King Dork Approximately (36 page)

Thank God she didn’t say yes, to any of it. It was maybe the stupidest phone call I have ever made. Because now I can see it wasn’t really about her at all. It wasn’t even about Fiona. It was about a feeling—the feeling of wanting to look out a window with someone and have them get it.

They happened to broadcast
Halls of Innocence
on the same night as the Clearview “prom,” one of those coincidences that seem significant but actually probably really aren’t. I had been looking forward to it for ages, and in my mind I had pictured a cozy scene of watching it at my house with my mom and Little Big Tom and Amanda, Sam Hellerman, Pammelah Shumway and the Robot, and maybe even Celeste Fletcher, if she could be persuaded to leave Todd Dante and the jacket behind. In reality, though, it was just Sam Hellerman, Amanda, my mom, and me, and it was more depressing than anything.

Sam Hellerman arrived with flyers and handbills for the show, saying that he had blanketed the area and he expected at least half the Mission Hills student body to attend. I confessed that I wasn’t the most popular guy at Clearview High School these days and that I doubted I’d need anywhere near that many flyers. Sam Hellerman shook his head.

“Too bad you couldn’t hang on to that chick with the boobies,” he said. “She was your ticket.” Despite his “man of the world” pretenses these days, he still couldn’t bring himself to use regular words for things. It sounded weird, like Hugh Hefner doing baby talk.

“Pammelah Shumway,” I said, just kind of drawing a line under her with my voice. She was the past now. And there had been good times somewhere in there, I supposed.

But Sam Hellerman just looked at me and said, “Shumway? Her name is Shumway? Why didn’t you tell me she was Mormon?” I guess the name Shumway is some kind of dead giveaway of Mormonism that I didn’t know about. Sam Hellerman said it explained everything. “Mormon girls never put out,” he said. “Never. Ever. I know. I’m Mormon. Well, Jack Mormon.”
It was true that Sam Hellerman’s mom was Mormon and Sam Hellerman had been raised as one till his family went off the reservation, so to speak. “It was doomed from the start,” he said finally.

“Tell me about it,” I replied. “Aren’t we all?”

And to that he had no answer.

I’ve already told you about
Halls of Innocence
. There was lots to laugh about and lots to groan about. My mom just sat there saying “That’s terrible” every time anything at all happened, and, yeah, it sure was terrible, but not always in the way she meant it. The jacket-throwing scene got the biggest reaction. Man, I wish you could see Amanda’s reenactment of it. It’s top-notch.

I found myself kind of daydreaming that there would be a knock on the door, and that my mom would get up to answer it and return with Pammelah Shumway and the Robot, still dressed in their “prom” getups. The fantasy wasn’t clear on what would happen then, but it was vaguely along the lines of everyone telling each other that everything was going to be okay.

It didn’t happen.

Back in my room afterward, making some last-minute notes and preparations for the set the following day, I told Sam Hellerman about my latest line of thinking on the Catcher Code and my indictment against the Universe. The lawsuit plan was all over, I assured him, but it had occurred to me that the whole thing could make a pretty good book. I mean, think about it. It has everything: sex, drugs, rock and roll, suicide, dad-icide, attempted tuba-cide. I asked Sam Hellerman if he knew anything about publishing.

Sam Hellerman had gone a bit pale as I was speaking, and his eyes flashed with the usual annoyance.

“No,” he said. “You can’t write that book. No one would be interested at all in a book like that.”

Well, I certainly didn’t agree, so I tried again. It could start all the way back at Most Precious Blood, and it could show Tit writing the Catcher Code and hatching the whole sordid plot, and then zoom forward in time to Hillmont and my dad and then finally to us and our rock and roll. In fact, now that I was narrating it, it seemed more like a movie than a book. Yeah, a movie. Close-up of Tit’s chubby hand filling in the graph-paper squares, chuckling softly, then a cut to Timothy J. Anderson hanging in the gym by a rope.…

“No,” said Sam Hellerman. “It can’t be a movie, either.” Sam Hellerman paused and then seemed to make up his mind about something.

“Okay, Henderson,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something now, and I don’t want you to freak out.” He made me promise, dumb though that was, that I would not freak out before he would continue, and of course I promised.

