King Dork (38 page)

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 ob-

session 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 eventu-

ally 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

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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

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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 as-

sumed 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 cir-

cumstances 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.