King Dork (25 page)

doubt that Née-Née Tagliafero’s team would have won,

though. The Pierre Butterfly Cameroon gambit had been so

spectacular that it was still being talked about several towns down the strip months later.

In the end, the Dud Chart fiasco was an object lesson in

how getting involved with normal people, if you’re not normal yourself, or even if you’re subnormal/drama, is always trouble.

You start by allowing your own world to be corrupted by their warped values, and then you gradually start using their sadistic methods and eventually end up adopting bits of their sick ideology. And even then, when you have become just like them, they will eventually turn on you anyway. Normal people are savage beasts. Even Sam Hellerman hadn’t been immune: he

sold out his people, though the corruption thankfully hadn’t been deep enough to induce him to betray the sacred bonds of alphabetical order. It’s sad. I imagine some of those girls at least had been decent, nice people before they were infected with normalcy by exposure to Lorra Jaffe. Maybe not, though.

I
was
impressed by the deal Sam Hellerman had managed to get for his services as Celeste Fletcher’s Dork

Consultant. Two full bottles of Percodan (from her dad’s

pharmacy), a half-bottle of Valium (from her mom’s night

table), twenty dollars, and a blow job. No way did I believe the blow job part at first, but he looked so serious and, um, pleased with himself while he was saying it that I even almost started to believe it. Or maybe I just wanted to believe that there were circumstances where it was conceivable that a

189

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

According to Sam Hellerman, anyway, Celeste Fletcher

had been a Sister of her word despite the cancelled contest.

But she had held out till the end of the term of the deal before delivering the i. b. j. as a kind of final payment, which partly explained his searching looks in her direction out there on the lawn (he had been keeping an eye on his business interests, among other things) and his seeming indifference

now that the transaction had been completed. On learning

this, it occurred to me that oral sex would probably have

been worth a lot of points in their game and that maybe Sam Hellerman
had
been in the running for the Make-out/Fake-out after all without his knowledge. Or maybe he had known, but they hadn’t known he’d known. Sometimes it’s hard to

tell who’s faking out whom in the battle of the sexes. It hardly matters, though. A blow job is a blow job. Or so I am given to understand.

The Hellerman/Fletcher eye-ray/ass phenomenon had

been pretty spectacular, though, and I still wasn’t sure, so I asked one last question: was it all just business, or did he really have the hots for Celeste Fletcher?

“Henderson,” he said, as he does when he wants me to

know he’s being serious, “I have the hots for everyone.”

I could see his point.

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

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

dressed to my dad, but it was a fair assumption. So my dad had had a friend, a Sam Hellerman–ish figure, named Tit, and they used to give each other coded notes. Probably there had been many, many other such notes, because such elaborate

methods only develop over time, and not if you’re just dabbling. Each of the scribbled dates in the
Catcher
had potentially been keys to notes that were now lost. The note

preserved in
A Separate Peace
was, I was guessing, a tiny rem-nant of a vast body of other coded notes, like a dinosaur’s fos-silized rib. The more bones you find, the easier it is to

imagine what the dinosaur might have looked like when it

lived. If you only have the one rib, it’s harder, and the results will be sketchier. More notes would have made it easier to see the total picture of my dad and Tit and their world, but I only had the one note to go on. It was clear, though, that it was a pretty weird world.

I knew right off the bat that the picture was going to be

distorted, but that didn’t prevent me from asking some questions. What kind of things did they encode? It appeared that they were in the habit of discussing more important, meaningful matters than Sam Hellerman and I ever had when we

were playing our code games. Our coded messages were en-

tirely trivial. For my dad and Tit, it was all about sexual con-quests and dead people, neither of which had ever figured

prominently in my and Sam Hellerman’s lives, though I guess Sam Hellerman was showing some promise in the former

category. Moreover, I got the impression that Tit and my dad weren’t doing it just for fun but because they really didn’t want anyone else to read what they were writing.

I could understand why the sexual stuff was coded: in the

sixties, everybody was all uptight about sex, and I bet you would have got in trouble for writing about how you had ramoned someone. But there was something odd about the fact

191

that “the bastard is dead” had not been deemed worthy of being encoded, but “are you going to the funeral?” had been. Or maybe the bastard who was dead wasn’t the same dead guy

they were having the funeral for? Or maybe “the bastard is dead” is some quotation, like the Superman reference, that I wasn’t aware of. It could have been sex again, though. The being tied up and whipped thing, I mean, though that’s just an expression, too, in a way.

Tit’s question, however, had an answer. I had no doubt

that my dad had in fact gone to the funeral. The date on

Timothy J. Anderson’s funeral card from
The Seven Storey
Mountain
was March 13, 1963. It didn’t square with the date on the note, but of course that wasn’t a real date; and

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

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

So Timothy J. Anderson was dead, whether or not he

had been “the bastard,” and my dad had gone to the funeral.

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

There wasn’t much information on the card, just the date, a generic-sounding quotation from the Bible, and the location: St. Mary Star of the Sea in San Francisco. The other card in
The Seven Storey Mountain,
from Happy Day Dry Cleaners with One-Hour Martinizing, had no date, of course, but it

happened to be located in roughly the same neighborhood as the church, if I wasn’t mistaken. All that proved was that he attended the funeral and visited the dry cleaners in the same neighborhood during the period when he was reading
The
Seven Storey Mountain.
I knew my dad had grown up in the city, but I didn’t know where—I note-to-selfed that I should find a way to ask my mom discreetly.

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

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

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

It kind of made me shiver like when you’re afraid of

something spooky. Coincidences will do that to you.

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

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

Nevertheless, choosing the band name, stage names,

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

Eventually, we settled on Balls Deep, Comrade Gal-

hammer on guitar, Our Dear Leader on bass and embroidery,

the Lonely Dissident on Real Fancy and Important Per-

cussion, first album
We Control the Horizontal.
We were going for a kind of communist guerilla/seventies porn vibe. If we had had the time or ability we would have grown mustaches

and chest hair. That wasn’t possible, but we did have big

medallions and little blue Chinese hats with red stars on them from the surplus store, and these huge white shoulder holsters that looked great with the black mechanic’s jumpsuits 193

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

Amanda, who has a lot of artistic talent, even painted us

a big banner, following Sam Hellerman’s specifications,

though I think she put a lot of herself into it, too. It was very seventies, with some silhouetted figures in educational kama sutra poses along the bottom, and a big AK-47 on either side.

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

Sam Hellerman’s idea for the audition tape was simple:

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

I felt bad because Little Big Tom came in while we were

making the tape and was like over the moon because he

thought we were interested in his music. We had to humor

him and listen to him deliver around six hundred speeches

about fusion and the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Chicano

and Latino influences on pretentious jazzy pseudorock. I think it was probably the happiest I’d ever seen him. And I also felt bad about the fact that after he left we kind of made fun of the funny way he said Latino, like he was the Frito Bandito or something. I felt bad, but I did it anyway, because I’m only human. I was ashamed of myself and depressed afterward,

though, which is human, too, I guess. Being human is an excuse for just about everything, but it also kind of sucks in a way.

Now that we had laid the groundwork, all we had to

do was try to convince Todd Panchowski to show up to

some practices for a change. Sam Hellerman said he’d get

right on it.

194

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

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

I wasn’t used to this role, and I was embarrassed by how

I sounded when I tried to speak like that. In my head, my

thoughts always sound so good and persuasive and witty and well constructed, even when I’m confused about something.

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

Hexstrom so much that I could handle the humiliation—I

would have run from the room screaming if anybody else had been there.

Anyway, as I explained to Dr. Hexstrom during our sec-

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

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