King Dork (26 page)

The Seven Storey Mountain
started off slow, but at least you could tell it was about something real, not just some poseur showing off. The main reason I started reading it was to see if I could figure out if there was a reason why the funeral card and the book shared the same scriptural quotation. So far I couldn’t tell about that, but the book was strangely absorb-ing. It reminded me of
Slan,
a bit. It’s about this weird, slightly freaky kid whose mom is dead and whose dad is this crazy

artist. He reminded me a little of me, too, to be honest. Well, he’s not quite as freaky as me or the slan kid, maybe, but I could tell his true freakiness was scheduled to come out later, since he drops a lot of hints right from the beginning that he’s going to end up becoming a monk at the end. That sort of

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blows the suspense, though maybe the excitement is all in

how he ends up getting there—the best stories are sometimes like that.

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

and D, kung fu movies, and heavy metal albums. But I have

this weird interest in priests and churches and that sort of thing because the seventh-grade aptitude test and my derogatory nickname set me up for it. I don’t know if it has occurred to you, but I couldn’t help thinking that maybe the dim but well-intentioned social engineer who had designed that aptitude test had read
The Seven Storey Mountain
and incorpo-rated it into the test, so that when I answered questions

indicating that I was a weird, slightly freaky kid with one parent missing like this slanlike monk-to-be character, the test said “ding! Clergy!”

If that’s the case, I bet the
Seven Storey Mountain
guy never dreamed that his book would set in motion a process

that fifty years later would cause a fourteen-year-old rock and roller in suburban California to have as his derogatory nickname an abbreviation for Child Molester. Or maybe he knew

all along that that’s what would happen. And wrote the book anyway, the bastard.

So I had to explain to Dr. Hexstrom about Chi-Mo in or-

der to talk about my
Seven Storey Mountain
theory. I could tell she didn’t believe me at first, but then I could tell she did. She seemed pretty taken aback by it. I can see why. It’s a weird, weird thing.

NATU R E’S MARVE LS

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

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skipping boxing to discuss Deanna Schumacher at Linda’s

Pancakes on Broadway, Mr. Donnelly decided to subject Sam

Hellerman and me to this thing they call a “grudge match.”

That’s when they put two best friends in the ring of sub-

human PE students. There’s this theory that such fights will be especially vicious and entertaining because of the fighters’

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

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

This is the sort of thing that gets everyone really excited around here. The girls took time off from Rape Prevention to crowd around and watch. The normal guys in the class even

pushed pause on their “who you callin’ faggot, homo?” tape loop. Which rarely happens: this was a big occasion. Mr.

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

Well, it was a dumb idea, of course, because everyone

knew that bleeding before he was hit was precisely what Sam Hellerman intended to do, and that I wasn’t going to hit him anyway. In other words, there wasn’t destined to be much

dork-on-dork drama, and the crowd was going to be disap-

pointed. But in fact Sam Hellerman just stood there for a long while, staring at me. I shot him a puzzled look, and everyone shifted a little uncomfortably, as mystified as I was. I was almost starting to wonder if something had snapped inside his brain and he really intended to go through with “boxing” me, 198

but then I realized what he was up to. He was trying to stall as long as possible, knowing that once he and his spontaneously bloody nose had finally pushed off to the nurse’s office, I might still have to face another opponent. I doubted he’d be able to stall long enough, but I appreciated the ges-ture. I focused my mind on my own nose as though it were

Fiona-Deanna’s candle, but try as I might, I just couldn’t make the blood flow Hellerman style—that’s why I don’t call myself a hypnotizer.

The crowd started the customary chant of “pussy, pussy,

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

“Commence! Commence!”

It was at this point, amidst all the shoving, that someone successfully “pantsed” Sam Hellerman. That is to say, someone grabbed his gay little blue and white George Michael

shorts by the hem of each leg and yanked them down, so that he was standing there with the g. l. b. & w. GMS’s around his ankles, looking extremely ludicrous, wearing nothing but his Boogie Knights T-shirt and his rather ill-fitting jockstrap. A wave of giggling from the Rape Prevention girls swept the

room and shook the rafters. I was glad it wasn’t me they had pantsed, not least because of that whole ball-spotting thing, but my heart really went out to Sam Hellerman, especially

since he had only been standing there in pantsing position in the first place out of kindness to me.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in Sam Hellerman’s sit-

uation, but if you have, you probably already know how difficult it is to pull up any gay little George Michael shorts that may happen to be resting on the floor around your an-199

kles while your hands are encased in boxing gloves. Try it if you don’t believe me. It’s very hard to get a grip. Sam

Hellerman, poor guy, gave it a shot, though, exposing him-

self to even more indignity as he did so. That was enough

for him: he looked up at Mr. Donnelly with a transcendent

kind of hatred and opened the floodgates. He even leaned

his head back so that the blood bubbled up from his nostrils like lava. Mount Hellerman. It was very impressive.

