“You’ll never manage it,” he said. “Not in a thousand years.” He began to laugh again, and to elaborate on why I’d never manage it in a thousand years, waving my documents for emphasis. They got Eisenhower, he said, and Kennedy, and they got Nixon, too. The key to the whole conspiracy is a code written into the United States Constitution that, when properly deciphered, reveals that all articles and provisions contained in it are really to be understood to mean the exact opposite of what they say literally. Presidents and other leaders who resist when informed of the code are destroyed by scandal or assassination, and regular people who begin to piece it together, if detected by the Reptilians, are either instantly vaporized or closely monitored by biological microchips rigged to superheat the brains of those who get too close to unraveling the mystery. The biochips are introduced into the host subject by means of tiny darts shot from the robotic surveillance insects that monitor our cities. The only way to tell if you’ve been infected is if you see faint streams of code and Reptilian characters racing across your peripheral vision: a quick suicide is your only option then, since removing the biochip would entail the removal of the entire brain and spinal column. That’s what happened to Ambrose Bierce, Jack Parsons, and Bishop Pike, and to Jimi, Janis, Lenny, and possibly Kurt, too. And that’s how we got Vietnam, McDonald’s, credit cards, the designated hitter rule, and the Reagan presidency. Lyndon Johnson was himself a Reptilian in disguise, and in our contemporary world, the actor Keanu Reeves is perhaps the most powerful Reptilian of them all. The world’s population is enslaved by brain manipulation, mechanical insect surveillance, and credit card debt, all controlled at the Federal World Government Headquarters in deep caverns hidden in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
Then Flapjack showed me a bloody spot on his arm where he had managed to dig out a surveillance dart before it was able to deposit its parasitic biochip into his bloodstream. He nodded knowingly.
“So you see,” he concluded with a warm, ironic chuckle, “you’ll never fight them with this.” He waved my papers derisively. “They’ll melt your brain before you get within ten miles of any courtroom. But if you want my legal advice, here it is: when you see them coming, shoot to kill. It’s your only chance.”
“Wonderful,” I said.
We were silent yet again in the truck on the way back to the motel. I had certainly gotten Little Big Tom’s message, which was: it is, in fact, possible to be too paranoid. And if I didn’t want to wind up like Flapjack, I’d have to try to recalibrate my paranoia to a more acceptable level.
My lawsuit days were over. Flapjack had scared me straight.
“Thanks … chief,” I said. Of all the lessons he had ever tried to teach me, this was perhaps the only one that had worked, or even been comprehensible.
Little Big Tom rumpled my hair and smiled wearily. I left him with Sam Hellerman’s motivational tape, because if anyone needed artificially induced self-confidence these days, it was Little Big Tom. It hadn’t worked too well for me, as far as I could tell, but who knew? It was certainly worth a try.
ON BEING A BOYFRIEND
“I’ve been thinking about it,” said Pammelah Shumway, “and I’ve decided that from now on I’m going to wear only leopard print and drink only vodka drinks, and no underwear ever.”
“As long as you’ve got a plan,” I said. That wasn’t snide. It was way more of a plan than I’d ever had. But maybe I didn’t need a plan. Just letting things happen hadn’t turned out all that badly, at least so far.
Time passed. And then more time passed, predictably. My home life still sucked, but my personal life had never seemed so “on track,” despite the Clearview jacket-varsity confusion. Walking among the normal people and avoiding detection by cloaking myself in the Spirit wasn’t the worst way to live. My band was, finally, pretty good. (We had gone from How to Kill a Mockingbird to Lobster Telephone, then to the Rimjobs, then to Salvador Dalí’s Hot Underwear, then back to Lobster Telephone, then to just Lobster, finally settling on the Reptilians, Thomas “Rock” Henderson on guitar-vox, the Hell Man on bass and spacecraft design, Lovelorn Phil on drums, first album FAQ on the Removal of the Brain and Spinal Column. Our illegible logo was really getting a workout.)
