny little hat from the St.

Vincent de Paul, and hiring a psychiatrist to squeeze the individuality out of you, and making you box till first blood, and pouring Coke on your book, and beating you senseless in the boys’ bathroom, and ridiculing your balls, and holding you upside down till you fall out of your pants, and publicly charting your sexual unattractiveness, and confiscating your Stratego, and forcing you to read and copy out pages from 246

the same three books over and over and over. So you think, who needs it? You get up and start walking. And just when you think you’ve found the edge of the field and are about to emerge from Rye Hell, this AP teacher or baby-boomer parent dressed as a beloved literary character scoops you up and throws you back into the pit of vipers. I mean, the field of rye.

Sound good? I’m sorry, but I’m rooting for the kids and hoping they get out while they can. And as for you, Holden, old son: if you happen to meet my body coming through the rye, I’d really appreciate it if you’d just stand aside and get out of my fucking way.

HOW NORMAL PEOPLE TRIED TO KILL ROCK

AND ROLL, AND HOW ROCK AND ROLL

CAME BACK TO BITE THEM ON THE ASS

When the day of the show arrived, I was pretty surprised at how many other rock bands there turned out to be at Hillmont. We were on last out of four bands, according to the schedule. Everyone who was in the Festival of Lights was allowed to take third period off as well, to set up. So there we were in the auditorium standing around checking each other out while the three sullen drummers were off to the side, grumbling and swearing under their breath about how no one was helping them set up, and mumbling that they played percussion, not just drums. There were three rather than four disgruntled percussionists because Todd Panchowski was in two of the bands, ours and Alter of Blood. Actually, to judge from the retarded flyers they had made, their official name appeared to be Alter of Blood (Formally Black Leviticus). I supposed they were Christian metal, though they could have been just plain old metal. Hard to tell sometimes.

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It was easy to tell, though, who was in either Alter of Blood or Karmageddon, as they were the heavy-metal stoner types. By process of elimination, I guessed that the remaining band, Radio Free Atlantis, had to be made up of one stoner drummer, two goths, and two normal people. Everyone had better amps than us in terms of quality, but Sam Hellerman had them all beat in terms of coolness. He had purchased an old and extremely large nonfunctional Magnavox hi-fi stereo cabinet from the St. Vincent de Paul for twenty bucks and had replaced the insides with the electronics and speakers from the Fender Bassman. Okay, so Sam Hellerman and I were the only ones there who realized how cool it was.

We’re used to it. One day they’ll wake up and realize that we were right about everything all along. Now, though, they were just standing there laughing at my guitar, which was, unbeknownst to them, by far the coolest and most valuable thing in the room. But I admit: it certainly didn’t have uber-super-mega-quadruple-distortion pickups like everybody else’s guitar.

The hippie-ish drama teacher (Mr. Malkoe, but he wanted you to call him Chet) was in charge, because it was

“his” auditorium we would potentially be trashing. The third-period drama class, those who were still there, including Celeste Fletcher, Syndie Duffy, and assorted boyfriends and minions, were all sitting in the back, laughing and “getting high,” I suppose. “Chet” had an easygoing manner on the outside, but inside he was an auditorium Nazi. He immediately confiscated our Balls Deep banner, just as Amanda had predicted. I tried all the usual tricks (calling him “man,” saying I was glad he stopped the Vietnam War, flashing him the peace sign). But despite his obvious admiration for Little Big Tom’s Che Guevara shirt, he had pretty much seen it all and positively would not be sweet-talked out of his fascist freedom-248

of-expression-crushing banner ban. So the banner was history. He also forbade everyone from setting anything on fire.

I saw a little light grow and die in Sam Hellerman’s eyes: even if he hadn’t been intending to set anything on fire before, he certainly was indignant at the prohibition now. “What might have been,” his eyes seemed to say.

“Wait till the revolution comes,” he whispered. “Chet Guevara will be the first against the wall.” And I could see his point, Matt Lynch notwithstanding.

Only Radio Free Atlantis, the first band, got to sound-check, which they finished doing just as the small chunk of the Hillmont High School student body that hadn’t decided to skip the “festival” and take off began to filter in. I was impressed with how RFA sounded. And when I say impressed, I mean that in the sense of “extremely bummed out.” How come we couldn’t sound like that? Maybe it was all in the PA.

So they started playing for real, and as I said, sonically it was relatively awesome, much better than any sound we were ever able to produce in my living room. The bass player (one of the goths) was even pretty good. They couldn’t play together very well, but it’s not like we could, either. I wasn’t sure what they were going for. At first I thought they were doing a kind of Cocksparrer/Sham 69 sort of football-chant punk rock. Then, to my even greater surprise, I figured out that they were going for a Smiths-y kind of thing. In fact, I soon realized that their whole set list was made up of punky Smiths and Cure and Joy Division covers, though many were so ineptly executed that it was hard to tell without a great deal of structural analysis. I don’t know if the punkiness was intentional or not, which is a common enough situation.

Now, the irony was that the singer was Dennis Trela, who was among the most sadistic alpha psychos the normal world 249

had to offer. In other words, he was a major player in the nation of perpetrators: he and his evil superbitch girlfriend had been responsible for half of the suicide attempts, nervous breakdowns, and eating disorders in the greater Bay Area. It’s guys like Dennis Trela who made the Smiths and the Cure and Joy Division necessary in the first place. I had thought normal people and that sort of music were mutually exclusive, but I guess I was wrong. It’s a funny world.

The nonband acts were scheduled to go on during the setup times, so while Karmageddon were setting up, this guy named Ben was doing an extremely ill-advised tap-dancing routine to “Singin’ in the Rain.” My guess is that he had lost a bet. But you just can’t tap-dance in front of an auditorium full of normal people and expect them not to take the bait. I heard this sound that was at once familiar and strange, the sound of around a hundred people pretending to cough and saying the word “homo” at the same time. There was also some loud fag-oriented heckling, chanting, and whatnot, which the crowd continued for some time after Ben left the stage. Fortunately, when you have amps and so forth, you can drown out the heckling. That’s what I was counting on. But hell, Ben got more of a response than Radio Free Atlantis had. You could look at it that way.

Both of the other bands were Black Sabbath–y, whether they realized it or not. Alter of Blood did their Christian Black Sabbath songs at normal slow speed, while Karmageddon sped their evil Black Sabbath songs up to a blur, so that they sounded like a malfunctioning piece of machinery. Both lead singers were trying as hard as they could to impersonate the Cookie Monster, and both guitarists played variations on

“Flight of the Bumblebee” during the entire set without stopping, even between “songs.” Fortunately for Alter of Blood, the guitar-o-technics drew attention away from the fact that 250

Todd Panchowski was finding counting to four a bit beyond his grasp. I envied them for that, at least.

Sam Hellerman pointed to the Alter of Blood guitarist as he let loose volley after volley of hammered-on and pulled-off hemisemidemiquavers. “Go tell him he missed a note,” he whispered. I almost spit my Coke all over my Che Guevara shirt.

I must admit, as our turn approached, I was getting pretty nervous, especially when I noticed Deanna Schumacher, along with around three or four other girls in IHA-SV uniforms, creeping into the auditorium through the side door. I tried to catch her eye and wave to her, but she pretended she didn’t notice. Oops, I realized. I was supposed to act like I didn’t know her, especially in front of her friends. I tried to wink, but I’m no good at winking, so I just mouthed “gotcha,”

but she pretended not to notice that either.

Of course, that “gotcha” was dubious in every sense.

The main reason I was so taken aback by the Skoomacker factor was that I had recently broken down and tried to call her on an unauthorized day. I suppose I had been hoping for a little “I’m so glad you called” action and for a feeling that I had more or less made it through the maze after all. As it turned out, though, here’s what happened: She picked up the phone without screening and, when she realized it was me, said, “My boyfriend’s here right now, and I’m sure he’s wondering who’s calling me at this hour.

You want to talk to him?” I quickly hung up and went searching for a place to hide till I was done hyperventilating. I guess the Monday/Thursday schedule was there for a reason. I had reached a dead end and was still in the pseudorelationship maze after all. Yet now here she was, cutting class at Immaculate Heart Academy to see my band play. Or maybe it was her lunch period and they had open campus.

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Now, if they ever make a TV movie called The Chi-Mo Story, they’ll probably try to present our performance at the Festival of Lights as a grand triumph of the underdog, a tribute to the noble spirit of the alienated and abused. We shamed and changed society. Because we three claimed our freedom, all are free. Hooray for us. In fact, our set did have a pretty significant impact on Hillmont High School society, but it was mostly negative, and entirely by accident. And it wasn’t a triumph. In fact, it totally sucked.

The first thing that went wrong was that unlike in movies and afterschool specials, where the sound would have been done by sympathetic people from the Math Club or something, the people in charge of the PA were totally normal guys, so they were psychotic and hate-filled and wanted us to die. And they wouldn’t let us use the PA. Or rather, they wanted a hundred dollars for the PA and fifty for the lights.

I’m sure they hadn’t tried to charge the other bands, but they weren’t interested in arguing on that basis. Clearly, we didn’t have the money, and we had to resolve the issue quickly. The act before us was a normal backward-baseball-hat guy who was “rapping” to a backing track about how he had ramoned everybody’s mother or something. He was deeply into his second appalling minute and we knew it would end soon and we would be on. But the normal PA guys wouldn’t budge on the hundred and fifty bucks.

Sam Hellerman did a little Ronald Reagan voice and said,

“I paid for this microphone,” which I thought was funny but which didn’t go over so well with the normal PA guys.

“Oops,” said one of them, and knocked Sam Hellerman’s Slurpee into his chest, all over his lovingly hand-lettered

“Mao Is Murder” T-shirt. Sam Hellerman got that familiar

“I’m totally gonna bleed all over this guy” look on his face, but he restrained himself and started to wheel and deal with 252

them instead. In the end he got them to rent him one microphone and to turn on two lights for fifteen bucks, which was all we had on us.

We had to work quickly, but we knew what to do. I found a hand truck backstage and duct-taped Amanda’s karaoke mic to the handle, while Sam Hellerman taped the rented microphone to one of Todd Panchowski’s unused cymbal stands. Todd Panchowski wasn’t too pleased about that but allowed it, presumably because he was worried that otherwise Sam Hellerman might be tempted to express his disappointment by bleeding on his drums—it wasn’t like it hadn’t happened before. Although the stand was pretty short, it was about Hellerman height after its legs had been taped to the seat of a metal folding chair. In fact, since he had to slump so far to reach the strings of his low-slung bass with the fingers at the end of his half-dislocated right arm, he still had to tilt his head up Lemmy style to sing into the mic after all. My mouth was level with the taped-on karaoke mic if I lowered my body by spreading my legs wide enough. It almost worked.

Sam Hellerman, true to form, had brought along an XLR-to-quarter-inch adaptor, so we were able to plug both mics into the Frankenstein Bassman/Magnavox amp, just like at home. Living room rock. Live. In concert.

The fake rap guy finished, saying how he had “mad love”

for his “hood” and “da funk,” and wanted to “shout out” to his

“homies” about how he had nine millimeters for “they ass”

and wanted to put his “gat” to “they dome” just as we were ready to go. It was more like an abortion than music, but he got a wildly enthusiastic response from the crowd. Well, we’re all pro-choice out here in Hillmont, after all.

I hadn’t meant to, but it turned out that here I made what I guess you’d call a fateful decision. I was standing at the 253

taped-on mic thinking about how Amanda’s banned banner had really been the best thing about Balls Deep, and how Sam Hellerman’s costume had been ruined and how Todd Panchowski had refused even to consider wearing his, and how everyone else got to use the PA without paying, and how nobody was ever going to understand the seventies porn/communist guerilla concept, and how I was tired of the name anyway, and how I would never know why my dad was dead, and how I really hated all normal people with every fiber of my being, not only because of the PA and Sam Hellerman’s Slurpee, but because of Charles Evan Henderson’s Brighton Rock and Bobby Duboyce’s helmet and Yasmynne Schmick’s pain and suffering and everybody’s Catcher in the Rye hypocrisy and Mr. Donnelly’s cruelty and Matt Lynch’s sadism and Mr. Teone’s idiocy and so many, many other things, including pretty much everything that had ever happened to me or that I had ever seen happen to anybody else. So as the student body’s white rap/poetry slam euphoria started to fade, and they gaped at us and several of them started trying to instigate a “you suck!” chant, I positioned my mouth about an inch from the karaoke mic (so I wouldn’t get shocked too bad) and—well, I think right up to the end I had intended to say, “hi, we’re Balls Deep.” But instead, what came out of my mouth was:

“Hi, we’re the Chi-Mos.” Then I didn’t know what to say.

Sam Hellerman stared at me, but he quickly recovered.

“Yeah!” he yelled in a high-pitched Paul Stanley voice, with a surprising degree of (devil-head) bravado, under the circumstances. “All right! We’re the Chi-Mos! That’s the Reverend Chi-Mo on guitar! And I’m your Assistant Principal Chi-Mo on bass and being aware of my own mortality, and back there we have Chi-Mo Panchowski on percussion and counting to four! Well, close enough, anyway! This song’s 254

called ‘I Saw Mr. Teone Checking Out Kyrsten Blakeney’s Ass’!”

Now, what was supposed to happen next was that Todd Panchowski would count off with four stick clicks and we would launch into the song. And that would have been pretty cool. But what actually happened was that Todd Panchowski just sat there for a while. Then he took his little towel and wiped off his face. Then he stood up and adjusted his drum seat. Then he raised his sticks in the air and twirled them around. Then he bent down to pick up the stick he had dropped. Then, around four hours later, he finally did the count-in, except that he did only three not-quite-regular clicks and started a beat ahead of the rest of us. Well, he always did have a hard time remembering what comes after three. And here’s a valuable lesson I learned that I will share with anybody who may want to try to have a band one day: the fewer songs you have the drummer start, the more chance you’ll have of getting to do more than a couple of them in twenty minutes. Have them start with the guitar instead. Trust me.

I have to admit, our “music” was, in its own way, no less abominable than the white rap thing had been. Most of what we had accomplished in all those practices just evaporated under the pressure of the “gig.” The Hillmont student body were unimpressed, and not even moved enough to join in the

“you suck!” chant that a few optimistic psycho normals kept trying to start. I think the crowd had realized that the most disheartening thing they could do in this situation was to gape in silent, stunned bemusement. They weren’t wrong about that, either. I don’t know how real bands manage to have three or more people all play the same thing at the same time—it was clearly beyond our capabilities. I kept getting shocked by the mic, so around half of the lyrics were lost, 255

though without the PA I doubt anyone could tell one way or another. Meanwhile, we had these long, uncomfortable pauses between songs because of Todd Panchowski’s misguided attempts at reverse showmanship. It was a disaster.

“Yeah, I hear somebody say keep on rockin’?” said Sam Hellerman after we had finished the first tune. Now, this world is vast and complex, full of ambiguity and uncertainty.

But if there was one thing in this muddled, crazy universe that was absolutely clear and beyond debate at that particular moment, it was this: Sam Hellerman had not heard anybody say keep on rockin’.

The best thing we had going for us was the song titles, many of which got a laugh when Sam Hellerman announced them. We did “Mr. Teone Likes ’em Young” and “Are There Hippies in Heaven (and If So, Can We at Least Confiscate Their Patchouli, ’Cause Otherwise I’m Definitely Going to Hell)?” We also did “I Wanna Ramone You,” which only I knew was in honor of Deanna Schumacher, and “Glad All Over,” which Sam Hellerman introduced by saying, “This song is about the face of God.”

Fortunately, our songs were very short. But we still had to cut quite a few because of Todd Panchowski’s delays, which were driving Sam Hellerman off the deep end. He kept looking back at the drum set, begging him with his eyes to start the song already. Plus, while Sam Hellerman was trying to introduce the songs with his clever little shrieked speeches, Todd Panchowski would just hit drums randomly, or practice his paradiddles on the snare. It was distracting, and I didn’t blame Sam Hellerman for being annoyed.