The crowd recoiled and seemed to hesitate between dis-

appointment and disgust, finally settling on the surly, vapid bewilderment that is pretty much the normal person’s natural state. The vein just under the surface of Mr. Donnelly’s shiny burgundy forehead slithered like a shrink-wrapped

lizard, and I almost thought he was going to say something like “curses, foiled again!” But he didn’t say c., f. a. Rather, he sputtered inarticulately and turned his attention to me, a snake eyeing a tasty rodent. Fortunately, I was saved once again through the agency of the solid, dependable Mount

Hellerman, which even in the midst of a major eruption had the presence of mind to pull the fire alarm on the way out. It was at best a temporary reprieve, but it was almost worth

whatever consequences lay ahead to have the opportunity to witness Mr. Donnelly’s face turn from a light burgundy to a hitherto unrecorded shade of deep magenta. One of nature’s marvels.

A B RO OD OF VI P E RS

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

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investigate: Deanna Schumacher, the fake Fiona, and

Timothy J. Anderson, the dead bastard. If he
was
the dead bastard. He probably was. How many dead people could

there be in this thing?

Things were pretty much back to business-as-usual be-

tween Sam Hellerman and me since he had come clean on the

Dud Chart situation. I had hesitated a bit out of lingering resentment, but after he got pantsed in boxing for my sake I relented and decided to let him in on the
Catcher
code, mostly because I was so pleased with myself for having

cracked it and I couldn’t think of anyone other than Sam

Hellerman who would be at all impressed by it. And he
was
impressed, though he claimed he would have easily spotted

the French angle—maybe he would have, though I doubt it. I wasn’t planning to include him in the fake Fiona arm of the investigation, but he was totally on the Anderson case and insisted we go to the library the minute I showed him Tit’s note.

The first thing we did at the library was to use a concor-

dance to look up the biblical quotation about stones and children and Abraham. Sam Hellerman knew how to do that

because of his long years of experience as the son of weird German vampire religious fanatics, I guess. It was from

Matthew 3:9.

The chapter was kind of hard to understand. John the

Baptist is telling some authorities (he calls them a “brood of vipers”) that they aren’t as powerful as they think they are, I believe.

Sam Hellerman thought it was a more or less generic

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

He had a point about the Q. A. theme, though it seemed

to me there was also a warning of an impending swift and terrible revenge: it reminded me of the movie
Carrie.
J. the B.

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was saying, in effect, “Okay, guys, just keep dumping buckets of pig blood on introverted girls at proms, and see what

happens—you have no idea what you’re playing with here.”

I was doubtful that the actual meaning of the quote

would have much to tell us about Timothy J. Anderson’s

character, though. It could be a question authority message, but it could also be about the generic power of God, or about the difference between earthly and spiritual reality, you

know, stones versus heaven, earth as opposed to air. It could be all of them at once, or none of them. I hadn’t read enough to be sure, but I think the
Seven Story Mountain
guy was getting at the rocks/air thing; plus maybe he was thinking of the stone walls of the monasteries and cathedrals of Europe,

which had inspired him as a child and which, I assume, were intended to foreshadow his eventual monk-ization. Who

knows? The
SSM
guy chose it for whatever reason he might have had; maybe Timothy J. Anderson or his survivors had

chosen it because they were under the influence of that book, or maybe for some other unrelated reason. All I’m saying is that as far as the content goes, the epigraph and the epitaph might as well have said “Have a Nice Day” or “I Heart Cats”

for all the difference it would make. You can make something mean anything you want. And you can spend a great deal of

time and effort choosing your words and allusions and quo-

tations carefully and hardly anyone will even notice or get it anyway.

But, as usual, while I was giving myself this stern lecture on the meaninglessness of the data we’d just uncovered and how communication is pointless and we’re all doomed, Sam

Hellerman was noticing the interesting part. I was jolted out of my daydream by the sound of his finger hitting the page of the Jerusalem Bible that lay open on the library table.

“Look,” he said in a library whisper.

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I went “?” but I soon saw what he was getting at. Right

after that quotation comes a kind of threat to the brood of vipers, a variation on the notion of clearing out dead wood:

“Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every

tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

If he is talking about the vipers, that’s kind of a mixed

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

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

That sounded like it could possibly be a reference to the

biblical passage, though it could also be coincidental. I

couldn’t decide. But if it was an allusion, this passage from the Bible arguably linked Tit, Timothy J. Anderson, my dad, and the
Seven Storey Mountain
guy. I wasn’t sure how, exactly, or what it meant. Maybe it was a common, standard quotation

that was used all over the place, though. And maybe “thrown into the fire” was just something people in the sixties used to say whenever a bastard died. You never know.

The Bible passage brought to mind my first response to

the note, the
Rosemary’s Baby/
Black Sabbath–influenced idea that it had something to do with burning witches. Was there something in that after all? I mean, maybe Tit was implying that Timothy J. Anderson had been some kind of heretic,

through a (devil-head) oblique and maybe ironic reference to a biblical text about burning trees and vipers and questioning authority? I really wished I knew more about history, religion, the Bible, witches, the sixties, and so forth. My Academic Achievements were second to none, yet somehow I instinctively knew I wasn’t going to solve this particular problem by making a collage or appreciating ethnic food or putting on a 203

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