King Dork (31 page)

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 com-

mitted 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,

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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 be-

lieved 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 deduction. 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-

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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

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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 rea-

sons 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 some-

thing 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 expla-

nation 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

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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.

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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 previ-

ous 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

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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