Our big finale was supposed to be “The Guy I Accidentally Beat Up,” the lyrics of which were just Paul Krebs’s name repeated over and over, ending in a wall of instrumental psychedelia during which we were supposed to 256

chant “Freak out, freak out. . . . ” Sam Hellerman announced the song as best he could, trying to shout over the paradiddles, and waited for Todd Panchowski’s irregular count-in.

He looked back after a while and saw TP standing on the drum seat with his arms raised for some reason. He’d had enough. He gave Todd Panchowski the most intense, most devastating eye-ray treatment the world had yet seen. Todd Panchowski flipped Sam Hellerman off, threw his sticks at him and stormed off the stage. Oh, well, it really wasn’t working out between us anyway.

So we did “The Guy I Accidentally Beat Up” without drums, but we skipped the actual song and started from the outro because we were running out of time and the audience was leaving. Sam Hellerman started bleeding from his nose, making sure that he thoroughly soaked the rented microphone. I put my guitar against the amp and turned it up all the way to cause as much feedback as possible, and then we knocked the drums over and tore the Magnavox apart by hitting it with the drum hardware. Sam Hellerman was on the speakers, jumping up and down, blood flying, hitting the Magnavox with a cymbal stand till it stopped making noise and was in several pieces. I was kicking the drum set, which soon was little more than a pile of rubbish. We were definitely going to have to find a new drummer after this. Todd Panchowski’s main qualification had been that he’d had a drum set. And he certainly didn’t have one of those anymore.

The set, and the Festival of Lights, finally ended when

“Chet” and a few others pulled us away from the wreckage and switched off the Polytone. Sam Hellerman, who had been rolling in his own blood screaming what sounded like

“yay-uss” over and over, had to be physically restrained by no fewer than three thoroughly confused goons. The students, who had been hurrying toward the exits when the destruc-257

tion began, had all stopped dead in their tracks to stare and remained frozen for some time. They didn’t know what to say—even “you suck!” must have seemed inadequate. There was total silence, and for probably the first time in my Hillmont High School career I could hear myself think. It was nice, though the thoughts weren’t.

TOTALLY CALLAB LE

We didn’t win the battle of—I mean, the Festival of Lights. The

“yo mama” guy did. Everyone had hated the Chi-Mos. But we had made an impression, albeit a negative one, and it was the kind of thing people talked about, which is what everyone did for the rest of the day and well into the following week.

Sam Hellerman had printed up a zine with the lyrics to all the songs on the set list plus several others. It had said

“Balls Deep,” of course, but as he stood at the main exit hand-ing them out, he wrote “The Chi-Mos” at the top of each one in Sharpie, so it looked like “Balls Deep” was just the title. It proved to be a pretty popular item because of its populist anti-Teone message, and he ran out quickly, promising to go over to the Copymat to make more as soon as possible.

I was kind of in a daze standing by the stage when Deanna Schumacher came up and whispered, “Thanks for hanging up on me, ass.” (It didn’t matter what I said before I put the phone back on the hook: she always claimed she thought I had hung up on her.) But then she said, “Nice show, sexy,” in a voice that didn’t sound all the way sarcastic and handed me a note, sneakily rubbing my palm with her finger as she did it, before running off to join her friends, who were on the way out. The note said: “Thanks for rawking my world. I’m totally callable Mon/Thur from 6 to 10 if you’re 258

into it,” and it was signed with a heart and a big “D.” And next to the heart it said “slurp.” I kid you not.

Cleaning up after our set had taken longer than anticipated, so I was late for sixth period. I stopped in to the otherwise deserted boys’ bathroom, and Mr. Teone ambled in.

Now, Mr. Teone’s office is located just across the corner from the boys’ bathroom at the southwest corner of center court, so he can see its door from his desk through the mirrored plate glass, though you can’t see him looking. When he has some important matter to discuss with a student in an un-official capacity, he’ll wait for his moment and try to meet him in the bathroom for an informal chat. I don’t know who takes care of the girls’ bathroom in that corner of center court. Not Mr. Teone, surely, but, hey, you never know.

I had never been a participant in one of these secret meetings, but I had walked in on them. When someone walks in, Mr. Teone abruptly ends the meeting and growls something like “keep your nose clean!” Then he’ll zoom out, but as he leaves he’ll say to the interloper: “that goes double for you, Henderson!” Well, he only says Henderson if the interloper happens to be me or someone else with my last name.

Obviously.

But for the first time, I wasn’t the interloper. I was the main guy.

“Well, well, Henderson,” he said, standing a couple of urinals over from me, “you and your stunt you boys pulled has a great deal of folks around here pretty steamed.”

I gave him a look that said: “well, if I interpret your tortured, semiliterate syntax correctly, my only comment is that all great artists are misunderstood in their own time.”

He stepped away from his urinal, which was kind of scary, but it turned out he was fully dressed and buttoned up. Thank 259

God. I gave up trying to pee and buttoned up as well. I can’t do that with anyone else in the room, especially Mr. Teone.

He was holding his reading glasses to one eye and squinting at a copy of Sam Hellerman’s song zine.

“Chi-Mos,” he said slowly, but he pronounced it, Schtuppe fashion, “chee moss.” “Mind telling me what that’s supposed to mean?”

Now, I had been in many ironic situations before, but none of them had quite prepared me for this. I mean, here was a leading figure in the normal hierarchy, a high-ranking official representative of the Perpetrator Nation, asking me to explain the meaning of the derogatory name foisted upon me by their own sadistic test several years ago and used against me as a weapon by their lower-ranking minions ever since. I snorted. How quickly we forget.

“It’s the plural of ‘chy moe,’ ” I said, correcting his pronunciation. “It stands for ‘child molester.’ ”

He continued to squint at me. “Where are you getting this stuff ?” he said.

I stared at him with a serious look, the look that says only a (devil-head) philistine asks an artist where he gets his ideas.

Then I laughed a little, because, you know, sometimes I crack myself up.

“Now listen to me,” he said suddenly, his red face a match for that of any PE teacher, his voice a (devil-head) histrionic stage whisper. He tapped the zine with his finger. “This crap . . .” He trailed off. “I don’t know who you think you’re dealing with, but watch your step, Henderson. Keep your nose clean!” Well, I could understand why he didn’t like the lyrics to “Mr. Hitler, Mr. Stalin, Mr. Teone,” but this was a bit over-the-top. He was still whispering, but it was loud, kind of like yell-whispering. His face was throbbing red, and drops of sweat were spattering from it in all directions. Yuck.

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Enter the interloper, who happened to be Syndie Duffy’s floppy fake-hippie boyfriend.

“You remember what I said,” said Mr. Teone. “Don’t be an a-hole.” And then, as he stormed out: “And that goes double for you, Shinefield!”

“Dude,” said Shinefield, after Mr. Teone left. “Radical show!”

Pause. “Really?”

“Insane,” he said, which I took to mean “yes, really.” Then he added: “What did Teone want?”

“He was just advising me not to be an a-hole.”

“Yeah,” said Shinefield. “Me too.”

I felt a strange sense of well-being. Here was the only conversation I’d ever had in the boys’ bathroom that hadn’t consisted of introductory remarks to an eventual attempt on my life. In fact, I was trying to think of another conversation I’d had anywhere with anyone other than Sam Hellerman or Dr.

Hexstrom that hadn’t been at my expense, but I was drawing a blank. So this is what it’s like, I thought. Going to the bathroom would never be the same again. As I was soon to learn, though, suddenly becoming a quasi celebrity doesn’t necessarily mean that attempts on your life cease to occur: they just tend to move to venues other than the boys’ bathroom. Still, it was progress, any way you sliced it.

“Rock on, Chi-Mo!” Shinefield called out as I left, and I didn’t really mind the nickname all that much.

A DR. H EXSTROM-ECTOMY

When I got home from school that day, Little Big Tom took me aside and told me that my mom had had a falling-out with Dr. Hexstrom and that they were looking for another therapist for me. I’d expected this. My guess was that they 261

wouldn’t actually get around to finding another doctor, and that that would be the end of the experiment in Chi-Mo modification unless I did something major like set something on fire or killed somebody.

A little later on, I talked to Amanda, who said that as far as she knew, suicide prevention hadn’t even been the main thing on Mom’s mind with the psychiatrist plan; she had just been hoping Dr. Hexstrom would give me some pills and set me on the road to being more normal and maybe then I’d go out for sports or something. But in their meeting, Dr.

Hexstrom had told her that she was the problem, not me, and suggested that she come in with me for some family-type counseling, because she needed help. My mom fired her on the spot. Well, good old Dr. Hexstrom. Not that I would have gone along with the family counseling thing. That sounded like a nightmare. I was going to miss talking to her, but oh well. Maybe it’s my destiny to remain a non-normal, unmedicated and uncorrected eccentric with no one interesting to talk to. It would figure.

“Did you know Dad killed himself?” I asked, after a brief struggle to remain silent. To my surprise, for once she didn’t give me the look that says “you’re as dumb as a freeze-dried coffee crystal.”

“That’s what she thinks,” she said. “I don’t know. She thinks a lot of weird things.”

“She told Dr. Hexstrom he left a note.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ve looked for that note. There is no note.”

So while my mom had been telling me a story about how my dad had died in a car accident, she was also telling Amanda a story about how he had killed himself. Or more probably, she was just being her crazy self, oblivious to both of us, and we had sensibly assumed that whatever she was 262

implying had to be wrong. It’s just that Amanda and I had accidentally drawn different conclusions about which fake story was being implied. Who knows who was right?

Amanda had started to cry a little. I felt bad for bringing it up, as I’d known I would.

“I don’t care how it happened,” she said. “I just wish it didn’t happen.”

She had the right idea, of course. I put my arm around her kind of awkwardly, and she put hers around my neck and squeezed really hard, still sobbing. I almost joined in, even though she was doing enough crying for both of us. All the reasoning and investigating in the world were never going to bring him back. Part of me still wanted everything to make sense, but the biggest part of me realized that Amanda was right and that that was an impossibly high standard.

I S TH E R E LATION S H I P STI LL I MAG I NARY

I F YOU CAN MAKE EAC H OTH E R C RY?

On Saturday afternoon, the day after the Festival of Lights, I walked into the kitchen to find my mom waiting for me with that familiar family-discussion look on her face. Little Big Tom wasn’t there, though, which was pretty weird: he lives for family discussions. I expected we were going to be talking about psychiatry and suicide and sports, that sort of thing, and I braced myself. But she wasn’t looking all that disturbed or crazy—she was more like bemusedly exasperated, if I read her body language correctly. You never could tell with her, though.

“I’ve been on the phone with Marjorie Blakeney all morning,” she said. “Kyrsten was very upset by your little poetry booklet. Everyone has been teasing her. She locked her-263

self in her room and hasn’t stopped crying since yesterday.

So . . .”

I hadn’t noticed before, but my mom was holding a copy of Sam Hellerman’s zine—one of the new ones that he had printed up that said “The Chi-Mos” instead of “Balls Deep.”

The cover had a big picture of Mr. Teone and the title was

“Never Again.” Carol moves in mysterious ways. I didn’t even have one of those yet.

I shot her my best “you’re losing me, sweetheart” look. I mean, “Callipygian Princess” is really just a heartfelt celebra-tion of feminine beauty, and “Shake It Like You Mean It”

doesn’t even mention her by name. But she had the zine open to “I Saw Mr. Teone Checking Out Kyrsten Blakeney’s Ass,”

and I guess it wasn’t too hard to fill in the “so.” Who knew Kyrsten Blakeney would have such a thin skin? She had to be used to people checking out her ass, but maybe she just blocked Mr. Teone out of her mind when the subject of ass-gazing popped up. I mean, that’s what I would have done.

But here it was in unavoidable black and white. Now, I had meant that song as a righteous indictment of Mr. Teone’s (devil-head) iniquity, but I suppose I had also accidentally robbed Kyrsten Blakeney of the peace of willful ignorance and forgetting. I knew how that felt, I really did, and I genuinely felt bad about it. It was a bit of a stretch, but I made a quick attempt to feel sorry for myself while pretending to be Kyrsten Blakeney, and it even kind of almost worked in the end: that is, the resulting song “Up for Grabs” ended up being one of my few good girl-point-of-view tunes when I finally got around to writing it.

But that was long after all the stuff that I’m about to explain happened. At the time I just said, “I didn’t mean to hurt Kyrsten Blakeney’s feelings.” Then I couldn’t help adding that 264

the callipygous among us have a certain responsibility as public figures. My mom just stared at me in incomprehension, which I suppose was the reaction I wanted. I don’t even understand what motivates me sometimes. She finally said she thought it might be nice if I apologized. So while she lighted up a Virginia Slims 120, I tore a sheet from my notebook and quickly wrote:

Dear Kyrsten Blakeney,

I apologize for mentioning your

callipygousness in the context of Mr.

Teone, and for immortalizing it in song.

That was inappropriate. I see that now.

But you should probably get used to the

idea that one of your roles in life will always be to inspire devotion and poetry among the dreamers, even though I can

see how in a certain way that can be a

pain.

Anyhow, I am very, very sorry. Please

don’t develop another eating disorder on my account. It’s really not worth it.

Sincerely,

Thomas Charles Henderson

I was folding it up, but my mom was holding out her hand, so I gave it to her. After she read it, she refolded it and put it in the Chi-Mos zine. Then she said, in a wry manner I hadn’t really thought her capable of, “maybe you’d better leave the apologizing to me after all.”

That seemed to wrap it up, but Carol had more to say.

She asked me what Chi-Mo meant. I told her it was a fond 265

name that the other kids had given me just to show how much they loved and cared for me. She didn’t believe me, but she wouldn’t have believed the truth, either.

“Well, I’ve also been on the phone with Tony Teone,” she said, after a brief pause. “He’s also very upset by your little booklet. So . . .”

I almost didn’t realize who she was referring to. Then I did, and I snort-laughed uncontrollably. Tony Teone? Tony Teone? Fully retarded. She misinterpreted the laughter and looked at me sternly. “You really hurt his feelings.”

Now, this was too much.

“Mr. Teone,” I said carefully, “is a devil-head maleficent, depraved, iniquitous, sadistic blackguard.” Except, in excellent Mr. Schtuppe style, I said “mal-efficient.” I was finally getting the hang of the mispronunciation thing. The trick is to make the mispronunciation have a totally different meaning from the correctly pronounced word. My education was finally starting to bear fruit.

She stared at me. “A devil-head, inefficient, black—uh, what?” Okay, I hadn’t intended to say “devil-head” aloud, and I could see why she was confused.

“Look,” I said, trying again in words she would be sure to understand. “Mr. Teone is a bad, bad man. The font of all evil.”

“He has always felt warmly toward you,” she said. “He had a lot of respect for your father.”

The fuck? I told her about Mr. Teone’s constant ridicule and abuse, the sarcastic salutes, and so forth. “Yeah,” I said,

“he’s the devil-head embodiment of warmth and respect. A real swell guy. No way I’m apologizing to him.”

“Well, they were in the navy together,” she said, and I had to admit, though reluctantly, that that kind of could account for the saluting thing. And maybe the “say hi to your father”

had been a retarded attempt to say “pay my respects when 266

you visit the cemetery”? I had to concede that it hadn’t, perhaps, all been sarcastic. When you think about it, it’s kind of hard to pull off Respect without everybody assuming it’s Sarcasm. It just is. But while I was considering this, my mom was still talking. “. . . they were very close, the two of them.

So . . .”

I was trying to fill in that so when a weird thought struck me. “Mom, do you know Mr. Teone’s middle name?” I asked, but I already knew the kind of answer I was going to get.

“Yeah, it’s Isadore,” she said. “And it’s actually kind of funny. Because of his initials, everyone always used to call him Tit.” She giggled, and under other circumstances I would have found that cute.

Tony Isadore Teone. Well, ramone me with a Mosrite.

B EYON D GO OD AN D EVI L

So Mr. Teone was Tit. A middle-aged Tit, rather, just as my dad would have been a middle-aged CEH had he lived. It was really hard to imagine that in 1960 my dad’s best friend had been a twelve-year-old version of Mr. Teone. On the other hand, how did I know what was hard or easy to imagine? I hadn’t known my dad then, and, as was constantly being brought home to me, I hadn’t known him very well even when the two of us had happened to be alive at the same time. Maybe he and Tit were two peas in a pod, just as evil as each other. Or maybe Mr. Teone had once been sweet and delightful, an all-around great guy and a joy to be around as a child, only turning evil later on. But no, Tit was evil by at least 1963. The coded note proved that. I loved my dad and trusted that he hadn’t been evil but had merely associated with at least one guy who happened to be evil, which wasn’t 267

quite so bad. Because you have to believe in something.