“I hereby solemnly swear that I will not freak out, so help me Satan,” I said.

“I don’t know who killed your dad,” Sam Hellerman continued, “if it was Mr. Teone or someone else, or if he was even murdered at all. I don’t think anyone will ever know, and I don’t know if it’s even possible to figure it out,
especially
from the Catcher Code. And you should stop obsessing about this because … because it’s going to ruin your life if you keep it up.”

I was taken aback. That was the most earnest thing I’d ever heard Sam Hellerman say. It didn’t sound like him. Since when did he care whether anyone’s life got ruined? I guess our little
guy is growing up, was my main thought about that, and I wasn’t at all sure that I liked it. Still, it was just a variation on what Little Big Tom had said, and I wouldn’t say I even disagreed with it. Maybe it already had ruined my life, in a way. But I didn’t see any reason to freak out to any extent over it. I reassured him on that, but I had to point out that I still felt the Catcher Code was important.

“After all, Tit wrote it. It’s the earliest evidence we have for his state of mind at that young age, and of his relationship with my dad.”

Sam Hellerman sighed and rolled his eyes.

“You’re not listening, Henderson,” he said. “Here’s the thing. I’ve been feeling bad about it ever since you started heading off into crazy town on this thing about Tit and your dad and I should have told you a long time ago. Tit didn’t write the Catcher Code.”

What was he talking about? Of course Tit wrote it. It was right there in the code itself, internal textual evidence, the best kind there could be.

“He didn’t write the Catcher Code,” said Sam Hellerman. “I know it for absolute certain.”

“Well, okay, then, if Tit didn’t write it, who did?”

Sam Hellerman laughed.

“I did,” he said.

I looked at Sam Hellerman. Then I kept looking at him. I knew it was the truth as soon as he said it. The whole thing had had Sam Hellerman written all over it from the beginning, really, if I had only thought to think of it. But I kept staring at him, not knowing what to say. He stared back at me, wondering what I was going to say. Then I knew, and so did he a moment later.

“Get out of here,” I said.

So the Catcher Code had been a Hellerman forgery. I could easily see how he might have managed it. And knowing Sam Hellerman as I do, it wasn’t that much more difficult to imagine a host of possible reasons why: he had wanted to give me something to focus on as a distraction from his schemes-in-progress, or he had merely wanted to see if he could pull it off, or it could even have just been that presenting his Sherlock Hellerman explanations and stretching them out over time had been a good opportunity to acquire an additional supply of my hospital tranquilizers. I wasn’t going to ask him. I knew that would get me nowhere. But I suppose it did explain why Sam Hellerman had been so negative about the Catcher Code during our lawsuit discussions.

To be honest, it was a bit of a relief not to have to think about the Catcher Code anymore, irritating and embarrassing as it was that running around in circles over it had cost me so much grief over the past year. The only thing that truly irked me, when I really thought about it, was the desecration of my dad’s book. (Look up “desecration.” I just did, and it definitely means what I thought it meant.) There was no excuse for it. Sam Hellerman could have easily accomplished whatever he had wanted to accomplish without resorting to that. I had accidentally beaten up Paul Krebs for the same sort of thing when he had poured Coke in one of my dad’s books, and I knew that if I dwelled on it there was a good chance that the flashing colors of rage would once again start to blot out my vision and I’d wind up accidentally beating up Sam Hellerman. I can’t say for sure I wouldn’t have enjoyed that, on some level. You never know till you try, do you?

As for what I was going to do now, well, we had a show,
and I wasn’t about to miss it just because of being pissed off at Sam Hellerman. After that, I didn’t know, but all that meant was that I had to add it to the huge list of other things I didn’t know—as usual, but possibly even more so.

Sam Hellerman had been startled enough by my “Get out of here” that he had fled from me like a cat from a jar of clinking pennies. Maybe I had reminded him of his dad and struck momentary terror into his soul. I hoped so. But in the interests of show business and rock and roll, I knew it would be a good idea to tell him I was still planning to show up and play the next day. I called him on his holster phone and had to listen to him fumble with it, drop it, scamper after it, and finally pick it up to answer.

“Tomorrow we rock” was all I said.