Moreover, I had a girlfriend, something I never thought in a million years I’d ever have. I even had a kind of nonthreatening social circle in the “pep band.” I hated the games and the routines, and spent a great deal of my time trying to will the basketball team to lose so we would have fewer games to go to. But I never had to worry that a band person would try to beat me up. And even though they found my lack of Spirit perplexing, the band kids were quite accepting in the end, seeing me, I believe, as a kind of lovable rogue. I’m sure making out all the time with Pammelah Shumway, who easily had the largest breasts in the whole music program, enhanced my standing even among my seminormal band comrades, as it did among the normal population at large. After all, they didn’t know that my girlfriend was in effect permanently locked down. I must seem like quite an impressive guy to them, I imagined, and it might even have been sort of true.
Nevertheless, I began to be conscious of a vague but growing sense of dissatisfaction.
Because having a girlfriend was not at all how I’d imagined it would be. I liked her a lot, and I found myself daydreaming about her and writing songs about her, and suffered bouts of crippling anxiety about whether she really loved me and what she was doing and with whom when we were apart: you know, all the hallmarks of true love. I told her I loved her with the precise required frequency, aided by the Robot’s helpful letters: once a day was too little, four times a day was too much. We talked on the phone to say good night to each other every single night. I meant it all too, at least to the degree that a person can be sure of genuinely meaning anything. In other words, this was my one, perhaps my only, chance at having a non-imaginary girlfriend, and I was trying my hardest to do it well. That part, the liking each other and being nice to each other and being on each other’s team, wasn’t difficult at all.
And yet … being “had” as a boyfriend turned out to be a pretty stressful, anxiety-ridden affair, very unlike, as I said, what I’d expected.
For one thing, it involved quite a lot more walking than you’d think. Not only were there the obligatory laps around the Quad during lunch, but there were similarly organized laps around the mall in off-hours, plus a good deal of walking just out and about on the street and in parks and such, because there really wasn’t anywhere to go and at least at the park you could find some semiprivate place to make out. But other than the walking around and making out, we didn’t end up doing a whole lot alone together, just the two of us. When we weren’t kissing or groping or walking in an arm-in-arm clinch, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot to say, so when we stopped, there would be a kind of uncomfortable pause till we would just relieve the tension by starting to make out again. Most of the conversations we did have revolved around administering the “relationship”: where we were going to go, who we were going to see, what she was going to wear, whether I still thought she was cute, et cetera.
But the most difficult part for me was the endless array of social obligations that came along with being Pammelah Shumway’s boyfriend. Until you have been the boyfriend of a girl with “school spirit,” you have no idea how much non–making out activity it involves.
Now, you may not know this about me, but basically, I don’t like people all that much. One on one, I’m fine, if the other one is halfway decent and at least sort of interesting and, most importantly, not trying to kill me. A trio, if everyone is nice and not too normal, I can handle. But a big group of kids, jabbering and chattering and whooping and hollering about their damnable school activities, their GPAs, and the terrible music they liked, and ranging in type from quasi-decent to full-on normal psychotic? That’s not my scene, baby. Just not my scene. I mean, you have no idea how many school-sponsored events there are on the calendar. It’s unreal. And I was obligated to go to pretty
much every one—the games, the track meets, the plays, the dances, the gymnastics, the fund-raising bake sales, everything, and that was on top of the “pep band” stuff I already had to do. I felt like I was spending nearly all my waking hours participating in some school-sponsored activity, which is basically everything I stand against. I would come home from some event, look in the mirror, and say, “Who are you?”
The only break I ever had from this relentless socializing was on Tuesday nights, when Pamm would attend her Latter-Day Saints Youth Group meetings. (That’s three things I detest all in one: youth, groups, and, you know, meeting.) I never thought I’d have cause to thank God for not making me a Mormon. But it was the one thing I wasn’t forced to go to, and I came to look forward to Tuesday as a precious little island of freedom set in a sea of oppression.