Don’t you?

I was also having some trouble squaring the clever young Tit, who could write codes in backward French and manipulate biblical quotations to his own nefarious ends, with the fat, dumb galunk he had apparently become. But people degener-ate as they get older, and anyway, it was possible that Mr.

Teone wasn’t quite as dumb as he looked. He knew Latin, after all, though that could simply reflect the fact that he had gone to school back when they still taught you things other than how to make great collages. It wasn’t a matter of intelligence, really. Evil was the common thread here. And maybe the obesity, too. Poor, dear little MT, I thought. Something told me we weren’t talking about top-quality ramoning here.

A thought struck: what if Mr. Teone wasn’t evil after all?

What if he turned out to be a Disney-ish figure, unjustly ma-ligned at the beginning, who would eventually be revealed as a kindly soul with an important message to impart? “Son, your old man wanted you to have this,” he’d say, waving some object or other, a sword or a curious gold coin. “But I had to wait till I knew you were old enough to understand.

Fortunately, you passed the test. Oh, you didn’t realize you are descended from kings? Well, you are, and it’s time to claim your rightful place.” Descended from kings? Oh my God, it all fits. “I’m terribly sorry,” he’d continue, “about the hazing, the mockery, the torture, the permanent psychological and emotional scars. We had to do that so you wouldn’t suspect the big surprise party we’ve been planning for you.”

Somehow, I couldn’t see it. I had to stand by my instinct that Mr. Teone was a bad guy, the apex of a pyramid of des-picable, sadistic normal psychos who wanted me and Sam Hellerman dead. I never really doubted it. The fact that he 268

had known my dad just made his evil a bit more complicated, that’s all.

That said, I realized that Mr. Teone would have answers to many of my questions, if only I could figure out a way to ask them. I was still sitting in the kitchen, thinking things over. My mom got up and I could hear her footsteps as she walked over to the living room. Then I heard some shuffling, followed by another little burst of giggling: and I knew she had just looked up “callipygian” in the dictionary.

I took out a sheet of paper and wrote another note: Dear Mr. Teone,

In light of recent events, I feel

there are important matters we need to

discuss. These concern materials among

my deceased father’s effects which you

may be in a position to elucidate.

Please contact me at your earliest

convenience to arrange a meeting so that we can discuss these issues and, I hope, come to a satisfactory arrangement.

Best wishes,

Thomas Charles Henderson

I put the note in an envelope and put the envelope in my backpack. Then I went into the living room. My mom was sitting on the couch, reading the Chi-Mos zine and looking up words in the American Heritage dictionary.

“Mom, was Dad really in the navy?” I asked.

“Yes, he was,” she replied absently. “For three years.”

And then, since I was on a roll, I dared to add, “and did he really commit suicide?”

269

“I’m sorry, baby,” she whispered. I had a sort of feeling that she meant that as a “yes, but let’s say no more about it.”

But it could just as easily have meant “no” or “maybe,” or perhaps “decline to state.” I tried one more.

“Can I see the note?”

“No.”

Well, that answer seemed to imply that there had been a note, but I remained unsure. I was ready in case she started to flip out, but she didn’t. She looked pretty sad, though, and there may have been tears in her eyes; but there were almost always tears in her eyes. So I just went over and kissed her on the cheek.

I left the room in silence. I was going to leave it at that, but then something came over me, and I reversed course and went back in and approached the couch.

“Why can’t you be straight with anyone?” I said. “You tell everyone different things and you keep the truth to yourself.”

She looked up, surprised: it was a very uncharacteristic outburst from me. Then she said, quietly, “I’m sorry, baby.”

This time I knew what it meant. It meant she didn’t know why she couldn’t be straight with anyone. She touched my arm, and it was the most affectionate thing I’d had from her in a long, long time.

U NC LE TONY

On Monday morning, it was already clear that our performance at the Festival of Lights had had an impact on Hillmont High society. Sam Hellerman’s new version of the lyrics zine was quite popular. He was selling them for two dollars apiece, and he already had over a hundred dollars by the end of first 270

period. It was a good thing, too, because Todd Panchowski’s parents were reportedly planning to sue our parents’ asses over his wrecked drum set: we needed the money. At this rate—well, I couldn’t quite calculate how many we’d have to sell to cover a drum set and legal costs and still maybe have enough left over so that my share would be at least a hundred and fifty dollars so I could schedule my own appointment with Dr. Hexstrom. Because I really wanted to discuss Tit with her, after all that had happened.

Anyway, our band had sucked and had been hated by one and all, but the zine was a hit. A couple of kids in homeroom even asked me to autograph their copies. (I noticed, though, with a slightly guilty pang, that Kyrsten Blakeney was absent. Or I think that’s what that pang was.) It wasn’t like suddenly everyone wanted to be our friends or anything.

Well, Shinefield, Syndie Duffy’s fake-hippie boyfriend, did seem to want to be friends. When I passed him in the hall he said, “Chi-Mo!” and put out his fist, which I dodged by force of habit. But he was only trying to do the hipster patty-cake secret-handshake thing, where you touch fists, then touch them again with one on top and then the other on top, and then snap your fingers and say “my brother” or something. I don’t really get how to do it, so I gave him the Vulcan “live long and prosper” sign instead, which was just going to have to do.

Other than Shinefield, the general public still gave us a wide berth, and most of them probably wouldn’t have considered being seen doing the hipster handshake with either of us. But it was a bit like when I had accidentally beaten up Paul Krebs. Somehow we had inched up the scale. We had produced useful materials and provided a needed service.

Laughter at Mr. Teone’s expense was in the end more valuable to society than strict enforcement of the pecking order.

271

Speaking of which, after homeroom that morning, Mr.

Teone once again accosted me in the boys’ bathroom. If I still harbored any hope that there was in the offing a Teone-related surprise party in my honor, it quickly sank, killing all on board. His transformation from pudgy, freakish, administrative buffoon to terrifying PE teacher–ogre had reached yet a further stage. I mean, his face was the color of sweet-and-sour sauce and a vein in his neck was throbbing to the beat of a dance track that it alone could hear. I almost didn’t recognize him. He looked like a less flat-chested Ms. Rimbaud.

“God damn it, Henderson!” he whisper-roared. “What in hell you think you’re trying to pull?”

“I’m sorry I hurt your feelings,” I said deliberately, “but I believe my right to satirize you, as a public figure, is protected by the First Amendment.”

He ignored the legal argument. “What we need to establish,” he continued, his damp, vibrating, PE-teacher face a re-volting inch or so from mine, “is where you’re getting your information.”

I reached into my backpack, pulled out my Catcher in the Rye, CEH 1960, and looked at him meaningfully, sure he would recognize it. But I was wrong.

“Yes, yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “A timeless classic. I used to carry one around with me when I was your age and it changed my life and society. Now cut the cute stuff—” I kid you not, he said “cut the cute stuff.” Despite the vibrant, Technicolor facial hue, this was pure black-and-white B-movie dialogue.

“Look,” I said, when it was clear that he hadn’t been able to come up with a way to end that sentence about the cute stuff. “Don’t you think you ought to be a little less unpleasant toward me, considering everything?” It seemed reasonable, given that we were two people separated by a common rela-272

tionship with Charles Evan Henderson’s copy of Catcher in the Rye, and I said it as politely as I could. He didn’t take it that way, though.

“If that’s supposed to be a threat, let me assure you: you are fucking with the wrong guy.”

A weird thing to say. From a deeply weird man.

He didn’t even wait for an interloper before he stormed out. “Keep your nose clean,” I called out helpfully, but I don’t know if he heard.

I walked past his office on my way to first period, then doubled back, took the note I had written on Saturday out of my backpack, and slid it under his door. Maybe he would be more reasonable when he’d had a chance to cool off. And maybe then we could have a more productive discussion, with our pants on, in neutral territory, say at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway, rather than in the boys’ bathroom, though it would still be a weird scene. I’d even be willing to apologize for my rude lyrics, given the right conciliatory ges-ture. And he would tell me all about my dad and their carefree youth together, and the turmoil of the Turbulent Sixties, their hopes, their dreams of sailing away to sea to find the answers to their souls’ mysteries. Maybe he’d even reveal his softer, human side, and I’d realize that he wasn’t such a bad guy after all, just misunderstood. The wounds wouldn’t heal instantly. There would have to be time for reflection, for honest soul-searching, for letting go. But bit by bit, we’d learn to laugh again. “You know, you remind me a lot of your old man,” he’d say from time to time, with a twinkle in his eye.

I’d start referring to him as Uncle Tony. And then Mr. Teone would finally explain the whole story behind Timothy J.

Anderson, CEH, the dead bastard, John the Baptist, and The Catcher in the Rye. Not the most solid plan, perhaps, but it was worth a shot, and anyway, I couldn’t think of an alternative.

273

N E R D B LO OD

I missed out on a lot of what happened next and had to have it explained to me later, for reasons that will become clear in a minute. I still have some numb spots on my head from the experience, though they tell me that some of the nerve tissue may well end up growing back over time. We’ll see.

Anyway, looking back, I suppose it hadn’t been the smartest idea to end our set with “The Guy I Accidentally Beat Up.” The Paul Krebs–Matt Lynch people had been looking for a discreet, plausibly deniable way to wreak vengeance on me ever since the Brighton Rock incident. What am I saying? They had been looking for d., p. d. ways to w. v. since they first became aware of my existence around the third grade. And finding them, too. But that song, not to mention its inclusion in a bestselling publication—by second period, Sam Hellerman had unloaded another forty copies—had invited immediate retaliation. Sam Hellerman thought the conspiracy went all the way to the top, at least up to Mr. Teone himself, who of course had his own reasons to wish me ill, despite my magnanimous decision to give him the tentative benefit of the barest doubt. I don’t know about that, but Mr.

Donnelly had certainly been in on it to some degree. If we could prove even that, Sam Hellerman promised, the lawsuit could bankrupt the school system, which was a nice thought.

But I doubted it could be proved. Their plan wasn’t particularly brilliant, but it was elaborate and involved several actors, all of whom were responsible only for their individual parts.

It did the job.

Sam Hellerman had just been sent to the nurse’s office, having once again used his magic bleeding nose to end a boxing match before it began. Mr. Donnelly had slated me to box Mark McAlistair next. Mark McAlistair was one of the lower 274

Matt Lynch minions, no more than a gopher, really, but he had clearly committed some transgression because he was the fall guy in the scheme. Soon after our match began and everyone had begun the usual chant of “pussy, pussy, pussy,”

someone tripped me, and Mark McAlistair, as instructed, fell on top of me and pinned me down while a couple of accomplices in the “ring” stood on my wrists and knees. Then he removed his right glove and hit me on the back of the head with his ungloved fist repeatedly as hard and fast as he could.

That was really against the rules, but Mr. Donnelly pretended not to notice at first. Then, when I was already seeing stars and starting to fade, he yelled, “What the hell are you doing, McAlistair?” and pulled him off me. Then he sent Rich Zim, another Lynchie, to escort me to the nurse’s office. On our way there, while I was still more or less in a daze, Rich Zim led me past the band room where a person or persons un-known stepped out while we were passing the door and brained me on the back of the head with a brass instrument.

I lost consciousness completely at that point. I think they may have kicked me in the ribs a bit while I was out, judging from the feeling when I came to. At some point, though, Rich Zim and another guy carried me to the nurse’s office, bang-ing my head on lockers and posts and doors and dropping me on the ground all along the way. At least, it felt that way when I assessed the damages after the fact. They did just about everything except beat me with a bag of oranges. And maybe they did that, too, for all I know.

The whole thing could then be blamed on Mark McAlistair’s gloveless punches. That was the plan, anyway, as near as I could figure. At any rate, Mark McAlistair was toast, and was headed to some sort of facility for delinquents that would be even harder to take than Hillmont. I felt a little sorry for him, as he was only a pawn. But he should have 275

known better than to sign up with a pack of depraved normal people, who didn’t care whom they sold out as long as it meant a chance at a couple more drops of nerd blood.

Savages.

So I ended up with a concussion and some skull fractures, and I had to spend the next few days in a hospital so I wouldn’t fall asleep and die. I didn’t die and life went on, but for a while there I wasn’t around to observe much of it. It takes more than a blow from a brass instrument to kill King Dork, apparently. Who knew?

It turned out I needed surgery because of some nerve damage. I was told that the surgeon was very good, but that there was a possibility that I was going to have some permanent numb spots on my scalp. That didn’t seem so bad, though part of me wished there was some way that I could have some numb spots inside my head as well as outside.

They supplied that on a temporary basis, anyway, which was nice. For a while there, I had feared that Hillmont was going to end up with another helmet guy on its hands, but fortunately it wasn’t going to come to that.

I have no recollection of the operation. Afterward, they moved me to a recovery room on a different floor, which I shared with this guy named Mr. Aquino. We were separated by a curtain: my side was by the window, while he had the door side. I don’t know what was wrong with him, but whatever it was, it resulted in a steady stream of moaning from his side of the curtain. After I got used to it, I took it in stride and didn’t really notice it anymore. But when anyone approached the door, the volume would increase, and if someone actually entered our room, he would break into a kind of hysterical wheezing. It was like an alarm system. When Mr. Aquino

“went off,” I knew someone was about to enter, which was 276

useful. I always had a few seconds to compose myself before entertaining guests.

More people came through that door and over to my side than you might imagine. My recollection is fuzzy, partly because of deluxe pain medication that would have quite literally made Sam Hellerman drool and partly because the whole situation was so disorienting. I gradually learned what had happened at Hillmont High in the aftermath of the Festival of Lights by piecing together accounts from various sources. But now I can’t quite recall which parts were explained by visitors, which parts I read about in the paper or saw on TV, and which parts I figured out afterward by putting two and two together.

The school ended up banning the Chi-Mos zine, which only made it more sought after, of course: Sam Hellerman had added a sticker that said “Banned in Hillmont” and had been able to raise the price to three dollars. Some of the punky kids, Sam Hellerman said, had even started showing up to school with “Chi-Mos” written in Wite-Out on their jackets and bags. We were famous.

Mr. Teone had left for lunch on Monday and never came back. After he had been missing for two days, they entered his house to investigate and found—

Well, let me describe how I first heard about it, in a fuzzy hospital conversation with Sam Hellerman. He had just told me about the mysterious disappearance of Mr. Teone and about how the cops had searched his house. Then he fell silent, lost in thought.

“What’s on your mind, Hellerman?” I said, after a while.

“Oh. I was just thinking about whether Budgie really was a part of the new wave of British heavy metal.”

“Really?” I said. What the hell was he talking about? Of course Budgie was a part of the new wave of British heavy 277

metal. The question was, what were we doing talking about who may or may not have been a part of the NWOBHM at a time like this? “Now, in the case of Ethel the Frog . . . ,” he began. He was just toying with me, though.

“I suppose you want to hear about Tit’s Satanic Empire?”

Which of course, as I immediately realized, was exactly what I wanted to hear about, though I hadn’t been able to find the words.

What the police had found at Mr. Teone’s house was evidence of this high school–oriented pornography operation.

Much of it had been removed or destroyed, but what was left supposedly included a large number of videos of Hillmont High School students from the past ten years, ramoning each other like crazy and doing God only knows what else.

As usual, Sam Hellerman seemed to know more about the situation, especially at that early stage, than the newspapers, the TV, or anyone else. But word got around pretty quickly, even though the details were murky. As always seems to happen whenever anything scandalous occurs in Hillmont, a group of parents and community leaders had decided that it all had to do with a powerful Satanic cult. Satanists, they believed, were turning Hillmont teens into mixed-up zombies and using them in their pornographic rituals. Parents were already taking their kids to be deprogrammed and hypnotized by therapists who specialized in recovering buried memories of Satanist porn-abuse. Mr. Teone had been smart to skip town; by the end of the week, there would be enough recovered-memory evidence to convict him several times over even without the videotapes. Now, I’d be the last person to deny a Teone-Satan resemblance, but that part of it seemed pretty far-fetched to me. I mean, a real Satanic conspiracy could probably have come up with someone better than Mr.