“Good man,” said Sam Hellerman.

And I had to hand it to Sam Hellerman. He had managed to produce a fake Mountain Dew–sponsored show to benefit recycling that was almost exactly like you might imagine a real one would look like, if your imagination was a bit gullible and your natural skepticism a bit leaky. Along with the CARING, HEALING, and UNDERSTANDING banners from school, he had painted banners that said MOUNTAIN DEW PRESENTS, complete with logos and everything. Unless you examined them close up, they looked almost unquestionably authentic, and no one, that I knew of, ever thought to question them. He had also enlisted some of his classmates from MHHS to staff tables and sell what was apparently Mountain Dew from big fountain tanks, wearing little Mountain Dew uniforms of Sam Hellerman’s own design. It was the hats that made it work: they looked too stupid to be fake. It wasn’t genuine Mountain Dew in the tanks, Sam Hellerman told me, but
similar-tasting discount generic soda he had managed to acquire somehow at a fraction of the cost. He also had placed free pretzels and other salty snacks in little buckets around the room to make people thirsty enough to buy the soda, and had set the thermostat at a high temperature for the same reason.

“If this sells out,” said Sam Hellerman, “we’re going to make a fortune in concessions alone.”

He had arranged for a back line too, drums and amps as well as the PA and monitors, to make the set changes go more smoothly and also because, as I’ve explained, our own equipment was total crap. And he had instructed the sound guy, who was basically his employee for the night, to reduce the volume of the opening bands’ mixes and to sabotage their sets subtly to make us look better, just like they do to the opening acts at real professional rock and roll shows.

Finally, he had had pamphlets printed up extolling the virtues of recycling and asking for donations to the International Ted Nugent Center for the Promotion of Recycling, along with envelopes to put the money in and slotted boxes in which to deposit them.

“How’d you pay for all this?” I asked. It must have cost a fortune.

But Sam Hellerman told me not to worry my pretty little head about it.

“We’ll make it all back and then some,” he said confidently. And I believed him. Sam Hellerman had always claimed he had assets, and it looked like by the end of the night, he was going to have even more.

If nothing else, Sam Hellerman’s elaborate preparations had impressed and successfully deceived their primary target. Shinefield was over the moon.

“I can’t believe this is really happening,” he said.

I wasn’t sure how to answer because, one, I couldn’t believe it either, and two, it wasn’t actually really happening.

When Sam Hellerman gave the signal for the doors to open at eight o’clock, it was clear that while he might have overestimated in his claim that half the Mission Hills students would attend, he hadn’t overestimated by nearly as much as I’d figured. There were hundreds of paying customers. We were out of the red on the hall within the first ten minutes, he gloated.

By this time, Sam Hellerman had gone backstage to change and had reemerged wearing an ill-fitting suit and tie, and he was acting very much the host and master of ceremonies, greeting many of the people as they came in and pointing them toward the concessions and donation bins.

“Salvation Army,” he said out of the side of his mouth, repeating his advice that I should try wearing a suit sometime. “Chicks love it.”

It was clear that whatever methods Sam Hellerman had been using to bump up his popularity and status at MHHS, they had had some success. His fellow students all called him Sammy and were high-fiving and fist-bumping him, and he responded in kind, calling them “my man” or “young lady” as the case warranted. If you’ll recall, Sam Hellerman had predicted that in two months he’d be running the place. Well, I didn’t know about that, but he did indeed appear to be “respected by his colleagues at work or school,” which was borderline amazing. However, there did not seem to be any hint of an actual girlfriend, or even any obvious romantic interest that I could see. The girls he was talking to were friendly, but they seemed to be treating him more as a sort of mascot than as a man who was in command of the situation. I believe I even saw one of
them reach out to pat him on the head. Which, honestly, is something I’ve been tempted to do from time to time myself.

At any rate, Sam Hellerman the entrepreneur and rock concert impresario was in full effect; Sam Hellerman the womanizer had yet to be demonstrated.

Still, seeing him in action in his little suit, frolicking with his little Mission Hills friends, provoked an unsettling thought: this was Sam Hellerman’s “prom.” How cute. Someone should have taken some photos for the mantelpiece.