Now, when I’m with a big group of normal people I withdraw into my own head. A defense mechanism, I guess it’s called. It’s either that or I explode; at least, that’s what it feels like. Or I manage to slink off to some corner and lick my wounds, or make some excuse and flee back home to where there are no people, only records and guitars, and a sort of family.
But when you have a girlfriend, you can’t leave. And you can’t withdraw into your head either, not if you don’t want her to get mad at you and take it out on you for days. (My girlfriend expressed her anger and disappointment chiefly by walking slower. We would be walking along as usual and I’d suddenly notice she was back there going at a slowed pace, her head down. So I would scamper back and try to recalibrate, attempting to match her step, which would in turn get even slower. Sometimes she would just stop in the middle of the street altogether, head down, till I went back and grabbed her by the arm to pull her out of the way of the oncoming traffic. It was the most challenging game of Try to Guess What I’m Mad About ever.)
I mean, I guess I get it, because in the dynamic, glittering social scene of drinking Coors Light, smoking dope, and blasting “booty music” down by the reservoir, a silent, pensive boyfriend is just an embarrassment. If it had been just Pamm, the Robot, and I, like how it started out, it would have been nice, even fun, maybe. But in the greater semi- to full-on normal world, I wasn’t cutting it as a boyfriend. And I knew the other girls were all saying things like “What’s the matter with your boyfriend?” and “He’s weird,” and even “He’s creepy.” I suppose I should have known it would only be a matter of time before this exposure of who I really was would be my undoing. But I was naive. Free girlfriend, I thought; what could go wrong? But as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free girlfriend. And as a philosophy, or at least as a practical guide to how to conduct your romantic affairs, the “Hey, I’ll Take It” philosophy isn’t quite the be-all and end-all of philosophies that I’d imagined it to be.
Now, you’ll have noticed, perhaps, that Roberta the Female Robot’s name is largely absent from the explanations I have just given. That’s because R. the F. R., though a school spirit girl herself (and how), was largely excluded from these wider social activities. Edging her out had been a gradual process that I only noticed after it was already well under way. My main contact with the Robot was through her still-frequent letters, a ten-minute briefing/debriefing in homeroom, and the conversations we would have at lunch or in the band room or on band trips at those odd times when I didn’t happen to have a second tongue in my mouth. But Pammelah Shumway’s circle of friends had been gradually widening, and in a place like Clearview, that meant that it—the circle, I mean—was becoming increasingly normal.
It was not at all surprising to me that the rank and file of Clearview High normalcy had rejected the Female Robot. She was as eccentric as they come, and clearly not normal material any way you sliced it: basically, she was one of those kids with nothing whatsoever to offer to the normal people of the world other than to serve as a target, a servant, a doormat, or a punching bag. The Clearview Spirit protected her from the worst of it, as it had thus far protected me, but that was as far as it was going to go. It infuriated me—still infuriates me, in fact—that she accepted this fate, welcomed it, even, with such bland goodwill. She should have been on my side, declaring total war on Normality forever. She was either oblivious to it or simply liked being marginalized by her favorite people in the world. That was incomprehensible to me, but it was her problem, not mine. The surprising part, at least at first, was that while the Robot clearly admired Pammelah Shumway almost to the point of idolatry, and whereas in my preboyfriend experience of the two of them in only “pep band” situations Pammelah had seemed like a nice enough friend to her, in the outer world and behind her back she was actually quite mean, and was in fact becoming nearly as bad as any normal person.
“Roberta’s so weird,” she would say. Okay, so Pammelah Shumway doesn’t exactly have a powerful vocabulary and you have to read between the lines. “Weird” covers a lot of ground, but I knew it was the third-worst thing she knew to say about anyone, right behind “creepy” and “not that cute”: it meant, your existence is embarrassing; it meant, you are beneath contempt. It sounds silly, I know, but translate it from normal-speak and put the whole weight of the psychotic universe behind it and it basically amounts to a death sentence.