Teone to handle the teen porn angle.

278

Anyway, Mr. Teone had been selling and trading the pictures and videos to similar operations overseas, which made it a very serious offense. His method appeared to be to recruit accomplices from within the student body, who would help to sign up friends and younger siblings to act in the videos; then, when the accomplices had graduated, the younger kids would “move up” and become the recruiters. He managed to keep everybody on board through a combination of rewards, punishments, perks, and intimidation; supposedly he even had a profit-sharing scheme for the “senior” student associates. They had really been raking it in, too, by all accounts. I thought of Mr. Teone’s afterschool programs—it sure gave a new meaning to the word “gifted,” not to mention “talented.”

Once again, I found myself wondering whether Sam Hellerman knew even more than he was telling about the whole situation. It wouldn’t have surprised me one bit.

The subject of who had been involved was of course a big topic of conversation at school. The Hillmont student body was now divided into two groups: those who desperately wanted to see those tapes and those who claimed they wanted to see the tapes but were secretly hoping the tapes would never leak out because they were in some of them. I also had an inkling of which of the two groups Kyrsten Blakeney probably belonged to, and I felt a bit sad for her.

And also just a bit interested, though I know this doesn’t reflect particularly well on me, in viewing her tapes, just for my own personal information.

I glanced up at Sam Hellerman, and I knew that if anyone could manage to get hold of them, he could, and I was pretty sure he was thinking something similar. If he didn’t already have a complete set, numbered and cross-referenced and neatly displayed in a little cabinet over at Hellerman Manor. You never knew with that guy.

279

I suddenly had a weird thought. What if Mr. Teone and company had wanted to make a “Hot Girls Do Geeks” video series for the specialized European fetish market? It wouldn’t have been hard to do with the cooperation of certain key people and some hidden cameras and so forth.

So I asked: “Was Dud Chart part of Tit’s Satanic Empire, too?”

Sam Hellerman looked startled and kind of peeved, as he usually did when the subject of Dud Chart came up.

“Oh, no,” he said. “No—they had nothing to do with each other.”

I wasn’t totally sure I believed him, though. I never am.

According to Sam Hellerman, one of Mr. Teone’s most trusted minions had been Matt Lynch, who had started at the bottom, recruited by his older brother, and had gradually moved up in the organization. I hated to admit it, but Matt Lynch’s promotion to Hillmont High Satanic Pornography Monitor (after his brother had graduated) had occurred around the time I had adopted my gun-freak strategy of Matt Lynch deterrence. Maybe he hadn’t been fazed by the gun stuff after all, as I had thought, but had just had other things on his mind by that point. All I knew was, if I had endured Little Big Tom’s devil-head sanctimony and worn that blessed army coat through the whole hot spring and summer of ninth grade for nothing, I was pissed.

It wasn’t too hard to figure out what had happened in the aftermath of the Chi-Mos performance. Mr. Teone had jumped to the conclusion that the name “Chi-Mo” was a reference to him and his questionable activities. The content of some of the songs seemed to confirm his suspicions. If he had just ignored it, the matter would certainly have gone away and no one would ever have known. But he had read the 280

band’s performance and the zine as a threat to him. In those circumstances, my note about “materials among my deceased father’s effects” must have seemed a bit like a blackmail message, implying, perhaps, that my dad had had some information on him that I had had access to. I never did figure out what my dad had been working on when he had been killed, but it was just conceivable that it might have had something to do with his old friend Tit. Even if it didn’t, though, Mr.

Teone’s association with my dad went back quite a long way, and it was likely that CEH had known some potentially damaging information that I theoretically could have uncovered.

Mr. Teone had tried to intimidate me in the boys’ bathroom a couple of times, and had maybe even organized the brass instrument attack to drive the message home, but the note had pushed him over the edge and he decided to skip town rather than risk being caught. He was still missing. The speculation was that he had left the country, or that he was being hidden in a secret lair by his fellow porn-Satanists.

At any rate, there went any possibility of Uncle Tony’s big surprise party or an illuminating heart-to-heart at Linda’s Pancakes on Broadway. Maybe I wasn’t descended from kings after all. Rats.

It was all over the papers and the news, of course. There was, however, no mention as yet of the fact that the chain of events that had exposed and toppled Tit’s Satanic Empire had begun with the performance of a sucky high school rock band. Nor was it noted that Mr. Teone’s flight had been sparked by his narcissistic assumption that a tenth grader’s derogatory nickname could only be a veiled reference to him, rather than the result of a faulty aptitude test that equated introversion, social anxiety, and depression with a spiritual vocation. It was quite a story, though. Sam Hellerman was already planning how, once we had a recording of Teone songs 281

available in stores, we would sell our story and make a million dollars.

C H I-MOS AR E R EAL RO C K AN D ROLL

My mom had come to visit at the hospital briefly during one of my most out-of-it phases. I hardly remember it, but I know I asked her to bring me the CEH library. She had passed the task along to Little Big Tom.

So Mr. Aquino started moaning, then wheezing, and then—well, in a way this was one of the bigger surprises of the whole affair. Little Big Tom and Amanda walked in together, and they seemed to be getting along pretty well. It’s not like they came in holding hands and skipping or anything. But Amanda was acting civil toward him, almost friendly, which was quite something. I mean, her eyes were rolling less than usual, and you’d be surprised at what a difference a small thing like that can make. She even pretended to laugh, just a little, when he said “Calling Dr. Howard!” Now, I have no idea why that was supposed to be funny, but you could tell by the look on his face that it was supposed to be a riot. I had never seen Amanda humor LBT like that. As for him, he was clearly in fake-dad heaven. Say what you will about Little Big Tom: it doesn’t take much. And a hospital visit can really help pull a fake family together.

One thing about being in the hospital: people always feel they should bring you something when they visit. Amanda brought in this impressive series of drawings illustrating the Chi-Mos story, kind of like the Bayeux Tapestry, except instead of William the Conqueror and the Pope and so forth, the main characters were me, Sam Hellerman, and Mr.

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Teone, whom she had drawn as a kind of effeminate Satan.

The last one depicted a wailing Mr. Teone being crushed under huge granite letters that spelled “Chi-Mos Are Real Rock and Roll!”

The drawings were childlike and brilliant, almost like real art. I totally wanted to use them for the first Chi-Mos album.

Actually we had already tentatively changed the name to the Elephants of Style, me on guitar, Sam Enchanted Evening on bass and animal husbandry, first album Devil Warship. Well, there was plenty of time to talk about it. I kissed Amanda on the forehead when she leaned over. She said: “You’re the most famous person I know,” which was sweet. She was being all Phoebe-esque and nicer-than-usual to me, too. Weird.

Little Big Tom had put two and two together and had realized I had been doing research into my dad’s youth reading list. So he decided, helpfully, to provide me with a comple-mentary LBT library. He had been impressed that I had swiped his Che Guevara T-shirt, so the LBT books were tilted toward impenetrable and/or goofy books on radical politics that no one would ever read voluntarily anymore. Among them was a beat-up copy of The Little Red Book, which is a collection of retarded sayings by this chubby mass murderer from China. (He made an appearance earlier in this story on Sam Hellerman’s hand-lettered T-shirt—guy by the name of Mao.) People in the sixties liked to be seen carrying this book around, hoping it would make them appear more radical and cutting-edge and sexy and intellectual. I guess you started out carrying around The Catcher in the Rye, and then, when you got a little older and the thrill was gone, you “turned political”

and switched to The Little Red Book instead. The funny thing is, by all accounts, doing this really could get you dates. With the hairy women of the time, perhaps, but still.

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There was of course no need to investigate Little Big Tom: he was already an open book, and there wasn’t even one little thing about him that wasn’t painfully obvious. That was part of his charm, maybe, but it made the LBT library a bit less compelling than he probably imagined. I nodded politely, though, and went along with it.

“Kill the bourgeois pigs,” I said. “And the running dogs of the imperial yo-yo or whatever. Except for you and Mom.

We need you to hang in there long enough to pay for our college.” Amanda nodded solemnly and put her arm around me, and we both flashed him sardonic peace signs.

You’ve got to hand it to Little Big Tom, though: he was either too clueless or too “centered” to let anything like that bother him. He just smiled back and rumpled our hair.

“Kids today,” he said, and we all laughed. I mean, he did.

Just before they left, as I was saying good-bye to Amanda, I made a sudden decision and handed her the bloodstained Brighton Rock.

“It was Dad’s book,” I said. “It’s the best book ever written.”

As she walked out, she had the book open and was staring at the inside front cover, at the bloody CEH 1965, and I had a pretty good idea what she was thinking. Maybe I’d even tell her the whole story one day if she played her cards right. And if I ever figured it out.

Whatever they were giving me in the hospital was pretty outstanding. They should put it in the water supply or something: the world would be a more peaceful and rewarding place. Life flies by in a nice breeze, and you remember stuff as if none of the boring or unpleasant parts even happened.

So I’m not sure if it was before or after the LBT/Amanda visit, and in fact I may be mixing up or joining a couple of dif-284

ferent episodes, but there was at least one other significant hospital event, and here’s how I remember it.

Mr. Aquino started moaning, then wheezing, and then I saw Shinefield, Syndie Duffy’s floppy boyfriend, coming past the curtain. He was followed by Celeste Fletcher and Syndie Duffy. Yasmynne Schmick and Sam Hellerman came in a couple of minutes later. Sam Hellerman discreetly handed me two sealed envelopes as he walked by.

So was Sam Hellerman hanging out with the drama people again? Or had he been all along? Or maybe they had just given him a lift. At any rate, the scene was very much as it had been during his hippie lunch phase. They weren’t paying too much attention to Sam Hellerman, though they didn’t seem to mind that he was hanging around. And the whole time, even when he was talking to me, he just stared at Celeste Fletcher’s ass, even going so far as to reposition himself so as to get a better view whenever she happened to move it out of his line of sight.

The other weird thing was that Celeste Fletcher seemed pretty friendly with Shinefield, though he was still Syndie Duffy’s boyfriend as far as I knew. When Syndie Duffy left to go to the bathroom or smoke, Shinefield would move even closer to Celeste Fletcher and touch her butt, acting like it was accidental. I couldn’t tell whether she was in on it.

Maybe Syndie Duffy and Celeste Fletcher had switched boyfriends or something. I’m not sure how dating politics works in the subnormal/drama world, so I could be misread-ing it. Clearly, though, on some level what we were seeing was the emergence of a new girl trio, out of the ashes of the Sisterhood. The question was, would Celeste Fletcher or Syndie Duffy end up as the dominant girl? My money was on Celeste Fletcher, because her open flirtation with Shinefield really did seem to give her the upper hand. Yasmynne 285

Schmick, of course, would be a #3 till the end of her days, but I was glad she was there. She was always nice and usually funny and generally seemed so happy to see me.

Much of the raw information about Mr. Teone’s activities and the Chi-Mos’ continuing influence at Hillmont came from the conversation between me and this weird-ass group.

I was kind of woozy and fuzzy, and the drama people were, no doubt, totally high. Sam Hellerman was ass addled. Yet somehow we figured out a way to exchange information, though I didn’t manage to tease out all the implications till I’d had a chance to think it all over during the next few days. It was a pretty interesting topic. The whole time, though, I was holding Sam Hellerman’s envelopes, dying to know what was inside them, but realizing that he had sealed them for a reason, and that I couldn’t open them till everybody had left.

I’ll say one thing: Shinefield was a true fan. He couldn’t stop talking about the Chi-Mos and the Festival of Lights and the zine. He had started to call me Chi-Bro. I kid you not.

The girls didn’t pay too much attention to the band talk, but even they said some nice things, too. I mean, it was ridiculous. We had sucked, probably worse than any band that had ever played at any high school ever. But I guess running the associate principal out of town, even accidentally, counts for a lot.

Just being in a band counts, too. I’m convinced of that. By my calculations, girls find you around fifteen percent more attractive and worth their attention if you’re in a band than they do if you’re not. It works with subnormal/drama girls, anyway. And apparently, in a different way, of course, it can even work with your own ordinarily ill-tempered sister; it doesn’t appear to have much effect on your mom, though.

Fifteen percent may not sound like much, but it feels quite substantial when you start the game at close to zero.

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E

* * *

ventually they left, and Sam Hellerman gave me a “we’ll talk later” look as he followed Celeste Fletcher’s ass past the curtain and out the door. I tore open the first envelope.

It contained $240, my share of the proceeds from the song zine. On the twenty-dollar bill on top of the stack, he had written “Keep making me money, kid.” Which was from some movie, I’m pretty sure. Anyhow, it was kind of funny.

More money than I had ever had at one time. Liquid assets.

Which is not a bad band name if you think about it. Hey, we’re the Liquid Assets, and this one’s called “Pheromone City. . . .”

I would have been happy if the other envelope had contained more money, but it was a lot thinner, and I could tell by feeling it that inside were a few sheets of folded paper.

Documents, information of some kind. I slid my thumb through the flap.

STI LL NOT D ON E LOVI NG YOU, MAMA

Before I got a chance to see what was in Sam Hellerman’s second envelope, I heard Mr. Aquino begin to moan, and then to wheeze. I hurriedly shoved both envelopes back under my pillow. To my surprise, Celeste Fletcher came back in.

“They’re getting the car,” she said. “I was hoping I could get your autograph.”

I was surprised, to say the least. Or maybe it was here, rather than before, like I said, that I made the calculation that girls like you fifteen percent more when you’re in a band. Or no, it was right after that, when she handed me a Sharpie, and then, instead of offering the zine or a piece of paper for me to sign like I had expected, leaned over and pulled her shirt 287

down. She wanted me to sign her tits. I had heard of this before, but come on: how many ordinary guys in lousy high school rock bands ever land in this situation, let alone King Dork? It’s not supposed to happen. You know, thinking about it, it’s really more like at least twenty-five percent. What was I thinking? Maybe more like forty-four percent, actually. Give or take.

She was pretty demure and tasteful about it, but she also did it smoothly, as though she’d done it many times before. I mean, she pulled the neck of her scoopy T-shirt down and to the left but not low enough to expose the nipple, and simultaneously pushed the breast up from below with her palm, so that the top of it bulged out and up. My guess is that that’s not the sort of thing you do well the first time you try it. I don’t know if you can picture it, but trust me: it looked fucking amazing.

“Certainly,” I said, trying to act as though I had done this many times as well, though my shaking hands probably gave me away. I hadn’t touched too many breasts, you know. This was only number four, by my calculations.

So I leaned forward and wrote in a spidery hand: “Best wishes, Thomas Charles Henderson.”

She said thanks. But as she was turning to leave, she pulled her top out and glanced down and said, haltingly,

“Trombone Chablis Ampersand?” I guess my handwriting was even shakier than I thought. They didn’t cover breast autographs in third-grade penmanship, you see, though maybe they should have.

I explained that that was my real name, well, pretty close, anyway. Clearly, though, she knew me as Chi-Mo, and wanted my autograph because I was one of the Chi-Mos, and hey, I might as well face it, I was as much Chi-Mo as I was anything else. She wanted a Chi-Mo autograph, and who was I to deny 288

her? So she came back around with the unsheathed Sharpie and pulled her shirt down and pushed the other breast so that most of its northern hemisphere bulged out and up. This time I wrote, much more carefully: “Nice breast. CM.” Which made her laugh and seemed to please her well enough.

“Thanks,” she said.

“No problem,” I said. “But I’m not sure how long we’ll keep that name. What do you think of Sentient Beard?” (Me on guitar, Samerica the Beautiful on bass and upholstery, first album Off the Charts—Way Off. )

“Well, it’s better than the Stoned Mamelukes.”

I was on drugs, so I was a little slow, but not so slow that it didn’t click. I could think of only one way she would have known about the Stoned Marmadukes. I realize now that there may have in fact been other ways, especially if she had spent time hanging around with Sam Hellerman. But her reaction gave it away: she realized she had slipped up, and even made a kind of half-motion to cover her mouth, almost as though to stuff the words back in. It looked kind of melodramatic and theatrical, and only halfway unintentionally so, which was familiar, too. And that’s what clinched it, pretty much. Fiona. Celeste Fletcher was fake Fiona. Note the nice, Schtuppified deformation of Marmadukes, which actually was a vast improvement, and which was another clincher: that’s exactly the kind of joke the Fiona of my dim memory would have made while leaving you guessing as to whether it had been intentional or not. Or wait, it was me, not her, who would make that kind of joke; but those were jokes she could get, so presumably she could make them as well. So it wasn’t breast number four after all. We were back to breast number one, with whose nipple I had spent so many happy moments in my innocent youth.

Wait. Really? She totally didn’t look like Fiona, even 289

adjusting for the lack of the Fiona costume. Fantasy and reality sure can get in the way of each other, can’t they?

When people disguise themselves as other people in movies and no one in the movie is supposed to realize it, you usually don’t believe it for a minute. In real life, though, it’s not so easy to figure stuff out. I had only seen the original fake Fiona once, in the dark and while a little buzzed, and I hadn’t even known Celeste Fletcher or seen her up close at the time.

Plus, I had seen the Fiona’d-out Celeste Fletcher mostly from the front, whereas up till now, I’d only examined Celeste Fletcher playing herself from Sam Hellerman’s vantage point—that is, from behind. Even without the costume, and as a general rule, that’s a totally different look for a lady. Celeste Fletcher’s breasts even felt different from how I had remembered Fiona’s breasts feeling—but I had had a different focus at that time. I mean, I hadn’t had to worry about keeping my handwriting neat and steady. Not to get too philosophical on you here, but in different contexts, and depending on what you’re doing, the same rack can be totally different worlds.

Anyway, God help ’em if they ever try to make a movie out of this, with the same sexy teenaged actress playing both fake Fiona and Celeste Fletcher in different costumes and makeup. It’ll be hard to pull off in movie form. But it worked in real life. I swear to God.

Anyway, there I was at Mercy Hospital in Santa Carla, on the other side of the curtain from the moaning Mr. Aquino, around ninety percent convinced that I was staring at the girl of my dreams, who just happened to have my name scribbled all over her breasts in black Sharpie. What would you have done?

It all went back to Dud Chart. Sam Hellerman hadn’t tried to exempt me from the contest, as he had said. Quite 290

the contrary: he had set me up, as he had done with all the Hillmont High School Untouchables, organizing my presence at the party, and advising Celeste Fletcher on how to dress and behave to “push my buttons” effectively when I got there. My point value had been high, and she had wanted to win. Why such a complicated plan? Well, an ordinary Make-out/Fake-out would have been unlikely to succeed because I was well aware of the technique and was always on guard against it, almost maybe to the level of paranoia. There had been Make-out/Fake-out attempts the week before the party, in fact, which I had wiggled out of—maybe those had been part of Dud Chart, too. I don’t think you got any points for a failed attempt, so they had to figure out a trickier, more elaborate way. Plus, from what I knew of the Sisterhood, Celeste Fletcher is one of those people who just prefers things to be elaborate. Sam Hellerman is certainly like that.

In fact, the Fiona project had Sam Hellerman written all over it, even down to the name, which probably had had a subtle influence on me because it sounded kind of English and rock and roll had made me a devil-head Anglophile.

This had been at an early stage in the Dud Chart game, where the object had just been making out rather than something really serious and extreme like walking around Center Court. Her plan had only been to get to second base in a publicly observable setting. That, and not ladies’ week, was why she hadn’t wanted me to go down her pants, why she had directed my attention to her tits instead, and also presumably explains her stalling, constantly glancing around the room, and eventual sudden instigation of the making-out part. She had been waiting for the witnesses to show up. Witnesses.

How embarrassing.

As for Sam Hellerman, he clearly had his own little obsession going for Celeste Fletcher qua Celeste Fletcher, and 291

her true fake identity made some of his behavior just a bit easier to understand. He had been pissed off and jealous when, according to my slightly exaggerated account, he heard it had gone beyond second base, which hadn’t been the “deal.” On top of that, he hadn’t wanted me to find out the real story, not to mention his role in it. So he attempted to dampen my interest in the imaginary mystery girl and to draw my attention away from the real girl who stood behind her. He wanted Celeste Fletcher to be his imaginary fake girlfriend rather than mine. Pointing to Deanna Schumacher, who had been selected for her glasses and her distant location, had been a diversionary tactic that totally would have worked if I hadn’t called her up and if she hadn’t been the kind of girl who would say “you’d better come over, then” in that situation. That was just a crazy stroke of luck.

The basic scheme was clear almost as soon as I heard Celeste Fletcher say “mamelukes.” I filled in more details later.

In the meantime, we were just staring at each other, trying to guess what the other was going to do.

I don’t know what normal people would have done. The girl would flounce out of the room in tears. Or the boy would say something along the lines of “leave me, I would be alone.”

Or they would have a big, soul-baring conversation that would drag on deep into the night, until somebody eventually ended up hitting somebody else with a heavy object.

But we weren’t normal people. And this situation (a pretty hot girl standing in front of you with your name scrawled all over her in black Sharpie) doesn’t come up all that often.

Believe it or not. So what I did was, I reached out to touch the Trombone Chablis Ampersand breast and dipped two fingers under the T-shirt and bra from above. And what she did was to lean into me and to start sticking her tongue into my mouth and saying “mmmm.” Soon we were fully making out, and it 292

was just like at the party, except she wasn’t in Fiona costume, and I was in pajamas instead of my army coat, and instead of a sound track of distant mod-related music, there was only the sound of Mr. Aquino’s moaning.

Soon I had my other hand on the Chi-Mo breast and was moving the TCA hand down to the back waistband of her jeans so it was jeans-underwear-fingers-skin, and instead of resisting like before, she scrunched up so I could reach farther down, though it was a pretty tight squeeze. This was more like it. The autographs were getting smudged, so she said,

“You’ll have to redo these sometime.” Sounds good to me. If you insist.

Then, and you can believe it or not, I don’t really care, she reached her hand under the covers, said “Let me see if I can help you with that,” and started to give me what I believe is technically referred to as a hand job. Mind-blowing.

I was thinking that there was a fairly good chance of this developing into full-blown ramoning. At this point in the proceedings, however, Mr. Aquino’s moans got louder and he started to wheeze. “Someone’s coming!” I said. We shared an extremely brief slan look about that hilarious choice of words—yeah, because we slans love our sophisticated jokes—

but she quickly disengaged, straightened herself up, reached into her back pocket, handed me a folded note, mimed a little kiss, and left the room.

The new visitor, I kid you not, was Deanna Schumacher, wearing her IHA uniform. She and Celeste Fletcher glared at each other as their paths crossed at the curtain. I shoved the note down behind my pillow with Sam Hellerman’s envelopes.

“Who was that?” said Deanna Schumacher.

“Sam Hellerman’s illicit lover,” I said.

“She seems like a bitch.” She sat on the edge of the bed.

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“You have no idea,” I said. Which was true.

Deanna Schumacher launched into her usual alternating hot/cold, mean/nice, hostile/polite routine. I’ll tell you one thing: navigating the twists and turns of a Schumacher conversation is way easier when you’re on prescription medication. It’s the only way to go. I just bided my time, till, as expected, she finally finished being schizophrenic and we started to make out.

“Let me see if I can help you with that,” she said, sticking to the script. But Deanna Schumacher had had a lot of practice with that sort of discreet, sheet-covered help and she knew what to do. It was just like in her room, with a similar sense of urgency and looming time limit, but also with perhaps a bit more confidence on my part. Everything went well, and there were no interruptions. And I was glad all over all over again. Then she left, calling me a jerk, reminding me that Mondays and Thursdays are best, and asking that I say hello to my mother for her.

R EADI NG MATTE R

When I was sure Deanna Schumacher had left the room for good, I retrieved Celeste Fletcher’s note. I had to laugh a little, because I hadn’t known what to expect, but I probably should have. It said my band rocked, blah blah blah, and there was a phone number; if I ever felt like killing some time I could call her. “Wednesdays are best, till around ten.” Hey, but what about the other day when her boyfriend works late?

Maybe that’s Sam Hellerman’s day. Or Shinefield’s. Well, at least the work schedule proved Celeste Fletcher and Deanna Schumacher didn’t have the same boyfriend. That sure would have complicated things.

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She had written the note before she knew that I would have learned the Fiona secret by the time I read it. But it didn’t make much difference. Maybe I should have been more irritated by the deception, but without it, and without her having slipped up and my having realized it, the hospital make-out session wouldn’t have occurred, so I was mostly glad it worked out the way it did. Whatever. Celeste Fletcher was hot and I was more or less totally into her, details be damned. Though I had to admit, I preferred her in Fiona drag.

What about Sam Hellerman? Well, he had sold me out, it’s true, and the whole thing was a bit embarrassing. But if it hadn’t been for his devil-head machinations, none of the making out in my life would have happened at all. None of it.

I couldn’t be too mad at him. In fact, I thought I really should try to give him some kind of thank-you gift. Plus, we had to keep the band together, at least till we sold our first million records. Only then could we move on to competing solo careers and sniping at each other about our shared women and sleazy escapades in the music press, till we eventually recon-cile around the time I record the third in a celebrated series of albums about having writer’s block.

The maddening part was that I probably would never end up knowing how many of the results of his plans had been intended and how many had been because things went awry. Or how much he knew, or what he was planning for the future. I could talk to him about it, but I’d never know for sure if he was being completely honest. Plus, he clearly still had the hots for Celeste Fletcher, and I didn’t really want the subject to come up. I didn’t want him to know about Deanna Schumacher, either, just in case he might tell Celeste Fletcher about her. I certainly didn’t want those two knowing about each other. God, no.

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* * *

I almost forgot Sam Hellerman’s other envelope in all the excitement. Eventually, though, I retrieved it from under the pillow and took a look.

In the envelope were two neatly folded pieces of paper.

The first was a reverse-exposure printout from the library’s microfilm machine. Clearly, Sam Hellerman had resumed the Tit investigation while I had been out. The article reported that in early March 1963, a student had been discovered hanging by the neck from a rope in the gymnasium of Most Precious Blood College Preparatory in San Francisco. An apparent suicide. The student was not named in the article, but it seemed a good bet that his name had been Timothy J.

Anderson. In the margin, Sam Hellerman had written, “Killed by Tit?” It was an intriguing notion, though I couldn’t see where he got that.

Most Precious Blood College Preparatory. Man, I prided myself on coming up with good names for bands and titles and such, but compared to the Catholic church, I was a rank amateur. Most Precious Blood—probably the best name ever, for a school or a band.

The other page was a computer printout of another, more recent article from the San Francisco Chronicle, dated nearly a year before my dad’s death. It was about a scandal and shake-up in the Santa Carla city and county govern-ments. The details were cursory, but it appeared to be some kind of corruption scandal. The entire board of supervisors, the chief of police, and several other unnamed officials had had to resign; a few had been indicted, and, interestingly, there had even been a couple of suicides, including a Santa Carla policeman. I didn’t see how it could be linked to Timothy J. Anderson, but I guessed Sam Hellerman saw some kind of connection between this story and my dad’s 296

death. Perhaps my dad had been involved in the scandal in some way and his suicide was delayed but similar to that of the cop mentioned in the article? If so, it was weird that this was the first time I’d heard of the Santa Carla corruption scandal, as I’d read dozens of articles concerning his death from the time and none of them had mentioned it. But of course, in those articles it had been reported as an accident rather than a suicide. Since my mom was the only person who thought it had been a suicide, as far as I could tell, I couldn’t quite put my finger on precisely how they might be connected outside my mom’s weird mind.

The most interesting bit to me, though, was the fact that the article quoted a county official named Melvin Schumacher.

The quote itself was bland and contentless, something about

“respecting the process and seeing it through,” but the speaker was Deanna Schumacher’s father, clearly.

Now, I’d known that her dad had worked with the county coroner’s office, so it wasn’t a big surprise to me. The question was, how much did Sam Hellerman know about that situation?

Supposedly, he knew nothing about it. Deanna Schumacher had been chosen strictly for her appearance, for the superficial resemblance of her yearbook photo to the Celeste Fletcher

“Fiona,” and presented to me as Fiona to throw me off Celeste Fletcher’s scent. As far as I knew, that was as far as it went. Sam Hellerman had no idea that I had struck up an illicit, blow-job-oriented relationship with her; he still believed that I believed that Deanna Schumacher was Fiona and that she was living in Florida with her suddenly transferred, non-CEH-associated father. But, as so often where Sam Hellerman is concerned, I had a few doubts. Was Deanna Schumacher more deeply involved in Sam Hellerman’s schemes than I knew? I had assumed that she had been chosen after the fact, on the basis of her resemblance to “Fiona.” But looking at the name “Melvin 297

Schumacher” in the article printout, another thought occurred to me: perhaps Celeste Fletcher’s Fiona outfit had been deliberately designed to make her look like Deanna Schumacher, rather than the other way around. And Sam Hellerman had had a plan, going all the way back to the Baby Batter Weeks at the beginning of the year, before Dud Chart, before the party, that involved bringing Deanna Schumacher into my world.

It sounded crazy in my head when I thought about it.

Before the Catcher code, before my mom’s “Thinking of Suicide?” freak-out, there had been no reason for Sam Hellerman to be particularly concerned about CEH-related issues. The problem went beyond CEH, though. Now that circumstances had arranged themselves so that my life involved making out secretly with both Deanna Schumacher and Celeste Fletcher, with Sam Hellerman’s role ambiguous, the question took on some urgency. How I proceeded with D. S. and C. F.

would in some ways depend on what Sam Hellerman knew and when he knew it. And what he planned to do about it.

So the real question concerning that second article was what Sam Hellerman was trying to tell me with it. Was he trying to tell me something about CEH and Tit and Timothy J. Anderson, or was he trying to tell me something about Deanna Schumacher? I started to rack my brains for a way to find out without his realizing that I knew there was anything to find out.

F I R EC RAC KE R

There was a pay phone down the hall in the hospital, and I used it to call Sam Hellerman shortly after I had opened the second envelope. He seemed pretty pleased with himself.

“You mean you haven’t been able to figure it out?” he 298

said, when I’d as much as told him I hadn’t been able to figure it out. “It all makes sense if you look at it a certain way,”

he added. Well, I doubted that very much. But he said we could get together to discuss it when I got out of the hospital. I tried to come up with a way to get him to talk about Deanna Schumacher without actually mentioning her myself, but I couldn’t manage it. The best I could do was:

“So, when you say it all adds up, you mean Timothy J.

Anderson and Tit and my dad and the Catcher code and Matthew chapter Three verse nine?”

“Uh, yeah,” he said, with that “no duh” inflection where you make “yeah” into two syllables, kind of swooping down on the last one.

“Hey, how about that Celeste Fletcher,” I said, after a pause, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“She’s a firecracker,” said Sam Hellerman.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“Really?” I said. I guess there are guys who can sound cool saying that a girl is a firecracker, but Sam Hellerman isn’t one of them. Anyway, that exhausted my material, so I said

“Later” and hung up.

Life feels a little easier when you don’t have to make your own schedule. I didn’t have to worry about calling Deanna Schumacher till Thursday, which was a relief. Wednesday, Celeste Fletcher’s “safe” day, was right around the corner, though. I was due to be released Thursday, so that meant I’d have to call from the pay phone in the hall. Even though I didn’t find calling Celeste Fletcher quite as scary as calling Deanna Schumacher, I was still pretty nervous about it.

Maybe you never get used to calling girls on the phone.

I stalled and avoided it for a while, but eventually I got up the nerve to go out to the hall and call from the pay phone.

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“Oh, thank God!” she said, when she realized it was me.

I kid you not. “Oh, thank God.” Could anyone be so happy to hear from me that they would spontaneously burst into a prayer of thanks? Sounds dubious, I know. She said she hadn’t been sure I would call her, showing just how little she really understood me and what I was all about. That was okay—I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of her being able to understand me that easily anyway.