Well, it was a slow-developing eye-opener. And all this, along with one other thing that I’ll tell you about in a minute, is why I decided before too long that I would have to break up with Pammelah Shumway. Like Celeste Fletcher, she had basically turned normal before my eyes. And unlike the Robot, I found I couldn’t just let it slide and play along.
All I had ever wanted was a Sex Alliance Against Society, and I had been quite willing to overlook the sex part in the interests of maintaining the alliance. But now it was turning out to be not much of an alliance, either. And it certainly wasn’t, in any meaningful sense, “against” society. Quite the opposite, in fact. Having a girlfriend, contrary to the conventional wisdom, kind of sucked. I wanted out.
Love was dead.
A WELL-ROUNDED NUT
In the midst of all this, I solved the Puzzling Case of the Perplexing Pizzaballa Papers by accident, which should be no surprise, as that is the only way I’ve ever solved anything.
My second attempt at playing book roulette in the basement book boxes had yielded a challenge to a reckless vow like no other: Naked Lunch. It’s about … well, I defy anyone to say what it’s about. It starts with a drug guy on the run from the cops, I think. Beyond that, I really couldn’t tell you, and since there’s no story in there, at all, it’s hard to see the point of someone’s having written it. Or of reading it. You know, it really seems like all those sixties people were just so proud of all the drugs they took that every single one of them felt like he had to write at least one incoherent book to demonstrate it, or prove it, or celebrate it. This was one of those.
I guess you could say that the Flow My Tears writer, a guy by the name of Philip K. Dick, was part of the same general drug writing movement, but with his stuff there was a story you could follow, and a whole lot of interesting ideas, and it was possible to tell that the ideas were in there because the writing didn’t suck. Plus, it was frequently hilarious. I had the suspicion too that Philip K. Dick was possibly literally crazy, which made the relative coherence of the books seem like a stunning feat. Great writer, one of the best, right up there with Jane and Graham.
I had been reading another of his, Clans of the Alphane Moon, about this psychiatric space colony where each different psychological disorder was its own separate community-like clan, when Sam Hellerman and I stopped by to visit Little Big Tom at his motel on the way to practice one day. (As for these clans, I’m pretty sure I would have been an Ob-Com, though there’ve been times when I was a definite Dep, and maybe sometimes a Pare.… Oh hell, I could have been in every one of them. I may be a nut, but I’m a well-rounded one.)
Little Big Tom noticed and nodded with that appreciative half frown he has.
“Clans of the Alphane Moon,” he said. “Very c
ool book. Wild stuff. I’ve always liked Dick.”
Sam Hellerman and I looked at each other. I tried not to say anything, I really did, for at least a brief little bit of time.
“Can we,” I said, with unfortunately perfect timing, “quote you on that, chief?”
Well, that visit didn’t end well, though possibly the joke had been worth it. But it got me thinking that maybe walking around with a bunch of Dick books wasn’t the smartest thing to do, considering the precarious state of my neutral status at Queerview and my near miss with Jane Austen.
So instead of another one of those, or another reckless vow book, I decided to try to read a book from Mrs. Pizzaballa’s list. And I mean actually read it, rather than just fake it based on my memory of the three thousand other times I’d been forced to read most of those books.
It was A Farewell to Arms. It was by a man named Ernest Hemingway.
And it made all the difference.
Now, before any English-teacher types who might be in attendance get too excited, let me make something clear: it wasn’t actually reading the book that made all the difference. It was deciding to read it that made the difference. And in fact, I didn’t actually have to read it.
Here’s how.
A Farewell to Arms is a love story set during World War I, and this Hemingway guy was a seriously famous writer. He won the Publishers Clearing House Prize for Literature, so he’s obviously a really big deal. He’s known for being an adventuring tough guy who was in a lot of wars, and a no-nonsense writer of simple phrases made up of very short words connected with each other into sentences by frequent use of the word “and,” something that was controversial at the time but ended up being so influential that now it just seems standard. Also he is known as a guy who blew his head off with a shotgun.
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