Our phone conversation was quite long, considering that my half of it was on a pay phone in the hallway of a hospital floor surrounded by angry fellow convalescents who thought I was taking too long and didn’t much like what they were hearing me say. It resembled the phone-side scene at the Henderson-Tucci household a bit, in other words, and it was not the first time I’d noted similarities between my house and a sanitarium, I can tell you that.

I knew there was one thing we would have to cover eventually, so I got it out of the way near the beginning. I assured her I wasn’t going to tell anyone about us or our activities, past, present, or (and here I knew I was taking an optimistic leap) future. We’d just pretend we hardly knew each other.

Okay? She sounded relieved that she didn’t have to figure out a way to bring it up, as I’d known she would.

“Because it would be really bad if my boyfriend found out,” she said.

I took a stab. “Shinefield?”

“Him too.” She laughed, a little nervously maybe. I wasn’t sure who her actual real official boyfriend was, but it seemed safest just to adopt a blanket policy of nondisclosure that would cover him along with everyone else. Make things simpler. How had she explained the smudged breastographs, I wondered? Well, I was sure she had it all figured out. She had 300

that air. “And, um, you might not want to mention anything to Sam, either.”

Way ahead of you, babe. Not that I thought she was still messing around with Sam Hellerman, too. Did I? Was she?

She was a busy girl, but I sincerely hoped not.

“Or Yasmynne.”

Okay, this was getting weird. But I didn’t want to kill the

“Oh, thank God” vibe, so I let it slide. “Don’t worry, Fiona.

No one will find out.”

“Stop calling me Fiona,” she said.

“Okay, if you stop calling me Trombone.” Because she had started to call me Trombone somewhere during the conversation. But that was a deal she couldn’t or wouldn’t make, so I guess Fiona was back on the menu in at least a limited way. Plus, for obvious reasons the word “trombone” would now forever bring to mind her breasts, or one of them, anyway. So I suddenly found I kind of liked hearing the word

“trombone.”

With the nondisclosure agreement out of the way, the rest went pretty well.

“For the record,” she said, “I never thought you belonged on the dude chart.”

Dude chart? Now, that was hard to interpret. In a variety of ways, that statement went against everything I had understood about Dud Chart, the Sisterhood, and Celeste Fletcher’s role in the whole thing. Or at least, it seemed to give the game slightly different implications. Had Sam Hellerman gotten it a bit wrong, or contrived that I should get it a bit wrong? But wait: why didn’t I belong on it, if it was a “dude chart” rather than a “dud chart”? What was she trying to say? Who fucking knows? Nevertheless, even though I didn’t quite understand it, it was just about the nicest thing 301

anyone had ever said to me. I think. So I said thanks and left it at that. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

On the other hand, “dude chart” may just have been a playful mispronunciation. See, one thing I learned from the conversation really blew me away—and this is so typical of me it’s not even funny: Celeste Fletcher was actually in Mr.

Schtuppe’s English class, and was something of a champion mispronouncer in her own right. I had been too devil-head oblivious even to notice. So while I was obsessing over the mystery girl, the mystery girl had been right under my nose, and we had been reading about Jane Gallagher and mispronouncing the same words from Catcher in the Rye all along without my realizing it. Hell God damn. So that’s why, when it was finally time to wrap it up, I asked her how things were in Old Nocturnal Emission Hills.

“Libidinous,” she said, but she pronounced it so it rhymed with “shyness.” She was the real deal. A slan chick with a great rack, a devious nature, and a powerful vocabulary. Not bad at all. I think I’m in love, I thought, whatever I might have meant by that.

ALWAYS TH E QU I ET ON E S

In movies and books there’s this thing called a character arc, where the main guy is supposed to change and grow and become a better person and learn something about himself.

Essentially, there’s supposed to be this part right at the end where he says: “And as for me, well, I learned the most valuable lesson of all.” Now, if I were the main guy in a movie, I’d have the most retarded character arc anyone ever heard of. I didn’t learn anything. What’s the opposite of learning something? I mean, I knew stuff at the beginning that I don’t know 302

anymore. Bits of my life simply disappeared. I’m more confused than I ever was before, and that’s really saying something.

But if you’re expecting that touchy-feely “you have touched me, I have grown” character arc stuff, here it is.

Because, well, as for me, I have learned the most valuable lesson of all.

As I originally described the King Dork card game, a player automatically loses if he gets a king in his hand. Now I see that it’s a little more complicated. You can bluff and fake your way out of getting kicked out of the game. In other words, if you play in such a way that no one knows you have any kings, you stay in. I still need to work out the details, because somehow there also has to be a way that two or more players, like, say, Deanna Schumacher and Celeste Fletcher, can hold the same king card at the same time without realizing it. And maybe some way for the queens to masquerade as each other or something. Anyway, I don’t know how you win. Maybe no one ever wins, and you just keep accumulat-ing cards and bluffing about them till everyone dies and is forgotten.

I don’t know how it is if you’re a normal guy with one special girl who is your official girlfriend in the approving sight of God and country. Nice work if you can get it, but it’s just not available to everyone. So this only applies if you’re the schlumpy King Dork type whom girls don’t tend to want to associate with in public if they can help it. But here it is, the lesson:

If you’re in a band, even an extremely sucky band, girls, even semihot ones like Celeste Fletcher and Deanna Schumacher, will totally mess around with you and give you blow jobs and so forth, provided you can assure them that no one will ever find out about it. Start a band. Or go around 303

saying you’re in a band, which is, let’s face it, pretty much the same thing. The quality of your life can only improve.

I admit, it doesn’t quite rise to the level of an actual Sex Alliance Against Society. Maybe a Sex Alliance Against Society is in the end too much to hope for for some of us. But even though there is a small part of me that reacts with fury and indignation over that fact, another part of me would argue that considering where I was at the beginning of the school year and throughout my entire life previous to it, the current lack of a Sex Alliance Against Society is quite an improvement over the previous lack of a S. A. A. S. This second small part understands where the first small part is coming from, but still, all things considered, it can’t really see the flaw in it. Of course, the huge, hunkin’ part that’s left over has no idea what to think and is still totally confused and melan-choly and bitter. So it’s not like we’re looking at a tremendous change here. My poor, adorable, flimsy character arc: you blink, you miss it, bless its little cotton socks.

Still. I’ve got two slightly less-than-imaginary secret quasi girlfriends whom I can call on Mondays and Thursdays, and on Wednesdays, respectively, when their official boyfriends are temporarily out of the picture because they’re on the late shift at the convenience store.

What you got?

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epilogue

S H E R LO C K H E LLE R MAN

We were in my room at the beginning of Christmas vacation, listening to Ace of Spades. Sam Hellerman was seated on the floor, leaning against the dresser, with a glass of bourbon between his feet and a couple of my deluxe hospital-issued painkillers, one balanced on each knee. He had promised to delay actually taking them till he had finished explaining his Timothy J. Anderson theory—I didn’t want him to pass out in the middle of a sentence—but I could see it was going to be a struggle for him. Sam Hellerman had very little self-control when it came to tranquilizers.

“Once you realize that Timothy J. Anderson was a kid, or a teenager,” he said, tapping on the microfilm printout about the hanged student in the Most Precious Blood gym, “the whole thing starts to make a little more sense.”

He paused to headbang slightly, and to sing “the ace of spades” a couple times under his breath, but stopped when he saw me giving him a rather desperate “mercy, please, I beg of you” look.

“Okay,” he said, after taking a little sip of bourbon.

“Starting with that Bible quote you’re so hung up on. Why did the mountain monk have the same quotation in his book that Timothy J. Anderson had on his funeral card? You had 305

guessed that the connection might be that they were both monks or clergymen. But they had something else in common, too—they were kids. I mean the mountain story guy was writing about his childhood; Timothy J. Anderson died while still a kid. And that quotation really suits a kid’s funeral as much as an I-was-a-teenaged-monk book.”

Clearly, Sam Hellerman hadn’t actually read The Seven Storey Mountain, but I could see his point. “God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” Matthew 3:9–11 did sound like something you might want to quote at a kid’s funeral.

The Catholic Church, he added, had had a pretty strict antisuicide policy, especially at that time. Adults who killed themselves weren’t allowed to have Catholic burials. Kids sometimes were, depending on their age, according to his research, though, of course, we didn’t know the hanged kid’s exact age.

“They were changing all the rules around at that time,” he said, pointing to the date, 1963, “including the rules about who got to have funerals and all that.” I hadn’t realized you had to earn the right to have a funeral by dying in the proper manner—it never ends, does it? But of course, a taboo like that doesn’t disappear just because they change the wording of something in Rome. Sam Hellerman thought that might be a reason why, even if there had been a funeral, as there appeared to have been, they might not have been eager to draw attention to it by publishing an obituary. “That’s assuming everyone believed it was a suicide, whether or not it really was.”

“But couldn’t you just as easily conclude,” I said, “that if suicides didn’t get to have funerals, the fact that TJA did have a funeral kind of suggests that he didn’t kill himself, that he wasn’t the one who hanged himself in the gym? How do we know for sure that TJA was that kid, and not some other 306

guy?” And then, thinking of Dr. Hexstrom, I added: “And how do we know that the TJA card was even from a funeral?

It could have been from just about anything.”

“It could have been,” said Sam Hellerman. “But it wasn’t.

It was a funeral, or at least a memorial service. Even if not, though, it doesn’t really matter: a kid, a classmate of Tit’s and your dad’s at Most Precious Blood College Prep, was found hanging in the gym. And there was a funeral, which Tit, according to his own note, refused to go to.” He conceded that it was possible that this kid was someone other than Timothy J. Anderson, but that it “worked out better” if they were the same person. How well it “worked out” seemed like a funny way to decide whether something really happened or not. But we both knew that this was the sort of game we were playing.

“So it’s just a coincidence that my dad happened to be reading a book with the same quotation as the one used at the funeral of a classmate?” I asked, still a little dubious.

“Well,” said Sam Hellerman, “it was a popular book.”

The Seven Storey Mountain?”

“No,” he said. “The Bible.”

It was hard to argue with that.

I got up to turn the record over, and when I came back I noticed that Sam Hellerman had only one painkiller left on his knee.

“For crying out loud, Hellerman.”

He pointed to the remaining pill knee. “This stuff isn’t at all bad,” he said. Lemmy was singing “Jailbait.”

I coughed. “So you were talking about TJA being a kid. . . .”

“Oh. Right,” he said, breathing a little more heavily.

“Think about all the stuff that happened this year. Our songs freaked people out because they reminded them of real stuff 307

that happened in the past, even though we didn’t mean it that way. So your mom freaked out about ‘Thinking of Suicide?’

Mr. Teone thought the Chi-Mos’ songs were about him and his Satanic Empire. And the same kind of thing happened with Kyrsten Blakeney.” He took another gulp of bourbon.

“It was unintentional,” he continued. “The connections happened in their heads. But in another way, Mr. Teone’s reaction to the Chi-Mos wasn’t at all an accident.”

I went: “?”

“I mean, there’s a nonrandom reason you have the nickname Chi-Mo. The kids in seventh grade gave you the name because they associated ‘clergy’ with ‘child molester.’ And the reason for that is that there really were situations, especially in schools like the one Tit attended with CEH, where kids were molested. It’s in the news all the time. That’s why I think there may have been a pattern. . . .” His voice trailed off.

A pattern. “Really?” I said.

“A pattern from the past re-created in the present,” he said, after staring into space for a while. That sounded like a poorly translated fortune cookie. He was losing me. We were halfway through the final guitar solo in “The Chase Is Better Than the Catch.”

He looked a little zoned. I punched him in the arm, which seemed to wake him up a bit.

It took some prodding and a bit of patience, but I was eventually able to get it out of him. Sam Hellerman’s idea was that Mr. Teone’s teen porn operation had been based on a similarly structured system at Most Precious Blood, which he had encountered as a young Tit. When he finally became a shop teacher, and later a principal, he had set up his own organization at Hillmont along the same lines.

“So there was a retro-porn thing going on at Most Precious Blood, too?” I asked, finding it kind of hard to pic-308

ture, given what I knew about the technology of 1963: homemade secret photography would have been more difficult back then.

“It could have been anything illicit,” replied Sam Hellerman. “But I’d guess it would have been sex-related in some way.” Check, I thought. It always comes back to ramoning, doesn’t it? And it squared, in a general way, with the contents of Tit’s note. If Tit had been involved, as a participant or even as a student organizer, in some kind of perverted ramoning situation at Most Precious Blood, what had my dad’s role been? I couldn’t get my mind around that question, so I shook it out of my head.

Anyhow, I could see the logic, sort of, assuming Timothy J. Anderson was Tit’s dead bastard. It could account for why Tit had hated “the bastard,” and rejoiced in his death. Say Tit had been a Matt Lynch figure, and TJA one of his minions. Tit was infuriated when TJA killed himself in shame and remorse, because it endangered the operation and risked sparking some kind of investigation. Or TJA was going to expose the operation and had to be eliminated, and, as Sam Hellerman had suggested, Tit had killed him and, somehow, made it look like suicide. Or TJA had been the Matt Lynch figure, and Tit a recruit who had turned on him. Or he could have been “talent”

like Kyrsten Blakeney. Mr. Teone was clearly deranged, and he’d had to get there somehow. So, long ago, in the depraved halls of Most Precious Blood College Preparatory, a sociopath was born? I guess that was the idea.

But even if that was true in a general way, it seemed like there were a lot of possible variations. I gave Sam Hellerman another “?” look, and said: “So why are you so sure TJA was killed by Tit?”

“It’s the patterns again,” he said, staring intently and with what seemed like loving devotion at the pill on his knee.

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“Patterns. I think Tit probably murdered TJA and disguised it as suicide. Because I’m pretty sure that’s basically how he killed your dad, and also kind of how he tried to kill you.”

He was talking about the old “knock me on the head with a tuba and blame it on the boxing” plan—I guess the connection there was the elaborate fake explanation for a murder attempt. That was a stretch, and in fact, I didn’t believe that the brass instrument scheme had been a true murder attempt.

It was just ordinary revenge, and maybe intimidation, as well.

But as for Mr. Teone’s being involved in my dad’s murder—

well, it wasn’t like I hadn’t considered this possibility. One of Amanda’s Chi-Mos panels had even depicted a devilish Mr.

Teone driving the car that had hit my dad—it was kind of obvious, in a way, if hard to fathom. But somehow, hearing Sam Hellerman say it really creeped me out. And I still couldn’t quite see how a fake suicide would fit in to the whole hit-and-run scenario, though I was sure Sam Hellerman was going to tell me, provided he could stay conscious long enough. It was a race against time.

“Could you turn that Funkadelic off ?” he said irritably.

“It’s giving me a headache.” I had put on One Nation Under a Groove after the Motorhead was finished.

I wanted to use our time wisely, so I refrained from mentioning his lack of good taste and took the Funkadelic record off. I was reaching for the Isley Brothers, but Sam Hellerman made a little cross with his index fingers, so I put on Young Loud and Snotty instead. He looked up at me with this TV-commercial “headache gone!” expression. Which I thought was kind of funny.

“See,” he finally said, slurring a little after I had shaken his shoulder to wake him up, “the problem with your dad’s death was never a lack of information. It was that there were too 310

many explanations. It was a murder, it was an accident, it was a suicide. It can’t have been all of those. And the one consistent element, the car crash, is the least likely part.”

“But the car crash definitely happened,” I said. “It was in the paper.”

“Yeah, but if you really wanted to kill someone, crashing into their parked car would be just about the worst plan possible.”

Okay, that was actually a good point. People get killed in car crashes when both cars are moving at high speed, and even then there can be survivors. You certainly couldn’t be sure that a hit-and-run on a parked car would lead to sudden death, though it happens. Plus the damage to your own car would be hard to disguise or explain. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before.

Sam Hellerman then began to deliver a rambling, semi-drugged analysis of the inadequacies of the car crash as a murder method, which once again I found kind of creepy at those moments when it hit me that it was my dad’s death he was retroactively strategizing about.

“So are you saying it was an accident, then,” I said, “as per the official story? I thought your idea was that Mr. Teone did murder him.”

“See, it’s not a believable way to die in an accident, either,” said Sam Hellerman with a deep, semitranquilized sigh as Stiv Bators sang “Caught with the Meat in Your Mouth.”

“There would still be all the same problems. And suicide by hit-and-run makes even less sense. And haven’t you ever wondered why your dad happened to be parked in the middle of nowhere at three a.m.?” In perfect hit-and-run position.

Yeah, I’d wondered about that.

“None of it seems like it could possibly be accidental,” he said. “That’s why I figure your dad was already dead when 311

his car was rammed, and that the person who rammed him had set it up that way.”

I’ll spare you the details of the retarded slurred Q&A whereby I finally arrived at a basic understanding of it, but Sam Hellerman’s hit-and-run scenario went more or less like this: Mr. Teone had started up the Satanic Empire operation almost as soon as he started teaching at Hillmont. For some reason, he had seen my dad as a threat and decided he had to get him out of the way. It may have been because of an official investigation my dad had been working on. Or it may have been a private matter between them. There was certainly no one better situated to cause trouble for Tit’s fledg-ling teen porn operation than a cop who had known him all his life and who had at least some knowledge of the shady activities of the past at Most Precious Blood. So he arranged to meet my dad on the Sky Vista frontage road at three a.m. under some pretense. Sam Hellerman wasn’t sure how he had actually killed him, but he “liked” the idea that he had rendered him unconscious somehow and rigged up a tailpipe/

hose/window apparatus—which is how people do commit suicide in cars on occasion. Then he had rammed the car and driven away. Sam Hellerman also speculated that perhaps Mr. Teone had written the suicide note my mom claimed to have or to have seen, leaving it in the car, or possibly arranging for it to get to my mom directly.

“But why would he go to such trouble to make it look like suicide and then confuse the issue with a faked accident?

And wouldn’t the cops have been suspicious, and wouldn’t they have been able to tell what had really happened?”

To my slight dismay, Sam Hellerman quickly popped the other pill in his mouth, gulped some bourbon, and smiled at me impishly. I knew we didn’t have long. He still seemed lucid enough but very tired and uninterested in focusing—I 312

knew the feeling pretty well by now. He picked up the computer printout about the Santa Carla corruption scandal.

“Didn’t you read this?” he said.

S H E R LO C K H E N DE RSON

Now, I’ve got to interrupt Sam Hellerman’s explanation with my own explanation. There was something I had to know, and under the circumstances it just wasn’t possible to ask it directly. So I had a plan. Fortunately, he was on drugs, which would help. That’s one of the reasons I had agreed to let him have some painkillers, in fact.

I reached over, tapped the printout, and said: “so Fiona is back in the picture.”

His facial expression and body language were easy to read. He sighed and slumped, looking exasperated and dismayed, like he always did whenever the name Fiona was mentioned. He liked to think he’d taken care of that situation, thrown me off the track, and he was bummed when the subject would still pop up now and again. But it was also obvious that my bringing up Fiona in the context of the newspaper article was puzzling to him. That told me something, but there was still a piece missing.

He looked over the article with a furrowed brow and a little growl of frustration. He couldn’t see what I was getting at. Then, eventually, his face cleared: he had figured it out. He mouthed the word “Schumacher” and nodded. Which was frustrating. Come on, Hellerman, I thought, trying to summon as much psychic power as I had in me: don’t mouth it, don’t mouth it. . . .

“I see,” he finally said. “Yeah. No. Those situations have nothing to do with each other. It’s a coincidence.”

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Now it was my turn to sigh. Well, it would have been too easy, I thought. Then, however, he added:

“It must be a different Schumacher. It’s a common name.”

Which was what I had been angling for. Saying “it’s a common [blank]” is always Sam Hellerman’s response to an inconvenient coincidence, I was starting to realize. But he had said “Shoe-mocker” rather than “Skoo-macker.” That told me that he had never actually spoken to Deanna Schumacher, and was almost certainly not in contact with her. Which was a big relief. Unless he was wilier than even I thought, and had realized what I was up to and had deliberately mispronounced the name. I didn’t think so, though. He was too mind fogged to put on much of an act.

Mispronunciation had come through once again.

I put on All American Boy and looked at Sam Hellerman, who was staring off into space and speaking kind of quietly but still seemed mostly in control of his faculties.

“The Santa Carla police department had just gone through an embarrassing controversy that involved at least one suicide. They would have wanted to avoid bad publicity from yet another one.”

According to Sam Hellerman, the cops would have wanted to cover up the suicide angle and treat the death publicly as an accident or possible vehicular homicide. They may or may not have actually believed the suicide story, though the fact that there was a suicide note that had convinced the widow would have made it more plausible. But whether they believed it or not, they had judged it to be in their interests to keep it quiet and had taken advantage of Mr. Teone’s setup.

“So let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying that Mr.

Teone arranged the fake suicide, knowing that the cops would want to cover it up; and, on top of that, he added a phony car 314

crash, knowing that the cops would prefer that scenario and run with it, instead of investigating it as a murder?”

“Or the cops did the hit-and-run themselves,” said Sam Hellerman. “But it works out better—”

“—if it was Teone,” I said, finishing his sentence.

“Right.”

Of course, I knew something that Sam Hellerman didn’t: Mr. Teone may have had some help from an accomplice in the county coroner’s office. Melvin Schumacher had known my dad, and his daughter’s going to Catholic school probably indicated that he had a Catholic background. Maybe he had even been a student at MPB himself.

In view of this, it seemed to me that the suicide angle needlessly complicated things—if Mr. Teone had wanted to murder my dad, and Melvin Schumacher was willing to help him cover it up, there would have been no need for another layer of subterfuge. I was more than ready to believe that my dad’s suicide was all in my mom’s head. But Sam Hellerman was trying to fit everything into a single storyline without leaving anything out, so he had to fit the suicide theme in somewhere. And, I had to admit, his story had a kind of sym-metry, with a faked suicide at either end.

At any rate, it was possible, though not certain, that Melvin Schumacher had been involved in my dad’s murder.

And now, circumstances had arranged themselves in such a way that I was getting weekly blow jobs from his daughter.

Life is weird.

Let me put it this way: some of it seemed like a bit of a stretch. Sam Hellerman seemed utterly confident in his theory, but then, he always seemed u. c. As Sam Hellerman would say, it “worked out” better if Mr. Teone was behind it all, but that didn’t mean it really happened that way. My dad 315

could have been murdered by anybody, not necessarily the guy who wrote the Catcher code and whose illicit activities were exposed by our retarded rock band. And despite all this energetic and ingenious reasoning, it was still possible that the whole thing had been a fluke accident after all. There was no evidence for any of what Sam Hellerman was proposing.

When I mentioned this, Sam Hellerman rolled his half-closed eyes.

“Oh no,” he said. “That’s the way it happened.” Then, realizing that I was still skeptical, he groaned and summoned what was left of his strength.

“Look at it this way: what year did your dad die?”

“O-nine, o-six, nine-three,” I said automatically.

“And what can you tell me about Mr. Teone’s car?”

I saw what he was getting at: he was saying Mr. Teone had had to buy his celebrated Geo Prizm in 1993 to replace the one he had smashed up by ramming into my dad. That seemed like reaching, even for Sam Hellerman. He could have bought the car used anytime after 1993. I regarded him dubiously but went along with it.

“What did he do with the smashed-up car?” I asked.

“Well,” said Sam Hellerman, “if you were a metal-shop teacher, and you needed to get rid of an incriminating car, what would you do?”

“The Hillmont Knight?” I said, catching on, but still doubtful.

“ ‘Presentated to HHS by the Class of ’94,’ ” he quoted, as smug as it’s possible to be when you’re about to slip into a coma. “He turned the evidence into a class project. Much better than pushing it in the reservoir.” He was right: Hillmont High Center Court was the last place anyone would look.

I shuddered a little at the image of Hillmont’s drama hippies leaning casually against what might have been my dad’s 316

murder weapon. Hell, I’d even climbed on it, and swung from its crankshaft lance once or twice. I suddenly realized that, if Sam Hellerman was right, Mr. Teone’s constant references to his ’93 Geo Prizm might have been more sinister than goofy.

There was one bit of evidence Sam Hellerman hadn’t covered, and I was pretty sure he did have a little theory about it that he had just forgotten to mention: the card for the Happy Day Dry Cleaners that had been stuck between the pages of The Seven Storey Mountain along with the TJA card. Maybe something to do with the bloodstains in Catcher, CEH 1960? That was just a guess. I started to ask Sam Hellerman about this but I noticed that he had finally slipped off. I stared at the wall for a while.

“Hellerman,” I finally said, in the direction of his coma-tose little form. “That is so . . .” I searched for the word.

“. . . retarded.” But then I said, “I don’t know, Hellerman,” because I really didn’t.

I put on The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and lay back on the bed, more or less alone with my thoughts, which under the circumstances didn’t have a lot to do with the English countryside of yesteryear.

DU NG EON S I N TH E AI R

Any way you sliced it, I was going to have a lot to think about over the Christmas break.

Despite Sam Hellerman’s confidence, I knew there were other ways to work it out. Presumably there is an actual story, one that really happened, behind the Tit-CEH-TJA nexus revealed by Tit’s note and Matthew 3:9–11, though I’d be willing to bet that if so, it would end up seeming to make even less sense. Life is stupid that way.

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It occurred to me that we had worked it out in much the same way we would have worked out the details of a particularly elaborate band. And the whole story, especially the complicated, multiply deceptive murder scheme, was Hellerman through and through. I mean, if Sam Hellerman were a loopy associate principal–pornographer who wanted to get rid of a cop he had known since childhood, that was exactly the sort of plan he would have come up with. That didn’t necessarily mean that Mr. Teone would have come up with the same plan.

Of course, if Mr. Teone really had murdered my dad, I wanted to know. But I was just starting to realize why I was so unsatisfied with Hellermanian theories on this matter: in the end, I didn’t want my relationship with my dad to be about Mr. Teone, or substitution ciphers, or broods of vipers, or pornography, or police corruption, or any of that stuff. And in reality, it wasn’t about any of those things, though it’s easy to forget that when you’re trying to solve codes and piece together an explanation out of scraps of paper and notes in the margins of books. I’m not a good detective, and I don’t even really want to be one. The only part of it that matters is that I miss my dad and wish he weren’t dead. And that I love making out with Celeste Fletcher and hope to be able to do it again one day. Family values and ramoning. That’s reality.

Now, Sam Hellerman had said I was “hung up on”

Matthew 3:9–11, and he wasn’t wrong, though it took a lot of thinking before I figured out why. It wasn’t only because the passage kind of creeped me out and kept popping up. And it wasn’t only because the brood of vipers kept reminding me of Rye Hell and the Catcher cult. I think it was also because it was something real, a piece of a book people had been reading for thousands of years, a part of the world that existed independ-318

ently from any of our conjectures. It was because my dad had probably read that quote, probably thought about it, probably wondered, as I had done, what it meant and how it applied to his life and the world. And he had read The Seven Storey Mountain and may have wondered why the SSM guy had chosen it for his epigraph. In a way, it put my dad in a picture made up of things that weren’t entirely imaginary or theoretical. It allowed me to imagine myself in his place in the past.

And those opportunities were pretty rare.

Even if every other element of Sam Hellerman’s theory turned out to be right, Timothy J. Anderson’s relationship to my dad and Tit and the Seven Storey Mountain guy could still have been random, unconnected to the rest of the story. And for some reason I found the randomness more satisfying. I imagined my dad, engrossed in The Seven Storey Mountain, perhaps attending church with his family. He notices the memorial card, if that’s what it was, for someone he has never heard of, on a table, in a pew, or in a missal or hymnal. He stops dead, struck by the coincidence that it uses the same quote as his book’s epigraph. He sits there thinking, “Wow, this is spooky and weird,” clips the quote off the rest of the card, and keeps it to use as a bookmark. Or he’s intrigued by it and starts his own little investigation into Timothy J. Anderson, trying to learn who he was and why his card and his book share the same quotation. That’s what I would have done. That’s what I had done. The thought came closer to bringing my dad “back to life” than anything else I had ever thought of.

And that road of reasoning leads to an entirely different way of looking at it, which is that all of these elements are random and not really connected to each other in any particular way, except to the degree that Sam Hellerman and I tried to make them make sense by coming up with a storyline to tie them together.

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Like this: there were two kids in the sixties who were into The Catcher in the Rye and who used to write notes to each other in code, often about weird or off-the-wall things, and boast about how they messed around with girls. And one of their classmates had hanged himself in the gymnasium. And one of them used to read a lot of books, and at some point acquired a memorial card, if that’s what it was, for a totally unrelated guy named Timothy J. Anderson and used it as a bookmark. And when they grew up, one of them became a cop, while the other became a loopy associate principal with a kind of perverted and illegal way of getting his jollies and earning extra cash on the side. These things happen.

Honestly, I can’t decide. One day I look at it one way, and the next I’ll think that’s nuts and start looking at it another way. Maybe I just haven’t hit on the right explanation yet. Or maybe there is no explanation. Around and around, it can drive a person crazy.

There certainly are a lot of avenues for further investigation. I should probably go through my mom’s stuff and try to find the supposed suicide note, despite Amanda’s plausible conclusion that it doesn’t actually exist. Learning a little more about my mom and her relationship with my dad would probably go a long way toward clearing up some of the confusion.

I’m not totally sold on that, however. My mom is sad, distant, goofy, mysterious, and beautiful, and part of me feels like I’d prefer to leave her that way. I’m pretty sure we will always fail to understand each other completely. And I know I wouldn’t like it if investigating her caused her to fade even more from view, which is what basically happened when I tried to investigate my dad. Anyway, you can’t spend all your time digging through other people’s stuff to try to shed light on your own concerns. Sometimes you just want to switch to obsessing about semihot girls and working on your band for a while.

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As I mentioned, Sam Hellerman had written “killed by Tit?” in the margin of the reverse-exposure printout about the hanged kid who may or may not have been Timothy J.

Anderson. Thinking it over, it occurred to me that if, decades from now, some kids were to discover this sheet of paper stuck in a book somewhere, it could lead to a whole new wheel-spinning investigation with God only knows how many twists and turns and coincidences and mistaken assumptions and imposed meanings and ingenious errors and peripheral connections to various episodes involving messing around with a variety of hot and semihot girls. Randomly generated dungeons in the air, passed from generation to generation. In the spirit of continuing this grand tradition, I located Little Big Tom’s most retarded-looking counterculture book, Revolution for the Hell of It (by Free—that’s supposed to be the guy’s name, I kid you not. Jacket photo by Richard Avedon).

Supposedly the author of this book got five years in prison for writing it. Which seems a bit lenient if you ask me. The guy who wrote The Doors of Perception got off way easier, though, especially since the worst band in the history of the world, the Doors, named themselves after it. He has a lot to answer for.

I picked up a pen, intending to underline a suitably bizarre section, and maybe compose an off-the-wall message in code based upon it. I found, however, that the book was all marked up already. There was one underlined passage, near the beginning, that said that five-sided objects were evil and proposed measuring the Pentagon to figure out how many hippies it would take to make it less evil by forming a big, smelly circle around it. And in the margin someone, presumably a young, idealistic, right-on Little Big Tom, had pa-thetically written “Yes!” I kid you not. Well, there was nothing I could add—you can’t improve on perfection. I put my pen down, folded up the “killed by Tit?” printout, and placed it in 321

the book between the pages containing this Deep Thought.

That oughta confuse the hell out of them, I thought with in-calculable satisfaction. All we had to do now was wait.

I glanced over at Sam Hellerman, sleeping peacefully in the corner. Then I got up and went down to the basement and put the book near the bottom of one of the book boxes, feeling as though I were burying the sixties. Even though I guess I really wasn’t.

G R EAT B O OK, C HANG E D MY LI F E, YOU

KNOW

It’s rather ironic, wouldn’t you say, that things ended up arranging themselves so that I spent a considerable chunk of my sophomore year carrying around a copy of The Catcher in the Rye everywhere I went? In a sense, I suppose you could even say that The Catcher in the Rye changed my life, though I’m not about to commemorate that fact by joining a cult or anything.

It set in motion a process by which I learned so much about some stuff that I ended up not knowing anything at all about it. And it indirectly influenced the fact that my rock band accidentally brought down a perverted high school sexploita-tion empire and freed the little children from the devil-head predations of an evil associate principal. And it happened to coincide with my clumsy venture from pure fantasy to impure reality in the girl arena. Not bad for a sucky book you read only to suck up to teachers holding a gun to your head.

Look, it’s not even that bad of a book. I admit it. I can feel sorry for myself while pretending to be Holden Caulfield. I can. And I can see why the powers that be have decided to adopt it as their semiofficial alterna-bible. Things were really, really bad in the sixties. You were always getting kicked out 322

of your prep school, or getting into fights at your prep school, or getting marooned on deserted islands on the way to your fancy English boarding school. And when you finally got off the island, your “old man” was always on your “case,” and Vietnam just drove you crazy, plus you were constantly high on drugs and out of touch with reality and it was sometimes a little more difficult than it should have been to get everyone to admit how much better you were than everybody else.

It was rough. I get it. I really get it. Up with Holden. I’d have probably been the same way.

In the end, though, the attempt to save the world by forcing people to read The Catcher in the Rye and dressing casually and supporting public television and putting bumper stickers on Volvos and eating only weird expensive food and separat-ing your cans and bottles and doing tai chi and going to the farmer’s market and pronouncing Spanish words with a cartoon-character accent and calling actresses actors and making up your own religion and so forth—well, the world refused to be saved that way. Big surprise. On the other hand, no one could ever mistake Hillmont High School for a prep school, so at least you accomplished that. I mean, calling it a school involves the kind of generosity of spirit that in other circumstances might get you the Nobel Peace Prize nomina-tion or something. You stuck it to the old man, killed half of your brain cells, and dumbed down the educational system: you are the greatest generation.

Before all that character arc stuff happened, I might have been able to sing “all we are saying is make high school a little less sadistic” with a little more enthusiasm. Compared to Hillmont High School, Holden Caulfield’s prep school troubles seem like a sort of heaven on earth. But honestly, I’ve got my mind on other things. Girls and rock and roll, I mean.

Everything else is trivia.

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OUTRO

How we live now:

Christmas break. Band practice. We Have Eaten All the Cake, me on guitar/vox, Spam L. Ermine on bass and domestic hygiene, Shinefield on drums, first album Slut Heaven.

Working on: “You Look Good on Drugs.”

Little Big Tom enters, tilts his head to one side, raises one eyebrow, does a quick, shallow knee bend, tilts his head to the other side, raises the phone he is carrying above his head, and brings it down, straightening his arm in one fluid motion, as though it’s a remote and he’s changing the channel. Or a phaser on stun.

“There a rock star in the house?”

I take the phone. “Oh, thank God,” I say, when I realize it is Celeste “Fiona” Fletcher. Because we’ve started saying that whenever we call each other.

Fake Fiona: “Trombone!”

Amanda: “Get off the phone. Get off the phone. Get off the phone.”

Mom: just about halfway visible from a certain angle, seated at the dining room table at the end of the hall in a cloud of cigarette smoke, staring into her drink. Looking sad and beautiful.

Little Big Tom, sighing: “Rock and roll . . .”

Sam Hellerman: staring ahead inscrutably, fingering bass strings. Saying nothing.

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bandography

( A U G U S T – D E C E M B E R )

1. Easter Monday

2. Baby Batter

guitar: Guitar Guy

base and scientology: Sam Hellerman

third album: Odd and Even Number

3. The Plasma Nukes

guitar: Lithium Dan

bass and calligraphy: Little Pink Sambo

vox: The Worm

machine-gun drums: TBA

first album: Feelin’ Free with the Plasma Nukes 4. Tennis with Guitars

lead axe: Love Love

bass and rat-catching: The Prophet Samuel vocals, keys, bumping, grinding: Li’l Miss Debbie drummer: Beat-Beat

first album: Amphetamine Low

cover: white with the album title in tiny black type on the back. The band name does not appear anywhere on the outside packaging.

second album: Phantasmagoria, Gloria photo: a police dog licks a broken doll’s face.

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5. Helmet Boy

guitar: Moe

bass and procrastination: Sambiguity

first album: Helmet Boy II

6. Liquid Malice

7. The Underpants Machine

guitar: Super-Moe

bass and bottle rockets: Sam Sam the Piper’s Son first album: We Will Bury You

8. The Stoned Marmadukes

guitar: Moe “Fingers” Henderson

bass and paleontology: Mr. Sam Hellerman first album: Right Lane Must Exit

9. Ray Bradbury’s Love-Camel

guitar: Moe-Moe

bass and calisthenics: Scammy Sammy

first album: Prepare to Die

10. Silent Nightmare

guitar: The Lord of Electricity

bass and gynecology: Samson

first album: Feel Me Fall

11. The Medieval Ages

guitar: St. Moe

bass and bodywork: Samber Waves of Grain first album: That Stupid Pope

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12. The Sadly Mistaken

guitar: Moe Vittles

bass and landscaping: Sam “Noxious” Fumes first album: Kill the Boy Wonder

13. Oxford English

guitar: Moe Bilalabama

bass and lollygagging: Sam “the Cat” Hellerman first album: What Part of Suck Don’t You Understand?

14. Some Delicious Sky, aka SDS

treble and vocals: Squealie

thick bottom and industrial arts:

Sambidextrous

first album: Taste My Juice

15. Arab Charger

guitar: me

bass and preventive dentistry: The Fiend in Human Shape

first album: Blank Me

16. Occult Blood

guitar and vox: Mopey Mo

bass and teleology: Hell-man

percussion instruments: Todd Panchowski

first album: Pentagrampa

17. The Mordor Apes

guitar: Mithril-hound

bass and necrology: Li’l Sauron

percussion and stupefaction: Dim Todd

first album: Elven Tail

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18. The Nancy Wheelers

guitar: Pseudo-Moe

bass and ouija board: Sam Hellerman

first album: Margaret? It’s God. Please Shut Up.

19. Green Sabbath

guitar: Monsignor Eco-druid

bass and industrial sabotage: The Grim

Recycler

drums, percussion, acoustic and semi-

acoustic drums, cymbals, tambourines,

cowbells, chimes, gongs, toms, shaker

eggs, bongos, stick clicks, wood blocks, percussion, percussion and more

percussion: Todd “Percussion” Panchowski first album: Our Drummer Is Kind of Full of Himself 20. Balls Deep

guitar: Comrade Gal-hammer

bass and embroidery: Our Dear Leader

real fancy and important percussion: the Lonely Dissident

first album: We Control the Horizontal 21. Super Mega Plus

guitar/vox: Moelle

bass, prevarication, and procuring young girls under false pretenses: Sam Hell

irregular timekeeping: Brain-dead Panchowski first album: A Woman Knows

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22. The Chi-Mos!

guitar: the Reverend Chi-Mo

bass and being aware of his own mortality: Assistant Principal Chi-Mo

percussion and counting to four:

Chi-Mo Panchowski

first album: Balls Deep

23. The Elephants of Style

guitar: Mot Juste

bass and animal husbandry: Sam Enchanted Evening

first album: Devil Warship

24. Sentient Beard

guitar/vox: Mot Nosredneh

bass and upholstery: Samerica the Beautiful first album: Off the Charts—Way Off

25. We Have Eaten All the Cake

guitar/vox: Tomcat

bass and domestic hygiene Spam L. Ermine

:

drums: Shinefield

first album Slut Heaven

:

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glossary

AC/DC (ACK-dack): the fourth-greatest rock and roll band of all time.

Advanced French (a-VALST flalsh): a form of the French language in which only the present tense is used. Primarily employed for telling time and for describing the activities of this one guy named Jean and this other guy named Claude.

Advanced Placement (ud-VANT-udgd po-LEES-munt): classes that are far easier than regular classes and for which students receive inflated grades. Rumor has it that “work” done in some AP classes can even count as college credit, though it is doubtful that the sort of college that would accept such credit is the sort of college you’d ever want to put on a resume.

anglophile (an-GLOF-eh-lay): someone who is under the mistaken impression that there is something cool or impressive about trying to speak in a fake English accent.

ankh (ANK-ul): the ancient Egyptian symbol of life, often worn as a pendant or tattoo, or emblazoned on drug paraphernalia.

atheism (AUT-iz-im): a religion for people who figure they probably already know everything there is to know about everything.

The Bad Seed (dee BUD sayd): the charming story of a typical American childhood. The second-greatest movie ever made.

Bayeux Tapestry (bay-OOKS tap-ESS-tree): a long strip of material embroidered in the Middle Ages that illustrates 333

the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England.

Starring the Pope, William the Conqueror, a guy named King Cnut [sic], and a lot of guys with swords dressed up as chess pieces.

The Beatles (the RUTT-ulz): four mop-topped lads from Liverpool who set the toes of the world a-tapping. Then they turned into hippies.

be-in (BE-ing): back in the sixties, hippies used to have these, where everybody took drugs and tried to feel important. I think it’s pretty much the same as a “happening.”

bête noire (bait nwah-RAY): “black beast” in nonadvanced French. It’s slightly worse than a pet peeve, though not as bad as a bane, as far as I can tell.

The Bible (the bibble): a big creepy book, the contents of which have influenced and formed the basis for much of the history and culture of Western civilization for thousands and thousands of years. Mention of this book is forbidden in public schools and in progressive right-thinking households, thus ensuring that substantial chunks of history and literature and the culture at large will be virtually incomprehensible to a sizeable minority of the country’s population. Highly prized by religious and other wrong-thinking people for these and other reasons.

The Big Chill (tha BEEG cheel): a nauseating movie about everybody’s parents. If anyone has ever tried to make you dance around to oldies while doing the dishes, you have this movie to thank for it.

bitch (beetch): an uncooperative female. Also, a cooperative female. Additionally, among girls, a rival. Or ally.

Black Sabbath (BLAY-ack suh-BAWTH): pentagrams, in-verted crosses, capes, tights, drugs, de-tuned guitars, un-limited recording budgets—what could go wrong? The eighteenth-greatest rock and roll band of all time.

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Blue Oyster Cult (blue iced occult): maybe rock and roll music wasn’t meant to be this intellectual and sophisticated, but they’re still the twelfth-greatest rock and roll band of all time.

Boomers (boh-OM-ers): the Most Annoying Generation.

bourgeois pigs (bore-GOYCE pegs): what people in the sixties used to call their parents.

Brighton Rock (BRIG-a-thon rawk): the best book ever written.

bubblegum (BOOB leh-GYOOM): this is, in the end, more or less the Lord’s music.

Jimmy Buffett ( JUM-ee boo-FAY): a weird old hippie dude featuring Hawaiian shirts and terrible music. On special occasions, a boomer dad will sometimes put on a little Jimmy Buffett costume, fix drinks with umbrellas in them, and bring them over to his “old lady,” biting his lower lip and doing this weird, slow-motion dance-walk. If there is a more gruesome scenario on this earth, I cannot think what it might be and do not want to know in any case.

callipygian (CALL-ippy-DJEE-ahn), also callipygous: Describes a woman with large, shapely, or otherwise lovely, remarkable, or impressive buttocks. By way of the Greeks, those ancient, horny, clever bastards. The day I learned there was a word for this was the day I regained my interest in living and faith in humanity.

Carrie (CARE-ree-AY): normal students stage an elaborate Make-Out/Fake-Out on a shy, freaky girl, joke-electing her prom queen and then dumping a bucket of pig blood on her head. She turns out to have special powers and destroys them all. All proms should turn out like that. The fourth-greatest movie of all time.

The Catcher in the Rye (KAT-sha-rin R’lyeh): don’t fight it.

Relax. Clear your mind and let the magic take hold of you.

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You’re floating, floating on air. Take the book. Go on, take it. You know you want to. That’s it. Nice and slow. Isn’t it so much easier this way? One of us, one of us, one of us . . .

Cocksparrer (HOT-spur): working-class English punk band who could have been the Sex Pistols if they had played their cards right. But they didn’t.

cock tease (kok TAYCE): an attractive female whose behavior is erratic, unpredictable, or otherwise unsatisfactory.

collage (koe-LODGE-ay): a piece of paper with things cut out from magazines glued on it in an attractive or arresting pattern. Has replaced the expository essay as the preferred means for assessing a student’s academic progress in American public schools.

concupiscent (con-koo-PISK-unt): wide open and up for anything.

D and D (DAN-dee): a role-playing game played only by very cool guys.

dilettante (dial-TAN-tay): one who can never stick with anything for more than a couple of minutes. An unjustly ma-ligned lifestyle.

The Doors (duh DERZ): there is an extremely well-organized conspiracy among boomers to cultivate the fiction that this band doesn’t totally suck. The worst thing in the history of the universe.

Dr. Dee (der DAY): Queen Elizabeth I’s astrologer. He put a hex on the Spanish Armada, saving England and ensuring that, four hundred years later, the Beatles would end up singing in English rather than Spanish. He was also given a weird code by angelic beings he saw in a crystal, and probably needed medication that hadn’t been invented yet.

Dr. Who (dra-WOO): a more sophisticated, English version of Star Trek.

Bob Dylan (BAY-bee ZIM-er-mn): there was a time in my 336

life when I fervently wanted to be Bob Dylan. Then I realized that practically everybody else in the world wanted to be Bob Dylan, too, and that if we all got our wish, being Bob Dylan would be so common that it would be completely meaningless to be Bob Dylan, even for the actual, original Bob Dylan, and the world would essentially end up exactly the same as it was before. The alpha Bob Dylans would beat up the less alpha Bob Dylans, the female Bob Dylans would confuse the hell out of the male Bob Dylans, the teacher Bob Dylans would make the student Bob Dylans read The Catcher in the Rye, the parent Bob Dylans would call continual inane family discussions with the kid Bob Dylans, and the sadistic, psychotic structure of the universe would be more or less preserved. Nature is a bitch.

epigraph (a-PIG-rape): an obscure quotation at the beginning of a book designed to make the author of the book seem smarter and more well-read than its readers. An epigraph that doesn’t make the reader feel confused, small, worthless, and stupid is an epigraph that has failed.

Therefore, the best epigraphs have no discernible relationship to the contents of the books they adorn.

epilogue (EPP-ul-oh-gay): just when you think the book is over, there are suddenly like twenty more pages to go, because some writers just don’t know when to stop. Don’t read epilogues: it will only encourage them.

epitaph (epp-EE-toff ): an obscure quotation on a tomb-stone, designed to make the dead guy’s life seem less pointless.

Europe (YOUR-ip): we beat these guys in World War II.

Foghat (foe-GAT): the fifth-greatest rock and roll band of all time.

Funkadelic (FUN-kee-assgroove-a-TELL-ick-ness): the funki-est band in the world, unless you count the Isley Brothers.

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genuflect (g-NU-fuh-lect): sometimes, the church only requires one half of a person’s body to be kneeling.

gifted and talented (gif-TED and tal-on-TED): gifted and talented students are those who have figured out that if you make a little effort to leave the right impression, very little will be expected of you in the end.

Gilligan’s Island (GILL-gan SIS-land): a television show, certain episodes of which contain the secret to the meaning of existence, concealed by means of coded messages and obscure symbolism.

Che Guevara (chee goo-ey-VAH-ra): a Latin American revolutionary famous for his sexiness and hip T-shirts. A cross between Elvis and Charles Manson. An inexplicably adored Holden Caulfield for the political-minded.

George Harrison (GORE-jer-us ISS-un): guitar player and Siddhartha-type. The hairiest of all the Beatles.

hemisemidemiquaver (HEE-mee-SUM-thin-ore-UDD-er): a sixty-fourth note. Many guitar players believe the object of the game is to play as many of these as possible, leaving as few spaces as they can for the entire song. It’s a test of endurance.

Hitler (HIL-ter): a thoroughly evil totalitarian mass murderer from Germany. Seriously, you can’t get more evil than him.

Admirers of other totalitarian mass murderers take comfort in the notion that at least their guy’s evilness doesn’t meet this standard; plus they point out that in their guy’s dicta-torship everyone who is not murdered gets free health care and education.

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